"The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo presents a model for realizing the fuller significance of illuminated music manuscripts as cultural artifacts, and offers unprecedented insights into the social and devotional life of Toledo, Spain, around the turn of the sixteenth century. After solving the mystery of the Rosary Cantoral's origins, subsequent essays probe the meaning and cultural significance of the manuscript's iconography (including a border decoration after Albrecht Durer), its rare Spanish chants for the Mass, and two striking musical works for multiple voices (one by Josquin Desprez and another on "L'homme arme"). Ultimately, this book focuses on the extraordinary circumstances that engendered the compilation of the Rosary Cantoral around 1500: a system of patronage between a brotherhood of suspected heretics and a religious house that was a key supporter of the Inquisition in Toledo."--BOOK JACKET.

Burdened by famine, the plague, and economic hardship in the 1500s, the troubled citizens of Milan, mindful of their mortality, turned toward the veneration of the Virgin Mary and the creation of evangelical groups in her name. By 1594 the diversity of these lay religious organizations reflected in microcosm the varied expressions of Marian devotion in the Italian peninsula. Using archival documents, meditation and music books, and iconographical sources, Christine Getz examines the role of music in these Marian cults and confraternities in order to better understand the Church's efforts at using music to evangelize outside the confines of court and cathedral through its most popular saint. Getz reveals how the private music making within these cults, particularly among women, became the primary mode through which the Catholic Church propagated its ideals of femininity and motherhood.

Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.

This bilingual edition of the Synopsis Purioris Theologiae (1625) provides English readers access to an influential textbook of Reformed Orthodoxy. Composed by four professors at the University of Leiden (Johannes Polyander, Andreas Rivetus, Antonius Walaeus, and Anthonius Thysius), it offers a presentation of Reformed theology as it was conceived in the first decades of the seventeenth century. From a decidedly Reformed perspective, the Christian doctrine is defined in contrast with alternative or diverging views, such as those of Roman Catholics, Arminians, and Socinians. The Synopsis responds to challenges coming from the immediate theological, social, and philosophical contexts. The disputations of this second volume cover topics such as Predestination, Christology, Faith and Repentance, Justification and Sanctification, and Ecclesiology.

It has become widely accepted among musicologists that medieval music is most profitably studied from interdisciplinary perspectives that situate it within broad cultural contexts. The origins of this consensus lie in a decisive reorientation of the field that began approximately four decades ago. For much of the twentieth century, research on medieval music had focused on the discovery and evaluation of musical and theoretical sources. The 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, witnessed calls for broader methodologies and more fully contextual approaches that in turn anticipated the emergence of the so-called 'New Musicology'. The fifteen essays in the present collection explore three interrelated areas of inquiry that proved particularly significant: the liturgy, sources (musical and archival), and musical symbolism. In so doing, these essays not only acknowledge past achievements but also illustrate how this broad, interdisciplinary approach remains a source for scholarly innovation.

Despite the fact that, if only by number, small and peripheral cities played an important role in fifteenth and sixteenth-century European print culture, book history has mainly been dominated by monographs on individual big book centres. Through a number of specific case studies, which deploy a variety of methods and a wide range of sources, this volume seeks to enhance our understanding of printing and the book trade in small and peripheral European cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to emphasize the necessity of new research for the study of print culture in such cities.

Presented in six contrasting and complementary pairs, the essays treat such matters as Berlioz's aesthetics and what it means to write about the meaning of his music; the political implications of his fiction and the affinities of his projects as composer and as critic; what the Germans thought of his work before his travels in Germany and what the English made of him when he visited their capital city. We learn in explicit detail how Berlioz deployed the mezzo-soprano voice, what he seems to have written immediately after encountering Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (a surprise), and where he benefited from Beethoven in what later became Romeo et Juliette.