Browsing by Author "Shephard, Tim"

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Open Access
Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-08-06) Ştefănescu, Laura; Shephard, Tim; O’Flaherty, Ciara; Page, Annabelle; Doyle, Oliver
This volume explores how everyday texts in Renaissance Italy engaged with music, sound, and hearing. Of the 358 known editions printed in 1501, only a few contained formal music notation or specialist theory. Yet a surprising wealth of musical knowledge emerges from religious texts, classical commentaries, lifestyle guides, poetry, and more. These sources—rarely penned by professional musicians—reflect the broader cultural presence of music in early 16th-century life, touching on themes like music’s moral influence, its role in education, and its scientific understanding. Drawing from an ambitious cross-disciplinary survey, this groundbreaking study repositions everyday references to music as vital to understanding Renaissance musical culture. It challenges scholars to look beyond elite and theoretical traditions, and instead engage with the rich, often-overlooked world of non-specialist musical discourse. Set against the backdrop of 1501—a landmark year when Ottaviano Petrucci revolutionized music printing—this book offers a compelling snapshot of how music was understood and discussed by ordinary readers in Renaissance Italy. By sounding out these diverse voices, the project reimagines the contours of music history and opens new avenues for musicological inquiry.
Open Access
The Khan’s Pifferi: Reading about the Musics of Asia in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy
(Open Book Publishers, 2026-07-27) Shephard, Tim; Xiao, Chenxi
This volume explores what Italian readers of the 1480s and 1490s could learn about Asian music through the expanding medium of print. Drawing on ten travel books printed in Italy before 1501, reporting the experiences of pilgrims, merchants, diplomats, adventurers, and an enslaved individual, the authors examine how musical practices in the Levant, Turkey, Persia, India, and China were described for late fifteenth-century audiences. Through close textual analysis, the book reveals how references to singing, instruments, religious ritual, and courtly patronage shaped an emerging Italian understanding of Asian sound worlds. These printed accounts are situated within Italy’s dense networks of pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, and migration across the Eastern Mediterranean, demonstrating that Italian musical culture was inflected by global connections reaching far beyond Catholic Europe. Interdisciplinary in approach, The Khan’s Pifferi will be of particular interest to musicologists, Renaissance scholars, historians of travel and intercultural encounter, and researchers in global and pre-modern studies. It offers a fresh perspective on how musical knowledge circulated and how Renaissance Italy engaged imaginatively with cultures beyond Europe.