Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640
Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640
$39.99
USDThis book looks at popular belief through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares in London in the century after the Reformation. It investigates the interweaving of the printed word with the existing oral and visual culture, as well as the general growth of literacy. Both Protestantism and print have been credited by recent historians with enormous, even 'revolutionary' impact upon popular culture. The protestant hostility towards traditional recreations is said to have 'inserted a cultural wedge' in village society, while its logo-centricism took the English people across a watershed 'from a culture of orality and image to one of print culture'. This study challenges these confrontational models, showing instead how traditional piety could be gradually modified to create a religious culture which was distinctively post-Reformation, if not thoroughly 'Protestant'.
- Important innovative work, now out in paperback
- Well illustrated and of interest to a broad range of historians and scholars of popular culture
- Pioneering book which won Ronald H. Bainton Book prize from the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield prize in 1992
Reviews & endorsements
"Cambridge University Press deserves our thanks for publishing a monograph that offers such a wealth of bibliographical detail." American Historical Review
"...remarkably creative, exhaustively researched, and consistently engaging study." The Catholic Historical Review
"This important book by Tessa Watt looks at the impact of the Reformation and the print 'revolution' on popular religious belief in England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares produced in London...The end result is a rich and well-researched monograph, compellingly argued, that offers a powerful challenge to many commonly held assumptions about the nature of popular religiosity during this period." Albion
"This is an effective book, not least for its retrieval of often-forgotten sources and its complication of the distinction between godly and ungodly spheres of activity." David Cressy, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"...impressive study of the popular religious literature of the 'long' Reformation, from Edward VI's reign to the eve of the civil war...." D.R. Woolf, Canadian Journal of History
"...an extraordinarily competent and valuable addition to the growing corpus of work on the culture of early modern England." Phyllis Mack, Journal of Modern History
"It is an important addition to the history of publishing but also offers compelling evidence for revisionist theories about cultural change in the early-modern period." Publishing Research Quarterly
Product details
November 1993Paperback
9780521458276
392 pages
229 × 152 × 22 mm
0.645kg
56 b/w illus. 4 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Part I. The Broadside Ballad:
- 1. Small and popular music
- 2. A Godly ballad to a Godly tune
- 3. The 1642 Stock
- Part II. The Broadside Picture:
- 4. Idols in the frontispiece
- 5. Stories for walls
- 6. Godly tables for good householders
- Part III. The Chapbook:
- 7. The development of the chapbook trade
- 8. Penny books and marketplace theology
- Conclusion.
