Event

Let’s Talk About History! Ballads as News Media in Early Modern and Nineteenth-Century Europe

  • Conférencier  Una McIlvenna, Australian National University

  • Lieu

    Campus Belval, Maison du Savoir, salle 3.010

    LU

  • Thème(s)
    Sciences humaines

Let’s Talk About History! in cooperation with the Doctoral School in Humanities and Social Sciences (DHSS)

From the dawn of the printing press, all over Europe the news of important events was put in verse form, set to familiar tunes, and performed everywhere. Printed on cheap paper and sold by street singers on busy streets and marketplaces, ballads were the most highly accessible medium for the dissemination of news: affordable and audible even to those who could not read, news ballads were available to all, regardless of age, gender, social class or education. The categories of news were not dissimilar to those of modern news media: crime and punishment, politics (including political commentary and satire), military events such as battles and sieges, and natural disasters and wonders. This talk will explore this once widespread and now largely vanished phenomenon, revealing why singing the news was seen as such an obvious choice for our ancestors and thinking about the specific skills historians need to develop in order to approach these complex, multimedia artifacts.

Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, and has held positions at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Kent and Queen Mary University of London. A literary and cultural historian, she researches the early modern and nineteenth-century pan-European tradition of singing the news, and the history of crime and punishment. Her monograph Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (OUP, 2022) explores the phenomenon of the execution ballad, songs that spread the news of condemned criminals and their often ghastly ends. This is accompanied by her website Execution Ballads which features recordings of some of these songs. She has published articles on news-singing in Past & Present, Renaissance Studies, Media History, Parergon, and Huntington Library Quarterly, and is a co-founder of the international Song Studies Network.

PROGRAM

18h15: Inscription

18h30: Presentation

19h30: Questions & discussion

20h00: Reception

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