Tag Archives: print culture

February 19, 2016

Miss Brooks Embellishes

By daseger

I am featuring yet another new-to-me Salem artist today, Mary Mason Brooks (1860-1915), who worked primarily in watercolors over her career. Mary’s biography is spare: the obituary in the 1915 American Art Directory consists of only two brief lines: a painter in water colors, died September 20, 1915. She was born in Salem, Mass, studied in Rome and Paris; exhibited in New York and Boston, her home being in the latter city. I can fill in these lines a bit: she was born into an old and well-connected Salem family, grew up on Lafayette Street, and her father was the long-time Secretary of the Essex Institute who also published quite a few antiquarian pieces over his long career. After her training in Europe, Mary returned to Salem briefly and maintained a studio and school in the famous “Studio” at #2 Chestnut Street among her fellow Salem artists, but she was off to Boston and Jamestown, Rhode Island by her early 30s. She had both family and friends in Jamestown, located right over the bridge (then ferry!) from Newport, where an artists’ colony was emerging and where she eventually died, “suddenly”, at age 55. That’s about it for the written record on Mary Mason Brooks: her works are going to have to embellish her character for us. And there are many: it is apparent that Miss Brooks was no dilettante, but rather a professional, working artist. Most are watercolors: some European scenes, lots of flowers and trees, several structures, the occasional (appropriate for a Salem girl) ship. But the most charming–and in many ways most revealing–work of Miss Brooks that I could find is a book illustrated by her after its publication: a one-off edition of Eleanor Putnam’s Old Salem (1886 & 1899). This charming little book is a collection of previous-published Atlantic Monthly articles written by Harriet Leonora Vose Bates, who preferred to use the pseudonym of her ancestor Eleanor Putnam, published posthumously in two editions. It is basically a series of reminiscences about the stuff of old Salem—shops, schools, homes and things–which Miss Brooks illustrates in her special edition.

I think it’s pretty gutsy to illustrate a book after its publication, and after its author’s death! And to sign your name right there on the title page! Miss Brooks probably thought her special edition would never see the light of day, but it made its way on to ebay, of all places, a century after her own death. I like the marginalia, which transforms a charming but mere book into something else entirely, but I also feel that I should present some of the artist’s more formal works which were represent her public oeuvre. They testify to a life well-lived, if short, in some beautiful places.

Watercolors by Mary Mason Brooks: Lumber Schooner; Garden of Poppies, Isles of Shoals; Three European Views, Skinner Auctions; and my favorite, a watercolor of the pool at Haleiwa, the Horace Sears Estate in Weston, Massachusetts, Weston Historical Society.

8 Comments | tags: Antiques and Collectibles, Art, Auctions, books, ephemera, print culture, Shopping | posted in History, Salem

December 15, 2015

The Merry Boys of Christmas

By daseger

One of the most dramatic examples of raucous Christmas revelry happened in Salem Village on Christmas Day, 1679 when four youths barged into the home of John Rowden and started singing loudly before the fire. After a few off-key tunes, they demanded compensation in the form of spirits: perry, in particular, as Rowden maintained a profitable pear orchard and was known to make a pleasing pear cider. According to the record of the subsequent trial: it was Christmas Day at night and they came to be merry and to drink perry, which was not to be had anywhere else but here, and perry they would have before they went”. Rowden and his wife were not pleased with the songs, or the demands, so they sent the young men away, but they quickly returned with a scrap of lead which they tried to pass off as coin to pay for their perry. The Rowdens rebuffed them again, and then all hell broke loose. According to Mr. Rowden’s testimony, The threw stones, bones, and other things against the house. They beat down much of the daubing in several places and continued to throw stones for an hour and a half with little intermission. They also broke down about a pole and a half of fence, being stone wall, and a cellar, without the house, distant about four or five rods, was broken open through the door, and five or six pecks of apples were stolen.” This was a case of Christmas wassailing gone bad, very bad, recounted by Stephen Nissenbaum in his wonderful book The Battle for Christmas as “The Salem Wassail” and a great example of why Puritans on both side of the Atlantic abhorred Christmas. Their power in both Parliament and the Massachusetts Bay Colony resulted in the great Christmas ban of the mid-17th century: from 1651 to 1660 in England and 1659 to 1681 in Massachusetts.

