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Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 By Adam Fox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. xiii, 497 pp. + 12 pp. of plates. Illus. Bibliog. Index. ISBN 0 19 820512 0 (hbk, £45); 0 19 925103 7 (pbk, £15.99)
In the latter part of the twentieth century, social historians started to address themselves to the spread of literacy and to the coexistence of oral and literate cultures in England (and lowland Scotland, too) in the early modern period - that is to say, roughly from late medieval times, say around 1500, to the mid eighteenth century and the beginnings of industrialization. Adam Fox's substantial and impressive book builds on and greatly amplifies this research to present a broad panorama of the non-élite culture of early modern England - the representative culture of a society at one and the same time pervaded by oral communication, where many people could not read, and permeated by the written word, where virtually no-one in the course of their everyday lives could escape contact with texts that derived from manuscript or print.
Ways in which the oral culture of the period reproduced the literate culture, and vice versa, form the subject of the book. Taking a spectrum of cultural activities that on the face of it appear intrinsically oral in nature, it explores their mutual reciprocity with the world of writing and print, in some cases extending back to medieval times well before the early modern period. Time and again. Fox demonstrates that this was a world in which the boundaries of speech and text were thoroughly permeable, and where even the non-literate were used to communication through the medium of text - a fundamentally textbased world, but one in which the unlettered could substantially share. This was greatly facilitated by the general habit of reading aloud. Proclamations and the like were read out and discussed in public places; broadside ballads were pasted up in ale-houses and private dwellings. Memory for texts could become extremely highly developed among the non-literate.
The actual examples are endlessly fascinating, and supported by a wealth of footnote references. Speech itself was influenced by print, encouraging standardization of English towards the later seventeenth century and the emergence of something like a common culture, but also in...