Marsh, Christopher, and Angela McShane, project dirs. 100 Ballads. Sheffield: Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, 2023. Accessed 2 June 2025. 100ballads.org. Broadside ballads  songs printed on single sheets  from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have now, thanks to two major ballad digitization projects, the English Broadside Ballad Archive (ebba.english.ucsb.edu) and Bodleian Ballads Online (ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), become a standard source for any researcher looking to understand popular culture in the early modern period. The 100 Ballads project, led by Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane (and, at an earlier formative stage, Vic Gammon), grew out of two problems that they repeatedly encountered about this major shift in ballad use. The first was that, despite the excellent contributions by the digitization projects, there had been no attempt to establish which of the several thousand surviving examples were particularly successful in their own time. The second problem was that musicians recording early modern ballads were perpetuating an idea that they were mostly bawdy in nature. But as any early modern scholar knows, ballads also concentrated on morality, religion, history, and politics. Therefore, the 100 Ballads database complements the ballad digitization projects by focusing more intensively on a much smaller group of highly successful songs and makes the study of English-language balladry in all its aspects a straightforward and highly enjoyable task. The site is divided into five main sections:   Ballads,     Essays,     Project,     Website,   and   Search.   The   Ballads   page (which is the same as the home page) lists all 120 ballads (the user  s guide explains that there are 120 ballads ranked, but that appropriate historical tunes have only been identified for 100 of them). When a user clicks on any ballad title they are brought to an individual page that provides a range of valuable material on that ballad. First, there is a recording of the ballad that can be played while one scrolls through the information below. Then, there is a large high-resolution image of the ballad, with an added feature that allows the user to click on a particular verse to jump to that part of the recorded performance; I can foresee this being an extremely helpful feature for anyone presenting research about a ballad, allowing their listeners to quickly and easily listen to a highlighted verse or section. This is Early Modern Digital Review 8.1 (2025) 9  10  Early Modern Digital Review  followed a list of keywords relevant to the ballad that one can click on to find other related ballads. The next item is the   Song History,   authored by either Marsh or McShane, which offers valuable, up-to-date research on the ballad  s printing history, related texts, content, and any other relevant information, followed by a helpful list of references. The language throughout is accessible, and the text is accompanied by links to relevant ballads that are exemplars of the topic at hand. The next section on each individual ballad page is the   Featured Tune History,   which provides notes on the ballad  s melody followed by detailed evidence relating to its career, paying particular attention to what the authors call the   echoes,   or inter-song associations and connections that were possible if it was the tune indication for more than one ballad. Those other ballads that use the same melody are then listed below along with summaries, keywords, and once again a list of references for the section. We then have a section titled   Featured Woodcut History,   which, like the   Featured Tune History,   provides   evidence relating to the career of the image under discussion, paying particular attention to the   reflections   (inter-song associations and connections) that may have been set up if it was chosen to illustrate more than one ballad.   Then we encounter   Related Texts,   which is an exhaustive overview of the many sources and intertextual references that the ballad composer was likely to have relied upon as well as the other texts the ballad itself may have inspired. These highly detailed and meticulously researched sections offer a valuable tool for researchers and for teachers: the organization means that students could be easily assigned readings for specific ballads and their histories, in the knowledge that the research content is as current as possible. Below these large sections the page divides into two columns, with the transcript of the ballad on the left, and a number of further sections of information on the right. The first of these subsections is   Publication History,   which offers a hyperlink for each edition that brings the user to a brief overview of the surviving copies, holding libraries, publisher, and date of that particular edition. The   Popularity   section sits underneath this, giving details about how the particular ballad fulfilled the ranking criteria (of which more below). Finally, there is another hyperlink for   Performances,   which explains the arrangement and its sources; offers a hyperlink for the performer(s) (which brings the user to that performer  s other recordings on the site); provides another link to the recording (which helpfully will continue to play even if one clicks onto a  Early Modern Digital Review  11  different page of the site); and offers a clickable link to a PDF of the arrangement. These features will be invaluable to musicians and