Author: emeyers

K. Dawn Grapes

With Mornefull Musique: Funeral Elegies in Early Modern England

Boydell & Brewer

278 pp, £19.99, ISBN: 9781787443242

Publication date: 2018

K. Dawn Grapes is an associate professor of Music History in the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance and has a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from the University of Colorado at Boulder with specialization in music of Early Modern England, music history pedagogy, and flute history. In her book With Mornefull Musique: Funeral Elegies in Early Modern England published in 2018, Dr. Grapes brings an interesting intersection of music theory and social history to the early modern scholarship. She shows scholarship has previously only looked at each piece individually, but not comparing them directly to show how society had changed and reacted quite differently to the death of each monarch from Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. 

The layout of the chapters are a bit confusing but have beautiful titles from a elegy mentioned in the chapter to signify the contents. Throughout this review I will be looking at the context these chapters are put in. The composers and pieces that Dr. Grapes writes of are fascinating however. Looking at chapters one through five, they have a bit of a chronological sense as they seem music specific to each of the monarchs from the mid-1500s to 1612 when King James I dies. She does discuss the legacy these composers and their work leaves behind towards the end as well. These chapters do take a social history perspective to examine why specific elegies began during this era.

Dr. Grapes begins by defining an elegy as “a song or poem of lamentation, esp. for the dead; a memorial poem” (p 5). She makes a point to explain that this word comes from ancient Greece and does not seem to appear in the English vocabulary until about 1521, when death had become more of a regular occurrence for the people of the early modern time, especially if they lived in the cities. The English Reformation may have attributed to this need for services when the Catholic Church was no longer available, people in England needed to understand their grief and loss. 

In chapter two, Dr. Grapes does a musical analyses that is quite interesting. She shows the readers that there were only a few accepted key changes at the time. This was explained in between the stories of two great composers, William Byrd and Thomas Watson. The deaths they were writing for were noticed by everyone from commoners to nobility so these elegies were significant and held in the highest regards. 

Chapters three and four take the idea of elegies adding to the monarchs persona with Elizabeth I. Her reign was so large when she was alive and well after her death. Every decision she made was a reflection of the court and herself, what she wanted England to be. Every monarch begins to question how the rest of society would view certain colors, like Mary and Philip using the color purple, but Elizabeth saw the growth of elegies and decided the musicians and composers chosen were also a consideration of her persona. Like her father, Henry VIII, she attempted to be larger than life and used music at this time to do that. Elizabeth used this growth to bring religion back with many pieces that followed Protestant thinking or “gave credence to Elizabeth’s goddess-like persona” (p 81). It because another political tool for the rulers of England.

Chapter five consists of the fascination that society takes in Prince Henry when James I dies. There was a hope that the Prince could bring England back together after the schism. Dr. Grapes highlights that there was so much focus on Henry that there was even a section of an elegy dedicated to honoring Henry. There seemed to be no personal connection between the two so there is no solid reasoning as to why it happened other that the fact that the tribute was public (p 134-135). There seemed to be a more personal, as opposed to monarchal, view of Prince Henry. Plus with the growth and regularity of this elegy tradition, these musicians and composers could attempt more grandiose statements to gain attention from nobility and higher. This shows how much has changed socially due to shifting monarchs and leading up to the English Civil Wars. 

Following that shifting in societal thinking, chapters six through eight talk about pieces and composers of the era that stand out. Chapters six and seven talk about elegies to honor women. These were mostly women who were deemed as socially significant and their elegies were found in manuscripts. Dr. Grape states that “deceased females represented in Paston’s collection include Queen Mary I, Queen Elizabeth I, Lady Magdalen Dacre Montague, and Mary Queen of Scots…A comparison of each of the “queen elegies” shows not only a similar approach in musical setting, but also a common textual voice, though neither composer nor poet is acknowledged” (p 155). Here it can be seen that composers and poets were willing to show themselves close (maybe closer than they were) with Prince Henry and other male monarchs, but the death of a significant woman was held in quite a different regard. There was still space made for these women and held with a different, maybe more sober, sense of loss.

Finally, chapter eight looks at elegies written to honor composers and musicians. This section is a different style of analysis than the rest of the book. Dr. Grape takes more of a musician and composer breakdown of how the word choice and music construction showed connection to the deceased. Each phase shows a view of not just the relationship of the two composers, but how the deceased left society a hole that needed to be filled, a need to express emotions. On page 207, she states “though the plaque is now gone, due to the church’s destruction in 1711, the words of this extended epitaph… revealing an ongoing remembrance of Tallis and his works.” The work these composers did was larger than themselves.

