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An exploration of one of the most common but least studied early modern forms of life‐writing, the annotated almanac, is long overdue. Printed almanacs were often interleaved with blank pages, onto which readers added notes of their activities: journeys; illnesses; resolutions. By examining a number of annotated almanacs, and by focusing in particular on the Civil War almanacs of Lady Isabella Twysden, this essay examines the relationship between printed almanac and manuscript annotations, and the connection between annotated almanacs and those categories which organise recent critical discussions of life‐writing: identity, subjectivity, autobiography, diary, self. Materials added to almanacs were often later transferred to other texts: diarists often generated a life through a process of shunting material from text to text, starting with an almanac, expanding records with each movement. The production of diaries was less about directly transcribing lived experience, and more the result of revising prior texts. Many features of diaries can be explained through reference back to the almanac as a first or early site where notes on a life began. This founding compositional moment shaped later diaries: the expectations the almanac created, the subjects and vocabularies it induced, informed later written lives.

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Beginning with one particularly compelling Civil War manuscript -a collage of manuscript notes and printed pages torn from books, assembled by Sir John Gibson in Durham Castle in the 1650s -this article examines the circulation of texts in seventeenth-century England. In particular, it explores the malleability of early modern texts in both manuscript and print, in order to suggest that certain entrenched ideas about early modern print, manuscript, authorship and readers might be revised. The article concludes by suggesting that editorial practice might respond to these ideas by rethinking the ways in which early modern texts are presented to contemporary readers.