Abstract
In early modern Britain and the Dutch Republic the rise to prominence of rather ordinary folk took some contemporaries by surprise. Did such vulgar people not know their place? Or, said others, their skills and expertise were needed and they should be praised accordingly. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the historical role of commoners, both in practice and in theory, began to change. Rather than simply being there, to be ignored or feared or denigrated, they came to be seen as contributing, as having value through their skills, or crafts, or through their ability to reason or even to anchor the stability of the state or, in the Dutch case, of one of its colonies. These chapters explore the changing attitudes toward ordinary people as well as the social reality of self-made men and women whose appearance on the historical stage in significant numbers was unprecedented. Our focus is on England (after 1707 Britain) and the Dutch Republic because their economies and representative forms of government stood as among the most advanced in early modern Europe.
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Notes
Keith Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England,” History Today, vol. 37, issue 1, 1987, pp. 17–22.
See, among others, M. Prak, C. Lis, J. Lucassen, and H. Soly (eds.), Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries. Work, Power, and Representation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006);
S. R. Epstein and M. Prak (eds.), Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008).
K. Porteman and M. B. Smits-Veldt, Een nieuw vaderland voor de muzen. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1560–1700 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008);
P. Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
W. te Brake, Shaping History. Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500–1700 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998);
T. Harris, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Benedict de Spinoza, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, translated from Latin, with an Introduction by R. H. M. Elwes, Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus, Tractatus Politicus, vol. 1, Introduction (rev. ed., London: George Bell and Sons, 1891). Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1710on2013–02-28.
J. Farr, Artisans in Europe. 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 173–175.
S. Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Vintage Books ed., 1997) (1st ed.: 1987), p. 319;
A. Th. Van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age. Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth Century Holland (Cambridge: CUP Digital Printing, 2003) (1st Dutch ed., Van Gorcum 1978), pp. 71–72;
Ann Goldgar, Tulipmania. Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 11, 139–148.
On urbanity, see the comments by Wim Blockmans, “Four Golden Ages. Regional Interdependency in the Low Countries,” Low Countries Historical Review, vol. 127–2, 2012, pp. 89–96.
Jan Hartman, Jaap Nieuwstraten, and Michel Reinders (eds.), Public Offices, Personal Demands. Capability in Governance in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).
H. K. F. van Nierop, The Nobility of Holland. From Knights to Regents, 1500–1650 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993, first published: 1984), pp. 222–225.
First in his Vita politica; see Catherine Secretan, “Simon Stevin’s Vita politica. Het Burgherlick leven (1590): A Practical Guide for Civil Life in the Netherlands at the End of the XVIth Century,” De Zeventiende Eeuw, vol. 28, 2012, pp. 2–21; then, more developed in his Materiae Politicae. Burgherlicke Stoffen (“Civic Matters”) (Leiden, the Netherlands: Iustus Livius, 1649). On this edition made by the son of Simon Stevin, Hendrick Stevin, and first published in 1649, see E. J. Dijksterhuis, Simon Stevin (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1943), pp. 333–336.
On Stevin, see J. T. Devreese and G. Vanden Berghe, “Magic Is No Magic”. The Wonderful World of Simon Stevin (Southampton and Boston: WIT Press, 2008) (trans. from Wonder en is gheen wonder. De geniale wereld van Simon Stevin. 1548–1620) (Leuven, Belgium: Davidsfonds, 2003).
Simon Stevin was appointed in 1594 as Maurice of Nassau’s personal counselor; then shortly afterward he was officially appointed quartermaster of the Dutch army. See also Justus Lipsius, Politica. Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction. Edited, with translation and introduction by Jan Waszink (Assen, the Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004), pp. 353–355; Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism & the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 44–45.
W. Frijhoff, “Inspiration, instruction, compétence? Questions autour de la sélection des pasteurs réformés aux Pays-Bas, XVIe–XVIIe siècles,” Paedagogica Historica. International Journal of the History of Education, vol. XXX, issue 1, 1994, pp. 13–38
Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People. Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. vii;
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 4.
See Ruben Buys, “Sparks of Divine Light: Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert’s Rationalistic Perspective on Man and Morals,” Dutch Crossing, vol. 36, issue 1, March 2012, pp. 19–34.
Beside the pioneer book of C. Harline, Pamphlets, Printing and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987),
see J. de Jruif, M. M. Drees, J. Salman (eds.), Het lange leven van het pamflet (Hilversum, the Netherlands: Verloren, 2006), pp. 151–160;
M. Reinders, Popular Prints and Politics in the Netherlands, 1650–1672 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2012), pp. 98–120;
R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk. Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
J. Walter, Crowd and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
This book is meant to complement the approach taken in Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), chap. 1.
David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Cf., inter alia, Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687–1851 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy. Britain and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1850 (London: Penguin, 2011).
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gonzalez, 1963);
E. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour (New York: Basic Books, 1964);
George Rudé, The Crowd in History; A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964);
Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975);
Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
See also Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Routledge, rev. ed., 1983 [1965]), chap. 2;
Christopher Hill, “The Many Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking,” in C. H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingley (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1965),
and reprinted in Hill, Change and Continuity in Seven-teenth Century England (rev. ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 181–204;
David Cressy, “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” Literature & History, vol. 3, 1976, pp. 29–44;
E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?,” Social History, vol. 3, 1978, pp. 133–165, reprinted as “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in Thompson (ed.), Customs in Common (London: New Press, 1993), pp. 16–96.
Keith Wrightson, “The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches,” in Lloyd Bonfield, R. M. Smith, and K. E. Wrightson (eds.), The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford, 1986), pp. 177–202; Keith Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England,” History Today (January 1987), pp. 17–22, expanded as “Estates, Degrees and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England,” in Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 30–52; Penelope J. Corfield, “Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century England,” History, vol. 72, 1987, pp. 38–61,
reprinted in Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 101–130;
chapter 2 by Bush and chapter 6 by Seed in M. L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (London: Longman, 1992);
Jonathan Barry, “Introduction,” in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 1–27; Jonathan Barry, “Review Article: The Making of the Middle Class,” Past & Present, issue. 145, November 1994, pp. 194–208;
K. E. Wrightson, “‘Sorts of People’ in Tudor and Stuart England,” in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 28–51; H. R. French, “Social Status, Localism and the ‘Middle Sort of People’ in England, 1620–1750,” Past and Present, issue 166, February 2000, pp. 66–99;
chapters by Shepard and Muldrew in Henry French and Jonathan Barry (eds.), Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800 (London: Palgrave, 2004).
Maarten Prak refers, among others, to Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975);
Antony Black, Guild and State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 45.
See also Margaret Jacob, “The Materialist World of Pornography,” in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Zone Books, 1993).
http://www.egodocument.net/egodocumententot1814–1.htm1—a list of over 300 such diaries, largely unpublished and often of a religious nature. For a particularly illuminating autobiography from the early eighteenth century in England, see John Money (ed.), The Chronicles of John Cannon, Excise Officer and Writing Master. Part 1: 1684–1733 (Somerset, Oxfordshire, Berkshire) Records of Social and Economic History, new series, vol. 43 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2010)
and Money, ed., The Chronicles of John Cannon, Excise Officer and Writing Master. Part 2: 1734–43 (Somerset), new series, vol. 44. (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2010).
For a start, see Rudolf Dekker, “Watches, Diary Writing, and the Search for Self-Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century,” in Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (eds.), Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 127–142.
John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
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Jacob, M., Secretan, C. (2013). Introduction. In: Jacob, M.C., Secretan, C. (eds) In Praise of Ordinary People. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380524_1
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