In 1588 Anthony Munday published A Banquet of Daintie Conceits, containing twenty-two new moral poems in various verse forms. Ranked with the best comic playwrights of his day, including Shakespeare, he was also a travel-writer, religious spy, actor, translator, royal messenger, deviser of civic entertainments, and historian. Munday confessed that he was not knowledgeable in music, yet he named a tune for singing each poem. Intriguingly, unlike typical broadside ballad tunes, most of Munday’s tunes are dances, and of the twenty-two named, fourteen are known from solo instrumental arrangements. Despite that survival, despite the poet’s fame, and despite an 1812 edition of the poems from the unique extant copy, this is the first attempt to set Munday’s Banquet lyrics to their respective music. Poems with unidentified melodies are set to period tunes that fit their versifications, making all the lyrics singable for the first time in over 400 years.

Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher Page reconstructs the trade in imported guitars coming to the wharves of London, and pieces together the printed tutor for the instrument (probably of 1569) which ranks as the only method book for the guitar to survive from the sixteenth century. Two chapters discuss the remains of music for the instrument in tablature, both the instrumental repertoire and the traditions of accompanied song, which must often be assembled from scattered fragments of information.

"Spring focuses on the lute in Britain, but also includes two chapters devoted to continental developments: one on the transition from medieval to renaissance, the other on renaissance to baroque, and the lute in Britain is never treated in isolation. Six chapters cover all aspects of the lute's history and its music in England from 1285 to well into the eighteenth century, whilst other chapters cover the instrument's early history, the lute in consort, lute song accompaniment, the theorbo, and the lute in Scotland."--Jacket.

As a study of lyric poetry, in English, from the early modern period to the present, this book explores one of the most ancient and significant art forms in Western culture as it emerges in its various modern incarnations. Combining a much-needed historicisation of the concept of lyric with an aesthetic and formal focus, this collaboration of period-specialists offers a new cross-historical approach. Through eleven chapters, spanning more than four centuries, the book provides readers with both a genealogical framework for the understanding of lyric poetry within any particular period, and a necessary context for more general discussion of the nature of genre.

In The World of William Byrd John Harley builds on his previous work, William Byrd: Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (Ashgate, 1997), in order to place the composer more clearly in his social context. He provides new information about Byrd's youthful musical training, and reveals how in his adult life his music emerged from a series of overlapping family, business and social networks. These networks and Byrd's navigation within and between them are examined, as are the lives of a number of the individuals comprising them.

Renaissance poetry anthologies were crafted within the book trade and re-crafted through performance, transforming Early Modern cultures of recreation.