This collection draws together twelve of the best essays related to early music—some never before published—by the influential musician and music scholar Audrey Ekdahl Davidson.

Davidson’s insightful studies of the works of composers such as Palestrina, John Dowland, Henry Lawes, and Hildegard of Bingen appear alongside equally impressive analyses of anonymously composed pieces, including the Planctus Mariae from Cividale del Friuli in Italy, the Ludus Danielis from the Beauvais Cathedral in France, and the Danish vernacular work known as the Roskilde St. John Passion.

Edited by literary scholar Clifford Davidson, Aspects of Early Music and Performance also displays Audrey Davidson’s skills as critic of English Renaissance texts, with carefully considered examinations of works by Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, and George Herbert, as well as an important reconsideration of the Alma redemptoris mater sung by Chaucer’s “little clergeon.”

At one time a professional solo soprano and the founder and longtime director of her own early music group, Davidson also writes compellingly about practical and theoretical issues related to the performance of early music, especially vocal music.

Taken together, these pieces will provide musicologists and performers, as well as students of literature, with important information and fresh insights into a diverse and compelling musical tradition and the cultural and religious conditions that helped shape it.