Confession Carried Aloft: Music, Religious Identity, and Sacred Space in London, c. 1540-1560

Abstract

The gradual unfolding of religious reform movements in Tudor England has generated considerable scholarship intent on evaluating why and how the English reformations happened as they did. Although musicologists typically consider the reigns of Edward VI (1547–53) and Mary I (1553–8) as distinct “Protestant” and “Catholic” periods, respectively, historians including Christopher Haigh, Susan Brigden, and Diarmaid MacCulloch have shown that religious practices and beliefs remained remarkably heterogeneous even into the reign of James I. This dissertation examines music and religious identity in mid-sixteenth-century London, investigating the cases in which local parishes and individual inhabitants turned to music—in a variety of forms, styles, genres, and contexts—to make sense of the doctrinal and liturgical reforms imposed on them by a rapidly changing succession of monarchs in the two decades from c. 1540–1560. Through a study of archival documents, popular print books and broadsides, contemporary diaries, religious drama, and manuscript and print sources of music—undertaking research into topics and repertoires not usually studied in musicological scholarship—this dissertation not only shows that music played a larger role in the early English reformations than has been heretofore acknowledged, but also demonstrates that it was the versatility of music as a communicative medium that allowed it to facilitate, reinforce, and reflect religious change in this pluralistic society.

A basic assumption underlying this study is that the transformation of religious life in mid-sixteenth-century London entailed a radical rethinking not only of religious dogma, but also (and more importantly) of the phenomenology of ritual as a sensory experience. Drawing on theories of ritual, space, and place by writers such as Michel de Certeau and Catherine Bell, as well as work in sixteenth-century sensory theory by Matthew Milner, this dissertation highlights how Londoners used music and sound to sacralize formerly Catholic (and then recently Protestant) spaces, corroborating Jonathan Z. Smith’s contention that “ritual is not an expression of or a response to ‘the Sacred’; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual.” In sixteenth-century England, the church was omnipresent; people attended mass on Sundays, read from prayer books in their homes, celebrated with their trade guilds at special worship services, and sang religious ballads together. Beginning with the parish church, this dissertation offers evidence that polyphonic music—whether in Latin or English—was foundational rather than incidental to liturgical as well as domestic religious expression. Text-oriented forms of religious music, especially that issued in print for wide circulation, likewise provided an important means for articulating confessional teaching during these years. Both reformers and conservatives also saw the potential of music and sound to render profane places temporarily sacred; those across the confessional spectrum used public performances including celebratory religious processions and theatrical productions as opportunities to invite religious conversion. By investigating music making across these confessional, performative, and contextual boundaries, this dissertation demonstrates that mid-sixteenth-century Londoners used both new and old music to anchor contemporary practice in the past and mediate between shifting religious orthodoxies, providing a window into what historian Christopher Marsh has called “the view from the pew.”