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A Personal History of a Vanished World
by Patrick Joyce
A landmark new history of the peasant experience, exploring a now neglected way of life that once encompassed most of humanity but is vanishing in our time.
"What the skeleton is to anatomy, the peasant is to history, its essential hidden support." For over the past century and a half, and still more rapidly in the last seventy years, the world has become increasingly urban, and the peasant way of life—the dominant way of life for humanity since agriculture began well over 6,000 years ago—is disappearing. In this new history of peasantry, social historian Patrick Joyce aims to tell the story of this lost world and its people, and how we can commemorate their way of life. In one sense, this is a global history, ambitious in scope, taking us from the urbanization of the early 19th century to the present day. But more specifically, Joyce's focus is the demise of the European peasantry and of their rites, traditions, and beliefs.
Alongside this he brings in stories of individuals as well as places, including his own family, and looks at how peasants and their ways of life have been memorialized in photographs, literature, and in museums. Joyce explores a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history and is usually mediated through others. And now peasants are vanishing in one of the greatest historical transformations of our time.
Written with the skill and authority of a great historian, Remembering Peasants is a landmark work, a richly complex and passionate history written with exquisite care. It is also deeply resonant, as Joyce shines a light on people whose knowledge of the land is being irretrievably lost during our critical time of climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely, and vitally important, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on history—and the future—remains profoundly relevant.
"Historian Joyce draws on his family's background in Ireland to provide an insightful and evocative homage to the peasant way of life...Joyce hauntingly conveys his perspective that the ramifications of the shift away from an agricultural way of life have been and will continue to be significant ('if we are cut off from the past, we are also cut off from ourselves'). Readers will be enthralled." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Joyce] rages against the amnesia hardwired into today's 'all consuming' present... A loving and unconventional work of genealogy, and a melancholic elegy for bygone ways of being." —Booklist
"A dozen pages in I realized that I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book. Anyone who has ever tried to unravel the intertwined skeins of ancestry, sociology, music, geography and history will gape at Joyce's skill. On almost every page the reader gets a jolt, a palpable sensation of immersion in the disappeared world of peasantry. A central part of the book is Joyce's own family's peasant past. I too, like many people, am only two generations and one language away from these ancestors. Because the time of the peasants is still palpable there are clues and messages here for every fortunate reader who picks up this book." —Annie Proulx
This information about Remembering Peasants was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Patrick Joyce is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Manchester. He is a leading British social historian and has written and edited numerous books of social and political history, including The Rule of Freedom, Visions of the People, and The State of Freedom. Joyce is also the author of the memoir Going to My Father's House, a meditation on the complex questions of immigration, home, and nation. The son of Irish immigrants, he was raised in London and resides beside the Peak District in England.
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