Abstract
Two Breton women in close conversation, portrayed by Émile Bernard, decorate the cover of this book—this is a conversation that the author wants us to overhear. His attentive ear evokes Chandler Davis's “Envoi,” which opens Natalie Zemon Davis's Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (1975): “The songs you think are vanished once they're sung/The pleas you think are wasted if turned down,/Jokes you dismiss if no one laughs or winces,/She listens for. You speak sometimes too soft” (p. xiii). David Hopkin admits from the outset that his study is an exhortation to historians to consider oral sources as a way of hearing the voices of the people. As exhortations go, this one is intriguing, careful, gracefully written, and ultimately persuasive. Hopkin's interest lies in understanding how the artifacts of oral culture can communicate the choices and agency of common people. In doing so he turns to a seaside village in Upper Brittany and its men on the high seas, the courting men and women of Lorraine, the stem households of the Nièvre, and finally to the men at the plow and the lace-producing women of the Haute Loire.
Published Version
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