What We Talk About When We Talk About Popular Literature

Popular culture is proverbially evanescent, so attempting to grasp the ephemera of an earlier age is a difficult task. It's worth doing, however, because reading early modern literature can be like looking at a woodcut picture, in which the central image is defined by its surrounding absences. For every folio that survives, there were hundreds or thousands of broadsides that do not; for every Philip Sidney or John Milton, a brace of William Eldertons and Martin Parkers. These texts and authors may now languish in perhaps deserved obscurity, but this was far from the case when they first appeared. Works by more canonical authors teem with references to this vanished literary culture; more than allusion, this was the sea in which they swam. Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender takes its title from a popular almanac, the Kalendar of Shepherdes, printed in multiple editions across Europe and now almost wholly unknown. It's debatable which calendar would have been more familiar to a sixteenth-century reader (which reader?), but certainly a much closer acquaintance with the almanac genre than is now common must be assumed in Spenser's first readers. In the same way, the ballads sung by Desdemona and hawked by Autolycus might sound different to audiences for whom the ballad was the most familiar of objects. They might look different again when we consider the routine circulation of broadside ballad versions of contemporary plays, including King Lear. What does it mean in these circumstances to describe a text as popular? How did contemporary audiences see these connections? How should we?

It is this vanished world that this impressive and authoritative volume, the first in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture and the first of its kind, aims to recover. The book explores these questions at a peculiarly apt moment, in what is often seen as another communications revolution. In 2011 the travails of new media are once again provoking a set of anxieties and crises over access, authority, and subversion that would have been familiar to many of the early modern readers sketched here. At the same time, digital formats have made early modern popular culture more visible and accessible than ever before. Take the iconic product of popular print, broadside ballads, of which an extensive corpus is available in facsimile on several different websites: Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads <http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/>, the National Library of Scotland's The Word on the Street <http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/index.html>, and the lavish and information-rich English Broadside Ballad Archive <http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/> at the University of California Santa Barbara. The Oxford History builds on this interest, part of the current fascination with all things material (and it is the perpetual fate of popular texts to be considered more material than others), as well as a rising tide of work in the field from many of the expert contributors gathered here.

At the heart of most studies of popular culture is the question of what, exactly, the popular is, and the problem of definitions emerges as one of the History's central concerns. Since the 1978 publication of Peter Burke's landmark Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 'popular' has often been thought to denote a shared or common culture - from which, in Burke's reading, elites gradually withdrew (although the nature, scope, and chronology of that withdrawal remains a vexed issue). Bibliographically speaking, this maximal definition is often interpreted in terms of price, an approach adopted in several of the chapters. Popular print is cheap print, i.e. that which is most widely available, although there are problems with this: even a penny, the price of a broadside or pamphlet, would have been financially out of reach for large segments of the population, at least on a regular basis. Male literacy levels (in the best-case scenario) never rose above...