Katherine Zieman's Books

Singing the New Song

Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England

By: Katherine Zieman

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Singing the New Song

Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England

By: Katherine Zieman

In Singing the New Song, Katherine Zieman examines the institutions and practices of the liturgy as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word. Where previous studies have described how writing comes to supplant oral forms of communication or how it objectifies relations of power formerly transacted through ritual and ceremony, Zieman shifts the critical gaze to the ritual performance of written texts in the liturgy—effectively changing the focus from writing to reading. Beginning with a history of the elementary educational institution known to modern scholars as the "song school," Zieman shows the continued centrality of liturgical and devotional texts to the earliest stages of literacy training and spiritual formation. Originally, these schools were created to provide liturgical training for literate adult performers who had already mastered the grammatical arts. From the late thirteenth century on, however, the attention and resources of both lay and clerical patrons came to be devoted specifically to young boys, centering on their function as choristers. Because choristers needed to be trained before they received instruction in grammar, the liturgical skills of reading and singing took on a different meaning. This shift in priorities, Zieman argues, is paradigmatic of broader cultural changes, in which increased interest in liturgical performance and varying definitions attached to "reading and singing" caused these practices to take on a life of their own, unyoked from their original institutional settings of monastery and cathedral. Unmoored from the context of the choral community, reading and singing developed into discrete, portable skills that could be put to use in a number of contexts, sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular. Ultimately, they would be carried into a wider public sphere, where they would be transformed into public modes of discourse appropriated by vernacular writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.

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Page Count

312

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812203887

ISBN 13

9780812203882

Staging Harmony

Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama

By: Katherine Steele Brokaw

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Staging Harmony

Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama

By: Katherine Steele Brokaw

In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England’s long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people’s reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for. The theater represented the music of the church’s present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.

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293

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501705911

ISBN 13

9781501705915

Singing the New Song

Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England

By: Katherine Zieman

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Singing the New Song

Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England

By: Katherine Zieman

Differing from previous studies by changing the focus from writing to reading, this examination of the institutions and practices of the liturgy places them as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

314

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812240510

ISBN 13

9780812240511

Book's by Katherine Zieman

Singing the New Song

Singing the New Song

Staging Harmony

Staging Harmony

Singing the New Song

Singing the New Song

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