Katharine Lee Bates’ Ballad Book and the Pedagogy of the Ballad

Abstract

Abstract In 1890, Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley professor, published a college/upper high school textbook entitled Ballad Book. Bates’ volume pre-dates by 4 years Francis Barton Gummere’s Old English Ballads (1894) and Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1904) by 14 years, making it the earliest ballad collection by an American scholar explicitly designed for classroom use. In 1904, Bates published a second edition of her textbook with the result that her two editions flank ballad work during the formative years of American ballad scholarship. This essay describes Bates’ approach to ballad teaching, how it changed between editions, and what her work demonstrates about early American academic ballad scholarship: that is, as an outcome of the political consequences of Bates’ promotion of a ballad study aimed at supporting classroom learning rather than one aimed at producing academic scholarship.