The literary essay is a form of writing associated with modernity, and one of the main reasons for this is the importance to the essay of the self; or, more particularly, the presentation of the self through the use of an intimate, personal voice. The Essayes of Sir William Cornwallis (c.1579-1614) published  in 1600-01, are the first examples in English of what we now know as the ‘familiar’ essay: written in a personal, discursive, chatty tone. I will suggest that Cornwallis’s Essayes are the results of complex interactions between different strands of sixteenth-century humanistic educational practices of reading and writing, and argue that the ‘personal’ and ‘familiar’ tone of the Essayes is not a proto-modern attempt realistically to create a representation of the mind thinking as an end in itself, but rather, that Cornwallis’s use of the personal voice is shaped by ethically inflected rhetorical theories of affect and imitation.

—Sophie Butler, New College, University of Oxford