Jim: thanks for the info about MacColl's Radio Ballads. I am just beginning to 'understand' various debates about MacColl. I assume 'Freud' is a typo for 'Roud'?

I'm not clear, sorry, what you are referring back to in your comment:

"Child's ability to distinguish between his work on formal poetry and traditional ballads is a new one on me".


As far as I know, Child's work on Chaucer was, in line with 'English' as mostly taught at that time, relating to the language eg verb forms, plurals, whether a word was considered 'vulgar' or was higher in rank, perhaps with some consideration of metre. He didn't seem to have been much interested in Chaucer's social criticism, his poetic techniques, etc. I might have missed some other work on these areas, not sure. I have found him referred to as very influential in Chaucer studies but neither of the books I have on Canterbury Tales mentions him at all. He published an edition of some 16thc plays. He seems to have spent a lot of time teaching composition and marking student essays.

I don't mind a bit of hyperbole now and again.

Steve: on defining the corpus, I quoted Roud on this in an attempt to suggest that Roud was clear about this, which I think he was.

Mr Sandman: This was an interesting post. It might, I think, illustrate that thinking about what counted as 'folk' or apt for study was not as monolithic as one might imagine. I checked and found that Roud cites two books by Alfred Williams. (attempting to bring thread back to its supposed topic).