In response to: A Most Particular Life from the March 26, 2026 issue To the Editors: Catherine Nicholson has written a wonderful account of Beloved Son Felix [“A Most Particular Life,” NYR , March 26], evidently a wonderful book, which I look forward to reading in full. But as a kind of autobiography it is not quite such a rare undertaking in the Renaissance as she implies. There is the wonderful Book of Songs and Sonetts , which was published in 1960, edited by James Osborn as The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne , who was an almost exact contemporary of Felix Platter in England and also a lute player. This has the added interest of giving a real idea of how contemporary English was actually pronounced since Whythorne uses his own special phonetic orthography. There is also the slightly later autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), which was indeed more or less written as an autobiography looking back at his early life.…