The musical activities connected with the teaching of Christian doctrine in the early modern era have failed to attract substantial scholarly attention. In fact, the noteworthy and by no means obvious association between singing and catechism is a longue durée phenomenon, and one of the most ubiquitous and characteristic elements of Catholic sonic cultures in the period 1550–1800. Interconnected as these practices are with many different aspects of early modern culture, their study raises questions and offers insights not only on musical issues, but on problems of interdisciplinary relevance. The present essay discusses their role in the pastoral work of early modern Jesuits and, conversely, the role of the Society of Jesus in the development of this tradition. Three different phases are examined: the export of the method from Spain to Italy in the sixteenth century; its adaptation to the French environment in the early seventeenth century; its further development in the golden age of popular missions.

A venerable form of petitionary prayer, the litany emerged as a key aural expression of Counter-Reformation Catholicism around the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly in the confessionally contested borderlands of the Holy Roman Empire. Its explicit projection of the dogma of sanctoral intercession, rejected soundly by Protestant theologians, helped to make the litany a flashpoint for religious controversy. Especially in the duchy of Bavaria, the northern bastion of the Counter-Reformation, the litany flourished in a wide variety of monophonic and polyphonic forms that reflected its fluid position on a spectrum between oral and written traditions. This essay explores the usage and significance of the litany in Counter-Reformation Germany, focusing especially upon the Thesaurus litaniarum (Treasury of Litanies, 1596) by Georg Victorinus, music director of the Munich Jesuits. Intimately connected with currents of Catholic reform in German-speaking lands, this great anthology illustrates the varied and creative ways in which composers responded to the litany’s distinctive ebb and flow of titles and petitions to holy intercessors.

The papacy and cardinalate in the period between Innocent III (1198–1216) and Benedict XI (1033–1304) can be shown to have had a wide range of musical interests. Papal inventories, testamentary legacies, chronicles and understudied visual evidence allow the piecing together of a lively and wide-ranging concern with music, liturgy and performance. The development of polyphonic music, the growing popularity of bells, and a lively interest among artists in portraying liturgical ceremonies and musical performance at the behest of their ecclesiastical clientele allow us to form a far more nuanced picture of the musical life of thirteenth-century Rome.

This essay examines the role of the hymns, the sacred polyphony by Vincenzo Pellegrini and Andrea Cima, and the spiritual madrigals of Giovanni Battista Porta in promoting the officially sanctioned image of Carlo Borromeo after his elevation to the status of ‘beato’ and following his canonisation. It further considers how the musical structures that characterised these works may have derived from other modes of textual presentation, in particular the sermons used to deliver the message in comparable settings. Finally, it explores how various styles of performance may have subliminally underscored certain constructed images of the archbishop and his city that developed in the years leading to the canonisation. San Carlo’s continued currency depended upon redefining his image according to changing social constructs. With the plague of 1630, Michel’angelo Grancini’s O sol & salus Carole returns to the event with which Borromeo’s sanctity was most closely identified, namely the penitential processions of 1576.

This essay studies the role played by Marguerite de Valois in the cultural life of the French court from early childhood until her death in 1615. Trained to perform in public, Marguerite acquired languages and diplomatic skills, and cultivated music and dancing in particular. Her passion for dancing and the energy and mastery she displayed in performance is traced through the testimony of contemporary records (French, Italian and English), through her own recollections, and through a discussion of her patronage of musicians, poets and dancers.

This article discusses a full-page schematic diagram contained in a twelfth-century manuscript of Boethius’ De institutione arithmetica and De institutione musica from Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury (Cambridge University Library MS Ii.3.12), which has not yet been the subject of any significant musicological study despite its remarkable scope and comprehensiveness. This diagrammatic tree, or arbor, maps the precepts of the first book of De institutione arithmetica into a unified whole, depicting the ways music and arithmetic are interrelated as sub-branches of the quadrivium. I suggest that this schematic diagram served not only as a conceptual and interpretative device for the scribe working through Boethius’ complex theoretical material, but also as a mnemonic guide to assist the medieval pedagogue wishing to instruct students in the mathematics of musica speculativa. The diagram constitutes a fully developed theoretical exercise in its own right, while also demonstrating the roles Boethian philosophy and mathematics played in twelfth-century musical scholarship.