Finding Justice: Punishment in Broadside Ballads

Abstract

Hana Bočková deals with broadside ballads about crime and punishment. Bočková shows that though often such reporting was criticized in its time and by later scholars as unreliable, it in fact deserves serious consideration as an influential literary and cultural phenomenon. Such is the case even though authors held to recognizable and traditional motifs, with frequent use of schematic elements familiar to European murder ballads. Certainly, the narrated story she focuses on as a case study holds to widespread motives of murder ballads. In particular, it served the function of an abstract or exemplum—the need of its recipients to hear of the restoration from a disrupted order to some form of reconciliation. Still, Bočková claims, Czech murder ballads—however fuzzy their “facts,” even at the time of the murders—recounted information that, though stereotypical and attractively sensational, was also uniquely rooted in Czech news. In sum, the account reported was in a crucial sense “true” to Czechian regional facts.