The Rise of the English Street Ballad 1550-1650 (European Studies in English Literature) by Natascha Würzbach, Cambridge University Press, 1990, Rare

I've put this up in the Mudcat auction for the serious collectors out there. The lowest price I found on the Internet was $162.00. If it doesn't sell here, I'll throw it up on EBAY. I'd rather give the auction costs to the Mudcat.

Natascha Würzbach's study of the street ballad is the first to investigate a specific genre of popular literature which has so far been vastly neglected. Attention is focused on the social and cultural conditions which accompanied its development: the relative position of authors and printers; the marketing and distribution of texts; the nature of the ballad monger and his audience. The contemporary reputation of the street ballad is examined, as is the importance of the genre for the history of ideas. It is also looked at as a literary form. In the period from 1550 to 1650 the street ballad was a widespread and well-known type of ephemeral literature which met the literary needs of the middle and lower classes. Its development in this period mirrored a change from religious dogmatism and a world-view orientated towards redemption and salvation to one that was secular in attitude, worldly-wise, and a reflection of modern individualism. It decisively influenced the subsequent development of the ballad as a medium of entertainment and instruction, and such diverse forms as the popular songs and political ballads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ballad opera, the chanson, the cabaret song, the pop song and some types of literary ballad all belong to a tradition reaching back to the street ballad.