Description: This collection contributes to a small but significant literature on music, sexuality, and sex in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Contributors employ a variety of different approaches to the repertoire: musical and visual analysis; archival and cultural history; gender studies; philology; and performance. By confronting musical, literary, and visual sources with historically situated analyses, the book shows how erotic life and sensibilities were encoded in musical works. It will be of value to scholars of early modern European history and culture, and more widely to a readership interested in the history of eroticism and sexuality.
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Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEWM) award for the best collaborative project on women and gender, 2015.
'This eye-opening collection, long and eagerly awaited, helps clarify why musicians enjoyed such a bad reputation for so long (and in some cases deserved it). Its diverse and impressive scholarship, often amusing and arcane, prompts readers to rehear and rethink a broad range of "early music", both familiar and unfamiliar, and tempts them perhaps even to perform some of it (in the privacy of their own homes).' Craig Monson, Washington University in St Louis, USA