10/19- “Linda Austern: Lady Music: Figuring ‘A Matron Among Other Arts’ in Early Modern England”

October 4, 2023 Amanda Rajnauth

The Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance (SSWR) and The Center for the Study of Women and Society (CSWS) are pleased to present Linda Austern: Lady Music: Figuring ‘A Matron Among Other Arts’ in Early Modern England, Thursday, October 19 from 6:00 – 7:30 PM on Zoom.

Continuing an age-old practice, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English thinkers personified music as a woman, which overlapped with Latin learning and with residual archaic-English conventions to grant female or male gender to certain inanimate nouns, of which music must be recognized as one. This, in turn, intersected with ancient bodily metaphors for creativity that ultimately complicated facile gender binaries, encouraging men to speak of their musical processes in terms of female reproductive processes and bodily nurture and ultimately empowering women musicians.

Linda Austern is a Professor of Musicology at Northwestern University. She has published widely on early modern music and musical culture in relation to literature, gender, natural philosophy and the visual arts in western Europe, especially Tudor and Stuart England. Her most recent monograph is Both From the Ears and Mind: Thinking About Music in Early Modern England and she is currently finishing Princess of Delights and Delight of Princes: Gendering Music in Early Modern England.

For more information and to RSVP, click here: https://bit.ly/SSWRLindaAustern