Overview

This volume provides the first printed critical edition of The Praise of Musicke (1586), keeping the original text intact and accompanied by an analytical commentary. Against the Puritan attacks on liturgical music, The Praise of Musicke, the first apologetic treatise on music in English, epitomizes the Renaissance defence of music in civil and religious life. While existing studies of The Praise of Musicke are limited to the question of authorship, the present volume scrutinizes its musical discourse, which recapitulates major issues in the ancient philosophy and theology of music, considering the contemporary practice of sacred and secular music. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of The Praise of Musicke, combining historical musicology with philosophical theology, this study situates the treatise and its author within the wider historical, intellectual and religious context of musical polemics and apologetics of the English Reformation, thereby appraising its significance in the history of musical theory and literature. The book throws fresh light on this substantial but neglected treatise that presents, with critical insights, the most learned discussion of music from classical antiquity to the Renaissance and Reformation era. In doing so it offers a new interpretation of the treatise, which marks a milestone in the history of musical apologetics.

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9781472473028

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Hyun-Ah Kim is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of two monographs, The Renaissance Ethics of Music: Singing, Contemplation and Musica humana (2015) and Humanism and the Reform of Sacred Music in Early Modern England: John Merbecke the Orator and 'The Booke of Common Praier Noted’ (1550) (2008). She has published widely on music and humanism in early modern culture.

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