New Thinking: Carols and Convents

What links carol singing with dogs? Medieval musicologist Micah Mackay reveals that carols aren’t just for Christmas – they began life as communal songs for anything from lullabies to drinking songs. She explains the detective work required to bring to life a fundamentally oral culture from a small number of manuscript sources, and what the origin of carols can tell us about the concept of Englishness in the medieval period. Englishness is also a key point of interrogation for Dr Caroline Lesemann Elliott, whose research explores the fascinating world of exiled English convents in Continental Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, focusing especially on their musical sound world. We hear from the Basilinda Consort, an ensemble Caroline founded in order to perform the music they discovered and reconstructed as part of their research. The host is BBC New Generation Thinker Leah Broad, author of Quartet, a group biography of four women composers, which came out earlier this year.

Dr Caroline Lesemann Elliott recently completed a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Bodleian Visiting Fellowship in Music. They are founder and director of the Basilinda Consort, an early music ensemble dedicated to exploring the lives of English Christian women religious. They are also a composer. https://carolinelesemannelliott.com/ https://basilindaconsort.com/

Micah Mackay is a writer and historian who recently submitted her PhD at the University of Oxford as part of the ‘Hearing the Page’ project in the Publication Beyond Print Doctoral Centre. She is also a theatre maker, screenwriter, and presenter based in Edinburgh. https://mamackay.com/about/ https://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/hearing-page

This New Thinking episode of the Arts & Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find more on BBC Sounds and in a collection on Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme website called New Research with discussions on topics ranging from diverse classical music to how and why we talk.