The Vindication of Christmas, 1652, lamenting the prohibition of its “keeping” in England during the Interregnum.

There were three major reasons why the Puritans hated Christmas. Their insistence on scriptural authority cast doubt on its date, as nowhere in the Bible does it say that the Nativity occurred on December 25th. They could only conclude, very reasonably, that some ancient winter festival, the Roman Saturnalia or the Winter Solstice, had determined this date, and that the Christian Church had merely adopted and assimilated it: consequently Christmas was perceived as a pagan holiday with a Christian gloss. Given their mandate to purify the Church of all its non-scriptural “traditions” and Popish trappings, it became a conspicuous target. The third reason was primarily social: the Christmas that the Puritans targeted was “Old Christmas”, or “Merry Christmas”, which they saw principally as a prolonged season–Christmastide, which could stretch beyond the twelve days of Christmas to encompass all of December and January–of disorder, misrule, and excess. In Cotton Mather’s words, the “Feast of Christ’s Nativity is spent in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and in all Licentious Liberty….by Mad Mirth, by long eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling…..”. By the time Mather wrote this, “Old Christmas” had returned to England with the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Salem seems a little behind the times in 1679 when those young men wassailed the Rowdens so crudely; indeed in that same year the government of Charles II begin requesting that the Massachusetts General Court repeal its anti-Christmas law. If the Rowden revelers had been a bit less rude (and much better singers) one wonders if they would have been let off as mere “merry boys of Christmas”, the subjects of a popular British ballad who cast off all constraints in their keeping of Christmas: these Holidays we’l briskly drink, all mirth we will devise, No Treason we will speak or think, then bring us brave mine’d Pies: Roast Beef and brave Plum-Porridge, our Loyal hearts to chear: Then prithee make no more ado, but bring us Christmas Beer!

carols

Keeping “Old” Christmas and the “Merry Boys of Christmas” broadside woodcut illustrations from 1680s; Christmas Carols return to Old England at about this time, but New England will have to wait a bit longer.

Dedicated to my friends at the Salem Historical Society and Creative Salem, big supporters of history AND revelry.

2 Comments | tags: books, Christmas, ephemera, holidays, print culture, Seventeenth Century | posted in Culture, History, Salem

December 2, 2015

A Closer Look: Salem 1854

By daseger

I’m following up on a post from a couple of years ago on urban “bird’s eye” maps from the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, which included a lithograph map of Salem from 1854 published by Endicott & Company and the Smith Brothers and based on an original aquatint by British born American artist John William Hill (1812-1879). I was impressed by this map at the time, but I didn’t really do it justice. Here’s what I said: Here is a map that defies categorization: it’s part panorama, part rendering. The detail, perhaps a bit idealized, is amazing, especially if you view it with a zoom feature. Yet the people are stick figures; it’s all about buildings and streets. Thanks to some close cropping by the folks at Princeton University’s Graphic Arts Collection blog, I now want to revise that view: Hill’s view of Salem in 1854 is far more humanistic than I thought. Now I’m more impressed than ever by this amazing artist, whose skills are on flagrant display in this map, and others. It’s that combination of aerial perspective and architectural detail that draws me in, very evident in the close-ups provided by Princeton.

Lithograph map of Salem, Mass., 1854 by J. H. Colen after John William Hill (1812-1879). Published by the Smith Brothers, 59 Beekman Street, New York. Graphic Arts Collection, Firestone Library, Princeton University.

Yes, the people are still a bit stickish and it is certainly an idealistic impression, but the material world on display still draws you (at least me) in: 6 over 6 window panes, 8 over 8 window panes, dormers, chimneys, laundry on the line. This is a city that seems to be in transition in its orientation, from water to land, as a lot of effort seems to have been spent on those wide (clean! far more clean than they would have been in actuality) streets, home to a few stray carriages now but later to be clogged with cars. Hill’s depiction of Charleston from a few years earlier displays the alternate water-to-land perspective. Moving out of the realm of street view maps (but still encompassing people) is his beautiful watercolor of Boston Harbor, from the same era and the same collection at Princeton, and the stunning New York from Brooklyn Heights, which was issued in several variant genres in the middle of the nineteenth century.

