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. 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. A Tale of a Fool? 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. 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, A Tale of a Fool? is ideal for researchers of microhistory and early modern Iceland/Scandinavia.

Beginning in the 1950s, Edwin Wolf 2nd embarked on a biblio'l. quest to reconstruct the library of Benjamin Franklin, which was the largest & best private library in Amer. at the time of his death & was subsequently dispersed. The contents of Franklin's library were virtually unknown until Wolf identified the unique shelfmarks that Franklin used to organize his books. That discovery allowed Wolf to locate 2,700 titles in 1,000 vols. that Franklin actually owned. Wolf also identified a further 700 titles owned by Franklin. After wolf's death, Kevin Hayes took up the project & brought it to fruition. This catalogue includes almost 4,000 books known to have been owned by Franklin, & the Intro. tells the complete story of Franklin's library, its dispersal, & its reconstruction.

Snæfellsjökull is one of Iceland’s most famous volcanoes. It is there that Jules Verne located the entrance to the centre of the earth; it is the abode of a medieval saga hero and the location of one of Halldór Laxness’s novels. Travellers, painters, poets, and film-makers have been drawn to it in equal measure – while at the same time and against all expectations, others seem unfazed: as famous as the mountain is on a national and international stage, local folklore and medieval historiography have amazingly little interest in it. Clearly, Snæfellsjökull is not the same to everyone. This volume presents a survey of the place of Snæfellsjökull in the Icelandic and European imagination. It adapts the paradigm of geocriticism, which shifts the focus of the scholarly investigation from the work of individual authors to the multitude of views that different authors, artists, and practitioners have on a single place. The results of the perambulation of Snæfellsjökull presented here show that both its cultural and literary history, as well as the paradigm of geocriticism, open up broad vistas that amply repay the effort necessary to tackle this mountain.