England Sings
Singing and the Imagination of Devotion:
Vocal Aesthetics in Early English Protestant Culture
by Susan Tara Brown
Paternoster, 2008
(350 pages, $29.90, hardcover)
reviewed by Lucy E. Carroll
As the great liturgies of the Western and Eastern churches developed, much of their music came to be reserved for singing by a schola cantorum or choir, although some segments of the Ordinary, the unchanging prayers of the Mass, could be sung by the faithful. The great body of early hymnody, though, grew up not for singing in the Eucharistic liturgies, but for the Divine Office, and for devotions such as Benediction, novenas, and the like.
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