The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music
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ISSN: 1089-747X
Volume 28 (2022) No. 1
Both from the Ears & Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England. By Linda Phyllis Austern. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. [380 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-70159-2.]
Reviewed by Amanda Eubanks Winkler*
1. Introduction
1.1 Over the course of her career Linda Austern has written groundbreaking articles on music and gender, music and medicine, and music and devotion. Her latest book, Both from the Ears & Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England, brings together these areas of inquiry and expands upon them, as she assembles an impressive range of sources from a variety of fields to demonstrate music’s centrality in the English intellectual tradition. In a sense, the shape and structure of Austern’s study mirrors the early modern sources that she has spent a lifetime researching. Indeed, her assessment of these discourses might be applied to her own book: “the sheer virtuosity and encyclopedic display of learning becomes at least as crucial as the argument itself” (p. 18). Or, as Bruce R. Smith pithily comments on his book-jacket blurb, “If anyone in England from 1500 to 1700 has written about music, Austern has read it.”
2. Thinking about Music
2.1 Austern first discusses early modern strategies for constructing arguments about music, focusing on the traditions of encomia, disputation, and dialectic. She also describes the early modern tendency to rely on ancient authority and other precedent texts. Chapter 1 gently corrects previous scholarship: Austern wisely points out that attacks on and defenses of music should not be viewed as a “calculated war” against the art in England: “Not one of the English interlocutors with a genuine agenda of social or religious reform was categorically opposed to music or supportive of all current practice” (p. 15). Austern’s discussion of commonplace books is equally perceptive. These early modern bricolages, compiled from carefully selected sources, reflect dominant epistemologies and the ways in which performable genres—including music—were conceived.
2.2 The rest of the book examines a series of early modern discourses about music. Chapter 2 frames the relationship between music and morality within a post-Reformation English context, as it summarizes arguments about music’s role in Christian worship and meditation. Austern astutely observes that “the same handful of classical philosophers, biblical passages, and early Christian theologians are cited again and again,” regardless of the author’s confessional status (p. 54). To demonstrate the complexity and slipperiness of music’s place in religious discourses, Austern compares two very different publications, one directed toward learned readers and the other intended for mass consumption: Stephen Batman’s addendum about music included with his translation of De proprietatibus rerum (1582), and Philip Stubbes’s notorious and oft-cited screed The Anatomie of Abuses (1583). Batman, a minister and vocational scholar, assembles sources ancient and modern, religious and secular, in his defense of the art. Stubbes is often cast as a Puritan firebrand in the scholarly literature because of his hyperbolic anxieties about the power of music to effeminate and corrupt men, but, as Austern points out, he is better viewed as a populist reformer than a person aligned with a particular religious sect. Notably, Stubbes dedicates his polemic to the Earl of Arundel, a nobleman who famously converted to Catholicism in 1584. What Stubbes and Arundel had in common was a dissatisfaction with the status quo.
2.3 The final three chapters expand considerably upon material discussed by Austern in previous studies. Some of this material also serves as a productive counterpoint to and expansion upon Penelope Gouk’s work on early modern experimental science, acoustics, medicine, and theories of auditory sense perception.[1] Chapter 3 pivots to music’s relationship with early modern science. This wide-ranging chapter covers Pythagorean notions of number, harmony, and proportion; the inaudible perfection of heavenly music; music and harmony as metaphors; music, mathematics, and architecture; and music’s relationship with various kinds of occult knowledge. Austern also considers how writers used musical analogies to describe the harmonious union of companionate marriage. Chapter 4 moves from the metaphorical to the embodied realm, as Austern reveals how humans perceived and were affected by musical sound. The final chapter investigates the relationship between music and the human organism. In a purely physical sense, playing music sharpens manual dexterity, while singing hones the ability to enunciate texts. And sounded music could also change one’s physical state of being. Music affected humoral balance—one’s internal bodily harmony. “Music not only shapes emotional response but produces detectable changes in underlying autonomic and somatic function. These, in turn, influence experience and behavior” (p. 237). Thus, for early moderns, music could both heal and sicken, promote both harmony and disorder.
3. Future Research
3.1 The book also raises tantalizing questions that might be pursued more fully in future studies. For instance, Austern shows how discourses about music shaped early modern composition: her analyses of Thomas Tomkins’s “Musicke Devine” and Thomas Weelkes’s “Thule, the Period of Cosmographie” and “The Andelusian Merchant” are particularly compelling and might serve as models for other similar explorations. Austern also mentions the ways in which the intellectual tradition regarding music changed in the latter half of the seventeenth century, an epistemological shift that deserves further attention. During this period, Civil War and regicide overturned old hierarchies. Writers questioned religious, political, and scientific orthodoxies, and, as Austern notes, music’s mystical properties—so real to those in the sixteenth century—were increasingly relegated to poetic metaphor by the end of the seventeenth. Music had moved firmly into the realm of praxis: “Scholars could no longer profess music in words alone” (p. 85).
3.2 Austern’s densely packed, highly learned study is an excellent guide to the various ways that our predecessors grappled with music’s slippery and mysterious powers on body and soul. Austern’s book does not make for light reading, as she grapples with challenging and arcane sources. However, the reader’s attention and engagement are amply rewarded. Like Christopher Marsh’s compendious study of early modern English popular music or Andrew Walkling’s two-volume exploration of the English masque and dramatick opera, Both from the Ears & Mind provides a rich array of material that will undoubtedly foster much new research on early modern English musical culture.[2]