Welcome to EBBA

Broadside Ballad from
17th c. "Heyday"

EBBA's goal is to make seventeenth-century broadside ballads fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records of the period. We provide high-quality facsimiles of the ballads as well as facsimile transcriptions (which preserve the ballad’s original ornament while transcribing its unfamiliar typeface into easily readable modern print). In addition, we supply recordings of the ballads whenever a tune is extant, extensive cataloguing of the ballads, including cataloguing of their illustrations or woodcut impressions, TEI/XML and MARC records, and both basic and advanced search functions that allow readers easily to find collections or individual ballads as well as their constituent parts or makers by a variety of means. We also offer background essays on the various ballad collections included in EBBA and on ballad culture generally as well as other helpful ballad resources. For more about the EBBA project, see About Us.

	Congratulations EBBA!
	The British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies has awarded EBBA the BSECS Digital Eighteenth Century Prize (2009). We are honored to have received this new annual award, sponsored by JISC Collections, Gale Cengage Learning, Adam Matthews Digital, and ProQuest, in collaboration with BSECS.

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.

EBBA has been generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as by UCSB, UCHRI, and the Making Publics project.