John William Hill’s Charleston, 1851 (hand-colored lithograph, Historic Charleston Collection); Boston, 1853, Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University, and New York from Brooklyn Heights, Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on deposit at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Aquatint with engraving and etching of the latter by William James Bennett, 1837, New York Public Library.

5 Comments | tags: Architecture, Art, maps, Port Cities, print culture | posted in Culture, History, Houses, Paper, Salem

November 23, 2015

Fabricating the Feast

By daseger

Can there be any other holiday more closely associated with women than Thanksgiving? Forget the quasi-mythical “First Thanksgiving”, for which we only have references to men fowling and feasting–after that it’s all about women. What emerged as a New England tradition in the early nineteenth century was transformed into a national holiday through the intense efforts of author and editor Sarah Josepha Hale, eventually resulting in Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863. Several other New England ladies contributed to this effort, including Lydia Maria Child, whose “Over the River and through the Wood” we traditionally associate with Christmas but was first published in 1844 as “The New England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving”. Successive presidents followed Lincoln’s precedent until 1941, when Congress established the fourth Thursday of November as a permanent Thanksgiving holiday. In the interim, a major medium for the adoption of a national harvest holiday seems to have been women’s magazines, chief among them Hale’s own Godey’s Ladies Book and later Good Housekeeping, The Ladies’ Home Journal (and Practical Housekeeper), (The) House Beautiful, and even Harper’s Bazaar. There was definitely a bit of culinary imperialism at work here: the ideal Thanksgiving menu published in Hale’s first novel, Northwood, was Yankee fare (cranberries!), but as turkey assumed the center stage (pushing out the very popular chicken pot pie and assorted other fowl) regional dishes could be assimilated as “sides”. And need I even say it? Women were making all those Thanksgiving feasts.

Fabricating a very FEMININE Thanksgiving in the popular print media, 1894-1937: 1894-95 covers by Louis John Rhead and William H. Bradley, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Ladies’ Home Journal Thanksgiving covers for 1897 and 1898; 1904 Puck Magazine cover, Library of Congress; Pictorial Review and Ullman Manufacturing calendar page for November 1906; Harpers Bazaar and Good Housekeeping covers, 1914 and 1937, Library of Congress and Good Housekeeping archive.

1 Comment | tags: ephemera, Graphic Design, holidays, print culture, Thanksgiving | posted in Culture, Current Events, History

November 19, 2015

The Equestrian King

By daseger

So Downton Abbey reruns began this week in advance of the show’s final season and I dutifully watched, even though I’d seen it all before. I’m not a big fan of this show–the writing is a bit too erratic and melodramatic for me–but I certainly will miss seeing the house when the series is over. The production values of the series have been stellar, although several friends of mine who are landscape architects tell me that the opportunity to showcase the the estate’s grounds has been squandered. There are two rooms in the “abbey” (really Highclere Castle) that I particularly like: the Earl’s library with its pair of plush red couches and the dining room. I love that huge van Dyck portrait of Charles I and his riding master towering over the Crawley family, but I suppose I can see it elsewhere because it’s one of at least 3 variant copies.

King Charles I (1600-1649) with M. de St Antoine (1633) by Anthony van Dyck at Highclere Castle; in the Royal Collection (Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2015); After van Dyck paintings at the Launceston Town Hall and Aspley House, Wellington Collection.

I’ve been thinking about Charles a lot over the past few weeks as I have just dragged the students in my graduate course on Early Modern England through the history and historiography of the English Revolution. When you’re focusing on Charles in this particular context, he looks arrogant and ill-advised, even stupid, and you tend to dwell on his death rather than his life. The enormity of being the only king in English history to be tried, convicted, and executed by his subjects for high treason will always be his primary identify and legacy, but still, sometimes it’s nice to think about “villains” in other ways. When I look at these images of Charles on horseback I see a dashing, dignified, and powerful cavalier (and also TALL, much taller than his actual height of 5’4” or so), and that is a nice way to consider him on this day, his birthday. Before the Revolution and after, when the monarchy was restored through the equally dashing persona of his son and namesake Charles II, similar portraits of Charles were commissioned, created, and published, almost as if the image of the robust, noble, and virtuous (horses are always virtuous) king was intended to wipe out alternative images of the tyrant or the traitor. Van Dyck painted two other equestrian portraits of Charles in the 1630s: the very large “wandering portrait” of Charles I on Horseback, c.1636-8 (National Gallery, London) and my favorite, Le Roi à la Chasse, c.1635 (The Louvre), and after the Revolution, prints of the equestrian king were produced well into the nineteenth century.

