1st Edition

Gender and Song in Early Modern England

By Leslie C. Dunn, Katherine R. Larson Copyright 2014

    Song offers a vital case study for examining the rich interplay of music, gender, and representation in the early modern period. This collection engages with the question of how gender informed song within particular textual, social, and spatial contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Bringing together ongoing work in musicology, literary studies, and film studies, it elaborates an interdisciplinary consideration of the embodied and gendered facets of song, and of song’s capacity to function as a powerful-and flexible-gendered signifier. The essays in this collection draw vivid attention to song as a situated textual and musical practice, and to the gendered processes and spaces of song's circulation and reception. In so doing, they interrogate the literary and cultural significance of song for early modern readers, performers, and audiences.

    Introduction, Leslie C.Dunn, Katherine R.Larson; Chapter 1 Performing Women in English Books of Ayres, Scott A.Trudell; Chapter 2 Witches, Lamenting Women, and Cautionary Tales, Sarah F.Williams; Chapter 3 Listening to Black Magic Women, JenniferLinhart Wood; Chapter 4 “Better a Witty Fool Than a Foolish Wit”, AngelaHeetderks; Chapter 5 Dangerous Performance, AmandaEubanks Winkler; Chapter 6 Making Music Fit for Kings, Joseph M.Ortiz; Chapter 7 Unimportant Women, Tessie L.Prakas; Chapter 8 Domestic Song and the Circulation of Masculine Social Energy in Early Modern England, Linda PhyllisAustern; Chapter 9 Song, Political Resistance, and Masculinity in Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece, Nora L.Corrigan; Chapter 10 Music for Helen, ErinMinear; Chapter 11 The Use of Early Modern Music in Film Scoring for Elizabeth I, KendraPreston Leonard;

    Biography

    Leslie C. Dunn is Associate Professor of English at Vassar College, USA. Katherine R. Larson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada.

    'Leslie Dunn and Katherine Larson have assembled a most interesting volume that approaches the topic of song in early modern England through a unique interdisciplinary lens that crosses an expanse of time and space. Its wide-ranging perspective, made possible by the contributions from scholars in several different fields, makes for an articulate and important contribution to the scholarship in all the areas it touches: gender and cultural studies, musicology, and early modern literature and language.' Candace Bailey, North Carolina Central University, USA