Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature

Contents

• Contents
• Introduction 1
• Part One: Architectonics
• 'The Bond of All Things': Neoplatonic Ideas
• of Eros and Music in the Early Modern Episteme
• Theories of union: discourses of Eros and music
• Classical and Christian theories of Eros and music
• Speculative music and the Neoplatonic Eros as binding agents
• Musical harmony in the microcosm and in the political body
• Unity as poetic principle
• 2 Empowering Eros: Embodied Harmonies and Erotic Mediation
• Eros and music as mediating agents
• Sensual love and practical music as educational agents
• Practical music as love's preferred agent
• The ambiguity of music's erotic agency
• The dual agency of music and the erotic ear
• 3 'Love's proper exercice': Eros and the dance
• Erotic action and temperate dancing
• The degradation of the cosmic dance:
• "Sellenger's round, or The Beginning of the World"
• The erotic dancing body
• The ambivalent rhetorical status of the dancing body
• 4 The Ambivalent Lute
• The Orphic Lute
• The Political Lute
• The Erotic Lute
• The Fair Lutenist
• Part Two: Poetics
• Ideas of Eros in the Early Modern Lute Ayre and Madrigal
• The ethos of the musical genres and the two Eros
• Ideas of Eros in madrigal and lute song lyrics
• 'Infinite Volumes': Miscellanies of love
• in Elizabethan madrigal and lute ayre lyrics
• Neoplatonic ideas of love in the lyrics
• The voice as erotic instrument
• Rhetoric and eroticis
• 6 Erotic and Rhetorical Trivializations of Music in the English Epyllion
• Music and Eros in the English epyllion
• Natural music and the harmonic world
• Erotic trivializations of music in the epyllion
• 'Love is forme': fiction and friction
• Desire as Palimpsest, or the Myth of Philomel
• in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus
• Philomel as musical myth
• Expressing the unspeakable: Lavinia as Philomel
• Philomel, an 'innocent Siren'?
• Philomel as Failed Orpheus: Dismembering the Body Politic
• 8 Specularity or speculation? Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis
• Echo/echo and the music of the spheres
• Transformative Encounters: Echo and the twofold nature of Eros 162 Echo and Eros in Venus and Adonis
• The Speculating Echo
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index