Cornelia Hughes Dayton

AHR Forum: Negotiating Power

Rethinking Agency, Recovering Voices

Has it become fashionable to eschew the word agency? Both Caroline Castiglione and Giovanna Benadusi, without using the word, employ techniques from social history and microhistory to uncover agency in two groups that have been cast as among the dispossessed peoples of early modern Europe. And indeed, the authors establish that neither group was dispossessed of cultural tools with which to shape important life outcomes. Villagers near Rome, though largely uneducated, were savvy legal and successful political actors who contested seigneurial rule. Women who had served many years as nurses and maid-companions in elite Tuscan families might through will-writing obligate their masters and mistresses to perpetuate their servants' names and memories through commemorative masses and charitable gifts. What binds these two essays are themes of power relations subverted, literacy appropriated, and (in claims briefly made) "counter-hegemonic" messages deployed.

I suggest the concept of agency as one possible way in which to frame this Forum discussion because it is more open ended—it puts us in less of a box—than counter-hegemony. Readers may find that agency rather than counter-hegemony is applicable in the analyses of Castiglione and Benadusi because in neither case did the subordinate subjects challenge the system of rule in systematic or revolutionary ways.¹ But whatever terminology is most informative, clearly both authors wish to focus our attention on two sorts of processes: how power relations were negotiated in specific early modern settings, and how particular documents allow scholars to recover the voices of the less powerful.

Using rare, surviving consiglio records from five villages in the stato of Monte Libretti for the 1640s–1680s and 1730s–1760s, Castiglione demonstrates that villagers were assertive in interpreting their rights (to hunting, fishing, etc.) as enshrined in the village constitution (statuto). They retained urban lawyers to pursue decades-long lawsuits in the papal courts in Rome to protect their conception of villagers' rights against the lordship. By the 1750s, the ruling family, the Barberini, felt compelled to overlook occasional insults tossed their way and to become adept at bargaining with rather than dictating to villagers. Thus elites were forced to "concede ... that the villagers were an important political force in the countryside" and indeed could be more of a threat to the lordship than the papal bureaucrats whom historians have often cast as encroaching on the power of ruling noble families. Castiglione coins the phrase "adversarial literacy," defining it as "a political reading and writing."² She finds this more useful than Steven Justice's rural, "insurgent" or "assertive" literacy used by English villagers in 1381 to destroy selective documents that failed to advance their rights. And it exceeds Michael Clanchy's term "practical literacy," which involves reading only.³ In Monte Libretti, a few villagers could read, and a few key figures, like the shoemaker Iezzone, could write. Thus they could generate their own documents, notably collections of testimonies, that threatened a new lawsuit or fueled ongoing litigation. Throughout the period, Castiglione believes that villagers "ignored" "the hegemonic message ... that their subjugation [to the Barberini] was divinely ordained," and increasingly made creative adaptations in their use of adversarial literacy, notably by insisting on new readings of the statuto, including one inflected with the strain of Catholicism that stressed the rich's obligation to protect, not exploit, the poor.⁴

Deploying a more coded script than Castiglione's villagers, Benadusi's early eighteenth-century will-writers managed to put their socially superior employers in an unusual spot. Not a representative sample of servant testators, the three women were widowed, and had probably served as long-time nurses, governesses, and companions to the women of the household. Paola, Margherita, and Domenica were chosen for special scrutiny by Benadusi because they had few kin and atypically named their masters as their heirs and imposed obligations on these Aretine patricians. The author argues that the three women articulated a counter-hegemonic language—a language that echoed in some ways the culture's dominant testamentary practices but that also contained critical and subversive possibilities. The crux of the argument as I see it is that, to take the best-documented case, Paola put her master in the position of undermining his own honor if he repudiated her bequest to him, in essence refusing to repay her wages by obeying her directions for the monies' mostly charitable distribution. In so cannily framing their wills, Paola and her counterparts were, to Benadusi, contesting the constraints of their position (living for years without access to their wages), redressing injustice, and making public the dignity and instrumentality of servant women. Further, the women's actions challenge what Benadusi believes is a blinkered scholarly view that early modern Italian testaments speak only to the lineal strategies of elites and that servant wills express the workers' cooptation into the paternalism of elite households. Rather than being reliant on a dowry for a modicum of earthly security, these women, in Benadusi's eyes, converted their wage-earning capacity into posthumous scenarios in which master and mistress became the serving woman's trustees and obedient agents and in which the honest servant entered the public sphere as pious benefactress.

Benadusi's thesis hinges on a supposition—that the testators' wealth consisted of unpaid wages. Both she and Dennis Romano have found multiple instances of Tuscan and Venetian patricians who were unable to or who failed to pay servants until the death of the master or mistress.⁵ Clearly, Benadusi's examples dislodge assumptions that servants were "inexperienced and helpless" in managing their own possessions and that servant loyalty and gratitude are the sole explanations for servants choosing masters as executors or heirs. But was Paola, for example, using the liminal moment of her deathbed will-writing to forge a "new relationship with her mistress" and, in so doing, "develop[ing] new ways of thinking about herself"?⁶ Some readers will wonder if these three examples of servants' wills, given the absence of documentary evidence on the nature of the particular household relationships, might bespeak an ongoing sort of partnership between servant and employer, generated by a shared religious commitment to charitable works. What Benadusi's informed speculation on the significance of these wills calls for is an imaginative reconstruction of the power relations of the households in question in the years preceding the will-writing.⁷

The two Forum articles scrutinize different sorts of documents and thereby focus on quite different types of voices. In Castiglione's article, we hear a collective voice expressing the village's political and legal will, arrived at by consensus among the enfranchised male residents. Little internal factionalism can be discerned; no competing voices emerge in the local records, although some internal political tensions can be inferred. Benadusi, having challenged herself to extract as much meaning as possible from documents that are only a half-page long, works to excavate the voices of the three testators, each tied to particular life histories whose lineaments are but dimly known. In neither case are the recovered voices literal speech acts; rather, they are collaboratively authored and structured by the conventions of writing to function as political strategies.⁸ Both pieces give us the chance to explore certain interpretive and methodological issues in the context of recent scholarship on Western Europe and the Americas. Among many possible approaches, I have chosen to advance three rubrics. These will allow us to think about the relationship of written documents to human agency, of power to space, and of political strategies to early modern selves.

