Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City (Epitome Musical)

These eleven essays, all centrally concerned with the intimate relationship between sound, religion, and society in the early modern world, present a sequence of test cases located in a wide variety of urban environments in Europe and the Americas. Written by an international cast of acclaimed historians and musicologists, they explore in depth the interrelated notions of conversion and confessionalisation in the shared belief that the early modern city was neither socially static nor religiously uniform. With its examples drawn from the Holy Roman Empire and the Southern Netherlands, the pluri-religious Mediterranean, and the colonial Americas both North and South, this book takes discussion of the urban soundscape, so often discussed in purely traditional terms of European institutional histories, to a new level of engagement with the concept of a totally immersive acoustic environment as conceptualised by R. Murray Schafer. From the Protestants of Douai, a bastion of the Catholic Reformation, to the bi-confessional city of Augsburg and seventeenth-century Farmington in Connecticut, where the indigenous Indian population fashioned a separate Christian entity, the intertwined religious, musical, and emotional lives of specifically grounded communities of early modern men and women are here vividly brought to life. Front Matter Editorial Introduction Martin Christ. 1. Converting Tondalos: Pilgrimages, Music and Sound in Early Modern Lutheranism Iain Fenlon. 2. Catholicising the City: Music, Ritual and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Córdoba Alexander J. Fisher. 3. Sound and the Conversion of Space in Early Modern Germany María Gembero-Ustárroz. 4. Music Books for Lima Cathedral and their Social Context in the Early Seventeenth Century: Black Slaves as a Guarantee for Producing a New Plainchant Library Glenda Goodman. 5. Land and Conversion: New Frameworks for Colonial American Hymnody Inga Mai Groote. 6. Lutheranising through Music: Tracing the Confessional Soundscapes of Early Seventeenth-Century Wolfenbüttel and Braunschweig Philip Hahn. 7. Sound Conversion? Music, Hearing and Sacred Space in the Long Reformation in Ulm, 1531–1629 Matthew Laube. 8. The Musical Cultures of Dissent and Anti-Catholicism in Counter-Reformation Douai Emilio Ros-Fábregas. 9. A Jesuit Ceremony of Spiritual Exercises with Music in the Seventeenth Century: Devotional Connections between Perpignan, Barcelona, Madrid, Granada and Archbishop Palafox Andrew Spicer. 10. Bells, Confessional Conflict and the Dutch Revolt, c. 1566–1585 Leonardo Waisman. 11. Music for an Endless Conversion: A Cycle of Offertories from Jesuit Paraguay Back Matter