Pietro Aaron (c.1480-c.1550) is the author of five music treatises. The first, Libri tres de institutione harmonica (Bologna, 1516), was composed in Italian and then translated into Latin by the humanist Giovanni Antonio Flaminio (1464-1536); the other four appeared in Italian, which made Aaron a pioneer in this regard. The Thoscanello de la musica, the first of the vernacular treatises, proved very successful and was reissued three times in the course of the sixteenth century under the title Toscanello in musica (Venice, 1529, 1539, 1562). These reissues are very similar to each other, but are clearly distinct from the first edition, in particular by the addition of an appendix (aggiunta) on various questions concerning musica ficta and the modes of Gregorian chant.

Emanating from a cosmos ordered according to Pythagorean and Neoplatonic principles, the Boethian musica mundana is the type of music that ‘is discernible especially in those things which are observed in heaven itself or in the combination of elements or the diversity of seasons’. At the core of this recurring medieval topos stands ‘a fixed sequence of modulation [that] cannot be separated from this celestial revolution’, one most often rendered in medieval writings as the ‘music of the spheres’ (musica spherarum). In the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic cosmological traditions, long established by the time Boethius wrote his De institutione musica, the music of the spheres is just one possible manifestation of the concept of world harmony. It pertains to a universe in which musical and cosmic structures express the same mathematical ratios, each of the planets produces a distinctive sound in its revolution and the combination of these sounds themselves most often forms a well-defined musical scale. Although the Neoplatonic world harmony continued to function in medieval cosmology as the fundamental conceptual premise, the notion of the music of the spheres, despite its popularity among medieval writers, was generally treated neither at any significant length nor in an innovative fashion. Quite exceptional in this respect is the treatise that forms the subject of the present study, a text beginning Desiderio tuo fili carissime gratuito condescenderem and attributed to an anonymous bishop in the late thirteenth-century manuscript miscellany now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Barb. lat. 283, fols. 37r-42v) but probably coming from a Franciscan convent in Siena. This seldom considered work affords a remarkable and special insight into the ways in which old and new ideas converged, intermingled and coexisted in the dynamic and sometimes volatile cross-currents of medieval scholarship.

The literary origins of the Italian sixteenth-century madrigal, as well as the presumed inexpressive nature of the so-called prima pratica as compared with the seconda pratica, perhaps represent two of the most abused commonplaces of modern musical historiography. Most scholars still believe that the linguistic, rhetorical and stylistic principles codified by Petrarchist humanists such as Pietro Bembo directly stimulated the birth of the new literary-musical genre. Even more problematic is the attitude of those who extract the dichotomy prima/seconda pratica from its specific cultural context - the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy - and apply it to an extended historical period, largely covering the whole history of the madrigal itself.

After decades of suffering and agony, Catholicism in Augsburg entered a phase of gradual recovery around 1550. The first half of the sixteenth century was characterised by the rapid expansion of the Reformation and the marginalisation of the Catholics in the town. At the zenith of Protestant predominance, the Lutherans even managed to force the entire Catholic clergy into exile from 1537 to 1547 and for a few months in 1552. The episcopate of Cardinal Otto Truchsess von Waldburg (1543-73), however, marked a turning point for Catholics in Augsburg. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) conceded political parity to the Catholic minority in town. Due to Otto von Waldburg's zealous activities, his severely decimated flock even managed to grow again slowly over the years.

For James Haar on his 70th Birthday

The sixteenth century in Italy was a time when academies of all kinds flourished as venues, and often as arbiters, of literature and high culture. A casual look at the academies might give the impression that they were mostly social in nature, that they functioned as a pastime for bored aristocrats and ambitious letterati. As originally constituted, the Accademia degli Umidi, founded 1 November 1540, indeed fitted this description, but with one difference characteristic of Florentine society - it was organised by twelve men of various social classes with a common interest in poetry and language. The academy expanded considerably under the patronage of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and on 25 March 1541 was reconstituted as the Accademia Fiorentina. Its avowed purpose was to promote the Tuscan language as an instrument of literature and knowledge, in an age when mastery of Latin was required of any educated man. In advancing the cause of vernacular literature, the Accademia Fiorentina, like other academies of the time, greatly extended the programme of Italian humanism, making available the fruits of humanist thought and enquiry to a larger public.

The Chigi Codex occupies a place of honour among music manuscripts of the Renaissance; thirteen masses by Ockeghem along with L'homme armé masses by Josquin, Busnoys, Brumel and Compère figure prominently among its contents. According to Herbert Kellman, it was copied between 1498 and 1503 for the Burgundian nobleman Philippe Bouton. Several coats of arms of the Spanish families Cardona and Fernández de Córdoba appear in different places in the manuscript and Kellman suggested that the transfer of the Chigi Codex to the Spaniards occurred after the death of its first owner in 1515. Seven works, the foliation in the upper right margin of the recto folios and a table of contents with a heading that reads Tabla de missas y motetes were added by a Spanish scribe. Since Mouton's motet Quis dabit oculis, written on the death of Anne of Brittany in 1514, is also among the added works, Kellman concluded that these additions to the Chigi Codex were made after that date. The assumption that the manuscript travelled to Spain is further supported by a seventeenth-century inscription written in Italian on the flyleaf of the manuscript, which affirms that the book was used in Spain.