Popular Culture and the End of Antiquity in Southern Gaul, c. 400–550. By LucyGrig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2024. xvi + 260 pp. £85. ISBN 9781108491440.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Entertainment has never been so easily available.Readers of this journal have likely become used to frictionless (if increasingly paywalled) access to slickly produced (if increasingly homogenized) 'content'.Lucy Grig's excellent new book on popular culture in fifthand sixth-century southern Gaul is a signal reminder of the messy human agency largely occluded by the algorithmic curation of the modern streaming platform.Building on her previous workincluding an important edited collection on Popular Culture in the Ancient World (2017) -Grig seeks to show how these forms of popular entertainment and 'sub-elite' experience were deeply embedded in local contexts of production, participation, and socio-political contestation.Chapter 1 introduces classic studies of popular culture in past and present (pp.3-18), the major historical developments in southern Gaul in this period (pp.18-28), and the big picture 'transformations' of late ancient society (pp.32-5).Grig proceeds from the premise (drawn from the work of Stuart Hall) that popular culture is embedded within relations of power and shaped by a dialectical relationship with 'dominant culture' (p.3).Studies of the rich epigraphic evidence from Pompeii and Aphrodisias have shown that historians of the ancient world can follow where their early modern colleagues have led in reconstructing how ordinary pre-modern people experienced urban life (pp.5-18).Grig argues that texts written by Christian clerics allow late ancient historians to do something similar (with important caveats: pp.28-32).The development of pastoral care produced a new concern on the part of these 'elite' authors for the lives of 'sub-elites', whose textual traces allow us to access a distinctive meeting point between 'dominant' and 'popular' cultures (esp.pp.33-4).Chapters 2-3 outline the social worlds of ordinary people in the cities and countryside of southern Gaul.These chapters sometimes veer a little close to a data dump of necessary 'context' (as opposed to stand-alone argumentation).But this choice is justified by rich and persuasive treatments of what we can (and cannot) say about a series of urban and Early Medieval Europe 2025
Source: Early Medieval Europe
DOI: 10.1111/emed.12740
Author: Robin Whelan
Institution: University of Liverpool
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403403400