The Rich Merchant Man, or, What the Punishment of Greed Sounded Like in Early Modern English Ballads

This paper explores how the ballad melody of the ‘Rich Merchant Man’ was fundamentally linked to a drive to educate the serving classes of seventeenth-century England in the appropriate expectations of the ever-growing merchant class, via a negative model of punitive retribution that stressed the need to be charitable and to shun greed for material wealth. In so doing, it offers a case-study of the multi-media methods by which this moral lesson of frugality and even charity – so seemingly contradictory for a merchant class that defined itself by the accumulation of wealth – could be inculcated in the youth it was attempting to train

Poison, Pregnancy and Protestants: Gossip and Scandal at the Early Modern French Court

This chapter examines the scandalous case of Isabelle de Limeuil, a lady-in-waiting to the sixteenth century French queen mother Catherine de Medici, whose notorious affair with the Protestant Louis de Bourbon, prince of Condé, illegitimate pregnancy, public birth and subsequent imprisonment for attempted poisoning was the stuff of gossip at courts across Europe. Given the multiplicity of scandalous factors in this case, and the historical contingency of many of those factors, the story of Isabelle de Limeuil provides an illuminating study of how gossip and rumour could be expressed and controlled at the early modern court

Word versus Honor: The Case of Françoise de Rohan vs. Jacques de Savoie

This paper examines one of the most notorious scandals of sixteenth-century France. In 1557, Françoise de Rohan, a lady-in-waiting to Catherine de Medici, launched a legal battle to get the duke of Nemours, Jacques de Savoie, to recognize their orally-agreed marriage contract and formally recognize the child whom he had fathered with her. Central to Rohan’s case were not only the love-letters Nemours had written to her but also the eye-witness testimonies of her servants, who had overheard their marriage vows and had witnessed their love-making. Nemours’s only defense was his word of honor as a gentleman that no marriage had taken place. This paper situates the case of Rohan vs. Nemours within a transitory period in French society as oral and literate cultures competed for precedence, and asks what happens to the concept of honor when the spoken word is no longer to be trusted

‘A Stable of Whores’? The ‘Flying Squadron’ of Catherine de Medici

This chapter examines the construction of the myth of the sixteenth-century French queen mother Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron' through the literature of the sixteenth century, in particular, the defamatory pamphlets and verse libels that portrayed the queen’s household as a site of debauchery and prostitution. Revealing the authors of this satirical literature and their motives, it then traces how their satirical representations came to be treated as genuine descriptions of life at court by later historians; in other words, how satirical literature became historical ‘fact’. I compare this negative representation of the court to the realities of life in the queen’s entourage, revealing that – in contrast to her alleged ‘Italian’ predisposition to manipulation – Catherine’s appointments to her household fell within distinctly French traditions. Rather than Catherine’s presiding over the ‘stable of whores’ for which satirical writers and historians gave her credit, this chapter shows that she took steps to ensure a household of experienced, respected and politically moderate members. The ‘flying squadron’ is revealed to be a reductive, misogynist fantasy that developed in response to the increasingly prominent role of women at the early modern French court

El sonido de la muerte inminente: Las baladas de ajusticiados en Europa (siglos XVI-XIX)

ince the dawn of the printing press, songs about especially newsworthy events were published. Ballads about criminals and their executions were one of the most popular subgenres. Their oral dissemination also made them an extraordinarily successful means of receiving news. Regardless of cultural level, social status, gender, or age, everyone could listen to and understand the content of a ballad about the executed. This study aims to explain not only the characteristic features of ballads about the executed but also a central aspect that may be difficult to grasp for most modern observers. This aspect is the fact that it was a common practice, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, for people to sing and listen to news of crimes and their often brutally violent punishments. This article examines ballads about the executed in English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian. It covers the period from the 16th to the 19th century, revealing the extraordinary uniformity of the genre in all languages and in all periods.Desde los albores de la imprenta se publicaron canciones sobre acontecimientos especialmente noticiosos, y las baladas sobre criminales y sus ejecuciones fueron uno de los subgéneros más populare. Su difusión oral las convertía también en un medio extraordinariamente exitoso para la recepción de las noticias: independientemente del nivel cultural, el rango social, el sexo o la edad, todo el mundo podía escuchar y entender el contenido de una balada de ajusticiados. El presente estudio trata de explicar no solo los rasgos característicos de las baladas de ajusticiados, sino también un aspecto central que quizá resulta difícil de comprender para la mayoría de los observadores modernos: el hecho de que fuera una práctica común, entre los siglos XVI y XIX, que la gente cantara y escuchara las noticias de crímenes y sus castigos, a menudo brutalmente violentos. Este artículo examina las baladas de ajusticiados en inglés, francés, alemán, neerlandés e italiano, desde el siglo XVI hasta el XIX, revelando la extraordinaria uniformidad del género en todas las lenguas y en todas las épocas

