A Woodcut and Its Wanderings in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

the majority of seventeenth-century ballad illustrations depict individual human figures, either male or female, in little black boxes.The beauty of such generic images was that they enabled publishers and printers to shuffle them around, reusing old pictures in new configurations on dozens of different ballads, thereby saving themselves the costs associated with commissioning new artwork.The appeal of this approach has not, however, been readily apparent either to the ballad specialists of the academic world or to the scholars who dip into balladry more occasionally while working on something else.Indeed, the recycling habit is one of the principal factors underlying the neglect of these woodcuts.There has been a pronounced tendency to assume that the reuse of images suggests apathy about their significance on the part of producers and consumers alike. 1 Fortunately, the situation is 1.Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad (Cambridge, 1990), 9; Margaret Aston, "Bibles to Ballads: Some Pictorial Migrations in the Reformation, " in Christianity and Community in the West: Essays for John Bossy, ed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.