MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

A community’s scriptural texts fulfill three functions: they provide origin stories, enumerate rules for living, and offer examples of lives lived well and ill. For most of human history, sacred scripture, stories of the community’s gods endorsed by their religious leaders, fulfilled this role. In the last half-millennium, this has ceased to be true. This presentation traces the decline of Judeo-Christian sacred scripture in the Western world and takes up the question of how fairy tales became secular scripture. Attention is given to the historical role of sacred scripture as core narrative for maintaining community, particularly the way that sacred scripture diffused daily life through media like the book of hours and school books from the 17th century to the 20th century. Then I trace the rise of fairy tales as a genre, taking up competing critical theories of fairy tale origins, the dynamics of tradition, and theories of adaptation. In the twentieth century the functions of sacred scripture were divided. Scientific theory provided the origin story while fairy tales, widely available since the Victorian period in anthologies and picture books and now from the multi-media Disney empire, currently offer positive and negative examples of human interaction and the cohesion of a shared narrative as a cultural reference point.