As an act, testifying epitomizes the interaction of oral and literate practices that scholars insist characterized early modern European culture.⁹ Of course, we most often associate testifying with the courtroom. But while neither Castiglione nor Benadusi focuses on courtroom testimony per se, each describes a form of testifying, in that both the villagers of Monte Libretti and the servants in some Aretine households took the deliberate step of turning their oral declarations into written documents that had legal power. The essays raise interesting questions about the range of literate practices familiar to non-elites, the collaborations that produced these documents, the public nature of manuscript writings, and the relationship between violence and writing.

If adversarial literacy turns out to have staying power as a distinctive phrase and useful concept, it will need to be more clearly defined and set in the context of the range of reading and writing practices pursued by non-elite groups. When Peter Burke broached "the uses of literacy" in early modern Italy in a brief 1987 essay, he surveyed the printed forms and written documents that increasingly circulated in the domains of elite families, mercantile business, the church, and the state. Some of his examples involved written documents handed to presumably illiterate peasants and artisans for a specific use (communion tickets, health passes); only a few involved documents generated by non-elites, such as occasional cartelli—humorous, pithy political jibes inscribed on placards—or papers and objects inscribed with words (or ABCs) in the form of a triangle or cross, which functioned as protective amulets.¹⁰ Benadusi's and Castiglione's essays can inspire scholars to pursue the potential range of life-course junctures when urban servants or rural villagers, largely unschooled nonwriters, were the recipients or producers of things-written-down. What texts besides the village constitution were discussed, read aloud, and reinterpreted by Italian villagers? Did the renewed piety and charitable impulses of the era affect female servants' perception of the power of the written word beyond the desire to record bequests in a will? When groups culturally cast not as holders of the pen did make use of writing, was it nearly always in an adversarial stance to the ruling orders?¹¹

The roles played by the notary and the lawyers in shaping the documents under study need further examination in Castiglione's and Benadusi's analyses. Laurie Nussdorfer has articulated perfectly the task of the scribe in such situations: it was to circulate "the spoken word back to his clients in the form of writing that had a special legal status."¹² Castiglione portrays the shoemaker Iezzone in the village of Monte Flavio as the catalyst and scribe behind key 1750 testimonies gathered for a lawsuit. But if the village retained a lawyer or lawyers in Rome to pursue this decade-long suit, and if key consiglio members at times made the trip to Rome, carting the statuto and presumably visiting their lawyers, should we not inquire at least speculatively about the extent to which lawyers advised on the best strategies and wording to pursue? Furthermore, did villagers in the stato, or in other areas adjacent to Rome, pass at times through each other's villages and exchange information about legal strategies? Did they consult the same cluster of Roman lawyers, thus producing lawyers with expertise that might lead to innovations in strategy? This would not be surprising, given that Hilton Root found that, in prerevolutionary France, "the lawyers who defended peasant communities ... developed new ways of viewing seigneurial rights and acquired the vocabulary necessary to discuss more effectively the grievances of their persistent clients in the countryside."¹³

The wills analyzed by Benadusi survive because they were all written by the same notary, Ser Anton Filippo Ruberti. Although Benadusi makes every effort to recover all available biographical information about her three women will-writers, she does not tell us anything further about Ruberti, the man who circulated among the households in which Paola, Margherita, and Domenica lived.¹⁴ If these wills are to open up a window onto social relations in early eighteenth-century Arezzo, it would be helpful to know who Ruberti was and whether his surviving cartulary (or copybook) allows one to reconstruct his work and clients.¹⁵ If Benadusi had offered transcriptions of one or more of the three short wills, we would be able to judge if even more can be squeezed out of such taciturn documents.¹⁶ For example, imagining the dialogue between the notary Ruberti and the deathly ill testator, and knowing the exact phrasing of these three wills and others drafted by Ruberti, would help us to guess at the degree to which the notary suggested the wording of each clause or drew from will formularies. Patterns of formulaic language tend to emerge most clearly in the religious preambles to Christian wills, which historians have analyzed to good effect more to discern scribal practices than testators' religious convictions. Since wills under Roman civil law required seven witnesses, one wonders about the possibility of recreating who was in the room (by status, occupation, residence). If wills written in 1710 are to testify to us three centuries later, we need to look closely at all their parts, not just their directions for property transmission.¹⁷

One feature shared by the servant wills and the villagers' legal claims is that they remained in manuscript.¹⁸ Crossing the threshold into print, of course, was hardly the sole marker distinguishing private from public documents in the early modern period. Most legal and state documents were rendered in handwriting, even though the use of printed forms was on the rise. And in learned circles, letters from far-distant correspondents, poems, and essays often circulated in manuscript.¹⁹ Yet the question arises: to what extent did the instrumental documents discussed by Benadusi and Castiglione, along with their villager and servant authors, enter the public sphere? Because we equate legal fora and the general sphere of politics with "the public," it is reflexive to assign to the public sphere the claims and counterclaims produced by Monte Libretti villagers that wound up in the papal courts of Rome. The situation is less clear with female servants' wills. As notarized documents, they joined the public record, but to what extent did the terms of such wills become widely known, and among whom? In 1696, an English clergyman, William Assheton, advised the "plain working people" of his parish to "Remember, your will stands upon record for public perusal and therefore to be idle and extravagant in this last act of your life is to be hissed off the stage and to proclaim your folly to all succeeding ages." Assheton's use of male pronouns in succeeding sentences suggests that he spoke with the male family and household head in mind. It is not clear if, in the context of Kentish villages, the rector believed that women's wills were as significant or as public. In a Tuscan town of several thousand inhabitants, would the terms of a widowed nurse's will circulate much beyond her employer's household? Historian Sarah Cline assumes notaries knew that "many eyes would see an elite individual's will, and few that of a low-born person," so that they probably took more pains with wording when the testator was wealthy or prominent.²⁰

