Elite and Popular Culture Mark Knights Links to

Elite and Popular Culture Mark Knights

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

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

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). • 1960 s and 1970 s ‘cultural history from below’; Raphael Samuel, ‘History workshop’; influence of sociology and anthropology eg Natalie Zemon Davis – Martin Guerre; interest in rituals and violence.

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.

Dutch noble officer by Daniel Mytens The Château de Brissac is a C 17 th French château in the commune of Brissac-Quincé

• 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

Coffee house, c. 1700

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

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

Bruegel

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 1550 -1750 (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

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?

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 1712. Judicial scepticism.

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 evildisposed men going armed in disguise‘, pillaging the royal forest of deer • Defence of popular customs – Andy Wood

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. 1598 -1601

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

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

Erhard Schön (attributed), “Demon Playing Monk (Lutheran) Bagpipe, ” c. 1535 Anti-papal satire

Elite display as street theatre Joyeuse entrée

• The crowds ‘read’ the symbolism

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

Cheap Print: the ballad • Popular, cheap forms of print: almanacs; chapbooks; ballads • Pepys (1633 -1703) collection of over 1, 800 ballads • mentions in his diary admiring and acquiring ballads in the 1660 s • 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.

• 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