ABSTRACT
This chapter examines one component of the theological toolbox' and to suggest that the Fathers did not provide clear and unambiguous grounds on which distinctive Puritan or Laudian theologies of music could be developed. It provides a case study in the use of patristic sources in the debates over church music from the reign of Elizabeth until the Civil War. The Fathers of the church were the common property of nearly all churchmen in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. The pattern of recurring contradictions in exegesis is discernible with particular clarity in the varying responses to the writing of Augustine on music. The Oxford scholar John Case, in his Sphaera civitatis of 1588 paused his treatment of the admirable nature of music in general to mention music in the church. The chapter has sought to examine the modes in which patristic testimony was deployed in relation to the use of music in worship.
