| Abstract | The very different sources and methodologies used to explore the cultural construction and social experience of gender in the long seventeenth century are prone to accentuate the gulf between the normative cultural codes of elite masculinity and the ways in which they were interpreted, experienced and represented in everyday life. This article examines the carefully edited and reconstructed version of elite masculine identity provided in The Life of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury and considers the extent to which autobiography, mediated by memory and shaped by the autobiographer’s needs, doubts and priorities at the time of writing, can be used to bridge the gap between prescribed ideal and experienced reality and to illuminate the context and process of acquiring, exercising and presenting elite masculine values and authority.
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