Download or read book Music in Renaissance Magic written by Gary Tomlinson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic enjoyed a vigorous revival in sixteenth-century Europe, attaining a prestige lost for over a millennium and becoming, for some, a kind of universal philosophy. Renaissance music also suggested a form of universal knowledge through renewed interest in two ancient themes: the Pythagorean and Platonic "harmony of the celestial spheres" and the legendary effects of the music of bards like Orpheus, Arion, and David. In this climate, Renaissance philosophers drew many new and provocative connections between music and the occult sciences. In Music in Renaissance Magic, Gary Tomlinson describes some of these connections and offers a fresh view of the development of early modern thought in Italy. Raising issues essential to postmodern historiography—issues of cultural distance and our relationship to the others who inhabit our constructions of the past —Tomlinson provides a rich store of ideas for students of early modern culture, for musicologists, and for historians of philosophy, science, and religion. "A scholarly step toward a goal that many composers have aimed for: to rescue the idea of New Age Music—that music can promote spiritual well-being—from the New Ageists who have reduced it to a level of sonic wallpaper."—Kyle Gann, Village Voice "An exemplary piece of musical and intellectual history, of interest to all students of the Renaissance as well as musicologists. . . . The author deserves congratulations for introducing this new approach to the study of Renaissance music."—Peter Burke, NOTES "Gary Tomlinson's Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others examines the 'otherness' of magical cosmology. . . . [A] passionate, eloquently melancholy, and important book."—Anne Lake Prescott, Studies in English Literature
Download or read book Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age written by John S. Mebane and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all their pride in seeing this world clearly, the thinkers and artists of the English Renaissance were also fascinated by magic and the occult. The three greatest playwrights of the period devoted major plays (The Tempest, Doctor Faustus, The Alchemist) to magic, Francis Bacon often referred to it, and it was ever-present in the visual arts. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age John S. Mebane reevaluates the significance of occult philosophy in Renaissance thought and literature, constructing the most detailed historical context for his subject yet attempted.
Download or read book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance written by Ioan P. Culianu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987-11-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today. Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent. In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing. Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.
Download or read book Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are no clear demarcation lines between magic, astrology, necromancy, medicine, and even sciences in the pre-modern world. Under the umbrella term 'magic,' the contributors to this volume examine a wide range of texts, both literary and religious, both medical and philosophical, in which the topic is discussed from many different perspectives. The fundamental concerns address issue such as how people perceived magic, whether they accepted it and utilized it for their own purposes, and what impact magic might have had on the mental structures of that time. While some papers examine the specific appearance of magicians in literary texts, others analyze the practical application of magic in medical contexts. In addition, this volume includes studies that deal with the rise of the witch craze in the late fifteenth century and then also investigate whether the Weberian notion of disenchantment pertaining to the modern world can be maintained. Magic is, oddly but significantly, still around us and exerts its influence. Focusing on magic in the medieval world thus helps us to shed light on human culture at large.
Download or read book Marsilio Ficino written by Angela Voss and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2006-12-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marsilio Ficino was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. Though an ordained priest, he was also a practicing astrologer and magician whose daunting life’s work was to reconcile religious faith with philosophical reason — which included integrating pagan magical practice with Christianity. In a lengthy introduction, editor Angela Voss puts Ficino’s achievement in context as a complete re-visioning of traditional astrological practice and the beginning of a humanistic and psychological approach that prefigured contemporary holistic approaches to astrology as therapy.
Download or read book Music Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth century England written by Penelope Gouk and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of natural magic in the rise of seventeenth-century experimental science has been the subject of lively controversy for several decades. Now Penelope Gouk introduces a new element into the debate: how music mediated between these two domains. Arguing that changing musical practice in sixteenth-century Europe affected seventeenth-century English thought on science and magic, she maps the various relationships among these apparently separate disciplines.Gouk explores these relationships in several ways. She adopts the methods of social geography to discuss the disciplinary, social, and intellectual overlapping of music, science, and natural magic. She gives a historical account of the emergence of acoustics in English science, the harmonically based physics of Robert Hooke, and the position of harmonics within Newton's transformation of natural philosophy. And she provides a gallery of images in which contemporary representations of instruments, practices, and concepts demonstrate the way in which,musical models informed and transformed those of natural philosophy. Gouk shows that as the "occult" features of music became subject to the new science of experimentation, and as their causes became evident, so natural magic was pushed outside the realms of scientific discourse.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Sixteenth Century Music written by Iain Fenlon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the seminal Cambridge History of Music series, this volume departs from standard histories of early modern Western music in two important ways. First, it considers music as something primarily experienced by people in their daily lives, whether as musicians or listeners, and as something that happened in particular locations, and different intellectual and ideological contexts, rather than as a story of genres, individual counties, and composers and their works. Second, by constraining discussion within the limits of a 100-year timespan, the music culture of the sixteenth century is freed from its conventional (and tenuous) absorption within the abstraction of 'the Renaissance', and is understood in terms of recent developments in the broader narrative of this turbulent period of European history. Both an original take on a well-known period in early music and a key work of reference for scholars, this volume makes an important contribution to the history of music.
