Abstract
Reviewed by: Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia
It is ironic that the cheap, mass-produced chapbooks of the early modern period are now hard to find, while fine editions with small print runs produced for bibliophiles are well preserved in European libraries. Chapbook literature was crudely produced and it rapidly fell apart. Titles originally issued in thousands of copies now often survive in only one. And that unique copy may surface in a library very far from its place of publication. As Flavia Bruni emphasizes, about one third of French or Dutch vernacular editions of the sixteenth century can today only be found outside their country of origin. This is one good reason for historians to cross national frontiers in their search for the history of popular print in the early modern period.
Such a pan-European perspective is the stated agenda of this collection of essays. The approach has already been promoted by Hans Lüsebrink (who is regrettably absent), while new European Union funding mechanisms supposedly facilitate research on pan-European topics. The collection under review emerged from the Dutch-funded EDPOP project (European Dimensions of Popular Print), and it draws on presentations to a conference held in Trento in 2017. The book is produced by the Trento German-Italian Historical Institute, which ensures that Germany and Italy are the main foci, although the Netherlands, Spain and Britain are also represented. Although one of the editors is a Finn, the Nordic countries unfortunately do not feature here.
The collection includes a few studies of high quality, but overall it falls short of its transnational target. About 40 per cent of the 15 contributions have nothing to do with transnational book history, or else they touch on it only superficially. Goran Proot’s excellent chapter is a good example. Proot offers an important study of the prices of books produced by the Plantin-Moretus house in Antwerp, showing that Plantin’s successors moved towards providing the top end of the market with expensive religious and liturgical works, and gradually abandoned the production of cheap literature, which this collection is supposed to be examining. This is outstanding book-historical scholarship, but it strays far from the intended theme of the volume.
The contributors worry about what was ‘popular’ about popular print, apparently unaware of previous scholarly debates on early modern popular culture. Robert Mandrou is quoted frequently, but usually uncritically. His view (now rather dated) that chapbook literature was essentially escapist and acted as a social tranquillizer, is unaddressed. Since chapbooks and almanacs were bought by both upper and lower-class readers, it is indeed difficult to locate literature exclusively destined for lower-class consumption. Niall Ó Ciosáin goes furthest to engage with previous scholarship and to locate the ‘popular’ not in low prices, small formats or specific content genres, but rather in the sphere of distribution methods and reception. How a given book was actually used is the determining factor.
There is certainly scope for a transnational or at least comparative approach to chapbook literature, almanacs, recipe books and chivalric tales. Jean-François Botrel and Juan Gomis isolate what was specifically Spanish about the sale and distribution of the literatura de cordel. Jordi Sánchez-Martí considers the fate of Spanish tales of chivalry as they migrated across Europe, appearing in different scripts and formats, shortened or divided into easily digestible sections for a popular readership. Claudia Demattè finds that the proliferation of Spanish tales of chivalry in sixteenth-century Italy amounted to a ‘chivalric avalanche’ (222). Two hundred editions of the Palmerín cycle were issued between 1511 and 1620 in six languages (224). Alice Colombo and Julia Martins advance the transnational agenda by considering translations and adaptations which were edited and censored to suit the requirements of different markets. Rita Schlusemann argues for a European canon of popular literature, citing among other titles the ubiquitous Amadis de Gaule, Griseldis or Grisélidis, and The Four Sons of Aymon. This suggestive chapter comes inexplicably at the end of the volume – instead of at the forefront where it might have acted as a spur for the further pursuit of transnational themes.
The English is awkward in places, poor in others, and from time to time the reader unexpectedly bumps into commas which should not be there. The maps on pages 210–211 have swapped their captions, giving us Welsh readers in the Scottish highlands, and Gaelic readers in Anglesey and Gwynedd. But these are not the main problems. At the end of this volume, I felt disappointed that my guides had not taken me nearly as far as they had promised. In spite of some interesting essays en route, I feel the research has barely advanced. We still await a more systematic and focused attack on the transnational chapbook.