In this substantial study, Patricia Fumerton draws on more than a decade of working closely with early modern printed texts to analyze English black-letter broadside ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, approaching them as material artifacts. The term “black-letter” refers to the antiquarian (Gothic-style) typography used for such texts, as opposed to the white-letter (Roman-style) font used in other English publications of that same era and for broadside ballads in later centuries. The term “broadside” denotes a text printed on a single sheet and customarily sold for a penny or so. When adorned with woodcut illustrations and ornamental borders (as they regularly were), English black-letter broadsides, though cheap to produce, were quick to catch the eye, thus becoming collectibles of their day. Moreover, the titles at the head of broadside ballads often included the instruction “To the tune of . . . ” (naming a familiar air), while vendors sometimes sang them as they hawked them on the streets. One can thus speak of the four-dimensionality of broadside ballads: their simultaneous existence as text, visual artifact, song, and social event.The strength of Fumerton's book resides in her analysis of the techniques of assemblage whereby publishers produced black-letter ballad sheets, freely reprinting and often cannibalizing their own prior publications so as to offer fresh versions or combinations of a ballad's constituent elements. “Assemblage” is the keyword here. The book's subtitle “Moving Media, Tactical Publics” directs attention to the volatile, unruly processes by which broadside-ballad publishers recycled their wares in hopes of catching a new market (or “tactical public,” in Fumerton's phrasing). Early collectors of ballad sheets, too, including Samuel Pepys (featured in two chapters), felt free to cut and paste their prints to generate albums that have since found a place in major libraries.Fumerton's attempts to penetrate into the subjectivities of the singers or consumers of early English broadside ballads are lively but involve her in much speculation, as she herself acknowledges, in part through the recurrent rhetoric of “might have been,” “could have been,” and “perhaps.” The chief substantive shortcoming of her book is that from her emphasis on “moving media,” one would never know that certain broadsides, such as “Barbara Allen's Cruelty,” the heroic ballad of “Chevy Chase,” or “The Children in the Wood,” were reissued many times over multiple centuries with very little substantive change in their texts. This relative stability, in turn, facilitated the entry of broadside ballads into both printed songbooks and oral tradition. Both stability and flux are therefore characteristic of the broadside ballad trade, while the reciprocal relations of script, print, and voice in English-language ballad tradition are far more complex than is suggested here.Innovations in digital technology have greatly facilitated research into early modern print culture. Paradoxically, the most valuable part of this book lies physically outside it: this is the large, evolving, and enormously useful database known as the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), of which Fumerton is founder and director. There, readers may use unique EBBA numbers to find brilliantly legible facsimiles of each ballad, unlike the reduced-size facsimiles in Fumerton's book and in others. One can also zoom in on woodcut illustrations (if included on the original ballad sheet) or determine if the same woodcut was used for multiple broadsides. Moreover, both EBBA and the book's online Audio Component feature audio recordings of those ballads with known tunes, whether sung by an EBBA contributor (many of them students) or played by a robotic “electronic fiddle” at a slow tempo. Those with access to a good music library may wish to supplement these plain performances with more vibrant ones, such as those that Peggy Seeger and the full-throated Ewan MacColl offer in their 1962 Folkways album Broadside Ballads (London: 1600–1700), with deft instrumental accompaniments.This brings up a missing dimension of Fumerton's book. It ignores possible continuities in the singing tradition of English broadside ballads all the way from their first appearance in print to performances by present-day singers and musicians. Instead, Fumerton sets up a dichotomy between “us” and “them”—between twenty-first century and seventeenth-century ballad publics—while first calling up and then dashing the “doomed” hope that through electronic access to multi-dimensional artifacts, our “ballad experience” might coincide with theirs (pp. 11–2). Working from a different perspective, readers may wish to make concurrent use of the Roud Folk Song Index—accessed online via the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London—with its database of nearly 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 English-language songs, including broadside ballads, that have been collected from oral tradition. These references confirm the continuity of the ballad genre and of certain individual broadside ballads over at least four centuries. From this perspective, “we” are not a deracinated group struggling for transhistorical knowledge, but rather are part of a continuum of people who like to sing and who also make use of books or papers in which songs are recorded.A few incidental points are worth noting. While distancing her work from that of “the folklorists”—as if they were all of one stripe (p. 29)—Fumerton represents the most accomplished ballad scholar of them all, Francis James Child, as having been uninterested in broadside ballads. She neglects to note that Child printed a great number of English and Scottish broadside ballads among the full-text variants of the ballads that comprise his anthology. She represents Child as having “promulgated the imaginary of a purely oral folk” whose songs could only be recorded “in remote areas, such as the Scottish Highlands or American Appalachians” (p. 22). Scots balladry is actually a Lowland phenomenon, not a Highland one, and no systematic fieldwork was undertaken in the Appalachians until decades after Child's death in 1896. As for the idea of “a purely oral folk,” it has had little or no play among professional folklorists for quite some while. And though George Lyman Kittredge was Child's literary executor, he did not co-author Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898), as the book's bibliography misstates.