Paper Memory

This is a fascinating study, which brings to life the tragic force of male honour codes for early modern families. It is the most extensive account available yet of the Cologne merchant, lawyer, city councillor and churchwarden Hermann Weinsberg (1518–1597), who assembled an unparalleled amount of information about his lineage, personal views and habits throughout much of his very long life. Lundin’s book emerges from Harvard doctoral work supervised by Steven Ozment, who used the Weinsberg records many years ago for his important monograph about changing family life during the Reformation period, When Fathers Ruled (1983). This was very much at the beginning of micro-history as a new genre and scholarly interest in early modern self-narratives, a field in which studies by Rudolf Dekker, Kaspar von Greyerz, Gabriele Jancke, Hans Medick, Claudia Ulbrich and others subsequently became particularly important for German-speaking areas. These authors demonstrate why and how we need to historicize concepts of selfhood and reconstruct contemporary cultural arguments about differing ideas of personhood in any period to dispel the idea that such concepts were monolithic. One of the oddities of Lundin’s book is that this whole scholarship seems to have passed him by—none of these works is referenced in the bibliography and questions about method and interpretation generally are not reflected on. The scholarly gesture is one of narrative empiricism and great promise: the book tells a ‘story’ which ‘takes us inside a mind’ to ‘witness transformations’ in this society ‘firsthand’. Paper Memory will ‘rescue’ this undistinguished man from ‘obscurity’ (book flap). It is therefore crucial to underline that a German project has already made Weinsberg’s diary available in a digitalized format several years ago and historians of selfhood have frequently made use of his diaries. These divide into three parts—the Liber iuventutis , Liber senectutis and, finally, Liber decrepitudinus , each of which numbers over 590 folio pages, as well as a further book of almost the same size which served to collect material for the diaries.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Honour · Interpretation (philosophy) · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Period (music) · Political science · Scholarship · Witness · Classics · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy

• The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe

  Open Access•Paul M Dover•Information Revolution in Early…•2021

  Add to list