Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History) - Hardcover

Watt, Tessa

3.9

20 ratings by Goodreads

9780521382557: Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521382556 ISBN 13: 9780521382557

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1991

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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'.

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Review:

'This is a fascinating study of the impact of print and Protestanism on the popular culture of early modern England ... Tessa Watt makes an important contribution to our knowledge of how popular culture functioned in early modern society.' Journal of Ecclesiastical History

'(Tessa Watt's) serious respectful study ... avoids both the value-judgements of the iconoclast and an unselective conceptual confusion, and allows her subject cognitive form and richness.' The Times Higher Education Supplement

'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

Book Description:

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

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