ABSTRACT
Monika Szturcová focuses on Czech-Polish interrelations in the field of broadside ballads. She takes as her sample case study popular Marian broadside ballads from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She focuses on the specific circumstances by which the printing industry operated along the Czech-Polish border (where many pilgrimage sites were located). Foreign-language songs, both Polish and Czech, she importantly observes, were incorporated into specific domestic song traditions, both via spontaneous adaptation among ordinary people—especially Czech and Polish pilgrims who met at pilgrimage sites—and also via the commercially motivated activities of printers/publishers seeking the widest consumer market they could target.
