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RESEARCH
 

Monograph

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Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages:
The Lives of the Seafaring Middle Class

Published June 7th, 2022

Order here: 
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463725415/maritime-musicians-and-performers-on-early-modern-english-voyages

Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages aims to tell the full story of early English shipboard performers, who have been historically absent from conversations about English navigation, maritime culture, and economic expansion. Often described reductively in voyaging accounts as having one function, in fact maritime performers served many communicative tasks. Their lives were not only complex, but often contradictory. Though not high-ranking officers, neither were they lower-ranking mariners or sailors. They were influenced by a range of competing cultural practices, having spent time playing on both land and sea, and their roles required them to mediate parties using music, dance, and theatre as powerful forms of nonverbal communication. Their performances transcended and breached boundaries of language, rank, race, religion, and nationality, thereby upsetting conventional practices, improving shipboard and international relations, and ensuring the success of their voyages.

Reviews: 

"This original and accessible book draws on archival sources and embraces social history, labor history, and the history of performance. The stories of these artists, actors, dancers, and musicians who are thrown together with common seafarers and how they are forced to (or are delighted to) navigate between the sailors’ rough ways and the courtly pretensions of their senior officers makes a striking new contribution to the history and sociology of shipboard life during the early modern period."
- Colin Dewey, California State University Maritime Academy

“[Seth] is trying to strike out a new path; he understands shipboard performance as an integral part of hydrarchical labor [. . .] Seth’s method is to be expansive, considering as wide a range of performers—singers, musicians, dancers, play actors—as he can, and attempting as full a recapitulation of the lives of the performers as sources will allow. And it is his capacious conception of music and performance that makes this work unique.”
- Manushag N. Powell, Purdue University, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 57 no. 2, 2024, p. 233-239. 
 
"By and large, Seth provides the reader with a fascinating overview of the history of maritime musicians onboard ship from the mid sixteenth to early eighteenth century, which explores the varied roles and functions that maritime musicians were expected to play – often extending far beyond the simple act of musicianship. This study gives us great insight into an area of maritime history that has been notably overlooked in the past and contributes to our understanding of the complex sociocultural systems that were in place within early modern English voyages, opening up new avenues of discussion and exploration that greatly benefit current scholarship."
- Mollie Carlyle, University of Aberdeen, UK, International Journal of Maritime History 0(0), 2024. p.1-3. 


Cited in: 

1. Leendert Van der Miesen. "Songs at the Docks: Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Musical Entanglements in Seventeenth-Century Marseille." Music and Letters (2023).  https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcad068
2. Kadri Tüür and Lauri Õunapuu. "Atlandi ookeani varjatud allhoovused." Keel ja Kirjandus 7 (2023). 
3. John McAleer. Atlantic Voyages: The East India Company and the British Route to the East in the Age of Sail (Oxford, 2023). p.119.  
4. Benjamin VanWagoner. Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). 

Book Chapters

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  • “Representations: The Maritime Visual Arts in the Global Early Modern Period.” The Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age. Ed. Steve Mentz. Series Ed. Margaret Cohen. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Link.

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  • ​“Sea Music and Shipboard Performance Culture.” The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1450-1750. Eds. Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert, and Steve Mentz. London: Routledge, 2020. Link. Book nominated for The Mountbatten Award for Best Book, from The Maritime Foundation.

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  • “Strange Fish: Caliban’s Sea-changes and the Problems of Classification.” The Metaphor of the Monster: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Understanding the Monstrous Other. Eds. Keith Moser and Karina Zelaya. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Link.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

  • “Shakespeare’s Sea Dogs and Archetypes of Constancy in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare Newsletter, vol. 67, no. 2 [300], 2018. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2019580888&site=ehost-live.

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