Bestselling ballads and the Bible in England, c.1560–1700

This article reconsiders the relationship between ballads and Bibles in England during the early modern period. It concentrates on the religious ballads within a group of 120 songs that have recently been identified as particularly successful. These cheap publications suggest that English people, right through into the eighteenth century, were notably interested in songs that connected with the vernacular Bible. This challenges several long-established scholarly assumptions: that religious ballads were in decline during the seventeenth century, that ballad writers were careless in their attitude to scriptural texts and that ballads with biblical connections were popular for reasons that were not primarily religious.