Copyright

Tim Shephard; Oliver Doyle; Ciara O’Flaherty; Annabelle Page; Laura Ştefănescu;

Published On

2025-08-06

Page Range

pp. 121–182

Language

  • English

Print Length

62 pages

2. Poetry

Chapter of: Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books(pp. 121–182)
Many literary genres are rendered in verse in our 1501 corpus, including conduct literature and advice on pious lifestyle, news and current affairs, heroic and religious epic, classical satire and eclogue, and classical, medieval and new lyric verse. Among these, contemporary secular verse is the focus of this chapter, including epic but with a particular focus on lyric verse, both neo-Latin and vernacular, which is filled with sound and linked to musical practice. The internal soundscape of the lyric verse printed in Italy in 1501 is analysed in four distinct aspects. Section 2.1 brings together the references made within the verse itself to its own audible performance, forming a bridge between the conceit of verse as song, and the performance of verse as song. In section 2.2, meanwhile, we map the natural landscapes constructed by poets within their verse, analysing their acoustic properties and contributors. Then, sections 2.3 and 2.4 highlight the two protagonists whose voices are most often heard within the verse: first the female beloved, whose voice (like her body) tends to be fragmented and controlled; and second the male lover, the author, who often claims Orpheus-like powers over the world constructed within his verse. Overall, the gleanings from our 1501 corpus show that Italian lyric poets of the late fifteenth century manipulated the soundscapes within their verse in deliberate and distinctive ways, as an important component in their self-fashioning as poets.

Contributors

Tim Shephard

(author)
Professor of Musicology at University of Sheffield
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4053-8916
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/music/people/academic-staff/tim-shephard

Tim Shephard is Professor of Musicology at the University of Sheffield. He has led two major research projects funded by The Leverhulme Trust, “Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy” (2014-17), and “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books” (2020-23). He is author of Echoing Helicon: Music, Art and Identity in the Este Studioli (OUP, 2014), co-author of Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy (Harvey Miller, 2020), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2014), The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits (Brepols, 2023), and Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy (Routledge, 2023), among many other publications. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/music/people/academic-staff/tim-shephard

Oliver Doyle

(author)
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0507-1344

Oliver Doyle completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2024, holding a studentship on the project “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501.” His research, which has appeared in the journal Renaissance Studies, focuses on the place of musical knowledge in everyday life in fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Italy, particularly in the domains of education, astrology, medicine and health, and diet. Also a tenor and harpsichordist specialising in italian music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he has directed modern and UK premieres of several works with his consort Musica Antica Rotherhithe, including Michelangelo Falvetti’s Il Diluvio Universale, Domenico Belli’s L’Orfeo Dolente and Antonio Draghi's L'Humanità Redenta.

Ciara O’Flaherty

(author)

Ciara O’Flaherty completed her PhD in 2024 at the University of Sheffield, where she held a studentship attached to the project “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501.” Her research concerns self-representation through music and sound in Italian verse of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a particular focus on gender issues and women’s verse. She has also published on music in humanist commentaries in an article for Renaissance Studies.

Annabelle Page

(author)
Lecturer in Musicology at Cardiff University

Annabelle Page is a researcher specialising in music in early modern Italy and Britain. She is a Lecturer in Musicology at Cardiff University, having previously taught at the University of Sheffield, where she also joined the team of Tim Shephard's “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501” project as a Research Associate. She has published on the topics of music and patronage in Italy and musical iconography, including an article in the journal Early Music. She obtained a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2023.

Laura Ştefănescu

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7571-3350

Laura Ştefănescu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento in Florence. She was the 2023–2024 Francesco de Dombrowski Fellow at Villa i Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance, and has taught on the Stanford Overseas Studies program in Florence. She is an art historian specialising in Italian Renaissance art and particularly fifteenth-century Florence, interested in the interplay between art, theatre, music and religious experience. She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield (2020), where she subsequently worked as Research Associate on Tim Shephard’s project “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501.” Her publications include articles in Renaissance Quarterly and Renaissance Studies, and the co-authored book Music in the Art of Renaissance Italy c.1420-1540 (Harvey Miller, 2020).