Margaret Board’s Lutebook

The lucky young lady Margaret Board, born the daughter of a wealthy merchant in 1600, had for a lute teacher John Dowland, the most famous lute player in Europe in the first decades of the 17th century. Her collection of lute pieces, begun between 1615 and 1620 contains some of the great masterpieces of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean lute repertoire, but also gives us a window on what a young woman about town needed, and wanted, to know to become an accomplished lute player (a skill appreciated in the marriage market), get musical allusions at the theatre, be au fait with the latest court fashions and even how to maintain good posture and cleanliness habits. Interviews with leading scholars investigate these extra-musical aspects of the book and we hear lute music by Dowland, John Johnson and his son Robert, Richard Allison and others played by John Edwards.