Una McIlvenna - Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900

JANE F. FULCHER, Series Editor

Series Board Members:

Celia Applegate

Philip Bohlman

Kate van Orden

Michael P. Steinberg

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Vanessa Agnew

Voice Lessons: French Mlodie in the Belle Epoque

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Jane Alden

Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life

Lynn M. Sargeant

Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation

Christi-Anne Castro

The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 12601330

Emma Dillon

Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 17891794

Mark Darlow

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria

Alexander J. Fisher

The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy

Jason Geary

Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna

David Brodbeck

Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe

Kate van Orden

Singing the Resurrection: Body, Community, and Belief in Reformation Europe

Erin Lambert

Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde

Jennifer Iverson

Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland

Andrea F. Bohlman

Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic

Glenda Goodman

Sounding Feminine: Womens Voices in British Musical Culture, 17801850

David Kennerley

Socialist Laments: Musical Mourning in the German Democratic Republic

Martha Sprigge

Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 15001900

Una McIlvenna

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935149

ISBN 9780197551851

eISBN 9780197551875

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197551851.001.0001

I dedicate this book to the memories of those who were, and continue to be, the victims of state-sponsored executions. I hope these songs act as a reminder of their suffering, and I look forward to the day when the immoral death penalty is abolished across the world.

A book that has taken a decade to research and write, and which involves multiple countries and languages, has, needless to say, benefited from the wisdom and generosity of more people than I can possibly thank here. I am indebted to the tireless researchers at the various ballad digitisation projects: Paddy Fumerton and the team at EBBA, Giles Bergel, Alexandra Franklin and the team at the Bodleian, Maxou Heintzen and the team at Criminocorpus, Martine de Bruin and the team at the Liederenbank, and the many librarians and archivists around the world who, where the ballads were not digitised, simply took photos of them and sent them to me without charge. I have tried to thank them where that work appears in the book. Also, I am grateful to Aurelle Levasseur who took photos for me in Paris, and Edina Eszenyi who took photos in Rome. I also want to thank the helpful staff of so many libraries, small and large, that I visited over this long period: the Bibliothque des Littratures Policires (BiLiPo), the Bibliothque historique de la ville de Paris, the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv in Freiburg, Chethams Library in Manchester, the Bibliothque nationale de France, and the British Library. I discovered some of the ballads about the French Revolution on a Newberry Library Fellowship in 2014; I am grateful for their warm welcome. I also thank the staff of the many libraries and institutions that provided images; as well as those mentioned above, Universittsbibliothek Gttingen, Universitts- und Forschungsbibliothek Erfurt/Gotha, Stadtbibliothek Augsburg, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Waddesdon Manor, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zrich, KunstbibliothekStaatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Harvard Law School Library, Historical & Special Collections.

As well as these, there are the song and music scholars who have repeatedly shared their expertise with me. My thanks go to Angela McShane, Chris Marsh, Jenni Hyde, Eva Guillorel, Oskar Cox Jensen, Steve Roud, Tom Cheesman, Rosa Salzberg, Massimo Rospocher, Siv Gril Brandtzg, Juan Gomis Coloma, Jeroen Salman, Rene Vulto, Ccile de Morre, Emilie Murphy, Maxou Heintzen, John Romey, Jessica Herdman, Jeanice Brooks, Nick Hammond, Tom Hamilton, Melanie Marshall, and Roland Brou, to mention only a few.

Scholars of crime and punishment have also shared their wisdom with me: I am so grateful to Pascal Bastien, Paul Friedland, Richard Ward, Joy Wiltenburg, Franois Soyer, Richard Evans, and Frances Dolan. Special thanks must go to the entire team at the Old Bailey Online Project, which has been an essential resource for me and my students.

Julianne Bell was responsible for taking the chaos of my Dropbox folders and making them into the ordered and beautiful Omeka database www.executionballads.com, which now allows the general public to see and hear these songs. My gratitude to her is immense, and to the Digital Studio run by Rachel Fensham who championed this digital initiative throughout. Various talented singers have recorded beautiful versions of these songs, especially Jenni Hyde, Hannah Sullivan, Molly McKew, and Lisa Salvo; you can hear them all on the website. The extraordinary Jenni Hyde also transcribed all of the melodies into modern musical notation, sometimes from nothing more than an audio track, and then provided accurate musicological analyses for each. My gratitude to her knows no bounds.

Several friends generously read sections of this book, for which I am immensely grateful. I would like to thank Jenny Spinks, Paddy Fumerton, Katie Barclay, Briony Nielson, Robin Walz, and Mark Seymour. Any errors that remain are my fault alone.

As an early career academic I relocated intercontinentally multiple times in order to secure jobs. While the current state of the academic job market leaves a lot to be desired, I am so grateful that at each place I was surrounded with dream colleagues, far too numerous to list in full here: at the University of Sydney where this project began; at Queen Mary University of London; at the University of Kent, and at the University of Melbourne.