ABSTRACT
The concept of popular culture is enriched and complicated when considered in the context of early modern London. The rapid development of the metropolis in the period 1500–1700 was profoundly transformative of almost every aspect of English life. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Peter Burke, a pioneering scholar of popular culture in the early modern period, significantly altered his concepts, definitions and approach to popular culture when he came to write specifically about London. In Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978), a wide-ranging study extending into the nineteenth century covering areas ‘from Norway to Sicily, from Ireland to the Urals’, Burke first developed a number of ideas still influential in the study of popular culture. 1 The most important of these, based on the anthropologist Robert Redfield’s contrast between ‘the “great tradition” of the educated few and the “little tradition” of the rest’, 2 was Burke’s ‘residual’ theory of popular culture, which identified popular culture as belonging to the vast majority of non-noble and non-clerical commoners. In line with this distinction, Burke also contrasted the traditional forms in which popular culture was embodied, by way of participation and performance, with the modern textual forms through which popular culture was recorded and mediated. 3 He offered important refinements and qualifications to these distinctions, noting, for example, that ‘there were many popular cultures or varieties of popular culture’ and explaining that the two cultural traditions did not fully correspond to ‘the two main social groups, the elite and common people’ because the elite ‘were amphibious, bi-cultural’ and ‘participated in the little tradition as a second culture’. 4 Nevertheless, Burke’s account of popular culture was governed by a number of strong binarisms – his division of traditional early modern society into ‘the elite and common people’, his narrative about alteration of traditional popular culture by its textual dissemination (an initial flowering, but inflected by modernising forces like secularisation and the political development of the populace), and his conclusions about the eventual withdrawal of the elite from participation in popular culture.
