Una McIlvenna0.0 Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in
Europe 1500-1900 looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch,
German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue dur�e study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death.
Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known
tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century,
and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life.
Marina Montesano0.0 This volume offers 18 studies linked together by a common focus on the circulation and reception of motifs and beliefs in the field of folklore, magic, and witchcraft.
The chapters traverse a broad spectrum both chronologically and thematically; yet together, their shared focus on cultural exchange and encounters emerges in an important way, revealing a valuable methodology that goes beyond the pure comparativism that has dominated historiography in recent decades. Several of the chapters touch on gender relations and contact between different religious faiths, using case studies to explore the variety of these encounters. Whilst the essays focus geographically on Europe, they prefer to investigate relationships over highlighting singular, local traits. In this way, the collection aims to respond to the challenge set by recent debates in cultural studies, for a global history that prioritises inclusivity, moving beyond biased or learned attachments toward broader and broadening foci and methods.
With analysis of sources from manuscripts and archival documents to iconography, and drawing on writings in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars interested in cultural exchange and ideas about folklore, magic, and witchcraft in medieval and early modern Europe.
Jonathan Y. H. Hui0.0 Vilmundar saga viðutan is an entertaining romance composed in the late Middle Ages in Iceland, where it remained popular for another five centuries. It tells of the adventures of Vilmundur, the rustic son of a farmer, whose rise through society is characterised by a combination of unrefined social etiquette and raw athletic prowess. Influenced by narratives of both indigenous and foreign origin, the saga is a good example of the eclecticism that characterises medieval Iceland’s indigenous romances. It also holds a place of folkloric significance, as it is currently the earliest known variant of the Cinderella folktale (ATU 510A) which contains a cinder-name. Discussion of all this and other points of literary, textual and folkloric interest can be found in the introduction of this volume, which precedes a facing-page text and English translation of the saga.
William G. Pooley0.0 The moorlands of Gascony are often considered one of the most dramatic examples of top-down rural modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. From an area of open moors, they were transformed in one generation into the largest man-made forest in Europe. Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century
France explores how these changes were experienced and negotiated by the people who lived there, drawing on the immense ethnographic archive of Felix Arnaudin (1844-1921). The study places the songs, stories, and everyday speech that Arnaudin collected, as well as the photographs he took, in the
everyday lives of agricultural workers and artisans. It argues that the changes are were understood as a gradual revolution in bodily experiences, as men and women forged new working habits, new sexual relations, and new ways of conceiving of their own bodies. Rather than merely presenting a story
of top-down reform, this is an account of the flexibility and creativity of the cultural traditions of the working population. William G. Pooley tells the story of the folklorist Arnaudin and the men and women whose cultural traditions he recorded, then uncovers the work carried out by Arnaudin to
explore everyday speech about the body, stories of werewolves and shapeshifters, tales of animal cunning and exploitation, and songs about love and courtship. The volume focuses on the lives of a handful of the most talented storytellers and singers Arnaudin encountered, showing how their cultural
choices reflect wider patterns of behaviour in the region, and across rural Europe.
Guy Beiner0.0 Forgetful Remembrance examines the paradoxes of what actually happens when communities persistently endeavour to forget inconvenient events. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the
north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants -- and in particular Presbyterians -- repeatedly tried to repress over two centuries discomfiting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798.
By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of
remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing.
Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories have been concealed behind a veil of supposed oblivion.
Martin Graebe0.0 Shortly before his death, the Devonshire-born cleric, writer and antiquarian, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) wrote: 'To this day I consider that the recovery of our West Country melodies has been the principal achievement of my life.' Though there have been a number of biographies of this Victorian polymath, none has looked in detail at his role as a leading figure in the English folk song. Most of Baring-Gould's childhood was spent travelling in Europe with his family. Away from the influences of a conventional education he explored the mythology, romances and folklore of northern Europe and took particular delight in the Icelandic sagas. He entered the church at the age of thirty and became a curate in Yorkshire where he accumulated folk tales, riddles and the first of the thousands of traditional songs he collected during his long life. He inherited the Lew Trenchard estate in Devon to become both squire and parson of this little parish. It was in 1888 that a chance remark at dinner prompted his hunt for old songs in the area around his home. From Lew Trenchard he travelled around Devon and Cornwall to meet the singers in their pubs and their cottages and to coax them to part with their old songs. He used his celebrity status as a leading novelist and writer to bring the folk songs of the West Country to a wider audience through his publications, lectures, costume concerts and the first folk opera, Red Spider, based on one of his novels and on songs he had heard. The books of songs that he published have been criticised for the way in which he edited them for publication, striking out coarse material or rewriting songs but, in doing so, he was acknowledging the limits and demands of public taste of his time. Martin Graebe has been fascinated by Baring-Gould for many years, but the re-discovery of a large quantity of his personal papers in 1992 propelled him towards a re-evaluation of Baring-Gould's work on folk song. What he has uncovered is a fascinating collaborative project between Baring-Gould and the musicians, singers and ordinary members of the public in Devon and Cornwall. He also looks at his relationships with other folk song collectors such as Lucy Broadwood, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp. This book will be of interest, not just to enthusiasts for English folk song, but also to those who wish to know more about their place in the lives of the ordinary people of the late nineteenth century.
