Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe, 1500–1900, by Una McIlvenna

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. The scale and the scope of Una McIlvenna’s hefty tome are astonishingly ambitious; it is based on a corpus of 1,280 execution ballads in five languages (Dutch, English, French, German and Italian) printed between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries, and it offers a frank account of their gruesome subject matter. Accompanying recordings of many of the ballads can be found on the author’s website: www.executionballads.com. By its own admission, the study is not ‘exhaustive’ (p. 10) but instead provides a survey of this pervasive print tradition and makes the persuasive case for the extraordinary uniformity of the genre across time and place.

The study’s eight main chapters are divided into two parts. The first three chapters explore themes common to all execution ballads: the use of melody and the significance of contrafactum (ch. 1); the centrality of shame and dishonour (ch. 2); and the relationship between truth and fiction (ch. 3). Part II then discusses specific categories of crime and is broadly chronological, covering religion and witchcraft (ch. 4); murder and infanticide (ch. 5); political crimes (ch. 6); outlaws (ch. 7); and closes with a study of nineteenth-century execution balladry (ch. 8). There is a brief Coda, offering a short discussion of songs that circulated about executioners, and which reinforce many of the book’s main claims that are articulated in the Conclusion. Putting the book down, nobody would be left in any doubt that singing and performance was central to the spectacle of punishment in pre-modern Western Europe.

McIlvenna is attentive to the limitations of her source material, noting discrepancies in survival rates of ballads on certain topics and of particular genres in particular languages, and the tendency for ballads to be written on sensational crimes that do not necessarily reflect how often these crimes actually took place. She is also keenly aware of her source material’s potential, and she demonstrates her interdisciplinary background as a literary critic, musician and historian on every page. Her first two chapters are particularly outstanding, and speak to what are (to my mind) the main contributions of the volume: its detailed discussion of songs and melodies across languages and borders, and analysis of balladry’s emotive power and possibilities. In Chapter One, McIlvenna traces the circulation of texts and tunes in their national and international contexts. We hear, for example, how Dutch song culture depended heavily on foreign melodies (Calvinism is to blame here, apparently) and how the English-language ‘Fortune my Foe’ was a big hit across the Continent. Taken together, execution ballads across Western Europe point to the vast international repertoire of shared musical knowledge operating during this period.

Chapter Two offers a sustained analysis of shame, elucidating its significance within the ritual of execution, and its representation in balladry. Shame in the early modern period, as McIlvenna explains, was not simply a personal emotion; it was attached to the specific method of punishment, and felt widely by all members of the criminal’s family. It is this social shame, McIlvenna explains, that was the ‘primary fear’ for the condemned (p. 128). The emotive power of song is a topic that recurs throughout the book, as (for example) political execution ballads prompted mourning or ridicule of condemned figures depending on who was writing, and melodies were shaped to the texts with the direct aim of emotional manipulation (as seen in the ‘Parodie sur la complainte de Louis Capet’, p. 329).

McIlvenna’s writing style is engaging and, despite its breath-taking range, the book has been written for a generalist reader. The present is also a presence throughout; woodcuts are compared to internet memes (p. 13), and readers are reminded that werewolves are ‘firmly part of the fantasy genre for us today’ (p. 134). There are some points that niggle here as a result, particularly when claims are made in response to the assumptions ostensibly held by readers. For example, the book makes it abundantly clear that ballads offer something so much more than straightforward news-bearing, and yet McIlvenna refers in her final chapter to the ‘surprising’ case of newspapers not eclipsing balladry in the nineteenth century. I did wonder who would have been surprised by this, especially if they had read the seven preceding chapters. Instead, as McIlvenna expertly argues, the two genres of media were highly complementary, with ballads referring to events in newspapers, and newspapers printing ballads and reporting on what news was being sung.

Another related issue for this reader was that McIlvenna seems to take balladry as self-evidently a news genre. It would have enriched this study to dwell a little more carefully on what ‘news’ was in the pre-modern period, and consider if, and how, this evolved over time (and balladry’s role in this process). There is evidently so much more to execution balladry than the dissemination of information: McIlvenna argues (persuasively) that whether singer-listeners believed what they heard was true or not was ‘not important’ (p. 181). Indeed, as she goes on to argue:

Whether ballads contained reliable, trustworthy information about the true nature of executions or, as I have intimated, a profoundly mediated representation that served a socially conservative ideology, is what makes these ballads such a challenging lens through which to understand society’s relationship to crime, punishment and the media that informs them (p. 182).

It is the presentation of balladry as a primary vehicle for the dissemination of a ‘socially conservative ideology’ that raises one further concern, and this is mainly due to the presentation of exceptions to the rule. ‘The corpse was a didactic tool, a vehicle for a message of shame and deterrence … to present an unequivocal message of the authority of church and state’ argues McIlvenna (p. 179)—except for when it was not, as in the case of German and Dutch execution balladry and the martyr songs of the early reformers (pp. 187–93). All this is to be expected in a monumental survey of this kind, which certainly lays important groundwork for future scholarship on the history of crime and punishment more broadly. This is, without question, a field-defining book and should be read widely.