The Impact of Increased Literacy on Ballads and Chapbooks in Seventeenth-Century England
In seventeenth-century England, the rise of popular education and literacy coinciding with the mechanical technology of printing, led to the decline in the creation of ballads and in the importance of chapbooks.
After England's Restoration period, inexpensive print was available in large quantities due to new technological innovations in the printing field. Almanacs became important for households on all social levels to own and approximately four hundred thousand were printed in the 1660s annually. Bibles were also being printed in great amounts, though less than almanacs due to the fact that they did not become out-dated.
Early in the seventeenth-century England underwent "a form of phenomenon a little like that phenomenon of the Great Rebuilding and is very likely related to it" (9). This upsurgance of spending power enabled the yeomanry of the countryside to send their sons to school. Free from the labor force, these boys were taught to read and write. Fathers who were not as wealthy as the yeomen, still could send their sons to school until they were of working age, about six or seven. These lower class boys were taught to read, but writing was taught at a later age. This increase in the amount of the population that could read and write was extremely significant, transforming England from the fourteenth-century to the sixteenth century from a late medieval peasant society, to a society in which reading and writing were used by more people, and on all social scales, for education and entertainment. Approximately thirty percent of men in the latter half of the seventeenth-century were literate. Sixty-five percent of the yeomen w...
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...rich widow, waiting at the same place to go through the ceremony with him" (56). Regional chapbooks were written, with the characters talking in local dialects and usually mocking another region of England or a person visiting from a foreign country.
The rise in literacy and the decrease of printing costs that simultaneously occurred in the seventeenth century, had both negative and positive effects on the socio-economic structure of England. The oral tradition of ballads, and the social community centered around it, were lost. Literacy brought self-education through books and entertainment from chapbooks to hundreds of yeomen, farm labors, tradesmen, and some lower class poor.
Work Cited
Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1981.
In Santa Rosa California stands the Adobe of Maria Ygnacia de Carrillo, known by many citizens of Sonoma County as the Carrillo Adobe. In the years of 1837-1838 a woman by the name of Maria Ygnacia de Carrillo built her home in what would become Santa Rosa, California. The foundation of her home was laid by Franciscan monks years earlier when they wished to build the 22nd mission in California, however they moved on to other sites in the surrounding area. After Carrillo’s death, the adobe became the first post office of Santa Rosa, California, a trading post, and a drying shed for a prune farmer named Hahman who would later purchase the property. In the 1930s a WPA survey was performed on the property, and since that time numerous restoration attempts have failed. However since 2012 archeologists and historians have been investigating the site to decide where the boundaries are of the adobe since part of the land has been sold for a company to build condominiums. In 2013 squatters broke into the chain link fencing around the structure, breaking boards from the ceiling and creating camps in the trees surrounding the structure. Due to the surveys and notes given by the archeologists, it has been determined that the structure was a U-shape, however there are only three small remains of rooms of the structure let underneath the overhang that has been constructed to house the structure. There has been a specific amount of money allotted to keep the remaining portion of the structure from being destroyed, however, the funds are not being used to reconstruct any portion of the destroyed portion of the building. The structure and site needs to be added to the National Historic Registry not only be...
Rene Descartes’ third meditation from his book Meditations on First Philosophy, examines Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God. The purpose of this essay will be to explore Descartes’ reasoning and proofs of God’s existence. In the third meditation, Descartes states two arguments attempting to prove God’s existence, the Trademark argument and the traditional Cosmological argument. Although his arguments are strong and relatively truthful, they do no prove the existence of God.
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Ward & Trent, et al. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21; New York: Bartleby.com, 2000
In this paper, I will explain how Descartes uses the existence of himself to prove the existence of God. The “idea of God is in my mind” is based on “I think, therefore I am”, so there is a question arises: “do I derive my existence? Why, from myself, or from my parents, or from whatever other things there are that are less perfect than God. For nothing more perfect than God, or even as perfect as God, can be thought or imagined.” (Descartes 32, 48) Descartes investigates his reasons to show that he, his parents and other causes cannot cause the existence of himself.
Descartes thinks that we have a very clear and distinct idea of God. He thinks God must exist and Descartes himself must exist. It is a very different way of thinking shown from the six meditations. Descartes uses ideas, experiments, and “proofs” to try and prove God’s existence.
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FIRST ESSAY: Thomas Hobbes described the life of most Englishmen in the 17th century as “nasty, brutish and short.” How far does the evidence presented in Past Speaks chpt. 2, suggest that little had changed by the mid 18th century?
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The evolution of auditing is a complicated history that has always been changing through historical events. Auditing always changed to meet the needs of the business environment of that day. Auditing has been around since the beginning of human civilization, focusing mainly, at first, on finding efraud. As the United States grew, the business world grew, and auditing began to play more important roles. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, people began to invest money into large corporations. The Stock Market crash of 1929 and various scandals made auditors realize that their roles in society were very important. Scandals and stock market crashes made auditors aware of deficiencies in auditing, and the auditing community was always quick to fix those deficiencies. The auditors’ job became more difficult as the accounting principles changed, and became easier with the use of internal controls. These controls introduced the need for testing; not an in-depth detailed audit. Auditing jobs would have to change to meet the changing business world. The invention of computers impacted the auditors’ world by making their job at times easier and at times making their job more difficult. Finally, the auditors’ job of certifying and testing companies’ financial statements is the backbone of the business world.
The eighteenth century saw unprecedented growth of literature and the arts in Europe and America. Britain during this time period also enjoyed prolonged periods of civil peace that stood in sharp contrast to the bloody and protracted civil and international conflicts that lasted throughout the 17th century. Furthermore, as the rising middle classes increasingly sought both education and leisure entertainment, the marketplace for artistic production swelled dramatically. One of the most critical elements of the 18th century was the increasing availability of printed material, both for readers and authors. The period was markedly more generally educated than the centuries before. Education was less confined to the upper classes than it had been in centuries, and consequently contributions to science, philosophy, economics, and literature came from all parts of the newly United Kingdom. It was the first time when literacy and a library were all that stood between a person and education.