Product Description

This book explores the varied vernacular forms and rich oral traditions which were such a part of popular culture in early modern England. It focuses, in particular, upon dialect speech and proverbial wisdom, "old wives' tales" and children's lore, historical legends and local customs, scurrilous versifying and scandalous rumour-mongering. Adam Fox argues that while the spoken word provides the most vivid insight into the mental world of the majority in this semi-literate society, it was by no means untouched by written influences. Even at the beginning of the period, centuries of reciprocal infusion between complementary media had created a cultural repertoire which had long ceased to be purely oral. Thereafter, the expansion of literacy together with the proliferation of texts both in manuscript and print saw the rapid acceleration and elaboration of this process. By 1700 popular traditions and modes of expression were the product of a fundamentally literate environment to a much greater extent than has yet been appreciated.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2731675 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 524 pages

Literature & History
"This is a delightful book which will both impress the academic specialist and enthral the general reader."

Review
This is a delightful book which will both impress the academic specialist and enthral the general reader. (Literature & History )

A stimulating account of the fabric of lived experience across England in the early modern period. (Years Work in English Studies )

Fox's encyclopaedic knowledge of the period and his keen sense of the connections between different cultural milieus has resulted in a masterpiece that thoroughly reorders some of the most basic categories through which we study the past. In its totalizing sweep and remarkable archival richness, it begs comparison with Religion and the Decline of Magic and The Stripping of the Altars, and in many ways it does for social history what those books did for the history of religious belief. (Reformation )

Rarely has a book of early modern English history so thoroughly conveyed the impression that the author has read every source produced in the England of that time ... tour de force. (Reformation )

This densely researched book is another rich contribution to the growing analysis of popular culture within a complex area which is difficult for the historian to retrieve - early modern England. Fox has meticulously drawn upon a wide range of fascinating sources ... this is a book to provoke thought and open up new avenues of historical awareness. (Social History Society Bulletin )

Exhilarating ... Adam Fox has written a most illuminating and thought-provoking account of this important subject, illustrated with an immense number of telling, pertinent and memorable examples. (English Historical Review )

This compelling study explores the interaction between speech, script and print ... Adam Fox's account of early modern English oral culture combines penetrating analysis with celebration of that culture's vigour, diversity, and inventiveness. (English Historical Review )

Painstaking research in many types of sources enables Fox to tell us far more than we might have thought it possible to know about the permeation of text into popular culture and the contribution of oral tradition to publication and print. (Times Literary Supplement )

Customer Reviews

A fluent, fascinating study of the origins of our culture
This is an amazingly rich and vivid account of the culture of ordinary men and women in Tudor and Stuart England. For most people at that time the world was oral and aural: what informed it was the the dialect speech of the lociality, its proverial sayings and its gossip, its anecdotes and traditions. Much of this, of course, is unrecoverable today but somehow Fox manages to make the voices of the past speak. He enables us to hear how people sopunded, what they said and the ways in which they described their views of life. From this book you will learn fascinating details about the stories people told, the salacious rumours which they spread on the grapevine about the rich and famous, and the rhymes which they invented to ridicule their neighbours. The brilliant and original thesis advanced here, however, is that even at the beginning of the sixteenth century, England had a much more literate popular culture than has ever been fully appreciated. Much of stuff of conversation and tradition derived from the written word at some remove and over the course of the next two hundred years huge increases in reading ability and the massive production of manuscripts and printed works created a fundamentally literate environment for all. The thesis that even in this period most humble folk operated in a world fundamentally structured by the written word is of the greatest significance. Fox combines massive erudition, with literary skill and imaginative sympathy in a book which will no doubt become one of the great works of social history.

Groundbreaking
This is a decidedly interesting and thorough analysis of the tight interconnection between the oral and written modes of expression in early modern England. I would personally like to emphasise Fox's groundbreaking and pioneering survey of popular speech in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England as presented in the first chapter of this book. Although the author is not concerned with a detailed linguistic analysis of regional modes of self-expression, this illuminating chapter provides a fascinating and descriptive insight into many sources, both of a literary and non-literary kind, that prove extremely useful for linguistic research. Fox's account of sources for the study of provincial language very much improves other attempts made by the very few linguists and dialectologists who have endeavoured to evaluate regional 'Englishes' at this time. This is a highly recommendable book reference for any scholar who analyses the linguistic intricacies of regional speech in early modern England.