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Vox populi: popular autobiographies as sources for early modern urban history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

James S. Amelang
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Abstract

This article reviews research on autobiographical texts written by artisans and other members of the urban popular classes during the early modern era. After reviewing some of the ways in which urban history has incorporated personal literature by authors from diverse social backgrounds, it explores the meaning of the term ‘popular autobiography’. After examining the contribution of this unique historical source to the study of urban politics, society and culture, the essay then focuses on the specific question of what autobiography can reveal about the study of popular sociability. A preliminary list of popular autobiographers figures in the appendix.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , April 1993 , pp. 30 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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Footnotes

*

This essay had its origins in papers delivered at seminars on urban history held at the University of Santander, Spain (March 1991), and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (March 1992). I am indebted to the organizers, José Ignacio Fortea, Juan Eloy Gelabert, and Bernard Lepetit, as well as fellow participants, for their comments and suggestions.

References

1 For some general considerations on autobiographies as historical sources, see: Redlich, F., ‘Autobiographies as sources for social history’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 62 (1975), 380–90Google Scholar; and Barkin, K.D., ‘Autobiography and history’, Societas, 6 (1976), 83–108.Google Scholar

2 Hale, J.R. (ed.), The Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis: Germany, Switzerland, The Low Countries, France and Italy, 1517–1518 (London, 1979)Google Scholar. For medieval and early modern travel literature as autobiography, see Campbell, M.B., The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, 1988).Google Scholar

3 The Sanuto text, originally written in 1493, has recently been published as De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis venetae ovvero La Città di Venezia, 1493–1530, ed. Aricó, A.C. (Milan, 1980).Google Scholar

4 Religion: see, for example, Greyerz, K. von, ‘Religion in the life of German and Swiss autobiographers (16th and early 17th centuries)’, in Greyerz, K. von (ed.), Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (London, 1984), 223–41Google Scholar. Education: note the use of libri di famiglia for the history of schooling in Renaissance Florence in Verde, A.F., Lo Studio fiorentino, 1473–1503 (Florence-Pistoia, 1973–1977), 3 volsGoogle Scholar. See also Bec, C., Les marchands écrivains. Affaires et humanisme à Florence, 1375–1430 (Paris-The Hague, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the systematic use of this source for the study of the Florentine Renaissance. Literacy: see Spufford, M., ‘First steps in literacy: the reading and writing experience of the humblest 17th-century spiritual autobiographers’, Social History, 4 (1979), 407–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Architecture and urbanism: note the discreet but consistent appearance of autobiographies as sources in Joseph Connors' work on early modern Rome, including Borromini and the Roman Oratory: Style and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1980)Google Scholar, and his ‘Alliance and enmity in Roman baroque urbanism’, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 25 (1989), 208–94Google Scholar. Festivals: see Muir's, Edward extensive use of Sanuto and other diarists in his Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981).Google Scholar

5 For diaries as sources for the study of civic mentalities, see Burke's, Peter The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 19–21Google Scholar. Examples of using autobiographical literature as a source for perception and organization of social space include Ranum, O., ‘Inventing private space: Samuel and Mrs Pepys at home, 1660–1669’, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Jahrbuch (1982–1983), 259–76Google Scholar, and Pipkin, J.S., ‘Space and the social order in Pepys’ Diary', Urban Geography, 11 (1990), 153–75.Google Scholar

6 For a more detailed exposition of the following, see my ‘La autobiografía popular en la Europa medieval y moderna: vías de investigación’, in 1490: En el umbral de la modernidad. El Mediterràneo europeo y tas ciudades en el tránsito de los S. XV–XVI (Valencia, 1993)Google Scholar. Autobiographies by artisans and workers have received much more attention from historians of modern Europe than from their early modern colleagues. See in particular: Vincent, D., Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Burnett's, John two anthologies, Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London, 1974)Google Scholar, and Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Kelly, A. (ed.), The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley, 1987)Google Scholar; and numerous editions of the memoirs of French workers (E. Léonard, A. Perdiguier, J. Bédé, V. Gelu, etc.).

7 For some general remarks on the history of this term, see Boas, G., Vox Populi: Essays in the History of an Idea (Baltimore, 1969), esp. chapter 2.Google Scholar

8 Passero, G., Prima pubblicazione in stampa, che delle storie in forma di giornali, le quali sotto nome di questo autore erano andate manoscritte, ora si fa a sue proprie spese da Vincenzo Maria Altobelli (Naples, 1785)Google Scholar. That Passero was regarded by his near-contemporaries as ‘popular’ is made clear by the remark of an editor of a later Neapolitan diary. Grimaldo, Giovan Battista, who oversaw the publication of the Historia delle cose di Napoli, sotto l'imperio di Carlo Quinto (Naples, 1635)Google Scholar by the notary (and his kinsman) Gregorio Rosso, commended Passaro's journals ‘excepting some things of low and popular taste found throughout the text’ (‘A' Lettori’). I am grateful to Maria Antonietta Visceglia for referring me to Rosso's text.

9 Landucci, L., Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, ed. Badia, I. del (Florence, 1883; rpt. Florence, 1969)Google Scholar. Does not the same sense of social mixture characterize the most famous English diarist of the period? Samuel Pepys was a prosperous, cultivated and upwardly mobile government employee, had studied at Cambridge, and hobnobbed with important figures within the civic elite and even the court. And yet his father had been a tailor, and his mother an illiterate washerwoman.

10 Roche, Daniel makes this point in his Le Peuple de Paris: essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1981), esp. chapter 2.Google Scholar

11 A stimulating article by Franceschi, F., ‘La mémoire des laboratores à Florence au début du XVe siècle,’ Annales E.S.C., 45 (1990), 1143–67Google Scholar, uses the transcriptions of oral judicial depositions, as well as diaries written by artisans, as sources for the study of ‘popular memory’.

