The impact of Linda Phyllis Austern's Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England (2020) will be felt well beyond the field of musicology. Both from the Ears and Mind is perhaps the most explicit and thorough monograph-length analysis of early modern English thought about music to date—certainly since landmark publications by Penelope Gouk (Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth Century England, 1999) and Christopher Marsh (Music and Society in Early Modern England, 2010). As in the research of Gouk and Marsh, Austern's scholarly approaches to contemporary musical knowledge are made not only readable but relatable to scholars and students in a wide range of early modern disciplines and subdisciplines, including (but not limited to) intellectual history, material and visual culture, sound studies, literature, and the history of emotions and sensing.

The depth of Austern's work on English musical thought is unmatched, however, in terms of both its focus, which is markedly different from that of other scholars in this area, and in the variety of sources upon which she draws. Rather than concentrating exclusively on major treatises, though she does use these sources, Austern turns to evidence from commonplace books, dictionaries, medical and marriage manuals, and emblems. Austern's stylish prose centers musical knowledge through an exploration of the educated debates on music and its meaning in relation to areas such as medicine, worship, harmony and proportion, and interior experience.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to Austern's methodology. While some of this content will be familiar to those well versed in the area, this chapter provides a necessary overview of how early moderns conceived of music, metaphorically and otherwise, and the verbal modes they would have encountered for understanding musical knowledge. Chapter 2 covers another well-trodden path—the debate over the appropriate use of music in Christian worship and moral life. Yet as Austern points out, “[b]eyond predictable sectarian lines, and rival interlocutors who recontextualized the same inherited wisdom about music and the sacred, stand some surprising alliances, hints of cross-confessional musical tourism, and occasionally uneasy mergers of sacred and secular gestures and genres” (4). So often in this period, binary tensions such as confession and music are far more muddled than they have been portrayed in the historiography. Austern's respect for this “uneasy” state brings vital nuance to the debate. Chapter 3 explores the spaces between math, metaphor, music, and metaphysics. Because this is a massive topic, Austern subdivides the chapter into thematic elements, such as magic, matrimony, and alchemy and astrology. Chapter 4 focuses on how music was thought to influence or build connections and relationships between elements of body, society, and spirit. This includes music's central role in a contemporary understanding of internal processes, incorporating soul and sense, but also individuals and their surroundings; Austern's use of Thomas Weelkes's madrigal “Thule, the period of cosmographie” is particularly persuasive. Finally, chapter 5 focuses on music and medicine, or Austern writes, “the issue of music in human ecology” (5). Austern is not claiming in any way to be the first to recognize a relationship between music and bodily and mental health; her achievements are in isolating and interrogating the spaces that lie uncomfortably between our modern ideas of medicine and ontology—not only in how music worked as a balm for pains of body and mind but how early moderns experienced music as a mode for healing that could go between the intersection of sensuous physicality and metaphysics.

In drawing together these pervasive themes beneath a single, widely angled lens, Austern reflects on music's ability to shape identities and communities beyond platitudes of, for example, universal harmony. She shows how music and music making was at the very heart of early modern intellectual life in ways hitherto underestimated. Austern uses visual culture particularly well, drawing attention to new sources for understanding how contemporaries thought about music (some beautifully printed in color) and the reader appreciates music examples of complete songs. The wealth of primary sources in Austern's book means it is a volume I will consult frequently, returning to its pages time and again in the way one does with Marsh. Both from the Ears and Mind is a rich, valuable resource that will quickly become an authority and key reference text on thought about music in early modern England.

Indeed, I suspect Austern was very specific in subtitling her book Thinking about Music in Early Modern England. The word thinking is spot on—her focus is not simply on how early moderns wrote about music or represented music in imagery. It is an attempt (bolstered by the history of sensing and other phenomenological or ontological fields) at understanding a multifaceted and historically specific mode of thinking. This, in turn, affects how we think about our own experiences of this music as well. Both from the Ears and Mind is the timely and stimulating account that I wish I had access to when writing my own recently published monograph on early modern musical knowledge.

As Austern astutely says, “music was no mere metaphor. To a culture that emphasized aurality as a pathway to knowledge and unity, it remained a pragmatic art with definite place in the sacred service, in personal devotion, and in pastimes of all sorts. Music was truly a delectation between the outward senses and the mind or reason, and therefore it enabled communication between the two” (75).

Early seventeenth-century English thought is often overshadowed on both sides—boxed in by canonical continental sixteenth-century thinkers and the looming Enlightenment. Consequently, this period of musical thought has often been dismissed by scholars as simply derivative or constituted entirely of metaphoric platitudes. Austern shows us not only why music is absolutely indispensable to an understanding of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century intellectual life, but also why the discourse about music at this time is more meaningful than often assumed.