ABSTRACT
Thomas Mace's self-publication of his practical and theoretical tract on the lute and lute-playing, Musick's Monument (1676) is well known for its academic style, nostalgic accounts of music-making before the Commonwealth, and complaints about “modern” Restoration fashions. But, uniquely for a printed music book in seventeenth-century England, it has the only printed list of subscribers. Just over a third of them were family members and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, where Mace was a singing-man at Trinity College. Although Musick's Monument is not a typical music book, the subscription list is an important source of the geographical extent of the circulation and consumption of printed music in late seventeenth-century England.
This chapter, the first study of Mace's subscribers, begins to reveal the often-hidden networks of a professional musician and his involvement in the printed book trade. It provides evidence of a national narrative of musical culture and printed music dissemination that looks beyond the more fully documented contexts of London and the university towns and reveals the existence of a wider geographical spread of printed music than previously acknowledged. This study underscores the importance of local, non-music specialist booksellers and their networks in the procurement of newly-published music books from the capital and university towns.
