1. Elite and Popular Culture
Mark Knights

2. Links to other themes
Last term’s discussion of the social order (bonds and tensions; the rise of middling groups)
The role of print – expensive and cheap forms
And looking ahead to:
Witches on Thursday
and after reading week: power and authority, popular politics, rebellion

3. Lecture structure
Set out what the terms ‘popular’, ‘elite’ and ‘culture’ mean (or have meant)
How far were there distinct spheres?
Sites and points of overlap

4. What is ‘culture’? Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (2004)
Narrow definition: clothing, artworks, literature, performances (Renaissance – Jacob Burkhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien 1860)
but also broader definition building on older interest in Folk culture – romanticism: beliefs/ideologies, customs, rituals, gender-relations. Sociological influence. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process (1939).
1960s and 1970s ‘cultural history from below’; Raphael Samuel, ‘History workshop’; influence of sociology and anthropology eg Natalie Zemon Davis – Martin Guerre; interest in rituals and violence.

5. Elite culture
different kinds of elites: monarch/aristocracy; urban elites; economic and intellectual elites
What about a middling sort? Were the bourgeoisie part of elite culture?
centres of patronage, culture but also sites of competition/negotiation: court, university, law courts, armed forces, houses and estates.

6. The Château de Brissac is a C17th French château in the commune of Brissac-Quincé
Dutch noble officer by Daniel Mytens

7. interest in lineage, prestige; conspicuous consumption; dissociation from manual labour/trade; humanist education
“The civilising process” (N. Elias 1939) – refinement of manners and etiquette as a process of social distinction – process of cultural integration or exclusion?
Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger, depicting the union of Charles of Arenberg and Anne of Croÿ, members of two of the most ancient and powerful houses among the Belgian nobility

8. Coffee house, c.1700

9. Popular Culture Who are the ‘people’?
‘The people’ encompassed great differences of wealth and education; urban/rural; gender and age
difficulty of studying popular culture at its lowest level: ‘an elusive quarry’ (P. Burke)
oblique access through a range of (mostly indirect) legal, administrative, literary and visual records
difficulties of looking at popular culture through elite sources, oral culture through written/printed sources

10. Jan Havicksz. Steen (Dutch, 1625–1679). Gamblers Quarreling, ca. 1665

11. Bruegel

12. Approaches low culture vs high culture?
Marxist: elite vs popular/plebeian (eg. E P Thompson); ‘cultural hegemony’
Robert Muchembled and Peter Burke (both 1978) tends to divide culture into two basic forms: "elite" and "popular" cultures which clash repeatedly until, Muchembled claimed, an older, popular culture, is "vanquished" by the power of social elites
Are there popular cultures? Sub-cultures? Barry Reay (Popular Cultures in England (1998): defines ‘popular cultures’ as ‘widely held and commonly expressed thoughts and actions’, the plural of cultures representing ‘the subcultural splinterings (or segmentation) of locality, age, gender, religion, and class’
growing separation – withdrawal of elites; triumph of Lent over charivari/carnival

13. Was carnival a ‘safety valve’ tolerated by the elite [Claude de Rubys: ‘it is sometimes expedient to allow the people to play the fool and make merry lest by holding them in with too great a rigour, we put them in despair’] or expressions of popular culture that could not be contained by the elite?

14. Separate spheres?
both Protestant and Catholic authorities target aspects of popular culture
Witchcraft – removed from statute book in France 1682; Prussia 1714; GB 1736
NB these often post-dated end of witch craze; the last conviction in England was Judicial scepticism.

15. Law as an instrument of suppression?
Marxist tradition
Property laws inflicting very high penalties including death
‘Bloody Code’. E P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters re the Black Act 1723 to deal with 'wicked and evil-disposed men going armed in disguise‘, pillaging the royal forest of deer
Defence of popular customs – Andy Wood

16. P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978), proposed the ‘great’ and ‘little traditions’: the elites participate in both, the majority have only the little tradition
Montacute House, Somersert (Edward Phelips), ‘Skimmington’, c

18. Agents and Sites of overlap
Were the gentry and artisans types of cultural brokers?
streets, markets, but esp. public houses (inns, alehouses, taverns)

19. Where are the points of overlap?
Print
C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (first English ed. 1980), emphasised circularity and appropriation of culture between different groups eg. the heretical miller Menocchio
=> new focus on transmission, exchange within a more unified culture rather than two separate spheres (see work of R. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation; R. Chartier)
Barry Reay (1998): plurality of overlapping cultures

20. Erhard Schön (attributed), “Demon Playing Monk (Lutheran) Bagpipe,” c
Anti-papal satire

21. Elite display as street theatre
Joyeuse entrée

22. The crowds ‘read’ the symbolism

23. Giovanni Battista Cimaroli - The Piazza San Marco with the Populace chasing Bulls 1740

24. Cheap Print: the ballad
Popular, cheap forms of print: almanacs; chapbooks; ballads
Pepys ( ) collection of over 1,800 ballads
mentions in his diary admiring and acquiring ballads in the 1660s
Bought collection of John Selden
other gentry collectors was Robert Harley whose expanded collection became known as the Roxburghe Ballads (1,500 ballads); Anthony Wood.

25. Ballads reflect popular culture;
The Poor Man’s Complaint
but do they also seek to control it?
Anything for a quiet life
Punish’d Atheist