This book argues that reflection on the spread of print commerce was a key factor in the shaping of our modern intellectual category of "oral culture." In 1700, the concept of oral culture did not exist. At a time when the bulk of the population could not read, orality was not something to be especially valued. Protestants deemed "oral tradition" a suspect Catholic theological notion, and literate intellectuals linked what we might call popular oral discourse with vulgarity, sedition, and religious dissent. But by 1800, ideas of oral tradition dramatically changed. The proliferation of print a ... More

This book argues that reflection on the spread of print commerce was a key factor in the shaping of our modern intellectual category of "oral culture." In 1700, the concept of oral culture did not exist. At a time when the bulk of the population could not read, orality was not something to be especially valued. Protestants deemed "oral tradition" a suspect Catholic theological notion, and literate intellectuals linked what we might call popular oral discourse with vulgarity, sedition, and religious dissent. But by 1800, ideas of oral tradition dramatically changed. The proliferation of print and the specter of mass literacy prompted widespread reflection on what we would now call media shift. This period saw the emergence of a secular notion of oral tradition and an interest in what would later be called folk culture -- a culture that was valorized for its presumed distance from print commerce and the degraded present. Fugitive Voices examines ideas of oral tradition, oral discourse, and orality over the long eighteenth century. Drawing on a hitherto unparalleled range of sources including elocution manuals, theological writings, travel narratives, legal records, scientific writings, and satiric prints, and emphasizing the relationship between emergent abstract ideas and particular local voices, this study re-creates a world in which fishwives and philosophers, clergymen and street hucksters, competed for audiences in taverns, marketplaces, and streets. A historical investigation of changing ideas of the oral also defamiliarizes key assumptions of current media studies concerning “print culture,” “oral culture,” and “orality.”