Murder Ballads. Singing, Hearing, and Writing about Murder in Renaissance Italy

This article focuses on poetic ephemera, particularly those works in the ottava or terza rima forms (i.e., with verse stanzas of eight or three lines) that suggest they were intended for public singing or performance: what we are calling here murder ballads. While this category of texts in part overlaps with the better- studied genre of execution ballads (laments in the voice of the condemned criminal, a Europe- wide phenomenon in the early modern period) here we also consider works that spoke from the perspective of the victim of the crime or a close relative lamenting the dead, and others in which an omniscient narrator recounted the events. The performative aspects of these works – intonation, gesture