Above: the Van Dyck equestrian portraits of Charles I from the National Gallery and the Louvre, and a 1636 line engraving of the latter from the National Portrait Gallery, London; Below: a succession of equestrian portraits of Charles I.

Bernard Baron, after Sir Anthony Van Dyck, line engraving, 1741 (1633); after Unknown artist, line engraving, 18th century; Charles Turner, published by Samuel Woodburn, after Francis Delaram, mezzotint, 1813, all National Portrait Gallery, London.

5 Comments | tags: Art, Charles I of England, Downton Abbey, Interiors, print culture | posted in Culture, History

November 15, 2015

The Cries of Paris

By daseger

A title that is all-too-poignant if perceived literally from our perspective here and now, in mid-November of 2015, but historically refers to a genre of popular prints from the early modern era depicting everyday people in the streets, carrying on their business openly and freely: modernity means “progress”, you say? The title is paradoxical because these are visual media, but if we could hear the cries we would be offered a multitude of services and products: chimney-sweeping, firewood, rags, vinegar, milk, cakes, bread, varieties of vegetables. Everyone was a specialist, and of course these images are essentially idealistic–yet still they are notable attempts to represent the people. The Cries genre encompasses not only Paris but also London and a few other European cities, and pre-dates print, but the printed images became particularly popular in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when many variants of original etchings were produced. They are key sources for economic, social, and cultural historians, but also for those of fashion and print. The Cries of Paris images disappear during the French Revolutionary era, only to reappear in the nineteenth century as a form of nostalgia for the “simpler” ancien regime: it is in that spirit that I am presenting them now. Nineteenth-century street cries images appear not only on print series but also on board games and playing cards: a judge is included in sets of latter, declaring “Peace, peace” in order to stop the game.

Milkmaid from Les Cris de Paris, c. 1500, BnF, Arsenal. Est. 264 ; A seller of rat poison, engraving by Abraham Bosse’s Small Trades and Cries of Paris, 1630, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Nutcrackers, from Les Cris de Paris, after Jacques Philippe Le Bas and François Boucher, 18th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Crit de Paris, published by Adriaan Schoonebeek, 1675-1714, British Museum; “Bill stickers” from variant versions of the Cries of Paris, 1740s; “Tisane seller”, conjurer, and umbrella pedlar, from The Cries of Paris series, engraved by Francois Seraphin Delpech after Antoine Charles Vernet, early 19th century, Musee de la Ville de Paris, Musee Carnavalet, Paris, France; Les Cris de Paris. Amusement de Société set of playing cards, Paris, 1820, Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions.

Leave a comment | tags: Art, Early Modern, ephemera, Paris, Popular Culture, print culture | posted in Culture, History

August 19, 2015

The Reverend Billy Cook, Salem’s Self-Published Poet

By daseger

As I am typing this, beside me is a little hand-bound and -printed pamphlet of verse, what one might call a chapbook, dating from 1852: it is one of many similar publications produced by the Reverend William “Billy” Cook (1807-1876) in the middle of the nineteenth century and sold to family and friends. The son of a prosperous ship captain, Cook spent his entire life in Salem except for stints at Phillips Academy in Andover and Yale University, from which he failed to graduate because of illness–both physical (typhus) and mental: his sole biographer, Lawrence Jenkins, writes in 1924 that “unkind Nature” had failed to outfit this “gentle soul” with a “complete and well-balanced headpiece”. After his return to Salem, Cook studied for the ministry but never made it beyond the level of Deacon: nevertheless he and everyone else seems to have referred to him as “Reverend”. To make ends meet (as the captain’s money seems to have run out), Cook tutored private students in Latin, Greek and mathematics and began writing and sketching. He maintained what is referred to as an “art gallery” in his home on Charter Street and included woodblock illustrations in all of his publications. These woodblocks are quite primitive, nevertheless they highlight the fact that Salem was Cook’s entire world as numerous street scenes and buildings are intermingled among his verse whether they have anything to do with Salem or not. According to Jenkins, the woodblocks were carved from maple or birch wood by Cook with a jack-knife, and touched up with lead pencil or paint after they were printed–one page at a time–on a hand-press that he had built himself. This rather rudimentary process is revealed by the folk nature of the prints, but I think it also renders them a bit more timeless, and charming.