I did not expect to like this book, music is not normally my forte. But this is an extremely interesting way to view the shifting thinking of early modern English society, especially from dynasty to dynasty. When it came to structure, this book reminded me of Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufman. It is centered around stories of composers and their work, but adds context to the time. It created an otherwise interesting social and gender study of the time that I would have never thought of before. It includes snippets of the original music score and most of her sources seem to be a wide range. Some early 2000s and 2010s for most recent, but also ranging from the 1960-90. Overall, a really interesting way to see the early modern period.

Ofer Hadass

Medicine, Religion, and Magic in Early Stuart England: Richard Napier’s Medical Practice

The Pennsylvania State University Press

 213 pp, $34.95, ISBN: 9780271080192

Publication date: 2018.

 

This work was created by Ofer Hadass who has released several books on the subject of medicine and magic in Stuart England. This Interestingly seems to be an extension or rewrite of his dissertation at University of Haifa (Israel) called Richard Napier,” renowned Physician Both of Body and Soul”: Astrological Medicine, Theology and Magic in Early Stuart England (2014). Even though this book is only 213 pages, it reviews not only a general understand of medicine during this time, but also how Napier and a few others operated on “hard evidence” theories when practicing. Hadass states several time that he and other scholars want to understand how medicine and religion or spiritual work could be reconciled at this time. The book is then broken down into four chapters but then further separated in each chapter with subsections.

Starting with chapter one, “Astrological Medicine,” Hadass begins by giving the reader a general understanding of where medicine is at by 1600, plus a general view of Napier’s framework. This is discussed in the subsections of The Image of Body, The Image of Illness, and The Basics of Astrological Medicine. I learned a vast amount about humors and how the belief that the whole body was interconnected (p 17) was used by Napier at a time to better understand these illnesses, and some of his treatments seemed to prove this theory correct.  

Chapter two, “Astral Magic,” contained Napier and other practitioners using charms and spells in their medicine plans. This seems like it would contradict the idea of hard evidence in medicine. However, this seems to be “balanced” out with the idea of using natural items from the earth. When a patient came back to the doctor with the same issues more than twice, Napier told her that she was condemned and no goodness from the earth could save her. He believed (as the author portrayed) that it was not the medicine alone that was giving them health, but the power of god through the medicine would help his patients. Another way Napier used astral magic was to use a copper or tin talisman to ward off the illness from that person. Thinking that the planets in specific phases, these talisman would attempt to counteract the effects.

Chapter three, “Converse with Angels,” is a bit harder to grasp at first. Very basically, some doctors like Napier began the practice of extending contact to Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Asariel to gain advice or information about how the patient is doing. This was following an English natural philosopher, John Dee, who subscribed to the belief that angels could assist mankind. Hadass states that “at this point, most recorded answers limited to disease prognosis or to forecasting the outcome of Napier’s treatment” (p 96). This seems to be controversial even for the time, but was not unheard of. Napier was attempting to find some facts, even within faith that would explain why treatments would work for some patients and not others. Asking angels and looking at the positions of the planets seemed to be what he saw as hard evidence.

Finally chapter four. This chapter is called “Religion and Knowledge” and it begins to answer some of the confusion that may have arose in the previous chapter. We see that Napier was stuck in two worlds, and Hadass offers that these two realms of thought may not have been so different after all. The author offers that ‘religion and the investigation of nature’ were simply different ways of seeing God (p 123). This starts to tie together all the strings from the previous chapters as Napier is looking for hard evidence in his work. Hadass uses this chapter to dive into Napier’s letters with others as tensions rose throughout his career. Napier would often write sermons in his personal notes, but did not fare well with the other members of society. At several points he was accused of heresy, especially in one case when his sermon mentioned pagans gods and goddesses (p 131). I believe this makes the case that, as much as Napier wanted to be a man of God, he was not religious in the way that Early Stuart England expected. After his sermon, he was chastised by the minister and many others. He battled religion and knowledge.

As a historian that is interested in medicine but not an endless wealth of knowledge on this topic, Hadass does well at explaining (sometimes more like translating) what would happen when patients came to see Napier for help. In what I thought was the most interesting case, a female had come to see Napier because she had not had her menstrual cycle in two months and had body aches, swelling, and feeling vertigo. When applying astrology and finding out that she has also had nose bleeds, Napier concludes that the interconnected body lost its menses and the blood needed a place to escape (p16). This is how we start to see connections between astrology, astral magic, and religion to his daily cases and the search for what caused these changes in the humors of the body.

