The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England

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.

Note on Audio Tracks Website and Citation Conventions Introduction Chapter 1. The Critical and Theoretical Parts: Moving, Assemblage, Publics, and Tactics Part I. Assembling by Disassembling: Archives, Databases, and Ballad Bits Chapter 2. Accessing the Artifact, Now and Then Chapter 3. Random Tactical Hits Part II. Remembering by Dismembering: Black Letter, Calligraphy, and Print History Chapter 4. The Network of Black-Letter Broadside Ballad Collectors Chapter 5. The Passing Present of Black Letter and Calligraphy Part III. From Networks to Publics: Samuel Pepys Chapter 6. Pepys and the Making of Gendered Publics Chapter 7. Pepys and the Making of Political Publics Part IV. Diachronic and Synchronic Ballad Publics: Crossing Society, History, and Space Chapter 8. The Moving Violations of "The Lady and the Blackamoor" Conclusion: The Limits of the Shakespearean Stage: Ballading The Winter's Tale Notes Bibliography Sources for Music Notations Index Acknowledgments

"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) "[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) "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) "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)