The proliferation of so-called ego-documents that characterized Renaissance Europe has given rise to a specialized field of research, to which this book contributes. Sundar Henny's interdisciplinary dissertation concentrates on five bodies of such documents from Zurich in the seventeenth century. Drawing on literature, cultural studies, and the history of knowledge, Henny analyzes the very different ways four men from Zurich's elite and one from its margins represented themselves in manuscripts and in print. Henny's elegantly self-referential introduction identifies one thread in his approach to the five authors involved—namely, the material heterogeneity of the testimonies he found through a Swiss catalogue of ego-documents. Questions about material form—manuscript or print, paper or parchment, large format and representational or small format and informal—and the work of writing each of the authors understood himself to be doing are key concerns for Henny. He also proposes that juxtaposing multiple authors from a single, highly interconnected milieu may “expand the horizon of the historically possible with respect to Selbstzeugnisse [self-testimonies]” (315). Accordingly, the book offers no general conclusions, but rather ends with a series of “discursive comments” (315) about various connecting themes and motifs.

Henny's five subjects include two mayors of the city (Salomon Hirzel [1580–1652] and Johann Heinrich Waser [1600–69]), two senior clerics (Johann Jakob Breitinger [1575–1645] and Johannes Müller [1629–84]), and one apocalyptic preacher who spent much time in prison (Johann Jakob Redinger [1619–88]). Although operating in the same narrow confines and often enough in direct contact as patrons and clients or teachers and students, these five men produced extremely heterogeneous textual remains. Henny selects material for analysis that ranges from modest notebooks listing family events to published sermons and controversial tracts. For Breitinger, a key leader of the Zurich church, Henny even expands his definition of Selbstzeugnis to include eighteenth-century recompilations of Breitinger's oeuvre, which he entitles “the posthumous self-testimony” (103). For each case, Henny closely reads and broadly contextualizes the material he selects, considering possible audiences (including the author himself), semantic contexts, social networks, and later uses of each set of material.

Two features characterize Henny's approach. First, he proposes a ruling trope for each case, and second, he reads each body in a way that could be described as extensive—reaching outward to embed self-testimonies in multiple external discourses—rather than intensive, in search of a biographical self behind the texts. Henny's chapter titles give the key concept for each case: Breitinger's opus is characterized as “written relics and copies,” while Hirzel's notebook is embedded discursively in “bookkeeping and prayer.” For Waser, the key metaphor is the shield, connecting Waser's personal defense against rivals and enemies to the language of heraldry and honor. Müller's self-representation, according to Henny, falls into two parts: an early diary, which Henny problematically describes as “textualized orality” (244), and printed sermons contributing to clerical discourses criticizing the city's secular administration. For Redinger, finally, Henny meticulously connects the cleric's personal prophesizing and suffering with biblical tropes of the prophet, with a strong emphasis on Redinger's eschatological expectations. These led him (among other adventures) to personally attempt the conversion of both Louis XIV and of Ottoman vizier Fazil Ahmed Pasha Köprülü.

A second feature of Henny's approach is how he explores images and themes outward from his core texts and into larger cultural contexts. Such excursions elucidate the key tropes he identifies for each author—for example, the chapter on Hirzel goes deeply into what prayer meant to the Reformed in the seventeenth century—as well as investigating supplemental themes that crop up in each corpus. Some of the resulting juxtapositions are thought provoking and illuminating, although at times the result feels like a compendium of excurses, with a few pages dedicated to everything from the meaning of bell ringing to the eschatological implications of the weather.

All in all, Vom Leib geschrieben frames a rich assemblage of documents as self-testimony about a seventeenth-century city's elite, whose heterogeneity and complex involvement in European culture are captured with deep erudition and sometimes penetrating insight. Even if not all of Henny's turns are persuasive, a wide variety of readers will come away from the book with new perspectives on the complexity of textual self-presentation, then and now.