Children and their Mothers in Early Modern Ballads about War

This article explores how ballads on military themes employed children and their mothers as a rhetorical device, as stereotypical models of vulnerability that would inspire emotions of pity and horror at their mistreatment by soldiers and their suffering because of war. Common themes emerge: soldiers leaving behind wives and children or pregnant lovers, noblewomen as exemplars of maternal grief, and the depiction of the ‘enemy’as unnatural and barbarous through their killing of pregnant women and children. Children in ballads about war are used as evidence of soldiers’ virility, and as a marker of the enemy’s barbarity in their treatment.