Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature

Claire Bardelmann is Associate Professor at the University of Lorraine, France, where she teaches Early Modern Drama. She has an academic background in English and Musicology. She holds an Agrégation in English, and a PhD in Musicology (Paris-Sorbonne University) which investigates the relationship between music and Early Modern literature. The author of many articles in books and journals including Cahiers Elisabéthains, she is the co-editor (with Pierre Degott) of Musique et théâtre dans les Iles Britanniques.

• ContentsIntroduction 1Part One: Architectonics ‘The Bond of All Things’: Neoplatonic Ideas of Eros and Music in the Early Modern Episteme Theories of union: discourses of Eros and music Classical and Christian theories of Eros and music Speculative music and the Neoplatonic Eros as binding agents Musical harmony in the microcosm and in the political body Unity as poetic principle 2 Empowering Eros: Embodied Harmonies and Erotic Mediation Eros and music as mediating agents Sensual love and practical music as educational agents Practical music as love’s preferred agent The ambiguity of music’s erotic agency The dual agency of music and the erotic ear 3 ‘Love’s proper exercice’: Eros and the dance Erotic action and temperate dancing The degradation of the cosmic dance: "Sellenger’s round, or The Beginning of the World" The erotic dancing body The ambivalent rhetorical status of the dancing body 4 The Ambivalent Lute The Orphic Lute The Political Lute The Erotic Lute The Fair Lutenist Part Two: Poetics Ideas of Eros in the Early Modern Lute Ayre and Madrigal The ethos of the musical genres and the two Eros Ideas of Eros in madrigal and lute song lyrics ‘Infinite Volumes’: Miscellanies of lovein Elizabethan madrigal and lute ayre lyrics Neoplatonic ideas of love in the lyrics The voice as erotic instrument Rhetoric and eroticis6 Erotic and Rhetorical Trivializations of Music in the English EpyllionMusic and Eros in the English epyllion Natural music and the harmonic world Erotic trivializations of music in the epyllion ‘Love is forme’: fiction and friction Desire as Palimpsest, or the Myth of Philomel in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus Philomel as musical myth Expressing the unspeakable: Lavinia as Philomel Philomel, an ‘innocent Siren’? Philomel as Failed Orpheus: Dismembering the Body Politic 8 Specularity or speculation? Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis Echo/echo and the music of the spheres Transformative Encounters: Echo and the twofold nature of Eros 162 Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis The Speculating Echo Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index