Rural life in a Maltese eighteenth-century village [Book Review : The Social and Religious History of a Maltese Parish: St Mary’s Qrendi in the Eighteenth Century]

Abstract

Today the village of Qrendi in the south of Malta has around 2,500 inhabitants, over three times as many as it had in the eighteenth century when it was composed of an almost entirely agricultural community of around 800 persons. Very few of the eighteenth-century residents of rural Qrendi were literate. They did not leave behind personal memoirs or letters for historians to read. They did not have their portraits painted. We do not have any records of their faces, or of their personal emotions. Their thoughts and actions are easily obscured within the traditional writing of history dominated by the lives and thoughts of the more educated, wealthy and influential classes of society. On the surface, they may seem to have left no traces of their voices at all.