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Bringing Ordinary People Into the Picture
John A. Shedd
State University of New York at Cortland
| ONE OF THE MOST CHALLENGING PROBLEMS faced by teachers of history is how to give voice to the vast majority of people who lived in the past. Our knowledge of history tends to center on the great and important because we are tied to extant written records, almost all of which were produced by and/or about people of high stature in society. For a long time, historians assumed that the little people of days gone by would always remain silent to us, since they left behind so few writings to examine. And, among some European historians at least, a bias in favor of the elite perspective was summed up in the phrase "the inarticulate masses," a term that was still in use as late as the 1990s. This essay cites examples from early modern European history to assert two broad conclusions. The first is that ordinary people are anything but inarticulate. If you wish to know what people believe, feel, need, or want, all you have to do is ask them. Most people in any society at any given time are not proficient in the formal usage of grammar and syntax, but they nonetheless manage to make themselves understood to others. Still, it is hard to get around the degree to which the majority, then or now, do not like to write. Mainly it is those who think themselves important or interesting who leave behind densely textured texts (be they memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, or blogs), sources that help elucidate for us the age in which they lived. Teachers need to find ways to get around this shortage of writings from ordinary people so as to help their students see that the human past was made by everyone and not solely by the few in power. The second assertion presented is that, despite the paucity of surviving written records left by ordinary people (resulting in a lack of detailed information about them in classroom textbooks), teachers can use supplemental secondary resources to help their students understand how people of low social status functioned in society, and even how they shaped their own worlds.1 |
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Finding out about ordinary people in history is also hampered by the fact that records kept about them are most often put together by their social superiors. This remains true right up to our own times. If, for example, we set out to write a history of the poor in the United States from 1950 to 2000, we would have to depend to a large extent on records such as reports left by social workers, statistics on poverty kept by other government employees, news reports about the needy that appeared occasionally, and records from private secular and religious charitable organizations. The limits of these primary sources are obvious: we would find out about only part of the poor population in the United States, since most did not come into contact with any of the above record-keepers. Except for periodic news media quotes from disadvantaged people caught up in tragic circumstances, we would remain unaware of the views of the people under study given by their own mouths. |
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Peter Burke, in his groundbreaking Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, described how, during the Renaissance, the upper classes took pains to separate their cultural practices from those of the more meager ranks of society, thus creating a "high" culture.2 What we think of as a popular culture, separate from elite culture, came about because of this withdrawal of the wealthy from social activities and from habits of the past. Burke also noted that, before the Renaissance, rich and poor Europeans in a given community participated in a shared culture. The new moneyed wealth of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries allowed people who could afford it to develop gradually a distinct culture, one that, for example, used more refined table manners (including such practices as eating with forks), listened to different, more "cultivated" kinds of music, and successfully suppressed Carnival which they saw as a time each year fraught with the danger of the poor getting out of hand.3 Thus, the elite became observers of popular culture, as well as antagonists of it, instead of participants. |
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Sometimes in post-Renaissance European history, though, the privileged did become interested in popular culture and even tried to emulate it. For example, the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century included a strong element of emerging nationalism, and with it came an ethnocentric love of traditional culture as practiced by the rank and file of society. Famous music composers of the movement, in revolt against the stuffy formalities of classicism, sought to celebrate folk tunes in their compositions. Unfortunately, in seeking to record and preserve for the future the national treasures that these songs represented, the Romantics did not resist the temptation to "improve" folk melodies before sharing them with their well-off audiences of symphony goers. Brahms and his Hungarian dances exemplify the way in which the Romantics, in their rush to replicate the music of the people, often did not trouble to get the record straight. The supposed Hungarian music he admired had in reality been derived from gypsy tunes played in cafes. The actual folk tunes of the Hungarian peasantry went unnoticed by the Romantics.4 Recorders studying other people cannot help but sift the experiences of those under scrutiny through a mesh of their own experiences. Thus, like Heisenberg trying to locate electrons, one who studies the poor, be it Brahms, Dickens, or Marx, changes the underprivileged by observing them. |
