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Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Adam Fox
Adam Fox
Affiliation:
The University of Sussex
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Extract

For students of the interaction between oral and written forms of communication the early modern period provides an important case study. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far from being an oral society; and yet it was not a completely literate one either. On the one hand, old vernacular traditions had long been infused and supplemented, or corrupted and destroyed, by the written word; on die other hand, only a certain part of the population could read and write or ever relied on the products of literacy. Indeed, as Keidi Thomas has suggested, ‘it is the interaction between contrasting forms of culture, literate and illiterate, oral and written, which gives this period its particular fascination’.

Type
Oral History, Memory and Written Tradition
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 9 , December 1999 , pp. 233 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1999

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