This is the fifth and last in a series of short posts about the Sound Faith: Religion and the Acoustic World 1400-1800 conference at the University of York from 12-14 June 2024.

The final panel was ‘The Soundscape of the English Parish Church and Beyond’, chaired by Ros Oates. It opened with a very engaging online paper from R. Adam Hill (St Mary’s University, Calgary) on Superstitious Ringing: Reforming the Bells of the Henrician and Edwardian Church. He began by outlining Henry VIII’s changing attitude to creeping to the cross, so by 1536 Henry was minded to define superstition as any sensory and popular experience which might remind people of the church of Rome. He was particularly bothered by bells. Adam noted that parish bells were rung to be heard – they were loud and aesthetically pleasing, able to cut through other sounds and grab people’s attention. They were rung frequently and dominated the community’s soundscape. Changing attitudes were informed by the need to transform services and reorder public worship, while the other focus was on the intercession between the living and the dead. Bells nevertheless survived iconoclasm because their sound wasn’t sacred but was used to draw people together to hear the word of God. Their use was restricted by the Injunctions of 1538, which prevented, for example, their ringing at the elevation of the Host. Instead of being rung too much, silence should replace the bell, undermining the doctrine of transubstantiation. It wasn’t the sound of the bell itself that was criticised, so the sounding of the bell at the beginning of the sermon instead of at the elevation, which shifted the focus from a miracle to an act of hearing. 

Bells had a particular function in the remembrance of the dead which reinforced ideas of purgatory. Henry was somewhat ambivalent about the removal of purgatory, but changes meant that funerals became bigger and more expensive. The ringing of bells might, in the contemporary view, put people in mind of the dead rather than being about purgatory, but these were clearly up for discussion in the period. Injunctions controlled the excessive use of bells for the rings for the dying. 

Next came John Craig (Simon Fraser University)’s paper, Choirs, Conducts and Congregations: The Changing Soundscape of English Parish Churches, 1549-1642. John apparently sings in the parish church of Louth in Lincolshire, where the Pilgrimage of Grace broke out! He is also putting together a database of purchases and ownership of texts in parish churches which is due to go live in 2025. Anyway, speaking without powerpoint, he talked about changing modes of expression in the parish church, and the sorts of texts which were used in churches, given that various Injunctions insisted that certain books were owned and, in some cases, used by parish churches. They were required to have Bibles and Books of Common Prayer, but not, as far as we know, metrical psalms. Nevertheless, much of the evidence suggests that many in London did, given that the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter went through so many editions. Early modern memories were trained to listen, and so presumably outside London they were learning by ear. Perhaps also they were only sung by a few people, not the whole congregation, and this perhaps also explained the custom of lining out psalms which goes back to at least 1550. It was in part how people learned the psalms. 

Moreover, congregational singing included women which was unusual so it even caused comment at the time. But the stress on the female nature of congregational singing highlights the masculine nature of polyphonic singing in church. He concluded by suggesting that English liturgical music of necessity assimilated material and adapted in order to survive.

‘The Auditory Politics of the English Revolution: Church as a Contested Soundspace’ was given by Kei Nasu (International Christian University, Tokyo). Kei talked about the change in the soundscape of York Minster when it was taken over by the Parliamentary forces in the civil war. He described the sound of congregation, choir and organs playing and singing psalms, but noted that this was banned under the Parliamentary regime. He suggested that the choice of listening or not listening to sounds in the period was a political choice and described sound as a part of a conflict.  He used the term soundspace rather than soundscape because it relates to the place and allows for competing, that is, actively conflicting sounds. I began to wonder whether the two ideas were complementary, but that is perhaps something to think more about later. After all, he did comment that Parliament tried to reform the soundspace of the church to create a different soundscape. By the time parliament finally banned organs, verbal and physical attacks on them had been going on for years. When people wanted to object to the service they were in, they sang loud psalms, sometimes specifically choosing Psalm 119 which has 176 verses to drown out polyphony and/or organs. 

Finally, we heard Jacqueline Wylde (St Francis Xavier University) presenting online on ‘Singing Beyond the Parish: Resounding the Early English Metrical Psalmes’. She presented research that came out of a project that seeks to understand the ways in which where the psalms were sung and who sung them made them different in different times and places. She used earwitness accounts to recreate the ways in which they were sung. She spoke in particular about domestic psalm singing, which might in itself have different functions including sociability, the creation of beautiful sounds, and personal devotion. She played several examples of how the psalms might have sounded, recreated from different accounts, and drew attention to the differences which had led her to make the choices she did in preparing the performances. 

