Adam Fox. Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700.

(Oxford Studies in Social History.) New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford, 2000. xiv + 498 pp. + 17 b/w pls. index. bibl. $74 (cl), $24.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-19-820512-0 (cl), ISBN: O- 19-925103-7 (pbk).

This rewarding study of the changes in the means and content of communication among the least literate of the population of early modern England focuses on the reciprocity of oral and literate culture in the aftermath of the print revolution. Fox strives to correct a nostalgic view of literacy as either corrupting popular culture, or else, as limited to the urban and elite segments of the population. He argues that in the early modern era written texts governed the linguistic ordering of the world for illiterates and literates alike.

The dynamic continuum between oral, manuscript, and print culture is explored in seven chapters. Through a plethora of fascinating case studies, chapter 1 demonstrates that while regional and trade dialects were central to identity formation, from the mid-sixteenth century on deviations from "The King's English" were likely to be associated with a lack of civility. Oral diversity, in other words, was losing ground to the deepening of social distinctions and rivalries facilitated by print culture.

Chapter 2 examines proverbs and adages as migrant forms between the oral and the textual realms, and as central to the repertoire of clergymen, the classically-trained elite, yeomen farmers, nurses, etc. Fox traces the route of these forms from biblical and humanist sources through such genres as "proverb plays" and literary dialogues, and into everyday conversation, commonplace books, and assorted forms of cheap print or even handwriting on the painted cloths hanging in inns, alehouses, and homes. From there they filtered back into advice books, such as Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry.

In a laudable effort to recover the interplay of literacy and orality among women and children, chapter 3 studies the tales, songs, lullabies, word games, and riddles of nursery lore. While a lot of the fireside songs and stories told to children of all classes belonged squarely to popular lore and remained relatively isolated from the influence of the written word, Fox manages to trace some back "to the great monastic chronicles of the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries" (198). Fairy tales and other "nursery" genres made their way into the drama and the poetry of the period; they were in turn influenced by widely circulated broadside ballads including some with an overtly political content. Thus even this exclusively oral domain was invigorated, if not shaped, by print culture.

In the isolated communities of early modern England, Fox argues in chapters 4-5, the historical memory of events and customs was preserved by old men who told tales of old-time heroes and battles, established the existence of property rights and the course of boundaries, and maintained customary rituals. These masters of oral tradition based their stories and claims in the signs of the land: geological formations, castle ruins, old trees. And yet, the historical imagination also owed a lot to monastic chronicles, popular romances, and broadside ballads. In turn, with the emergence of a more active land market in the sixteenth century, the oral system of customary law began to lose its reliability and was eventually committed to writing in the rulings of equity courts.

The last two chapters focus on two especially vital oral forms, libels and rumors, used by people across the social spectrum. Both forms relied on a mixture of scribal or printed transmission, which could greatly add to their performative force. By word of mouth and/or the reading or even witnessing of personal letters, independently generated rumor could spread, in the words of one of Fox's sources, "as a cloud carried with a violent wind" growing ever more hyperbolical the further it traveled (355). Against these spoken and handwritten words of sedition, governments wielded the propaganda vehicle of the printed broadside, "stimulating an ever increasing appetite for news and opinion" (405).

Fox's account of the dialogic relationship between early modern orality and literacy clearly privileges the written word as source of much in oral culture and as providing vital energy to "something which was in danger of disappearing" (9). While this is the case in a number of the discursive realms he explores, there is much in oral culture which cannot be traced back to textual sources, and such divergence is worth foregrounding more clearly. I was also troubled to see women's oral culture equated exclusively with nursery lore, while Fox's evidence on the oral tradition of the historical imagination includes significant numbers of women keepers of communal memory. In spite of these criticisms, Fox's inspired and exhaustive study of the oral and literate culture of early modern England opens a new and exciting chapter in the scholarly dialogue of the relationship between the popular and the elite and significantly expands our notions of both orality and literacy.

KIRILKA STAVREVA

Cornell College