‘ALLURING THE AUDITORIE TO EFFEMINACIE’; MUSIC AND THE IDEA OF THE FEMININE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Abstract

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP in several disciplines, notably literary criticism, the history of medicine, and social history, has come to recognize that rapid change in political and social orders, coupled with new concerns in medicine, theology, moral philosophy and family life, led sixteenthand seventeenth-century thinkers to redefine feminine nature as especially disordered, convoluted, deceptive, changeable and uncontrolled, a literal inversion of the positive, direct qualities associated with the era's masculine ideals.' Nowhere was this revaluation more evident than in pre-Civil War England, where public discourse in nearly all areas became obsessed with issues of sexual morality, gender, consequences of female usurpation of male prerogatives, and the nature of womanhood.2 Because of perceived affective similarities between music and femininity, many English writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries discussed one in terms of the other; applied the technical vocabularies of music theory and performance to descriptions of women; or categorized both women and music as potential inflamers of the passions that could, through similarly strict masculine control, serve as earthly reminders of divine love and providence.3 However, in the symbolic discourse that dominated the era, sexual meta-