Hearing the City is a major new contribution to the field of urban musicology in the early modern period with twenty-one essays by leading figures in the field from Europe, the USA and Australia. The urban soundscape is studied from a range of different interdisciplinary perspectives, and its scope is broad, from the major role of city minstrels in fifteenth-century Viennese urban identity to the civic problems presented by the location of opera houses in Enlightenment Naples. The individual contributions explore themes related to the complex relationships between sound and space within the urban context and between social identity and civic authorities and draw on a wide range of source material from city pay documents and legislation to contemporaneous accounts, correspondence, travel writing, religious and moral tracts, fictional writing and architectural legacy. Aspects of urban soundscapes both specific and common to Naples, Rome, Palermo, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Lisbon, London, Vienna, Hamburg and Zurich are analyzed in their broader socio-cultural contexts, as well as the dynamic networks between cities in Europe and beyond. These case studies are framed by Tim Carter's stimulating introduction to the development of historical urban sound studies and a coda in the form of a discussion as to how the results of urban musicology might be applied through a digital platform to reach beyond academic discourse to involve modern citizens in hearing the soundworlds of the past.

These eleven essays, all centrally concerned with the intimate relationship between sound, religion, and society in the early modern world, present a sequence of test cases located in a wide variety of urban environments in Europe and the Americas. Written by an international cast of acclaimed historians and musicologists, they explore in depth the interrelated notions of conversion and confessionalisation in the shared belief that the early modern city was neither socially static nor religiously uniform. With its examples drawn from the Holy Roman Empire and the Southern Netherlands, the pluri-religious Mediterranean, and the colonial Americas both North and South, this book takes discussion of the urban soundscape, so often discussed in purely traditional terms of European institutional histories, to a new level of engagement with the concept of a totally immersive acoustic environment as conceptualised by R. Murray Schafer. From the Protestants of Douai, a bastion of the Catholic Reformation, to the bi-confessional city of Augsburg and seventeenth-century Farmington in Connecticut, where the indigenous Indian population fashioned a separate Christian entity, the intertwined religious, musical, and emotional lives of specifically grounded communities of early modern men and women are here vividly brought to life.

Covering European history from the invention of the printing press to the French Revolution, the third edition of this best-selling textbook is thoroughly updated with new scholarship and an emphasis on environmental history, travel and migration, race and cultural blending, and the circulation of goods and knowledge. Summaries, timelines, maps, illustrations, and discussion questions illuminate the narrative and support the student. Enhanced online content and sections on sources and methodology give students the tools they need to study early modern European history. Leading historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks skillfully balances breadth and depth of coverage to create a strong narrative, paying particular attention to the global context of European developments. She integrates discussion of gender, class, regional, and ethnic differences across the entirety of Europe and its overseas colonies as well as the economic, political, religious, and cultural history of the period.

Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 presents a range of historical case studies on the sounding worlds of the European past. The chapters in this volume explore ways of thinking about sound historically, and seek to understand how people have understood and negotiated their relationships with the sounding world in Europe from the Middle Ages through to the early twentieth century. They consider, in particular: sound and music in the later Middle Ages; the politics of sound in the early modern period; the history of the body and perception during the Ancien Régime; and the sounds of the city in the nineteenth century and sound and colonial rule at the fin de siècle. The case studies also range in geographical orientation to include considerations not only of Britain and France, the countries most considered in European historical sound studies in English-language scholarship to date, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, British Colonial India, Germany, Italy and Portugal. Out of this diverse group of case studies emerge significant themes that recur time and again, varying according to time and place: sound, power and identity; sound as a marker of power or violence; and sound, physiology and sensory perception and technologies of sound, consumption and meaning.

Exploring the nexus of music and religious education involves fundamental questions regarding music itself, its nature, its interpretation, and its importance in relation to both education and the religious practices into which it is integrated. This cross-disciplinary volume of essays offers the first comprehensive set of studies to examine the role of music in educational and religious reform and the underlying notions of music in early modern Europe. It elucidates the context and manner in which music served as a means of religious teaching and learning during that time, thereby identifying the religio-cultural and intellectual foundations of early modern European musical phenomena and their significance for exploring the interplay of music and religious education today.

Listening to Confraternities offers new perspectives on the contribution of guild and devotional confraternities to the urban phonosphere based on original research and an interdisciplinary approach. Historians of art, architecture, culture, sound, music and the senses consider the ways in which, through their devotional practices, confraternities acted as patrons of music, created their identity through sound and were involved in the everyday musical experience of major cities in early modern Europe. Confraternities have been studied from many different angles, but only rarely as acoustic communities that communicated through sound and whose musical activities delimited the urban spaces in which they were active. Contributors: Nicholas Terpstra, Emanuela Vai, Ana López Suero, Henry Drummond, Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita, Ferrán Escrivà-Llorca, Noel O’Regan, Magnus Williamson, Xavier Torres Sans, Erika Honisch, Alexander Fisher, Konrad Eisenbichler, Daniele Filippi, Dylan Reid, Elisa Lessa, Antonio Ruiz Caballero, Juan Ruiz Jiménez, Sergi González González, and Tess Knighton.

Both in our time and in the past, death was one of the most important aspects of anyone’s life. The early modern period saw drastic changes in rites of death, burials and commemoration. One particularly fruitful avenue of research is not to focus on death in general, but the moment of death specifically. This volume investigates this transitionary moment between life and death. In many cases, this was a death on a deathbed, but it also included the scaffold, battlefield, or death in the streets. Contributors: Friedrich J. Becher, Benedikt Brunner, Isabel Casteels, Martin Christ, Louise Deschryver, Irene Dingel, Michaël Green, Vanessa Harding, Sigrun Haude, Vera Henkelmann, Imke Lichterfeld, Erik Seeman, Elizabeth Tingle, and Hillard von Thiessen.