ABSTRACT
What were the fundamental attitudes and values of the craftsmen and peasants of early modern Europe? The question is central to this book, yet to answer it is the most presumptuous part of the whole enterprise, involving as it does the attempt to make explicit what was implicit in the different forms of popular culture. The approach adopted in this chapter depends on the assumption that a culture’s heroes, villains and fools form a system, that they reveal the standards of that culture by surpassing them, threatening them and falling short of them respectively.1
