ABSTRACT
Although ‘chapbooks are notoriously difficult to define’, the technical difficulty of defining chapbooks mirrors the conceptual problem of defining popular culture itself.1 Even the ‘what is’ gambit has been employed many times, starting in the 1970s, by scholars trying to define popular culture and its place in the broader project of cultural history. Peter Burke offered a magisterial justification of the concept in his 1978 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Upon the book’s republication in 1994, however, Burke’s new introduction surveyed the continued debates about ‘What is “popular”?’ and ‘What is “culture”?’ and conceded that both notions were still ‘in serious need of re-examination and redefinition’.2 Burke’s 2004 study, which asks What is Cultural History?, continues to address questions specifically about popular culture.3 Meanwhile, in 1984 David D. Hall asked whether chapbooks constituted ‘a literature “of” or “for” the people’; in 1989 Bob Scribner mused, ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’; and a 2002 article demanded, “What has happened to the history of popular culture?’4 In short, those committed to the study of popular culture – as we contributors all are – still feel called upon to defend publicly the validity of ‘popular culture’ as a historical category and the artefacts so categorised. Similar doubts surround the term ‘chapbook’, leading to an apologetic strain in assessments of their material and cultural values to readers then and now. This brief consideration of chapbooks,
1 David Stoker, ‘“To all Booksellers, Country Chapmen, Hawkers and Others”: How the Population of East Anglia Obtained its Printed Materials’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote, eds, Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (New Castle, Del. and London: Oak Knoll Press, 2007), pp. 107-36, at p. 116.
