Secrets in all their variety permeated early modern Europe, from the whispers of ambassadors at court to the emphatically publicized books of home remedies that flew from presses and booksellers’ shops. This interdisciplinary volume draws on approaches from art history and cultural studies to investigate the manifestations of secrecy in printed books and drawings, staircases and narrative paintings, ecclesiastical furnishings and engravers’ tools. Topics include how patrons of art and architecture deployed secrets to construct meanings and distinguish audiences, and how artists and patrons manipulated the content and display of the subject matter of artworks to create an aura of exclusive access and privilege. Essays examine the ways in which popes and princes skillfully deployed secrets in works of art to maximize social control, and how artists, printers, and folk healers promoted their wares through the impression of valuable, mysterious knowledge. The authors contributing to the volume represent both established authorities in their field as well as emerging voices. This volume will have wide appeal for historians, art historians, and literary scholars, introducing readers to a fascinating and often unexplored component of early modern culture.

Winner of the 2020 Bainton Prize for Reference Works This volume, edited by Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield, focuses on Rome from 1492-1692, an era of striking renewal: demographic, architectural, intellectual, and artistic. Rome’s most distinctive aspects--including its twin governments (civic and papal), unique role as the seat of global Catholicism, disproportionately male population, and status as artistic capital of Europe--are examined from numerous perspectives. This book of 30 chapters, intended for scholars and students across the academy, fills a noteworthy gap in the literature. It is the only multidisciplinary study of 16th- and 17th-century Rome that synthesizes and critiques past and recent scholarship while offering innovative analyses of a wide range of topics and identifying new avenues for research. Committee's statement "The volume includes a multidisciplinary study of early modern Rome by focusing on the 16th and 17th centuries by re-examining traditional topics anew. This volume will be of tremendous use to scholars and students because its focus is very well conceptualized and organized, while still covering a breadth of topics. The authors celebrate Rome’s diversity by exploring its role not only as the seat of the Catholic church, but also as home to large communities of diplomats, printers, and working artisans, all of whom contributed to the city’s visual, material, and musical cultures". Roland H.Bainton Prizes Contributors are: Renata Ago, Elisa Andretta, Katherine Aron-Beller, Lisa Beaven, Eleonora Canepari, Christopher Carlsmith, Patrizia Cavazzini, Elizabeth S. Cohen, Thomas V. Cohen, Jeffrey Collins, Simon Ditchfield, Anna Esposito, Federica Favino, Daniele V. Filippi, Irene Fosi, Kenneth Gouwens, Giuseppe Antonio Guazzelli, John M. Hunt, Pamela M. Jones, Carla Keyvanian, Margaret A. Kuntz, Stephanie C. Leone, Evelyn Lincoln, Jessica Maier, Laurie Nussdorfer, Toby Osborne, Miles Pattenden, Denis Ribouillault, Katherine W. Rinne, Minou Schraven, John Beldon Scott, Barbara Wisch, Arnold A. Witte.

"The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre's beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day."--Jacket.

The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape – on stage and beyond – which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.

How did Catholicism sound in the early modern period? What kinds of sonic cultures developed within the diverse and dynamic matrix of early modern Catholicism? And what do we learn about early modern Catholicism by attending to its sonic manifestations? Editors Daniele V. Filippi and Michael Noone have brought together a variety of studies — ranging from processional culture in Bavaria to Roman confraternities, and catechetical praxis in popular missions — that share an emphasis on the many and varied modalities and meanings of sonic experience in early modern Catholic life. Audio samples illustrating selected chapters are available at the following address: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5311099. Contributors are: Egberto Bermúdez, Jane A. Bernstein, Xavier Bisaro, Andrew Cichy, Daniele V. Filippi, Alexander J. Fisher, Marco Gozzi, Robert L. Kendrick, Tess Knighton, Ignazio Macchiarella, Margaret Murata, John W. O’Malley, S.J., Noel O’Regan, Anne Piéjus, and Colleen Reardon.

In sixteenth-century Italy, Rome ranked second only to Venice as an important center for music book production. Throughout the century, printers in the Eternal City experimented more readily and more consistently with the materiality of the book than their Venetian counterparts, who, by standardizing their printing methods, came to dominate the international marketplace. The Romans' ingenuity and willingness to meet individual clients' needs resulted in music editions in a broader array of shapes and sizes, employing a wider range of printing techniques. They became "boutique" printers, eschewing the run-of-the-mill in favor of tailoring production to varied market demands. Accommodating the diverse requirements of their clientele, they supplied customized volumes, which Venetian presses either could not--or would not--produce. In Printing Music in Renaissance Rome, author Jane A. Bernstein offers a panoramic view of the cultures of music and the book in Rome from the beginning of printing in 1476 through the early seventeenth century. Emphasizing the exceptionalism of Roman music publishing, she highlights the innovative printing technologies and book forms devised by Roman bookmen. She also analyzes the Church's predominant influence on the book industry and, in turn, the Roman press's impact on such important composers as Palestrina, Marenzio, Victoria, and Cavalieri. Drawing on innovative publications, Bernstein reveals a synergistic relationship between music repertories and the materiality of the book. In particular, she focuses on the post-Tridentine period, when musical idioms, both new and old, challenged printers to employ alternative printing methods and modes of book presentation in the creation of their music editions. Of interest to musicologists, art historians, and book historians alike, this book builds on Bernstein's previous work as she continues to chart the course of music and the book in Renaissance Italy.

The Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete, Euridice (1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. A large collection of recently discovered account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done much more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the remarkable value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period. This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and also opens a completely new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. At the same time they allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.