This edited collection focusses on the writing of ordinary, semi-literate people in history, emphasising the agency and voices of the subordinate classes and contesting conventional histories that treat them as passive or silent. It analyses ordinary writings across a range of geographical areas, historical periods and scholarly disciplines.
This book underlines the importance of writing for the subordinate classes, and the variety of uses to which it was put. In eleven new studies by thirteen leading historians of scribal culture, it foregrounds the common writer and contributes to a New History from Below. The book presents pauper letters, ego-documents, life-writing of various kinds, soldiers and emigrants correspondence, handwritten newspapers and graffiti in streets and prisons, analysing the major genres of ordinary writings. The studies draw on different disciplines, including cultural history, sociology and ethnography, folklore studies, palaeography and socio-historical linguistics. They range from the early modern Hispanic Empire to twentieth-century Australia, including studies of modern Britain, Iceland, Finland, Italy, Germany, South Africa and the USA. The book demonstrates the importance of studying manuscript culture to give a voice, a presence and dignity to the ordinary protagonists of history.
