Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England by Penelope Gouk

Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England by Penelope Gouk

The role of natural magic in the rise of seventeenth-century experimental science has been the subject of lively controversy for several decades. Now Penelope Gouk introduces a new element into the debate: how music mediated between these two domains. Arguing that changing musical practice in sixteenth-century Europe affected seventeenth-century English thought on science and magic, she maps the various relationships among these apparently separate disciplines. Gouk explores these relationships in several ways. She adopts the methods of social geography to discuss the disciplinary, social, and intellectual overlapping of music, science, and natural magic. She gives a historical account of the emergence of acoustics in English science, the harmonically based physics of Robert Hooke, and the position of harmonics within Newton’s transformation of natural philosophy. And she provides a gallery of images in which contemporary representations of instruments, practices, and concepts demonstrate the way in which musical models informed and transformed those of natural philosophy. Gouk shows that as the “occult” features of music became subject to the new science of experimentation, and as their causes became evident, so natural magic was pushed outside the realms of scientific discourse.

Penelope Gouk, Emerita, University of Manchester. Her recent publications include Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts, and she is currently writing about changing medical explanations for music's effects between the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Helen Hills is Professor of Art History at the University of York, UK. She has published widely on seventeenth-century Italian architecture, including Invisible City: the architecture of devotion in aristocratic convents in baroque Naples, and is the editor of Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780300073836
ISBN 10	0300073836
Title	Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England
Author	Penelope Gouk
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	Yale University Press
Year published	1999-08-11
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable