Chapter 1 - Merry Worlds

Summary

This chapter argues that the phrase ‘the merry world’ – and sometimes even the word ‘mirth’ – acquired a coded status in Reformation polemical print that then shadowed its use in other contexts: a way of expressing nostalgia for the pre-dissolution past that was proximate to, but not identical with, sedition and recusancy. There is evidence that these feelings were widespread, even amongst orthodox Protestants, but also that they remained potentially incendiary. Focusing on a series of disguised-king broadside ballads set in a pseudo-medieval ‘merry’ past, it suggests the historical fictions of cheap print recuperated the psychic materials of merry world complaint as a source of cosy and uncontentious pleasure.