Cherchez le texte : the interrelationship of manuscript and print in seventeenth-century English popular ballads

In this thesis I propose to study the complex relations between manuscript and print as exemplified by three seventeenth-century popular ballads found in both the Pepys collection of broadside ballads and the Percy Folio Manuscript. Following Roger Chartier's practice of "object studies," I examine these ballads with three goals in mind: first, by considering the ballad as a material artifact, I attempt to show how materiality affects the way in which ballads in different modes present and communicate information; secondly by studying both the bibliographic and linguistic codes, I suggest that ballads are performative texts, not merely when orally transmitted, but also in manuscript and print; and thirdly, by looking at the ballad as a palimpsest revealing layers of text, I suggest that ballads are also sites of production and reproduction. Taking issue with "great divide" theories that describe changes in communications technology in revolutionary terms, I argue instead that a close study of ballads in different media reveals that there is still a significant degree of interplay and interpenetration between manuscript and print some one hundred and fifty years after the emergence of print technology.