Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640

This book looks at popular belief through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares in London in the century after the Reformation.

Tessa Watt (Author)

9780521458276, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 21 October 1993

392 pages, 56 b/w illus. 4 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.645 kg

'This is a pioneering book … (which) will start historians thinking in a new way about the social and intellectual life of ordinary people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.' Christopher Hill

This book looks at popular belief through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares in London in the century after the Reformation. It investigates the interweaving of the printed word with the existing oral and visual culture, as well as the general growth of literacy. Both Protestantism and print have been credited by recent historians with enormous, even 'revolutionary' impact upon popular culture. The protestant hostility towards traditional recreations is said to have 'inserted a cultural wedge' in village society, while its logo-centricism took the English people across a watershed 'from a culture of orality and image to one of print culture'. This study challenges these confrontational models, showing instead how traditional piety could be gradually modified to create a religious culture which was distinctively post-Reformation, if not thoroughly 'Protestant'.

Introduction
Part I. The Broadside Ballad: 1. Small and popular music
2. A Godly ballad to a Godly tune
3. The 1642 Stock
Part II. The Broadside Picture: 4. Idols in the frontispiece
5. Stories for walls
6. Godly tables for good householders
Part III. The Chapbook: 7. The development of the chapbook trade
8. Penny books and marketplace theology
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]