Benadusi would like to think that Paola and other servant testators "step[ped] out into the public realm" by writing a will;²¹ but since scholars define the early modern Italian public sphere as encompassing print, universities, urban academics, salons, and café society, it is probably wiser to recast the issue. To what extent did Paola use her will to perpetuate a memory of herself among particular communities of the living? Her concept of having a public is signaled not so much by her bequests of personal items to the three Magi girls, now adult, whom she had nursed, but more compellingly in her command (repeated by other testators of high and low rank) that ten masses be performed for her soul and an additional number be performed in her name on behalf of others. As Samuel K. Cohn puts it, with such masses "the memory of the testator did not end with death, but would be carried on in the earthly as well as the spiritual sphere." Benadusi thinks that Paola et al. were trumpeting their identities as working women. To confirm this, to ascertain what churchgoers would hear, we need to know what information beyond the benefactress's name was recited at the mass or written down in parish records. Clearly, such a testator was perpetuating her own name beyond death as a charitable and good Catholic: but what other markers of the one-to-be-remembered, such as natal town, parentage, spouse and children, or occupation, were made manifest to worshipers?²²

The argument in each of these essays rests on a "not X but Y" formula wherein X, the mode of protest or self-assertion avoided, is more violent than the mode of writing chosen. For Castiglione, villagers in the Roman countryside used litigation not violent rebellion to contain the ruling family's demands; for Benadusi, servants used posthumous bequests rather than lawsuits pursued in life to enforce employers' obligations. Each of these formulations deserves comment. In the case of servant-master relations, we need to know more about servants' access to lawyers and courts and actual patterns of servant-initiated litigation. Dennis Romano in examining Venetian records from the late sixteenth century found that only three of 416 civil disputes between masters and servants were brought by servants. All of these (and five in the following decade) were brought successfully by female servants suing non-noble employers over charges of beating. If the matter in dispute was wages and provable physical abuse was absent, it appears that in central and northern Italian cities it was either impracticable or not culturally permissible for servants to bring suit. In contrast, as Benadusi notes, in sixteenth-century Nantes, a decade-long run of aldermen's records reveals female servants actively using a temporarily available, more accessible forum to challenge their mistresses over wages and working conditions.²³ Thus Benadusi has highlighted a useful set of questions. What was it about early eighteenth-century Tuscan society and culture that led some long-serving, seemingly loyal, pious nurse-widows to use will-writing as a way to resolve the unpaid wage problem? Do records exist that confirm that urban servants—unlike the villagers of Monte Libretti, armed with their statuto—never utilized lawyers and courts? And how did servants who served shorter terms, as younger, single and married women, resolve wage disputes?

In demonstrating that Italian peasants had politics, Castiglione joins the large cluster of scholars who have insisted that violent rebellions are scarcely the only marker of political consciousness on the part of rural dwellers in medieval and early modern Europe. As Jonathan Dewald and Liana Vardi write in their survey of the scholarship on the French countryside, "clearly villagers [from the sixteenth century on] were more familiar with legal remedies to their problems than many historians have supposed. They benefited ... from the proliferation of impoverished lawyers" and thus could sometimes get legal representation "at bargain prices."²⁴ Historical geographer John Langton, in creating a flow chart to sum up a volume of state-of-the-field essays on European peasantries, notes that all the authors emphasize the "two-way relationships between" the ruling elites and the lower sorts.²⁵

Gadi Algazi's essay on the Weisung tradition in late medieval, western German villages makes a particularly effective companion piece to Castiglione's work. Because lawyers and litigation were not part of the mix, we can call the dynamic at work here "negotiation rather than rebellion." The Weisung was an annual assembly at which the lord arrived in the village and, in ceremonial fashion, posed questions to the sworn representatives ("jurors") of the community. The purpose was to elicit a formal question-and-answer period that allowed the articulation of the lord's and peasants' mutual obligations, claims, rights, and rules of governance, filtered through the semi-fiction that the jurors were citing the villagers' consensual reconstruction of precedent and remembered practice. The ritual ended with a feast, including "testimonial wine," which was believed to bind the drinker "to retain things said and done." The proceedings were written down by the lord's scribe. Although the ritual accorded peasants a certain amount of agency—and avenues of resistance—in "telling the law," Algazi is acutely aware that these were "dialogues between unequals." He points to the differential silences that the structured Q&A produced, given that "the distribution of legitimate speech was controlled quantitatively and qualitatively by the lord." And finally, although the Weisung was "an important constraint on the lords' freedom," "for subject peasants ... [it] was both a resource and a burden, since ... they were taking part in the legitimation of their own subjection by publicly recognizing their manifold obligations." Algazi finds it no wonder that few German peasants protested when the ritual withered away.²⁶ While the late medieval Weisung bears certain similarities with the negotiations between lord and villagers described by Castiglione for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what had changed was the option of litigation. Across Europe in the early modern period, not only did more sets of triangulated power relations emerge (village peasants–papal courts–ruling lord, villagers–local priests–landlords), but, as Castiglione shows in both of her articles, recourse to the courts could force lords into negotiated agreements over hunting and fishing rights or into adopting new forms of address and appeal to their social inferiors—peasants who now could afford to give up traditional patterns of deference.²⁷

I have focused a considerable part of this essay on the testifying thread because issues of literacy, access to writing, and subalterns' familiarity with legal procedures link the Forum articles. We have pursued the extent to which the words chosen by our subjects, once they had decided to sue their lord or write a will, may have been shaped by brokers such as notaries and lawyers and by cultural formulas or scripts. We have stretched our perspective so as to glimpse how villagers' and servants' agency was embedded in collaborative practices. Now we turn to the meaning of both the settings in which those practices took place and the landscapes through which our historical subjects moved.

