Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. Linda Phyllis Austern brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical performance, and the remarkable ways in which English people understood music to inform other endeavors, from astrology and self-care to divinity and poetics. Music was considered both art and science, and discussions of music and musical terminology provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning. This book demonstrates how knowledge of music permitted individuals to both reveal and conceal membership in specific social, intellectual, and ideological communities. Attending to materials that go beyond music’s conventional limits, these chapters probe the role of music in commonplace books, health-maintenance and marriage manuals, rhetorical and theological treatises, and mathematical dictionaries. Ultimately, Austern illustrates how music was an indispensable frame of reference that became central to the fabric of life during a time of tremendous intellectual, social, and technological change.

"The mental, experiential and musical landscapes of human beings in the 16th and 17th centuries were different from ours. Austern’s latest book is an ambitious attempt to map out that territory in detail." - BBC Music Magazine

"“The impact of Linda Phyllis Austern's Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England 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. . . . 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.”
 " - Journal of British Studies

"Linda Phyllis Austern’s latest contribution to early modern studies is wide-ranging, extremely learned, and illuminating to those interested in the history of ideas in general and the history of ideas about music in particular... Austern’s book is filled with knowledge distilled and clarified. She has digested and made comprehensible many of the most important ideas from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from humoral theory to cosmology, and shown how music is at the heart of them." - Seventeenth-Century News

"Austern’s densely packed, highly learned study is an excellent guide to the various ways that our predecessors grappled with music’s slippery and mysterious powers on body and soul. . . . Both from the Ears and Mind provides a rich array of material that will undoubtedly foster much new research on early modern English musical culture." - Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

"With its wide-ranging scope and multidisciplinary approach, this book should become essential reading for musicologists, historians, and indeed anyone who wants to further their understanding of the complex relationship between 'actual' music as performed and listened to and ideas about music that are held in a given society, including, but not limited to, early modern England." - Revue de Musicologie