Mary, Music, and Meditation: Sacred Conversations in Post-Tridentine Milan
Author(s): Christine Getz (Author)
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication Date: 8 July 2013
Language: English
Print length: 360 pages
ISBN-10: 0253007879
ISBN-13: 9780253007872
Book Description
Burdened by famine, the plague, and economic hardship in the 1500s, the troubled citizens of Milan, mindful of their mortality, turned toward the veneration of the Virgin Mary and the creation of evangelical groups in her name. By 1594 the diversity of these lay religious organizations reflected in microcosm the varied expressions of Marian devotion in the Italian peninsula. Using archival documents, meditation and music books, and iconographical sources, Christine Getz examines the role of music in these Marian cults and confraternities in order to better understand the Church’s efforts at using music to evangelize outside the confines of court and cathedral through its most popular saint. Getz reveals how the private music making within these cults, particularly among women, became the primary mode through which the Catholic Church propagated its ideals of femininity and motherhood.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Mary, Music and Meditation contains a wealth of scholarship of great interest to historians and musicologists alike. The appendices to the book supply nearly 150 pages of archival transcriptions, and musical examples that will serve many scholars as research and teaching resources.
― Journal of Jesuit Studies
A welcome and growing trend in scholarship on Renaissance sacred music is an expanding view of the spiritual concerns and devotional practices that surrounded and impelled the composition, performance, listening, and perception of music. Christine Getz’s study of institutional, ritual, and personal Marian devotion in Milan joins that conversation. Getz bases her findings on primary-source documents, on music printed or published in close conjunction with the institutions, and on the scholarship of Italian and Milanese religious culture of the period.
― Rennaisance Quarterly
Review
Mary, Music, and Meditation provides a comprehensive and well-documented view of how Marian devotion worked, socially and sonically, in one important early modern city. By looking at confraternities, church devotion, and little-known music, Getz shows how central this piety was to sacred culture in Milan across several generations, with music being one of its primary conduits.
— Robert L. Kendrick ― University of Chicago
Book Description
Making music in Marian cults of early modern Milan
About the Author
Christine Getz is Associate Professor of Musicology and Dean’s Scholar at the University of Iowa.
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