Written autobiographies in Europe emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance. As the feudal system disintegrated, so did fixed concepts of individual identity within the social system. Social unrest, mobility, and economic opportunities birthed fresh possibilities for personal identity. Additional developments in science, trade, and travel expanded opportunities for identity and individualism. Individuals found new interest, meaning, and pleasure in everyday living.

The first extant autobiography written in English at the end of the Middle Ages was The Book of Margery Kempe. She recorded her personal experiences in the early years of the fifteenth century, leaving a journal of life and travel at that time. She described her pilgrimages to Jerusalem, to Rome, to St. James of Compostella, and to Danzig. She wrote of her spiritual revelations; however, she also honestly wrote of her earthly, human relationships. Her autobiography combined her spiritual chronicle with her factual narrative. Kempe was an anomaly in her time. Margery Kempe, "a medieval mystic from a burgher family… left behind a most remarkable story of one…woman’s life… Kempe sought to convince her reader and her church that her name belonged in the genealogy of great female saints. She looked back on powerful foremothers for a legitimate and authoritative life script: Maternal narratives thus helped her structure her self-representation…" (Smith 1987:60)

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, new interest in self may have been encouraged by the invention of glass mirrors. This development may have encouraged the proliferation of self-portraits, which emerged in the late fifteenth century. As Rembrandt (a Christian artist) had sought obsessively in more than one hundred self-portraits for a sense of personal identity, Albrecht Durer (a Reformation artist, as well), likewise, sought his self-identity and produced prolific self-portraits in a wide variety of roles at the end of the fifteenth century. Durer used mirrors to aid his introspection in producing self-portraitures. Delaney states, "Durer’s self-portraits change radically as he pursues his elusive core of selfhood through various costumes, settings, and expressions. The brooding self-portrait at the age of twenty seems to suggest an anxious search for a lost identity." (Delany 1969:13)

In 1559 a Myrroure for Magistrates encouraged the idea of recorded personal history as a mirror for readers. In his dedication of the text, William Baldwin wrote, "here as in a loking glas, you shall see (if any vice be in you) howe the like had bene punished in others heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be good occasion to move you to the soner amendment." Baldwin:1559,in Delany 1969:64)

In 1591, A Christal Glasse, the narrative account of the life and death of Katherine Stubbes, was published by Stubbes’ husband, as "a mirror of woman-hood [and]…a perfect pattern of true Christianity."(Stubbes 1591) In this text the subject spoke at length in first-person discourse of her personal experience, especially of her imminent death at 20 years old. "Christ is to me life, and death is to me advantage: yea the day of death is the birth day of everlasting life, and I cannot enter into life, but by death, therefore is death the door or entrance into everlasting life…This blessed Spirit hath knocked at the door of my heart, and my God hath given me grace to open the door of my heart, and he dwelleth in me plentifully…I thank my God through Jesus Christ, he is come… O most holy, blessed and glorious Trinitie, three persons and one true and everlasting God, into thy blessed hands I commit my soul and body." (Stubbes 1591, in Mascuch 1996: 57-59)