Minor Knowledge and Microhistory. Manuscript Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Minor Knowledge and Microhistory. Manuscript Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Co-author Dr. Davíð Ólafsson (London: Routledge 2017). 240 pages.

Once we step beyond the traditional boundaries and standardized processes of scholarship into unexplored areas of “minor or local knowledge,” we come across material that sheds new light on institutional structures. This is where microhistory makes its greatest contribution to modern scholarship, by moving out beyond the conventional framework of historiography into areas where knowledge has flourished and made a difference.

In this book we study every-day writing practices among ordinary people in a poor rural society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our research material is the abundance of handwritten material produced, disseminated and consumed some centuries after the advent of print. Our focus is on its day-to-day usage and what we call minor knowledge, i.e. text matter originating and rooted primarily in the everyday life of the peasantry.