Ballad Culture & Printing

These essays cover relevant topics on the production of ballads such as circulation, papermaking and ballad sheet sizes, black-letter print, ballad woodcuts, ballad music, and ballad measure. Each essay is meant to familiarize the reader with issues surrounding the cultural production of as well as the instrumentation behind the ballad phenomenon in Early Modern England. Read together, they paint a picture of the forces that gave rise to the popularity of the ballad of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Other essays in this collection place the ballads historically, describing their heyday and social function. We also offer an early modern costume book that our cataloguers utilize in cataloguing woodcut impressions for our Ballad Impression Archive.