#The story of icarus oxford university professional

All the identifiable purposes and motives for authorship were, on the other hand, ones which `artisan' authors shared with first-person writers of higher social station. In these respects a high proportion of Amelang's writers led lives utterly different from that of the archetypal artisan Parets, life-long resident of Barcelona, religious conformist, and long-term occupant of an inherited social niche. The experiences of religious conversion or social mobility were also shared by many of the authors on the list. One cannot help but be struck by the high proportion of the authors listed in Amelang's appendix (over forty per cent, according to my rough estimate) who travelled far from their birthplaces. Implicit ones are grouped under the general heads of utility, duty, pleasure and need, the impact of events, pride and mobility, and confession and justification. Explicit motives include the desire to preserve the memories of oneself and one's friends, to defend one's actions, teach from experience, or (especially in spiritual autobiography) to assist self, scrutiny and chronicle God's favour and disapproval. The `personal purposes' of first-person writing identified by Amelang are extremely diverse. Unlike modern worker autobiographers, early modern popular writers seldom claimed to speak for a larger social group or class: yet much of what they wrote `was nevertheless an exercise in speaking for others who remained silent' (p.

#The story of icarus oxford university professional

Several artisan writers, whether `conservative' or `radical' in outlook, criticized the faults of the clergy and their social superiors, or resented the exclusiveness of social or professional elites. Several professed their inadequacy or lack of qualification to penetrate `high' matters yet `Apology legitimized intrusions of all sorts', and a 'rhetoric of self-denigration'' might be used `to disguise an author's pride and self-confidence' (pp. Popular writers embraced a plain and simple style, and sometimes eschewed grammatical conventions. Amelang compares the experience of artisan writers with that of other `marginalized' groups, including women and members of ethnic and religious minorities. Thanks to this very logic, Parets won his association with Icarus' (p. Yet `Whether or not they willingly assumed the mantle of outsiders, they could count on being defined as such by others.

Artisans were often `insiders', to the extent that they possessed citizens' rights and shared in the administration of guild, ward and parish, even though they stood only on the foothills of local government. `Artisans, workers, and others (including women) for whom writing, much less writing in the first person, was not a widely accepted social expectation, often defined the act of authorship as an incursion into unknown, and, to a certain degree, forbidden territory' (p. The tension between the self-affirmation of individuals and the `collective norms and constraints' of a society's culture is a central theme in Amelang's investigation. An interesting though perhaps misleading inference which could be drawn from this list is that Italian first-person text writing, after an early start in the fifteenth century, declined from the seventeenth: nearly two-thirds of the Italian examples date from before 1600. About a third of the authors were English, Welsh or Scottish some 15 per cent were residents of the German-speaking lands, rather fewer French. An appendix contains a checklist of texts written by over two hundred individuals born between the fourteenth century and 1771. Amelang draws on a wide variety of `first-person texts', emphasizing the considerable degree of overlap between the categories into which they have conventionally been divided: autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, family books, personal chronicles, travel writing, ledgers and letters. along a path of upward social mobility' (p. Autobiographers for whom membership of the `popular' category was `a temporary stage or transition. Merchants, notaries and all but the most minor administrative officials were generally excluded, but not yeomen - members of the highest rank of English rural society below the gentry. They form a pretty miscellaneous group which embraces people who differed greatly in their social standing and levels of wealth.

Some of them relied wholly or principally upon farming for their livelihood. 24) but especially of the lower middle class. His authors were by no means all artisans, but rather members of the `popular classes. He prefers flexible and inclusive definitions to rigorous ones. Autobiographical writings, their authors, the audiences they addressed, their style and rhetoric, and the purposes which inspired them, are Amelang's principal concerns.