Song Studies – serie

Politics of Feeling in Songs of the Dutch Revolutionary Period sheds new light on the intertwined history of music and politics by exploring Dutch political songs. In the emotionally charged climate of the Dutch revolutionary period at the close of the eighteenth century, songs became a powerful medium, speaking directly to people’s bodies to engage them in political action. Emphasizing the performative nature of the songs and the interplay between imagination and embodied expression in singing practices, this book shows how beyond merely creating communities, the songs were also instrumental in mobilizing, imagining, and affirming these collectives. It uncovers the diverse roles of these songs, showing how they were used both to polarize and to unite, to mourn and to celebrate. They were employed to imagine and to embody togetherness throughout the Dutch revolutionary period, thereby creating a fixed repertoire of feelings on which various political regimes of that time relied.

This book presents the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between music, rhetoric and Christian Hebraism, by re-appraising the significance of the first German humanist Johannes Reuchlin's study of Kabbalah and cantillation in the light of Renaissance rhetoric.