The Power of Music: the Significance of Contrafactum in Execution Ballads

This paper looks at how song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, and how this performative medium could both frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. In particular, it focuses on the ancient, pan-European tradition of contrafactum, the setting of new words to old tunes, that was a feature of this early form of news media, revealing the significance of the choice of music to the transmission of information

When The News Was Sung: Ballads as News Media in Early Modern Europe

News songs differ in crucial ways to the other news media of the early modern period like newsletters, newspapers, or diplomatic correspondence – they differ even from the prose broadsheets and pamphlets that they so closely resemble. As historians of news we need to ask different kinds of questions of these multi-media artifacts. For example, how does the presentation in a performative genre affect the dissemination and reception of information about events? What part do orality and aurality play in how the news was sold and received? Here the activities and social status of street singers play an important role. We must consider the production, format and distribution of these songs in order to understand their impact. We also need to pay attention to the conjunction between text and melody, and the ways in which this affected the presentation of a news event. On a broader scale, what kind of information can ballads provide about specific news events that other documents cannot or will not provide? Can they offer us a new medium by which to interpret historical events? And lastly, how should historians deal with these profoundly emotive texts? The combination of sensationalist language and affecting music meant that songs had the potential to provoke a more powerful response than any other contemporary news source, and this emotional potency can at times be challenging for a modern historian to decipher and explain. This article will attempt to answer some of these questions and suggest some of the skills we as historians need to develop in order to appreciate the full meaning of songs as the most popular of news media in early modern Europe

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici’s ‘flying squadron’, the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress’s own Machiavellian purposes. Branded a ‘cabal of cuckoldry’ by a contemporary critic, these women were involved in scandals that have encouraged a perception, which continues in much academic literature, of the late Valois court as debauched and corrupt. Rather than trying to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, Una McIlvenna here focuses on representations of the scandals in popular culture and print, and on the collective portrayal of the women in the libelous and often pornographic literature that circulated information about the court. She traces the origins of this material to the all-male intellectual elite of the parlementaires: lawyers and magistrates who expressed their disapproval of Catherine's political and religious decisions through misogynist pamphlets and verse that targeted the women of her entourage. Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici reveals accusations of poisoning and incest to be literary tropes within a tradition of female defamation dating to classical times that encouraged a collective and universalizing notion of women as sexually voracious, duplicitous and, ultimately, dangerous. In its focus on manuscript and early print culture, and on the transition from a world of orality to one dominated by literacy and textuality, this study has relevance for scholars of literary history, particularly those interested in pamphlet and libel culture

Singing complaintes criminelles across Europe

The complainte, a song about crime and punishment, is not simply a French phenomenon, but has been found all over Europe since the early modern period. This article compares the French complaintes of 1870-1940 with their counterparts in English, Italian, German and Dutch to reveal European similarities as well as regional differences. Beginning with a brief discussion of the term ‘complaint’ and its usage in the early modern era, we move into the nineteenth century. Everywhere we find that murder remains the most common subject, but that the numbers of victims are usually much higher in German songs. We find that there are variations in the use of melodies, and that the Italian songs do not use the tradition of contrafactum. The biggest difference is in the printing technologies: the size of the sheets or booklets varies a lot from region to region, and the use of images has seen great changes since the early modern era

Punishment as public spectacle

This short essay explains the various methods of punishment that existed in early modern Europe, and the emotions they were intended to inspire in both the spectators and the victim