The Spoken Word
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‘This is a well-assembled volume. All of the contributions come from scholars writing at their best and are well aimed at the overall theme.’ Professor Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol The The spoken word The early modern period was of great significance throughout Europe with respect to its gradual transition from a largely oral to a fundamentally literate society. On the one hand, the spoken word remained of the utmost importance RAL CULTURE IN RITAIN to the dissemination of ideas, the communication of information and the O B , transmission of the cultural repertoire. On the other hand, the proliferation of spoken word written documents of all kinds, the development of printing and the spread of 1500-1850 popular literacy combined to transform the nature of communication. Studies previous to this have traditionally focused on individual countries or regions, and emphasised the contradictions between oral and literate culture.The essays in this fascinating collection depart from these approaches in several ways. By examining not only English, but also Scottish and Welsh oral culture, they provide the first pan-British study of the subject.The authors also emphasise the ways in which oral and literate culture continued to complement and inform each other, rather than focusing exclusively on their incompatibility, or on the 'inevitable' triumph of the written word. The chronological focus, ranging from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, with glances ahead to the twentieth, set the problem against a longer chronological span than most other studies, providing a link between early modern and modern oral and literate cultures. FOX & WOOLF & FOX This book will be of interest to students and scholars of British History, Linguistics, Literary Studies and Folklore Studies. Adam Fox is Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Edinburgh Daniel Woolf is Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada Cover illustration: engraving from James Macpherson’s Fingal, an ancient epic poem, in six books (London, 1762). Photograph courtesy Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain ADAM FOX & DANIEL WOOLF The6 spoken word Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain General Editors professor ann hughes dr anthony milton professor peter lake This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus con- tribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain. Already published in the series Leicester and the Court: essays on Elizabethan politics simon adams Ambition and failure in Stuart England: the career of John, first Viscount Scudamore ian atherton The idea of property in seventeenth-century England: tithes and the individual laura brace Betting on lives: the culture of life insurance in England, 1695–1775 geoffrey clark Home divisions: aristocracy, the state and provincial conflict thomas cogswell A religion of the Word: the defence of the reformation in the reign of Edward VI catharine davies Cromwell’s major-generals: godly government during the English Revolution christopher durston Urbane and rustic England: cultural ties and social spheres in the provinces, 1660–1750 carl b. estabrook The English sermon revised: religion, literature and history, 1600–1750 lori anne ferrell and peter mccullough (eds) Londinopolis: essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London paul griffiths and mark jenner (eds) Inventing a republic: the political culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 sean kelsey The boxmaker’s revenge: ‘orthodoxy’, ‘heterodoxy’ and the politics of the parish in early Stuart London peter lake Theatre and empire: Great Britain on the London stages under James VI and I tristan marshall Courtship and constraint: rethinking the making of marriage in Tudor England diana o’hara Communities in early modern England: networks, place, rhetoric alexandra shepard and philip withington Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 nicholas tyacke Political passions: gender, the family and political argument in England, 1680–1714 rachel weil 6 The spoken6 word Oral culture in Britain 1500–1850 edited by Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Manchester University Press 2002 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester m13 9nr, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn 0 7190 5746 9 hardback 0 7190 5747 7 paperback First published 2002 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset in Scala with Pastonchi display by Carnegie Publishing, Lancaster Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton Contents 6 Contents preface and acknowledgments—vii contributors—ix 1 Introduction Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf 1 2 Language, literacy and aspects of identity in early modern Wales Richard Suggett and Eryn White 52 3 The pulpit and the pen: clergy, orality and print in the Scottish Gaelic world Donald Meek 84 4 Speaking of history: conversations about the past in Restoration and eighteenth-century England Daniel Woolf 119 5 Vagabonds and minstrels in sixteenth-century Wales Richard Suggett 138 6 Reformed folklore? Cautionary tales and oral tradition in early modern England Alexandra Walsham 173 7 The genealogical histories of Gaelic Scotland Martin MacGregor 196 8 Constructing oral tradition: the origins of the concept in Enlightenment intellectual culture Nicholas Hudson 240 9 ‘Things said or sung a thousand times’: customary society and oral culture in rural England, 1700–1900 Bob Bushaway 256 index—278 Preface and acknowledgments Preface and acknowledgments6 Preface and acknowledgments he origins of this volume lie in the desire of the editors, both historians Tof England with an interest in the oral culture of the early modern era, to situate their subject in a wider British context. This is in keeping with a major thrust of British historiography in the last decade and a half, which has increas- ingly stressed the importance of taking Scotland, Wales and Ireland into account. We reached the decision early on that Scotland and Wales alone would provide sufficient material for an already lengthy volume, but there is no question that Irish material could usefully have been brought to bear here, and at least one contributor, Martin MacGregor, treats it in passing below. We have likewise taken a long, rather than a short, view of the appropriate time period for discussion; although many of the essays rest squarely in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, others range earlier and later, in one case as far as the early twentieth century. Further contexts for the book are provided by a number of other historio- graphical problems, not least the relations between literacy and orality, and between speech, writing and print; and those between elite and popular culture. There has been a tendency, until recently, to regard these as exclusive categories, if not poles; the essays that follow both individually and collectively emphasize the complexities of these relationships. As noted in the Introduction, below, this book on aspects of the spoken word in Britain has been written by two editors and seven other contributors, geo- graphically even further removed than the Scottish Highlands were from Wales or London. We are most grateful to our contributors, and to Manchester University Press, for making efficient use of email for the exchange of texts. We are similarly grateful to our contributors for their patience with our queries, and for their willingness to undertake revisions to their individual pieces in order to render them more coherent with the themes of the book as a whole. We received helpful comments from the series editors and from an anonymous referee on an early version of the manuscript; these have assisted immeasurably in revision. We would also like to acknowledge the advice and suggestions at various stages of Tim Stretton, Mark Stoyle and Ian Dyck, each of whom has expertise in related