Many congratulations to Royal Holloway PhD graduate Caroline Lesemann-Elliott who has been awarded the Albi Rosenthal Visiting Fellowship in Music at the Bodleian Library, Oxford for autumn 2023.
Caroline’s project at the Bodleian will provide the first complete overview of the music collection of the Blount family of Mapledurham, a collection acquired by the Bodleian Library in 1983. The Blount music collection contains manuscripts from around 1700, including sources associated with young English Catholicwomen such as Theresa and Martha Blount, and Francis and Lettice Tichborne. Caroline’s PhD research uncovered how these manuscripts document the musical connections gained by these girls through their education at exiled English convents in France. Caroline’s Bodleian project will explore how the manuscripts reflect interpersonal relationships and cultural exchange, seeking to broaden the focus of musicological research away from famous composers and instead to illuminate a range of cultural go-betweens who moved across geographic borders.
Caroline has recently gained a PhD at Royal Holloway entitled “Music, Power, and Place at Exiled English Convents in France and the Low Countries, 1660-1740”. Using methods from book history, material culture studies and the history of emotions, it offers a thematic analysis of musical culture at 10 of the 22 religious houses established in continental Europe for English women. You can read more of Caroline’s research in her recent article on the Blount music collection in the 2023 issue of the Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society.
