Female lute accomplishment and performance practices in early seventeenth-century England

Abstract

This study explores the pedagogy, performance practices, and accomplishments of women lute players in early seventeenth-century England and analyses the ways in which lute-related skills contributed to performative self-fashioning through musical accomplishment. The opening chapter explores ideas associated with female lute players through an analysis of depictions of female lutenists in visual art and poetry, and compares these symbolic and fantastical depictions with the reality of women’s lute performance practices which took place within domestic spaces. The second part of this chapter develops a methodology incorporating practice-based research involving early seventeenth-century clothing in the context of personal historical reenactment experiences, shedding light on historical women’s lute technique. A detailed case study on one particular female owned source of lute music, the manuscript GB-London, Royal Academy of Music MS603 (known as the ‘Margaret Board lute book’) follows over the course of the following two chapters, and a range of aspects of this manuscript are explored. Chapter 2 presents new archival information about Margaret, her life and family, and explores what this information tells us about her lute book and the music contained within. In turn, aspects of the musical and social network encoded in the manuscript offer insights into the place of music in Margaret’s life. Chapter 3 focuses on the lute lesson as it would have been experienced by a young gentry lady in the first quarter of the seventeenth century (explored through the Board lute book). Aspects of Margaret Board’s lessons are reconstructed, and her theoretical and practical musical accomplishments investigated, via the practice-based analysis of her diligently notated symbols for ornamentation. The final chapter contains the critical commentary on the four pieces of creative-practice output which accompany the written thesis.