An introduction to the varied forms and practices of early modern life-writing, including diaries, familiar letters, spiritual autobiographies, conversion narratives, martyr stories, personal essays, financial account books, and spousal memoirs. Our primary aim will be to examine the multiple, sometimes conflicting, possibilities for writing a life, whether one’s own or another’s, during a period of profound and often violent religious and political change. Our secondary aim will be to engage some of the experimental and methodological approaches by which novelists, critics, and historians, from Virginia Woolf to Saidiya Hartman, have sought to narrate untold life stories in ways that confront and creatively surmount the opacities of the archive or the historical record. Together we will consider how these approaches might limit or expand our own efforts to understand, and represent, how early modern individuals lived and wrote about their lives.