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

by Raymond, Joad

• ISBN13: 9780191803468
• ISBN10: 0191803464
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2011-06-24
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers' lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time? These questions are central toThe Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, 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.

Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the later seventeenth, governments, institutions and individuals learned to use inexpensively-produced printed texts to inform, entertain, and persuade. Cheap print quickly became rooted in British and Irish culture, both elite and popular. This substantial and authoritative collection of essays - the first of its kind - examines the developing role of popular printed texts in the first two centuries of print in Britain and Ireland. Its forty-five chapters (with sixty-six illustrations) look at a broad range of historical and social contexts, at comparisons with other European countries, at the variety of content and themes in cheap printed texts, the forms and genres that developed with and were used by cheap print, and concludes with a series of case studies exploring the role of print in particular years. The book takes none of these terms - Popular, Print, Culture - for granted, but interrogates each of them with a rich, contoured picture of the relationship between a popular readership, the materiality of books, the economy of the book trade, and political and cultural history. Its forty-two contributors come from different disciplines and with expertise in fields from political and book history, through visual and material culture, to rhetoric and literature. These contributors do not all agree on definitions, or on the history that underlies them, but instead establish the ground for future debates and examinations of the role of cheap print in early-modern Britain.

Author Biography

Joad Raymond is Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia. His work explores early newspapers, politics, religion, and literary history, and the connections between these. Previous books include The Invention of the Newspaper (OUP, 1996), Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (CUP, 2003), Milton's Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (OUP, 2010) and various essays and edited books. He is presently editing Milton's Latin Defences for The Oxford Complete Works of John Milton, and also working on a project investigating early-modern international news networks.

Table of Contents

Preface
List of Tables
List of Illustrations
Notes on Conventions
Notes on Contributors
Chronology
1. Introduction: the origins of popular print culture, Joad Raymond
Part one: Historical Contexts
2. England and Wales, Mike Braddick
3. Scotland, Hamish Mathison
4. Ireland, Jane Ohlmeyer
5. Popular, Plebeian, Culture: Historical Definitions, Tim Harris
6. The Development of the Book Trade in Britain, Joad Raymond
7. Printing, Learning and the Unlearned, Anna Bayman
8. Popular Literacy and Society, Heidi Hackel
9. Reading Strategies, Stephen Dobranski
10. Oral Culture and Popular Print, Julie Crawford
11. Manuscript Culture and Popular Print, Andrew McRae
12. Libel, Alastair Bellany
13. The Social Life of Books, William H. Sherman
Part two: Some International Comparisons
14. France and Spain, Roger Chartier
15. Italy, Ottavia Niccoli
16. The Netherlands, Margit Thofner
17. Germany, Alisha Rankin
Part three: Themes
18. Religion and Cheap Print, Peter Lake
19. Rhetoric, David Colclough
20. Political Argument, Markku Peltonen
21. Images, Representation, and Counter-Representation, Helen Pierce
22. Women and Print, Sara Mendelson
23. London, Mark Jenner
24. Parliament and the Press, Thomas Cogswell
25. War, Nicole Greenspan
Part four: Forms and Genres
26. Ballads and Broadsides, Angela McShane
27. Romance, Lori Newcomb
28. News, Joad Raymond
29. Science, Simon Schaffer
30. Popular Medical Writing, Mary Fissell
31. Almanacs and Prognostications, Lauren Kassell
32. Popular History, Peter Burke
33. Pamphlets, Jason Peacey
34. Chapbooks, Lori Newcomb
35. Sermons, Primers, and Prayer Books, Mary Morrissey
36. Popular Didactic Literature, Natasha Glaisyer
37. Playbooks, Zachary Lesser
Part five: Case Studies
38. 1535, Tracey Sowerby
39. 1553, Cathy Shrank
40. 1588-9, Jesse Lander
41. 1603, Matthew Woodcock
42. 1625, Thomas Cogswell
43. 1641, Jason McElligott
44. 1649, Martin Dzelzainis
45. 1660, Gerald MacLean
Bibliography