The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture. Vol. I

Oxford University Press has embarked on an ‘ambitious nine-volume series devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present’, and this opening volume has much to recommend it. In its forty-five chapters and over six hundred pages, both words and images in ‘cheap print’ from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries are surveyed, not only in England and Wales, but also, briefly, in Scotland and Ireland; and there is the bonus of four essays on contemporary developments in France and Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany, which show some parallels and many differences between developments in these islands and on the Continent. From a number of disciplines, though predominantly English Literature and History, the editor, Joad Raymond, has assembled a panel of talented and informed contributors who range from scholars with international reputations such as Roger Chartier and Peter Burke to those fresh from their graduate studies. The initial thirteen chapters are devoted to ‘historical contexts’: popular and plebeian cultures, the book trade, literacy, orality, manuscript culture and the social life of books. Next come the chapters offering international comparisons, and eight chapters on themes such as religion, rhetoric and politics, images, women and print, London, parliament and the press, and war. Then there are twelve chapters on forms and genres, including ballads and broadsides, romance, news, science and medicine, almanacs and history, pamphlets and chapbooks, sermons, primers and prayer-books, didactic literature and playbooks. The final eight chapters offer a set of case-studies of cheap print that appeared in years of political turmoil or change: 1535, 1553, 1588–9, 1603, 1625, 1641, 1649 and 1660

Art · Art history · Audience measurement · Ballad · History of the book · Irish · Literacy · Literature · Media studies · Orality · Parliament · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Print culture · Rhetoric · Sociology · Classics · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Scottish History and National Identity