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’

‘Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads’, Journal of Early Modern History, 15: 1-2 (2011), pp. 105-137

This article revisits the “heroic and glamorous language” of recruitment and retention in seventeenth century England through an exploration of the market, medium and message of many hundreds of “military” ballads that were disseminated from London across the country, especially in times of war. These show that military volunteerism among the lower sorts was less surprising and more sophisticated than historians have previously imagined, which suggests the need to reconsider the question of military professionalism among ordinary rank and file soldiers. Furthermore, the common use of the love song as a vehicle for military messages, reveals how regular soldiering became a new vocation for the “lower sorts” in this transitional period for army development. This new “profession” not only marked a direct break from the older system of “estates” which put fighters at the top and workers at the bottom of society, it was negotiating its place within the social structures of household formation in early modern England

'Rime and reason': the political world of the English broadside ballad, 1640-1689

This thesis explores political broadside balladry in England in the period from c.1640 to the Glorious Revolution, and argues that it was a medium by which the political ideals of Christian humanism were transmitted to a socially and geographically diverse audience. The investigation is based on an analysis of all extant broadsides and titles of the period in conjunction with contemporary sources such as diaries, discourses on literature and politics, state papers and court records. No comprehensive historical study of this material across such a broad period has been done to date. The thesis is divided into three sections: the market, the medium and the message of the broadside ballad world. These analyse the range and nature of products and consumers in the political ballad market, set out the functions of the political ballad and present the political analysis that ballads offered contemporaries as they sought to render comprehensible the political world in a period of momentous change. The findings of the thesis are first, that the use of cheap print as a source by historians necessitates a serious engagement with the material culture, the genre and the content of print products. Second, it challenges the long-standing orthodoxy that the broadside ballad functioned primarily as a news medium and offers an accurate assessment of the ballad genre as political cultural broker between centre and periphery and a more nuanced explanation of the ballad as vehicle of choice for political debate. Third, in the light of material and generic insights and through detailed content analysis, it reveals the way in which the most traditional broadside ballads, printed for most part in black-letter, used Christian humanist ideas, based on Aristotle and the New Testament, to explain the trauma of the civil war and interregnum, to complain at the incursions into law and liberty by corrupt and radical Stuart government and to lay out the constructs and constraints of a political world which made it possible for the xenophobic English to eject an English King in 1688-9 and make a Dutch one acceptable, by dressing him in the mantle of an English Protestant hero

‘Subjects and Objects: Material Expressions of Love and Loyalty in Seventeenth-Century England’, in special section on ‘Loyalties and Allegiances in Early Modern England’ in Journal of British Studies Vol. 48: 4 (October, 2009)

This article investigates how and where the emotive relations between subject and state were forged and how these ideas were manifested in early modern England. McShane describes an affective economy of loyalty, embodied in cheap and accessible political commodities: decorated objects made of clay, metals, and paper, on which precious household resources of time, money and emotion were spent. She argues that by engendering, inculcating and insinuating codes of political love into people’s ‘emotional, sensual, representational, and communicative’ lives, ‘loyal’ goods acted as vehicles and texts for what Victoria Kahn describes as ‘the supplementary role of the passions’ in ‘forging political obligation’ and the reformulation of ‘the duty to love’ of both subject and king in 17th-century England. McShane’s research contributes to a growing theme in scholarship, namely the active consumption of politically significant goods. This essay extends the range of objects under examination to include quotidian household items, shedding light on the dissemination and construction of early modern loyalty across a much wider social scale. The research draws on an extensive survey of collections held at the V&A, the Museum of London, Ashmolean Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum and Burrell Collection. Importantly, by putting illustrated print products back together with other political commodities in the early modern home, creating a broad archive of objects and text-objects where each informs the other, McShane’s approach challenges the typical social historical methodology, which uses material culture as merely illustrative of textual sources. This article was part of a special section on loyalty and allegiance in early modern England, co-edited by McShane with Dr Ted Vallance for one of the leading scholarly journals in the field. The material was drawn from a workshop on the topic held at the University of Liverpool funded by the British Academy, University of Liverpool and the Scouloudi Foundation (2007)

'Rime and reason' : the political world of the English broadside ballad, 1640-1689