Christopher Josiffe0.0 An exhaustive investigation of the case of Gef, a “talking mongoose” or “man-weasel,” who appeared to a family living on the Isle of Man.
“I am the fifth dimension! I am the eighth wonder of the world!”
During the mid-1930s, British and overseas newspapers were full of incredible stories about Gef, a “talking mongoose” or “man-weasel” who had allegedly appeared in the home of the Irvings, a farming family in a remote district of the Isle of Man. The creature was said to speak in several languages, to sing, to steal objects from nearby farms, and to eavesdrop on local people.
Despite written reports, magazine articles and books, several photographs, fur samples and paw prints, voluminous correspondence, and signed eyewitness statements, there is still no consensus as to what was really happening to the Irving family.
Was it a hoax? An extreme case of folie à plusieurs? A poltergeist? The possession of an animal by an evil spirit? Now you can read all the evidence and decide for yourself. Seven years' research and interviews, photographs (many previously unseen), interviews with surviving witnesses, visits to the site—all are presented in this book, the first examination of the case for seventy years.
In the words of its mischievous, enigmatic subject, “If you knew what I know, you'd know a hell of a lot!"
Lizanne Henderson0.0 This book represents the first investigation of Scottish witchcraft post-1662, the period of supposed decline of such beliefs and coinciding with the dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment. It explores the changing attitudes and diversity of opinions towards witch belief, the interface between folk conceptions and the philosophies of the learned.
Richard Jenkins0.0 This book gives insight into a particularly grim period during the early 1970s in Northern Ireland using an extremely unusual episode the black magic rumors as a privileged window onto a world that may now be behind us, but which continues to fascinate many readers. Providing a fascinating insight into some of the problems and procedures of social history, the author also demonstrates that phenomena like the black magic rumors cannot be understood without taking a multidisciplinary approach, taking in perspectives and comparative evidence from anthropology, sociology, folklore and media studies."
David Atkinson0.0 This is the first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship. Just like canonical literature and music, the ballad should not be seen as a uniquely authentic item inextricably tied to a documented source, but rather as an unstable structure subject to the vagaries of production, reception, and editing. Among the matters addressed are topics central to the subject, including ballad origins, oral and printed transmission, sound and writing, agency and editing, and textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, the book offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades. Primarily directed at the community of ballad and folk song scholars, the book will be of interest to researchers in several adjacent fields, including folklore, oral literature, ethnomusicology, and textual scholarship.
Karl Bell0.0 This book uses the nineteenth-century legend of Spring-Heeled Jack to analyse and challenge current notions of Victorian popular cultures. Starting as oral rumours, this supposedly supernatural entity moved from rural folklore to metropolitan press sensation, co-existing in literary and theatrical forms before finally degenerating into a nursery lore bogeyman to frighten children. A mercurial and unfixed cultural phenomenon, Spring-Heeled Jack found purchase in both older folkloric traditions and emerging forms of entertainment. Through this intriguing study of a unique and unsettling figure, Karl Bell complicates our appreciation of the differences, interactions and similarities between various types of popular culture between 1837 and 1904. The book draws upon a rich variety of primary source material including folklorist accounts, street ballads, several series of -penny dreadful- stories (and illustrations), journals, magazines, newspapers, comics, court accounts, autobiographies and published reminiscences. The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack is impressively researched social history and provides a fascinating insight into Victorian cultures. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century English social and cultural history, folklore or literature. Karl Bell is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth.
David Hopkin0.0 This innovative study of the lives of ordinary people - peasants, fishermen, textile workers - in nineteenth-century France demonstrates how folklore collections can be used to shed new light on the socially marginalized. David Hopkin explores the ways in which people used traditional genres such as stories, songs and riddles to highlight problems in their daily lives and give vent to their desires without undermining the two key institutions of their social world - the family and the community. The book addresses recognized problems in social history such as the division of power within the peasant family, the maintenance of communal bonds in competitive environments, and marriage strategies in unequal societies, showing how social and cultural history can be reconnected through the study of individual voices recorded by folklorists. Above all, it reveals how oral culture provided mechanisms for the poor to assert some control over their own destinies.
