Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature

Claire Bardelmann is Associate Professor at the University of Lorraine, France, where she teaches Early Modern Drama. She has an academic background in English and Musicology. She holds an Agrégation in English, and a PhD in Musicology (Paris-Sorbonne University) which investigates the relationship between music and Early Modern literature. The author of many articles in books and journals including Cahiers Elisabéthains, she is the co-editor (with Pierre Degott) of Musique et théâtre dans les Iles Britanniques.

Contents



Introduction 1



Part One: Architectonics














‘The Bond of All Things’: Neoplatonic Ideas








of Eros and Music in the Early Modern Episteme

Theories of union: discourses of Eros and music



Classical and Christian theories of Eros and music



Speculative music and the Neoplatonic Eros as binding agents



Musical harmony in the microcosm and in the political body



Unity as poetic principle



2 Empowering Eros: Embodied Harmonies and Erotic Mediation

Eros and music as mediating agents



Sensual love and practical music as educational agents



Practical music as love’s preferred agent



The ambiguity of music’s erotic agency



The dual agency of music and the erotic ear



3 ‘Love’s proper exercice’: Eros and the dance

Erotic action and temperate dancing



The degradation of the cosmic dance:



"Sellenger’s round, or The Beginning of the World"



The erotic dancing body



The ambivalent rhetorical status of the dancing body



4 The Ambivalent Lute

The Orphic Lute



The Political Lute



The Erotic Lute



The Fair Lutenist



Part Two: Poetics














Ideas of Eros in the Early Modern Lute Ayre and Madrigal






The ethos of the musical genres and the two Eros



Ideas of Eros in madrigal and lute song lyrics



‘Infinite Volumes’: Miscellanies of love



in Elizabethan madrigal and lute ayre lyrics



Neoplatonic ideas of love in the lyrics



The voice as erotic instrument



Rhetoric and eroticis



6 Erotic and Rhetorical Trivializations of Music in the English Epyllion

Music and Eros in the English epyllion



Natural music and the harmonic world



Erotic trivializations of music in the epyllion



‘Love is forme’: fiction and friction








Desire as Palimpsest, or the Myth of Philomel






in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus

Philomel as musical myth



Expressing the unspeakable: Lavinia as Philomel



Philomel, an ‘innocent Siren’?



Philomel as Failed Orpheus: Dismembering the Body Politic



8 Specularity or speculation? Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis

Echo/echo and the music of the spheres



Transformative Encounters: Echo and the twofold nature of Eros 162 Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis



The Speculating Echo



Conclusion



Notes



Selected Bibliography



Index