Printed Popular Literature and Social Projection: Sixteenth Century Chapbooks in Verse with Dedicatee

Abstract

This work sets out to scrutinize a set of XVI Century chapbooks in verse that are divergent from the most idiosyncratic lines of the Spanish literature of colportage. The analyzed chapbooks are pieces where literary text and social projection are merged by means of a dedication to a high rank person. So, the goals are first, to specify the corpus of XVI chapbooks in verse with dedicatee, second, to determine its particular editorial form and third, to delve into the most representative subject matters, specially the religious one. The attention to the number of female dedicatees and its comparison with previous works on the presence of female dedicatees in books written in the Golden Centuries yield interesting data as to the higher presence of women in these minor prints, in particular with respect to little religious treatises. Finally, and as regards to three very particular chapbooks, I reflect on the role that these prints may have played as promotion and publicity for a given book.

Keywords

• chapbooks in verse
• sixteenth century
• dedicatees
• social projection
• publicity