The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume I: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660

Abstract

The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume I: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, edited by Joad Raymond, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, xxix + 672 pp., £95.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-928704-8For students and scholars of early modern British print culture, Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, the first in a proposed nine-volume series, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, will serve as a standard reference point for a long time to come. Its 45 consistently fine essays cover a broad and varied terrain, helpfully mapped out by a five-part organisational scheme -Historical Contexts, Some International Comparisons, Themes, Forms and Genres and Case Studies-that encompasses a rich array of perspectives and approaches. The combination of broad discussion with focused considera- tion of examples is well balanced, and the contributors successfully convey both the importance of print to an understanding of early modern politics, religion, culture and society, as well as the complexity of the subject and its problems. Joad Raymond, the volume's editor, comments in the preface that popular print culture is elusive and perhaps indefinable, and that he has made no efforts to reconcile disagreements (ix) between contributors. Certainly, sharp divergences and even contradictions between some of the essays, and much debate remains unresolved. Readers hoping for an overarching narrative and analysis will be disappointed; however, those looking for a fertile, varied and interdisciplinary body of scholarship suggesting a number of paths for further research and discussion will be well rewarded.Popular is now well established as a problematic term, so much so that Raymond has eschewed it in the volume's title, preferring instead. While is not itself a problem-free term - affordability is relative, and even among genres most readily associated with cheap print, such as ballads, some decidedly non-cheap examples - it does offer a more obviously identifiable category of print based on formal features such as price and production quality. This focus can lead to impressive results. For example, Peter Lake's essay on Religion and Cheap Print, building on (and often taking methodological issue with) important earlier studies on this topic by Tessa Watt, Ian Green and Alexandra Walsham, persuasively argues for cheap print as a vital source for our understanding of popular religion. The ephemeral nature of much of this cheap print poses challenging evidential problems to the scholar, but as the various discussions of chapbooks, ballads, pamphlets and other forms of low-end and invariably disposable printed matter make clear, it is their ephemerality and immediacy that make them such intriguing evidence for popular culture. If the volume's title might be thought an attempt to sidestep the thorny issues surrounding popular (print) culture, the contributions themselves repeatedly turn to a consideration of what cheap print may or may not tell us about popular culture. As Michael Braddick puts it, the surviving cheap prints are not the residue of popular culture in any straightforward sense, but we might nonetheless see ways of understanding the world obliquely reflected there (20).Certain themes recur, one of which is the relationship between popular and cultures. Anna Bayman, noting the plagiaristic nature of much print culture, argues that elite culture was disseminated through borrowings, citings and recyclings; in her view, [p]opular print provided an interface for the unlearned to engage with the learned, in genuinely shared cultures (78). Certainly various genres, such as almanacs, ballads, news-sheets and pamph- lets, appealed across cultural divides. For example, Simon Shaffer's essay on almanacs, a genre that contributed some of the staple best-sellers of the seventeenth century, explores how they bridge popular and culture, and Mary Fissell perceives a transformation in popular medical books in the 1650s (notably through the output of Nicholas Culpeper) that presents a democratic vision of knowledge (428). …