I wish I knew more about William Cook. Jenkins’ article definitely paints him as a rather eccentric figure, but isn’t he in a similar situation as his contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne? The old Salem money had run out for both of them, and they had to depend on the their well-placed friends and ink-stained hands to provide for themselves. And they were both so so shaped by Salem. (I think the similarities must end here). The poem that illustrates Cook’s life the best for me is his “Chestnut Street”: not only did he include the names of all the contemporary residents of the street but also accompanying illustrations of nearly every building by my estimation (including the McIntire South Church). He had to: these were his patrons. So here we have quite a different Chestnut Street than that portrayed later in the photographs of Frank Cousins or the etchings of Samuel Chamberlain. Cook’s style emphasized the elemental fundamentals–chimneys and windows–and all those top-heavy, twisting trees–the lost elms of Chestnut Street, I believe.

All illustrations from The Euclea collection of Cook’s poetry, 1852; For more on Cook see the only source: Lawrence Jenkins, William Cook of Salem, Mass.: Preacher, Poet, Artist and Publisher,” in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series, Vol. 34, April 9, 1924-October 15, 1924.

Leave a comment | tags: Art, Chestnut Street, ephemera, Literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, print culture | posted in Culture, History, Houses, Salem

July 6, 2015

American Girls

By daseger

Countless cards were inserted in countless packs of cigarettes for decades starting in the later nineteenth century, for product (to avoid crushing the cigarettes inside), advertising, and revenue purposes (encouraging the formation of collections) and consequently cigarette cards form a huge category of ephemera. This is not really my category, but I do find some of the collections to be really interesting expressions of their era. A case in point are the several series of “State Girls” or “State Belles” offered by various publishers in the first decade of the twentieth century: the girls (or young women) are portrayed in a way that supposedly characterized their state, accompanied by other state symbols, and sometimes situated in representative settings. I became acquainted with these particular cards, which I have seen in both cigarette and postcard forms, through a flea market discovery of a Massachusetts girl, wearing academic dress while standing out on some North Shore rocky coast. This find occurred just several days after I received my Ph.D., and so this girl had a particular appeal to me: here I am, I thought, Scholar Girl, a Bay State Belle!

As you can see, not all Massachusetts girls walked around in academic gowns, books in hand. The Raphael Tuck (on the rocks), Langsdorf (schoolmarmish) and National Art Company (sans glasses) girls do, but not those on the Platinachrome Company’s “alphabet” cards, which focus more on the letter and the state seal and flower, or the Fatima Turkish Cigarettes cards, which are all about the elaborate hats which adorn the heads of rather indistinct state girls. The ladies from all 45-48 states (depending on when these cards were published, and sometimes including the District of Columbia) get more detailed characterizations on some cards while on others they are simply idealized lovely-but-generic belles. Miss Pennsylvania is portrayed in colonial dress, armed with a musket and adorned with a tricorner hat, on the National Art Co. and Langsdorf cards below, while the “Keystone Belle” stands before the bustling factories of what I presume is Pittsburgh on the Tuck Card: the past and the present. Not yet quite a golden girl, Miss California is identified with her steamship and her oranges. The “Lone Star Girl” of Texas has her bluebonnets, and the “Opera Belle” of New York comes equipped with a skyscraper. There are girls equipped with fishing poles (Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon and Maine), swords (Maryland), paddles (Virginia), riding crops (New Jersey) and locomotives (Illinois), but the majority of young women are pictured with farming equipment or produce, a reflection of our then still-agrarian nation. A 21st century update on these cartophilic characterizations would be quite interesting.

