Gossip, rumour, scandal and defamation are just some of the popular discourses examined in this collection of essays by an international group of scholars.

Contents: Introduction; subversion and scurrility in the politics of popular discourses, Dermot Cavanagh and Tim Kirk; Sins of the mouth: signs of subversion in medieval English cycle plays, Lynn Forest-Hill; Skelton and scurrility, Dermot Cavanagh; Rumours and risings: plebeian insurrection and the circulation of subversive discourse around 1597, Nick Cox; The verse libel: popular satire in early modern England, Andrew McRae; To 'scourge the arse / Jove's marrow so had wasted': scurrility and the subversion of sodomy, James Knowles; Anticlerical slander in the English Civil War: John White's First Century of Scandalous and Malignant Priests, James Rigney; His praeludiary weapons: mocking Colonel Hewson before and after the Restoration, Neil Durkin; Innuendo and inheritance: strategies of scurrility in medieval and Renaissance Venice, Alexander Cowan; The last Austrian-Turkish war (1788-91) and public opinion in Vienna, Gerhard Ammerer; Surrealist blasphemy, Malcolm Gee; The policing of popular opinion in Nazi Germany, Tim Kirk; Subversion and squirrility in Irvine Welsh's shorter fiction, Willy Maley; Index.