This thesis explores political broadside balladry in England in the period from c.1640 to the Glorious Revolution, and argues that it was a medium by which the political ideals of Christian humanism were transmitted to a socially and geographically diverse audience. The investigation is based on an analysis of all extant broadsides and titles of the period in conjunction with contemporary sources such as diaries, discourses on literature and politics, state papers and court records. No comprehensive historical study of this material across such a broad period has been done to date. The thesis is divided into three sections: the market, the medium and the message of the broadside ballad world. These analyse the range and nature of products and consumers in the political ballad market, set out the functions of the political ballad and present the political analysis that ballads offered contemporaries as they sought to render comprehensible the political world in a period of momentous change. The findings of the thesis are first, that the use of cheap print as a source by historians necessitates a serious engagement with the material culture, the genre and the content of print products. Second, it challenges the long-standing orthodoxy that the broadside ballad functioned primarily as a news medium and offers an accurate assessment of the ballad genre as political cultural broker between centre and periphery and a more nuanced explanation of the ballad as vehicle of choice for political debate. Third, in the light of material and generic insights and through detailed content analysis, it reveals the way in which the most traditional broadside ballads, printed for most part in black-letter, used Christian humanist ideas, based on Aristotle and the New Testament, to explain the trauma of the civil war and interregnum, to complain at the incursions into law and liberty by corrupt and radical Stuart government and to lay out the constructs and constraints of a political world which made it possible for the xenophobic English to eject an English King in 1688-9 and make a Dutch one acceptable, by dressing him in the mantle of an English Protestant hero.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceUniversity College, Northampton (UCN)Victoria and Albert Museum. Research Dept. (V&A)GBUnited Kingdo

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Effects of Caffeine on Prospective and Retrospective Working Memory in Rodents

Caffeine is a substance that many people now consider to be a necessary part of their daily routines due to its desired effect of keeping us awake and functional. It’s been subject to much 59 debate over the years as to how it affects performance in terms of memory and cognitive ability. In our study, we examined the performance of 15 male rats in a delayed matching-toposition task (delayed from 1-20 seconds) after administering intraperitoneal injections of caffeine (10 mg/kg) to assess their levels of working memory and compared them to a control group that was similarly injected with saline. Each group of rats were trained in this task prior to experimental trials using methods of either differential outcomes (DO) or non-differential outcomes (NDO) and their performance measured as using prospective and retrospective working memory respectively. Pairwise comparisons using Fischer’s LSD showed a significant decrease in performance of those injected with caffeine at the 5 and 10 second delay in the DO group and at the 5 second delay in the NDO group when compared with those in the control groups in each condition. The results show that more can be learned about caffeine’s effects on working memory and that further research with a larger subject pool would be a promising way to do so.https://openriver.winona.edu/urc2019/1099/thumbnail.jp

Spatial Working Memory Under Differential and Nondifferential Outcomes IV: Effects of Dextromethorphan

Previous studies have demonstrated the potential for nicotine to enhance cognitive ability including learning, attention, and memory in both animal and human models. The effects of 62 nicotine were examined while subjects performed a discrimination task under delayed conditions. Subjects were trained under nondifferential outcomes (NDO), or differential outcomes (DO) procedures. While subjects that were trained under (DO) did exhibit performance gains across delays indicative of the differential outcomes effect (DOE), no evidence of significant performance gain as a function of nicotine exposure were found under either condition. We are currently engaged in a follow-up study using a wider range of doses in which we investigate the effects of ethanol, scopolamine, MK-801, and dextromethorphan.https://openriver.winona.edu/urc2019/1043/thumbnail.jp

Spatial Working Memory Under Differential and Nondifferential Outcomes I: Effects of Scopolamine

This project examined the effects of drugs associated with working memory on the accuracy of subjects completing tasks under differential outcomes (DO), that utilize a unique outcome after each stimulus and response sequence, or tasks with non-differential outcomes (NDO) where the two available outcomes randomly occur after each stimulus and response. Such drug can indicate neurochemical differences and similarities between these tasks, and insight into working memory. Tasks that administer differential outcomes are linked to prospective memory (foreseeing future events), while tasks with non-differential outcomes and common outcomes are associated with retrospective memory (memory of past events). Scopolamine, an acetylcholine antagonist, is prescribed to treat nausea and motion sickness, and is also a muscarinic cholinergic antagonist. Depending on the effect of scopolamine on memory performance at different doses in tasks that utilize differential and non-differential outcomes will indicate acetylcholine’s role in prospective and retrospective memory. Subjects were required to complete delayed matching to position tasks with specific or randomized outcomes for each stimulus and response. Results suggested that acetylcholine mediated prospective and retrospective memory, with scopolamine effecting tasks that utilized differential outcomes less than tasks that utilized non-differential outcomes. This indicates that acetylcholine is linked to the accuracy in performance of tasks that utilize differential and non-differential outcomes, or prospective and retrospective memory.https://openriver.winona.edu/urc2019/1076/thumbnail.jp