Created by the English Department’s Early Modern Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara, EBBA is dedicated to mounting online surviving early ballads printed in English, with priority given to black-letter broadsides of the seventeenth century—the heyday of the printed broadside ballad.

Our goal is to make these ballads fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records of the period. We provide online images of each ballad in high-quality facsimiles as well as “facsimile transcriptions” (which preserve the original ballad ornament while transcribing the black-letter font into easily readable white-letter or roman print). In addition, we provide sung versions of the ballads, background essays that culturally place the ballads, TEI/XML encoding of the ballads, and search functions that allow readers easily to find ballads as well as their constituent parts/makers. Look for new and fuller site features coming Summer 2008.

The Pepys Ballad Archive

The Five Volumes of the Pepys Collection

EBBA’s first project is to archive the over 1,800 ballads in the Samuel Pepys collection. Thanks go to the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, for granting us unprecedented permission to mount online its ballad holdings. Additional thanks go to the NEH for generously awarding EBBA an NEH Reference Materials Grant over the course of two years (2006-2008) to complete the PBA. Next to be archived will be the Roxburghe Ballads (only second in importance to the Pepys collection) and the other early ballads held by the British Library.

The Pepys ballads became the first priority of EBBA because full access to these ballads has until now been extremely limited. Due to their fragility, the Pepys Library has restricted access to the originals. As consolation, it published in 1987 a facsimile edition of the five volumes of Pepys’s ballad collection, which has proved invaluable to scholars. But since most of the ballads are in black-letter or gothic font (a thick print type that bleeds into the poor quality ballad paper), the printed facsimiles are very difficult—at times, impossible—to read. Very few of the ballads, furthermore, have been mounted on the web.

The PBA thus meets a pressing need in making all the Pepys ballads readily accessible. Currently, the EMC’s ballad team has mounted and extensively catalogued facsimiles of the entirety of the Pepys collection so that it is now available and searchable online. We also provide essays about Pepys's categories for organizing his collection. As the ballads are further transcribed and sung, the modern texts and recordings will be added to the database. Look for updated cataloguing, imaging, and TEI/XML features coming in Summer 2008.