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Historians since the 1960s have increasingly sought to produce works reflecting the perspectives and concerns of the common people. Some of my own work is part of this trend, especially my study of seventeenth-century apprentices.5 During the English Civil War, Parliament promised apprentices that if they left their masters and joined the army to oppose the forces of King Charles I, they could deduct the time they spent in military service from their seven-year contracts. The war dragged on much longer than anyone wanted or expected, as wars too often do, so that many former apprentices in uniform managed to take three or four years off their terms of obligation to their masters.6 Naturally, masters thus deprived of labor, along with their guilds, vigorously resisted freeing apprentices who had spent so little time in training with their masters. This resistance was sometimes played out in guild courts, where apprentices who had claimed the freedom to practice their trades were fined and jailed. Parliament in turn countered the efforts of the guilds by making good on its word. It set young men from all over the country free to practice their trades, in what should be seen as an early example of a state-sponsored veterans' benefit. The stories of these apprentices lay buried in parliamentary manuscripts for centuries, and bringing them to light was a satisfying experience for me. But we cannot get around the fact that their cases were embedded in records kept by members of Parliament, which prevents us from telling a fuller story. Apprentices sought help from Parliament by making appeals to a committee consisting of members of the House of Commons, gentlemen who limited their record keeping to what they thought was important. This committee produced a collection of state records with the intention mainly of including what it decided, its decisions being more important than the opinions of the apprentices who petitioned it. |
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How can we as teachers overcome the problem of too few records left by ordinary people compounded by the tendency of records about them that do exist being the products of the minds of the elite and not of the ordinary? One answer is by investigating the findings of social histories written during the last twenty years or so. Many of them either examine previously unused primary sources or ask new questions of old, familiar archival sources. These new social histories fall into at least four categories: histories of ordinary people in trouble, demographic studies, microhistories, and studies using anthropological methodology.7 A theme that ties all four of these types together is that everyday people, though restrained to varying degrees by political, economic, and social systems designed in part to exploit them, find ways to cope within these systems, and even sometimes to work the systems to their advantage.8 |
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Ordinary People in Trouble | |
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Most often, people lacking leverage in society get written up in official records when they have acted in unconventional or illegal ways and threatened the status quo.9 The profession of history for a long while ignored a very large group of ordinary people who lived in the past, namely women. The women's liberation movement of the 1970s, however, led scholars to take an interest in women who were not rich or famous. Traditional women's histories had focused on just such great women, about whom there is a good deal of evidence, be it Eleanor of Aquitaine or Florence Nightingale. So, feminist historians began to examine the few records that were available to find out what happened to women from all walks of life. One source readily at hand that had not yet been used extensively on studies about women was court cases. Women do not occur in criminal records as often as men for the simple reason that they do not commit nearly as many crimes. But the crime of prostitution is an exception. |
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Studies of prostitutes in early modern Europe written since the 1970s have turned up surprising findings. Some have found that single poor young women eking out a living on their own and lacking male support were on occasion targeted and raped by youth abbeys, gangs consisting of young men either apprenticed to a trade or unemployed. Youth abbeys constituted an often violent element in larger urban centers that drew in teenaged boys from farming areas where employment opportunities were few. A woman so used was considered spoiled and many who had been raped turned to prostitution for survival.10 Thus, poverty was not the only reason during this period of time in Europe why girls and young women became prostitutes. Prostitution in those days was not often a long-term condition. After providing sex for money for a time, some were able to find husbands and settle into respectable households, apparently with neighbors treating them well and setting aside the stigma they had formerly borne. |
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Because witches were persistently prosecuted over a long period, persecutions that left behind a bulk of written records, there is no shortage of recent historical literature for classroom use on the witchhunts. The witch craze that struck Europe during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries is a well-known example of how, for people lacking substance, abnormal behaviors can draw deadly attention from their neighbors in times of mass panic. However, for centuries witches and other "cunning folk" had been providers of needed services to their communities. In a pre-scientific world, they were uniquely gifted with the ability to manipulate the mysterious forces of nature to the benefit of their clients. |
