SOURCE: “Prologue” and “The fashion for Female Warrior ballads: new ‘hits’ and old favorites, 1600-1650,” in Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 1-14; 43-64.

In the following excerpts, Dugaw examines the popular appeal of Mary Ambree, an early seventeenth-century ballad about a transvestite warrior woman, a story that appeared in various manifestations in chapbooks for over two hundred years.

The Anglo-American Female Warrior is a high-mettled heroine of popular ballads who masquerades as a man and ventures off to war for love and for glory. Songs celebrating such women flourished as lower-class “hits” for over 200 years, reaching the zenith of their popularity in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Female Warrior and masquerading heroines like her were an imaginative preoccupation of the early modern era, appearing not only in popular street ballads but in a host of other genres as well: epic, romance, biography, comedy...