Patrick Joyce is Emeritus Professor of History at Manchester University, and one of the leading social historians of his generation. He has long been a radical and influential voice in debates on the politics and future of social and cultural history. Patrick has written and edited numerous academic books of social and political history, including The Rule of Freedom, Visions of the People, and The State of Freedom. He has held visiting professorships and fellowships at numerous places, including Trinity College Dublin, the University of California at Berkeley and San Diego, the LSE, and he has been a Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.
In recent years I have moved away from academic writing to a new mode of writing which includes combines history, memoir, and photography. I have recently completed Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World. To be published by Allen Lane/The Penguin Press in the UK and Scribner/Simon and Schuster in the USA, February 2024. In the book I consider how peasants in advanced western societies are now being lost to memory after millenia of time as the dominant social group. This is a loss we all share. The writing invokes the Irish peasant past of my forbears but sets this in the context of the end of the European peasantry, west and east. Why should we remember, and how are peasants remembered now?
Review of Remembering Peasants: “A dozen pages in I realized that I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book. Anyone who has ever tried to unravel the intertwined skeins of ancestry, sociology, music, geography and history will gape at Joyce’s skill. On almost every page the reader gets a jolt, a palpable sensation of immersion in the disappeared world of peasantry. A central part of the book is Joyce’s own family’s peasant past. I too, like many people, am only two generations and one language away from these ancestors. Because the time of the peasants is still palpable there are clues and messages here for every fortunate reader who picks up this book.” —Annie Proulx
Penguin book description, UK edition: In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the nineteenth century to the present day. Into this passionate history, written with exquisite care, Joyce weaves remarkable individual stories, including those of his own Irish family, and looks at how peasant life has been remembered - and misremembered - in contemporary culture.
This is a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history. Yet for Joyce, we are all the children of peasants, who must respect the experience of our ancestors. This is particularly pressing when our knowledge of the land is being lost to climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely and vital, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on our history and our future remains profoundly relevant.
Scribner Book description, US edition: “What the skeleton is to anatomy, the peasant is to history, its essential hidden support.” For over the past century and a half, and still more rapidly in the last seventy years, the world has become increasingly urban, and the peasant way of life—the dominant way of life for humanity since agriculture began well over 6,000 years ago—is disappearing. In this new history of peasantry, social historian Patrick Joyce aims to tell the story of this lost world and its people, and how we can commemorate their way of life. In one sense, this is a global history, ambitious in scope, taking us from the urbanization of the early 19th century to the present day. But more specifically, Joyce’s focus is the demise of the European peasantry and of their rites, traditions, and beliefs.
Alongside this he brings in stories of individuals as well as places, including his own family, and looks at how peasants and their ways of life have been memorialized in photographs, literature, and in museums. Joyce explores a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history and is usually mediated through others. And now peasants are vanishing in one of the greatest historical transformations of our time.
Written with the skill and authority of a great historian, Remembering Peasants is a landmark work, a richly complex and passionate history written with exquisite care. It is also deeply resonant, as Joyce shines a light on people whose knowledge of the land is being irretrievably lost during our critical time of climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely, and vitally important, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on history—and the future—remains profoundly relevant.
Pre-publication reception of Remembering Peasants:
“A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“An insightful and evocative homage to the peasant way of life… Readers will be enthralled.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[Joyce] rages against the amnesia hardwired into today's 'all consuming' present... A loving and unconventional work of genealogy, and a melancholic elegy for bygone ways of being.” —Booklist
In Spring 2021 my my Going to my Father’s House: A History of My Times was published by Verso.
Praise for Patrick Joyce and Going to My Father’s House:
“A haunting meditation on Ireland and England, war and migration, Derry and Manchester. I admired the originality of his observations and his tone of melancholy, calm wisdom.”
—Colm Tóibín, eminent writer (Observer Books of the Year 2021)
“An immensely readable, thoroughly enjoyable book... Hegel would have admired the way Joyce lets a sharply individualised life distil a whole social history.”
—Terry Eagleton, one of the most celebrated radical authors of our time
“This is a rare kind of writing, a form of meditation on the societies that are forming and melting around us in the present. Only a voice such as this can alert us to these historical worlds.”
—the late Seamus Deane, foremost Irish literary critic of his day, and author of Reading in the Dark
“I can't think of another historian around who could write something so suggestive and profound, so much on both a minor and major scale, constantly tracing the connections between the two.” —the late Paul Ginsborg, eminent historian
“Merges personal stories with large political moments. Joyce's family came to England from Mayo and Wexford. His account of his life in London, of the legacy of war and of his experiences in Ireland is written with wisdom and grace.”
—Colm Tóibín, (Authors' and Critics' 2021 Favourites), Irish Times
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