This excellent overview of the current state of a broad and complex field, whose defining terms — especially popular culture, words tellingly avoided by the volume title — it persistently interrogates, asserts the centrality of print to the study of early modern culture. Far from being limited to questions of bibliography or even of book history narrowly construed, the forty-one-author enterprise combines, as we have learnt to expect, work in political, cultural, religious, social, and literary history, not only between the same covers but in practically each essay. In fact, it is precisely printed matter itself — its making, its formal and material features, and the mechanisms of its distribution — that would occasionally require a little more attention in some of the chapters.
The history is organized into five units. A section on “historical contexts” includes general chapters about the trade in each of the three kingdoms, about orality, literacy, manuscripts, about reading and book use, and about the problems of conceptualizing the popular. Essays in the section on “themes” discuss religion, rhetoric, political argument, parliament, war, and also images, women, and London. The section on “forms and genres” has chapters on formally identifiable texts like ballads and broadsides, almanacs, news, romances, pamphlets, and playbooks, but also chapters defined by modern areas of research: the treatments of science, medical writing, and didactic literature each comprise multiple genres, which results in overlaps that are frequently illuminating.
These main sections are complemented by a set of overviews of the worlds of popular print in other Western European countries and by a series of eight case studies about the output of particular years. Although the editorial preface points to this final section as most obviously reflecting the diversity of approaches and emphases that characterizes the volume as a whole, it is here that the book's defining perspective is most apparent. The fact that each case study concentrates on a year of major political transition (from Henry VIII's introduction of the Royal Supremacy to the Restoration) guarantees that the picture of popular print culture emerging from their sequence is focused on discursive events of a clearly political nature, rather than on slowly shifting mentalities, on the Weberian disenchantment of the world, or on the cumulative effects of commercialization, for example. The book couches accounts of such discursive events in a narrative about the widening spectrum and growing volume of discussion and debate about matters of religion, society, and government, a process of fits and starts that then accelerates dramatically in the mid-seventeenth century. Aspects of this core narrative are presented in chapters summarizing how research in the circulation and functions of news, libels, political pamphlets, and the logic of religious controversy has made us rethink the notion of the early modern public sphere.
This picture is complicated by print that is less involved in the “publicity dynamic” (6), and to which different criteria of popularity therefore seem adequate, such as the address to laypeople or to those outside a certain profession or discipline.Address is the crucial term here: if “books are not ‘popular’ in themselves but only in their uses” (443), those uses (and the users) often emerge from readings of how they are projected by the forms and paratexts of the books themselves. Thus, while the volume has clearly left behind the approach that “misleadingly equates (popular) print and (popular) literature” (304), its authors often adopt methodologies that are decidedly literary in their attention to the verbal and material rhetoric of popular print. This paradox inherent in the focus on the social lives of textual objects is often sidestepped by considering printed documents not so much as objects with uses, but rather as (public) acts with consequences — but this is not always an available option.
The book reflects advances in a field that has long ceased to be marginal. Through the openness of its structure, it also highlights topics to be further explored. The provincial and international geographies and topographies of printed matter, its physical presence in public and private spaces, the manner in which a cultural and conceptual divide between popular writing and its various opposites begins to be polemically constructed, and how habits of collecting print (habits that account for much of the evidence discussed here) reflect these divides, are only some of the areas of which we get suggestive and promising glimpses here.
