Abstract
One of the difficulties of writing the history of ordinary people in the early modern era is that the category belongs mainly to those who never left enough of a trace to be written about. “In any society the conditions of access to the production of documentation are tied to a situation of power,” as Carlo Ginzburg has put it, and this is to say nothing of more indifferent killers of would-be archival survivors, like time, impermanence, or contingency.1 But if most people never inhabit the sources on which historical recovery depends, then the ones who do are unusual for that reason alone. The paradox is unavoidable: ordinary people lose something of their ordinariness as soon as they become knowable in any kind of detailed sense.
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Notes
Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993), 21.
Here I am thinking of microhistorical work on individual lives. Class formation, popular rebellion, and various other social groupings that obtain coherence only when underpinned by common motives necessarily emphasize shared goals and ideas over differences. On the now more complex relationship between microhistory and biography, particularly as it relates to the emotional distance between historians and their subjects, see Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 1 (June, 2001): 129–44.
Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives in Historical Writing (University Park, PA: 1992), 97. A similar concern can be found among the British Marxist historians. E. P. Thompson worried that the “materialist vocabulary” left no room for “agency, initiatives, ideas, and even love.” Structuralism and determinism were simply continuations of “Milton’s old argument with predestinarianism” and signaled that we live in a “defeated and disillusioned age.”
E. P. Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: 1994), 362–3. Similarly, for Christopher Hill there were times in early modern England, most notably during the Civil War, when, without the guidance of a Rousseau or a Marx, people “had to improvise.”
Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (New York: 1994), 8.
Not everyone in Ryder’s general era wanted to build a traditional family. See Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
There is no modern book-length study on the Puritan diary, although a few articles tackle the subject. See Tom Webster, “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality,” Historical Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (1996): 33–56;
Margo Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” Journal of British Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1992): 236–64;
and Andrew Cambers, “Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580–1720,” Journal of British Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2007): 796–825.
Two recent book-length studies consider the matter of godly selfwriting more broadly: Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996);
and John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Also filled with insights about spiritual diary writing are Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985);
and Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: A Seventeenth Century Clergyman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Philippe Lejeune, “Le journal comme antifiction,” Poétique 149 (February 2007): 3–14.
This is not to deny Defoe’s piety or the general way in which Robinson Crusoe can be read allegorically as a spiritual self-account. But as Leopold Damrosch observed, it is inconsistent with the genre of Puritan diary keeping for Crusoe’s conversion to happen during rather than at the beginning of the journal he keeps in the novel. See Damrosch’s God’s Plots and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Ramona Wray, “Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 197.
Charles Wicksteed, Lectures on the Memory of the Just: Being a Series of Discourses on the Lives and Times of the Ministers of Mill-Hill Chapel, Leeds …; with a Farewell Sermon Delivered on the 14th of March, 1847 (London: Chapman, 1849).
Herbert McLachlan, “Diary of a Leeds Layman, 1733–1768,” Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1929–1930): 248–67.
On the instrumental and affective nature of the family in this era, see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chapters 2–3.
Here I am drawing on a more general insight in Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c.1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 210–11.
The historiography on Weber is vast. Still the best place to begin is Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds.), Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Readers might also see my Watchful Clothier, chapter 4.
Quoted in Isabel Rivers, “Joseph Williams of Kidderminster (1692–1755) and His Journal,” Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, Vol. 7, (2005): 359.
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), especially chapters 1 and 2.
Diderot quoted in Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 21.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, vol. 1 of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). “Empathy” is a twentiethcentury word that Smith could not have used, but it covers precisely what he meant by his keyword “sympathy.”
There is nothing of a structural nature in the more intentional Stoic underpinnings of Smith’s psychology that could not also be found in the Calvinism Smith knew from his youth in Scotland. The Stoic influence is discussed at length in Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
Some of the most important works written in the last century on Britain’s transition to economic modernity have left us with an extremely useful but emotionally flat impression. Max Weber looked mostly at ideal types, like Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard (if not “Benjamin Franklin” himself, the half-human character of Franklin’s autobiography whose creator deprived him of a complex inner life in the effort to create a cheery national archetype); R. H. Tawney was interested more in broad social and political forces and abstract personal characteristics than in lived experience. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York: Hartcourt, Brace, 1926). If more recent scholars to tackle this transformation have been more interested in practice than in theory, they are still focused on the world of outward behavior.
See, for example, Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People 1727–83 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
and Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1998).
Other works have dealt with this transformation in ways that consider emotion from a general cultural perspective. Not without justification, Eiko Ikegami has recently placed Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (1979) in this historiography— see her “Emotions” in A Concise Companion to History, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 351. But Hirschman’s short book offers no indication of how people actually felt at the visceral level about the big changes that he instead discerns through theorists like Smith, Montesquieu, and Hume. Despite, and maybe because of, the abstract elegance of recasting rational interest as a harness for the passions, historians have underestimated how much the implied audience of the de-moralizers of self-interest were disturbed by this new direction the culture was taking.
Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
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© 2013 Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan
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Kadane, M. (2013). Self-Discipline and the Struggle for the Middle in Eighteenth-Century Britain. In: Jacob, M.C., Secretan, C. (eds) In Praise of Ordinary People. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380524_12
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