Music and Society in Early Modern England is the first comprehensive survey of English popular music during the early modern period to be published in over t5o years. Christopher Marsh offers a
fascinating and broad-ranging account of musicians, the power of music, broadside ballads, dancing, psalm-singing and bell-ringing. Drawing on sources ranging from ballads, plays, musical
manuscripts and diaries to wills, inventories, speeches and court records, he investigates the part played by music in the negotiation of social relations, revealing its capacity both to unify
and to divide. The book is lavishly illustrated and is accompanied by a CD featuring forty-eight specially commissioned recordings by the critically acclaimed Dufay Collective. These include
the first ever attempts to reconstruct the distinctive early modern sounds of 'rough music' and unaccompanied congregational psalm-singing.
