Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England ed. by Linda Phyllis Austern, Candace Bailey, and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (review)

The boundaries called into question by these fifteen essays range from societal constructs (class, gender, religion, profession, genre) to concepts of media (aural/oral, manuscript, print) and space (home, stage, court, church, street). As a collection, the book provides a broad survey of ways in which music and musicians in England negotiated these boundaries circa 1550–1800. In their introduction, Linda Phyllis Austern, Candace Bailey, and Amanda Eubanks Winkler discuss how this project developed partly out of frustration with the application of anachronistic dichotomies, such as public/private and professional/amateur, in historical narratives of early modern English music. These and other categorical dichotomies become specific boundaries that the contributing scholars collaboratively blur.

This volume draws another aspect of its unity from a metamethodology of systematically testing and adjusting scholarly definitions; in this vein, the editors devote part of their commentary to a series of themes—chiefly space (residential and theatrical), community (in acts of musicking), and the musical work (written/unwritten/oral/aural)— treated in various and complementary ways by the contributors. Essays appear in chronological order, which precludes thematic or boundary-specific grouping, but the editors' larger sense of purpose has produced a selection of chapters that complement each other interchangeably. Read selectively or in full, Beyond Boundaries equips scholars of sixteenth-through eighteenth-century English music to question their field's established categories. Perhaps more importantly, this work will encourage any scholar of Western early modernity to rethink the capabilities of binary language to adequately represent historical trends.

In the first chapter, Katherine Steele Brokaw positions the music of Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister, a 1553 play in which choirboy-actors parody a variety of church music practices, as one playwright's plea for a "hybridized musical liturgy" (p. 14) while Mary Tudor, Queen of England, reestablished Catholicism at the state level. Jane Flynn's chapter 2 also addresses Catholic practice but from the perspective of clandestine Jesuit evangelism following Elisabeth I's return to public Protestantism. Brokaw considers the interaction of theatrical and sacred spaces, while Flynn highlights that of residential and sacred spaces. In both cases, music enables spatial transformation and reinforces politico-religious identity.

In chapter 5, John Milsom discusses the "Cries of London" repertory as a dramatic genre that demands believable acting of its performers. Whereas such works are often characterized as learned parodies of street society, Milsom's assessment is that the essential art of the "Cries" lies in their facilitation of boundary crossing: "Noise becomes art; outdoors becomes indoors; social classes are traversed; and the genres of consort song and verse anthem, conventionally sites for serious thoughts, are quite literally dragged down to the level of the streets" (p. 76). The fishwife and boatman cannot emerge from their polyphonic backdrops if the singer does not make an adequate transformation, and so their characters are represented rather than patronized. Beyond the categories that the works themselves juxtapose, Milsom uses the repertory to challenge the historiographic dichotomy of high and low culture.

Several essays evaluate boundaries of gender. Flynn's study of music in recusant Catholic communities pays special attention to the participation of women. Chapter 6 contains Katherine R. Larson's analysis of a later musical-theater example: Richard Brome's The Northern Lasse (1629). While song plays a structural role in the drama, it also acts as "a powerful mechanism for spatial and sociocultural meditation" (p. 80) for the female protagonists, whose final "positioning" eludes boundaries of "spatial or social containment" (p. 93). In the final chapter, "Education, Entertainment, Embellishment: Music Publication in the Lady's Magazine," Bonny H. Miller considers the public packaging of music for female consumption in Georgian residential spaces. The diverse origins of repertoire disseminated by this periodical complicate assumptions of...