Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University. A literary and cultural historian of early modern Europe, she is also the author of Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici (2016). She has held positions at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Kent and Queen Mary University of London.

"In her remarkably wide-ranging, rich, and engaging survey, McIlvenna documents the extraordinary appetite for songs about capital crime and executions across Western Europe over four centuries. McIlvennaâs approach opens a new and important avenue for more comparative cultural work that tracks popular print culture across state, language, and social boundaries. A must-read for scholars and students of the ballad, and attractive for students interested in the development of horror as a genre, it is also an important resource for scholars working on the psychology of crime." -- Dr. Angela McShane, University of Warwick

"With extraordinary erudition, Una McIlvenna provides an original, ambitious, and fascinating investigation into a now-vanished genre of print—the execution ballad. She most impressively crosses five languages and four centuries to explore how people throughout Western Europe vicariously inhabited the condemned's last words as supposedly sung from the scaffold. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of 'true' crime, public execution, and popular song." -- Patricia Fumerton, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

"The execution ballad was a distinctive sub-genre of cheap publishing from the first century of print to the nineteenth century, and in this definitive and wide-ranging study, Una McIlvenna does full justice to its musical subtlety, emotional appeal and moral purpose. This is a fantastic book, wide-ranging and authoritative, a landmark in the history of European print culture and balladeering." -- Andrew Pettegree, University of St Andrews

"A challenging comparative study presenting a broad view of execution ballads throughout Europe. A vividly illustrated analysis in which music, pictures and texts in multiple languages bring life to five centuries of crimes and punishments through songs." -- Éva Guillorel, Université Rennes 2, Institut universitaire de France