ABSTRACT
The quote from John Selden touts the importance of printed ballads, which he equates with "libels": "Though some make slight of libels," Selden notes, "yet you may see by them how the wind sits. As take a straw, and throw it up into the air; you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels." Although ballads were originally an oral genre dating back to medieval times, the invention of printing led to an explosion of printed ballads in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries together with related popular broadside forms such as advertisements. The result is a small body of exciting but, in crucial ways, delimited work. Scholars have increasingly acknowledged the importance of ballads and broadsides to the study of popular culture in early modern Britain.
