The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe

James Amelang's study of autobiographical writing by artisans in early modern Europe breaks new ground, both in social and cultural history and in life-writing studies. The existence of a large corpus of texts that can be considered autobiographical-a checklist in the book runs to almost a hundred pages-convincingly demonstrates that a significant number of members of the urban lower classes engaged in this kind of writing, which has normally been considered a preserve of elite authors. Amelang casts a wide geographic net, including texts written by authors from the British isles, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and other parts of western and central Europe. Although Amelang makes no great claims for the literary qualities of the vast majority of these texts, he makes a persuasive case for their value as testimonies to the experiences and attitudes of their authors and the milieus they came from. He also argues successfully that awareness of the artisan autobiographical tradition sheds a new light on such canonical autobiographies as those of Franklin, Rousseau, and Karl Philipp Moritz, authors who rose above their humble origins.

Recent studies of early-modern autobiography, such as Elizabeth Bruss Autobiographical Acts (1976) and Felicity Nussbaum's The Autobiographical Subject (1989), have already broadened the concept to include texts that go well beyond the classic definition of autobiography. Although Amelang starts with a discussion of the differences between autobiography in the Franklin-Rousseau sense and other genres such as diaries, family books, chronicles, spiritual testimonies, and travel writing, he uses the term more broadly still, pleading for a definition that takes in numerous texts with minimal personal or narrative content as long as they record one individual's actions or observations over some period of time. The Flight of Icarus expands on Amelang's previous research on the personal chronicle kept by one Miquel Parets in Barcelona during the mid-1seventeenth century, and Amelang cites numerous examples of life-writing from the sixteenth century as well, but he finds that relatively coherent narratives corresponding to the popular definition of autobiography only become common in the eighteenth century. He thus reinforces the notion, derived from study of elite texts, that this was a key period in the development of the genre. The variety and lack of dominant models that characterized artisan autobiography before 1800, Amelang suggests, make these texts livelier than the more numerous but increasingly stereotyped working-class autobiographies of the nineteenth century (239-40).

Although a few texts in Amelang's corpus were dictated, the majority are testimony to the confidence with which these artisan authors deployed their abilities in reading and writing. Admittedly, until the eighteenth century, when publishers began to exploit the market for seemingly naïve and natural descriptions of experience, most of these writings remained in manuscript, but their existence shows that artisan authors participated actively in the same cultural movements as their social superiors. Artisan autobiographical writing had some distinctive characteristics, such as irregular orthography and a tendency to stress the process by which the author learned to read and write, but Amelang argues against regarding it as either sharply separated from more sophisticated writing or as a socially transgressive takeover of elite privileges. Instead, in his view, these texts show that the barrier between elite and popular culture was less marked than has often been claimed. Like personal writings by women and members of ethnic minorities, artisan autobiographies offer precocious insights into "what would soon emerge as staple dilemmas of modernity: rootlessness, displacement, and inability to engage directly or genuinely with a past to which one nonetheless felt attached" (231).

In addition to demonstrating the historical significance of these texts, Amelang uses them to challenge some of the conventional assumptions that have governed autobiographical studies. Autobiography has often been taken to be the most individualistic of literary genres, but Amelang emphasizes the social dimensions of artisanal autobiographic writing. These authors often acknowledged the encouragement they received from friends, family members and patrons, and their texts often recorded the experiences of others along with their own. Most of these writings were "act[s] of citizenship," (196) intended to have public consequences, rather than solipsistic explorations of the self. In any event, "even the initiatives of those least moved by public concerns helped expand the space for self-expression for other writers from similar social backgrounds" (234). Rousseau's radical innovation was not to assert the right of an author from a modest social background to engage in autobiographical writing, but his "conception of autobiography as non-citizenship, as making a forceful statement from within a private space radically separated from the public" (236).

For a number of reasons, then, Amelang's clearly written volume needs to be taken into account by anyone interested in the popular culture of the early modern period, the interaction of elites and more ordinary people, and the development of autobiographical literature in its broadest sense. The lengthy checklist appended to the volume will be a valuable resource for others interested in pursuing many of the questions Amelang has raised.