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.

The book also contributes to the contemporary interdisciplinary debate concerning the nature and evolution of autobiographical writing. It draws upon those currents within literary studies, such as feminist criticism, which favor a more flexible approach to the study of first-person narrative than that adopted by traditional literary critics and historians of ideas. It also argues for revising the standard history of autobiography, eschewing the teleological presentation of a small handful of classic texts in favor of a more nuanced trajectory in which a wide range of social actors helped shape the emerging patterns of modern self-understanding and expression.