Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 (Oxford Studies in Social History) - Hardcover

This is a delightful book which will both impress the academic specialist and enthral the general reader. (Literature & History)

A stimulating account of the fabric of lived experience across England in the early modern period. (Years Work in English Studies)

Fox's encyclopaedic knowledge of the period and his keen sense of the connections between different cultural milieus has resulted in a masterpiece that thoroughly reorders some of the most basic categories through which we study the past. In its totalizing sweep and remarkable archival richness, it begs comparison with Religion and the Decline of Magic and The Stripping of the Altars, and in many ways it does for social history what those books did for the history of religious belief. (Reformation)

Rarely has a book of early modern English history so thoroughly conveyed the impression that the author has read every source produced in the England of that time ... tour de force. (Reformation)

This densely researched book is another rich contribution to the growing analysis of popular culture within a complex area which is difficult for the historian to retrieve - early modern England. Fox has meticulously drawn upon a wide range of fascinating sources ... this is a book to provoke thought and open up new avenues of historical awareness. (Social History Society Bulletin)

Exhilarating ... Adam Fox has written a most illuminating and thought-provoking account of this important subject, illustrated with an immense number of telling, pertinent and memorable examples. (English Historical Review)

This compelling study explores the interaction between speech, script and print ... Adam Fox's account of early modern English oral culture combines penetrating analysis with celebration of that culture's vigour, diversity, and inventiveness. (English Historical Review)

Painstaking research in many types of sources enables Fox to tell us far more than we might have thought it possible to know about the permeation of text into popular culture and the contribution of oral tradition to publication and print. (Times Literary Supplement)

This book explores the varied vernacular forms and rich oral traditions which were such a part of popular culture in early modern England. It focuses, in particular, upon dialect speech and proverbial wisdom, "old wives' tales" and children's lore, historical legends and local customs, scurrilous versifying and scandalous rumour-mongering.

Adam Fox argues that while the spoken word provides the most vivid insight into the mental world of the majority in this semi-literate society, it was by no means untouched by written influences. Even at the beginning of the period, centuries of reciprocal infusion between complementary media had created a cultural repertoire which had long ceased to be purely oral. Thereafter, the expansion of literacy together with the proliferation of texts both in manuscript and print saw the rapid acceleration and elaboration of this process. By 1700 popular traditions and modes of expression were the product of a fundamentally literate environment to a much greater extent than has yet been appreciated.