Today I’m very pleased to present you The Seventeenth Century Lady Interview with Baroque ensemble Armonia Celeste! This increasingly popular group is comprised of three singers: sopranos Sarah Abigail Griffiths and Rebecca Choate Beasley, and mezzo-soprano Dianna Grabowski. Lyle Nordstrom accompanies on lute, theorbo, and Baroque guitar, and Paula Fagerberg plays the Baroque triple harp. SCL: What was it about the music… Read on
The following was a draft I wrote about two months ago. The Stuarts in 100 Facts is currently being edited and Steel and Lace is out for sale, so I now have a brief window of time before I begin to focus on A Year in Stuart Britain. I’m spending time with my family in the United States… Read on
Please welcome Joanne Limburg to The Seventeenth Century Lady! I’ve known Joanne for several years now because we started working on our novels at the same time (me on William & Mary, she on A Want of Kindness). Joanne’s novel is soon to be released (and I’m still looking for a publisher!), so please give a warm welcome to… Read on
When I finished listening to the audiobook version of Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier, I was left sitting at my kitchen table in floods of tears. What a moving story! The first thing I thought after I finished was that this was rather like The Bridges of Madison County – a woman is married to someone and has children… Read on
Armonia Celeste is a US-based Early music ensemble of three women’s voices and plucked-string period instruments. They specialise in Italian music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque – so as soon as I could I purchased their 2015 album Udite, amanti: Music from Seventeenth-Century Barberini Courts which contains eighteen tracks of excellent music. I knew about them from their Twitter page. (This social… Read on
The 23rd of April is St. George’s Day here in England. There is something inherently romantic in the many artistic depictions of St. George. He is often in full armour, brandishing a weapon, and on the verge of killing a dragon. Later on in this post, I hope to convey the importance of St. George in the history… Read on
Once again, Audible delivered the goods. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this excellent lecture series by Professor Alan Charles Kors. For those of you who study philosophy, the content may not bring anything new to the table, but for the rest of us I found it immensely enlightening. Some other reviewers have been overly harsh about Professor Kors’s delivery and… Read on
Two Sundays ago (my how time flies!), I attended the 8am Easter Sunday service at the iconic Basilica di San Marco by the Piazza San Marco, Venezia, Italy. In this, the first of a series of articles from my recent trip to Venice, I would like to briefly cover a fraction of the history of this building and… Read on