Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature

The entanglement of music and literature of the early modern period is rich with exchanges, dialogues, and disputes. These entanglements present a fascinating counterpoint to early modernity, and in many ways serve as complicit witnesses to their times and places. The Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature considers musico-literary production from the period 1500–1800, as well as its contemporary resonances, and seeks to unpick these often knotty intersections.

Following in the footsteps of The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (edited by Rachael Durkin, Peter Dayan, Axel Englund, and Katharina Clausius), the 28 chapters within consider this transformative time through four thematic groupings—music and early modern writings, political voices, staging the early modern, and afterlives—and invite readers to marvel at the miscellany of interactions between early modern musics and literatures from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This Companion is therefore a valuable addition to the bookshelves of those looking to grapple with the early modern musico-literary relationship.

Rachael Durkin is Associate Professor and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in History and Music at Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. Her research focuses on the history of musical instruments, and musical instruments as material culture in literature, which includes work on the violin in nineteenth-century detective fiction, and the player piano in the writings of William Gaddis. Her book The Viola d’Amore: Its History and Development was published by Routledge in 2020, and she was co-editor of the preceding The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. She is now working on a monograph on musical instrument innovation of the long eighteenth century. Katharina Clausius is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Intermedial Studies at the Université de Montréal in Canada. Bridging musicology, philosophy, and culture studies, her research focuses on the politics of aesthetics in literature, music, and visual art. Recent books include her monograph, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy (University of Rochester), The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (Routledge), as well as publications on the politics of translation, the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, intermedial modernism, and interwar cultural ideology.

Christin Hoene is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Her research spans modern and contemporary anglophone literature, with a particular focus on postcolonial literature, word and music studies, sound studies, and queer theory. Her current work focuses on the role of music in contemporary queer literature. She is the author of the book Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of Asian Sound Cultures (Routledge, 2022).

Katherine Butler is Associate Professor and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow in History and Music at Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. Her research focuses on the musical culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, spanning courtly and popular musics; print, manuscript, and oral circulation; and mythology and early modern science. Her book Music in Elizabethan Court Politics was published with Boydell and Brewer in 2015, and she has also co-edited collections on Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (2019), The Heroic in Music (2022), and Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2023). She is currently writing a monograph on the social significance of round and catch-singing, c.1550–1650.