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In ancient Greek musical theory, harmony was seen as being endowed with a natural virtue capable of altering the rational faculties of the listener’s soul. The many theological and cultural implications of this classical axiom featured in early modern debates about music, dance, comedy, and emotion. By exploring a series of Campanella’s sources, this article seeks to provide some examples of original theoretical elaborations formulated in the course of these debates. A central aim of this approach involves understanding the role of emotion in composing and performing music.

The Renaissance has passed on to us an ostensibly ambiguous image of youth. Armed with crosses, hymns and drums, children and young people are both the quintessential trouble-makers and the guardians of public order and morality. How does music allow them to express in the rituals of sociability those emotive impulses which theology, law and medicine regard as typical of adolescence? This contribution addresses these aspects in light of cognitive theories advances in recent international historiography.

As with symbols in general, numbers are regarded as admitting a plurality of meanings, according to their literary context and the different orders of reality they are embedded in. In the wake of Ficino and Pico, the corpus of teachings devoted to arithmology enjoyed a rapid growth from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The Christian Platonic explanation of arithmological data retains the three-fold pattern of ancient Pythagoreanism regarding the interpretation of number in cosmological, ethical, and theological terms. By exploring Della Porta’s Taumatologia, this essay attempts to reconsider the relations between number symbolism, natural philosophy, magic and music.

Since his youth Federico Borromeo had shown an ardent desire for knowledge that drove him to delve into a broad variety of disciplines, which included Pythagoreanism. This corpus of teachings became vital in early modernity due to the debate over heliocentrism, but also on account of its intersection with the occult arts. This note presents the main aspects of De pythagoricis numeris, one of the three published works of the archbishop of Milan focusing on Pythagoras and his school, which has been generally overlooked in historiography.

This note proposes a few preliminary observations on the Apologia written in 1604 by the Theatine Antonio Caracciolo in reply to the theses put forward by Gregorio de Valencia on the role of choral office among regular religious orders. Promptly censored by the Society of Jesus, Caracciolo's short text brings to light the different spiritual identities of the Theatines and Jesuits, and highlights the analogies in their respective pastoral strategies, in which music was an element of major importance.

Starting with Daniel P. Walker, a dense historiography has examined the shades and hues of Ficino's music-spirit theory. Situated along the blurred border between the natural and the diabolical, the astrological song caused division among the protagonists of late Renaissance theology. Ficinian echoes are also found in penitential casuistry, a hitherto ignored witness to that debate, which raised questions on the origin and implications of the virtus of the musical sign.

In ancient Greek musical theory, harmony was seen as being endowed with a natural virtue capable of altering the rational faculties of the listener's soul, to the extent of depriving that person of his freedom. The many ethical implications of this classical axiom featured in early modern theological debates. By exploring a series of sources which have hitherto been overlooked in historiography, this contribution seeks to provide some examples of original theoretical elaborations and pastoral strategies formulated in the course of these debates.

Is it possible to censure music? This question may sound rather extravagant, and this is perhaps why music is often overlooked in studies on ecclesiastical censorship in the early modern period, for it would seem that its very essence is incompatible with any form of control. There is no simple answer to the initial question. The conciliar decrees, the Indexes of prohibited books, the treatises on music and the manuals on demonology reveal a wide range of grounds for censorship. Some of these went beyond written or spoken words and could be applied to music. Musical censorship did not only involve zealous inquisitors battling with some licentious musician, but also the language of worship and the circulation of prohibited knowledge, which included dangers in the form of sounds that went beyond erotic seduction.