Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History podcast. I'm your host, Heather Tesco, and I know it's been forever since I've posted and I'm a serious slacker.

Thank you to Eugene who sent me an email that came through to my work inbox for getting me going on this again.

I know I'm always seeming to promise it, but I really am

going to make a concerted effort to get one of these out a month. I really, really am. I promise.

Oh, okay, and one other thing before I get started is if you hear funny noises in the background,

my husband is building a shed on our deck. And it's Sunday afternoon, and this is really

the only time I have this week to do this. So I have to do it and I have to do it while he's using

a nail gun out there and an air compressor and whatever. So sorry about that. Okay. So with that out of

the way, let's get on with it. I want to talk about music this episode,

because that's how I first got into Renaissance history. Renaissance literally means rebirth,

and the music of the time is so exciting to me because whole new harmonies were being

developed. If you think about Gregorian chant, it's all just one melody.

And in the Renaissance, the sacred music was dominated by polyphony, which is multiple independent harmonies that cross over and play together to make a piece of music that is

exciting and interesting to listen to.

This secular music is also exciting with lyrics that are filled with puns and

innuendo and they tell stories that were being told musically for the first time since music was

being written down. So to support this podcast, I've created both a Spotify and a YouTube playlist

and I'm going to put the links on the blog at

HTTP-colon slash-slash-Englandcast.blogspot.com. Now, I suggest listening to the music

as you listen to the podcast, and because I don't really feel like being sued anytime soon,

I'm not going to post snippets of the music on

the podcast. So I was thinking I could have it kind of interspersed, but then I thought I'd

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