The American Historical Association

The 101 annual meeting of the American Historical Association offered a number of good panels in labor history. Several sessions featured papers on working people in the early modern and modern eras, in the Third World as well as in Europe and the United States. Nearly all presentations bore the influence of the New Labor History, which suggests that the genre no longer confines itself to the familiar industrial worker in modernizing settings. A session on "Language, Labor, and Ritual: Changes in French Artisan Culture in the Old Regime" heard three papers. John Martin (Trinity University), in a paper titled "Northern Protestants and Popular Heresy in SixteenthCentury Venice" explained why lay and ecclesiastical elites in Venice tolerated Protestants in the middle of the Inquisition. He observed that the city's highly cultivated cosmopolitanism, coupled with fears of disrupting ties with Protestant trading partners, helped stay the hand of repression, but so did the very presence of large communities of French and German Protestants who engaged in craft production. Such artificers not only supplied vital goods and services (printed materials and food being the most obvious) but also developed means of "passing" as Catholics, feigning devotion to the Church while furtively observing their faith. French masters also figured prominently in a paper by James Farr (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) "Artisans and the New Morality: Sexual Propriety in Dijon during the Catholic Reform (1550-1650)." Much like Martin, he drew attention to the interior of the artisan community in support of the thesis that the "new sexual morality" was less an imposition from above than a reflection of personal need in the context of increasingly competitive commodity and marriage markets. Farr detected both a heightened proclivity to hurl "sexual slanders" at spouses and daughters and a complementary tendency to defend reputations of female offspring and condemn sexual promiscuity in the name of preserving the order and name of neighborhoods. In " 'Rather than Submit': The Language of Opposition and Honor among Journeyman in Old Regime France," Cynthia Truant (Newberry Library) reviewed the language of some forty letters written by compagnons to one another and later confiscated by the police. Truant argued that while the documents proved somewhat formulaic and dealt primarily with mundane trade matters, they still shed some light on artisan culture in the transition from an oral culture to a written one. They disclose more concern for honor and disgrace than the ribaldry and opposition to authority that historians