Both from the Ears and Mind

The mental, experiential and musical landscapes of human beings in the 16th and 17th centuries were different from ours. Austern's latest book is an ambitious attempt to map out that territory in detail. -- BBC Music Magazine Having undertaken a comprehensive survey of many and often little-known sources in manuscript and print, Austern has created an unequaled storehouse of ideas about music that circulated in early modern England. Her fascinating book practically overflows its covers with discourses of music's powers and effects, notably on the self and society, that reveal how this elusive topic lay virtually at the heart of the early modern English intellectual enterprise. Austern vividly portrays how, at a time of rapid religious and social change, urgent debates about music's role in worship were conducted even while music itself served as both a civilizing and disrupting influence on society. This book makes a major contribution to the expanding field of sound studies and to sensory history more generally. --Penelope Gouk, University of Manchester If anyone in England from 1500 to 1700 has written about music, Austern has read it. Both from the Ears and Mind is a magnum opus that draws together twenty-five years of research and publication. No existing scholarship on ideas about music in early modern England has the range and the depth of Austern's. Musicology scholars will find in Austern a resource that will challenge and complicate received ideas about early modern tonality, harmony, rhythm, and performance. --Bruce Smith, University of Southern California Both from the Ears and Mind is a marvelously valuable and stimulating guide to the many ways in which early modern thinkers contemplated music. It traces the importance of music through all areas of intellectual endeavor and draws upon an immense range of contemporary writings. No other analysis of this material is so encyclopedic, sophisticated, and deeply learned. Austern's book deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. --Christopher Marsh, Queens University Belfast