Music and Health Regimens in Early Modern England

Abstract

This project is a cultural history of music’s role in household healthcare in early modern England. Much of the research on music’s medicinal powers in this period, especially in England, focuses on theories of the body and sound exchanged in university circles and through printed texts. Missing, however, are granular accounts of everyday musical activities that were meant to have a restorative effect on the body or mind, for which we must turn to the material traces of the domestic sphere. I argue that even as music was broadly touted as physically beneficial in print sources, especially in music anthologies full of bawdy songs, individuals tended to gather their own musical repertories and assemble them alongside medicinal material. Such collecting practices structure what I call “musical health regimens”: bodily and household management involving a combination of musical and medicinal knowledge. Drawing from book historical methodology and history of science, I consider not only the musical and medicinal contents of archival sources, but also how they were read, assembled, and used, the status of their music notation, and how disciplinary boundaries have partitioned their diverse musical, medicinal, and nutritional contents. I shift musicology’s focus from theoretical discourse about music’s healing powers to the idiosyncrasies of individual, everyday practice by examining well-known but under-contextualized sources, such as anthologies of popular songs advertised as “pills to purge melancholy,” alongside archival sources completely new to musicology: music housed within recipe books for food and medicine. Early modern recipe books were home to the personalized music collections of individuals who sang hymns and psalms alone or with their families for daily prayer, and who fumbled their way through roughhewn cittern tablature for dance tunes and ballads as part of preventative, dietetic medicine. These amateurs inscribed songs alongside recipes for plague cures and pies and bought printed song anthologies that likened their contents to prefabricated remedies. By examining music’s utilitarian purpose in the daily lives of early modern people, music’s affective powers to move the body and its passions can be understood as a discourse of household care. Chapter One charts the intellectual history of music’s medicinal qualities in this period, with a particular focus on interrogating the secondary literature’s preference for the works of Ficino and other learned authors over trade writers and lay knowledge. Chapter Two is a short introduction to a source previously unknown to musicology: the corpus of manuscript medicine and cookery recipe books that contain music. Here I present a typology of the many ways music can appear in these books, an overview of the repertories present, notational styles, organizational techniques, and cataloguing and searchability challenges. Chapter Three presents case studies on music in recipe books in a practice of household care, showing how compilers, especially women, included texts for psalms, hymns, and sometimes ballads to tend to the health of their households, emphasizing the interconnectedness of music, health, and spiritual well-being. Chapter Four considers cases of music notation found within manuscript recipe books, including lute and cittern tablature, examining how music was gathered, inscribed, and used. This chapter argues that music notation’s similarity and proximity to recipes in these books gave it the function of a recipe for early modern compilers; both are sparse, personalized, and embodied inscriptions of ephemeral household practices.

The fifth and final chapter turns from manuscript sources to consider the better-known printed music anthologies advertising their contents as medicinal. Here, I suggest that the nascent pharmaceutical industry influenced music publishers’ and printers’ language around music’s healing potential; while such language draws on the real connections between music, health, compilation, and consumption already explored in this dissertation, I ultimately argue that the bawdy contents of supposedly medicinal printed anthologies are a far cry from the repertories found in recipe books long before and after this printed tradition.