Download or read book Renaissance Fun written by Philip Steadman and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.
Download or read book The Transformations of Magic written by Frank Klaassen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores two principal genres of illicit learned magic in late Medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic, which could not"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Metaphysical Song written by Gary Tomlinson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999-02-21 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author "connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years."--Cover.
Download or read book Mandolin Picking Tunes Early Music Gems written by Dix Bruce and published by Mel Bay Publications. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mandolin Picking Tunes: Early Music Gems by Dix Bruce is a collection of 34 wonderful songs from the 1200s to the 1600s especially arranged for intermediate and advanced mandolinists. The titles span the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras and the sounds of the individual songs reflect those years. The music includes standard notation, accompaniment chords, and tablature. Includes access to online audio recordings of each piece for listening and playing along.
Download or read book Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart written by Ralph P. Locke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the years 1500–1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.
Download or read book Magic in Western Culture written by Brian P. Copenhaver and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-09 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the beliefs and practices called 'magic' starts in ancient Iran, Greece, and Rome, before entering its crucial Christian phase in the Middle Ages. Centering on the Renaissance and Marsilio Ficino - whose work on magic was the most influential account written in premodern times - this groundbreaking book treats magic as a classical tradition with foundations that were distinctly philosophical. Besides Ficino, the premodern story of magic also features Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Aquinas, Agrippa, Pomponazzi, Porta, Bruno, Campanella, Descartes, Boyle, Leibniz, and Newton, to name only a few of the prominent thinkers discussed in this book. Because pictures play a key role in the story of magic, this book is richly illustrated.
Download or read book Nuns Behaving Badly written by Craig A. Monson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.
Download or read book Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz written by Francesca Brittan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The centrality of fantasy to French literary culture has long been accepted by critics, but the sonorous dimensions of the mode and its wider implications for musical production have gone largely unexplored. In this book, Francesca Brittan invites us to listen to fantasy, attending both to literary descriptions of sound in otherworldly narratives, and to the wave of 'fantastique' musical works published in France through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, including Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie fantastique, and pieces by Liszt, Adam, Meyerbeer, and others. Following the musico-literary aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann, they allowed waking and dreaming, reality and unreality to converge, yoking fairy sound to insect song, demonic noise to colonial 'babbling', and divine music to the strains of water and wind. Fantastic soundworlds disrupted France's native tradition of marvellous illusion, replacing it with a magical materialism inextricable from republican activism, theological heterodoxy, and the advent of 'radical' romanticism.
Download or read book The Devil s Doctor written by Philip Ball and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2006-04-18 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A vibrant, original portrait of a man of contradictions,” the Renaissance-era Swiss father of modern medicine (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus, stands at the cusp of medieval and modern times. A contemporary of Luther, an enemy of the medical establishment, a scourge of the universities, an alchemist, an army surgeon, and a radical theologian, he attracted myths even before he died. His fantastic journeys across Europe and beyond were said to be made on a magical white horse, and he was rumored to carry the elixir of life in the pommel of his great broadsword. His name was linked with Faust, who bargained with the devil. Who was the man behind these stories? Some have accused him of being a charlatan, a windbag who filled his books with wild speculations and invented words. Others claim him to be the father of modern medicine. Philip Ball exposes a more complex truth in The Devil’s Doctor—one that emerges only by entering Paracelsus’s time. He explores the intellectual, political, and religious undercurrents of the sixteenth century and looks at how doctors really practiced, at how people traveled, and at how wars were fought. For Paracelsus was a product of an age of change and strife, of renaissance and reformation. And yet by uniting the diverse disciplines of medicine, biology, and alchemy, he assisted, almost despite himself, in the birth of science and the emergence of the age of rationalism. Praise for The Devil’s Doctor “An enlivening portrait that will spark interest in [Paracelsus’s] role in the rise of science.” —Booklist “A true iconoclast, [Paraclesus] inhabited an ideological landscape somewhere between the medieval and the modern. Ball effectively places Paracelsus in the larger context of Renaissance magic and philosophy, and of a turbulent period. . . . Worth the effort.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book A Magical World written by Derek K Wilson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning some of the most vibrant and fascinating eras in European history, Cambridge historian Derek Wilson reveals a society filled with an ardent desire for knowledge and astounding discoveries—and the fantastic discoveries that flowered from it. Thinkers were drew from surprising intellectual traditions: some from folk religion, which in its turn had deep roots in a pagan past; others referred to spirits or tapped into stores of ancient wisdom and herbal remedies. This was the world of wise women, witches, necromancers, potions and incantations. Even the mighty Catholic Church, which permeated all elements of life, had its own "magical" traditions.In 1663, the Royal Society in London received its charter. Just three years later, the French Academy of Sciences was founded, and other European capitals rapidly followed suit. In 1725, the word "science" was at last defined as "a branch of study concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified." Yet just nine years before, the last witch had been executed in Britain. Fascinating and thought-provoking, A Magical World is a reminder of humanity's paradoxical nature—our passionate pursuit of knowledge alongside deep-rooted fears, superstitions, and traditions.
