Outsiders, Lawbreakers, Apostates, Witches

The most popular texts in early modern England (c. 1500-1800) were not novels, like Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe, or plays, like the works of William Shakespeare, but belonged to a genre that is still much overlooked today: the ballad. Thousands of such ballads have been preserved, and still they represent only a fraction of the actual phenomenon of the broadside ballad so called for the single sheets on which these song texts were hurriedly printed and then sold to the masses at very low prices. Since the ballads fit on one print page, since the rapidly evolving printing press enabled cheap mass production, and since those who could not read could nevertheless hear the ballads sung, the concept proved highly successful. In this way, the printed text gradually became a mass phenomenon, not least because an increasing number of people from all social classes learned to read and could now purchase and consume their literature themselves a novelty in England at the time. In this way, incredible news, heroic legends, and everything in between reached everyone: from the distinguished gentleman to the ordinary day laborer. The stories readers enjoyed most concerned heroines and heroes who broke with social norms and about whom we still like to read today: pirates, witches, adventurers and, especially, outlaws like Robin Hood. Almost all the stories we know today about the charismatic hero from Sherwood Forest stem, not from medieval sources, but from broadside ballads. The present project aims to establish the position of the early modern English ballad within literary and cultural history and to emphasize its remarkable role in the development of British literature and culture. The core of the project is a representative corpus of ballads that tell of such norm-breaking (transgressive) figures. Closer investigation will then happen in three steps: 1. First, a so-called character typology of the English ballad shall systematically record and describe the repertoire of protagonists and their typical narrative characteristics. 2. A similar procedure will then examine and map out the typical plot structures and narrative techniques that characterize the ballad. 3. On the basis of this, the ballad genre will be embedded in the social and cultural history of early modern England. During the course of this, the project will determine to what degree the texts reflected important cultural developments on the one hand and, on the other, even influenced and fueled such developments. The findings will be published as a book that aims to set new standards with regard to research on the ballad as a genre and on its role in literary history.