Writing to Undo

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates protestations as a unique lens into the workings of coercion and resistance in the early modern period. Protestation was a wide-ranging genre of document, written to counter the consequences of coercive forces in myriad forms: familial, economic, religious, and political; on the levels of micro and macro; and across social and geographical space. This remarkable scope has paradoxically proven an obstacle to realizing the historiographical potential of the phenomenon, which remains largely uncharted and familiar only to a few specialists separated by sub-disciplinary divides. This article thus offers a unifying conceptual, analytic, and methodological framework. It interrogates protestations as material objects as well as verbal texts; follows them throughout their lifecycle; and explores their spectra of producers, protagonists, and functions. A variety of case studies from the ancien régime illustrate the significance of the phenomenon on both the micro and macro levels, whether in the struggles of young people against the abuses of patriarchal and familial authority or in the subversive use of protestations in the constitutional crises of absolute monarchy. Protestation is thus shown to be of wide interest to a broad swath of scholars, including historians of gender, family, working-people, elites, high politics, law, and writing.