Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England (review)

This volume - a collection of papers read at the international conference 'Popular Culture and the Early Modern World' held at the University of Sussex in 2007 - invests a lot of effort into blurring the traditional demarcation between the adjective 'popular' and the noun 'culture'. More precisely, it attempts to place the 'popular' component, commonly seen as deriving from a sociological stratification of cultural production, closer to what might be perceived as the elite territory of cultural perception. The collection gets its best characterization from Sue Wiseman's opening essay in which she invites readers to distance themselves from 'the loose idea or habit of mind of casually imagining the popular as a sphere or place', and instead understand it as an ever-changing entity, which can accommodate rich, and sometimes contradicting, connotations (p. 26). The subsequent essays follow this agenda, while making apparent the shared concern with defining popular culture not as a unitary terrain, but rather as one that begs constant renegotiations.

Neil Rhodes's contribution, an exercise in multidisciplinary cross-reading, is one such renegotiation. It offers a re-interpretation of Elizabethan poet and pamphleteer, Thomas Nashe's style from the perspective of mid-twentieth century theories of mass-transmitted culture. Rhodes notes that 'Nashe's negotiations between elite and popular cultures are reflected in his agile interweaving of features from oral and print media' (p. 33). In Rhodes's view, this is an effect of the instability that characterizes Nashe when it comes to his identification with one or another of the elements implied by the elite-versus- popular dichotomy.

In her essay, Michelle O'Callaghan performs a similar critical reading of a product of early modern popular culture, focusing on Thomas Taylor, the so-called 'sculler poet', who had the exceptional ability (like Nashe) to 'move between the worlds of the labouring-classes and the court' (p. 45). O'Callaghan concludes that 'Taylor does have a clear sense of the distinctions between learned and unlearned cultures', but 'these bipolar categories are not so fixed that they cannot be recalibrated in order to privilege the labouring poet over the learned wit' (p. 56).

Part I ends with 'What is a Chapbook?' by Lori Humphrey Newcomb, who argues that both 'popular culture' and 'chapbook' are 'elite analytical phrases that refer to cultural leftovers', and reads the two accordingly (p. 58). With its widespread circulation, the early modern chapbook is said to have travelled 'through social and geographic space, generally attracting no attention' (p. 70). Newcomb points out that chapbooks 'went where print could not otherwise go'. This is perhaps the most important aspect that ties it to the discourse of popular culture, which rests not so much on the social class of its audience, but rather on the broad circulation and significant affordability of its products (p. 71).

The second part of the book fleshes out the concept of popular culture in a variety of genres, firstly in Linda Hutjens's essay with its emphasis on the tradition of tales about incognito monarchs. The author identifies the 'communal cultural source' of this tradition in 'the Judeo-Christian tradition as a formative element in popular culture' (p. 87).

Ian Frederick Moulton's '"Popu-love"' starts from the observation that both popular culture and sex tend to be defined as 'low', either from the perspective of the social origins of their audiences (the former) or that of 'the lower body and base desires' (the latter) (p. 91). Elisabeth Salter's and Femke Molekamp's contributions both deal with religious subjects. The former bases its argument on the close reading of the marginalia of John Day's Booke of Christian Prayers, in an attempt to provide material evidence for the 'rupture between medieval Catholicism and the post-medieval Protestantism' (p. 107). The latter generates a discussion about the Bible as both text and object, with a particular emphasis on its circulation in the field of domesticity. The article...