Damnable Practices

Book excerpt: Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; but until now the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has not been accounted for. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from music analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales about and for women.