PhD Project Survey: Gender Nonconformity in Early Modern Ballads (1600–1800).

For this blog post-graduate history student Abi Kingsnorth at CCCU is seeking responses to her survey on Early Modern Ballards. Over to Abi, who explains more about her research and how you can take part:

As part of my PhD, Gender Transgressions in Folksong: Using Digital History to Understand Gender Nonconformity in Early Modern Broadside Ballads, I wanted to create a collection of soundscapes that incorporate ballads into different early modern environments. I am now seeking feedback on these soundscapes through a short survey: https://forms.gle/3gYnZrmHRyhM1kHEA

For those who don’t know, broadside ballads were short and simple narrative songs, typically accompanied by woodcut images. They were commonly distributed on a single printed page, meaning they could be sold cheaply. They were popular street songs from the late 16th century before falling into decline in the early 19th century.

Cheap and widely available, ballads could be enjoyed by all ranks of society. This broad audience allowed them to communicate a range of popular beliefs and attitudes of the time. The speed at which they could be produced also meant that ballads were constantly adapted and altered to reflect trends and events in popular culture.

Their origins in oral tradition, and their continued oral transmission alongside printed versions, allowed flexibility in meaning as ballads were moulded and adapted to the singer’s and audience’s environment.

Figure 1 A Strange Banquet Ballad Sheet https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/37125/image

This privileged position of ballads between oral, textual and visual forms has attracted a range of research into early modern ballads and the viewpoints they reflect.

My work focuses on the use of gender as a device to create meaning in ballads and the attitudes towards gender nonconformity reflected in their stories.

Recreating early modern ballad performances

The performance of ballads is becoming increasingly important in ballad research, and many scholars have included music and recordings of ballads in their work. However, recent recreations tend to be professional recordings by professional singers, often in an almost choral style.

Research suggests that ballads were rarely performed in this way. Instead, they were performed more casually, often by entertaining amateurs or by performers seeking to attract attention in a crowd. This project therefore aims to create performances that more authentically reflect the ways in which ballads might have been heard on early modern streets.

To create these recreations, I enlisted a range of volunteer singers who learnt and performed the ballads at CCCU’s Creative Innovation Hub. The singers ranged from music students, choir singers and musical theatre performers to untrained PhD students turned amateur singers.

In total, 16 ballads were performed, and a selection of sound effects was added to create ‘soundscapes’ of early modern ballad performances. These include not just the songs themselves but also the aural environments in which they may have been performed.

A lot was learnt through the process of performing the ballads, and I am now seeking feedback on the resulting soundscapes to investigate their effectiveness.

Take part in the survey

I would really appreciate it if you could spare five minutes to listen and fill out the following survey: https://forms.gle/3gYnZrmHRyhM1kHEA