Elite and Popular Culture

The European World HI203Dr Rosa Salzberg

Pieter Brueghel the

younger, Peasant Dance (1607)

Dance at the court of King Henry III, later XVI

Definitions

• beliefs, customs, rituals, clothing, artworks,

literature, performances etc. of non-elites

• different elites: rulers/aristocracy; urban

elites; economic and intellectual elites

• blurring at the edges

Courtly Culture

• Shift of power towards ruler

• Centre for patronage, preferment, cultural life

• Competitions in magnificence

Palais du Louvre,

Paris

Place des Vosges,

Paris

Pierre Patel, Palace of Versailles, 1668

• The “civilising process” (Norbert Elias)

• Refinement of manners and etiquette

• Elaborate rituals and behaviour

•Lineage, prestige, status

•Conspicuous consumption

•Dissociation from manual labour/trade

•Humanist education

Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527

Definitions

• who are ‘the people’?

• differences of wealth,

education, gender, age,

religion

Studying Popular Culture

•‘an elusive quarry’ (P. Burke)

•‘a lost Atlantis’ (R. Muchembled)

•oblique access through ‘brokers’/mediators

•NB. problem of sources as ‘filters’

Interactions

•New work in the 60s and 70s

•Influence of anthropology and sociology eg. Natalie Zemon Davis

Peter Burke, Popular Culture in

Early Modern Europe (1978)

•‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions

•elites participate in both, “people” only in little tradition

Carlo GinzburgThe Cheese and the Worms

(English trans. 1980)

•focus on circularity and appropriation

•Microhistory of Menocchio the miller

•active appropriation from elite culture

•“a total, unified culture, rather than some kind of fractured 'two-tier' entity” (R. Scribner)

The Court

•Protecting and enclosing the prince

•Connecting to the outside

•Presence of artists, craftsmen, performers

The Globe Theatre

Shakespeare

Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso

Change•growing division between popular

and elite?

•‘Triumph of Lent’ over carnival (Burke)

•Protestant and Catholic reform of popular practices

•attempts to control spaces like piazzas, streets, alehouses

Pieter Breughel the elder, Peasant Wedding (1567-8)

Gentile Bellini, Procession in St. Mark’s Square (1496)

Change

•growing division between popular and elite

•‘Triumph of Lent’ over carnival (Burke)

•Protestant and Catholic reform of popular practices

•attempts to control spaces like piazzas, streets, alehouses

•BUT elites still participate

•popular culture could be conservative

Rough music/charivari

Role of print

•‘popular print’ eg. ballads, almanachs, chapbooks, prints

•blurred boundaries, encouraged interchange

•stemmed by censorship, regulation

•but new opportunities to express and preserve popular culture

1)other factors

2) not inherently rebellious

3) look for connections

4) changes over the period