Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780192865526

Table of Contents

Reviews

Katherine R. Larson's The Matter of Song in Early England is an exceptional study ... Throughout, Larson guides the reader through numerous and often overlooked primary sources, tracing the histories of their contents and reading them anew. She has opened the door for scholars in understanding the importance of song for early modern women and in expanding the false boundaries that have previously left so many texts, lives, and connections unexplored ... Larson has created a work of scholarship that will serve as a model for researchers whose perspectives are wide and inclusive, and a work that will help show a way forward for those who wish to be. * Kendra Preston Leonard, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal * The Matter of Song is a substantial contribution to early modern literary studies, musicology, and gender studies on multiple levels. * Anna Lewton-Brain, Seventeenth-Century News * Song may be the most elusive of artistic mediums, animated briefly by air, by the singer's breath, before dispersing into oblivion. But Larson's assertion of song-in-performance as a kind of critical practice enables her to explore the physical experience of song and the meanings that experience conjures in radical and exciting ways. * Mathew Lyons, History Today * being both a trained soprano and a literary scholar means Larson has learned to read and interpret early modern music not only as a singer expressing herself in the semi-improvisatory context of performance, but also as an academic trained to be analytical about both music and lyrics on the printed page. This combination of skills and experience has encouraged her to develop a scholarly style that acknowledges 'the matter of song' as an evanescent yet powerfully affective force that can nevertheless be subject to interpretative analysis. * Penelope Gouk, University of Manchester, Renaissance Studies *

The Matter of Song is a substantial contribution to early modern literary studies, musicology, and gender studies on multiple levels. * Anna Lewton-Brain, Seventeenth-Century News * Song may be the most elusive of artistic mediums, animated briefly by air, by the singer's breath, before dispersing into oblivion. But Larson's assertion of song-in-performance as a kind of critical practice enables her to explore the physical experience of song and the meanings that experience conjures in radical and exciting ways. * Mathew Lyons, History Today * being both a trained soprano and a literary scholar means Larson has learned to read and interpret early modern music not only as a singer expressing herself in the semi-improvisatory context of performance, but also as an academic trained to be analytical about both music and lyrics on the printed page. This combination of skills and experience has encouraged her to develop a scholarly style that acknowledges 'the matter of song' as an evanescent yet powerfully affective force that can nevertheless be subject to interpretative analysis. * Penelope Gouk, University of Manchester, Renaissance Studies *

Author Information

Katherine R. Larson is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Early Modern Women in Conversation (Palgrave, 2011) and co-editor of Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2014), and Re-Reading Mary Wroth (Palgrave, 2015). A former Rhodes Scholar and the winner of the 2008 John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature, Professor Larson is a member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available