Background
PhD, University of Chicago
Linda Phyllis Austern is a specialist in Western European, and especially English, music of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. Her expertise includes the intersections between music and the visual arts, gender and sexuality, natural philosophy, and the Shakespearean theater. Her monographs include Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking About Music in Early Modern England (2020) and Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance (1994). She has edited Music, Sensation, and Sensuality (2002), and co-edited Beyond Boundaries: Re-Thinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (2017); Psalms in the Early Modern World (2011); and Music of the Sirens (with Inna Naroditskaya 2006).
Professor Austern's articles and reviews have appeared in collections of scholarly essays and such journals as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicological Research, The Journal of Musicology, Music and Letters, Modern Philology, The Musical Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, and Shakespeare Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, British Academy, Newberry Library, The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College (Harvard University), and National Endowment for the Humanities. She is presently finishing a monograph called Princess of Delights and Delight of Princes: Gendering Music in Early Modern England.
Professor Austern recently completed a term as vice-president of the North American British Music Studies Association. She also serves as Musical Advisor for the forthcoming Oxford University Press Complete Works of John Marston, is a member of the Advisory Committee for Seventeenth-Century Music for Grove Music Online/Oxford Music Online, and has previously served on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association (International Advisory Panel), and Renaissance Quarterly.
Selected Works/Publications
BOOKS
Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking About Music in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), winner of the Diana McVeagh Prize for the Best Book on British Music, 2021.
Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England, co-edited with Candace Bailey and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)
Psalms in the Early Modern World, co-edited with Kari Boyd McBride and David Orvis (Surrey, UK; and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2011)
Music of the Sirens, co-edited with Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)
Music, Sensation and Sensuality: A Book of Essays, editor, Cultural and Critical Musicology series (New York: Routledge 2002)
Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance (London and New York: Gordon and Breach, 1992; reissue Routledge, 2024)
ARTICLES
“’Well-Sorted and Ordered’: Sociable Music-Making and Gentlemen’s Recreation in the Era of Byrd and Weelkes,” Early Music 51 (2023): 551-567.
“Manipulating Music at the Court of Elizabeth I,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 142 (2017): 207-216
“Women’s Musical Voices in Sixteenth-Century England,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2008): 127-152.
“Words on Music: The Case of Early Modern England,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 199-244.
"The Siren, the Muse and the God of Love: Music and Gender in Seventeenth-Century English Emblem Books," The Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1999): 95-138.
"'For, Love's a Good Musician': Performance, Audition and Erotic Disorders in Early Modern Europe," The Musical Quarterly 82 (1998), pp. 614-653.
“Nature, Culture, Myth and the Musician in Early Modern England,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998): 1-47
"'The Conceit of the Minde': Music, Medicine, and Mental Process in Early Modern England," Irish Musical Studies 4.1 (1996): 133-151.
"'Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie': Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England," Music and Letters 74 (1993): 343-354.
"'Art to Enchant:' Musical Magic and its Practitioners in English Renaissance Drama," Journal of the Royal Musical Association 115 (1990): 191-206.
"'Sing Againe Siren': The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature," Reniassance Quarterly 42 (1989): 420-448.
"Sweet Meats with Sour Sauce: The Genesis of Musical Irony in English Drama After 1600," The Journal of Musicology 4 (1986): 472-490.
"Musical Parody in the Jacobean City Comedy," Music and Letters 66 (1985): 355-366.
“Thomas Ravenscroft: Musical Chronicler of an Elizabethan Theater Company," Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985): 238-263.
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Wax Figure or Anne Boleyn,” in The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits, ed. Vincenzo Borghetti and Tim Shephard (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023): 477-481
“Anne Boleyn, Musician: A Romance across Centuries and Media,” in Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction, ed. James B. Fitzmaurice, Naomi J. Miller, and Sara Jayne Steen, Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World series (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2022): 141-154. (Winner of the SSEMW Collaborative Project Award, 2023.)
“Sing Willow, &c.”: Willow Songs, Cultural Memory, and the Establishment of an “Authentic” Shakespeare Music Canon,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Christopher Wilson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2022)
“Music, Its Histories, and Shakespearean (Inter-)Theatricality in Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle,” in Bill Barclay and David Lindley, eds., Shakespeare, Music and Performance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 84-98.
“’Lo Here I Burn’: Musical Figurations and Fantasies of Male Desire in Early Modern England,” in Eroticism in Early Modern Music, ed. by Bonnie Blackburn and Laurie Stras (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 175-202.
“’The Mystic Pow’r of Music’s Unison’: The Conjuncture of Word, Music, and Performance Practice in the Era of Katherine Philips,” in The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips: A Poetics of Culture, Politics and Friendship, ed. by David L. Orvis and Ryan Singh Paul (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2015), pp. 213-241.
“Domestic Song and the Circulation of Masculine Social Energy in Early Modern England,” in Gender and Song in Early Modern England, ed. by Leslie Dunn and Katherine Larson (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 123-138. (Winner of the SSEMW Collaborative Project Honorable Mention Award in 2015)
“Women, Gender, and Music,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allyson M. Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 509-532.
“Music and Manly Wit in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of the Catch,” in Concepts of Creativity in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Rebecca Herissone and Alan Howard (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 281-308.
“’For Musicke is the Handmaid of the Lord’: Women, Psalms, and Domestic Music-Making in Early Modern England,” in Psalms in the Early Modern World, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd BcBride, and David L. Orvis (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 77-114.
“Music on the Jacobean Stage,” in Thomas Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 184-194.
“’Teach Me to Heare Mermaides Singing’: Embodiments of (Acoustic) Pleasure and Danger in the Modern West,” in Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, eds., Music of the Sirens (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2006), pp. 52-104.
“The Music in the Play,” in Michael Neill, ed., The Oxford Shakespeare: Othello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; reissued 2008), pp. 445-454.
“Portrait of the Artist as (Female) Musician,” in Thomasin LaMay, ed., Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies (Aldershot, Hants, England; and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005), pp. 15-62.
“’ ‘Tis Nature’s Voice’: Music, Scientific Inquiry, and the Hidden World in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe,” in Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, eds., Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 30-67.
"'All Things of this World, is but the Musicke of Inconstancie': Music, Materiality, and Spiritual Transcendence in Seventeenth-Century 'Vanitas' Imagery," in Katherine McIver, ed., Art and Music in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, Hants, England; and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), pp. 287-332.
“’My Mother Musicke’: Early Modern Music and Fantasies of Embodiment,” in Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds., Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregivers in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2000), pp. 239-281.
"'No Pill's Gonna Cure My Ill': Erotic Melancholy and Traditions of Musical Healing in the Modern West," in Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts, ed. by Penelope Gouk (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2000), pp. 113-36.
"Musical Treatments of Lovesickness: the Early Modern Heritage," in Peregrine Horden, ed., Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy Since Antiquity (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2000), pp. 213-45.
"'Foreign Conceits and Wand'ring Devices': The Erotic as Exotic," in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. by Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), pp. 26-42.
"Music and the English Controversy over Women," in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. by Susan Cook and Judy Tsou (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), (winner of Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book of 1995 and nominee for the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award, 1995), pp. 52-69.
"'No Women are Indeed': The Boy Actor as Vocal Seductress in English Renaissance Drama," in Embodied Voices: Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. by Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 83-102.
"Love, Death, and Ideas of Music in the English Renaissance," in Love and Death in the Renaissance, ed. by Kenneth R. Bartlett, Konrad Eisenbichler, and Janice Liedl, Dovehouse Studies in Literature 3 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions Inc., 1991): 17-36.