Katherine R. Larson
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.
List of Figures
Track List for Companion Recording
Abbreviations
Note on the Text
Prologue
1. Airy Forms
2. Breath of Sirens
3. Voicing Lyric
4. Household Songs
5. Sweet Echo
Epilogue
Works Cited
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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.
