Music and Catholic culture in post-Reformation Lancashire: piety, protest, and conversion

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilie K. M. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Catholic Culture ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
Manuscript Collections ◽  
The Way ◽  
Entertainment Culture

AbstractThis essay adds to our existing understanding of what it meant to be a member of the English Catholic community during the late Elizabeth and early Stuart period by exploring Catholic musical culture in Lancashire. This was a uniquely Catholic village, which, like the majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England, was filled with the singing of ballads. Ballads have almost exclusively been treated in scholarship as a ‘Protestant’ phenomenon and the ‘godly ballad’ associated with the very fabric of a distinctively Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture. By investigating the songs and ballads in two manuscript collections from the Catholic network surrounding the Blundell family this essay will show how Catholics both composed and ‘converted’ existing ballads to voice social, devotional, and political concerns. The ballads performed in Little Crosby highlight a vibrant Catholic community, where musical expression was fundamental. Performance widened the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. This essay uncovers the way Catholics used music to voice religious and exhort protest as much as prayer. Finally, by investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the manuscripts, I demonstrate how priests serving this network used ballads as part of their missionary strategy.

scholarly journals From directions to descriptions: Reading the theatrical Nebentext in Ben Jonson’s Workes as an authorial outlet

Sederi ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
David J. Amelang
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
The Way

This article explores how certain dramatists in early modern England and in Spain, specifically Ben Jonson and Miguel de Cervantes (with much more emphasis on the former), pursued authority over texts by claiming as their own a new realm which had not been available—or, more accurately, as prominently available—to playwrights before: the stage directions in printed plays. The way both these playwrights and/or their publishers dealt with the transcription of stage directions provides perhaps the clearest example of a theatrical convention translated into the realm of readership.

Facing Justice

2019 ◽  
pp. 351-372
Author(s):  
Subha Mukherji
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
The Law ◽  
Dramatic Practice ◽  
The Way

Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.

The Law of Patronage in Early Modern England

1975 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-260
Author(s):  
Rosemary O'Day
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Law ◽  
Patronage System ◽  
The Way

The calibre of the early Elizabethan clergy left much to be desired and much criticism was levelled by contemporaries and near contemporaries at the bishops for their failure to check the flow of insufficient ministers into benefices. While historians have acknowledged the existence of legal obstacles in the way of a firm episcopal policy in this regard, and have come gradually to realise some of the profound implications of the patronage system, no one has charted in detail the law of patronage which so hampered hierarchical attempts to raise the standard of the parochial clergy.

scholarly journals Translation and Genettean Hypertextuality: Catherine Magdalen Evelyn, Catherine of Bologna, and English Franciscan Textual Production, 1618–40

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-261
Author(s):  
Jaime Goodrich
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Franciscan Order ◽  
Gerard Genette ◽  
The Voice

Drawing on the ideas of Gérard Genette, this article argues for the value of reading translations as “hypertexts,” or as works grafted onto earlier texts (“hypotexts”), on the basis of the intriguing case study of The Admirable Life of the Holy Virgin S. Catharine of Bologna (1621), translated by Catherine Magdalen Evelyn of the Gravelines Poor Clares. Little-known today despite Evelyn’s importance as the most prolific female translator of the early Stuart period, this publication sublimates the voice of the translator through its laconic paratextual materials and its misattribution of Evelyn’s work to another nun. In spite of this carefully engineered authorial opacity, the stakes of Evelyn’s translation become clearer when it is read as part of a hypertextual system of Franciscan writings published in English, French, Italian, and Portuguese over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An analysis of how her text is grafted onto this series of hypotexts through bibliography, intertextuality, and translation results in a detailed, albeit speculative, account of Evelyn’s motivations for reading, translating, and publishing The Admirable Life. This seemingly modest publication is thus revealed as a rich hypertext that participated in a wider European project to chronicle the history of the Franciscan order. A concluding discussion of hypertextuality in early modern England briefly gestures more broadly toward the relevance of this method for studies of Renaissance literature.

STOICS WHO SING: LESSONS IN CITIZENSHIP FROM EARLY MODERN LUCCA

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER N. MILLER
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Political Literature ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Lucca was the smallest and least important of the three Italian republics that survived the Renaissance. Venice and Genoa still command the attention of historians. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for all that it might seem out-of-the-way, Lucca developed an extraordinary political literature. The regular election of senators was marked by the musical performance of a text, generally drawn from Roman history, that illustrated the way citizens of a republic were to behave. The poet and composer were natives and the event was a lesson in citizenship. A close look at the content of these serenades, or operas, makes clear that the republic's motto might have been Libertas but its teaching emphasized constantia. The themes and the heroes of Lucca's political literature were those we associate with neo-Stoicism. The relationship between neo-Stoicism and citizenship in early modern Lucca is the focus of this article. These texts present us with the self-image of an early modern republic and its understanding of what it meant to be a citizen. They are an important source for anyone interested in early modern debates about citizenship and in the political ideas that are conveyed in the commonplaces of baroque visual and musical culture.

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