Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads

Download or read book Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads written by Dr Sarah F Williams and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.