Katherine Butler
My research interests lie in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English music. My current project, funded by the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme, investigates the changing cultural significance of music in early modern England by examining musical myths and stories. I explore the interaction between learned and popular ideas of music and how these ideas were created and altered through the retelling of established myths or the invention of new fictional stories.
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
early music sixteenth century musicology Tudors early modern Renaissance music publications Tudor Partbooks Music and Politics Queen Elizabeth I Music Printing queenship myth study day music Elizabeth I Seventeenth Century Elizabethan progresses open access music and medicine
24 June 2018
From 1588 until his death in 1608 Thomas East was the premier music printer in England, working for first William Byrd and later Thomas Morley. He printed such famous collection as Musica...
Motets, Inscriptions and the Praise of Music in Robert Dow’s Tudor Partbooks
22 June 2017
In 1580s Oxford debates concerning the relative merits or vices of music were intensifying. Ex-Oxford student Stephen Gosson had attacked music in his School of Abuse (1579) encouraging...
Creating Harmonious Subjects? Songs for Queen Elizabeth I’s Accession Day
1 July 2016
Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) was the first monarch whose Accession Day on 17 November (the day when Mary I died and she became Queen) became a yearly occasion for celebration....
The Mythical Powers of Music in the Age of the ‘Scientific Revolution’
2 June 2016
Writers about music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drew extensively on classical mythology to exemplify its powerful effects and importance to society. With little...