This study proposes a new reading of Delie and tries to shed a new light on the poet himself. Sceve appears here not only as the humanist we all know, but as a Christian poet, a poet as much interested in biblical and other religious sources as in Classical and Italian ones. In his canzoniere, Scève follows very closely, and even sometimes imitates, a corpus of fixed-form poems — rondeaux parfaits, ballades, and chants royaux — written by poets of the two previous generations for poetic contests known as Puys. And he constantly expresses his love and describes his idol in terms, images, and symbols directly borrowed from Marian poetry. To the Christian cult of the Virgin Mary corresponds for the Lover the pagan cult of Délie.

The chiasmatic themes of architecture as frozen music and music as singing the architecture of the world run as leitmotifs through the histories of philosophy, music, and architecture. Rarely, however, can historical intersections of these practices he identified. This study proposes a transient nexus of architecture, sacred music, and theology in early modern Florence.

Ponttis de Tyard, a lesser-known member of the Pleiade poets of mid-sixteenth-century France, was deeply influenced by the concerns of his comrades and contemporaries about the elemental remoteness of all “reality “ and the resulting “semiosic drift “ undermining any attempt to denote it. He expresses this preoccupation during the mid 1550s, in the Douze Fables de fleuves ou fontaines, his long underrated collection of twelve mythological fables, each accompanied by directions for a fable-based painting and an explanatory sonnet. Like the author's more highly regarded Discours du temps from the same years, the Douze Fables registers traces of not only the “strong” hermeneutic paradigm of the hermetic Neoplatonic tradition, but also the anxiety-ridden mannerist aesthetic of the period.

This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of women. As a feminine counterpart to masculine love lyric, the complainte arose from an alternative poetics, treating subjects excluded from fin amors, such as death, crime, and war. Essentially, lyric assigned erotic longing to men and mourning to women. The unusual subject matter accommodated by the complaintes, coupled with a set of material and musical forms locating them amid the cultures of cheap print, psalmody, and street song, ultimately embroiled them in the battles of the religious wars. Thus female voices came to trumpet confessional politics in songs that levied lyric, gender, and faith to serve in civil war.

Richly suggestive on a variety of levels, Odysseus's encounter with the Sirens in Homer's Odyssey remains one of the best-known episodes in world literature. This article exhumes a once popular variant of that story and tells how wise Ulysses, contrary to the ancient myth, came to stop his own ears against all allurements.

In an essay on La magia d'amore, Guido Casoni (d. 1642) demonstrated how music, along with other arts and sciences, is generated by love. On the surface, the essay strikes one as a hodgepodge of fact and fantasy in which the credibility of the data is vitiated by their often whimsical interpretation. But there is more to music than historically or logically verifiable acts or events. Casoni's musical hermeneutics reflects conceptual tendencies inherent in his own times, yet derivative from a long tradition of commentary on musical mirabilia. The present study is an attempt to contextualize these tendencies. It follows through the equation of love with music as a parable, of a plainly Neoplatonist stamp, for the relevance of music to all forms of scholarly discourse.