Alice & Margaret Brownlow

Alice brownlow (1659-1721) & Margaret Brownlow (1687-1710)

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Alice Brownlowe her Book

pd 4d 1678 [~£2.15, Real Wealth]

Margaret Brownlowe her Book Given her by her

Dear Mother the Lady

Brownlowe, Aprill ye 20

1705

Notes

Alice Brownlow 1701

A collection of psalms of David  specified for Alice in the Chapel (S.123.14). This psalter was first published in England in 1696. It was the work of two men, Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady. This edition provided the texts for congregational singing for the next few centuries. Listen to one of their psalms, As pants the Hart for cooling streams, set to music by Handel, lyrics by Tate.

Tate, left, was poet laureate of England, as well as being a playwright and an adapter of other's plays. He wrote the libretto for Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, 1689, and the Christmas carol While shepherds watched their flocks, 1703. 

Brady was an Anglican clergyman, poet and author. His ode Hail, Bright Cecilia (1692) was set to music by Henry Purcell. 

References to death occur 16 times in the psalms. One can imagine that Alice would find this consoling after the tragic death of  her husband, Young Sir John Brownlow, just a few years earlier, sat alone on the Chapel balcony.

Alice Brownlow's music, S.128.3

Songs in the Opera call'd Clotilda 1709

A pasticcio opera by John James (Johann Jacob) Heidegger (1666 -1749). A Swiss count and leading impresario of masquerades in the early part of the 18th century. He promoted masquerade balls at the Haymarket Theatre. This opera used music from Conti, Bononcini, A. Scarlatti, and others. The librettist was Giovanni Battista Neri. The singers included female sopranos as well as castrati singing in English & Italian. The London version had seven performances in March 1709.The rivalry between the two lead females singers led to this report, a Rudeness last night at the Play-House [the] throwing of oranges and hissing when Mrs L'Epine the Italian Gentlewoman sung. The plot of Clotilda, as it appeared in London, had its source in Boccaccio’s Il decamerone (X/10). Details on the opera are in this PhD thesis on page 207. A sample of Alessandro Scarlatti's music for castrato.

The name Clotilda was used on the last known American slave ship, in 1860. Even though the U.S. banned the importation of the enslaved from Africa in 1808, the high demand for slave labour from the booming cotton trade encouraged Alabama plantation owners to risk illegal slave runs to Africa. Clotilda was burned and sunk to conceal the evidence of this illegal activity and was rediscovered in 2018. After being freed by Union soldiers in 1865, Clotilda’s survivors pooled the wages they earned from selling vegetables to create their new settlement Africatown, Alabama.