Women and Ballads

The ballad was known throughout Europe from the late Middle Ages, eventually spreading to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A popular or traditional song, the ballad combines narrative poetry, lyrical passages, and dialogue in strophic form, often with a recurring refrain. The broadside ballad, a single-sheet, folio-sized publication printed on one side containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery was sold commercially from the 1550s through the nineteenth century. Because of their performance and visual display in all manner of public and private spaces, ballads had the unique position of being equally available to both men and women. Digital resources such as the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) enable research on printed ballads, increasing interdisciplinary scholarship on circulation and performance. New methodologies, including performance studies, gender theory, and ethnomusicology, illuminate women’s contributions to the trade and contemporaneous attitudes toward gender. While traces of women’s professional roles in the commercial ballad trade are scant, women were certainly written about with regularity and played a critical part in circulation and transmission. This entry focuses on early modern English ballad culture; recent scholarship, however, has begun to explore parallel developments in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the New World.