RHS Lecture, Prof. Chris Marsh: Bestselling Ballads in 17th-century England

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Date / time: 22 September, 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location
Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre


“The Woman to the Plow and the Man to the Hen-Roost”: Wives, Husbands, & Best-Selling Ballads in Seventeenth-Century England

Professor Chris Marsh (Queen’s University Belfast)

This lecture grows out of a research project that aims to identify 100 hit songs from seventeenth-century England.  Two historians are working with a group of musicians to produce new recordings of the period’s most successful broadside ballads (single-sheet songs that were sung and sold on the streets), and the results will eventually appear on a website.  Today, we will concentrate on ballads about marital relations, and the importance of these sources for our understandings of early modern culture and society will be assessed.  The talk will feature murder, adultery and monstrosity, though it will also be suggested that a tendency to concentrate on the exotic and extreme in early-modern balladry needs to be held in check.  Some of the ballads will be performed live by the singer, Vivien Ellis.