Tale of a Fool?

<p>A Tale of a Fool? explores the life of Guðrún Ketilsdóttir a peasant woman born in Iceland around 1759. Guðrún worked as a farmhand for most of her adult life and when she died she left behind a partial autobiography which is believed to be the oldest autobiography of an Icelandic peasant woman.</p><p></p><p>In this autobiography Guðrún writes openly about her life and provides colourful depictions of the society in which she lived providing one of the few first-hand accounts that have survived from members of the peasant class at that time. <i>A Tale of a Fool? </i>demonstrates how it is possible to work with this kind of source using the methods of microhistory as a historical tool to study events and individuals of the past. In doing so it not only provides an illuminating study of the life of a peasant woman in the 18th and 19th centuries but also addresses the question of the methods priorities and interpretations applied in the collecting cataloguing and publication of women’s writing.</p><p></p><p>Analysing the place of the individual in traditional agrarian societies and highlighting the impact that women have had on the cultural and social history of the period <i>A Tale of a Fool?</i> is ideal for researchers of microhistory and early modern Iceland/Scandinavia.</p>