AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, March 8, 2014 The Boston Conservatory Samantha Bassler, "John Dowland and Constructions of Melancholy as Disability in Early Modern England" In the past, scholars of early modern England considered John Dowland's lute songs as seventeenth-century examples of religious melancholy and the cult of melancholia. Recent scholarship on melancholy and music in early modern England argues that cultural thinking about melancholy evolved significantly throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, calling for a nuanced view of the relationship between early modern conceptions of melancholy and Dowland's lute songs. As Eubanks Winkler has shown, the early modern English conception of melancholy is complex; often intertwined with theories about madness, gender, and the supernatural. To navigate these complexities, I utilize disability studies and investigate melancholy as a narrative prosthesis in Dowland's lute songs, demonstrati...
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