Ginzburg 1980

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Trans. by John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

how to do a history of popular culture without an historical record?

"To what degree is the first [the subordinate classes], in fact, subordinate to the second [the dominant classes]? And, in what measure does lower class culture express a partially independent content? Is it possible to speak of reciprocal movement between the two levels of culture?" (xiv)

evidence: written, generally "by individuals who were more or less openly attached to the dominant culture. This means that the thoughts, the beliefs, and the aspirations o the peasants and artisans of the past reach us (if and when they do) almost always through distorting viewpoints and intermediaries." (xv)

Robert Mandrou answers question by looking at almanacs, songsters, recipes, etc., disseminated to and imposed on the subordinate classes, finding in it an "escapist" attitude (xv); problematic, though, because 1) most peasants couldn't read, and 2) wasn't culture produced by the masses

Bahktin answers by developing idea of carnivalesque in popular cultures, that filters up to literature of the ruling classes (xvi-xvii)

N. Z. Davis, "Printing and the People"

confusion in concept of "popular culture:

"First there is attributed to the subordinate classes of preindustrial society a apssive accommodation to the cultural sub-products proffered by the dominant classes (Mandrou), then an implied suggestion of at least partly autonomous values in respect to the culture of the latter (Bolleme), and finally an absolute extraneousness that places the subordinate class actually beyond or, better yet, in a state prior to culture (Foucault). ... To what extent are the possible elements of the dominant culture found in popular culture the result of a more or less deliberate acculturation, or of a more or less spontaneous convergence, rather than of an unconscious distortion of the source, inclined obviously to lead what is unknown back to the known and the familiar?" (xix)

looking at texts produced by dominant culture about subordinate: "a deeply-rooted stratum of basically autonomous popular beliefs began to emerge by way of the discrepancies between the questions of the judges and the replies of the accused -- discrepancies unattributable to either suggestive questioning or to torture" (xix)