Editors' Foreword

Summary

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a high order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect.

The editors’ aim in publishing this volume has been to make the highly original and insightful work of the late Tom Dixon (1948–2015) accessible to the wider scholarly community, and to celebrate his regrettably short scholarly career. He had begun to work seriously on his book, “Between the Rational and the Mystical”: Music, Nature and Divine Knowledge in England, 1650–1750, around 2012. It was to be his unique contribution to the history of music, religion and ideas in early modern England, challenging the hegemonic concepts of a seventeenth-century ‘Scientific Revolution’ and an eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’ by advancing an alternative narrative of continuity and change covering the period between 1650 and 1750. At one point, this timeline even extended to the 1830s of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). Unfortunately, the work remained incomplete at the time of his death, existing only in the form of a plethora of notes and nearly a dozen chapters in various stages of development. Stored on his laptop computer, these files might have easily been destroyed or simply lost. Fortunately, their significance was well understood by two of us: Chloë Dixon, his daughter, and Penelope Gouk, his former supervisor and later friend and colleague. While we had hardly known each other before Tom's death, at the reception after his funeral we joined in sharing memories about his passion for history. Our conversations strengthened our conviction that publishing the fruit of his later years’ research would benefit a larger audience. The task deserved our time and energy.

Academic work and publications

Tom was an unusual scholar who came late and purposefully to academic life, having taken early retirement after a career in insurance and estate agency. In his fifties, he took his BA in Independent Studies (2000) and MA in Historical Research (2002) at the University of Lancaster, where he found a welcoming academic community.