Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music Katie Bank

This is an ambitious and original book that should inspire historians, musicologists, and other scholars who are interested in learning more about music’s contribution to the Early Modern field of knowledge and how it altered the way that people think. It perfectly complements Linda Austern’s Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England (coincidentally also published in 2020), a study that demonstrates unequivocally that music stood at the centre, not the periphery, of the Early Modern English intellectual enterprise. This is not a new discovery as such; for example my own Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 1999) identified how new instrumental practices of the sixteenth century gave rise to new scientific theories and methods of natural philosophical enquiry during the seventeenth. But as Bank correctly points out on page 3 of her introduction, I never ‘took the step to connect any of these epistemic themes to specific musical works’, nor did I ‘partake in any musical interpretation’. The genius of Bank’s approach is that she has precisely taken these steps in order to reveal how everyday recreational music-making, notably in the form of polyphonic singing, contributed to contemporary ideas about the nature of knowledge while also presenting fundamental metaphysical questions about the quality of the body and spirit or soul. In sum, her book explores the dynamic yet understudied relationship between the embodied, dialogical practices of music-making and knowledge-building in England around 1600.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Genius · Literature · MAGIC (telescope) · Music education · Music history · Musical · Philosophy of music · Polyphony · Popular music · Singing · Sociology · Soul · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Music · Philosophy