A History in 100 Exhibits

Auteur(s): Vincenzo Borghetti, Tim Shephard (eds)

Date de parution: 12 Mai 2023

ISBN: 978-2-503-58856-8

A history of Renaissance music told through 100 artefacts, revealing their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music.

This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe, at home and in its global horizons. It is a history through artefacts—materials, tools, instruments, art objects, images, texts, and spaces—and their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music. The result is a history by collage, revealing overlapping musical practices and meanings—not only those of the elite, but reflecting the everyday cacophony of a diverse culture and its musics. Through the lens of its exhibits, this museum surveys music’s central role in culture and lived experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, offering interest and insights well beyond the strictly musicological field.

Vincenzo Borghetti is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Verona. He holds a doctorate in musicology from the University of Pavia-Cremona and in 2007–08 was a fellow of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Italian Studies in Florence. His research interests are centred on Renaissance polyphony and opera. His essays and articles have appeared in Early Music History, Acta musicologica, Journal of the Alamire Foundation, and Imago Musicae, among other journals, and in several edited collections. In 2019 he was elected to the Academia Europaea.

Tim Shephard is Professor of Musicology at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-author of Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy (Harvey Miller, 2020), as well as numerous other books and essays on Italian musical culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He currently leads the project ‘Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Musical Knowledge in a Year of Italian Printed Books’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.