This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and supers

The first comprehensive study of the dominant form of solo singing in Renaissance Italy prior to the mid-sixteenth century.

This study overturns twentieth-century thinking about pasticcio opera. This radical way of creating opera formed a counterweight, even a relief, to the trenchan

This book considers the production of collective identity in Venice (Christian, civic-minded, anti-tyrannical), which turned on distinctions drawn in various fi