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