Abstract
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.
After discussing problems inherent in concepts such as "culture", "popular", "tradition" and "hegemony" the author attempts to describe and explain the main changes in European popular culture from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. He presents a "model" in the sense of a simplified general picture of European developments as a yardstick against which the characteristics of particular regions may be defined. Four main periods are distinguished: the late Middle Ages, 1350-1500; the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, 1500-1650; the commercialisation of popular culture, 1650-1800; and the industrialisation of popular culture, since 1800.