This essay collection, as noted in the helpful introduction by Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, grew out of a 2006 conference commemorating the achievements of the University of California at Santa Barbara’s online English Broadside Ballad Archive. The volume includes fifteen essays written by established and emerging scholars from various disciplines, a conscious move on the part of the editors who have strived to cross such boundaries in order to provide a cross-fertilization of knowledge about the importance of ballads and broadsides. These popular works, they argue, function as markers of cultural change in ways that set them apart from other texts, providing more insight into our understanding of early modern British culture.

The first section of the collection contextualizes the remainder of the volume by exploring definitions of ballads and ballad collecting. Fumerton begins the book with an insightful essay on the connections between early modern broadside commercialization and the ways scholars conduct their research today using online databases. She notes that fragmentation is common to both periods and suggests this commonality gives us a broader historical view of the period. The next two essays, by Paula McDowell and Mary Ellen Brown, examine debates surrounding the authenticity of ballads. McDowell questions when and how ballads came to be valued as oral tradition among scholars and finds that, although for early eighteenth-century scholars the oral/written binary was virtually nonexistent, later ballad critics helped this binary form by privileging oral ballads as more authentic. Brown’s essay demonstrates the problematic inconsistencies in Francis James Child’s ballad collection philosophies and practices, the result of which is Child’s incorrect implication that oral ballads preceded broadsides.

The next two sections of the collection focus on the subjects of ballads. Thomas Pettitt’s essay looks at ballads from a variety of cultures in order to establish the English broadside, which tends to focus on the male perspective, as an oikotype of the traditional, oral, female-centered, tragic sexual encounter ballad. Tassie Gniady interrogates the monstrous in her essay about the appearance of the hog-faced woman Tannakin Skinker. Using pamphlets and broadsides, Gniady examines various shifts in portrayals of female monstrosity. Anita Guerrini further complicates the concept of monstrosity by considering parallels between broadside advertisements and scientific publications of the Royal Society, in order to demonstrate that both groups addressed the curiosity of their audiences and tried to establish their legitimacy in shockingly similar ways. Simone Chess launches the section on criminal subjects in her essay about murderous wives in good-night ballads. Chess observes that the oaths of murderous wives function as speech acts that evoke agency on the part of the speaker, giving the wife the agency that allows her to murder her husband, an act with legal ramifications in regards to coverture. Frances E. Dolan looks at the woman who kills her husband, across a variety of print genres—legal records, pamphlets, and broadsides—and argues that ballads, unlike other printed popular texts, give the petty traitor a voice, exposing the audience to her perspective, motive, and repentance. Joy Wiltenburg completes the sections on ballad subjects with her study of English crime ballads. She cogently illuminates the ways ballads allow us to imagine the inner emotions of the condemned by giving criminals a voice that can evoke audience sympathies, reinforce state power, and permit public participation in the emotions surrounding the crime.

The fourth section of essays looks at the intersections of artistic craft and class. Steve Newman analyzes the authenticity and implications of “The Maiden’s Bloody Garland: Or High-Street Tragedy,” a ballad written by Thomas Warton. He reveals that Warton, an eighteenth-century Oxford scholar, in spite of his social status, sympathizes with lower-class Londoners. Angela McShane explores a balladeer of a different sort—Richard Rigby, a street cobbler who wrote ballads about state affairs and politics—to suggest that we can learn about broadside readership by tracing publication practices and trends. Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell investigates William Hogarth’s portrayals of pregnant ballad sellers and concludes that Hogarth’s inclusion of these low-class women acts as a metaphor for artistic regeneration in a variety of ways.

The final section of the collection expands beyond the confines of England, tracing reverberations of ballads in Scotland and the New World. Using a Scottish and English version of a ballad that depicts a battle in differing ways, Ruth Perry notes the impact of cultural constructions of historical narratives through oral lore. Dianne Dugaw follows the Anglo-American warrior woman from historical records to popular fiction, across continents and centuries, to discover her impact on ideas about heroism, cross-dressing, lesbianism, and gender performativity. Noelle Chao’s essay about John Gay’s ballad opera Polly highlights Gay’s use of ballads to disrupt and complicate notions of difference between the English and the Amerindians, who Chao asserts play an active role in the colonial conflicts the play dramatizes. A brief afterward by Bruce R. Smith rounds out the volume, by showing how ballads have influenced the past, now influence the present, and will influence the future, further reinforcing the collection’s importance.

Ballads and Broadsides might well have turned out to be a collection of essays with little in common, save their connection to the broader topic of the book, but this is, happily, not the case. It is clear that the contributors to this volume have made an effort to construct the book as a conversation between disciplines and fields, collecting essays much like the ballad collectors they examine. The result is a book that is self-referential, as authors frequently allude to works by their colleagues within the collection and quote from them, creating cohesiveness among the essays. This edition sheds light on the significance of oral and popular print culture and is worthwhile reading for anyone with an interest in early modern popular culture.