A guide to the interpretation of the Golden-Age ballad. Collections of traditional Spanish ballads were made in the early seventeenth century; some recorded directly from singers, others reworked by educated poets. So popular were these that Court poets composed ballads of their own. Most Spanish poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries circulated in manuscript among a small coterie of wits and fellow poets, and it often contains references to contemporary events and people, sideswipes at institutionsand individuals, and allusions to other writings of the time. The modern reader has to know about the people and events criticized and lampooned, and everything from municipal by-laws to contemporary painting can prove helpful. The traditional popular associations of the ballad also led to many poets combining in their poems the language of the street alongside that of polite society and the schoolroom. This volume discusses some of the problems encountered by anglophone students and teachers of literature when they turn to the Golden-Age ballad and offers informed guidance on how such poems might be read. The nine poems discussed have been chosen with such difficulties in mind and a strophe-by-strophe prose translation is provided for each, followed by a detailed critical analysis. Edited by NIGEL GRIFFIN, CLIVE GRIFFIN, ERIC SOUTHWORTH and COLIN THOMPSON, all of Oxford University. OTHER CONTRIBUTORS: Oliver Noble-Wood, John Rutherford, Ronald Truman.

Although the history of the book is a booming area of research, the journeymen who printed books in the sixteenth century have remained shadowy figures because they were not thought to have left any significant traces in the archives. Clive Griffin, however, uses Inquisitional documents from Spain and Portugal to reveal a clandestine network of Protestant-minded immigrant journeymen who were arrested by the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal in the 1560s and 1570s at a time of international crisis. A startlingly clear portrait of these humble men (and occasionally women) emerges allowing the reconstruction of what Namier deemed one of history's greatest challenges: 'the biographies of ordinary men'. We learn of their geographical and social origins, educational and professional training, travels, careers, standard of living, violent behaviour, and even their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions.
In the course of this study, many other subjects are addressed, among them: popular culture and religion; the history of skilled labour, the history of the book, and of reading and writing; the Inquisition; foreign and itinerant workers and the xenophobia they encountered; and the 'double lives' of lower-class Protestants living within a uniquely vigilant Catholic society.