Preternatural beliefs in early modern England were affected by popular culture. Certainly magic had roots in the upper classes; Henry VIII wrote his first anti-witchcraft law to help prevent fortune hunting; Elizabeth I wrote hers, in part, to prevent the casting of her own fortune; James I wrote a treatise on witchcraft while in Scotland and expanded England's existing laws. Some of the best documented cases involved some of England's elite: Thomas Overbury's murder trial was mixed up with magic; Francis Manner and Edward Fairfax were unrelenting in their efforts to seek out and prove their families had been hurt by maleficium. However, for the most part, the stories of witches and demoniacs did not belong to those privileged few. Rather, these stories were printed cheaply, circulated widely, and staged publicly by such august playwrights as William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley. Sarah F. Williams's book Damnable Practices: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth Century Broadsides promises readers insight into a small but important subsection of wildly popular witch stories, that of the witch in seventeenth century ballads. However, although there are many good ideas in this book, with a lack of primary textual and archival research on witches, Williams does not entirely fulfill its potential.

In chapter 1, Williams tries to draw critical connections across the immensely complex network that supported and exploited foundational ideas about witches. The chapter is breathlessly chockablock with ideas predominately culled from secondary sources. For the witchcraft scholar, there are no new ideas offered up here. Moreover, some of the elisions and comparisons Williams makes might rankle. Additionally, as the reader is flung from ballad to pamphlet to treatise to superstition and then from murder to witch to playwright, scholar, king, and pagan, in a dizzying whirl, finding and following the argument structure was difficult.

Williams begins chapter 2 by looking at music, lyrics, and dances. The dances titillatingly quoted as containing “pleasant soundes (set) to wanton songs [and] dishonest verses,” with such “wanton [J]iggin skips,” that they promised to make one's bullocks quake like a custard” never come to life for the reader, however (62–63). Williams slips into musicology jargon without providing information on how to “read” the music or, more critically, the music scholarship. She explores how three pieces of music Bragandary, Peggy Ramsey, and Fortune My Foe, drag the troubled histories they have recounted with them. Through its ballad, An Excellent Merye Songe (1568), Williams links Peggy Ramsey to Alice Chaundler, who allegedly bewitched Mary Cowper and her father Francis Cowper on 3 July 1573 in Maldon, Essex. She argues that this first coupling of witch text and music may have typecast Peggy Ramsey as music best suited for the preternatural and illegal. She then argues that Fortune My Foe, likewise infused nonrelated ballads with the social history of all previous ballads sung to its tune; Williams links it to twenty-five select crime ballads, one of which was Anne Wallens Lamentation. In it, Wallen is described as swearing, cursing, and otherwise refusing to hold her tongue (74–75). This in itself, of course, is not enough to make Wallen witchy, nor is Wallen's claim that the devil made her do “it.” It is, of course, possible that it was a choice of convenience. However, it is very interesting to think that the ballad makers, in choosing music previously associated with witches, would make Wallen into a witch in theirs. Finally, although the tune certainly had long use, it was unclear why the final bit of music, Bragandary, might have been used for The Salisbury Assize (1653) or any of the other twenty ballads reciting the wicked and weird: the chapter section tracing of Bragandary is more list than argument.

In chapter 3, Williams begins an interesting discussion contrasting the open-mouthed, passionate woman enthralled in song to the aged, discordant crone. The chapter does not quite come together, however. She does not establish how singing in a childish treble, the pipes and whistles of old age, or being, in the words of Jacques from As You Like It, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” makes one acoustically witch-like (2.7.139–65). It is also unclear what link she is making with wicked women, humoralism, and sound. Having an unpleasant voice or even cursing or swearing is not enough to ensure one is figured as a witch: the woman, for the most part, needs to be tied to a crime. As with much of the book, the connections are tenuous, and there is simply not enough work done to tell us something new about witches and acoustic disorder or verbal excess.

Positioned as “largely speculative,” chapter 4 looks at the physical artifact of the ballad and its performance. Williams's tracing of a single devil is fun. Her claims on Reginald Scott's views on the witch's dancing of “La Volta,” (the dance memorialized on canvas as being performed by Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester) are wrong, however. Witches did not sing and dance with the devil leading their revels (123). Rather, than citing common thought on witches, in the Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) Scott was citing a web of lies that popularized by “lewd Inquisitors and peevish Witch-mongers” like Jean Bodin, author of the 1580 De la démonomanie des sorciers (On the Demon-Mania of Witches). The broomstick and unguent Williams describes are also not staples in English witchcraft. Williams also looks to theatrical references, since there is little in the way of description of balladeers in popular culture. The readings of the plays are lovely, but in her argument, the performance of ballads (so enthralling that they link listening to ballads with being pickpocketed) seems out of alignment with the acoustic disorder of witch ballads seen in the previous chapter.

In her conclusion, Williams very briefly describes the continuing life of witches in ballads as a cultural meme after they had stopped being a legal phenomenon. Williams is right in demanding that we remember the complex, iterative transmutations of these ideas. The witch is not a stable idea. Rather, the figure of “Elizabeth Francis” might be better thought of as something like broken, distributed shards, recompiled (as necessary) to create the idea of Elizabeth Francis, the witch. We need to remember that what we might read as making up a whole is in fact a mosaic, not an organic whole in and of itself. That alone should earn Damnable Practices a place in some of the larger university libraries.