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Popular Autobiography in Early Modern Europe: many questions, a few answers1

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Popular Autobiography in Early Modern Europe

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Popular Autobiography In Early Modern Europe

I would like to begin by contrasting two autobiographical revolutions. The first is that commonly referred to by historians of literature and philosophy as the "rise of autobiography." By this they mean the highly visible increase, beginning in the Renaissance, in the writing (and reading) o...

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Institution Popular Autobiography in Early Modern Europe
Course Popular Autobiography in Early Modern Europe

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Popular Autobiography in Early Modern
1
Europe: many questions, a few answers

James S. Amelang
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Abstract: This article deals with diverse aspects of what may be called a "second
autobiographical revolution" -the rise of autobiography to the status of most favored
source among historians. This new situation of privilege is due in large measure to the
tendency to attribute to these sources the all too little discussed condition of "witness".
Following some remarks on the work of Marc Bloch, a historian who devoted
distinctive attention to the question of witness, it examines the specific case of artisans
who wrote autobiographical texts during the early modern era. To that end it
summarizes several strategies for the study of these documents, particularly those
contextual approaches aimed at reconstructing the wide range of motivations of artisan
autobiographers.

Key words: autobiography; popular autobiography; witness; historiography; source;
individual; ego-document; context; artisan; intentionality; Marc Bloch; Miquel Parets;
Icarus; Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Resumen: Este estudio trata diversos aspectos de lo que se podría llamar una "se-
gunda revolución autobiográfica", es decir, el aumento en popularidad de las autobio-
grafías y otros documentos personales como fuentes para el análisis histórico. Esta
nueva situación de privilegio se debe en gran medida a la tendencia a atribuir a estas
fuentes la condición de "testimonio", concepto que todavía no ha sido objeto de revisión
crítica. Después de algunos comentarios sobre la obra de Marc Bloch, historiador que
destacó por la atención que dedicó a esta cuestión, trata el caso específico de los artesa-
nos que escribieron textos autobiográficos durante la Edad Media. Resume algunas es-
trategias para el estudio de estos documentos, y en particular las aproximaciones con-

1
This text is a revised version of a paper I delivered at the conference
"Au plus près du secret des coeurs? Nouvelles lectures historiques des écrits
du for privé", held at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne on June 6-7, 2002.
I am grateful to the organizers, Profs. Jean-Pierre Bardet and François-Joseph
Ruggiu, for the opportunity to participate in this interesting encounter, and
for their generous permission to publish this version in Memoria y Civiliza-
ción.

[Memoriay Civilización (MyC), 5, 2002, 101-118]

,102 James S. Amelang

textualistas cuyo fin es la reconstrucción de la amplia gama de motivaciones de los
artesanos autobiógrafos.

Palabras clave: autobiografía; autobiografía popular; testimonio; historiografía;
fuente; individuo; ego-documento; contexto; artesano; intencionalidad; Marc Bloch;
Miquel Parets; Icaro; Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

I would like to begin by contrasting two autobiographical revolu-
tions. The first is that commonly referred to by historians of literature
and philosophy as the "rise of autobiography." By this they mean the
highly visible increase, beginning in the Renaissance, in the writing
(and reading) of texts written in the first person, and focusing on the
personal experience of the author. The change involved was not just
quantitative. The expansion in the number of such works was also
accompanied by a qualitative transformation, by which these texts
gave literary expression to a new attitude of individualism and con-
scious, subjective self-awareness. The standard histories date this first
autobiographical revolution to the later Middle Ages and above all
sixteenth century, the era of Montaigne, Cellini, Cardano, and Teresa
of Avila, to name only the best known protagonists. However, it is
also generally agreed that this revolution did not reach full consolida-
tion- in the form of the modern, developed genre of autobiography
proper- until the eighteenthth century, with the works first of
Rousseau, and then of Goethe.

This is a story well known to all of you, and I need not dwell on it.
I mention it in order to introduce the real subject of my talk, what
might be called the "second autobiographical revolution" of the later
twentieth century. The same sense of effervescence, of the flourishing
of a particular way of writing in which the author is the central subject
of his or her own text, has a close if chronologically distant parallel in
the recent resurgence of autobiography not only as one of the most
widely-read forms of writing, but also as a source used -indeed,
privileged- by historians. Or to put it more crudely: the first autobio-
graphical revolution took place in history, the second in historiogra-
phy.

[MyC, 5,2002, 101-118]

, Popular Autobiography in Early Modern Europe 103

Predictably, this latter transformation has been read in different
keys. One interpretation depicts it as part of a more general trend of
representation overtaking reality among historians' priorities of study.
The broader changes favoring autobiography as a source have been
variously labelled (and on occasion libelled) as microhistory, post-
modernism, the revival of narrative -all part and parcel of a reversal
of the "Rankean revolution" that established the academic discipline
of history in the early nineteenth century, and which endowed it not
only with rules of procedure, but also with firm hierarchies of subject
2
matter and sources.

A different, less judgmental way of presenting this change has
been to see it as one segment of a discipline-wide shift in the subjects
and themes of historical analysis, away from the broad and largely
impersonal approaches characteristic of recent social and economic
history in particular, toward more subjective and individualized foci
of attention within a thematically expanded history newly sensitive to
political and cultural issues. Here I trust I may be permitted an auto-
biographical reference of my own. My experience suggests that what
has happened has less to do with subjectivity replacing objectivity as
the main dish at the banquet of history, although some substitutions
along these lines have obviously been made in the menu. Rather,
when I began to study history back in the Jurassic Era of the 1970s,
autobiography as a source met with diffidence not because it was
"subjective", but because it was seen as referring only to individual
instead of collective experience. Autobiography was never completely
rejected, but it was nevertheless considered a minor source, not to be
preferred over documents and texts that were more -this is the key-
word- "representative". In other words, its principal problem was that

2
At least one prominent nineteenth-century historian turned to autobio-
graphical sources out of disillusionment with what he saw as the narrowness
of Ranke's focus. For the conversion of Lord Acton "from the Venice of
Ranke to the Venice of Henry James", see John PEMBLE, Venice Rediscov-
ered, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 84-86.

[MyC, 5,2002, 101-118]

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