The Epilogue presents two central conclusions: (1) that song is a slippery and multidimensional form that demands to be considered in embodied, gendered, and performance-based terms, and (2) that song constituted a vital, and vitally charged, rhetorical medium for women writers, performers, and patrons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Epilogue also open up future areas of critical inquiry, both in relation to early modern women’s writing and literary studies more broadly. In particular, it introduces Early Modern Songscapes, an emergent collaborative and interdisciplinary digital initiative that is responding directly to the methodological questions raised by The Matter of Song in Early Modern England.
Andrea Walkden . Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England. Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016. Pp. 206. $70.00 (cloth).