Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England

Description

Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. Linda Phyllis Austern brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical performance, and the remarkable ways in which English people understood music to inform other endeavors, from astrology and self-care to divinity and poetics. Music was considered both art and science, and discussions of music and musical terminology provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning. This book demonstrates how knowledge of music permitted individuals to both reveal and conceal membership in specific social, intellectual, and ideological communities. Attending to materials that go beyond music’s conventional limits, these chapters probe the role of music in commonplace books, health-maintenance and marriage manuals, rhetorical and theological treatises, and mathematical dictionaries. Ultimately, Austern illustrates how music was an indispensable frame of reference that became central to the fabric of life during a time of tremendous intellectual, social, and technological change. Contents Introduction 1. Praise, Blame, and Persuasion: “Of Musicke by Way of Disputation” Praise and Dispraise (of Music): Discourse, Dialectic, Disputation Knowledge of Music “by Witt and Understanding” Reading as Creative Process: Toward “Places of Invention” Constructing Arguments Materials for Discourse 2. Debating Godly Music: Sober and Lawful Christian Use “Musica, serva Dei”: (Textual) Places for God’s Handmaid Music to the Praise and Glory of God: “A Methodicall Gathering Together of Authorities” Anxieties of Aurality and Homonymies of Love Codetta: The Prosecution Rests 3. Harmony, Number, and Proportion Art and Science Abstracted from Bodies Between Sense and Intellect: Music as Conceptual Tool “The Worlds Musicke” “A Simbolisme between the Elements”: (Re)appropriation across Domains “Profound Contemplation of Secret Things”: Magic, Occult Doctrines, and Music Hidden Harmonies of Earth and Heaven: Alchemy and Astrology “Divine Consent”: Holy Matrimony as Harmony 4. To Please the Ear and Satisfy the Mind Explaining Musical Experience Sound, Soul, and Sense To Captivate the Mind: Music and Interior Process 5. “Comfortable in Sicknes and in Health”: Music to Temper Self and Surroundings Music and Medicine Music “to Preserve the Health” Music and the Humors: Balancing the Self Beyond Black Bile: Sorrow, Grief, and Musical Remediation Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index