Hagen convincingly demonstrates that rural subjects, even though burdened by labour dues and bound to land and farm through a myriad of individualised, complicated contracts and legal agreements, also possessed strong property rights, legal entitlements, a strong will of self-defence and litigiousness, and were light-years away from the caricature of the passive, miserable, tortured, pitiable and exploited creatures which traditional historiography – either of the Marxist or the liberal persuasion – has hitherto painted. The expression 'peasants' (as well as 'serf' and 'serfdom') is banned from this book from the very start, and rightly so. This work is full of such iconoclastic approaches, which the author presents in a captivating, entertaining and yet scholarly manner. 645) This statement would not be surprising about nineteenth-century Prussian working-class culture, but it is about early modern nobles and peasants. It is refreshing to be told by William Hagen that 'refractoriness and insubordination proved to be Prussian virtues'.(p.
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