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

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Summary: Watt offers a corrective to adrocentric historiography.
Review: In Cheap Print and Popular Piety, Tessa Watt argues that the English Reformation and popular print did not revolutionize popular culture and religious expression, but gradually modified it. She also argues that traditional interpretive polarities such as literary versus visual, popular versus elite, and city versus country do not serve to better the understanding of this period. Watt briefly reviews some dichotomous interpretations and counters that religious publishing in and around London in the hundred years after the English Reformation had a very organic nature which included image and text in varying degrees and cut across social and geographical distinctions. When taken as a whole, Watt argues, the religious publishing industry was diverse enough in content and influence that historians can no longer review the documentary evidence selectively and place somewhat forced constructions upon narrowed fields of consideration of post-Reformation English life.

Watt reviews three forms of popular religious publication: the broadside ballad, the broadside picture, and the godly chapbook. From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century in England the broadside ballad was sold to common folk for a fraction of a cent, was performed for nobility by professional minstrels, and included subject matter as diverse as biblical stories to 'news' of monstrous births or other supernatural occurrences. The growing use of moveable type allowed printers in London to mass-produce ballads for sale all over England and develop sophisticated marketing techniques. In 1557 the Stationers' Company was granted sole license to print ballads and thereafter sought to get as much product to market as possible. The technical capability to print in greater volume combined with organization structure directed toward greater profit allowed some interesting things to happen. The social influence of the broadside ballad, the broadside picture, and the chapbook is key to understanding early modern Europe, and Watt's interpretation of the documentary evidence is no less than revolutionary.