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

by Raymond, Joad

• ISBN13: 9780199287048
• ISBN10: 019928704X
• Format: Hardcover
• 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 Historyof 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

General Editor's Introduction	p. vii
Preface	p. ix
List of Tables	p. xi
List of Illustrations	p. xii
Notes on Conventions	p. xvi
Notes on Contributors	p. xviii
Chronology	p. xxiii
Introduction: The Origins of Popular Print Culture	p. 1
Historical Contexts
England and Wales	p. 17
Scotland	p. 31
Ireland	p. 39
Popular, Plebeian, Culture: Historical Definitions	p. 50
The Development of the Book Trade in Britain	p. 59
Printing, Learning, and the Unlearned	p. 76
Popular Literacy and Society	p. 88
Reading Strategies	p. 101
Oral Culture and Popular Print	p. 114
Manuscript Culture and Popular Print	p. 130
Libel	p. 141
The Social Life of Books	p. 164
Some International Comparisons
France and Spain	p. 175
Italy	p. 187
The Netherlands	p. 196
Germany	p. 205
Themes
Religion and Cheap Print	p. 217
Rhetoric	p. 242
Political Argument	p. 252
Images, Representation, and Counter-representation	p. 263
Women and Print	p. 280
London	p. 294
Parliament and the Press	p. 308
War	p. 320
Forms and Genres
Ballads and Broadsides	p. 339
Romance	p. 363
News	p. 377
Science	p. 398
Popular Medical Writing	p. 417
Almanacs and Prognostications	p. 431
Popular History	p. 443
Pamphlets	p. 453
Chapbooks	p. 471
Sermons, Primers, and Prayerbooks	p. 491
Popular Didactic Literature	p. 510
Playbooks
1535	p. 537
1553	p. 548
1588-1589	p. 557
1603	p. 578
1625	p. 589
1641	p. 599
1649	p. 609
1660	p. 619
Bibliography	p. 629
Index	p. 649
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.