Writing Peasants: Studies on Peasant Literacy in Early Modern Northern Europe

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2004 by Mar Jonsson

The German contributions are quite different, in particular the article by Michael Kopsidis on peasant accounting books preserved in Westphalia from the period 1750-1880 with a profusion of sophisticated statistics on crops (130-50). Karl-Heins Ziessow writes on an exchange of letters between a peasant and a learned relative in the early nineteenth century (151-174). An Icelandic contribution, written by Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson and David Olafsson, shows yet another take on peasant writing, as the authors focus on education and its role in peasant society, claiming that it provided Icelandic children with "an opportunity to distance themselves from the everyday drudgery of their working lives" (181). They also demonstrate the vitality of a writing tradition amongst peasants in nineteenth century Iceland (175-209).

The two Swedish contributions are Britt Liljewall's article on Swedish peasants in the nineteenth century who wrote autobiographies (210-38), and Janken Myrdal's article on a diary kept by a Swedish farmer's son who went to university, became a poet and received the Nobel Prize of literature in 1931 (239-51). The last empirical study is a presentation by Peter Meurkens of a Dutch schoolteacher's diary kept during the years 1844-1904, that he has already published in six volumes (252-70). The last article in the book, by Liv Egholm, echoes the theoretical considerations presented in the introduction by connecting peasant diaries in a promising way with microhistorical investigations by proposing questions such as why peasants "write some items of information down and not others?" (276). Egholm also addresses pertinent issues such as the representativeness of writing peasants, who tended to be rather exceptional persons: "By writing, they represented a group outside the norm" (282). That tricky issue is also mentioned by other authors (see pp. 92, 113 and 268).

Each of these articles adds one or more elements to a (scholarly) reader's understanding of peasant writing in diverse periods and places. It would have been interesting to see some studies on England or Poland, just to take examples, but one cannot ask for everything. Some of the articles certainly give a refreshing contribution to the field, for instance Lorenzen-Schmidt on the one hand and Magnusson and Olafsson on the other by weaving together general trends and specific examples. Most authors, however, reaffirm the fragmented vision of the field that the editors complain about in their introduction. Thus, the book as a whole does not provide us with a significantly new interpretation of peasant writing as such. The conceptual issues presented in the introduction are only rarely addressed in the articles and one does not get the feeling of an imminent extension or a genuine rethinking of the subject. One way out of this might be the introduction of a gender perspective. The only women mentioned as writers in the whole book are two Swedish women who wrote autobiographies (222, 227). Why did peasant women not write? Or did they? Other exits are most certainly possible, but it has to be said that some hard thinking needs to be done if the study of peasant writing is to avoid running out of steam. The material is extremely interesting and the editors are clearly on the right track in the introduction, by discussing issues that concern the peasants themselves rather than the sources as such. Hopefully, that line of work will be pursued in future conferences and books.