Thomas Anthony Birrell (1924-2011) was a man of many parts. For most of his working life he was Professor of English Literature in the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he was famous for his lively, humoristic and thought-provoking lectures. He was the author of some very popular literary surveys in Dutch, one of which - a history of English literature - has had seven editions so far. However, first and foremost he was a bibliographer and a book historian. The present collection contains fifteen of his book-historical articles, two reviews and one published version of a lecture for the illustrious ’Association Internationale de Bibliophilie’. The lecture - with a wealth of illustrations - about the British Library as the ’Custodian of the Unique’ gives one a sense of Birrell’s ability to present an audience with a complicated topic in comprehensible, but not simplified, terms. The reviews serve as a statement of principle of how to tackle the subject of ’English readers and books’ and the standards that ought to apply. The articles demonstrate Tom Birrell’s in-depth knowledge, dedication and scholarship. He once said that he felt that he could have talked to the 17th-century London booksellers on an equal footing and his work convinces one that they would have enjoyed these conversations. Aspects of Book Culture was edited by Birrell’s former pupil, colleague, friend and fellow-bibliographer Jos Blom.

A detailed study of the domestic life of the early modern, non-elite household

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.

1978 witnessed the publication of Peter Burke's groundbreaking study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Now in its third edition this remarkable book has for thirty years set the benchmark for cultural historians with its wide ranging and imaginative exploration of early modern European popular culture. In order to celebrate this achievement, and to explore the ways in which perceptions of popular culture have changed in the intervening years a group of leading scholars are brought together in this new volume to examine Burke's thesis in relation to England. Adopting an appropriately interdisciplinary approach, the collection offers an unprecedented survey of the field of popular culture in early modern England as it currently stands, bringing together scholars at the forefront of developments in an expanding area. Taking as its starting point Burke's argument that popular culture was everyone's culture, distinguishing it from high culture, which only a restricted social group could access, it explores an intriguing variety of sources to discover whether this was in fact the case in early modern England. It further explores the meaning and significance of the term 'popular culture' when applied to the early modern period: how did people distinguish between high and low culture - could they in fact do so? Concluded by an Afterword by Peter Burke, the volume provides a vivid sense of the range and significance of early modern popular culture and the difficulties involved in defining and studying it.

Explores the production of John Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs', a milestone in the history of the English book.

Uses the idea of the box in early modern England to develop a new direction in book history and material culture.