Bringing together diverse scholars to represent the full historical breadth of the early modern period, and a wide range of disciplines (literature, women's studies, folklore, ethnomusicology, art history, media studies, the history of science, and history), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 offers an unprecedented perspective on the development and cultural practice of popular print in early modern Britain. Fifteen essays explore major issues raised by the broadside genre in the early modern period: the different methods by which contemporaries of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries collected and "appreciated" such early modern popular forms; the preoccupation in the early modern period with news and especially monsters; the concomitant fascination with and representation of crime and the criminal subject; the technology and formal features of early modern broadside print together with its bearing on gender, class, and authority/authorship; and, finally, the nationalizing and internationalizing of popular culture through crossings against (and sometimes with) cultural Others in ballads and broadsides of the time.

In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive—individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another—some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive. In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama. A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.

In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas—commercial, intellectual, political, and individual. "A compelling exposition of how authors, printers, booksellers and readers competed for power over the printed page. . . . The richness of Mr. Johns's book lies in the splendid detail he has collected to describe the world of books in the first two centuries after the printing press arrived in England."—Alberto Manguel, Washington Times "[A] mammoth and stimulating account of the place of print in the history of knowledge. . . . Johns has written a tremendously learned primer."—D. Graham Burnett, New Republic "A detailed, engrossing, and genuinely eye-opening account of the formative stages of the print culture. . . . This is scholarship at its best."—Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor "The most lucid and persuasive account of the new kind of knowledge produced by print. . . . A work to rank alongside McLuhan."—John Sutherland, The Independent "Entertainingly written. . . . The most comprehensive account available . . . well documented and engaging."—Ian Maclean, Times Literary Supplement

This book looks at popular belief through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares in London in the century after the Reformation.