Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300–1918

Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 presents a range of historical case studies on the sounding worlds of the European past. The chapters in this volume explore ways of thinking about sound historically, and seek to understand how people have understood and negotiated their relationships with the sounding world in Europe from the Middle Ages through to the early twentieth century. They consider, in particular: sound and music in the later Middle Ages; the politics of sound in the early modern period; the history of the body and perception during the Ancien R gime; and the sounds of the city in the nineteenth century and sound and colonial rule at the fin de si cle.

The case studies also range in geographical orientation to include considerations not only of Britain and France, the countries most considered in European historical sound studies in English-language scholarship to date, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, British Colonial India, Germany, Italy and Portugal. Out of this diverse group of case studies emerge significant themes that recur time and again, varying according to time and place: sound, power and identity; sound as a marker of power or violence; and sound, physiology and sensory perception and technologies of sound, consumption and meaning.

Ian Biddle is a cultural theorist and musicologist, working on a range of topics in music- and sound-related areas. He is co-founder and co-ordinating editor of the journal Radical Musicology and is co-convenor, with Beate Muller, of the Newcastle University Genocide Research Group. His work deals with: the cultural history of music and masculinity; music’s intervention in communities and subjectivities; sound, soundscapes and urban experience; the politics of noise. He has interests in Holocaust studies, memory studies, sound studies, Italian workerist and autonomist theory and psychoanalysis. He is author of Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History: The Austro-German Tradition from Hegel to Freud (Ashgate, 2011), editor of Music and Identity Politics (Ashgate, 2012), co-editor, with Kirsten Gibson, of Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Ashgate, 2009) and co-editor of Sound, Music Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (2013). Kirsten Gibson’s research has focused on John Dowlanda s printed songbooks, Elizabethan court politics, early modern musical print culture and discourses of music and masculinity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Her work appears in Early Music History, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Renaissance Studies and Early Music as well as in various essay collections. She is co-editor, with Ian Biddle, of Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Ashgate, 2009).＂