Music: a Book of Knowledge in Renaissance England

Abstract

The Renaissance man was as eager as any twentieth-century scientist to understand the universe and himself, the center of that universe, but he sought that knowledge in a different way. He relied heavily upon the Word of God. He accepted with little question the words of wise men of the past—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, St. Augustine. He was fascinated with the mysterious hieroglyphics and drawings left by the Chaldeans and Egyptians, untranslatable in his time but thought to be an esoteric language which might reveal hidden secrets of the universe. But his most accessible book was the ‘universal and publick Manuscript’ of nature, that great volume written in the language of God, sometimes in ‘Hieroglyphicall Characters’ difficult to decipher, again in figures and ‘letters’ easily understood by any one who would take time to observe them.