How useful is a Study of the popular printed word in helping the historian understand popular culture in general?

CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. How can we define “popular”?

III. Possible sources and methods of interpretation

IV. Disadvantages and advantages of interpreting “popular” writings

V. Summary

VI. Bibliography

I. Introduction

Throughout recent years, in the discipline of historical sciences an extensive evolution has taken place. The transformation from the history of policies to “Historical Anthropology” (including several steps in between) involved not only entirely new topics, but also different approaches. In this development, the field of interest changed from investigating the lives of a few “important” authorities to those of the main part of “ordinary” agents.

In order to explore the usefulness of “popular” writings for historic research, we firstly have to determine a suitable definition of the term “popular” (section II)^[1]. Thereupon, section III describes several kinds of printed sources read, respectively written by “the public” as well as appropriate modes of interpretation. Finally, section IV examines cons and pros of using certain written records and their impacts on the knowledge of “popular” culture.

II. How can we define “popular”?

Since the 1970s, the so-called “popular” culture has been (re)discovered as an interesting field of historical study among scientists of various academic disciplines. However, the term “popular” has caused much controversy, owing to difficulties regarding a final and general valid definition of this term.^[2] Although the representatives of European culture have not been able to solve this problem, they at least came to the conclusion that the antiquarians and folklorists of Romanticism “were prisoners of their own position”.^[3] By collecting and printing oral transmitted stories of “the folk”, they continued the traditional concept of the opposition between the “ordinary people” and the “elite”, which is based on the idea of exclusion.^[4] Like the authorities in the early modern period, the Romantics measured the culture of “the people” using their own values and attitudes. They

came from the upper classes, to whom the people were a mysterious Them, described in terms their discoverers were not (or thought they were not): the people were natural, simple, illiterate, instinctive, irrational, rooted in tradition, and in the soil of the region, lacking any sense of individuality.^[5]

Unlike this point of view “from above”, historians nowadays scrutinize this perception of “popular” culture and ask, if a specific definition is actually possible or advantageous.

In this essay I will essentially follow one direction which defines “popular” culture as the culture of the “subordinate classes”^[6]. According to Roger Chartier, they opposed “the three robes”: “the black robe of the clerics; the short robe of the nobility; and the long robe of […] officials”^[7]. In addition, I will be aware of David Hall, who warns off a simple “social localization”^[8] and against drawing an unmoveable line between social classes. His example of the medieval expression “illiteratus” (means Latin vs. vernacular) versus the modern term “illiterate” attempts to prove the fluid and changeable boundaries between an assumed oral-illiterate-lay and a print-literate-clerical. Besides, this illustration demonstrates that terms like “illiterat/us” should be mentioned in the context in which they are used and that we should avoid describing “popular” culture by insisting on a few, inconstant words.^[9]

[...]

^[1] I abandoned a definition of the term “culture”, because such an attempt includes enough controversial points of view for another survey.

^[2] See S. L. Kaplan: ‘Preface’, in S. L. Kaplan (ed.) Understanding Popular Culture. Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, (Berlin/ New York/ Amsterdam, 1984), pp. 1; J. Le Goff: ‘The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Otherworld in the Middle Ages’, in S. L. Kaplan (ed.) Understanding Popular Culture. Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, (Berlin/ New York/ Amsterdam, 1984), pp. 19

^[3] D. Hall: ‘Introduction’, in S. L. Kaplan (ed.) Understanding Popular Culture. Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, (Berlin/ New York/ Amsterdam, 1984), pp. 7

^[4] See ibid. p. 6f.

^[5] P. Burke: Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, (New York, 1978), p. 9 in Hall Introduction p. 7

^[6] Hall Introduction p. 10

^[7] R. Chartier: ‘Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France’, in S. L. Kaplan (ed.) Understanding Popular Culture. Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, (Berlin/ New York/ Amsterdam, 1984), pp. 237

^[8] Hall Introduction p. 7

^[9] See ibid. p. 6-8