I think you can split history books into three basic types:-
- Books that retell us what we already know – i.e. a missed opportunity
- Books that tell us about things we didn’t know – i.e. a pleasant surprise
- Books that change our minds about things we thought we knew – i.e. gold dust
It should therefore already be no surprise to you that I place Jim Amelang’s excellent (1998) “The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe” firmly in the thirdmost of these categories: it’s one of those books that not only places depth-charges beneath a whole sequence of tacit assumptions about history you weren’t previously aware that you had, but also presses the big red button to blow them up right in your face.
Structurally, while Amelang’s work is a hugely broadened study of early modern artisan autobiographical works that grew out of his initial research into the milieu of the Barcelonan tanner Miquel Parets (d.1660), what I think he brings to the party is a sensitivity to the nuances of the cultural and social life of basically ordinary working people that is wholly lacking in nearly all similar books. Amelang repeatedly demonstrates his ability to nimbly avoid back-projecting contemporary conceptions of such easily-misused notions as public, private, citizenship, the people, fact, fiction, authorship, emphasis, silence, insider, and outsider onto his early modern target period: ultimately, the result of his careful scholarship (which focuses on the particular but with flashes of the general) is that readers come to find their own subtle prejudices being uncomfortably brought to the fore.
For me, “Icarus” is at its very best in Chapter Four (‘Allegiances’) – thanks to Amelang’s extensive raking over of the Barcelonan notarial archives, this builds up a dauntingly complex picture of the web of allegiances and connections around Miquel Parets – the etiquette and practice of god-parents, dowries, executors, competitors, guilds, notarial witnesses, politics, neighbours, religion, meetings, friends, loyalties, etc. It could be argued that Amelang’s weakest parts are where he tries to draw parallels with later autobiographies by members of disadvantaged or minority groups (specifically women, slaves, etc) by referring to works grounded in (for example) full-on feminist ideologies: all the same, there is still a little meat to be had there, though it is clearly a somewhat less sustaining soup than he boils up elsewhere.
Given the huge scope of his final project, it is unsurprising that there are numerous other autobiographical works omitted from the list of works given: the three that kept springing to my mind are Marin Sanudo’s epic 58 volumes of diaries, Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico (which, for all its fictional side, has been stripmined by historians for decades), and even John Dee’s angelic diaries (which have similarly been subjected to unrelenting analysis as a kind of implicit autobiography). All three follow Amelang’s template, where the early modern artisan hopes to effect personal-transformation-from-an-outsider-to-an-insider-through-intense-creativity (p.48).
At the end of it, it felt to me as though Amelang’s sustained focus on artisanal autobiographical writings had brought him to his own Zen moment. That is, I got the impression that the process of looking for his subjects’ prejudices through close reading had forced him to confront (and overcome) his own tacit historical prejudices about early modern life, and to produce a genuinely even-handed view of what life was actually like for people in their own context. And how many historical books can you think of that come remotely close to that?