Sixteenth-century English speakers understood identity in radically different terms than ours. "The Interpersonal Idiom" explores the ways early modern usage figures selves as a function of other selves, particularly in the tropes of humoralism, visual perception, and sexual constancy. Challenging the current critical preoccupation with subjectivity, Selleck argues that Shakespeare, Donne, and other early modern writers often emphatically resist emerging conventions of subjective authority and cast selfhood instead as the experience of others. Analyzing a diverse range of texts -- from treatises on medicine, faculty psychology, and the controversy over women to drama, poetry, and devotional literature -- Selleck's study proposes a new theoretical understanding of identity in early modern culture.

The Interpersonal Idiom offers a timely reformulation of identity in the age of Shakespeare, recovering a rich and now obsolete language that casts selfhood not as subjective experience but as the experience of others.