We can pose the question for these two micro-historical studies and others: what would we gain by painting the scene in more detail? A cinematographic panning, rendered in prose, of the sickroom in which Paola's will was dictated, or of the village space in which consiglio meetings were held, would be worthwhile if the exercise extends our analytical reach. After all, power relations can be revealed not just through the political negotiations expressed in written documents but also by how human bodies occupy and move through the built and natural landscapes.²⁸ And an attention to spatial dimensions can offer new insights into the ways in which oppressed groups counteracted or limited the power of their oppressors. Witness scholars' recent appreciation that enslaved men and women in the Chesapeake and lower south of the United States commonly displayed, marked, and padlocked their possessions (livestock, crops, money) "to secure acknowledgment of [their de facto property-owning] from their masters and fellow slaves."²⁹

Will-writing scenes can sometimes be reconstructed—the players, the interior space, the props—from the testimonies collected when wills were appealed. Such contested cases shed light on the social dynamics of the ritual, including negotiations (attempts to persuade the testator to leave property in a certain way), scripted gestures (the scribe's reading aloud the document and receiving the testator's oral approval), and unscripted moments (the sudden arrival of a disgruntled kinsman). Since wills tended to be contested only when significant wealth was at stake, we would not expect the modest estates of servant women to generate such additional documentation.³⁰ Instead, Benadusi could use what is known about the architecture of patricians' palaces and elites' houses, and also the housing arrangements of servants, to speculate on where and under what conditions the will-writing scenes of Paola, Margherita, and Domenica took place.³¹

If space speaks to power relations,³² then the conditions and choreography of consiglio meetings in the stato of Monte Libretti are worth our efforts of imaginative reconstruction. Banned from the church interior by the tenets of reform, were villagers forced to hold general meetings of the consiglio in cramped, inadequate interiors? Or did the meetings tend to occur largely out-of-doors, perhaps on or around the church porch, as was often the case in France?³³ We know that a representative of the lord was typically present, introducing the elements of scrutiny-from-above and continuous negotiation. Lamentably, it appears that the surviving consiglio records do not contain the sort of internal clues that would allow us to map who faced whom, which players spoke from a location of honor (whether elevated or seated), who entered late and left early.³⁴ But imagining the scene does push us to consider an important issue left out of Castiglione's discussion, and that is gender. In the Roman countryside, as elsewhere in rural Europe, the gathered audience at village meetings swelled when crises or issues of particularly serious import were discussed, such that women, youths, children, non-taxpayers and others not formally belonging to the consiglio were present. As Algazi puts it, how effective were the rules excluding women from formal participation and voting? In what ways did women of various status levels (wives of notables, mothers of poachers, widowed household heads) and other disenfranchised residents exert indirect influence on community politics, memory, and identity, as they were negotiated through the consiglio's actions? Equally important—and difficult to apprehend—is the question of how the sense of manliness of male household heads was wrapped up in their inclusion in consiglio meetings.³⁵

Another approach to visualizing political gestures as they relate to space is to follow the documents as they traveled through the Italian landscape. What containers (boxes, pouches, scrolls) were used to move precious documents such as a village statuto or a last testament from one location to another? Who had the trust of these after the document was finalized or revised? How many copies were made? Was The Will in the notary's, the servant's, or the master's control? Asking such questions brings into sharp relief the dearth of material culture studies for non-elites.³⁶

Finally, we ought to try to map the movement of bodies within and out of the villages and towns in Castiglione's and Benadusi's studies. Both pieces raise the issue of the impact of travel and migration on their subjects. In the stato of Monte Libretti, did villagers circulate among the six villages, thus communicating political ideas? Did members of the various villages know about the lawsuits, the constitutions, of neighboring villages? Castiglione implies that the villages shared a political culture, given their similar responses to the Barberini claims, but she omits to inquire if "adversarial literacy" included deliberate inter-town communication. An actual map would help: Were the villages strung out on the road to Rome?³⁷

In suggesting that, as servants, Paola, Margherita, and Domenica entered the public sphere only upon their deaths by fashioning their wills in certain ways, Benadusi fails to broach these women's movements through public and private space during their lives. In their natal villages, non-domestic spaces—the streets, roads, fields, church—would have been familiar aspects of their daily and weekly rhythms.³⁸ Once their lives transferred to Arezzo, they would become aware that public spaces such as the streets and piazzas were inhospitable to their mistresses as elite women, and redolent of potential physical and moral danger to themselves. Yet it is likely that Paola and her counterparts did witness public life from the balconies or loggias of their employers' houses, run errands and visit with other servants and working women in the neighborhood, and accompany their mistresses frequently to the parish church and perhaps to convents that were often the focus of elite women's devotion.³⁹ And, as Elizabeth and Thomas Cohen and Laurie Nussdorfer remind us, maids were key intermediaries in clandestine love affairs. In sum, scholars who have assessed the gendering of space in central and northern Italian cities conclude that non-elite women were present in the streets, markets, and neighborhoods, even if they are omitted from pictorial representations and travelers' accounts.⁴⁰ Knowing this, we can pose the question, how does the circulation and publication of Paola's name as the benefactress of twenty masses after her death compare to her circulation in life as a young, middle-aged, and possibly elderly working woman with an established neighborhood identity?

Evoking Paola's perambulations and village consiglio members' conspiring town-to-town can serve to remind us that, often, when historians discuss the agency of the less powerful, they use metaphors of space. We speak of ordinary people shaping history; subalterns maneuvering in, through, and around; and cultures or legal regimes possessing openings or apertures for voices of the less powerful to walk through so as to be heard. To maintain simultaneously in our viewfinders the self-possession of those not in power and the often-brutal exercise of power by elites, we may find it preferable to think not so much in terms of agency but rather of cartographies of power relations: where were the bargaining places, the theaters for power's display, the spaces of liminality, the communicative networks that could lead to literacy, litigation, or rebellion?⁴¹

The Forum articles provide modest test cases for the proposition made by Natalie Zemon Davis in 1989 that, for early modern Europeans, "the greatest obstacle to self-definition was not embeddedness but powerlessness and poverty." The first part of this formulation has now been seconded by many others, who agree that, while social embeddedness (in kin, work, neighborhood, parish) structured early modern modes of self-reflection, that very embeddedness often stimulated self-narration. ⁴² Indeed, scholars who reflect on concepts of self and identity among non-elites converge on this notion of embeddedness as marking off early modern patterns of thought from nineteenth and twentieth-century cultural frames for self-discovery and self-expression. As Ronald Weissman puts it, "an awareness of self, a propensity to reflect on one's identity, a tendency to shape and consciously project one's public image were clearly important facets of the Renaissance urban psyche." Educated urbanites—for whom survive diaries, letters, and accounts of extensive credit-debt relations—lived "within a dense social network where roles and relations overlap[ped]" and where personal "options were constrained by an on-going network of obligations that outlived any specific transaction." Florentines, he finds, spent "substantial time ... discussing the nature of obligations to others," for example, "how to honor commitments, how to win friends, and how to expand kinship ties." In sum, a sense of self was not antithetical to "strong social bonds" but "nurtured" by them. John Martin notes that Renaissance philosophical and religious authors urged their readers to see "the internal self as agent or subject, as director of one's words and deeds." The Renaissance self that emerges from the texts of Luther, Calvin, Ockham, and Montaigne "was something greater than the sum of one's social roles": "a complex individual, who was self-conscious about the degree to which the inner self ... directed the outer, public self in its daily interactions." ⁴³

