Musica Scientia: Musical Scholarship in the Italian Renaissance

Theories of music and its nature have been difficult to integrate into modern scholarship. In Musica Scientia, Ann E. Moyer analyzes the work of the sixteenth-century Italians who debated the nature of music and its relationship to mathematics, the natural sciences, poetry, and rhetoric. Moyer's book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the classification of knowledge in the Renaissance and of the process by which two competing kinds of analysis--humanistic and mathematical--came to distinguish the modern arts and sciences.