This chapter maps how students moved, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, between church and schoolroom, and the purposes religious music-making served in these contexts. It focuses on students’ performance of psalms, especially how particular performance practices (processing two-by-two) and the selection of psalms with moralizing texts inculcated potentially unruly children into the Protestant faith through bodily discipline and the act of communal singing. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the “Easter Psalms” sung at the Spital Sermon by children from the school at Christ’s Hospital as a multisensory event. Religious speech, music, and the display of the children’s bodies in their characteristic blue uniforms worked together to solicit charitable donations for the school and to demonstrate their piety, a performance practice that continues to this day. However, the potential for disruption, for something to go awry, for the script to be overturned is ever present, then and now.

This chapter turns inward, considering how the performance of vice haunted the early modern child, how the positionality of boyhood or girlhood inflected and shaped the act of performance, and the possible reasons for casting children as rule-breakers, sexual deviants, and seducers in a pedagogical context. Plays and masques with antimasque style roles were performed by schoolgirls and boys, including a boy who played an unruly scholar celebrating truancy in song, young ladies who sang as Furies and witches, and schoolgirl dancers who enacted scenes of murder and violence. Children of both genders also practiced the arts of musical seduction: a boy, Wentworth Randall, sang as Dame Siren in Apollo Shroving (1627), before his costume was violently torn from him, revealing a monstrous fish tail; a girl sang to persuade Paris to choose Venus and pleasure in Beauties Triumph (1676), even as she warned of the dangers of doing so. As these entertainments reveal, the performance of vice was dialectical – the pedagogues who crafted the entertainments claimed they displayed immorality only to uncloak its rottenness. Yet, given early modern pedagogical theories, there was also the very real danger that children might become what they performed – imitatio gone terribly wrong.

This chapter describes the educational institutions of post-Reformation England and the conflicted role music, theater, and dance played in English life and educational schema. According to English conduct books and prescriptive literature, music and dance were necessary skills for accomplished gentlemen and gentlewomen to possess; they might also be useful for students at charity schools, who sought socio-economic improvement through marriage or the procurement of apprenticeships. Yet, as many scholars have noted, there was also a strong suspicion and overt antipathy toward music-making, playacting, and dancing – some religious thinkers believed that these activities could lead to lasciviousness, decadence, and effeminacy. Others expressed concern that female students might develop inappropriate relationships with their music and dance teachers.

This chapter investigates how the prestige of the court and its genres were deployed in school-based contexts. Alignment with the court and its glamour took many forms. Elaborate polyphonic service music, pageants for visiting dignitaries, and masques performed by students evoked the performative specter of dancing courtiers, the progresses of Elizabeth I, the Chapel Royal, the royal body itself. The students’ imitation of performative behaviors that originated in other contexts served the needs of ambitious schoolmasters, drawing attention to the skills of talented pupils, the training they received, and the institution’s alignment with powerful people. Yet the same performances also established temporal connections between past and present, as the specter of the court, with all its religious, political, and class complexities haunted the pedagogical space of the schoolroom, sometimes in unexpected ways. Students overturned established hierarchies even as they co-opted behaviors of the court, as their singing, dancing, and acting exerted control over the passions of those who would rule them.