European Dimensions of Popular Print Culture

This special issue is one of the outcomes of a fruitful collaboration between a large group of European experts in the field of popular print. The collaboration started with a grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to establish the international network ‘European Dimensions of Popular Print culture’ (EDPOP) in 2016. This group of scholars, comprising experts from a range of European countries who until then had focused mainly on regional and national material, was intrigued by the question how ‘European’ popular print culture was in the period 1450–1900. The collaborative papers that were presented at the closing conference of the project (Utrecht 2018), form the basis of this special issue. Part 1 contains three articles that feature the life cycle of popular print in Europe. The authors aim to provide a summary of the current ‘state of the art’, as well as exploring the possibilities of large-scale comparative research in the field of production, distribution and consumption. By doing so, they provide an up-to-date framework for the articles that follow in Part 2, and for future work. Part 2 comprises four comparative case studies, covering many European countries over a long period of time, focusing on four popular genres and categories of print: penny prints, execution ballads, narrative fiction, and cheap print for children. The transnational similarities that emerge in these essays are often striking, confirming that not only the materiality of cheap print, but also genres, contents, and reading practices were similar across linguistic and confessional traditions, and across time.