Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy

This collection of essays is unified by a number of concerns: one is the way in which musical activity of all kinds was instrumentalized by those in power, in Italy, during the Sixteenth Century. A second expressed through the chornological concentration on the second half of the century, is with a period which is still often regarded as one of decline and degeneracy after the achievements of the Quattrocento and the decades before the calamètà d'Italia . This book implicitly argues that Italian culture did not lose its vigor after 1530, but underwent a transformation, as both individuals and institutions reacted to new economic, political, and religious circumstances.

Iain Fenlon is Reader in Historical Musicology at the University of Cambridge and the editor of Early Music History. His publications include: Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua; The Early Sixteenth Century Madrigal (with James Haar); The Song of the Soul: Understanding 'Poppea' (with Peter Miller); Music, Print and Culture in Renaissance Italy; and Music, Ceremony and Identity in Counter-Reformation Venice (forthcoming, Yale University Press).