Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology

A corporeal history of music—making in early modern Europe.

Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music—making subjects—composers, performers, listeners—in the long seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon the early modern body; it is described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, and miraculous while affecting “the circulation of the humors, the purification of the blood, the dilation of the vessels...