“Singing by course” was both a product of and a rhetorical tool within the religious discourses of post-Reformation England. Attached to a variety of ostensibly distinct practices, from choirs singing alternatim to congregations praying responsively, it was used to advance a variety of partisan agendas regarding performance and sound within the services of the English Church.

This dissertation examines discourses of public worship that were conducted around and through “singing by course,” treating it as a linguistic and conceptual node within broader networks of contemporary religious debate. I thus attend less to the history of the vocal practices to which “by course” and similar descriptions were applied than to the polemical dynamics of these applications. Discussions of these terms and practices slipped both horizontally, to other matters of ritual practice, and vertically, to larger topics or frameworks such as the nature of the Christian Church, the production of piety, and the roles of sound and performance in corporate prayer. Through consideration of these issues, “singing by course” emerges as a rhetorical, political, and theological construction, one that circulated according to changing historical conditions and to the interests of various ecclesiastical constituencies.