Herbert Halpert, J.D.A. Widdowson0.0 This annotated collection presents a unique corpus of over 400 traditional tales, collected by North America’s most distinguished scholar of Folk Studies. It includes anecdotes, historical and aetiological tales, legends (including the tales of the Jersey Devil), and tall tales. This book contains thirteen black and white photographs.
Arthur Taylor0.0 Aunt Sally in Oxford, Toad in the Hole in Lewes, bagatelle in Chester, quoits in Darlington and bat and trap in Kent - they sound like relics of a bygone age, and yet contrary to popular belief the pub games of Britain live on. Traditional games such as nipsy (the poor man's golf), played by Barnsley miners, may have died out in the 1990s, joining in the history books such former favourites as guile bones, noddy board, slide thrust, fox-mine-host, tick-tack, and the mysterious milking cromock. But new games emerge all the time so that nowadays regulars are just as likely to be entering pub quizzes - the first quiz league was recorded in Bootle in 1959 - or playing pool (which arrived via Australia during the 1960s) or petanque (brought over from France). Fashions may move on but find any decent pub and the chances are that there are games to be played. Arthur Taylor published his first study of British pub games in 1976, updated it in 1992, and now, with Played at the Pub brings us his third and most extensive study so far. This time, to add to his encyclopaedic knowledge and infectious enthusiasm there are copious illustrations, many of them contemporary images taken by English Heritage's own specialist photographers. Played at the Pub is not only beautiful to look at and overflowing with great stories it is also an informative guide. Where can you watch or play skittles? Where are the best pubs to play table football? Why are some of the dartbords in Manchester pubs so different to the ones you see on TV? Where can you legitimately fire a rifle in the snug? And what exactly is dwile flonking? Dipping into Played a the Pub one can almost smell the polished wood, hear the tinkle of glasses and the sound of laughter. Never has cribbage or dominoes appeared so alluring.
Kathryn Marsh0.0 The Musical Playground is a new and fascinating account of the musical play of school-aged children. Based on fifteen years of ethnomusicological field research in urban and rural school playgrounds around the globe, Kathryn Marsh provides unique insights into children's musical playground activities across a comprehensive scope of social, cultural, and national contexts.
With a sophisticated synthesis of ethnomusicological and music education approaches, Marsh examines sung and chanted games, singing and dance routines associated with popular music and sports chants, and more improvised and spontaneous chants, taunts, and rhythmic movements. The book's index of more than 300 game genres is a valuable reference to readers in the field of children's folklore, providing a unique map of game distribution across an array of cultures and geographical locations. On the companion website, readers will be able to view on streamed video, field recordings of children's musical play throughout the wide range of locations and cultures that form the core of Marsh's study, allowing them to better understand the music, movement, and textual characteristics of musical games and interactions. Copious notated musical examples throughout the book and the website demonstrate characteristics of game genres, children's generative practices, and reflections of cultural influences on game practice, and valuable, practical recommendations are made for developing pedagogies which reflect more child-centred and less Eurocentric views of children's play, musical learning, and musical creativity.
Marsh brings readers to playgrounds in Australia, Norway, the USA, the United Kingdom, and Korea, offering them an important and innovative study of how children transmit, maintain, and transform the games of the playground. The Musical Playground will appeal to practitioners and researchers in music education, ethnomusicology, and folklore.
Джек Зайпс0.0 In his latest book, fairy tales expert Jack Zipes explores the question of why some fairy tales "work" and others don't, why the fairy tale is uniquely capable of getting under the skin of culture and staying there. Why, in other words, fairy tales "stick." Long an advocate of the fairy tale as a serious genre with wide social and cultural ramifications, Jack Zipes here makes his strongest case for the idea of the fairy tale not just as a collection of stories for children but a profoundly important genre.
Why Fairy Tales Stick contains two chapters on the history and theory of the genre, followed by case studies of famous tales (including Cinderella, Snow White, and Bluebeard), followed by a summary chapter on the problematic nature of traditional storytelling in the twenty-first century.
Кэтрин Райдер0.0 Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages investigates the common medieval belief that magic could cause impotence, focusing particularly on the period 1150-1450. The subject has never been studied in detail before, but there is a surprisingly large amount of information about it in four kinds
of source: confessors' manuals; medical compendia that discussed many illnesses; commentaries on canon law; and theological commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Although most historians of medieval culture focus on only one or two of these kinds of source, a broader comparison reveals
that medieval writers held surprisingly diverse opinions about what magic was, how it worked, and whether it was ever legitimate to use it.