But what of the youths, men, and women of the vast, laboring order, who rarely had a library or writing space of their own? James Amelang demonstrates that the impulse to write a first-person narrative of some sort was not restricted to best-selling authors such as Rousseau or to Puritan clergymen. He identifies and analyzes over 200 surviving autobiographical writings, penned between about 1550 and 1800 and hailing from across Western Europe and its New World colonies; they take the form of diaries, spiritual journals, family chronicles or ricordanze, and memoirs.⁴⁴ Amelang finds that their themes and preoccupations—family, public events—do not differ dramatically from first-person accounts written by well-educated elites in the early modern era. Embedded as these accounts were in the social bonds of family and community, and focused as they typically were "on externalities" rather than interior states, the writings do betray a concern with expressing individuality and preserving a place in memory for oneself and one's family. In essence, Jacob Burkhardt wasn't all wrong. Amelang argues that "I write therefore I am" could be and "was a proud claim from the subaltern classes" prior to the Romantic era, when tastes in autobiographical writing shifted to revelations of the inner, psychological self.⁴⁵

By the early eighteenth century, the number of models for self-narration had radically increased. Potential models for one's own act of authorship might include, besides oral story-telling, the increasing numbers of biographies, saints' lives, picaresque novels, and urban chronicles that circulated in print or in manuscript.⁴⁶ Neither Castiglione's nor Benadusi's study focuses on genres that closely resemble autobiography, but they raise the issue of what forms of self-narration, written and oral, were familiar to urban servants and rural villagers in early modern Italy.

Surveys of popular first-person writings such as Amelang's remind us that relocation and travel could be a spur to writing one's life. What, then, of the Aretine servants who, having spent their young childhoods in villages outside the urban center, lived their adult lives out in this center of learning? Given the high literacy rates that characterized northern and central Italian cities relative to much of Europe and given schooling opportunities in Arezzo, is it a foregone conclusion that high-status nurse-governesses such as Paola were entirely illiterate?⁴⁷ Paola may indeed have thought of her testament as the most important opportunity to record her life and her aspirations. Yet there could have been other occasions in Paola's life when she made public part of her life story; perhaps she was one of those migrant workers who on visiting her natal village was asked to tell about where she had been.⁴⁸ However, to write down her life, from the perspective of the late life-stage of domestic service during widowhood, was not an option taken up by Paola's fellow workers. Uncovering almost no autobiographical writings by European servants, Amelang asks, was silence "the price of professional discretion?"⁴⁹ If testaments are the largest body of first-person writings that servants dared leave behind, then we can ask if there is a corporate self—reflecting country folk transplanted to cities, kin ties disrupted, employers' demands negotiated—discernible in this testamentary corpus. We can hope to learn much more about urban workers' cultures and milieus from the ongoing research into wills by Benadusi and by Shona Kelly Wray.

In villages of Monte Libretti and their ilk across early modern Europe, the corporate village self might be invoked as a rebuke by seigneurs. Algazi points to late medieval uses of the term "self" as it was paired with "forgetting" to describe junctures when peasants rebelled or when they met in assemblies "outside the reach of lordship" to plan resistance. Thus peasant villagers were said to "forget themselves" in defying their obligations to the lords, obligations that had been recounted and reinscribed through rituals like the Weisung. As Algazi points out, the self here referred to agricultural workers' socially ascribed self, and self-forgetting denoted collective, structured, social action.⁵⁰ To get behind the corporate self expressed in village consiglio records, our further inquiries might pursue a wider set of records that could tell us about the various selves in village ranks, especially those like shoemaker Iezzone who developed reading and writing skills. As Duccio Balestracci reminds us, "the mentality of peasants who lived next to the city surely was different from the mentality of those who had to travel a full day to reach its gates." Were Iezzone and his counterparts in the villages of the Roman countryside like Benedetto del Massarizia, the villager who lived near Siena—often in and out of the city, actively trading and seeking out notaries? Our analyses of political expression and the uses of literacy need to take into account the many different types of countryside communities.⁵¹

In looking for self-expression, we ought to take care not to assume that expressions of self by subalterns were always subversive or inevitably represented a desire for autonomy. All exercises in literacy by "the weak" were not wielded as weapons, even though access to the pen or to scribes provided opportunities for new forms of opposition to the powerful.⁵² Thomas Kuehn offers a similar caveat in his discussion of women's strategies for the transmission of property in Renaissance Florence. Gender is not "a matter solely of opposition," he writes. We need to ask "how it was that both women and men managed to sustain ... patriarchy?" and, also, how were men "constrained by the structures of patriarchy?" The longue durée of differential bequest patterns in men's and women's wills in Western European culture is an excellent example of the issues raised by Kuehn. As the carriers and transmitters of landed property and the bulk of wealth, men were obliged in writing their wills to articulate strategies of lineal preservation. Women, writing wills in the margins of that patriarchal system, can appear as if freed from it. But, as Kuehn demonstrates, Florentine women as legal persons, as agents, often chose to take actions to support consolidation of wealth in the male lineage, thus articulating shared interests with their husbands. The lesson to Kuehn is that personhood in the early modern era cannot be equated with "individual freedom and self-determination" and that "agency is social and frequently ambiguous."⁵³

I raised the issue of agency at the outset because it seemed to me to be the unspoken but dominant back-story of the Forum articles. Both authors assume a healthy skepticism at the notion of an omnipotent ruling class in early modern Italy and seize on particular sources to elucidate the bargaining places in which the voices of subalterns can be heard. Is agency the right word for the maneuverings of wily peasants and canny servants? There may be very good reasons for eschewing the term. In a recent reappraisal of the concept's deployment in studies of North American slavery, Walter Johnson suggests that we may want to lay aside this "master trope of the New Social History" even while continuing to make good on our passionate commitment to writing the history of the less powerful. Johnson urges us to be cognizant that the word, "saturated [as it is] with the categories of nineteenth-century liberalism," smuggles in "the jargon of self-determination and choice" and makes it difficult to consider the extent of choicelessness, the nature of the constraints, faced by those who live outside of modern, liberal conventions and structures of power.⁵⁴ In answering the call to explore how subalterns negotiated, we need to be explicit about the theories of power relations that inform our analyses, and we ought to seek to juxtapose the micro-historical gaze with a broader, comparative lens that moves us toward a creative synthesis of what we know about power and class relations.⁵⁵

The author is immensely grateful for substantive and bibliographical advice from James S. Amelang, Richard D. Brown, John A. Davis, Jonathan Dewald, Kenneth Gouwens, Sherri Olson, and Susan Porter Benson.

