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Y312: Popular Culture and the Witchcraze of the 16th and 17th Centuries

Popular culture: popular and elite culture, their definitions

  • 3 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on popular and elite culture, their definitions, participation in popular culture and the withdrawal of the elite, the significance of ritual, the role of pageants and the festivals of misrule.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Key term

What distinguished elite culture from popular culture?

Key term

Give three features of rural popular culture.

Who and when

How did urban popular culture differ from rural?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Define popular culture as historians use the term for this period.

    Model answer

    It is the shared culture of the great majority who were not part of the educated elite, transmitted largely by speech, custom and performance rather than by books.

  2. 2

    What distinguished elite culture from popular culture?

    Model answer

    Elite culture was literate, learned in Latin and the classics, acquired through formal education and increasingly practised in private among people of similar rank.

  3. 3

    Explain what is meant by the withdrawal of the elite.

    Model answer

    It is the argument that before about 1500 the elite shared in the festivals, tales and games of everyone else, and that by about 1800 they had abandoned them as vulgar and superstitious, leaving popular culture to the poor.

  4. 4

    Give three features of rural popular culture.

    Model answer

    The festive calendar of the farming year such as harvest home, parish gatherings including church ales and saints' days, and the alehouse as the centre of village sociability.

  5. 5

    How did urban popular culture differ from rural?

    Model answer

    Towns added craft guilds, civic processions and drama, a denser market in cheap print such as ballads and chapbooks, and a much larger and more mobile population of servants and apprentices.

  6. 6

    Why did ritual matter so much in this society?

    Model answer

    Ritual marked the passage of the year and of life, from baptism and churching to weddings and wakes, and it publicly confirmed who belonged to the community and on what terms.

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