In Luther’s times, music expressed the religious experience of enclosed nuns and Anabaptist martyrs, of Calvinist pious wives and Lutheran schoolgirls, of powerful female rulers and tired peasant mothers. Though few of their songs have reached our ears, they make a fascinating narrative worth exploring.

As the result of semantic and cultural shifts, it has become impossible to order a decent cup of tea – a phenomenon that revives the old question about the relationship between language on the one hand and thought and culture on the other.