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Not only had witches traditionally been seen as beneficial, but their practices varied from place to place and constituted a rich and ever-changing patchwork of folkways that stretched all across Europe. However, in time, witchcraft was turned into a homogenous entity by the witch hunters. As the elite came to see witchcraft as an alarming evil, one that was spreading the will of Satan throughout the world, they set about trying to exterminate it. And, as has been the case in witch hunts from then until now, the best way society thought to deal with the problem was to see it as a coordinated, monolithic movement. Thus, in witch-hunting manuals such as Malleus Maleficarum we get a single version of witch activities and traits. By the late 1500s, a standardized version of the witches' sabbath11 had developed, one that presented a formulaic set of practices we have become only too familiar with in our popular novels and movies: witches joining in a coven and conjuring up the devil, whose head is that of a goat; drawing a chalk star on the ground and making a blood sacrifice; copulating with the devil, taking on his powers; etc. Once a source of remedy and comfort for countless villagers and townspeople, witchcraft was subjected to official investigations sanctioned by threatened upper classes, and came to be seen as a coordinated demonic movement.12 When the elite study and set down on paper an aspect of popular culture, be it witchcraft or folk dancing, what had been a regionally-varying and constantly-evolving folkway becomes set in stone, only to be copied over and over again in the exact same form by later generations who cannot retrieve other variations of practices that did not get recorded. |
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Studies of unintended consequences can sometimes open up new ways to investigate the lives of the powerless. For example, the Council of Trent, in launching the Counter-Reformation against the Protestants, made strenuous efforts to standardize Catholic practices in its push to put into place a top-down managed revival based on universal obedience to exactly specified rules. The exhaustive list of topics the bishops at the Council took up included the subject of marriage. In the process, they put together a definition of what constitutes a good marriage. However, by doing so, the Catholic hierarchy inadvertently set a trap for itself. For that which is not a good marriage must logically be a bad one, one that could then be justifiably dissolved. |
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Joanne M. Ferraro has studied annulment cases from Renaissance Venice and discovered that wealthy women took advantage of this loophole to secure an escape from their unions with abusive or neglectful husbands.13 The Council of Trent had stipulated that a marriage must be voluntary. Ferraro noticed that, in court, the women who had brought the annulment suits often avowed words like, "I said 'yes' with my mouth and 'no' with my heart," in their efforts to try to convince judges that they had been coerced into their marriages. This phrase repeated in the records led Ferraro to infer that the women in the study had been coached by sympathetic priests who knew to the letter the definition of a good marriage and how a wife might escape a bad one.14 Certainly, no one could argue that the well-to-do women of Venice who had the wherewithal to confront husbands in court were ordinary. Nor could it be claimed that annulment ever became commonplace in an institution that forbids divorce. Still, given how seldom we can read the statements of women at any social level in archival collections from this period of history, it can be noted that this is a rare instance of a group of women under the rule of their husbands finding a way to work the system to gain surprising, if not astonishing, leverage. |
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Demographic Studies | |
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Computers now enable us to analyze data at a more sophisticated level and thus to see patterns of past social trends that were once hidden. Historians interested in statistical analysis compile many snippets of information—e.g., birth, death, marriage, and tax records—to reach conclusions based on aggregates. For example, recent studies about public assistance show that the governments of Elizabeth I and James I provided welfare payments to a greater percentage of its citizens than did the British government in the twentieth century. In 1598, Elizabeth's Parliament enacted the Poor Law. It stipulated that each parish was to collect a poor rate, money tendered by a local official to the needy who applied for assistance. The Elizabethan Poor Law has long been seen as a pivotal moment shifting the responsibility of poor relief from the church to the state, in effect the deepest root of the coming welfare state. What was not known until lately was the extent to which indigent people in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drifted in and out of the system, some taking advantage of payments from the state intermittently throughout their lives. Other data indicates that two percent of the national income was devoted to poor relief during this period, suggesting a greater fiscal burden on government then than now.15 |
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In George Huppert's After the Black Death, we read that European peasants living in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not as bad off financially as we had long assumed.16 Due to the labor shortage caused by plague, the poor who survived were able to demand more money for their services, causing serfdom to all but disappear in Western Europe.17 Serfs could not move from one farm to another to take advantage of opportunities to better themselves, but if they became freemen, they could relocate. By looking at church and tax data and making careful calculations, scholars are able to report that peasants during this period moved households on average once per lifetime in efforts to improve their earnings. Findings like this, as well as others mentioned below, show us that we can no longer consider early modern European peasants as people stuck in the places where they were born, condemned to live out lives of unrelenting drudgery. |
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Microhistories | |
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Generally speaking, a microhistory starts with an event relating to the unusual behavior of a common person, behavior sufficiently notorious during its time to generate written or printed sources about the event, and then places the story in a broader historical setting. One of the earliest and still best known of these works is The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Z. Davis, published in 1984.18 Martin Guerre, a sixteenth-century French peasant, was put into an arranged marriage by his parents. After overcoming an embarrassing period of post-nuptial impotence, Martin fathered a son with his wife Bertrande. Then, for unknown reasons, he abandoned his home, left France, and eventually found service in the Spanish army. In 1557, Martin was wounded in the Battle if St. Quentin while fighting for the Hapsburg cause. The injury left him crippled. |
