Political Broadside Ballads in Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (Pickering and Chatto: London, 2011)

Ballads on ‘affairs of state’ have been largely eschewed by scholars of popular political history, despite the growing digital availability of ballad literature. McShane’s extensive critical bibliography makes these texts accessible for the first time by providing a systematically and rigorously researched bibliography of all recorded and published broadside ballads on affairs of state between the outbreak of the Bishops’ Wars in 1639 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Based on comprehensive research into all the major holdings in the UK and USA, the bibliography locates, dates and fully indexes more than 3,100 ballad sheets. McShane, an authority on English print culture, also provides a 10,000-word introduction based on this original research. It sets out the history of printing background of the genre; the importance of typographical and material analysis in helping to understand the broadside as a marketed medium; and the significance of its collecting history to any notion of the ballad as representative of popular political mentalites. A reviewer notes, ‘this comprehensive bibliographic survey, which often corrects previous errors on dating and in its notes offers invaluable contextual information, will open up new research pathways’ (English Historical Review, 2013). McShane has been invited to speak on this research on numerous occasions, including Reading University’s Early Modern Research Centre Colloquium, ‘Printed Image and Decorative Print, 1500–1750′ (2013); the 8th Bildlore Congress, Bassano, Italy (2012); for the international panel on Popular Culture and Media Diversity at the ESSHC Conference, Glasgow University (2012); the ‘Popular Music Participation and the People’ symposium, Goldsmiths (2012); and Leeds University ‘Text and Orality’ research seminar (2011). She is currently a consultant to the JISC-funded Integrating Broadside Ballad Archives project, Bodleian Library (2011–13), and the Popularisation and Media Strategies 1700–1900 project, Utrecht University, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2010–14)

‘The Extraordinary Case of the Flesh-Eating and Blood-Drinking Cavaliers’

In May 1650, five royalists at an alehouse in Milton, Berkshire were reported to have tried to drink a health to the exiled Charles II in blood, to which end they ‘unanimously agreed to cut a peece of their Buttocks, and fry their flesh that was cut off on a grid-iron’. This article examines the cultural contexts in which this remarkable episode took place, and from which contemporary behaviours and their meanings were inevitably constructed, are explored. It demonstrates how such events, rather than simply appealing to our taste for the bizarre and spectacular, can illuminate the everyday experiences of royalists in interregnum England. McShane’s article analyses a broad range of perspectives from which contemporary readers of opposing political and religious stances might have received this published report, elicited from the discourses and milieu of interregnum England. McShane argues that these drunken antics could be understood in the period as an attempt to enact a secular sacrament, expressing and strengthening a loving bond with the absent King, and as a means of healing and strengthening the blood of the dismembered ‘body politic’, reflecting, more broadly, a politicisation of drinking. Building on earlier work about political ballads and drinking, McShane’s research was supported by an ESRC-funded network grant, Intoxication in Historical and Cultural Perspective, held jointly with Professor Phil Withington (2008–10). The article appears in a volume of essays co-edited by McShane and Dr Garthine Walker exploring the relationship between the extraordinary and the everyday with the aim of providing greater understanding of, and new insights into, the mental and material worlds of 16th- and 17th-century England. In his review of the book on history.ac.uk (Institute of Historical Research, 2011), Professor Malcolm Gaskill affirms that the author’s approach ‘speak[s] to big questions of consciousness, belief and agency’

A remarkable identity for lengths of curves

In this thesis we will prove the following new identity Σγ 1/(1 + exp |γ|) = 1/2, where the sum is over all closed simple geodesics γ on a punctured torus with a complete hyperbolic structure, and |γ| is the length of γ. Although it is well known that there are relations between the lengths of simple geodesics on a hyperbolic surface (for example the Fricke trace relations and the Selberg trace formula) this identity is of a wholly different character to anything in the literature. Our methods are purely geometric; that is, the techniques are based upon the work of Thurston and others on geodesic laminations rather than the analytic approach of Selberg. The first chapter is intended as an exposition of some relevant theory concerning laminations on a punctured surface. Most important of these results is that a leaf of a compact lamination cannot penetrate too deeply into a cusp region. Explicit bounds for the maximum depth are given; in the case of a torus a simple geodesic is disjoint from any cusp region whose bounding curve has length less than 4, and this bound is sharp. Another significant result is that a simple geodesic which enters a small cusp region is perpendicular to the horocyclic foliation of the cusp region. The second chapter is concerned with Gcusp, the set of ends of simple geodesics with at least one end up the cusp. A natural metric on Gcusp is introduced so that we can discuss approximation theory. We divide the geodesics of Gcusp into three classes according to the behaviour of their ends; each class also has a characterisation in terms of how well any member geodesic can be approximated. An example is given to demonstrate how this classification generalises some ideas in the classical theory of Diophantine approximation. The first class consists of geodesics with both ends up the cusp. Restricting to the punctured torus it is shown that for such a geodesic, γ, there is a portion of the cusp region surrounding each end which is disjoint from all other geodesics in Gcusp. We call such a portion a gap. The geometry of the gaps attached to γ is described and their area computed by elementary trigonometry. The area is a function of the length of the unique closed simple geodesic disjoint from γ. Next we consider the a generic geodesic in Gcusp, that is, a geodesic with a single end up the cusp and another end spiralling to a minimal compact lamination which is not a closed geodesic. We show that such a geodesic is the limit from both the right and left of other geodesics in Gcusp. Finally we give a technique for approximating a geodesic with a single end up the cusp and the other end spiralling to a closed geodesic. Essentially we repeatedly Dehn twist a suitable geodesic in Gcusp round this closed geodesic. The results of this chapter are then combined with a theorem of J. Birman and C. Series to yield the identity

Cross Ratios and Identities for Higher Thurston Theory

We generalise in this article the Mc Shane-Mirzakhani identities in hyperbolic geometry to arbitrary cross ratios. We give an expression of them in the case of Hitchin representations of surface groups in PSL(n, R) in a suitable choice of Fock-Goncharov coordinates.Comment: 64 pages, 5 figures The new version corrects many typos, sign errors and imprecisions. The writing has been hopefully improved. The mathematical content is identica