lewis lockwood. Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–1505: The Creation of a Musical Center in the Fifteenth Century. (Studies in the History of Music, number 2.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1984. Pp. xxii, 355. $35.00

Author(s):  
Marta Celati

The final section sums up the main innovative findings of this whole study. It points out how starting from the second half of the fifteenth century the development of a ‘thematic genre’ of literature on conspiracies was influenced by, but at the same time contributed to, the phenomenon of the literary fashioning of the profile of the ideal ruler, who now corresponded to the figure of a princeps. This literature also contributed to the creation of a new language and symbology of power through the multifunctional reworking of the classical legacy. This evolution culminated in Machiavelli’s attention to the issue of political plots in this work, with an approach that proves to be partly inspired by the previous cultural horizon, but already prominently projected towards an utterly new conceptual world. This analysis, besides providing a missing chapter on the background of Machiavelli’s work, more generally, underlines the significant contribution made by the humanist tradition, through its various literary expressions, to the development of modern political theories and to the history of our culture.


Author(s):  
Stuart B. Schwartz

The Castilians and Portuguese were the first Europeans to create systems of continual communication, trade, and political control spanning the Atlantic. Following medieval precedents and moved by similar economic and demographic factors, these two kingdoms embarked in the late fifteenth century on a course of expansion that led to the creation of overseas empires and contact with other societies and peoples. This process produced a series of political, religious, social, and ethical problems that would confront other nations pursuing empire. Portugal and Castile were sometimes rivals, sometimes allies, and for sixty years (1580–1640) parts of a composite monarchy under the same rulers. Their answers to the challenges of creating empires varied according to circumstances and resources, but they were not unaware of each others' efforts, failures, and successes nor of their common Catholic heritage and world-view that set the framework of their imperial vision, their rule, and their social organisation. This article focuses on the history of the Iberian Atlantic to 1650, the Atlantic origins and Caribbean beginnings, conquest and settlement to 1570, and imperial spaces and trade.


Author(s):  
Anthony Pagden

Europe's incursion into the Atlantic — the ‘occidental break out’ — after the mid-fifteenth century created many challenges and generated many kinds of ‘newness’ for all of those caught up in it. For the peoples of the African littoral, of the Canary Islands, of the Caribbean, and of the American mainland, the contact with Europeans throughout this period was inevitably, if not always initially, violent. Both Africa and America had been the site of large political structures which the Europeans called ‘empires’, Zimbabwe and Benin, Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru, before the fifteenth century. The discovery of America had seriously undermined both classical geography and the traditional Christian accounts of the creation and subsequent peopling of the world. It offered, however, other, less direct, challenges to the ancient understanding of the world which in the end, were to be even more devastating for the subsequent history of Europe.


2020 ◽  
pp. 95-128
Author(s):  
Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

The consolidation of a texted past around Sufi migrants in fifteenth-century Gujarat was accompanied by the development of the tomb-shrines of Aḥmad Khattū and two members of the Suhrawardi spiritual fraternity, Burhān al-Dīn ‘Abdullāh (d. 1453) and Sirāj al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 1475). Texts and tombs represented conjoined processes that enabled ongoing community formation. The tomb shrines created regional networks of disciples and pilgrims focused on the burial sites of the Sufis just as texts increasingly cohered the history of the buried Sufis and their community into genealogies and overlapping personal connections. This chapter argues that the participation of the Gujarat Sultans in the creation of a sacral geography—through patronage, shrine veneration, and not least of all the building of palatial structures and royal tombs in close proximity—reflected the intertwined processes of state, community, and region formation in fifteenth-century Gujarat.


Author(s):  
Paul Walker

This book explores the roots of the classic fugue and the early history of non-canonic fugal writing through the three principal fugal genres of the sixteenth century: motet, ricercar, and canzona. The book begins with the pivot in Western composition from an emphasis on variety to one on repetition, first developed by such Franco-Flemish composers as Loyset Compère and Josquin des Prez toward the end of the fifteenth century. By around 1520 Jean Mouton and his contemporaries had established the classic Franco-Flemish motet with its well-known point-of-imitation structure. Nicolas Gombert proved to be the real pioneer in the further development of this idea in the 1530s when he explored the return of thematic material after its initial presentation, an approach that proved central not only to the motet writing of Thomas Crecquillon and Jacobus Clemens non Papa, but also to the earliest experiments in serious abstract instrumental composition (the ricercar) undertaken by a series of organists active in Venice, most notably Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli. The most important innovation of the last decades of the century was the creation at the hands of Brescian organists of the fugal canzona alla francese, an instrumental genre inspired not by the sophisticated compositional style of the motet, but by the contrapuntally looser approach of such imitative chansons as Passereau’s Il est bel et bon. By century’s end, composers such as Giovanni de Macque had given the canzona a contrapuntal integrity commensurate with that of the ricercar.


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