Early Modern Polemics

Abschlussbericht über Forschungsaufenthalt in Iran und Indien 2011

by Dennis Halft OP

Abschlussbericht über Forschungsaufenthalt in Iran und Indien im Rahmen des Reisestipendiums für den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs 2011 der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft e.V. (DMG)

Schiitische Polemik gegen das Christentum im safawidischen Iran des 11./17. Jahrhunderts

by Dennis Halft OP

“Schiitische Polemik gegen das Christentum im safawidischen Iran des 11./17. Jahrhunderts. Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlawīs Lawāmiʿ-i rabbānī dar radd-i šubha-yi naṣrānī”, in Adang, Camilla / Sabine Schmidtke (eds.), Contacts and Controversies between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire and Pre-Modern Iran (Istanbuler Texte und Studien 21), Würzburg 2010,
273-334.

The Idea of History In Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and the'Light of Truth'From the Accession of James I to the Civil War

by Daniel Woolf

"The Forty-Nine Gates of Wisdom as Forty-Nine Ways to Christ: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Heptaplus and Nahmanidean Kabbalah," Rinascimento: Journal of the National Institute for Renaissance Studies, vol. xlix (2009), pp. 27-43.

by Brian Ogren

"In oratorio nemo aliquid agat": Savonarola, lo spazio sacro e la musica

by Giovanni Zanovello

In Uno gentile et subtile ingenio: Studies in Renaissance Music in Honour of Bonnie J. Blackburn, edited by M. Jennifer Bloxam, Gioia Filocamo, and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, 129-136, C.E.S.R., Collection "Epitome Musical." Turnhout: Brepols, 2009

Scholars have devoted several studies to Girolamo Savonarola and music. As it is well known, the Dominican friar... more Scholars have devoted several studies to Girolamo Savonarola and music. As it is well known, the Dominican friar expressed his views in a series of sermons delivered in Florence in the mid-1490s. His position amounted to a sweeping rejection of polyphonic music, which was performed by singers of doubtful moral profile and furthered the ceremonial display rather than the edification of worshippers.
In this essay, I focus on the political context of Savonarola's speeches beyond the oft-rehearsed hostility towards the Medici regime. If Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici offered an easy target to point at from the pulpit, the Dominican friar did not limit himself to criticism. Rather, he challenged the control of civic authority over religion and proposed a republic founded on popular consensus and firmly rooted on God's laws – a utopia he introduced with the paradoxical concept of "ruling through orations." As I propose, the rejection of polyphony can be read as an aesthetic choice, but also as a way of reclaiming a different balance between religious and civic power in general, especially (but not only) in the matter of worship. In this context, Savonarola singled out polyphonic music as a conspicuous example of civic occupation of sacred space and liturgical ritual and attacked it together with all the "ceremonial" aspects of liturgy that allegedly deterred from the "inner worship" he stood for.
With this study, I would like to contribute to a better understanding of these crucial texts by underscoring their specificity and the complexity of the context surrounding the quotes musicologists too often read in isolation from the Florentine events that generated them.