When English reformers sang: An ethics of proportion for the sixteenth century.

In this study the use of psalm-singing is taken as a special instance of the use of song in the English social order in the sixteenth century. The aim of the study is to show how reformers sought to use this song to help reshape the oral culture of which they were a part. Reformers in England generally intended the singing of psalms to purge the monarchy (and by implication the realm) of self-interest, teaching singers through delight to "will the good" of the other. The proportion in ethics represented by the intention of congregational song, however, was unachieved. The first two chapters give an analytic history of the use of religious song in the Christian practice in the West from Christian origins to the fifteenth century. The third chapter addresses psalm-singing and Katherine Parr and the English royal household of the 1540s. A discussion of psalm practice at the Elizabethan settlement (1559) when longer-lasting reforms to religious life were initiated follows. The fourth chapter analyzes early texts and tunes of metrical psalms in English in The Whole Booke of Psalmes (1562). The analysis which results recommends these psalms for qualities of performance related to both dance and carol. These performance qualities are shown to be consistent with values, primarily ethical, given to poetry by George Puttenham which Puttenham represents in his treatise The Arte of Poesie (1589) as the figurative yoking together of sound and sense. The fifth chapter displays Puttenham's view of poetry against developing religious practice, particularly against the practice of the eucharist and Biblical interpretation represented by William Perkins, and against Richard II's final soliliquy in Shakespeare's King Richard II. The sixth chapter suggests that as the value of orality to the social order noticably diminishes in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the idea of the will became less and less related to musical-verbal qualities. Thus a reformation ethics of proportion between sound and sense that began with hopes of purging the renaissance monarchy of self-interest that in no wise intended the execution of a king did end there.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105152/1/9635614.pdfDescription of 9635614.pdf : Restricted to UM users only