Itinerant salesmen, also called pedlars, street hawkers, hucksters and ballad singers are considered to be the most important distributors of popular printed matter in Europe between 1600 and 1850. A general assumption is that the pedlar travelling from town to countryside was strongly distinct from the role of the established booksellers in the towns, selling books to the educated and affluent buyer. The commercial position of the urban pedlars, however, is very often underestimated. In this book, therefore, the itinerant book trade is studied in an English and Dutch, urban context, leading to a new perspective on the role of the pedlars as an intermediary between the established booksellers and an extensive, socially diverse reading public.
The profession of peddling has until now received only slight and fragmentary scholarly attention. Usually treated in an anecdotal fashion, the pedlar has generally been thought of as a marginal figure, closer in character to a vagabond than a trader. In this first sustained account of the profession in Europe, Laurence Fontaine argues that peddling, particularly as a means of distributing new commodities such as books, watches, and tobacco, played a crucial role in the formation of the modern European economy. Focusing primarily on the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, Fontaine traces the origins and development of peddling and the establishment of trading networks. She analyzes the changing social construction of the practice and the effect of encounters between traders of different regions. Following the pedlars' trade routes across Europe from Spain to Sweden and Scotland to the upper Rhine, she examines their importance as channels of communication as well as of goods and raises such issues as the impact of pedlars on the values and cultural practices of the communities they visited and the ways in which being merchants changed the lives of these migrants. History of Pedlars in Europe separates the mythology that surrounds peddling from the historically reliable and integrates existing studies with new archival research to illuminate one of the most remote areas of the social and economic history of early modern Europe. A means of trade based on mobility, uncertainty, and interdependence, peddling is rediscovered as a dynamic force involved in nothing less than the creation of a modern consumer society.
Cheap print moved across Europe in surprising ways, crossing unusual distances by unusual routes and by unusual means. Pedlars, news, and cheap print defy the conventional categories and models of distribution: we need to think about their extraordinary diversity, and about the means by which their unstable cultural images inflect distribution. Books were not dead things, and the examination of Italy, the Netherlands and Britain, three regions that contain instructive parallels and contrasts, reveals their unpredictable liveliness. This collection of essays, which emerges from transnational dialogues about pedlars and commerce and communication, examines the various means by which cheap print moved across Europe, and the cultural and material and economic premises of the European landscape of print. Contributors include: Alberto Milano; Jason Peacey; Jeroen Salman; Jo Thijssen; Joad Raymond; Joop Koopmans; Karen Bowen; Kate Peters; Melissa Calaresu; Roeland Harms; Rosa Salzberg; Sean Shesgreen.
DIVLong before the invention of printing, let alone the availability of a daily newspaper, people desired to be informed. In the pre-industrial era news was gathered and shared through conversation and gossip, civic ceremony, celebration, sermons, and proclamations. The age of print brought pamphlets, edicts, ballads, journals, and the first news-sheets, expanding the news community from local to worldwide. This groundbreaking book tracks the history of news in ten countries over the course of four centuries. It evaluates the unexpected variety of ways in which information was transmitted in the premodern world as well as the impact of expanding news media on contemporary events and the lives of an ever-more-informed public. Andrew Pettegree investigates who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and journalists trustworthy; and people’s changed sense of themselves as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pettegree concludes, transmission of news had become so efficient and widespread that European citizens—now aware of wars, revolutions, crime, disasters, scandals, and other events—were poised to emerge as actors in the great events unfolding around them./div
The Press and the People is the first full-length study of cheap print in early modern Scotland. It traces the production and distribution of ephemeral publications from the nation's first presses in the early sixteenth century through to the age of Burns in the late eighteenth. It explores the development of the Scottish book trade in general and the production of slight and popular texts in particular. Focusing on the means by which these works reached a wide audience, it illuminates the nature of their circulation in both urban and rural contexts. Specific chapters examine single-sheet imprints such as ballads and gallows speeches, newssheets and advertisements, as well as the little pamphlets that contained almanacs and devotional works, stories and songs. The book demonstrates just how much more of this literature was once printed than now survives and argues that Scotland had a much larger market for such material than has been appreciated. By illustrating the ways in which Scottish printers combined well-known titles from England with a distinctive repertoire of their own, The Press and the People transforms our understanding of popular literature in early modern Scotland and its contribution to British culture more widely.
Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities The Enlightenment led to revised ideas about work together with new social attitudes toward work and workers. Coupled with dynamism in the economy, and the rise of the middling orders, work was more frequently perceived positively, as a commodity and as a source of social respectability. This volume explores the cultural implications of the transition from older systems based on privilege, control and embedded practices to a more open society increasingly based on merit and ability. It examines how guild controls broke down and political and commercial systems loosened. It also considers the theoretical justifications that brought new binding ideas, such as the strengthening of ideology on home, domesticity for the female, and work and politics for the male. North America embodied the extremes of these transitions with free workers able to make their way in a society based on ability and initiative while solidifying the ravages of the slavery system. A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.
This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions’ production, distribution, and consumption of books. The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting research on European books can instruct researchers on East Asian book production, so can the privileged role of noncommercial publications in the East Asian textual record highlight for historians of the European book the singular contribution of commercial printing and market demands to the making of the European printed record. Likewise, although production growth was accompanied in both regions by a wider distribution of books, woodblock technology’s simplicity and mobility allowed for a shift in China of its production and distribution sites farther down the hierarchy of urban sites than was common in Europe. And, the different demands and consumption practices within these two regions’ expanding markets led to different genre preferences and uses as well as to the growth of distinctive female readerships. A substantial introduction pulls the work together and the volume ends with an essay that considers how these historical developments shape the present book worlds of Eurasia. “This splendid volume offers expert new insight into the ways of producing, financing, distributing, and reading printed books in early modern Europe and East Asia. This is comparative history at its best, which leaves us with a better understanding of each context and of the challenges common to book cultures across space and time.” —Ann Blair, author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and professor of history, Harvard University “This engrossing account of the history of the book by leading specialists on the European and East Asian publishing worlds takes stock of what we know—and how much we still need to know—about the places that books had in the lives of our early modern forebears. Each chapter is masterful state-of-the-field coverage of its subject, and together they set a new standard for future studies of the book, East and West.” —Timothy Brook, author of The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties
Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue durée study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death. Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life.
In 1685, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes made Catholicism the only recognized religion in France and criminalized the practice of Calvinism, throwing the minority Protestant population into crisis. A Peddler’s Tale personifies these events in the story of Jean Giraud, a Protestant merchant-peddler, and his various communities. Drawing on Giraud’s account book; municipal, parish, and consistory records; and death inventories, Kristine Wirts ably reconstructs Giraud’s familial, commercial, and religious circles. She provides a detailed description of the persecution of Giraud and his fellow church members in La Grave, France, as well as their flight across the Alps to Vevey, Switzerland. The town’s residents did not welcome all refugees equally, often expelling Huguenots without social connections or financial resources. Those allowed to stay worked diligently to reestablish their lives and fortunes. Once settled in Vevey, Giraud and his extended family supported themselves by moneylending and peddling books, watch parts, and lace products. In contrast to past studies on the Huguenot diaspora that often depicted those fleeing France in heroic terms, A Peddler’s Tale exposes the harsh economic realities many exiles faced, as well as the importance of social relationships and the necessity of having financial means to secure passage and sanctuary. Wirts contends that Huguenotrefugees who succeeded in obtaining permanent residency in Vevey shared one important element: many derived their livelihood from the burgeoning economic ties and social bonds that emerged with the rise of capitalist markets. A compelling microhistory, A Peddler’s Tale ultimately illustrates the role and power of informal networks in sustaining and fostering early modern communities.