12 Margarita Levisi rightly notes that early modern autobiographies tend not to focus on individual ‘personality’, identified by Philippe Lejeune and others as a hallmark of modern autobiography. Instead, they feature the ‘narration of personal facts in which the recounting of external events is stressed’. See her ‘Golden age autobiography: the soldiers’, Hispanic Issues, 2 (1988), 99.Google Scholar

13 As in the work of Rudolf M. Dekker, who has adapted the term ‘ego-documents’ to refer to ‘texts in which the author tells us something about his or her personal life and feelings’: ‘Ego-documents in the Netherlands, 1500–1814’, Dutch Crossing. A Journal of Low Countries Studies, 39 (12, 1989), 61–72.Google Scholar

14 See, for example, Lottin, A., Chavatte, ouvrier lillois: un contemporain de Louis XIV (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar; Ménétra, J.L., Journal de ma vie, ed. Roche, D. (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar; and Seaver, P., Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, 1985).Google Scholar

15 Stow, J., The Survey of London, ed. Wheatley, H.B. and intro. Pearl, V. (London, 1987)Google Scholar. See pp. 110–17 for Portsoken Ward, and 115 and 117 for these two citations.

16 The late Gilbert's, Felix Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton, 1965)Google Scholar combines the point of view of official records like reports of committee meetings with that of more personal texts (for example, Guicciardini's Ricordi, or Bernardo Machiavelli's libro di famiglia) to offer a masterful analysis of the inner workings of Florentine politics.

17 Arditi, B., Diario di Firenze e di altre parti della cristianità, 1574–1579, ed. Cantagalli, R. (Florence, 1970).Google Scholar

18 The original manuscripts of his chronicle are located in the Biblioteca Universitària of Barcelona/MSS 224–225. I am presently preparing a biography of Parets, which will focus on broader issues related to early modern popular autobiography.

19 These passages are available in modern Catalan as Parets, M., Dìetari d'un any de pesta, Barcelona, 1651, eds Amelang, J.S. and Torres, X. i Sans (Vic (Spain), 1989)Google Scholar, and in English as A Journal of the Plague Year: The Diary of the Barcelona Tanner Miquel Parets, 1651, ed. Amelang, J.S. (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

20 For a recent example from modern urban history, see Gould, R.V., ‘Multiple networks and mobilization in the Paris Commune, 1871’, American Sociological Review, 56 (1991), 716–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 At least two studies reconstruct the patterns of association of early modern artisans. Montias', J.M. Vermeer and his Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar exhaustively uses contemporary documents to link the painter to his kin, fellow guildsmen, patrons and business associates. Claire Dolan reports on her research in progress into the sociability of urban craftsmen in ‘The artisans of Aix-en-Provence in the 16th century: a micro-analysis of social relationships’, in Benedict, P. (ed.), Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France (London, 1989), 174–94Google Scholar. See also the articles on ‘Informatica e fonti storiche’ in Quaderni Storici, 78 (12 1991)Google Scholar. Quite useful for comparative purposes, though devoted to the study of an overwhelmingly agrarian society, is Rutman, D.B. and Rutman, A.M., A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650–1750 (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

22 For introductory discussions, see: Bennett, M., ‘Spiritual kinship and the baptismal name in traditional European society’, in Frappell, L.V. (ed.), Principalities, Powers and Estates: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Government and Society (Adelaide, 1977), 1–13Google Scholar; Klapisch-Zuber, C., ‘Parrains et filleuls: une approche comparée de la France, l'Angleterre et l'Italie médiévales’, Medieval Prosopography, 6 (1985), 51–77Google Scholar; and Lynch, J.H., Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1986).Google Scholar

23 The tanner's was not an isolated practice. The habit of identifying the degree of relation of godparents is also found in another Catalan diary from the same period by the Gironese patrician Jeroni Saconomina (1572–1602), recently published as Cavallers i Ciutadans a la Catalunya del Cinc-Cents, ed. Tarrés, A. Simon i (Barcelona, 1991), 183–253Google Scholar. Libri di famiglia often contain this pattern of notation, as Christiane Klapisch-Zuber and others have noted.

24 For remarks on many of the traps early modern documents have prepared for modern historians, see Levi, G., L'Eredità immateriale: carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del '600 (Turin, 1985)Google Scholar, and his ‘Family and kin — a few thoughts’, Journal of Family History, 15 (1990), 567–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Macfarlane's, Alan The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar is a pioneering effort in the use of autobiography for the reconstruction of affect within family relations. For other examples from specifically urban contexts, see Roodenburg, H.W., ‘The autobiography of Isabella de Moerloose: sex, childrearing, and popular belief in 17th century Holland’, Journal of Social History (Spring 1985), 517–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Strocchia, S.T., ‘Death rites and the ritual family in Renaissance Florence’, in Tetel, M., Witt, R.G. and Goffen, R. (eds), Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Durham, NC, 1989), 120–45Google Scholar. I know of no work that focuses specifically on popular autobiography, although see my bibliographic essay, ‘Actitudes populares hacia la familia en la Europa moderna: la evidencia autobiogràfica’, in Jiménez, F. Chacòn et al. (eds), Familia, grupos sociales y mujer en España, S. XV–XIX (Murcia, 1991), 137–47.Google Scholar

26 Richard Goldthwaite uses the account books of artisans with telling effect in his The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980), especially 312–14Google Scholar. Note also that elite personal literature can also shed light on popular economic practices; thus the daybook of the Barcelona lawyer Perot Vilanova (1551–73) refers to the loans he extended to craftsmen (Cavallers, ed. Tarrés, Simon i, 42–3).Google Scholar