Table Of Content

Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe ‘Qui dit le peuple dit plus d’une chose: c’est une vaste expression, et l’on s’étonneroit de voir ce qu’elle embrasse, et jusques ot elle s’étend.’ La Bruyére, Les Caractétres, Paris 1688, ‘Des Grands’ PETER BURKE POPULAR CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE ‘ HARPER TORCHBOOKS Harper & Row, Publishers New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London This book was originally published by Maurice Temple Smith Ltd in 1978. Itis here reprinted by arrangement. POPULAR CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE. Copyright © 1978 by Peter Burke. Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. First HARPER TORCHBOOK edition 1978 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 78-402 INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 0-06-131928-7 Contents Acknowledgements Vill Note Prologue XI Part 1: In Search of Popular Culture 1 The Discovery of the People 2 Unity and Variety in Popular Culture 23 3 An Elusive Quarry 65 The mediators 65 Oblique approaches to popular culture 7/ Part 2: Structures of Popular Culture 89 4 The Transmission of Popular Culture 91 The professionals 92 The amateurs 102 Settings 108 Tradition and Creativity 113 5 Traditional Forms 116 Genres 116 Themes and variations 124 The process of composition 136 6 Heroes, Villains and Fools 149 Prototypes and transformations 150 Popular attitudes and values 169 7 The World of Carnival 178 Myths and rituals 178 Carnival 182 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe The world upside down 185 The carnivalesque 191 Social control or social protest? 199 Part 3: Changes in Popular Culture 205 8 The Triumph of Lent: the Reform of Popular Culture 207 The first phase of reform, 1500-1650 207 The culture of the godly ; 223 The second phase of reform, 1650-1800 234 244 9 Popular Culture and Social Change The commercial revolution 244 The uses of literacy 250 Politics and the people 259 The withdrawal of the upper classes 270 From withdrawal to discovery 281 Appendix 1 The Discovery of the People: Select Studies and Anthologies 287 Appendix 2 Select Publications illustrating the reform of Popular Culture, 1495-1664 289 Notes 290 Select Bibliography 329 Index 353 Illustrations (between pages 98 and 99) Street Singers (German, 17th century) Newsvendor (German, 16th century) “The hurdy-gurdy man”, Georges de la Tour (early ee) 17th century) Skomorokhi at Ladoga in 1634 Charlatans on Piazza S. Marco Oo N Charlatans in Paris (early 17th century) B D O King Karvel and Ogier the Dane (painted chest) Bjérn Fréysak. Norwegian peasant and family 1699 “Credit is Dead” (Paris 1657) oO The mice bury the cat (Russian Broadside, c.1765) 11/12 Medal of Admiral Vernon (1739) 13 Charles XII (painted hanging by Gustaf Reuter, 1746) 14 The Four Sons of Aymon (17th century Dutch) 15 Chap-book title page, (Amsterdam 1602) 16 Musicians masked as Jews (Venice 1642) 17 The World Upside Down (18th century French broadside) 18 A politcal plate (c. 1790) 19/20 Politcal prints (by André Basset, 1789) Acknowledgements In the course of writing this book I have incurred even more debts than usual. I should like to thank the British Academy for an exchange grant which made it possible to visit people and museums in Norway and Sweden, and the University of Sussex for two terms’ leave and for refunding my typing expenses. Ruth Finnegan of the Open University and my Sussex colleagues Peter Abbs, Peter France, Robin Milner-Gulland, John Rosselli, and Stephen Yeo were kind enough to comment on draft versions of all or part of the book. My raid into their territory was abetted by a number of Scandinavian scholars, notably Maj Nodermann ij n Stockholm, Marta Hoffmann in Oslo and Peter Anker in Bergen. I am also grateful to the many historians in Britain who have passed me references or replied to queries. Alan Macfarlane gave me an opportunity to try out ideas from Chapter 7 on a lively group of social anthropologists and historians gathered in King’s College, Cambridge. An early draft of Chapter 3 was read to a conference at the University of East Anglia in 1973 and has now appeared in C. Bigsby (ed.), Approaches to Popular Culture, 1976; I should like to thank Edward Arnold Ltd for permission to reprint. I should also like to thank Margaret Spufford for comments which arrived just before the proofs. For Sue Note A book of this scope is inevitably stuffed with names and technical terms. The reader is advised that brief biographical details about persons mentioned in the text will be found in the index, which also contains a glossary. Many references given in the notes are abbreviated; they are spelt out in full in the bibliography. Unless stated otherwise, translations are my own.