Music as the Measure of the Soul: Musical Instruments as Materiality in the English Renaissance Court and Noble Culture

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y proposed project seeks to develop a new understanding of the nature of personal musical performance within Renaissance culture. I seek to explore how musical instruments, made as for self-fashioning and for display, provided permanent visibility to claims of virtue embedded in personal musical accomplishment. I intend to focus on the English Renaissance court for my evidence of a broader European phenomenon because England serves as an enthusiastic latecomer to these Renaissance ideals, and because there is a compelling body of evidence (such as surviving instruments and evidence of ownership) upon which to develop these arguments. I seek to establish how high-status musical instruments, and other material embodiments of music, were made as decorative art in order to respond to the metaphors of humanist virtue embedded in the performing of music. Crucially, this proposed research is intended to explore underlying Renaissance philosophies that underpin these claims. This is a little explored area in the field of musical instruments where 'organology' has chiefly observed the technology of their making.