Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads
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Author_Sarah F. Williams
Ballad Partners
Ballad Sellers
Ballad Texts
Ballad Trade
Ballad Tunes
balladry
blaspheming
Blaspheming Wretch
Broadside Ballad
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Broadside Trade
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Damnable Practises
Disorderly Behavior
distressed
Distressed Gentlewoman
Doctor Faustus
early
Early Modern English
early modern gender
English street literature
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eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
female transgression
gentlewoman
Godly Ballads
Harmonious Society
Ladies Fall
modern
music and gender in ballads
OED Online
Peascod Time
performance studies
print culture history
salisbury
Salisbury Assizes
trade
Trial Accounts
Tune Indication
Tune Title
witchcraft representation
Woodblock Prints
wretch
Product details
- ISBN 9781472420824
- Weight: 589g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Apr 2015
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Broadside ballads-folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery-related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across seventeenth century England. Ballads straddled, and destabilized, the categories of public and private performance spaces, the material and the ephemeral, music and text, and oral and written traditions. Sung by balladmongers in the streets and referenced in theatrical works, they were also pasted to the walls of local taverns and domestic spaces. They titillated and entertained, but also educated audiences on morality and gender hierarchies. Although contemporaneous writers published volumes on the early modern controversy over women and the English witch craze, broadside ballads were perhaps more instrumental in disseminating information about dangerous women and their acoustic qualities. Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.
Sarah F. Williams is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of South Carolina School of Music, USA. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Musicological Research, the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Musicological Society.
