Elite and Popular
Culture
Pieter
Brueghel the
younger,
Peasant
Dance (1607)
The European World HI203
Dr Rosa Salzberg
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 Ginzburg
The 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