ABSTRACT
Religion; music; material culture; text. This essay is an exercise in aĴempting to draw connections between these quite disparate elements, in order to demonstrate how an appreciation of the significance of everyday objects can have tangible benefits beyond the immediate realm of understanding material culture, for the historian generally, and in this specific case for the historian of Reformation England. Fundamental to this exercise is the assumption, given voice by Leora Auslander, that ‘objects not only are the product of history, they are also active agents in history’, and again that ‘most people for most of human history … have created meaning, represented the world, and expressed their emotions through textiles, wood, metal, dance, and music’.1 As the questions we ask of the past become more complex, historians must expand their traditional notions of ‘evidence’ to include hitherto under-(and even un-) explored categories of human experience, such as music and material culture, and to integrate their testimony into our histories.
