In the third decade of the twenty-first century, visitors to Rome on a whistlestop tour to take in the splendours of St Peter's Basilica are likely to miss the now unassuming-looking buildings comprising the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia. The hospital, located just out of sight of the busy Via della Concilazione leading to Bernini's piazza, and a few minutes’ walk from the Basilica, is still active today in a modern building adjacent to the fifteenth-century complex. It is an institution with a documented history dating back to 1198, though its origins as an ecclesiastical institution are even older.1 The scope and function of what constituted a Hospital and similar charitable institutions at the time of the foundation of the Order of Santo Spirito and its hospital are, however, vastly different from their modern equivalents.

At the time of the Hospital's foundation and throughout the period with which this book is concerned, the separation of disciplines into science, religion, art and their subsidiary disciplines of biology, botany, music, philosophy and so on did not exist. A university-trained physician of the Renaissance would have had a thorough understanding of a wide range of topics embraced within ‘natural philosophy’, as well as music theory, rhetoric, logic and astronomy, all of which were included in grammar-school education. This study focuses in particular on the close relationship between religion and medicine – a relationship that is extremely complex, with roots reaching back to antiquity – and how music may be viewed as a point of triangulation between them.

In pre-Christian and non-Western contexts, temples were (and are) places where the sick sought relief through rituals, and shamans functioned as mediators between the spirit world and physical world for guidance in curing diseases. We know from ancient literature that music played a part in these healing practices. It should not be surprising that as Christian communities developed, their places of worship likewise became sanctuaries to which folk came to find cures for mental and physical illness.

Healing was a fundamental part of the activities of the followers of Jesus recounted in the New Testament and, according to the earliest defences of Christianity written by Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen and Irenaeus, contin-ued in the Christian communities of late antiquity up until around the Council of Nicaea.