Cheap Print and Popular Piety by Tessa Watt

CITATION: Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Does "cheap print" reflect a popular culture, or one defined by limited access to markets, limited literacy, and Protestant propaganda?
• Answer: The cheap print market was limited by its illiteracy and remoteness to musical and godly ballads, controlled in the 17th C. by a cartel of "ballad partners." Illustrated broadsides reflect the background of woodcut illustrations in Protestant epistemologies and reveal the application of printed illustrations for popular decoration. The chapbook trade shifted in the 17th C. from polemical and religious print to news pamphlets and plays.
• Method: Watt tracks surviving copies of ephemeral literature and reconstructs trends with the aid of the Stationer's Register.
• Assumptions: 
• Watt responds to a tradition that views both the popular press and Protestantism to be monolithic, sometimes sympathetic, revolutionary forces. In turn, Watt seeks to demonstrate the multiplicity of motives, modes, and methods for the proliferation of print and Protestantism.
• Watt plays fast and loose with some established figures relating the survival rates of ephemera.
• Sententiae: 
• "[O]nly some 250 [16th C. broadsides] exist in black-letter copies... A comparison of the Registers with the surviving [ballads] shows that approximately 65% were recorded... Assuming 65% registration, and allowing for a constant output during the years for which there is no Stationers' Register (1550-7 and 1571-6), this figure represents probably 3,000 distinct ballads in the second half of the sixteenth century." (42)
• "The consolidation of copyrights to the popular ballad titles was accompanied by a new emphasis on what we would now call 'marketing strategy'. The most striking change was the institution of woodcut pictures as a standard feature.... Only one fifth of surviving sixteenth-century religious ballads are illustrated. Taking sixteenth-century collections as a whole... , no more than roughly one quarter have some kind of woodcut decoration. In the seventeenth century, the proportion of ballads with woodcuts was completely reversed. For the period 1600-40, more than five-sixths of extant religious ballads are illustrated." (78-9)
• "The fact that reading required some education as a prerequisite could be used as an argument for allowing religious illustration in print. When Archbishop Laud was charged with permitting bibles with superstitious pictures to be sold, he claimed that 'they were not to be sold to all comers, because they may be abused, and become evil; and yet might be sold to learned and discreet men, who might turn them to good.' This was a neat reversal of the view held a century earlier that pictures were 'laymen's books' especially for the unlearned and illiterate." (160)
• "How did [publishers and craftsmen] respond to restrictions in the range of acceptable images? ... one response was the use of biblical figures which were not associated with cults of devotion: generally, a shift from saints, and the central characters fo the Gospels, to Old Testament figures... A second reaction of publishers and craftsmen was to sidestep direct depictions of the most sacred by developing allegorical or emblematic themes instead... A final response to the problems surrounding religious imagery was simply avoidance." (161-162)
• "The 'ballad partners' may have avoided religious themes in their large poster-size prints, but the woodcuts they used on their ballads tell quite a different story, testifying to a continued demand for religious images." (167)
• "On the right of [Christus natus est] is the 'exlanation' of the so-called conceits: the Latin comic-strip speech bubbles. This is very much a down-market version of the emblem, where the viewer is not expected to decipher the meaning fo the animal symbols on his own, and is helpfully given a translation of the simple Latin." (176)
• "Murray Roston has commented that in biblical drama there was from the mid-sixteenth century 'a gradual move down the ladder of sanctity.' First the depiction fo central figures from the Gospels was considered irreverent, then slowly the Old Testament became sacrosanct too. The playwrights moved a rung down to the Apocrypha, and finally to the histories of Josephus." (185)
• "The Elizabethan homily against idolatry made a careful distinction between narrative pictures and static icons: 'And a process of a story, painted with the gestures and actions of many persons, and commonly the sum of the story written withal, hath another use in it, than one dumb idol or image standing by itself.'" (185)
• "Godet's Paris connection helps us to estimate the price fo his woodcuts. We have a 1598 inventory of the rue Montorgueuil woodcut designers, Denis de Mathoniere. The uniformity of style throughout these woodcuts means that we can extrapolate Godet's probably prices from this inventory, De Mathoniere's woodcut prints were valued in bulk at about 0.17d. Even with a retail mark-up of four times that amount, they would still be under 1d. each; 4d. for a series of six." (188)
• "It may be that despite their reasonable price, prints at 2d. were not as good value for humbler households as sturdier decorations like painted cloths, which would better survive the ravages of smoke from the hearth (as well as serving the practical purpose of insulation)." (189)
• "A 42-sheet series of biblical scenes would not have been affordable to the same wide audience who bought ballads. However, it may have had a greater impact if it was used by other craftsmen as a pattern book. At all levels of skill, the major source copied by painters was the printed picture. Prints were the standard medium for passing visual information and artistic themes across geographical distances. The influence of devotional woodcuts has often been used to explain the late fifteenth century 'decline' of wall painting into a style of stiff figures and harsh black outlines." (191-2)
• "With the strong black lines and stunted figures [of 'A pleasant new ballad of Tobias'], the effect of these [broadside ballad] woodcuts is not unlike that of the painted series at the White Swan." (210)
• "[T]he beginning of the seventeenth century was also a time when emblem books and emblematic engraved title-pages were gaining [sic] in popularity: the old iconographic tradition in a new form. Like the arts of memory, the emblem books built up concepts from sets of related images, and gave the sense of vision a central role in the acquisition of moral and spiritual knowledge. In the broadside tables we are not witnesing the word ousting the pictorial symbol, but rather a co-existence and tension between the two." (244)
• "The ballad publishershad access to a network of chapmen; at what point did they begin to distribute chapbooks along this network as well?" (272)
• "Even to write of Protestantism and print as 'forces' is misleading: we need to see them not as coherent and unchanging entities... but as inseperable from andconstantly modified by the cultural contexts in which they are found. ... Quarter sessions, assize and church records document local conflicts over sexual morality, ale-selling and sabbath-day festivities. However, this bias in the sources can lead us to ignore areas of culture where these conflicts were either resolved or unarticulated. In some media, such as the narrative 'stories' for walls, Bible-centered Protestantism and traditional visual piety found common ground." (325)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Persuasive. But Watt has a tendency to use established prices and figures as a starting point for speculation--specualtion that, in turn, is used as evidence towards conclusions.
• Synthesis: Obviously, Evenden and Freeman object to Watt's perspective on prices. Link to post.
  Watt's economic-sociological approach does not address the actual form of the ballad, that is, narrative lyric. While Dubrow's articulation of the lyric may be a helpful compliment, I believe that Challenges of Orpheus understates the lyric as a mode (associating character with technique) rather than as a form (a disposition towards linguistic fundamentals, namely: order, duration, and frequency). But with this knowledge, it's provocative to imagine the two texts in conference. Watt contributes to the early modern English understanding of ballad--what it meant, to whom--and Dubrow contributes to the function of lyric.
• Application: I'm most interested in applying the early modern English understanding of narrative image. A printed gesture, according to the Homily against the Peril of Idolatry, invokes the narrative mode (to borrow from Alpers). Furthermore, the narrative image is a mode--in this understanding--as opposed to a form.