By Katherine Butler
Boydell & Brewer, PB, 271pp
ISBN 9781783274031
Buy online from Booktopia

Given our seemingly insatiable desire for all things Tudor, a book on music at the court of Queen Elizabeth I looks like it ought to be a good, even a juicy read. Katherine Butler’s scrupulously researched Music in Elizabethan Court Politics is certainly thorough. Her subject, however, is a little hard to pin down, due mostly to a relative paucity of surviving music that can be linked one hundred percent to Elizabeth, whether it’s works for intimate performance in the Privy Chamber, or the grander pieces that accompanied court junkets, monarchical visits and that annual praise-fest, the Royal Progress.

Butler, a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University in the UK, starts small with a look at Elizabeth’s own musical performances – she was adept on lute and virginals – noting the need to balance her self-projection as a cultured statesman against popular accusations that female musicianship was a hotbed of shameful sensuality. Sadly, she cannot tell us what she played, but we do learn who she played for and what it represented in terms of marks of favour of diplomatic...