Cornelia Hughes Dayton teaches history at the University of Connecticut and is the author of Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995). Dayton is currently working on two book projects. One is a study (with Sharon V. Salinger) of Boston's mid-eighteenth-century "warning out" system—its regulation of the in-migration of "strangers." The other highlights how law, gender, race, and concepts of self were wrapped up in New Englanders' reactions to mental illness in the period prior to the establishment of asylums.

Notes

¹� For those who have come to see the term "agency" as too simplistic, vague, or overly sunny, James C. Scott's analytical terms "weapons of the weak" and "hidden transcripts" provide alluring alternatives: Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn., 1985); and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990). Evidently, this is the tack chosen by Benadusi and Castiglione; the latter cites Scott but omits a fuller discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of her analysis.

²� Caroline Castiglione, "Adversarial Literacy: How Peasant Politics Influenced Noble Governing of the Roman Countryside during the Early Modern Period,"AHR 109 (June 2004): 785.

³� But Justice's full discussion of insurgent literacy (in chap. 1), besides "revealing the range of purpose that motivated the rebels' destruction of documents," also recognizes that "there were documents that the rebels wanted to see created" and preserved, such as certain ancient charters of liberty. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 45, 47; M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).

⁴� Castiglione, "Adversarial Literacy," 803. Castiglione offers more detail on the mechanics of village governance in "Political Culture in Italian Villages," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31 (2001): 523–52. In the different political setting of Burgundy, Hilton Root finds that mid-eighteenth-century villagers moved from litigating over specific rights to challenging the foundations of seigneurial authority; his influential article, "Challenging the Seigneurie: Community and Contention on the Eve of the Revolution," Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 652–81, appears in revised form as chap. 5 of Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 155–204.

⁵� Dennis Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600 (Baltimore, 1996), 145–49. Romano finds that sometimes servants requested that masters safeguard their earnings in the family strongbox (147); Benadusi fails to acknowledge that this scenario might apply to Paola, Margherita, or Domenica. For a widespread pattern of delayed payments to workers, see Renata Ago, "Enforcing Agreements: Notaries and Courts in Early Modern Rome," Continuity and Change 14 (1999): 193–94.

⁶� Giovanna Benadusi, "Investing the Riches of the Poor: Servant Women and Their Last Wills,"AHR 109 (June 2004): 820, 819. To my mind, Erik R. Seeman provides more persuasive evidence of inversions of authority relations in his examination of deathbed consultations between female parishioners and their Protestant ministers; "'She Died Like Good Old Jacob': Deathbed Scenes and Inversions of Power in New England, 1675–1775," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 104 (1994): 285–314. See also Seeman, "Regarding Indians' Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches,"Journal of American History 88 (2001): 17–47. For a parallel discussion of confessors and Catholic saintly women, see Jodi Bilinkoff, "Confessors, Penitents, and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila," in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis, Barbara Diefendorf and Carla Hesse, eds. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993), 83–100.

⁷� Just how unusual these three women were in terms of the servant population is suggested by Monica Chojnacka's analysis of surviving parish censuses from late sixteenth-century Venice, which reveals that only 3 percent of widows were live-in servants and only 0.2 percent of female servants were widowed. "Women, Men, and Residential Patterns in Early Modern Venice," Journal of Family History 25 (2000): 15, 19. For a recent exploration of maidservants and the politics of the household, see Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (New York, 2003), 127–84.

⁸� On early modern documents that do reproduce idiomatic speech patterns, see Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (New York, 1987), 79–80. For an astute assessment of how the medieval English court roll can reveal "a village voice" at several levels, if rarely the "vernacular phrasing" of peasants, see Sherri Olson, A Chronicle of All That Happens: Voices from the Village Court in Medieval England (Toronto, 1996), 6–27.

⁹� John Jeffries Martin, "Religion, Renewal, and Reform in the Sixteenth Century," in John A. Marino, ed., Early Modern Italy, 1550–1796 (New York, 2002), 40.

¹⁰� Burke, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, 110–31, esp. 124, 126, 127, 122.

¹¹� For an enlightening application of the "uses of literacy" to a Protestant society where lay levels of reading were very high and where the high/low cultural divide was not acute, see David D. Hall, "The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850," in Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, Mass., 1996), 36–78; and Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989), 21–70.

¹²� Laurie Nussdorfer, "Writing and the Power of Speech: Notaries and Artisans in Baroque Rome," in Diefendorf and Hesse, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe, 110.

¹³� Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy, 157, 183–93. For the case of the Roman countryside, it would be illuminating to know what type of lawyer the villagers sought out (procurators, advocates) and what the lawyers did for their rural clients. In sum, what did it mean to retain a lawyer? For a window onto a rare cache of letters between clients and lawyers, illuminating ways in which the documents that ended up in court were negotiated, see Joanne Bailey, "Voices in Court: Lawyers' or Litigants'?" Historical Research 74 (November 2001): 392–408.

¹⁴� For an explanation of the titles accorded to notaries and lawyers, see Lauro Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, N.J., 1968), 29–30.

¹⁵� See the analysis of "notaries at work" in Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, Pa., 1998), 28–33, 45–49; and Shona Kelly Wray, "Speculum et Exemplar: The Notaries of Bologna during the Black Death," Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 81 (2001): 207–24.

¹⁶� Here, I am echoing Steven Justice's assumption "that taciturn records can be squeezed until they talk" (Writing and Rebellion, 9). Helpfully, transcripts of wills or will formularies are appended to many of the essays in Susan Kellogg and Matthew Restall, eds., Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes (Salt Lake City, 1998).

¹⁷� For analyses of preamble, examples for England include Margaret Spufford, "The Scribes of Villagers' Wills in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Their Influence," Local Population Studies 7 (1971): 28–43; and J. D. Alsop, "Religious Preambles in Early Modern English Wills as Formulae," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 40 (1989): 19–27; for Spain, Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1995), 34–43, 62–86; for New Spain, Kellogg and Restall, Dead Giveaways, esp. the essays by Sarah Cline and Kevin Terraciano. For Italy, the best analysis for what wills reveal beyond bequests is Wray, "Speculum et Exemplar: The Notaries of Bologna," and her forthcoming monograph, Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death.

¹⁸� In 1645, the villagers of Nerola considered getting their statuto printed, but it may never have happened (Castiglione, "Political Culture in Italian Villages," 535).

¹⁹� For printed forms, see Burke, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, 130–31. For the circulation of poems and other literary efforts among a circle of educated, unmarried Quaker women in Philadelphia, see Karin A. Wulf, "'My Dear Liberty': Quaker Spinsterhood and Female Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania," in Larry D. Eldredge, ed., Women and Freedom in Early America (New York, 1997), 83–108; and Susan M. Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004).

²⁰� William Assheton, A Theological Discourse of Last Wills and Testaments (London, 1696), quoted in R. C. Richardson, "Wills and Will-Makers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Some Lancashire Evidence," Local Population Studies 9 (1972): 38; Sarah Cline, "Fray Alonso de Molina's Model Testament and Antecedents to Indigenous Wills in Spanish America," in Kellogg and Restall, Dead Giveaways, 25.

²¹� Benadusi, "Investing the Riches of the Poor," 807.

²²� Brendan Dooley, "The Public Sphere and the Organization of Knowledge," in Marino, Early Modern Italy, 209–28; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death (Baltimore, 1992), 206, 243. For the frequency of commemorative masses and indulgences mentioned in a larger sample of servants' wills, see Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 172–83. See Sharon T. Strocchia, "Remembering the Family: Women, Kin, and Commemorative Masses in Renaissance Florence," Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 635–54, for a fuller discussion of the various types of commemorative masses and their degrees of publicness.

²³� Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 63, 221–22; Gayle K. Brunelle, "Contractual Kin: Servants and Their Mistresses in Sixteenth-Century Nantes," Journal of Early Modern History 2 (1998): 374–94. For an analysis of 261 complaints filed by or on behalf of servants in Maryland, 1652–1797, see Christine Daniels, "'Liberty to Complaine': Servant Petitions in Maryland, 1652–1797," in Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 219–49.

²⁴� Jonathan Dewald and Liana Vardi, "The Peasantries of France, 1400–1789," in Tom Scott, ed., The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 1998), 42–43; Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre, 1398–1789: Lordship, Community, and Capitalism in Early Modern France (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 148–52, 258–63. See also the seminal article by R. B. Goheen, "Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England,"AHR 96 (February 1991): 42–62, esp. his concluding thoughts on how a Cartesian emphasis on theorizing action, an "intellectualist dogma of the mind," may explain why scholars for so long reflexively believed that "peasants were incapable of political thought" and avoided focusing on the key issue "of agency" (61–62).

²⁵� John Langton, "Conclusion: The Historical Geography of European Peasantries, 1400–1500," in Scott, Peasantries of Europe, 376–78. Even more emphatically, David Gentilcore writes that for early modern Italians "from all walks of life" "negotiation was the order of the day." Gentilcore, "The Ethnography of Everyday Life," in Marino, Early Modern Italy, 192.

²⁶� Gadi Algazi, "Lords Ask, Peasants Answer: Making Traditions in Late-Medieval Village Assemblies," in Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith, eds., Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations (Toronto, 1997), 213, 202, 205, 202, 221.

²⁷� For the multiplicity of players in a French case and for an argument that outbreaks of violence over gleaning rights often went hand-in-hand with litigious strategies, see Liana Vardi, "Peasants and the Law: A Village Appeals to the French Royal Council, 1768–91," Social History 13 (1988): 295–313. Frank McCardle comments that the peasants in one Tuscan village with no communal government utilized a string of collective petitions over the eighteenth century to bid for concessions over debts, land access, and housing conditions, but, due to a number of factors, including their dependence on the landlord for their survival, armed revolt was not an option. Altopascio: A Study in Tuscan Rural Society, 1587–1784 (New York, 1978), 210–13. Castiglione, "Political Culture in Italian Villages."

²⁸� For an eye-opening exploration of "the spatial dimensions of gender and power" in a non-European culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York, 1993), esp. 3–12.

²⁹� Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 91–108 (quotation on 91). See also Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 108, 111, 113–17. For a deft interpretation of how slaves differed from planters and white, yeoman farmers in their perception of the plantation landscape and its purposeful, visual displays of social hierarchy, see Dell Upton, "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600–1860 (Boston, 1988), 357–69.

³⁰� These observations are based on my research on the twenty-eight contested wills appealed in eighteenth-century Massachusetts over the issue of the testator's sanity, "Legal Rituals of the Deathbed: Testing the Sanity of Colonial New England Gentlemen," paper presented to the University of Chicago Legal History seminar, November 1997. For England, see Lloyd Bonfield, "Probate Litigation in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury: A Preliminary Report," in C. W. Brooks and Michael Lobban, eds., Communities and Courts in Britain (London, 1997), 133–54; and Bonfield, Dying, Devising and Dispute: Probate Litigation in Seventeenth-Century England (forthcoming).

³¹� Wray reports that late medieval Bolognese wills contained a final clause giving the location of the will-signing, including the specific room or spot in the testator's house or the parish church ("Notaries of Bologna," 212–15). For the architecture and furnishings of patrician palaces and townhouses, see Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen, Daily Life in Renaissance Italy (Westport, Conn., 2001), 159–61; and Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993), 212–43. For servants' quarters, see Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800, Allan Cameron, trans. (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 143. Romano notes that, in Renaissance Venice, married servants often did not live in the master's household; live-in servants were typically housed in "mezzanines and garrets, the small floors tucked between and above the main floors of palaces"; and some wealthy employers provided higher-status servants such as nurses with small houses or apartments (Housecraft and Statecraft, 93–95). Raffaella Sarti, using a 1796 census of 10 percent of Bolognese parishes, found that only 4 percent of female servants were not co-resident with their masters. Sarti, "The True Servant: Self-Definition of Male Domestics in an Italian City (Bologna, 17th–19th Centuries)," C. Boscolo, trans., available on the web at http://www.uniurb.it/scipol/drs_true_servant.pdf.