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Meanwhile, a man he had met while on his travels listened to Martin tell his life story and decided to go to Martin's village and take his place in the bed of Bertrande. Bertrande's motives for accepting this stranger as her husband are intriguing and can only be guessed at. Perhaps it was a combination of loneliness, lack of social status as an abandoned wife, and the charms of a flim-flam artist. After living the lie successfully for some time, Bertrande and the fake Martin were found out when the real Martin, weary and lame, came back home. His return led to actions at court that put the fake Martin on trial for his life. |
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The legal proceedings and execution following were so sensational that histories were written about Martin's story on the spot, giving Davis access to the details of an anomalous event in French history. While relating the general plot of this unusual story, Davis includes information about how peasants, and not just aristocrats, arranged the marriages of their children in order to build their family fortunes, how a village witch was hired to cure Martin of impotence, and how farming families used other pursuits—in this case making tiles—in order to increase their cash income. These, as well as a host of other episodes, indicate that peasants were not just passive players coping with the oppressive actions of their social "betters." |
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Like Natalie Davis, Robert Darnton made his reputation with a microhistory, this one set in eighteenth-century France.19 Apprentices and journeymen in a print shop intentionally misunderstand an order given by their cruel master. The master and his wife had been disturbed in the night by howling cats and want the culprits caught and killed. His workers go on a rampage to destroy all the cats in the neighborhood they can get their hands on, and in the process purposely kill their master's favorite pet. A description of the repressive structure of the printers' guild is included in the story. During the period, French law prohibited an increase in the number of master printers, despite a general increase in population and overall wealth. Legal restrictions on the growth of this trade condemned many journeymen and apprentices to prolonged wardship under their masters. Later in his narrative, Darnton puts the scandalous cat massacre episode into a wider context of popular phobias and superstitions relating to cats. |
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Another dead cat appears in David Cressy's book Agnes Bowker's Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England.20 Agnes, unmarried and pregnant, apparently conspired with her midwife to switch her newborn baby with a skinned cat. News of this monstrous birth (the skinned cat) spread throughout England. A broadside was printed that contained the image of a furless cat, with teeth bared and claws distended, adding graphic titillation to the news report. What happened to Agnes's actual baby is not known, though historians are increasingly aware of the sad and frequent practice of infant abandonment in Europe, running right up through the eighteenth century.21 Yet what remains of the story indicates that a young, vulnerable woman was able to play on superstitious beliefs to avoid the taint of giving birth to an illegitimate child. Agnes, like Darnton's print shop workers, though of modest means, was nevertheless able to get even, to a degree, with her tormenters. |
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Studies Using Anthropological Methods | |
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Artifacts and rituals are of primary importance to anthropologists, and in recent years, I have taken to beginning my undergraduate British history classes by sharing photocopies of three artifacts. The first is a short section, consisting of a paragraph called "The Mace," printed each year in SUNY-Cortland's graduation pamphlet, one that is handed to our students and their families when they arrive at the ceremony. This paragraph describes Cortland's silver mace as a symbol of authority and graduation does not proceed until the mace-bearer places it in front of the central lectern. The second is a picture of the large, elaborately carved golden mace that rests on the table in front of the Speaker of the House of Commons when Parliament is in session. The third is a woodcut print of a ceremonial parade showing the opening of the Commons in the seventeenth century, with the mace-bearer leading the procession. |
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Before distributing these handouts, we discuss the nature and purpose of rituals. I ask them to think about the traditional materials and practices associated with familiar rites of passage like baptism, bar mitzvah, or marriage. Then I ask them to share family rituals associated with holidays, perhaps relating how they pull the family together, bringing about a satisfying sense of unity that is too often missing. Perhaps we also discuss when and why rituals can feel dull or even suffocating. Then, just before sharing my three handouts, I ask them what a mace is (not the spice or the aerosol kind, the medieval kind) and who in the class will soon be wearing a black robe and following a mace-bearer in a long line. The point, of course, is to get them to think about why the use of ceremonial maces became part of college graduation, not just in Britain but in much of the world besides. Finally, I ask them to decode other symbols and practices connected with graduation as a rite of passage. I also hope our discussion prompts them to start thinking about how and why cultural practices persist long after their original purposes, or even meanings, are forgotten. |
