Music

The brief of this chapter is to interrogate the sharp rise over the last ten years or so in scholarship on the history of medieval and early modern music and emotions (1100–1700). The problem is that though there has been an escalation in scholarship in the area of music and emotions, most of it is cognitive and philosophical and has more to contribute to psychology, physiology and medicine than it has relevance to history. As Gouk and Hills point out, ‘The literature is overwhelmingly dominated by medical, ethical and philosophical publication in which emotions are often assumed to be natural entities amenable to scientific analysis. By comparison, history is practically invisible’. ¹ Much of this scholarship is so strongly focused on the connection between music and emotion that it is separated, if not divorced, from its cultural and historical context. This makes the construction of a history of music and the emotions challenging, since there are few studies and these are distributed piecemeal over this extended timeline. These few are also hard to find, often buried as essays within broad thematic collections, or as poorly titled journal articles lacking precise and distinguishing key terms. There is no single study that examines the history of medieval and early modern music and emotions.