In 2003, Patricia Fumerton and her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara established the English Broadside Ballad Archive. This project set out to digitize all of the 12,000 or so surviving ballads printed on a single sheet in Britain before 1701. To date more than nine thousand specimens from numerous separate collections have been reproduced on the archive's website in high-resolution color images. Others continue to be added, and Fumerton estimates that by about 2023–24, the complete corpus of these extant texts will be available via this open-access collection. Each text is supplemented by bibliographic information, clarified in a transcription, and accompanied where possible with an audio recording of any named tune. The archive has become an immensely valuable resource for all students of early modern British culture, making accessible as never before the entire body of this fascinating source material.

Broadside ballads clearly appealed across a wide spectrum of contemporary society, and they touched upon a remarkably eclectic range of issues, including religion and politics, love and marriage, history and news, drink and death. These popular songs could be, by turns, somber or convivial, pious or bawdy, didactic or humorous, antique or modish. In their diverse contents, slight format, and cheap price, they appear to have reached the most heterogeneous of markets and to offer a fully rounded picture of the attitudes, assumptions, and values of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people.

Fumerton's new book, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics, provides a companion to the English Broadside Ballad Archive and a guide to ways of thinking about this material. Fumerton argues that ballad verses must be understood, alongside the tunes to which they were set and the woodcut images with which they were adorned, as a holistic artifact that appealed to the senses and sensibilities of a broad audience. They were not a static medium, but a vehicle for interactions with their consumers that could be either passive or participatory as readers and hearers, singers and dancers, variously engaged with texts and remade them in the acts of performance and appropriation. In order to emphasize and enliven these points, the book is generously illustrated with more than eighty figures and accompanied by an online archive of forty-eight music files (hosted on the publisher's website). Thus the sense of ballads as a multimedia experience—a series of transactions between text, image and tune—is heightened in a study that will be of value to scholars of early modern culture across a range of disciplines.

In part one of the book Fumerton provides a theoretical and analytical framework for exploring both the dynamic meanings that these texts could convey and the plurality of publics among which they circulated. She utilizes as a case study two surviving versions of a ballad from the 1630s, “Mock-Beggar Hall,” to illustrate the ways in which not only textual revision but also melodic variation and visual adaptation could alter the meanings either intended by producers or construed by consumers. Part two focuses on some of the great ballad collectors of the seventeenth century, and in particular Samuel Pepys. In analyzing the ways in which these figures assembled, “garbled” (158) dismembered, rearranged, and presented their collections, Fumerton shows how they invested them with their own meaning and at the same time conditioned their interpretation by later generations. Many seventeenth-century collectors of black-letter ballads shared a common sense of nostalgia, and this sentiment may have contributed to the continued use of gothic typeface on these broadsides long after it had ceased to be employed on most other texts.

In part three, Fumerton provides case studies of the ways in which Pepys circulated, performed, and derived both social and political meaning from some of the most popular ballads at large in Restoration London. We know from his diary that he both sang and collected songs to the tunes “Barbara Allen,” “The Blacksmith” (formerly “Greensleeves”), “Shackley Hay,” and “St George,” all of which were among the favorites of the seventeenth century. Fumerton successfully demonstrates how these melodies amplified and augmented the verses that they accompanied, and in so doing, she aids our understanding of the way they formed, through collective performance, a series of rhetorical communities or “ballad publics.” (209–11)

In part four Fumerton offers an analysis of “The Lady and the Blackamoor,” first registered in 1570 and surviving in at least seventeen editions and thirty-four individual copies before 1700. It was set to the evergreen tune “The Lady's Fall” and recounts a sensational tale in which gruesome violence and murder are perpetrated by a black servant on his genteel mistress and her children. Here, too, Fumerton suggests the ways in which different audiences—servants, householders, women, and children—might be engaged and created by this best seller. Finally, in conclusion, Fumerton examines the insufficiently recognized significance of the broadside ballads invoked in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and she uses the play to emphasize her arguments about the polyvalence of these ubiquitous single sheets.

In sum, this 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” (19) of early modern culture.