The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe.

James S. Amelang. The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xi + 497 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-8047-3340-6.

The Flight of Icarus began as a study of Miguel Parets, the autodidact tanner of seventeenth-century Barcelona, but somewhere along the way it changed completely, becoming an immense work of synthesis, examining over two hundred authors. With the exception of one chapter, Parets's chronicle has become just another datum in Amerlang's analysis of the common characteristics of artisan autobiography in the early modern period.

Among this immense and at first seemingly amorphous body of literature are spiritual tracts, chronicles, travel books, diaries, memoirs, other family books and even works of fiction stretching from Germany across Europe to the New World. Similarly, Amelang's definition of the artisan is wide ranging; the early nineteenth-century Scottish shepherd James Hogg rubs shoulders with men such as Benjamin Franklin and the Florentine spice merchant Luca Landucci, who regularly held office in Lorenzo de Medici's elitist oligarchy. Indeed, some readers might be surprised to read that the Florentine victor of the Baptistery doors, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and the Scot Robert Burns were "lower class" (64, 69).

Nonetheless, Amelang argues convincingly that artisan autobiographies in the early modern era (roughly sixteenth to the eighteenth century) were more common than historians have thought and form more or less a coherent body of literature with similar stylistic characteristics and reasons for personal writing, especially when compared with more elitist documents from the period or, even more so, with the development of autobiography in the nineteenth century. Although Amelang wishes not to draw too fine a line between elite and popular cultures, he does argue that artisan writing about the self differed from the ways contemporary elites portrayed themselves. In contrast to the more cosmopolitan and abstract autobiographies of the elites, those by artisans were more concrete and empirical; they emphasized local events and relied on kinship networks.

Further, unlike the working-class autobiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those of early modern artisans generally refrained from discussing their crafts or conditions of work (although exceptions must certainly be made for authors such as Ghiberti and Benvenuto Cellini). More importantly, the purpose behind writing about oneself changed. Occasionally, early modern artisans did write of personal sentiment, as when the tanner Parets broke his cataloguing of events and lists of names to turn inward and mourn the loss of his wife and favorite son during Barcelona's plague of 1651. In fact, Amelang argues that plague in the early modern period was a centerpiece of a number of these works and the motivation for some to write about themselves and their families.

But the self and its discovery were not the essence of these works as they became after Rousseau's radical innovation in autobiography. Instead, early modern artisans placed their personal accounts more squarely within the public life of the city or commune: "their gaze was directed outward, not inward" (30). Moreover, their production was much less a solitary act than we might assume looking back on the autobiography from the perspective of current autobiographies. The early modern variety was firmly embedded in neighborhood and family relations and benefitted from a cross fertilization with elite culture, whether it was the local notary or priest or a writer as important as Goethe, who encouraged Heinrich Jung-Stillung to embark on a career of writing. Finally, the world of the artisan autobiography was much more circumscribed than those written by elites, or later, by workers. The early modern artisan tracts were written with the family or neighborhood in mind and circulated mainly through manuscript copi es well into the eighteenth century when the printing press only then finally began to transform their patronage and genre.

Amerlang's fine synthesis has examined the early modern autobiography with a new rigor and has shown its importance and originality before Rousseau. But some might question the breadth of Amelang's notion of autobiography, whether works such as Luca Landucci's chronicle of Florence or even Parers's of Barcelona might not have been better understood within an analysis of artisan histories rather than autobiographies in the early modern period.