Description: Music and Society in Early Modern England is the first comprehensive survey of English popular music during the early modern period to be published in over one hundred and fifty years. Christopher Marsh offers a fascinating and broad-ranging account of musicians, the power of music, broadside ballads, dancing, psalm-singing and bell-ringing. Drawing on sources ranging from ballads, plays, musical manuscripts and diaries to wills, inventories, speeches and court records, he investigates the part played by music in the negotiation of social relations, revealing its capacity both to unify and to divide. The book is lavishly illustrated and is accompanied by a CD featuring forty-eight specially commissioned recordings by the critically acclaimed Dufay Collective. These include the first ever attempts to reconstruct the distinctively early-modern sounds of 'rough music' and unaccompanied congregational psalm-singing.
Brief description: Christopher Marsh is a Reader in Early Modern History at Queen's University Belfast. His previous publications include The Family of Love in English Society (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England (1998). He is also the author of the satirical novel A Year in the Province (2009).
Review Quotes: "Marsh's book is a massive amalgam of evidence, much of it newly discovered. The richness is undeniable: we can be grateful that he has so effectively broadened the soundscape of early modern England."
Jessie Ann Owens, The Journal of Modern History