This was a time of questions and attempting to find answers that made sense to these doctors. Hadass makes the claim here that “Napier was not an uneducated practitioner and certainly not a quack,” and I have to agree (p 140). Looking at the mix of what was proven science and educated estimate based on experience, Napier was quite close to what we know today. Hadass makes a strong and convincing case that Napier and others may have called this work magic and conversing with angels, but had shown that there was some “hard evidence” in his work. Napier would not have moved forward with a treatment or medical exam if he did not think it would be helpful, or even harmful as shown in his notes for each patient. 

Spence, Craig

Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650-1750

Suffolk: Boydell Press

288 pp, £19.99, ISBN: 9781782049005

Publication date: 2016.

As a historian who has found extreme fascination with the Bills of Mortality, my interest was peaked (and/or piqued) by the work Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650-1750 by Craig Spence. Accidents is a book that attempts to explain what the Bills of Mortality did and the purpose it served in society but also a look at some of the inconsistencies within them that added to some confusion and questionable statistics. Spence has stated on his website to be a “historian and archaeologist. His interests are varied but he has expertise in late 17th and early 18th century London, social and cultural history, and archaeological practice.” I think we get to see that in this work as it bounces between storytelling of a cultural shift, but also a data driven archaeological sense of change happening.

Working through the book structure, Spence split the book into three parts. Part one, which included chapters one and two, are more of a broad understanding of the physical lay of the land and social reactions to death in general respectively. Part two, which included chapter three through six, covers what was deemed as an accident and how these accidents were listed in the Bills versus what actually occurred. Incidents like fires or water related deaths, everyday accidents that could happen in the cities, rarities like carbon monoxide, and seasonal deaths are all discussed in their respective chapters in quite a bit of detail. Finally part three, which included chapters seven through nine, looks at the social and medical changes that death brought to Early Modern London.

Before I get too far, I want to examine and explain the difference between chapter two and nine. These two chapters seem similar but are quite different and I appreciate it. Both sections look at death in society and how the culture of the time engaged it or not, but the difference is that chapter two dives into why these deaths began to be counted and how suicide or murder is defined. However, in nine, Spence takes a look into how sudden or violent death affected society and how it digested that information. There is now more private records like diaries, looking at how the average person was understanding and handling (or not) the deaths happening around them became easier. However, this chapter also dives into the news of these deaths changing as well.

The Bills of Mortality were just an example of how information began to switch from oral retellings to pamphlets, and then soon to newspapers! It is great to see how this transformed visually and historically because people could then understand what was happening in other parishes much faster than before. Then, there is a downside of politics coming into play here. As Spence puts it “It was not only the London papers that utilised sudden-death narratives. Early provincial newspapers often recycled metropolitan news, in part to establish a publisher’s credibility but also, more prosaically, to fill column space: as Cranfield phrased it, they were ‘a mere parasite upon the London press’.” (p 233) As we have seen in other works, like Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England, written news could change the perception of the information and this could then affect how the top-down versus bottom-up reactions could be vastly different, if not opposite. In this case, we see the Bills serve as possible way to question daily life for each class and even how the government attempts to respond or ignore the issue while getting wrapped up in the politics of misinformation or narrative made.

I truly was not sure if I liked this book when I first started reading it because the introduction drew me in with storytelling, then took a flip to data and a more mathematical view. I do tend to be a story not data driven historian. But, after getting through part one of the book, I understood the style of the work better and I really enjoyed it. This book seems to be that middle ground between the data historians and the historians that thrive on stories. Straight out from the beginning, Spence stated that this book’s “aim is not to reduce portrayal of such incidents and fatalities to anecdotal tales of ‘human interest’ or, for that matter, to see them as a window onto ‘everyday life’ in the past. Rather, it is to comprehend who, among hundreds of thousands of Londoners, encountered such events, how the city’s bureaucracy recorded and elaborated their circumstances and why they did so, and what practical responses might follow.” (p 2). I think he did just that in this book. There is not a focus on what ‘everyday life’ was like unless it was necessary to the story, like in the section about urban accidents. Overall, I like that this book stretched one mile wide but six miles deep per say.

My final thought is that this works shows a broader interest in the historiographical side of this time but from a data format. If historians can see things like a 1.6:1 male to female suicide rate compared to the previous 5.2:1 (p 36), there can be questions asked about how suicide was defined before or if the data was skewed because of something else happening like parishes changing, fires loosing records, etc. There are some places Spence could have made more deductions about the data he found, but I also feel like that defeats the purpose of the work. This is a bit more of an overview or “how to read the Bills of Mortality” and I found that it begins the process of gathering information to create further discussion, not too many hard arguments here.

This is going to be a longer review because I think this format explains the chapters best, and because yes I liked the work!

Boswell, Caroline

Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England

Suffolk: Boydell Press

300 pp., $91.73, ISBN: 9781783270453

Publication date: 2017.

Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England is a work written by Caroline Boswell that dives into the problems happening in everyday life leading up to and going into the civil war. There is a bottom up socio-political perspective happening here that makes this easy to read. Even from the introduction, there is a political science feeling as Boswell compares life of common people to the royal of the time and the political occurrences. She has broken the book into two parts, Sites of Disaffection and Objects of Disaffection, The former is not literally physically, but more tangible than the ambiguity of the second.

In the first chapter, Boswell attempts to show how “sites” could mirror the issues happening above these citizens. Especially when there was no less than five major changes in (leadership) at this time. She goes on to say that the streets and the marketplace is where a lot of exchanges and tension happened. She asks the reader if the streets and marketplace were simply a “backdrop” for the conversation, or if it affected the conversation because it was a different type of forum was created? Boswell seems to believe it is micro examples of macro political issues. For example, this forum had a larger effect, especially to women. Boswell mentions that women sellers where arrested for being thieves and many other things but there was also the chance that women’s reputations may be put at risk if a man where to start “spitting at hir and calling hir whore.” (26-27) This reminds many that gender and reputation still mattered heavily at this time.
Chapter two looks into at alehouses and how any alcohol type drink was used at the time to ease the stress of poverty and other political discourse. This came with its pros and cons as it built a community, selling served as a job for struggling families, and became a culture point as the crafting of different beer grew (73). But this all connects back to the larger issues of the era. There was the aforementioned poverty, here and later Boswell talks about the excise-man, and others mentioned throughout the chapter. As drink became so ingrained in society and the crafting varied between “strong” and “weak” ale or beer, there became a class and cultural divide over who deserves the “good” drink. However, there is the classic inn setting happening also, as gender (for a short time) and class is not highly focused because it is mostly the working class visiting the inn or tavern. This is where much of the political discussion is happening. Finally, drink is also connected to religion and the culture related to religion in London. All of this comes back to Boswell’s original question to the readers, is it the “site” that made the issue or simply serve as a forum?

Section two starts to discuss specific “objects of disaffection,” as Boswell calls them. These are specific people or things that add to the tension. Chapter 3 is quite straightforward (name and contents) as the government attempts to quiet tensions of lower classes with “meddling soldiers” which made lower classes more upset. Then as the state failed to pay its own army, there is disarray as soldier begin seizing livestock and other provisions from citizens. The army seemed to have affected a bit of every issue also happening at this time, adding heat to the fire. Then chapter four shows the interwoven web of issues with the excise-man. Debt collectors were viewed by many citizens as the singular person that wrecked their society. There was a massive amount of hateridge put against this person appointed for the job by the government as they were called cruel and sinful. The citizens see the excise-man as the reason that they are suffering. Finally, chapter five focuses on the issue of religion with the dissolution of church and state connections (or lack thereof). This last chapter is massive in the sense that, most of the other issues really fall back to this. It seems to be the umbrellas that encapsulates it all. 

I think that this is a good and interesting writing style for the topic. There are a few sections where maybe too many citations and quotes happen, but it help to get the reader into the mindset of the time, Another strength of this work is the way Boswell broke up the two parts, I found this to be a massive strength because it feels like the reader starts with what is familiar and zoomed into the issue. But then discussing the taverns and alehouses still feel familiar, but start to zoom out and see how it is connected to previous issues mentioned. It felt easy to digest. There is also a good mix of secondary and primary sources, however the primary sources do not come in as much until part two. That adds to what I find to be almost a dialogue within the chapters in part two. Again, a little hard with so many citations and quotes but it did not ruin the book per say. Last minus for the book is that these chapters are so hard to explain! That is a bit of a joke and serious reflection. Each chapter handles such a complex issue that summarizing them is surprisingly difficult. 

