‘Your Muse Remains Forever’: memory and monumentality in Elizabethan manuscript partbooks

Abstract

The presence within Elizabethan music collections of antiphons and motets with explicitly Catholic themes has long been a source of interest and historiographical argument. The old theory that the inclusion of such pieces reveals covert Catholic beliefs among early modern collectors has been undermined by recent historical research, and it is now more frequently taken as evidence of their education and discerning musical taste. This article argues that the most important shared characteristic of this musical corpus is not its Catholic origins, but the status of its composers as (nearly always) both British and already dead. By interrogating late Elizabethan and early Jacobean discourse surrounding the British past, and the ways that the past was investigated and evidenced—particularly the study of funerary monuments and other material culture—I reveal that Tudor copyists explicitly invoked tropes of memory and memorialization in their copies of contemporary and earlier music, which link their collections to broader notions of developing national identity. In so doing, they shifted the emphasis of their collections, allowing problematic Latin motet texts to acquire new meaning within mainstream Protestant thought.