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.

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.

Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry and novels (by for instance Langland, Erasmus, Sidney, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Eliot and Lowell). But only in the last twenty years or so has it received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader cultural significance. Contributors to this book focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and sociological significance that Walsingham has had for over six hundred years. The collection's essays consider connections between landscape and the sacred, the body and sexuality and Walsingham's place in literature, music and, more broadly, especially since the Reformation, in the construction of cultural memory. The historical range of the essays includes Walsingham's rise to prominence in the later Middle Ages, its destruction during the English Reformation, and the presence of uncanny echoes and traces in early modern English culture, including poems, ballads, music and some of the plays of Shakespeare. Contributions also examine the cultural dynamics of the remarkable revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage and as a cultural icon in the Victorian and modern periods. Hitherto, scholarship on Walsingham has been almost entirely confined to the history of religion. In contrast, contributors to this volume include internationally known scholars from literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, anthropology and musicology as well as theology.

The author offers close examination of the English-language songs of Byrd published in the late 1580s, looking at the music, texts, politics, and other aspects of the songs.

This book surveys the most significant published materials relating to William Byrd. It presents a collection of all-new original essays covering everything from feminist to postcolonial readings of his play as well as source queries and analysis of historical performances of the play.

William Byrd's Gradualia, a set of liturgical music published in 1605 and 1607, is one of the most important compositions of the English Renaissance. Byrd composed this collection based on the Roman Catholic liturgy at a time when this religion was illegal in England, and the performance of its liturgy was punishable by fines, imprisonment, or even death. Not only was it surprising that the normally politically careful Byrd chose to create a liturgical work, but it also went against his usual practice of taking a free approach to text setting â¬" changing words or inserting additional text as he saw fit to suit his music. The Mass cannot be changed; and much of its text is not very inspiring. The challenge, then, to the composer was to find musical inspiration in a text that must be rigidly followed. The resulting work is one of the most unusualâ¬"and often misunderstoodâ¬"collections in the English repertoireKerry McCarthy has undertaken to study how Byrd approached this task, its meaning both musically and philosophically/religiously. Combining both the cultural history of the dangers faced by Catholics who practiced their religion at this time with a very close reading of how Byrd created this work, McCarthy creates a book that will interest musicologists, religious historians, and students of Elizabethan English culture.