Professor David Hopkin

David Hopkin
Professor of European Social History
Hertford College
01865 (2)79459
david.hopkin@hertford.ox.ac.uk

I'm a social and cultural historian of modern Western Europe (c.1760-c.1914), working primarily with oral and popular cultural sources -- the kind of sources left by people who are otherwise underrepresented in the archive.  My first monograph Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture 1766-1870(Gladstone Prize 2002) concentrated on popular prints, my second Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Katharine Briggs Award 2012) used sources such as ballads, folktales, religious legends and riddles to reconstruct social interactions in rural and maritime communities. I've also written on the history of the human sciences – how our predecessors in anthropology, folklore and philology have tried to make sense of the relationship between society and culture. I used to edit the journal Cultural and Social History and currently edit the Manchester University Press series Studies in Modern French History.

 

Research Interests

  • Popular culture, and specifically oral cultures (songs, tales, legends, riddles, proverbs, memories, histories..)
  • Rural and maritime communities
  • Women workers, especially servants and lacemakers

I research the social and cultural history of the poor, the illiterate and the working populations of modern Europe (18th to 20th centuries), that is most people in the past.  I used to focus on France and its borderlands, but  my attention has switched now to Italy and the Low Countries.  My particular field is oral and popular culture (ballads, stories, dance, street theatre...).  I explore historical communities through the stories that they told about themselves.  

My first book, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, examined the relationship between rural communities and the army, as displayed through popular prints, conscription rituals, songs and tales.  It was awarded the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone prize in 2003.  A continuing interest in war and the collective culture of soldiers also led to project with two colleagues in France, Yann Lagadec and Stéphane Perréon, on Brittany’s experience of the second hundred years’ war (1688-1815) with Britain.  But mostly I have left military matters to turn to other social groups, such as fishermen and servants.  Their cultures, expressed through oral traditions, were the subject of my second monograph Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France.  This won the Folklore Society's Katharine Briggs Prize in 2012.  

I currently hold a Leverhulme Fellowship to research the working lives of lacemakers in France, England, the Low Countries and Italy.  Lacemaking was introduced to several regions of Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and wherever it travelled it brought elements of a common material and oral culture with it.  The themes of this transnational culture were poverty, a particular vision of Christianity, and the violence enacted by men on women.

With Éva Guillorel (Caen-Normandie) and William Pooley (Bristol), I have just completed an edited collection on how memories of Early Modern revolts in Europe were maintained and used in oral cultures in succeeding generations.  The examples dealt with in the book focus primarily on songs as a vehicle for historical traditions.  This work forms part of the French Agence nationale de recherche project, hosted at Caen, on Cultures des Révoltes et Révolutions.  Alongside this project I have been working on a particular theme: how rural societies remembered feudalism and its abolition around the time of the French Revolution, and how those historical traditions affected social and political practices in following centuries.  

As I am interested in oral and popular culture, I have to be interested in how these sources came to be preserved, and thus also in the history of folklore and anthropology as disciplines.  One fruit of this was the edited volume (with Tim Baycroft, Sheffield) Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century.  I have also worked with European colleagues on this topic, especially with the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique and the BEROSE team in Paris.  I am currently writing a chapter on ‘Folklore and Regionalism’ for a project led by colleagues at Leiden and Munich.  

In 2014-15 I held a Knowledge Exchange grant with Nicolette Makovicky (Central and Eastern European Studies), working with local museums and other heritage bodies on 'By the Poor, For the Rich: Lace in Context'.  website: http://laceincontext.com

http://www.berose.fr/

http://www.univ-brest.fr/crbc/

http://www.crhq.cnrs.fr/curr/accueil.php

http://frenchhistorysociety.co.uk/

http://folklore-society.com/

 

Teaching

I would like to hear from potential DPhil students regarding European social and cultural history, history of popular culture, history of the social sciences

I currently teach:

Masters:

Peasant Societies, Economies and Polities in Western Europe c.1750-1950 (option in Economic and Social History).

I have also taught the core courses for the M.St and M.Phil in Modern British and European History

Prelims

 FHS
Foreign Texts: Tocqueville GHXI, GHXII, GHXIII, GHXIV
GH4 Disciplines
OS French Revolution and Empire FS Voltaire to Balzac
OS The Romance of the People FS Military and Society in Britain and France 
Historiography: Tacitus to Weber  

Publications

  • 'The Tinderbox: Military Culture and Literary Culture from Romanticism to Realism'

    2019
    |
    Chapter
    |
    A History of the European Restorations: Culture, Society and Religion

  • Working, Singing and Telling in the Nineteenth-Century Flemish Pillow-Lace Industry

    2019
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Textile

  • Ballads and Broadsides in France: Accounting for an Absence

    2019
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Cheap Print and the People: Popular Literature in the European Perspective
    Compared with Spain or Germany, France, or at least the French-speaking parts of that country, does not possess a very rich ballad tradition. Inspired by Breton successes, French folksong collectors actively searched for ballads throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, but the harvest was meagre. Lyric song was the prevailing genre. This absence has long been remarked and has been the subject of scholarly investigation. However, perhaps the most plausible explanation is the relative scarcity of broadside ballads. This is not to deny that broadside ballads have a long history in France, with famous collections surviving from the sixteenth century. The same is true of other other genres of cheap print. Before the French Revolution, Parisian streetsingers congregating around the Pont-Neuf were famous for their songbooks or ‘garlands’, while in other cities songbooks were produced for carnival. In the smaller towns, marketplace-singers relayed news and, in particular, sensational crime stories, while others sold religious knicknacks. Provincial print houses, particularly in Troyes and Rouen, were famous for their chapbooks (known in France as ‘la bibliothèque bleue’) and almanacs; these were carried to every part of the countryside by pedlars. Therefore, there was clearly a market for ‘street literature’. However, whereas in England text dominated the single-sheet print, in France it was the image that mattered. Every region had its own imagists, although by the mid-nineteenth century such production had been concentrated in eastern France. These highly coloured images were often accompanied by songs, but songs were secondary. The reasons for this preference lie both in the specifics of production (the makers of woodcut images originated in the card-making industry, rather than printing), and consumption. Images, especially religious images, were supposed to do work for their consumers; they watched over their belongings and provided blessings for the household. The songs that accompanied images certainly influenced popular song traditions, but because the production of coloured images was more expensive and print runs longer, producers tended to play safe and avoid new material. Censorship also encouraged conservatism. Songs on a single sheet, known as ‘canards’ continued to be sold by marketplace singers, but the ‘canard’ was considered a low genre, and marked by its own conventionalism, in that most songs were sung to just one tune (Fualdès, or Le Maréchal du Saxe). Popular aesthetics were more stimulated by the visual than the aural in France

  • 'Ballads and Broadsides in France: Accounting for an Absence'

    2019
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Cheap Print and the People: European Perspectives on Popular Literature
    Broadside Ballads, Street Singers, Popular Imagery, Canards

  • Regionalism and Folklore

    2019
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Regionalism and Modern Europe Identity Construction and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day
    A consideration of the importance of the sub-national region as a key concept in folklore studies, and an overview of the role of folklore within the politics and culture of regionalism since c. 1880.
    History
    • More