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  • IntroductionExperiential Scholarship/Learning
  • Patricia Fumerton (bio)

this special issue was inspired by a two-day interdisciplinary conference of the same title, held at the Huntington Library April 4–5, 2014. I do not use the word inspired lightly. Normally, I would take pains to distinguish a special issue from being “just” a duplication of a conference, and in that mode, I can provide assurance that indeed this issue offers a selection of papers from those presented at the event, significantly expanded and honed. It also includes essays by scholars who were present at the conference but did not present papers there. I have now used the word present three times, and with good reason. Those who were involved in “Living English Broadside Ballads, 1550–1750” were present in every sense of the word. They immersed themselves in the happenings of the event, which extended far beyond formal presentations into a multimedia lived experience. For this reason, I want to focus on the conference as an extended moment of experiential scholarship and learning.

The conference had two goals, the first of which was to celebrate the inclusion of the Huntington Library’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English broadside ballads—521 items, to be exact—in the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu, a resource housed at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As the director of EBBA, I am especially excited to include the Huntington’s ballads in the database—composed of facsimile images, transcriptions, recordings, and catalogue records of not only texts but also tunes and woodcut illustrations—because the Library’s holdings represent a wide range of the 11,000 to 12,000 extant ballads printed in English before 1701. Most significantly, the Huntington holds 90 of the estimated 250 extant sixteenth-century English broadside ballads.1 Having such a [End Page 163] significant number of these rare sixteenth-century ballads in EBBA allows researchers to trace the complicated arc of development of the printed ballad genre in England from the sixteenth century into the eighteenth.


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Figure 1.

Christopher Marsh performs a ballad on the fiddle at the “Living English Broadside Ballads” conference, 2014.

The second goal of the conference was to embrace broadside ballads as part of a more comprehensive experience encompassing text, song, art, dance, and culture.2 Mingling scholarly activities with such untraditional functions as ballad singing, fiddling, dancing, and visual encounters with broadside ballad sheets and woodcuts led to new insights. In addition to addressing such key issues as the truth status of printed ballads and the communities built around them in the process of their being authored, printed, published, performed, and collected (both in their own time and in the digital age), the conference offered presenters and audience alike an enveloping sensory experience of singing, hearing, dancing, and viewing these ballads.

On the first day of the conference, EBBA singers Erik Bell (the lead singer for the digital project), Leeza Bautista, and Caroline Bennet joined presenters-turned-performers Christopher Marsh, Lucie Skeaping, and Bruce Smith in a “Taste of Song.” Songbooks decorated with woodcut illustrations contained the lyrics. Members of the audience sang along—especially belting out the increasingly familiar refrains—to tunes performed a cappella in solo or dialogue form or to an accompaniment of fiddling by Marsh (fig. 1). [End Page 164]

But all did not go as planned. Smith tossed aside his assigned ballad and delivered an impromptu ditty that he thought better fitted his upcoming talk on ballads and dance. Lucie Skeaping exchanged her assigned ballad for a raunchy dramatic song featuring several characters (all of whose voices she variedly assumed), which she elected to sing in light of the morning’s discussions.

Katherine Steele Brokaw, as the introducer of the performers and all-around emcee, did a superb job of holding together what was becoming an increasingly unruly group. And though Megan E. Palmer had painstakingly designed the songbook, replete with woodcut illustrations, and might have been a tad disappointed that two of her printed broadside ballads were cast away for alternatives, I think she would agree that the spontaneity of the moment perfectly fit the early...

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