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The introductory lesson just described is only one of several changes I have made to my courses in European history brought about by having first assigned awhile back in my Renaissance and Reformation class Edward Muir's Ritual in Early Modern Europe.22 Muir opens his book with a discussion of how rituals serve as mirrors and models. He discusses how rites of passage take people through important thresholds in life, as well as the dread and/or thrill experienced as one approaches a threshold. Chapters on other kinds of rituals are also included. He uses the Catholic Church's pre-Reformation ritual calendar, which contained a multitude of feast and saints' days, to describe how linear time was once seen as profane while cyclical time was sacred. Of particular interest (certainly to my students at least) is his discussion of how most of the festive culture of the Middle Ages was destroyed by Protestant and Catholic reformers alike. As mentioned in the introduction to this essay, Lent took on Carnival and won, leaving Lent alone (excepting, of course, in places like Venice, New Orleans, and Rio) as the more sober time set aside each year for religious observances. Other joyous festivals, notably maypole dancing as a rite of spring, were also suppressed. To get a carnival today we have to wait for the circus to come to town. And, even then, only part of the community participates. |
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Later in his book, Muir includes destruction rituals, emphasizing especially the wave of vandalism that swept Protestant Europe in efforts to wipe out popish idolatry. These destructive episodes are familiar to students of history. What Muir adds to the picture is an analysis of this iconoclasm as a rite of destruction, citing for example, how crucifixes were "mocked, defiled, and destroyed" or sold for lumber. Studying such events helps us today to understand the depths of anger that Protestants felt at having what they thought of as dangerous and evil trifles, instead of pious works of art, shoved down their throats by an unresponsive religious hierarchy every time they went to church. Muir's last chapter treats political rituals, especially ceremonies designed to reflect or enhance the power of the crown. Regal entries and processions, much like political rituals today, were meant to give the impression to observers who were caught up in them that there was more harmony in the state than was actually the case.23 |
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In practicing their profession, anthropologists must often draw broad inferences from very few examples. Sometimes only a single unearthed artifact is available to them, making its meaning or purpose hard to determine. Extrapolating meaning by positing connections between pieces of evidence that have previously been seen as discrete and separate more often than not makes for tentative conclusions. Still, social historians writing today, like Patricia Crawford, think that such a methodology is worth the trouble. Thus, in her book, Blood, Bodies, and Families in Early Modern England, Crawford asserts the potential value of scarce qualitative evidence over more abundant, but descriptively limited, quantitative data.24 She argues: "Like the surveyor who seeks to triangulate on a point, so our deployment of different perspectives may increase our understanding of the ultimately unknowable realities of past lives."25 For Crawford, demographic calculations like average age at marriage, birth and death rates, and fluctuating tax rates is not enough. She uses what little evidence that survives to make observations about such topics as knowledge about menstruation, medicine as it was practiced popularly as opposed to professionally, male attitudes about female sexuality, and mothers as care-givers to infants. By these means, social histories of ordinary people, once limited to head counting, has now been stretched into new areas of investigation, shedding light on daily life. |
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Conclusion | |
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Until a few years ago, it was not unusual for a historian to claim that unimportant people, people not in a position to make decisions affecting the direction that their societies would take, were not worth studying. Certainly, starting in the nineteenth century, there have been scholars writing history—notably romantic nationalists and socialists—who have had sympathy for the common people. The Cult of the Common Man and the theory of the ultimate triumph of the industrial proletariat come to mind here. Yet, historians of both these types during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to place their accounts within a moralistic framework, positing meaning in their stories using, to coin a phrase from Howard Gardner, "good-guy, bad-guy scripts,"26 e.g., Patriots good, Loyalists bad; poor good, rich bad; etc. Luckily, for those of us who teach history today, recent social histories available for use in the classroom have shed these old morality scripts while retaining the view that unimportant people are just as capable of teaching us important lessons as are the great. Thanks to their work we can now unlock voices from the past of groups of people who were once considered inarticulate. |
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Notes
1. As a former secondary social studies teacher of twelve years, I am mindful of the challenges connected with taking the time to delve into the lives of everyday people, given especially the strictures of mandated state syllabi, guidelines which are too often neglectful of this topic. This essay resulted from a presentation I made at the 2005 Central NY Council for the Social Studies conference in Syracuse.
2. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: 1978).
3. Carnival, as a yearly period of merrymaking prior to entering the sober self denial required by Lent, was sometimes marred by alarming violence. A slogan connected with Carnival, "world turned upside down," was invoked by poorer sorts of people as a rationale for mocking their superiors in public.
4. Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms, A Biography (New York: 1997), 38, 55–6, 61–2.
5. "The State Versus the Trades Guilds: Parliament's Soldier-Apprentices in the English Civil War Period," International Labor and Working Class History, 54 (Spring 2004), 105–116.
6. Ibid., 108. Apprentices who joined Parliament's army and navy had served on average 3.27 years with their masters before they deserted them to take up arms.
7. These categories should generally be considered overlapping instead of distinct (and each is defined in the four sections below). Histories of ordinary people in trouble, for example, are sometimes written as microhistories. Demographic studies, however, differ from the other three in the sense that they look at the aggregate instead of the individual.
8. Mark Goldie, author of "The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England," in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: 2001), 155, puts it this way: "But historians are now increasingly doubtful that the exercise of power should be construed as the monopoly of a ruling class, under whom the powerless subsisted either in deferential awe or truculent disobedience. The tendency of recent post-Marxian historiography has been to abandon the interpretive vocabulary of hegemony and social control, in favour of a vocabulary of agency, reciprocity, mediation, participation and negotiation."
9. This essay intentionally avoids the topic of riots, as it would have taken the piece in a very different direction. Suffice it to say here, though, that rioting became a routine method whereby small farmers in the early modern period made their opposition to low grain prices clear to the authorities. "Reading the Riot Act" is a phrase that came into being because English magistrates, lacking the support of a modern police force, confronted rioters in person and read aloud the text of the act so as to reinforce the penalties connected with the crime. Often, after the act had been read, there followed a period of negotiation over the price farmers could expect for their grain at market and the matter was settled peacefully. John Walter has found that sometimes women and children were exhorted by their male relatives to perform acts of vandalism during a riot. It appears that people preparing to riot had heard the act often enough to figure out that only men could be prosecuted in court for the crime, since the text of the act referred to men exclusively. See his "Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629," in John Brewer and John Styles, eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Brunswick, NJ: 1980), 46–84.
10. See Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution (Oxford: 1988).
11. Apparently, the notion of a witches' sabbath originated in the Alps during the fifteenth century. See Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: the Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: 1998), 34.
12. Of course, not all witch hunters were from the upper classes. Countless ordinary people made accusations and gave testimony against supposed witches. For an excellent study of the origins, course, and consequences of the witch craze, see Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (Chicago: 1991). See also his The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Baltimore: 1983). For a brief survey of the history of modern scholarship on English witches, see James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Harlow, Essex: 2001).
13. Joanne M. Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford: 2001).
14. Priests might also have been aware of the tactic employed by Catholic minorities in Protestant nations, whereby they were able to equivocate and keep their consciences clean when forced to take an oath of allegiance to a heretic state. This tactic required that mental assent and oral statements be treated as separate entities. See Edward Vallance, "Oaths, Casuistry, and Equivocation: Anglican Responses to the Engagement Controversy," Historical Journal, 44, 1 (2001), 63.
15. Peter M. Solar, "Poor Relief and English Economic Development Before the Industrial Revolution," Economic History Review, 48, 1 (1995), 7; Goldie, "The Unacknowledged Republic," 155. See also Steve Hindle, "Power, Poor Relief and Social Relations in the Holland Fen, c. 1600–1800," Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 67–96.
16. George Huppert, After the Black Death (Bloomington, Indiana: 1998).
17. Ibid., 67–72. Although Huppert is not a demographer, he takes his cue from the Annales School of history and uses statistical findings to bolster the arguments he weaves into his engaging narrative.
18. Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1984). Other books of interest of this type, among many, include Steve Ozment, The Burger-Meister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town (New York: 1996); Ann Wroe, A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Town in Fourteenth-Century France (New York: 1995); Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg or, The True and Incredible Adventures of a Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History (New York: 2000); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore,: 1980); and Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope's Elephant: An Elephant's Journey from Deep in India to the Heart of Rome (New York: 1997).
19. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York: 1985).
20. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker's Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: 2001).
21. Rousseau's giving away his children is a famous example of this problem. The widespread occurrence of foundling hospitals and orphanages in those times underlines its severity. It is possible it took the Victorian cult of childhood to make the practice a rarity in Western culture.
22. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe: New Approaches to European History (Cambridge: 1997).
23. Ibid., 188–9, 230.
24. Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies, and Families in Early Modern England (London: 2004).
25. Ibid., 12.
26. Gardner is a professor of education at Harvard University. This citation is taken from his The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach (New York: 1991), 4, 99.
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