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. 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’.

• Important innovative work, now out in paperback • Well illustrated and of interest to a broad range of historians and scholars of popular culture • Pioneering book which won Ronald H. Bainton Book prize from the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield prize in 1992

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.

‘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