After a short break, the last keynote of the conference was given by Jan-Friedrich Missfelder (Universität Basel) on Voice and Intermediality in the Early Reformation. This really spoke to my interest in the intermedial aspects of news which came together in our Cambridge Element from last Christmas, Communicating the News in Early Modern Europe. He pointed out that Thomas Kaufmann (The Saved and the Damned) has suggested that the Reformation captured the ephemeral voices of two generations to settle in the Reformation. The main reformers were print natives, but the circular relationship of print and reform has not gone unchallenged, for which we might see Andrew Pettegree and Matthew Hall’s Historical Journal article, ‘The Reformation and the Book – a Reconsideration’. We must not forget the face-to-face aspects of the Reformation, which are outlined by Scribner’s 1981 German article ‘Flugblatt und Analphabetentum: Wie kam der gemeine Mann zu Reformatorischen’ as well as ‘Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Ideas’, which also discussed the visual basis of much oral culture. This highlighted the requirement of the voice in Reformation communication. Nevertheless, Pettegree challenged Scribner’s argument in favour of reading aloud and image, suggesting that they couldn’t convert high numbers of ordinary people, especially in comparison with preaching and, in particular, song. In many places, the Reformation was a singing movement – Calvinist hymns and Lutheran psalms were important in spreading theology. Jan-Friedrich suggested that song and voice were used in vocal media which went beyond just singing, including ballads, didactic pamphlets and printed sermons. He based his talk on Scribner’s concept of ‘score’. A musical score is more than just the individual melodies of instruments brought together on a page – they are highly intermedial.

His example was a manuscript ballad which presents a one-sided, antagonistic account of the life of Dr Thomas Murner, who died in 1537. The coming of the Reformation and then Peasants’ War forced him to flee Strasbourg and have to eventually return to his hometown. It mocks him for his un-priestlike behaviour and uses a slight change in spelling to turn his name into a foolish person and the purr like a cat. The reference alludes to his writing of the Ship of Fools, his reputation for grumpiness, and slightly hides his identity. The animal metaphors were used for several Papal men, but in Murner’s case the nickname stuck and was used several times. One pamphlet is particularly vocal, with phonetic spellings of Murner the cat murmuring. Murner actually took ownership of his nickname and used it to frame a pamphlet attacking Luther.

The various Swiss cantons were divided over religion and in May 1526 they held a disputation in Baden, in which Murner had a minor role. He nevertheless became the centre of media attention, being represented as a bishop who cares more about his good life than preaching the gospel in a very successful play called Concilium. This sparked a print war, at least some of them in verse, much in the same vein as the ballads on Thomas Cromwell’s fall in 1540 which uses visceral language for muck spreading. By the time the disputation started they had already been published. Further ballads then profiled Murner’s less than central role at the disputation, resorting to allusion and presupposing a great deal of knowledge about what went on at the disputation. He questioned whether people needed to know the underlying meanings, or whether because they were full of dirty jokes they could be enjoyed by anyone regardless of how much they understood of the allusions.

Jan-Friedrich then considered whether they were actually sung. One of the commentators suggested that the tune direction was less for singing than for the purpose of bringing it’s added layer of allusion to the piece. We do know that 5 songs were sung against Murner, and that the authorities felt the need to ban the singing of songs on Zwingli and the disputation, which does suggest that they were sung publicly. 

Going back to the manuscript song, Jan-Friedrich noted that it indicates the existence of Murner’s calendar. After the disputation, Murner didn’t let the matter of Zwingli’s dishonour or the issue of the satirical plays drop. He published a calendar not of liturgical, medicinal or agricultural knowledge but of Lutheran church robbers and heretics. This itself, however, was based on a Protestant calendar which had replaced the traditional saints’ names with Old Testament prophets, where Murner’s had listed heretics. The song provides alternative readings of Murner’s calendar, so is highly intermedial. He wondered whether the reader or singer of the song was expected to have a copy of the calendar to hand, and whether they were evidence of an intermedial network the elements of which could not be separated. He argued that the tune was chosen very carefully to turn accusations against the accuser, and that it’s vocality cannot be separated from its intermediality. He concluded that when sixteenth-century people sang they were carefully navigating sound, voice, vocality, images and prints which were all highly intermedial.

After the keynote, Simon Ditchfield gave a vote of thanks, and Emilie Murphy gave the final remarks, drawing attention to the range of methodologies and work being undertaken. The conference then closed with a wine reception and informal dinner of pizza, and I walked back across the park and the allotments to the guest house with Oscar Patton and Rachel Willie, which was lovely.