Winner of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society's 2021 Bevington
Award for Best New Book
Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early
modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory,
uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how
sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in
cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds
are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were
shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English
masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapı
Palace in Istanbul and at King's College, Cambridge; and the drum
thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers
a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds
of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic
events, calibrating foreign otherness with the familiar self on the same
frequency of vibration.