The English Renaissance is frequently defined in the context of the Elizabethans and early-Stuarts, but here we focus on the early Renaissance, and the important cultural transitions of the late-medieval/early-Tudor period. In this innovative study, Elisabeth Salter reconstructs the lives and experiences of six men and women of the early Renaissance and leads us on a quest to reconstruct their lost cultural worlds. The six men and women are all figures from the margins of the royal courts during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII: Gilbert Banaster, present at the court of Henry VII in the guise of writer and musician; The Anonymous Witness, spectator to the marriage of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon; William Cornish, playwright and musician at Henry VIII's household; Elizabeth Philip, silk trader to the royal court; Dame Katherine Styles, whose biography is recreated through her will; and William Buckley, Educator and Schoolmaster to King Edward VI. Salter presents an exemplary model of how it is possible to reconstruct biography from sometimes fragmentary sources. The connections drawn between these six individuals display ample evidence for the cultural innovation and sophistication of these courts in terms of pageantry, music, the visual arts, fashions in luxury consumption, scientific discovery and literary invention. When all six lives are added together as a whole, the book will lead the reader to a richer understanding of the cultural context of the early English Renaissance.

"The Victorian cup on my shelf--a present from my mother--reads 'Love the Giver.' Is it because the very word patronage implies the authority of the father that we have treated American women patrons and activists so unlovingly in the writing of our own history? This pioneering collection of superb scholarship redresses that imbalance. At the same time it brilliantly documents the interrelationship between various aspects of gender and the creation of our own culture."--Judith Tick, author of Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music "Together with the fine-grained and energetic research, I like the spirit of this book, which is ambitious, bold, and generous minded. Cultivating Music in America corrects long-standing prejudices, omissions, and misunderstandings about the role of women in setting up the structures of America's musical life, and, even more far-reaching, it sheds light on the character of American musical life itself. To read this book is to be brought to a fresh understanding of what is at stake when we discuss notions such as 'elitism, ' 'democratic taste, ' and the political and economic implications of art."--Richard Crawford, author of The American Musical Landscape "We all know we are indebted to royal patronage for the music of Mozart. But who launched American talent? The answer is women, this book teaches us. Music lovers will be grateful for these ten essays, sound in scholarship, that make a strong case for the women philanthropists who ought to join Carnegie and Rockefeller as household words as sponsors of music."--Karen J. Blair, author of The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America

With increasing frequency, composers of instrumental music claim to be specifically inspired by a poem or painting, a drama or sculpture, transforming the essence of this art work's features and message into their own medium, the musical language. How does the knowledge of such a transformation from one medium into the other inform our understanding of the musical work? In this round-breaking study, Siglind Bruhn makes a case for a musical genre hitherto hidden under the term program music. She defines her subject matter in relation to the term, ekphrasis, which is used by literary scholars for poems responding to works of visual art. Bruhn develops a clear methodology and a precise set of criteria, which she employs to situate musical ekphrasis within the aesthetics discourse.

" Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) was a colorful and controversial Italian painter, talented musician, a notable comic actor, a prolific correspondent, and a successful satirist and poet. His paintings, especially his rugged landscapes and their evocation of the sublime, appealed to Romantic writers, and his work was highly influential on several generations of European writers. James S. Patty analyzes Rosa’s tremendous influence on French writers, chiefly those of the nineteenth century, such as Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Théophile Gautier. Arranged in chronological order, with numerous quotations from French fiction, poetry, drama, art criticism, art history, literary history, and reference works, Salvator Rosa in French Literature forms a narrative account of the reception of Rosa’s life and work in the world of French letters. James S. Patty, professor emeritus of French at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Dürer in French Letters . He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

W HAT I H A V E attempted in this book is a survey of song; the kind of song which one finds variously described as 'concert', 'art', or sometimes even 'classical song'. 'Concert song' seems the most useful, certainly the least inexact or misleading, of some descriptions, especially since 'art song' sounds primly off putting, and 'classical song' really ought to be used only to refer to songs written during the classical period, i. e. the 18th century. Concert song clearly means the kind of songs one hears sung at concerts or recitals. Addressing myself to the general music-lover who, though he possesses no special knowledge of the song literature, is never theless interested enough in songs and their singers to attend recitals of Lieder or of songs in various languages, I have naturally confined myself to that period of time in which the vast majority of these songs was composed, though not necessarily only to those composers whose songs have survived to be remembered in recital programmes today. I suppose this to be roughly the three centuries covered by the years 1650-1950, though most of the songs we, as audiences, know and love were composed in the middle of this period, in other words in the 19th century.