The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England - (Material Texts) by Patricia Fumerton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A comprehensive presentation and examination of a popular seventeenth-century genre: the English broadside ballad

In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive--individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another--some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive.

In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama.

A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.

Review Quotes

"[T[his is a stimulating and wide-ranging book that will enrich our understanding of the early modern broadside ballad, augment the invaluable research tool that the English Broadside Ballad Archive has become, and stimulate further scholarship on this important 'multimedia artifact' of early modern culture."-- "Journal of British Studies"

"Drawing on formidable experience with gathering, editing, teaching, thinking about, and writing about ballads, Patricia Fumerton has produced a comprehensive synthesis of all the scholarly work on broadsides that has been done to date. Her book will be the starting point for all future research on the subject."-- "Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California"

"Fumerton has produced the singular volume on the broadside ballad in the early modern period. Part ballad primer, part exhaustively-researched history of ballad media, collectors, and culture, part theoretically-informed analysis of individual ballads and their publics, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England stands as a cornerstone for scholars interested in print history and ephemera, music history, performance studies, popular culture, and more. In focusing on the heyday of broadside ballads."-- "Seventeenth-Century News"

"In this substantial study, Patricia Fumerton draws on more than a decade of working closely with early modern printed texts to analyze English black-letter broadside ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, approaching them as material artifacts...The strength of Fumerton's book resides in her analysis of the techniques of assemblage whereby publishers produced black-letter ballad sheets, freely reprinting and often cannibalizing their own prior publications so as to offer fresh versions or combinations of a ballad's constituent elements."-- "Journal of American Folklore"

About the Author

Patricia Fumerton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is the founder and director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive.