Reading for musical knowledge in early sixteenth‐century Italy: introduction

The essays included here present case studies prepared within the project ‘Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and hosted at the University of Sheffield. The project asks a simple question: standing in a Venetian bookshop towards the end of the year 1501, what information about music might you encounter as you browse the new printed titles available for purchase? Very few of the books printed in Italy in 1501 were ‘about’ music, but almost all of them mention music in passing, and sometimes at length, whilst discussing something else. These kinds of casual, fragmentary comments on music were surely read by many more people than specialist music theory, the audience for which was probably quite small. To recover these comments, and characterise the contradictory and incoherent field of everyday musical knowledge they comprise, we are reading every book printed in Italy in 1501 cover-to-cover, excerpting every passage mentioning music, sound or hearing. The final product of our project—a co-authored book, yet to be written—will present our findings in synoptic fashion. The essays presented here take a different approach, offering detailed case-studies on particular books within our 1501 corpus.