Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads by Williams, Sarah (review)

Historians of gender and witchcraft have long recognized the importance of broadside ballads in disseminating and reinforcing ideas and stereotypes about witches and other so-called transgressive and disorderly women in early modern communities, but little detailed study has been done in this area, no doubt because of the elusive nature of broadside balladry and a deficiency of musicologists amongst early modern historians. As a musicologist of some note, Sarah Williams’s contribution to the field is therefore very welcome. In Damnable Practises, she builds upon the work of Amanda Winkler, Frances Dolan, Tessa Watt, Christopher Marsh, and others by applying her extensive knowledge of early modern English broadside ballads and music to demonstrate how witches, scolds, and husband murderers were represented and characterized in broadside ballads and their accompanying music.

Williams is ultimately concerned with the shaping of musical and acoustic stereotypes of female transgression by the London publishers of broadside ballads in the seventeenth century. She provides an excellent overview of the development, printing, promoting, and performance of broadside ballads in early modern England, before focusing on broadside ballads produced in London that deal specifically with witchcraft and female transgression. As broadside ballads were widely circulated as text, and transmitted orally through street and theatre performances, they were indeed an important tool, reflecting and reinforcing female stereotypes, and shaping gender hierarchies and moral values. Williams considers the ways in which the textual, musical, visual, and performative characteristics of these ballads influenced their reception by early modern audiences and contributed to perceptions of transgressive women in the early modern community. Every aspect of broadside balladry is considered, including the use of fonts in the text, the use and reuse of woodcut imagery to reinforce stereotypes, musical accompaniment and repetition of certain tunes, public display and performance, reception by audiences, and the intersection of broadside balladry and theatre.

There are some problems with Williams’s discussion of the cultural and historical context of gender, witchcraft, and female disorder. It is, of course, difficult to come up with new material in this heavily explored area, but Williams’s treatment of witchcraft in early modern England is superficial. She draws selectively from secondary sources to demonstrate that pagan rituals and agrarian traditions, ingrained in the English consciousness, contributed to fear of and prejudice against loquacious women in early modern England. While there were certainly remnants of pagan practices and beliefs in early modern witchcraft, her emphasis on witch-cults is misleading, not least because evidence of their existence has been convincingly dismissed by historians. Furthermore, Williams’s statement that witchcraft prosecutions increased under James I is mistaken (p. 37), and she conflates the witch hunters of the disruptive Civil War period with King James and the Jacobean period. To advocate her position on gender bias, Williams also neglects to point out the discrepancies between the prevalent depictions of women burned at the stake for witchcraft and domestic crime in broadside ballads and the historical records. Women convicted of witchcraft in early modern England were not burned but hanged, and while it was stated in law that women found guilty of murdering their husbands should be burned at the stake, only a small minority of husband murderers were burned: the majority were hanged, and a small number were pardoned. This discrepancy warrants some discussion, as it surely reveals something significant about the stereotypical depictions of women in the ballads. While there is no doubt that witchcraft was a gendered crime, Williams’s argument for gender bias using spurious claims and inadequate discussion detracts from the overall value of her work, as does the misquote from John Boys in the heading for Chapter 4, ‘Auditories are like Fairies’ (p. 111), which mistakes ‘Faires’ for ‘Fairies’.

Williams’s failure to create an accurate historical context for witchcraft beliefs does not detract from her detailed exploration of the...