Copyright
Tim Shephard; Chenxi Xiao;Published On
2026-07-27ISBN
Language
- English
Print Length
142 pages (X+142+nulla)Dimensions
Weight
Media
Funding
- University of Sheffield
- Programme: Institutional Open Access Fund
OCLC Number
1609508011THEMA
- AVM
- NHDL
- NHF
- JBCC
BISAC
- MUS020000
- MUS015000
- HIS037020
- HIS020000
- SOC002010
Keywords
- Renaissance
- Italy
- Asia
- music
- sound
- travel
- knowledge
The Khan’s Pifferi
Reading about the Musics of Asia in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Tim Shephard (author)
- Chenxi Xiao (author)
This volume explores what Italian readers of the 1480s and 1490s could learn about Asian music through the expanding medium of print. Drawing on ten travel books printed in Italy before 1501, reporting the experiences of pilgrims, merchants, diplomats, adventurers, and an enslaved individual, the authors examine how musical practices in the Levant, Turkey, Persia, India, and China were described for late fifteenth-century audiences.
Through close textual analysis, the book reveals how references to singing, instruments, religious ritual, and courtly patronage shaped an emerging Italian understanding of Asian sound worlds. These printed accounts are situated within Italy’s dense networks of pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, and migration across the Eastern Mediterranean, demonstrating that Italian musical culture was inflected by global connections reaching far beyond Catholic Europe.
Interdisciplinary in approach, The Khan’s Pifferi will be of particular interest to musicologists, Renaissance scholars, historians of travel and intercultural encounter, and researchers in global and pre-modern studies. It offers a fresh perspective on how musical knowledge circulated and how Renaissance Italy engaged imaginatively with cultures beyond Europe.
Endorsements
This excellent study is a welcome and timely contribution to the burgeoning field of global music history. It offers valuable new readings of Italian texts on Asia that were published before 1501, critiquing the ways in which their authors represented and engaged with a diverse range of musical and sonic practices. By focusing on a clearly defined set of travelogues and subjecting them to innovative forms of analysis, Shephard and Xiao show how these works collectively contributed to Italian Renaissance discourse on musical difference. The Khan’s ‘Pifferi’ helps us understand the impact of travel and pilgrimage on musical ideas of Asia in fifteenth-century Europe, prior to the age of sustained trans-oceanic colonialism.
David R. M. Irving
ICREA Research Professor at the Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, CSIC
Additional Resources
Contents
- Tim Shephard
- Chenxi Xiao
- Tim Shephard
- Chenxi Xiao
- Tim Shephard
- Chenxi Xiao
- Tim Shephard
- Chenxi Xiao
- Tim Shephard
- Chenxi Xiao
- Tim Shephard
- Chenxi Xiao
- Tim Shephard
- Chenxi Xiao
Contributors
Tim Shephard
(author)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 Sounding the Bookshelf 1501 (OBP, 2025), 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 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4053-8916
Chenxi Xiao
(author)Chenxi Xiao is currently a graduate student in musicology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, following undergraduate study at the University of Sheffield. Her research focusses on music and warfare in early modern Europe, and the musical culture of early modern Italy.