Subaltern Writing and Popular Memory in the Early Modern World
Volume 13 of the Journal of Early Modern Studies seeks to interrogate how common men and women used different modes of writing to keep, shape, and contest social memory in the early modern world. Studies on popular senses of the past, such as Andy Wood’s, have brought to light the complex interrelation between custom, collective memory, and social struggle. A usable past was key in conflicts over economic and political resources in the present. As the systematic regulation of access to reading and writing (Guillory), literacy was the basis for persistent forms of exclusion — particularly when gender and racial regimes of inequality intersected with class. But literacy was also a site of contestation.