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Articles

Emotional Regimes Reflected in a Popular Ballad: Perspectives on Gender, Love and Protest in ‘Scarborough Fair’

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Pages 65-78 | Published online: 29 Jun 2016
 

Abstract

‘Emotional regimes’ is a concept defined by William Reddy in 2001 and used in the history of emotions literature to refer to the modes of emotional expression and thought that are dominant in particular time periods and cultural contexts. Popular ballads provide a useful way of exploring emotions in their cultural contexts across different time periods because of their long life-span, and because of the way they are shaped and moulded by social beliefs during the processes of transmission. In this article we use the theoretical framework of emotional regimes to re-examine the popular English and Scottish ballad often known as ‘Scarborough Fair’ and three of its variants from three specific time periods: the Early Modern, the Victorian era and the twentieth century. We also report on a survey of 600 modern-day listeners who describe their response to the ballad. The discussion considers what the transformations to the song-text reveal about the changing viewpoints towards gender and love that were prevalent in the historical periods considered and in the twenty-first century.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Notes

1 A length of cloth worn as a shawl by women or a skirt (kilt) by men throughout Scotland (A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (up to 1700), 〈http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/plaid), accessed 10 Dec 2015.

2 See 〈https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTBZORMUSms, accessed 10 Dec 2015.

4 For further discussion of nostalgia, see for example Atia and Davies (2010) and Poole (2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Garrido

Jane Davidson is a singer and stage director with research interests in performance and expression, voice, musical development and well-being. She is currently Professor of Creative and Performing Arts (Music) at the University of Melbourne and Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Jane Davidson

Sandra Garrido has a background in both music and psychology. Her research primarily considers emotional response to music and the impact of music on mental health both historically and in the modern day. Garrido is currently an NHMRC-ARC Dementia Research Fellow at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University.

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