The Medieval Tradition

Abstract

The cultural traditions of the Middle Ages have been described in broad terms as comprising two streams. In the 1930s, Robert Redfield, a social anthropologist, described ‘the great tradition’ as that of the educated few, and ‘the little tradition’ as that of the unlettered majority. These traditions, though independent, ‘have long affected each other and continue to do so’. Peter Burke, who quotes Redfield,1 modifies this model in an important way. He suggests that these two cultural traditions ‘did not correspond symmetrically to the two main social groups, the elite and the common people. The elite participated in the little tradition, but the common people did not participate in the great tradition.’ The great tradition was closed, being available only to those who had attended grammar school and university whereas the little tradition was ‘open to all, like the church, the tavern and the marketplace, where so many of the performances occurred’. The upper classes, Burke later states, withdrew from participation in the little tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and although it was argued (by Swift, for example), and is still sometimes asserted, that the culture of the lower classes is a debased form of an earlier higher-class culture (as opposed to the view of ‘the discoverers of popular culture, such as Herder and the Grimms — that creativity came from below, from the people’), ‘it can be stated with confidence that there was a two-way traffic between them’.KeywordsCommon PeopleDirect AddressGreat TraditionPopular AppealReligious TruthThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.