FRIAS Kolloquium - Robert Spindler

Outsiders, Lawbreakers, Apostates, Witches: A Narratological Morphology of Broadside Ballads, 1550-1714

Despite its immense popularity in Elizabethan England and beyond, the so-called broadside ballad is still one of the most overlooked text types. Broadside ballads are short, narrative song texts, written in rhymed verse and printed on single sheets of paper: produced quickly, sold cheaply, and consumed widely. Broadside ballads covered many different topics. There were traditional, tragical, comical, political, historical, religious, bawdy, and sensational ballads.

The aim of this project is twofold. Working with a large corpus of texts, it attempts to produce a narratological morphology of the broadside ballad, including a character typology as well as an analysis of recurring plot structures and narrative characteristics and techniques. In a second step, and on the basis of this, it will embed the ballad genre in the social and cultural history of early modern England, trying to shed further light on how the texts reflected and influenced crucial developments of the time.