Abstract
Popular culture has been one of the most fruitful areas of study in social history. As readers of this volume are by now aware, the concept of popular culture is not without its problems: it is too easily reined, it easily becomes static and unified, and it suggests too sharp a divide between elite and popular. Historians have sometimes made popular culture seem more coherent than it really was. We need to restore the complications, by looking at the divisions and conflicts it expresses. One way to do this is to focus less on the exceptional — popular festivals, rituals and the like — and more on a broader conception of culture which emphasises the values and norms of ordinary people as expressed in the course of their lives.1 Rather than being extraordinary, popular culture is everyday, and our task is to understand the ‘webs of meaning’ within which people lived and understood their lives.2
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