Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe

This study examines the popular culture of pre-industrial Europe and describes the world of the professional entertainer – minstrels, fools, jugglers – and considers the songs, stories and plays performed by ordinary people. It shows how the attitudes and values of the otherwise inarticulate were shaped by social conditions and how they changed as European society changed between 1500 and 1800. This edition contains a new preface looking at developments in recent years in the study of Popular Culture and the difficulty in fixing these two terms. An extensive supplementary bibliography also adds to the information about new research in the area.