1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature
Prologue: Intermedial Earliness
PART I
Music and Early Modern Writings
1 Writing the Music of the ‘New World’: Representing Alterity in Early Modern French Accounts of Tupinamba Songs
Niall Oddy
2 Translating Echoes: British Interpretations of Indian Rāgamālā Poetry and Painting in the Eighteenth Century
Richard David Williams
3 The Spring Grass Studio Anthology of Qin Music and Musical Writings (Chuncaotang qinpu): A Vignette of Music, Prose, and Literati Ideals in
Eighteenth-Century Hangzhou, China
Joseph S. C. Lam
4 Popularising the Morris Dance in William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder
Kathryn Roberts Parker
5 Thwick-a-thwack: Metallic Music in Early Modern London 62
Emily Rowe
6 ‘As Person, As Artist’: Composer Anecdotes and the Appeal of Musicians’ Lives in Eighteenth-Century Germany 75
Sean Toland
7 Pudica Siren: Multilingual Poetic Tributes to the Italian Singer Leonora Baroni in the Applausi poetici (1639) 90
Thomas Matthew Vozar
PART II
Political Voices
8 Ballads, Ayres, and Collective Memory in the Performance of Refrains in Early Modern England
Sarah F. Williams
9 Moll Cutpurse, Mad Tom, and the Politics of Noise in Early Modern London
Joseph V. Nelson
10 Whistling Treason: Catchy Songs and Innocent Sound in ‘Thomas of Woodstock’
Laura Jayne Wright
11 Pastoral Allegories in Lepanto Celebrations: A Symbolic Framework for Crisis and Rebirth
Alessandra Ignesti
12 The Medium of Life: Learned Wit in the Catch and Glee Repertoire
Chris Price
13 Singing about Sex: Songs as Pornography in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Alison DeSimone
14 Performing Nothing: Shakespeare Plays with Music
Erin Minear
PART III
Staging the Early Modern
15 Interweaving Song: Communal Female Singing and Sewing on the Early Modern English Stage
Jennifer Linhart Wood
16 ‘With Tears I Complain
about Thee’: Literary Traditions of Lovesickness and Lamenting on the Spanish Musical Stage
Maria Virginia Acuña
17 Discovery and Disguise: Tracing the Bellman’s Cry in Early Modern English Drama
Elisabeth Lutteman
18 ‘Listen to the Speech of A Good Orator’: Rhetoric and Recitative at the Intersection of Speech and Song
Alan Maddox
19 Image, Text, and Sound in Lorenzo da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte (1790)
Carl Niekerk
20 Textual Strategies in Contemporary Shakespeare Opera Adaptations: The Tempest (Thomas Adès) and Hamlet (Brett Dean)
Michael Halliwell
PART IV
Early Modern Afterlives
21 ‘I Strive Thy Name to Sing’: The Music of Seventeenth-century English Devotional Lyrics and Their Modern Afterlives
Helen Wilcox
22 Paracelsus, Fouqué, Hoffmann: Elemental Spirits and the ‘Quest for Nature’ in German Romantic Literature and Opera
Benjamin D. Schluter
23 Salon and Sociability in Nature: Music and Text in Louise Reichardt’s Lieder
Julia Schmidt-Pirro and Robert Pirro
24 Tolkien, the Gawain-Poet, and Music
Maxwell C. Ramage
25 ‘Pop Petrarchism’: The Beatles’ Love Songs as a Petrarchan Songbook
Gabriel Laguna-Mariscal
26 Scots Wha Hae: The Afterlives of Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns in Scottish Popular Music 1970s–1980s
Michael Redwood
27 Back to Bach: Music and Universality in Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations
Josh Torabi
28 Early Modern Poetry and the Uses of the Past in John Darnielle’s Songwriting
Richard O’Brien
Biography
Rachael Durkin is Associate Professor and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in History and Music at Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. Her research focuses on the history of musical instruments, and musical instruments as material culture in literature, which includes work on the violin in nineteenth-century detective fiction, and the player piano in the writings of William Gaddis. Her book The Viola d’Amore: Its History and Development was published by Routledge in 2020, and she was co-editor of the preceding The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. She is now working on a monograph on musical instrument innovation of the long eighteenth century.
Katharina Clausius is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Intermedial Studies at the Université de Montréal in Canada. Bridging musicology, philosophy, and culture studies, her research focuses on the politics of aesthetics in literature, music, and visual art. Recent books include her monograph, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy (University of Rochester), The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (Routledge), as well as publications on the politics of translation, the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, intermedial modernism, and interwar cultural ideology.
Christin Hoene is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Her research spans modern and contemporary anglophone literature, with a particular focus on postcolonial literature, word and music studies, sound studies, and queer theory. Her current work focuses on the role of music in contemporary queer literature. She is the author of the book Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of Asian Sound Cultures (Routledge, 2022).
Katherine Butler is Associate Professor and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow in History and Music at Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. Her research focuses on the musical culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, spanning courtly and popular musics; print, manuscript, and oral circulation; and mythology and early modern science. Her book Music in Elizabethan Court Politics was published with Boydell and Brewer in 2015, and she has also co-edited collections on Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (2019), The Heroic in Music (2022), and Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2023). She is currently writing a monograph on the social significance of round and catch-singing, c.1550–1650.
"In the wake of The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (2022), this new volume considers musico-literary production from the period 1500–1800, as well as its contemporary resonances. It is a collection of essays that examines diverse forms of intermedial ‘in-betweenness’ and invites the reader into a fascinating spectrum of encounters between cultures, languages, histories, geographies, and genres. It is a book that will fill a major gap in the field of intermedial studies."
Pierre Degott, University of Lorraine, France
"A valuable resource for the intermedial study of music and literature, this Companion significantly enhances and develops the work begun in The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. The collection’s focus on the musico-literary coupling is commendably matched by a sustained concern with the socio-political dynamics of the early modern period, revealing fruitful and fresh perspectives for the project of decolonizing both naïve historical periodization and uncritical inter/disciplinarity. The well-conceived sections of the book—Music and Early Modern Writings, Political Voices, Staging the Early Modern, Early Modern Afterlives—provide a rich and comprehensive panoply of analyses sure to shape future trends in the study of early modern music and literature together."
Elicia Clements, Chair of the Department of Humanities and cross-appointed Associate Professor of Humanities and English, York University, Canada