singers interested in the performance of these ballads. And the recordings that I have listened to are of the highest standard, featuring world-class folk musicians and singers who provide versions of the songs, in either a cappella style or with musical accompaniment, that are much closer to the performances one might have heard on the streets and in the taverns of early modern Europe than many of the recordings provided by other ballad projects, which tend to feature classically trained singers. One of the most intriguing contributions in the   Essays   section (discussed more below) is   The Musicians Reflect,   wherein three of the musicians involved in making the recordings for the site  Vivien Ellis, Andy Watts, and Steno Vitale  offer their thoughts on the process of creating these songs. Among other insights is the revelation that Vitale taught himself the cittern specifically for this project. His playing is wonderful, accompanying 46 of the recordings, and the performances will undoubtedly become the standard by which these ballads are now known. Under the   Performances   section we find   Standard Tune Name   with a clickable link to all the other songs on the site with the same tune, and the alternative names for that tune; the   Standard Woodcut Name   with names for recurring woodcuts that have been invented by the site  s creators, such as   the how-de-do-man   or the   welcoming woman  ; and the (almost unnecessary)   Authors   section  I say   unnecessary   because 93 of the 120 ballads were composed by our most prolific early modern author:   Anonymous.   The last section on each individual ballad page is   Updates,   where the site  s creators place information that has newly come to light, understandable given that the project started in 2014 and features over a decade of painstaking research on each ballad. The amount of research behind this project is evident when one explores   Essays,   which has article-length essays on   The Ballad Business  ;   Methodology  ;   Texts, Tunes and Pictures  ;   Audiences, Performances and Recordings  ;   The Musicians Reflect  ;   Collectors and Collections  ; and   Broadside Ballads and the Origins of Pop.   Any one of these essays can be thought of as the most recent research on the complex world of early modern British balladry.   The Ballad Business,   for example, is an exhaustive account of the busy and complicated world of seventeenth-century English printing and will become a key reference for future balladry studies.  12  Early Modern Digital Review  The most obvious question someone might ask in response to a list of the top hits of the seventeenth century is: How would one measure such a thing? There were no Billboard charts in the early modern period, nor Top of the Pops; we don  t even have any sales figures. So what are the criteria by which these songs have been deemed to have been the   top   ballads of their day? The ranking criteria is explained in the   Methodology   essay, and while it is too detailed to explain in full here, it is a rigorous and complex evaluation of multiple factors, including whether the ballad featured on the lists of stock by the leading publishers of the day; its registration with the Stationers   Company at certain dates; its inclusion in the list of 80 ballads now known as the Shirburn Ballads; the number of surviving editions and surviving copies; the publication of multiple editions in a short time frame; and several other criteria. While Marsh and McShane are keen to acknowledge that certainty about the bestselling status of the ballads is not possible, they are confident that the indicators of popularity reinforce each other by drawing attention to the same songs repeatedly. The other essays draw attention to the richness and complexity of the early modern ballad trade and its consumers, with   Audiences, Performances and Recordings   noting that, in contrast to the widespread belief that popular balladry was dominated by bawdry, the bestsellers seem to have been focused on   heavyweight morality, cautionary tales, heroic and anti-heroic histories, social conservatism and conventional religion.   Similarly, the essay   Collectors and Collections   by Tim Somers reminds us that the majority of the ballads that have survived until today did so because they were collected in a   context of elite sociability and intellectual investigation,   further complicating notions of popular and elite culture. And the final essay in the section,   Broadside Ballads and the Origins of Modern Pop,   extends this consideration, revealing the continuities between the ballad publishers of the seventeenth century and the pop music producers of the late twentieth century. Ballads were the pop music of their day, and this site demonstrates overwhelmingly why we need to take them seriously as the most accessible cultural form of the early modern period. The 100 Ballads site will quickly become a valuable, regularly consulted tool for researchers, students, musicians, and performers interested in knowing more about this major multimedia art form. It is thoughtfully designed, offering simple links between pages and useful features such as the recordings that play  Early Modern Digital Review  13  continuously even if one clicks to a different area of the site. Its language is clear, the images and recordings are of a high quality, and the research is cutting edge. It is a project a long time in the making, but it has definitely been worth the wait. Una McIlvenna Australian National University