| Title | 3. Scholarship |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Tim Shephard(author) |
| Oliver Doyle(author) | |
| Ciara O’Flaherty (author) | |
| Annabelle Page (author) | |
| Laura Ştefănescu(author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0473.03 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0473/chapters/10.11647/obp.0473.03 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Tim Shephard; Oliver Doyle; Ciara O’Flaherty; Annabelle Page; Laura Ştefănescu; |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-08-06 |
| Long abstract | University students need textbooks and set works to study, and professors want to publish their scholarship. Thanks to these two fundamental factors, the universities had long fuelled the book trade. This chapter considers the treatment of music in those books printed in Italy in 1501 that were in some way connected with university study and scholarship. These include set works of classical literature for study in grammar class, often printed with new and recent commentaries; textbooks for the study of rhetoric, natural philosophy, law and medicine, more often accompanied by medieval commentaries; and new works of scholarship in all of these fields. Section 3.1 focusses on natural philosophy, a high priority for the Italian universities, giving particular attention to commentaries on, and new works of scholarship inspired by, Aristotle’s account of the senses and sensory cognition in De anima. In section 3.2, on rhetoric, a 1501 edition of Cicero’s De oratore with commentary by Ognibene Bonisoli is adopted as the central case study, investigating music’s role as an enabling analogy in the theory and practice of oratory. Section 3.3 considers how humanists of the second half of the fifteenth century deal with musical terms and characters in their commentaries on the Latin classics by Virgil, Juvenal, Apuleius, and others. In section 3.4 we turn our attention to the classical historical and encyclopedic works in the 1501 corpus, such as Livy and Pliny, considering how literature professors mined them for musical information in order to explicate Latin verse. Finally, in section 3.5 the focus is on law, represented in the 1501 corpus by a wide range of texts concerned with both ius commune and ius proprium; whilst music is hardly the lawyers’ foremost concern, in fact both laws and legal processes reflect the role of music in the public sphere in an Italian city. Overall, this chapter argues that, whilst music was not taught as an independent curricular subject at Italian Renaissance universities, it did indeed come up in class. |
| Page range | pp. 183–302 |
| Print length | 120 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Tim Shephard is Professor of Musicology at the University of Sheffield. He has led two major research projects funded by The Leverhulme Trust, “Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy” (2014-17), and “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books” (2020-23). He is author of Echoing Helicon: Music, Art and Identity in the Este Studioli (OUP, 2014), co-author of Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy (Harvey Miller, 2020), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2014), The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits (Brepols, 2023), and Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy (Routledge, 2023), among many other publications. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/music/people/academic-staff/tim-shephard
Oliver Doyle completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2024, holding a studentship on the project “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501.” His research, which has appeared in the journal Renaissance Studies, focuses on the place of musical knowledge in everyday life in fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Italy, particularly in the domains of education, astrology, medicine and health, and diet. Also a tenor and harpsichordist specialising in italian music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he has directed modern and UK premieres of several works with his consort Musica Antica Rotherhithe, including Michelangelo Falvetti’s Il Diluvio Universale, Domenico Belli’s L’Orfeo Dolente and Antonio Draghi's L'Humanità Redenta.
Ciara O’Flaherty completed her PhD in 2024 at the University of Sheffield, where she held a studentship attached to the project “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501.” Her research concerns self-representation through music and sound in Italian verse of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a particular focus on gender issues and women’s verse. She has also published on music in humanist commentaries in an article for Renaissance Studies.
Annabelle Page is a researcher specialising in music in early modern Italy and Britain. She is a Lecturer in Musicology at Cardiff University, having previously taught at the University of Sheffield, where she also joined the team of Tim Shephard's “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501” project as a Research Associate. She has published on the topics of music and patronage in Italy and musical iconography, including an article in the journal Early Music. She obtained a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2023.
Laura Ştefănescu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento in Florence. She was the 2023–2024 Francesco de Dombrowski Fellow at Villa i Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance, and has taught on the Stanford Overseas Studies program in Florence. She is an art historian specialising in Italian Renaissance art and particularly fifteenth-century Florence, interested in the interplay between art, theatre, music and religious experience. She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield (2020), where she subsequently worked as Research Associate on Tim Shephard’s project “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501.” Her publications include articles in Renaissance Quarterly and Renaissance Studies, and the co-authored book Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy c.1420-1540 (Harvey Miller, 2020).