³²� Laurie Nussdorfer, "The Politics of Space in Early Modern Rome," Memoirs of the American Academy of Rome 42 (1997): 162, quoting Burke, Historical Anthropology, quoting E. T. Hall, hardly represents the only time this phrase has been deployed.

³³� For France, see Dewald and Vardi, "Peasantries of France," 37. At least in the 1640s, in Nerola, the consiglio met in general meetings about six times a year (with perhaps thirty or so male household heads recorded as attending), and as a council of twelve on two or three occasions (Castiglione, "Political Culture in Italian Villages," 528–29).

³⁴� Compare Algazi on the German Weisung records ("Lords Ask, Peasants Answer") and Olson, Chronicle of All That Happens, 17.

³⁵� Algazi, "Lords Ask, Peasants Answer," 201. For a helpful discussion of village assemblies in France (from which female heads of household were excluded) and the debates over who should speak for the community, see Hilton Root, "Village Assemblies and the General Will," in Peasants and King in Burgundy, 66–104.

³⁶� Goldthwaite pointed out in 1993 that few scholars had yet to address how the great palaces and townhouses of the less elite "functioned as homes" or what "the material conditions of the household" were (Wealth and the Demand for Art, 237–38). Beginning to fill the void are Sarti, Europe at Home; and Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800, Brian Pearce, trans. (New York, 2000). Castiglione illuminates villagers' concern over establishing secure storage for their statuto in "Political Culture in Italian Villages," 532, 535. Duccio Balestracci refers to "Florentine peasants who kept their papers locked carefully in drawers"; Balestracci, The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant (University Park, Pa., 1999), 3; Sandra Cavallo finds an urban woman, mistrustful of her husband, giving a box containing treasured deeds into the safekeeping of the Compagnia di San Paolo, an organization of pious lay women; Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and Their Motives in Turin, 1541–1789 (New York, 1995), 178–79.

³⁷� Data on intermarriage would suggest how much villagers communicated and circulated. For a close examination, using diaries of lay readers, of when and what news arrived in the rural villages of New England, see Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York, 1989).

³⁸� Cohen and Cohen, Daily Life in Renaissance Italy, 158. Benadusi assumes that Aretine servants originated in the surrounding countryside. For an unexpected finding that 74 percent of female servants were of urban not rural origin, according to census data from certain Bolognese parishes in 1796, see Sarti, "True Servant," 13.

³⁹� Dennis Romano, "Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice," Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 340, 342–45; Robert C. Davis, "The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance," in Judith C. Brown and Davis, eds., Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1998), esp. 20–25, 33–37. An emblematic image is Paolo Veronese's fresco of Giustiniana Barbaro as a sumptuously dressed woman on a villa balustrade with her "faithful nurse," an older woman rendered "with crude, haggard features and leathery skin"; see a reproduction of the fresco, plus commentary, in Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, frontispiece, 32.

⁴⁰� E. S. Cohen and T. V. Cohen, "Camilla the Go-Between: The Politics of Gender in a Roman Household," Continuity and Change 4 (1989): 53–77; Nussdorfer, "Politics of Space," 164, 162–63; Davis, "Geography of Gender," 20–22; Romano, "Gender and Urban Geography," 347–48. In Venice, female servants were frequently sent to visit the city's churches on given days to gather indulgences for their masters and mistresses; this weekly schedule "provided an opportunity for poor women to move about the city" and socialize (Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 173).

⁴¹� I take my inspiration here from Christophe Charle, "Contemporary French Social History, Crisis or Hidden Renewal?" Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 63.

⁴²� Natalie Zemon Davis, "Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France," in Thomas C. Heller, et al., eds., Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, Calif., 1986), 55–59, 63.

⁴³� Ronald F. E. Weissman, "The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations, Individualism, and Identity in Renaissance Florence," in Susan Zimmerman and Weissman, eds., Urban Life in the Renaissance (Newark, Del., 1989), 278–79; John Martin, "Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,"AHR 102 (December 1997): 1330, 1340. Charles Taylor makes the important point that using an article with self (as in "the self," "a self") was not a pattern of speech before the nineteenth century. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 113.

⁴⁴� James S. Amelang's book, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, Calif., 1998), can be seen as an extended exploration of the issues raised in Davis's brief, influential essay. See the valuable Checklist, which provides a capsule biography and information on the location and various editions of the original manuscript, plus its discussion in secondary literature (Flight of Icarus, 253–350). Mechal Sobel analyzes what survives of the "thousands of individuals" of European and African origin in the New World, often "of the middling sort or poor,... who were enjoined or volunteered to write narratives of their lives." "The Revolution in Selves: Black and White Inner Aliens," in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 167. And see Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Chapel Hill, 2000).

⁴⁵� Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 115–50, 246, 123, 135, 119. For a different summary of the concept of the person in the early modern period, see David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (New York, 1984), 30–36.

⁴⁶� Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 129–41.

⁴⁷� For literacy rates, see Gentilcore, "Ethnography of Everyday Life," 191; Burke, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, 112. For a caution against assuming that most servants were illiterate, and an extended discussion of English servants who became poets and playwrights, see Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996), chap. 12.

⁴⁸� Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 135.

⁴⁹� Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 361.

⁵⁰� Algazi, "Lords Ask, Peasants Answer," 218–19.

⁵¹� Balestracci, Renaissance in the Fields, 3, 23–24.

⁵²� For an alternate implication, see Edward Muir's introduction to Renaissance in the Fields, xiv.

⁵³� Thomas Kuehn, "Understanding Gender Inequality in Renaissance Florence: Personhood and Gifts of Maternal Inheritance by Women," Journal of Women's History 8 (Summer 1996): 58–80, esp. 59, 61.

⁵⁴� Walter Johnson, "On Agency," Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 114–15. The Fall 2003 issue is devoted to a reconsideration of the field of social history.

⁵⁵� For bracing and cautionary remarks on the micro-historical methodology, see Giovanni Levi, "On Microhistory," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Peter Burke, ed. (University Park, Pa., 1991), in addition to his monograph, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist, Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. (1985; Chicago, 1988).

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