Review Article: Popular Politics and Cultural Conflict in Early Modern Europe
Abstract
Review ArticlePopular Politics and Cultural Conflict in Early Modern Europe SAGE Publications, Inc.1988DOI: 10.1177/026569148801800104 R.W.Scribner Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theatre. Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, London, Methuen, 1985; x + 237pp.; £21.00. Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France 1400-1750, translated by Lydia Cochrane, Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana State University Press, 1985; ix + 326pp.; £30.00. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion. Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985; xvi + 324pp.; £17.50. Robert Muchembled's book was first published in French in 1978 and has found a considerable echo in Anglo-American scholarship over the past few years. Its central thesis, that rural popular culture underwent an erosion at the hands of centralizing powers in Church and state, an 'acculturation' as he labels it, has been so widely discussed and criticized that we can now draw a more critical balance of its central argument. It has much in common with the notion coined by Peter Burke to describe the attempt to impose more puritanical standards in religion and society, the 'Reformation of popular culture', and it is a theme taken up in David Underdown's book under