Medieval discussions of magically caused impotence also include a great deal of information about magical practices, most of which have not been studied before. In particular, these sources say a great deal about popular magic, a subject which has been particularly neglected by historians because
the evidence is scanty and difficult to interpret. Magic and Impotence makes new information about popular magic available for the first time.
Magic and Impotence also examines why the authors of legal, medical, and theological texts were so interested in popular magical practices relating to impotence. It therefore uses magically caused impotence as a case-study to explore the relationship between elite and popular culture. In
particular, this study emphasizes the importance of the thirteenth-century pastoral reform movement, which sought to enforce more orthodox religious practices. Historians have often noted that this movement brought churchmen into contact with popular beliefs, but this is the first study to
demonstrate the profound effect it had on theological and legal ideas about magic.
0.0 Are black cats lucky or unlucky? What should you do when you hear the first cuckoo? Since when have people believed that it's unlucky to shoot an albatross? Why does breaking a mirror lead to misfortune? This fascinating collection answers these and many other questions about the world of superstitions and forms an endlessly browsable guide to a subject that continues to obsess and intrigue.
Malcolm Jones0.0 Using the wealth of medieval art, much of it unseen or ignored by museums and art historians, Malcolm Jones paints a compelling picture of life as imagined by the great mass of ordinary people between 1200 and 1500. The picture that emerges is of a civilisation that is both like and unlike our own, one that teems with the richness of life and its contradictions. Unlike most studies of the medieval world, it does not concern itself greatly with religious or aristocratic art but with the products of popular and folk art. Here we find beliefs and traditions rendered memorable by the vivid creative imagination and strong visual culture of the middle ages. Love, hatred, crime and punishment, proverbs, heaven on earth, husband-beating -- all feature in the jewellery, tableware, illustrations, carvings and textiles of the period. This book offers a major reassessment of the high medieval period. It will be essential reading for medievalists and those interested in the history of language and customs. It provides a brilliant and evocative picture of medieval Europe where people spent their time wearing their hearts on their sleeves, snapping sausages and getting bees in their bonnets.
Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey0.0 · How do the living maintain ongoing relationships with the dead in Western societies?
· How have the residual belongings of the dead been used to evoke memories?
· Why has the body and its material environment remained so important in memory-making?
Objects, images, practices, and places remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality. At the time of death, embodied persons disappear from view, their relationships with others come under threat and their influence may cease. Emotionally, socially, politically, much is at stake at the time of death. In this context, memories and memory-making can be highly charged, and often provide the dead with a social presence amongst the living. Memories of the dead are a bulwark against the terror of forgetting, as well as an inescapable outcome of a life’s ending.
Objects in attics, gardens, museums, streets and cemeteries can tell us much about the processes of remembering. This unusual and absorbing book develops perspectives in anthropology and cultural history to reveal the importance of material objects in experiences of grief, mourning and memorializing. Far from being ‘invisible’, the authors show how past generations, dead friends and lovers remain manifest – through well-worn garments, letters, photographs, flowers, residual drops of perfume, funerary sculpture. Tracing the rituals, gestures and materials that have been used to shape and preserve memories of personal loss, Hallam and Hockey show how material culture provides the deceased with a powerful presence within the here and now.
Адам Фокс0.0 Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 explores the rich oral culture of early modern England. It focuses upon dialect speech and proverbial wisdom, old wives' tales and children's lore, historical legends and local customs, scurrilous versifying and scandalous rumor-mongering. Adam Fox demonstrates the extent to which this vernacular world was fundamentally structured by written and printed sources over the course of the period.
Diarmuid Ó Giolláin0.0 This much-anticipated study brings new level of sophistication to the study of Irish folklore and provides a source for other disciplines to negotiate the area with greater understanding.
Marina Warner0.0 No Go the Bogeyman considers the enduring presence and popularity of figures of male terror, establishing their origins in mythology and their current relation to ideas about sexuality and power, youth and age. Songs, stories, images, and films about frightening monsters have always been invented to allay the very terrors that our sleep of reason conjures up. Warner shows how these images and stories, while they may unfold along different lines - scaring, lulling, or making mock - have the strategic simultaneous purpose of both arousing and controlling the underlying fear. In analysis of material long overlooked by cultural critics, historians, and even psychologists, Warner revises our understanding of storytelling in our contemporary culture. She asks us to reconsider the unintended consequences of our age-old, outmoded notions about masculine identity and about racial stereotyping, and warns us of the dangerous, unthinking ways we perpetuate the bogeyman.
