The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution.

Most who work with the English popular pamphlet literature of the mid-seventeenth century find a couple of favorites which epitomize the entertainment and shock value of this genre. I am a fan of a 1641 impression called A Nest of Serpents Discovered which concerns a nudist colony the author claims to have seen cavorting in the trees of Lambeth near London. The title page contains an image of this ungodly crew prancing about and one woman bears a placard proclaiming "Down lust" thrust towards an erect member which, in the copy I have seen, is partially blacked out. Jerome Friedman's new book concerns this genre of popular publishing in the time of the English Civil War until the return of Charles II. This was a period of great freedom of the press, or at least one of erratic government regulation of what was printed.

Friedman has used the resources of many libraries, but especially the Thomason Collection of the British Library which contains over 22,000 items, and, happily, is available on microfilm. His study is based on some 300 pamphlets; the earliest dates from 1575, the latest 1734, but most are from the period 1641-1661. His book includes 13 illustrations of title pages. Friedman has selected texts that seem non-political and concern strange births, aberrant behaviors, excessive activities of the self-proclaimed religious, and bizarre occurrences in nature. He argues that this popular pamphlet literature shows an underlying conservatism among the English, and from this evidence concludes it is no surprise that Charles II was enthusiastically welcomed after the godly rule of Cromwell and Parliament. His aim is to make straightforward, literal descriptions of the pamphlets' contents and to give readings that are neither obfuscated nor enlightened by any interpretative methodologies. This sticking to the text has the disadvantage that Friedman doesn't tell the reader, for example, that one image (40) is taken from a chapbook woodcut of Mandeville's Travels. Thus, he forgoes opportunities to discuss the traditions of English popular literature, and does not note the borrowings and exchanges with the contemporary Dutch popular press. Nor does he inform the reader that the author who eats its vomit (106) is actually citing citing Proverbs 26.11.

The greatest interpretative problem Friedman faces is that we have little information on the number of pamphlet copies printed, and we don't know who bought them, nor what such putative readers made of them. No testimony like that of Ginzburg's Menocchio has yet been discovered for England in this period. Friedman makes analogies between contemporary readers of the National Enquirer and those who read the pamphlets he studied. We don't see many bumper stickers proclaiming "I read the National Enquirer and I'm going to vote;" but that doesn't mean the relationship between political opinion and what people read for entertainment is a simple matter. We need to know more about different readerships and the perspectives and intentions of readers and of authors to understand what the literal sense might have been for them. Studies of marginalia or other annotations made by contemporary readers may tell something about a reader's response; and until we find such direct evidence, relying on interpretative methods has some merit. What Friedman has given us is an informative description of a significant number of pamphlets that enlighten us to the creative imagination and intellectual vitality of popular culture during a time - as the title of one pamphlet proclaimed - "the world [was] turn'd upside down."

HAROLD S. STONE American University in Cairo