(Just click on the collages to enlarge)

2 Comments | tags: advertising, Antiques and Collectibles, ephemera, Massachusetts, Popular Culture, print culture | posted in Culture, History, Paper

June 15, 2015

Magna Carta Monday

By daseger

As today marks the 800th anniversary of the reluctant concession to the Magna Carta by King John at Runnymeade, there clearly is no other topic on which to focus than this Charter, which has become far more momentous with history than in its own time. There is a seemingly-definitive exhibition at the British Library: “The Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy”, which is full of iconic documents, including Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence, and interesting facts: apparently the British were contemplating luring the U.S. into World War II by offering us the Lincoln Cathedral copy of the Magna Carta! Neither of these inclusions surprise me, as Americans have always viewed the Great Charter through the prism of their own constitutional struggles, rather than its more precise historical context. Invariably if I ask a student in my Medieval class what it is, they will say: “the British Constitution”. This horrifies my British friends, who maintain that they don’t need a constitution: the beauty of British history and government is the gradual, organic evolution of civil liberties and the universal understanding of just what these liberties should be, rather than their explicit expression on a piece of paper. But there have been many pieces of paper (or parchment) which have defined individual rights in relation to government, and the Magna Carta is a particularly prominent one. Its reissuing in 1216, 1217 and 1225, printing in 1534, and role as a touchstone in the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and after) determined its greatness, over time and as precedent.

Cropped image of one of four 1215 Magna Cartas and the big moment portrayed in a colored print based on a 1776 painting by John Hamilton Mortimer, British Museum, from the British Library exhibition The Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy. It’s impossible to find an image of this historic signing before the early modern era, and they really proliferate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The legacy of the Magna Carta, below:

First printing by Robert Redman, 1534; inclusion as one of the “Emblems of England” during the Cromwellian Regime, 1650s; Thomas Bewick’s engraving of the feudal knight passing Magna Carta to Britannia, with Lady Liberty overlooking (very important–the feudal knight passes the torch of “liberty” to the Enlightenment!), and the contrast between liberty in Britain and France in 1792, all from the British Museum; Ladies handkerchief portraying the signing of the Magna Carta, 19th century, Victoria & Albert Museum; “Votes for Women” reference, 1911 and editorial cartoon protesting the 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Bill, ©The Times and the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent (“mini Carta”!!!); Royal Mail commemorative stamp, 2015.

6 Comments | tags: Anniversary History, British Library, Commemoration, ephemera, Exhibitions, Medieval History, print culture, Textiles | posted in Culture, Current Events, History

April 28, 2015

Bawdy Ballads

By daseger

One of my favorite tweeters posted an image of a rather racy seventeenth-century ballad yesterday which prompted me to take a break from all the boring administrative things I have to do at this time of the year to search out some more examples of bawdiness for my last English history class. This was a much more pleasant activity than scheduling and it’s always good to end on a high note! Virginity grown troublesome is just one of many later seventeenth century ballads–drinking songs, working songs, walking songs–focused on human relations in general and maids who are either too chaste or too wild in particular: another of my favorites is The wandring virgin; or, The coy lass well fitted; or, the answer to the wand’ring maiden (1672). Every title which refers to ladies from London is an almost certain reference to their looseness, as in the case of The ansvver to the London lasses folly, or, The new-found father discoverd at the camp (1685). Country girls don’t get off easy either, but generally (not always) they are duped and remorseful. Poor Celia, the subject of the 0ft-printed (and apparently sung) ballad Celia’s Complaint (1678-95?) who was “quickly won” by a rogue’s fair words and is now, forever, “quite undone” and an example to all: My Spotless Virgins Fort, thou strongly didst assault/ My Favor thou didst Court, and this was my great fault/ So soon to yield, to thee the Field, which did my Honour stain/ And now I cry, continually, poor Celia Loved in Vain.

Later seventeenth-century ballads from the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beineke Library at Yale, and a great database for English broadside ballads: The University of California at Santa Barbara’s Broadside Ballad Archive. You can actually hear variations on these ballads performed, including the classic “Maid’s Complaint for want of a Dil Doul”, on the City Waites’ album Bawdy Ballads of Old England.