Music and the Identity Process

In the last decades, early modern Rome has attracted increasing and increasingly diverse attention from scholars of various disciplines. (A recent and accessible guide to such interdisciplinary scholarship can be found in the Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, ed. Pamela Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield (Brill, 2019).) New musicological investigations and research projects too have contributed to this growth of Roman studies. Among the most stimulating recent enterprises on Roman musical life in the early modern era is the one that produced, inter alia, the present volume on ‘the national churches and their networks’. Its special and perhaps most intriguing character lies in its double, centripetal and centrifugal, perspective. The national churches—that is, the churches established, maintained, and frequented by foreign communities in the papal city—were, in fact, cultural safe havens and reference points for alien residents and visitors, but at the same time places where romanità was absorbed and assimilated by foreign cultures. They were both outposts and thresholds.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Character (mathematics) · Early modern period · Identity (music) · Literature · Musical · National identity · Period (music) · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Worship · Classics · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity