Una McIlvenna's "Singing the News of Death"

Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University. A literary and cultural historian of early modern Europe, she is the author of Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici (2016).

McIlvenna applied the Page 99 Test to her newest book, Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900, and reported the following:

Singing the News of Death explores the once widespread and enduring phenomenon of execution ballads, songs that told the news of crime and the often brutal public executions that the criminal faced. The book is divided into two sections: the first talks about key elements of execution ballads that are necessary to understand in order to make sense of the songs, such as the re-use of familiar melodies and the complex role of truth and fiction, and the second discusses the different crimes that are found in the ballads. Page 99 is from the first section, and falls in the middle of chapter 3, which is about the role of shame and dishonour in the public execution ritual, and how and why shame is regularly mentioned in execution ballads. The start of the page finishes off a section on the dishonorable, drunken behaviour typical of English executioners, different to the highly professional behaviour of most Continental executioners. That section of the book is important because it explains that the mere touch of the executioner could ritually ‘pollute’ the convict, with disastrous consequences for them and their family. The page then moves into a discussion of the extra-legal punishments, such as shaming penalties like charivaris and ducking stools, in which the community used public dishonour to shame members who by their (usually sexually related) behaviour threatened the order of society. I wanted to show how music was a central part of all punishment in early modern Europe, whether capital or not. In this way, page 99 is strangely not terribly representative of the book, in that it doesn’t mention executions, but instead, for example, people being forced to ride backwards on an ass through the city. But the discussion of ‘rough music’ (the English term for a charivari) does at least reinforce the central role of music in punishment, something that is key to understanding the appeal of execution ballads over such a long time period. It also helps us to understand why executions had to be public: the community’s witnessing of the dishonorable punishment would have serious ramifications in what was an honour-based society. In fact, it is once executions cease to be public, and take place behind the prison walls, that spells the demise of execution ballads after four centuries.

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--Marshal Zeringue