Ballads on Affairs of State : The Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England - Pt. I

Political broadsides are a fascinating window on to the tumultuous political and cultural landscape of the seventeenth century.

By turns propagandist or satirical, these printed songs informed and reflected the views of the broader political nation.

They took as their subject matter political heroes and villains, war and peace, and the divisions and harmonies of the Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution.

Despite having been the most ubiquitous print products in their own time - too ordinary to mention - political broadsides are now amongst the rarest and least understood of the vast panoply of early printed material.

Until the loss of their printing monopoly by the 1695 Licensing Act, these sheets were printed in their hundreds of thousands in London.They survived by accident and design.

Some were bought or rescued and carefully kept by contemporaries.

Others have been found pasted to the insides of boxes, or inserted as padding for book covers.

This eight-volume facsimile edition brings together for the first time a comprehensive record of this body of literature. Sources are drawn from holdings in the US and the UK.

The edition will be essential for scholars of the political and social history of the seventeenth century.

This title is drawn from public and private collections in the US and the UK.

Its new editiorial material includes a general introduction, volume introductions, headnotes, endnotes and a consolidated index in the final volume.

Each facsimile page is digitally cleaned and enhanced, improving on the quality and legibility of the original.