Both from the Ears and Mind

"As recent scholarship has begun to register, music during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occupied a much wider intellectual and cultural position than it did in later centuries, including the present one. Linda Austern's study aims to restore music to its former scope and give us a renewed sense of its role and effects in early-modern English society. The book brings to life the kinds of educated debates and conversations that would accompany musical performances or animate intellectual gatherings, and engages with the various genres of writings about music that circulated at the time. 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"--