The project examines the cultural, political, and financial impact of what we call the lottery fantasy, the idea of a sudden, life-changing wealth through the big prize in the lottery. We will examine the lottery fantasy as a cultural figure as it circulated between countries, languages, and different medial forms in Europe, both in the eighteenth century and today.

State-sanctioned lottery institutions are important agents in European economy, through the financing of sports, culture, and charitable organisations. At the same time, their position as a public body for the organisation of gambling has repeatedly been subject for debate, from the birth of the state-sanctioned lotteries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until today. The debate has been centred around political and moral issues connected to gambling addiction, social inequality and the relationship between state and citizen. The project will study the role played by the lottery fantasy in this political and financial development, through its invention and circulation in and from the eighteenth century.

A group of international researchers  will map and analyse the lottery fantasy in a large array of cultural and medial forms of expression: newspapers, periodicals, almanacs, visual art, literature and theatre. By exploring how the lottery fantasy was transmitted, criticised, parodied and played with in European culture in the eighteenth century, we aim to produce new knowledge of the impact of state-sanctioned lotteries in the emergence of the modern European state, as well as of the role played by art and culture in modern political economy and in the relationship between state and citizen.

What was the cultural/social/commercial role of Dutch commercial lotteries after the introduction of the State lottery in 1726? 

• Marius Haugen (PI)

The aim of this project is to develop an international network and a virtual research environment (VRE) to facilitate and stimulate innovative research on European popular print culture. Although popular print culture has been studied intensively since the 1960’s, this was done mainly with a regional or national focus, based on the assumption that popular print in the vernacular had a limited geographical reach. Recent research has revealed however, that popular print culture had strong European characteristics and an often transnational infrastructure. The key question of the project is: how European was popular print culture in the period 1450-1900? Besides workshops, conferences this network will develop a taxonomy of popular genres, a thesaurus of the producers and distributors of popular print and lists of (digitized) bibliographical and archival sources. The results of this project will shed new light on processes of cultural exchange, on the similarities and differences of popular genres, on international collaboration in the book industry, on the organisation of transnational distribution networks and on the multifaceted practices around translation, appropriation,  adaptation and reception of stories, songs and images.

• Prof. Cristina Dondi (Oxford); Prof. Juan Gomis (Valencia); Prof. Matthew Grenby (Newcastle); Drs. Marian Lefferts (London); Dr. Jennifer Orr (Newcastle); Prof. Joad Raymond (London); Prof. Massimo Rospocher (Trent); Prof. Hannu Salmi (Turku); Dr. habil. Rita Schlusemann (Utrecht/Berlin); Dr. Jenny Spinks (Manchester)

This project analyses the process of selection and adaptation in Dutch popular literature during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Research for this project is centred on songs and catchpenny prints, which can be considered as the main mass media of the past. These genres incorporate three important components of popular culture: music, images and text. They also have strong affiliations to contemporary forms of popular culture, such as comic strips and popular music. Furthermore, these genres ensured that a large potential of stories, images, songs and melodies were being passed down from one generation to the next. This project wants to answer the question of how the process of selection and adaptation in songs and catchpenny prints interacted with the motives and strategies of producers, distributors and consumers. The hypothesis driving this exploration is that the Dutch popularisation process in this period, contrary to common notion, led to cultural convergence instead of cultural divergence. This convergence manifested itself, just as it does in our modern media society, on the levels of production and distribution, intermediality, reception, and appropriation. The central question is addressed in two related subprojects. The first subproject (PhD) studies the motives and strategies of the producers and distributors of songs and catchpenny prints. Intermediality is approached here as a production strategy. The second subproject (Postdoc) focuses on the selection, adaptation, and intertextuality of the literary content of songs and catchpenny prints. Here intermediality is studied on the level of shared text, images, and music.

• dr. Roeland Harms

The pedlar is generally seen as a representative of popular culture and as the main supplier of cheap print for the lower classes in the period 1600-1850. In countries like England, Germany and France this theme has been studied in a predominantly rural context. There the role of the pedlar travelling from town to countryside was indeed distinct from the role of the established booksellers in the towns, selling books to the educated and affluent buyer. In this project however, an urban society will be at the centre stage. The hypothesis driving the proposed exploration is that in the highly urbanised Netherlands the itinerant functioned as a crucial extension of the established booksellers in the towns. The pedlar contributed to a fine distribution network that effectively reduced the gap between the established bookseller and the more modest consumers instead of extending it. Consequently, the assumption of an inevitable connection between itinerant trade and popular culture will be fundamentally revised in this project. To find evidence for this central thesis, this project will focus on all aspects of the organisation of itinerant bookselling in the urbanized Netherlands from 1600 to 1850 and make a comparison with the more rural situation in England.

• dr. Roeland Harms