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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.4 (2000) 652-653



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Book Review

The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe


The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe. By James S. Amelang (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 497 pp. $60.00.

Amelang has written a fascinating, yet flawed, study of artisan autobiography in early modern Europe. His method consists of scrutiny of the lives of the authors, their social contexts, and their purposes in taking up their pens. His book is both an exercise in comparative history and an expansion of his earlier work on Miquel Parets, the Barcelonan tanner. For Amelang, Parets' chronicle, like the surprisingly large number of published and unpublished autobiographies turned out from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century, offers unmediated access to the voices of the lower middling sorts. Neither inquisitors nor state officials twisted these personal accounts, though Parets was ill-served by a translator who added passages to his text. [End Page 652]

Amelang treats the category of artisan broadly, in part because his subjects so rarely mentioned their daily toil. Printers, weavers, and shipwrights are lumped together with petty traders, but Amelang contends that the desire to bear witness was the real link among the creators of "personal documents of popular origin" (253). And bear witness they did, describing friendship and kinship, neighborhood and craft identity, the moral life, and personal, even political, responsibility. They shielded their emotions, but even this convention broke down in the face of the ravages of disease and infant mortality.

The business at hand for most of these authors was the stuff of everyday life, whether among the rulers or the ruled: settling scores, making complaints, revenging insults, and righting wrongs. They aired nagging concerns and thought aloud about novelties and newcomers, with family, comrades, their souls, their God, posterity, and a vague public as their audiences. They wished their tales to contribute to collective memory and hence, Amelang maintains, to do their duty as sons and daughters of the patrie or citizens of their cities. Thus, the marginal man would become a sort of insider. Accordingly, Amelang believes that his artisan autobiographers widened political culture and discourse. But how so? Was theirs the language of men who worked with their hands, travelled ceaselessly in search of seasonal employment, held guild offices, sweated for others, or toiled for themselves? Did the personal documents of popular origin emanate most frequently from men at the center or the periphery of their trades? Were they the pleas of the desperate or the handiwork of the self-satisfied? After all, there were enormous gaps in prestige and prosperity, as well as identity and loyalty, within individual guilds and between crafts in early modern Europe. Amelang's bold analysis is hamstrung by a certain inattention to the artisanal in his artisans.

Finally, Amelang argues that artisan autobiography, chronicle, and self-examination were "unquestionably a project of emancipation," both political and personal (235). He asserts that the very creation of these works was "overtly political" (236). Perhaps. But having one's say about governors and their shortcomings is not the same as having one's say in civic affairs. Still, as Williams wrote, "memory is a kind of accomplishment," and Amelang has provided a valuable service in jogging our memories about the early modern European writers of the menu peuple who recorded and bore witness to their lives and world (248). 1

Leonard N. Rosenband
Utah State University

Note

1. William Carlos Williams, cited in Amelang, 248.

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