Exploring autobiographical texts written by European urban craftsmen from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this wide-ranging book studies memoirs, diaries, family chronicles, travel narratives, and other forms of personal writings from Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and England. In the process, it considers the motivations of the authors, the changing forms and emphases of artisan narratives, and, more generally, the significance of written self-expression in early modern popular culture.

By analyzing reading and writing as practices laden with social meaning, this work aims to illuminate the changing role of the lower classes and other groups considered marginal in the history of literature and literacy.

It uncovers an "Icarian" logic by which writing about the self and one's immediate and private world developed as a complex response to widely shared expectations regarding the cultural and political subordination of craftsmen and others relegated to the margins of public life and discourse.