https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7314-297X
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Eleanor Chan, A musical-visual frontier?, Early Music, Volume 49, Issue 4, November 2021, Pages 615–616, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caac004
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Within the bounds of the friezes of the Eglantine Table, a profusion of interests are represented: in plant life, in godly and secular music, both vocal and instrumental, in the art of writing and in musical notation, in short-lived games of chance and in lines of inheritance stretching back to time immemorial. The teeming surface of the Table reveals the richness and variety of country-house life in the sixteenth century; it is a virtuosic attempt to fit, within a limited frame, the manifold occupations of an accomplished mind which, in the spirit of Renaissance humanism, desires to make itself universal: farsi universale. Whatever else the Eglantine Table might be, it is witness to the compulsion … to turn from the complex and chaotic world towards schematic reductions of the same.
(E. Wilson Lee, ‘Tables of the mind’, Music and instruments, pp.219–30, at p.219)
The Eglantine Table has fascinated academic and amateur Renaissance enthusiasts alike for nearly 500 years. A visual art object that serves, as David Collins memorably put it, as ‘a manuscript in wood’ (D. Collins, ‘A 16th-century manuscript in wood: the Eglantine Table’, Early Music, iv/3 (1976), pp.275–80), its legibility and coquettish pretence to legibility as a musical source continues to tantalize. Part of its especial seduction lies in its sheer impulse to collapse time and space into a single moment—the tabletop—and the microcosm of Elizabethan recreational life that it represents. Here we have the gaming pieces, the heraldic motifs, the artistry and, crucially for us, the music as it would have been enjoyed in 1568. It is all laid out for us to see, and yet curiously it remains enigmatic even in its openness, its claims that what you see is what you get. Music and instruments of the Elizabethan Age seeks to unpack its riddles, with a fascinating series of essays that speak across disciplinary boundaries.