Complete side note and not really “review worthy.” A weird connection I thought of when reflecting on section one was the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I thought of the scene where the peasants are working in the field and asks how Arthur became King of the Britons without their vote. I kept thinking about the idea of the “backdrop” that is mentioned in this book and asked myself; is it weird for peasants to discuss politics in the field, but not a street/bar?

Reviewed by Emily Meyers – George Mason University

Ormrod, W. M., Bart Lambert, and Jonathan Mackman.

Immigrant England, 1300-1550.

Manchester: Manchester University Press

308 pp. £19.99, ISBN 9781526135773

Publication Date: December 2018

William Mark Ormrod was a Welsh historian who focused on the Later Middle Ages of England who passed away in 2020. Ormrod held multiple positions at University of Sheffield, Queens University Belfast, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and University of York before becoming a Professor of History in 1995. He also held numerous  connections and memberships at well regarded institutions such as the Royal Historical Society, a Councillor of the Pipe Roll Society, and many more.

Bart Lambert is an Assistant Professor of Late Medieval History at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Lambert received his PhD in 2011 from Ghent University and, before joining the VUB in 2018, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher.

Jonathan Mackman is a Research Associate for the University of York. His current project is The Northern Way: the Archbishops of York and the North of England, 1304 – 1405.

This book dives into the changes that occur in England from 1300-1550 for immigrants and aliens. Some of the major question they attempt to answer are; who were these immigrants, how did the government define and regulate them, what work did these people do, and did their culture get integrated into society? The social and political landscape of defining who are immigrants, whether they are in the British Isles or overseas, was constantly shifting. The authors claim that the Hundred Years War in 1337 is one of the defining factors that “decided –​permanently, as it turned out –​whether they and their descendants would thereafter be ‘English’ or ‘French’’ (13).

From there the book is broken up into subsections. Each subsection is still discussing immigrants, but details how each group was viewed and how these biases would affect said groups. One section explains how markets became supplied with trades like shoemaking, another reflects on gender, wealth, and status in England, culture, and more. The authors use intersectionality to show how these groups of people may have been connected based on where they lived or were born, but could have been treated quite differently based on who they were.

To further the work done in writing, a website was created called England’s Immigrants to display the authors’ work. This site is a database that lays out the questions asked in the project and how they came to the conclusions they did. Below is an example of how the data gave way to new information for the authors to interpret into their work.

Combining both the text and the data from the site, historians and the public are able to see the benefit of digital history in the field. Using historians with a social lens versus an economic one shines well in this example as jobs, labor, and gender are all shown to have an affect on aliens, the government, and society at large. This work is also dedicated to the explosion of record keeping that begins in the 13th century (5). There is a recognized bias with these records but they are still numbers that were not had before, giving hard evidence to work from. It took almost 50 years after the first notice of them to see how the field of history could use them.

As far as the way that this is written, this work could still be read and further used by many. However, late medieval and early modern historians or students would benefit from this the most. This adds to the first strength of the work, it is easy to jump into and comprehend. In the introduction, Ormrod et al. take the time to define what they mean when using the term alien, before and after outlining historical markers for the audience to follow. There are references to events that the authors feel it is unnecessary to cover in detail, but still mention as a factor to the social and political changes. One example is when the authors had summarized the flow and effects the Black Death had on society in 1348 which continued until the end of 1500’s. They do not explain the Black Death in extensive detail, but reference how it affects immigrants. To explain some of the opportunities afforded to these people, the authors mention “Laws were passed to make it easier for aliens involved in trade to maintain their commercial interests in England; special measures were taken to draw in people with particular skills; and exemptions were readily granted from the periodic threats to expel enemy aliens during times of war.”(4).

This is counted as one of the strengths of the work because it keeps it from becoming to bogged down in the weeds. One place where the text could use some work is finding a more systematic way to discussing events that affect all of the chapters. There are topics, like “Husbandmen, yeomen and gentlemen” in the chapter Wealth, status, and gender could have fit better in Supplying the market when discussing different jobs had by these immigrants, then referenced back in the conversation about status. This is a difficult distinction to make, especially with how interconnected these issues are, and does not fully hinder the work but makes it a bit awkward.

Overall, this book and website are great works that supply the field with an in-depth look at late medieval and early modern England from the bottom up and top down. Being able to see how both the immigrants and the government worked against and with each other respectively shows just how confusing it was for the developing society then and people today. This also is a great example of how interdisciplinary work from the political and economic sides of the field can work together to uncover more within a subject than previously thought.

Reviewed by Emily Meyers, Digital Research Assistant at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History in New Media at George Mason University.