Fifty years after its first edition, Peter Burke’s classic, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, is placed in the international historiographical panorama of popular culture studies as the first fundamental synthesis on a vast area and a broad chronology, with an enduring validity of the basic concepts that structure it, that of “people” and that of “culture”, combined to define a “common people culture”. This latter notion, followed by Burke, has effectively held together in the research practices, meanings and representations of social groups in the historical context investigated. The article reconstructs the comments of historical colleagues and the author’s own retrospective reflection on the volume, through its four editions from 1978 to today.