This volume treats early modern song as a musical and embodied practice and considers the implications of reading song not just as lyric text, but as a musical phenomenon that is the product of the singing body. It draws on a variety of genres, from theatre to psalm translations, sonnets and lyrics, and household drama to courtly masques. being both a trained soprano and a literary scholar means Larson has learned to read and interpret early modern music not only as a singer expressing herself in the semi-improvisatory context of performance, but also as an academic trained to be analytical about both music and lyrics on the printed page. This combination of skills and experience has encouraged her to develop a scholarly style that acknowledges 'the matter of song' as an evanescent yet powerfully affective force that can nevertheless be subject to interpretative analysis.