Women And Murder In Early Modern News Pamphlets And Broadside Ballads 1573 1697

As voyeuristic and prurient as today's tabloid newspapers, early modern crime pamphlets and broadside ballads about women murderers tell of furtive love affairs and domestic poisonings, of battered wives who kill their abusive husbands, and of troubled mothers who murder their children. On first acquaintance, many pamphlets leave an impression of shallow sensationalism yoked to idealised repentance, and for that reason modern critics and historians have often discounted their importance as culturally significant artifacts. This volume presents a selection of over forty texts and is intended to encourage a reconsideration of these views. In his Introductory Note to the volume, Randall Martin discusses the narrative content and social commentary of these ballads, pamphlets and trial reports, and the contribution that they make to the discursive construction of the early modern female murderer through their representational strategies and evolving legal and gender contexts.

As voyeuristic and prurient as today's tabloid newspapers, early modern crime pamphlets and broadside ballads about women murderers tell of furtive love affairs and domestic poisonings, of battered wives who kill their abusive husbands, and of troubled mothers who murder their children. On first acquaintance, many pamphlets leave an impression of shallow sensationalism yoked to idealised repentance, and for that reason modern critics and historians have often discounted their importance as culturally significant artifacts. This volume presents a selection of over forty texts and is intended to encourage a reconsideration of these views. In his Introductory Note to the volume, Randall Martin discusses the narrative content and social commentary of these ballads, pamphlets and trial reports, and the contribution that they make to the discursive construction of the early modern female murderer through their representational strategies and evolving legal and gender contexts.

This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

Bringing together diverse scholars to represent the full historical breadth of the early modern period, and a wide range of disciplines (literature, women's studies, folklore, ethnomusicology, art history, media studies, the history of science, and history), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 offers an unprecedented perspective on the development and cultural practice of popular print in early modern Britain. Fifteen essays explore major issues raised by the broadside genre in the early modern period: the different methods by which contemporaries of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries collected and "appreciated" such early modern popular forms; the preoccupation in the early modern period with news and especially monsters; the concomitant fascination with and representation of crime and the criminal subject; the technology and formal features of early modern broadside print together with its bearing on gender, class, and authority/authorship; and, finally, the nationalizing and internationalizing of popular culture through crossings against (and sometimes with) cultural Others in ballads and broadsides of the time.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

The tumultuous climate of early modern England had a profound effect on its Catholic population's domestic life, social customs, literary inventions, and political arguments. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism explores the broad spectrum of the early modern English Catholic experience, presenting fresh and often startling assessments of the most problematic topics in post-Reformation English Catholicism. The contributors to this volume – all leading or rising scholars of early modern studies – conceptualize English Catholicism as a hazardous series of contested territories divided by shifting boundaries, requiring Catholics to navigate with vigilance and diplomacy their status as 'insiders' or 'outsiders.' This collection also presents new ways to understand the connections between reformist and Catholic inflections in the emerging canon of English poetry, despite the eventual marginalization of Catholic poets in English literary history. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ably demonstrates the profoundly experimental as well as recuperative character of early modern English Catholicism.

Fashion featured in black-letter broadside ballads over a hundred years before fashion magazines appeared in England. In the seventeenth century, these single-sheet prints contained rhyming song texts and woodcut pictures, accessible to almost everyone in the country. Dress was a popular subject for ballads, as well as being a commodity with close material and cultural connections to them.This book analyses how the distinctive words and images of these ballads made meaning, both in relation to each other on the ballad sheet and in response to contemporary national events, sumptuary legislation, religious practice, economic theory, the visual arts and literature. In this context, Clare Backhouse argues, seventeenth-century ballads increasingly celebrated the proliferation of print and fashionable dress, envisioning new roles for men and women in terms of fashion consumption and its importance to national prosperity. The book demonstrates how the hitherto overlooked but extensive source material that these ballads offer can enrich the histories of dress, art and culture in early modern England.