Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300-1900 by Christopher H. Johnson David Warren Sabean

Author:Christopher H. Johnson, David Warren Sabean [Christopher H. Johnson, David Warren Sabean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, European General, Modern
ISBN: 9780857450463
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Notes

This chapter is a revised version of an article previously published as “Brother Trouble: Incest Ballads of the British Isles,” The Eighteenth Century 47.2 (2006): 289–307. It appears here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

1. Maria Colomba Mattei Trombetta di Roma, called la Romaninia or La Colonna or Signora Mattei. Her career began in Naples in 1743, and she sang in numerous Italian cities before reaching London in 1754–1755. She returned to London and finished her career there, in 1758–1762. Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, vol. 10 (Carbondale, IL, 1973), 137–138. Thanks to Lowell Lindgren for this reference.

2. Published 13 October 1759 in The Bee.

3. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London, 1988), 43.

4. Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick, 1966), xi.

5. Albert B. Friedman supposes that many of them might have been in existence as early as 1100, but points out that Child’s oldest example [“Judas,” Child #23] dates from the late thirteenth century and that there are only half a dozen ballads in Child’s collection from manuscripts older than 1500. Friedman, The Ballad Revival (Chicago, 1961), 15.

6. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, A Ballad Book (Edinburgh, 1880), 159, cited in Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. [1882–1898] (Northfield, MN, 2001), vol. 1, 259.

7. Francis James Child’s monumental collection of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads was published in ten volumes between 1882 and 1898. He included 305 ballads in his collection, and they are still referred to by the numbers he gave them.

8. These elements of oral composition are listed by (among others) David Atkinson, The English Traditional Ballad (Burlington, VT, 2002), 12.

9. Atkinson, Traditional Ballad, 148.

10. A further association between broom and sexuality is suggested by the folk marriage custom of jumping over a broom—an implement originally made of broom, whence its name.

11. A version of “Leesome Brand” was collected by Motherwell from Agnes Lyle of Kilbarchan parish at about the same time as he collected “Sheath and Knife” from Mrs. King of the same parish. It is very similar to “Sheath and Knife,” except that the lovers are not said to be brother and sister and they have with them a child—his “auld son”—whom he carries in his “coat lap.” This child, too, is killed when he shoots his arrow.

12. Buchan, Ancient Ballads and Songs of North of Scotland, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1828).

13. Helena Mennie Shire, “Introduction,” in Poems from Panmure House, ed. Helena Mennie Shire (Cambridge, 1960), 13–19. Shire observes on 22–23 that at the same time this ballad was circulating, Ford’s play “ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” was on the stage. The similarities of incident and atmosphere between that play and the ballad lead her to conjecture that “Ford may have had a version of this ballad running in his head” when he wrote the play.

14. See The Norton Anthology of Literature.

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