The Matter Of Song In Early Modern England

Download or read book The Matter of Song in Early Modern England written by Katherine Rebecca Larson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume treats early modern song as a musical and embodied practice and considers the implications of reading song not just as lyric text, but as a musical phenomenon that is the product of the singing body. It draws on a variety of genres, from theatre to psalm translations, sonnets and lyrics, and household drama to courtly masques.

Download or read book The Matter of Song in Early Modern England written by Katherine R. Larson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'songscape', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque or a play, however, the tendency is to engage with it as poem rather than as musical performance. Opening up the notion of song from a performance-based perspective The Matter of Song in Early Modern England considers the implications of reading song not simply as lyric text but as an embodied and gendered musical practice. Animating the traces of song preserved in physiological and philosophical commentaries, singing handbooks, poetic treatises, and literary texts ranging from Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalmes to John Milton's Comus, the book confronts song's ephemerality, its lexical and sonic capriciousness, and its airy substance. These features can resist critical analysis but were vital to song's affective workings in the early modern period. The volume foregrounds the need to attend much more closely to the embodied and musical dimensions of literary production and circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It also makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of women's engagement with song as writers and as performers. A companion recording of fourteen songs featuring Larson (soprano) and Lucas Harris (lute) brings the project's innovative methodology and central case studies to life.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 written by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on—and challenges—the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

Download or read book Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England written by Erica Longfellow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-23 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study challenges critical assumptions about the role of religion in shaping women's experiences of authorship. Feminist critics have frequently been uncomfortable with the fact that conservative religious beliefs created opportunities for women to write with independent agency. The seventeenth-century Protestant women discussed in this book range across the religio-political and social spectrums and yet all display an affinity with modern feminist theologians. Rather than being victims of a patriarchal gender ideology, Lady Anne Southwell, Anna Trapnel and Lucy Hutchinson, among others, were both active negotiators of gender and active participants in wider theological debates. By placing women's religious writing in a broad theological and socio-political context, Erica Longfellow challenges traditional critical assumptions about the role of gender in shaping religion and politics and the role of women in defining gender and thus influencing religion and politics.

Download or read book Beyond Boundaries written by Linda Phyllis Austern and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-13 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English music studies often apply rigid classifications to musical materials, their uses, their consumers, and performers. The contributors to this volume argue that some performers and manuscripts from the early modern era defy conventional categorization as "amateur" or "professional," "native" or "foreign." These leading scholars explore the circulation of music and performers in early modern England, reconsidering previously held ideas about the boundaries between locations of musical performance and practice.

Download or read book Singing the News of Death written by Una McIlvenna and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue durée study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death. Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music written by Christopher R. Wilson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 1289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, the contributors' lines of enquiry extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed by the book's team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts"--