The writings of Lucio Marineo Sículo, royal historian at the court of Fernando and Isabel, provide a wealth of information on the history of early humanism in Spain. His collection of letters, in particular, yields the kind of anecdotal evidence that adds the fine strokes to the overall picture of Renaissance Spain.

Marineo was born in Vizzini, Sicily, in the mid 1440s. He embarked on a scholarly career late in life. His parents, he tells us, ridiculed and frustrated his desire for an education. As a result he learned to read and write only when he was twenty-five. It seems that the local vicar became his mentor, but it was not until he moved to Catania that he received formal schooling.

Jen'ay pas plus faict mon livre que mon livre m'a faict, livre consubstantiel à son autheur … ” (I have not made my book any more than my book has made me, a book consubstantial with its author). That was no ordinary assertion in plain language. Montaigne explained his Essais as “concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand extraneous purpose, like all other books.” Its subject was uniquely himself. His usage of the term “consubstantial” projected his design beyond the literary theory of imitation into a theological paradigm of divinity.

Acknowledging that “well-known phrase” and “famous declaration,” literary criticism has much interpreted Montaigne's “consubstantial” book. Yet the slight mention of the word itself has been both undocumented and inaccurate.

In two of his major works, On the New Star (1606) and Harmonics of the Universe (1619), Johannes Kepler engaged in an extensive debate against Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Disputations against Judicial Astrology. But despite his disagreements with Pico's Disputations, Kepler wrote about it in these works with deep respect and even expressed many points of agreement with it. Ernst Cassirer suggested that despite Kepler's continuing practice and support of astrology, Kepler essentially adopted Pico's idea of the human being making himself and thus gradually liberated himself from a belief in astrological determinism: “The problem of freedom is closely allied to the problem of knowledge; the conception of freedom determines that of knowledge, just as, conversely, the latter determines the former. The spontaneity and productivity of knowledge finally become the seal of the conviction of human freedom and human creativity.”

In his biography of Nicholas Ferrar, A.L. Maycock speaks volumes in describing the Ferrar family's transition in 1625 as a movement from one venture (the Virginia Company) to another, the “great adventure” of Little Gidding. In this one phrase Maycock comprehends the view of its founders that no less than the Virginia Company's epic plantation of true religion among the Indians, the community at Little Gidding ranks as a heroic enterprise, the discursive preoccupation of which proves to be the very nature of Christian heroism itself. Even if readers of the Ferrar papers do not know how highly Nicholas Ferrar prized the Acts and Monuments, it is impossible for them to miss the Foxeian narratives of “heroic suffering” so pervasive in the “story books” left as folio records of the dialogues performed by the so-called Little Academy.

Many critics of John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, perhaps “embarrassed by the rawness and repetitive misery of his lived experience,” have structured Bunyan's obsessive vacillations between hope and despair through identifying conventional stages in his autobiography, as if the intensity of Bunyan's narrative might be contained by placing him within a set of literary or theological conventions. Patricia Caldwell questions this critical focus on “thought” and doctrine, noting that “it is almost as if the literary people themselves are taking their cue from the Puritans themselves” by denying the affective power of a text which appears to follow conventional stages.