Introduction

This introductory chapter establishes the connection between music and the way knowledge was understood in early modern England. It draws from contemporary writers like Thomas Wright, Francis Bacon, and Philip Sidney, who asked metaphysical questions about the passions, sensing, and planes of materiality. This type of questioning surrounding art and truth challenged certain knowledge within a fundamentally Aristotelian early seventeenth-century intellectual framework.

There was a concerted metaphysical interest around the passions in this period, evident in a variety of treatises and fictions. Much of this interest surrounded music making’s effects upon selves and societies. Unlike previous studies, however, this book positions the historical experience of music, including the examination of individual songs, within frameworks of literary and historical scholarship on representation, sense perception, and approach to knowledge in early seventeenth-century England.

A juxtaposition of Werner Wolf and Francis Bacon demonstrates why rhetorical interpretation is key to understanding early modern writing. This chapter also shows how early modern rhetorical practices reflect a fundamental understanding of art as a basis for producing knowledge. It argues why both scientific and literary works from this period should be read rhetorically, as our modern distinctions between fiction and philosophy are irrelevant in contemporary rhetorical tradition.

Early moderns felt and observed how music physically presented a fundamental mind-body problem. This chapter introduces the central theories and concepts of relevance to this monograph, including historical phenomenology and writing by theorists like Stephen Greenblatt, Lawrence Kramer, and Bruce R. Smith. It sets the scene for recreational domestic musicking, surveying who would have used, interacted with, and played this printed song. It also introduces central contemporary figures like Bacon and Philip Sidney.

Phenomenological history requires hermeneutic interpretation because emotions do not exist in unmediated forms. We cannot replicate what it was like to be a subject in that time, but an exploration of phenomena like emotions of the past are worthwhile and rigorous scholarly endeavours. This chapter considers the importance of musical expression in understanding musical meaning and concludes with an overview of the monograph.