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University students need textbooks and set works to study, and professors want to publish their scholarship. Thanks to these two fundamental factors, the universities had long fuelled the book trade. This chapter considers the treatment of music in those books printed in Italy in 1501 that were in some way connected with university study and scholarship. These include set works of classical literature for study in grammar class, often printed with new and recent commentaries; textbooks for the study of rhetoric, natural philosophy, law and medicine, more often accompanied by medieval commentaries; and new works of scholarship in all of these fields. Section 3.1 focusses on natural philosophy, a high priority for the Italian universities, giving particular attention to commentaries on, and new works of scholarship inspired by, Aristotle’s account of the senses and sensory cognition in De anima. In section 3.2, on rhetoric, a 1501 edition of Cicero’s De oratore with commentary by Ognibene Bonisoli is adopted as the central case study, investigating music’s role as an enabling analogy in the theory and practice of oratory. Section 3.3 considers how humanists of the second half of the fifteenth century deal with musical terms and characters in their commentaries on the Latin classics by Virgil, Juvenal, Apuleius, and others. In section 3.4 we turn our attention to the classical historical and encyclopedic works in the 1501 corpus, such as Livy and Pliny, considering how literature professors mined them for musical information in order to explicate Latin verse. Finally, in section 3.5 the focus is on law, represented in the 1501 corpus by a wide range of texts concerned with both ius commune and ius proprium; whilst music is hardly the lawyers’ foremost concern, in fact both laws and legal processes reflect the role of music in the public sphere in an Italian city. Overall, this chapter argues that, whilst music was not taught as an independent curricular subject at Italian Renaissance universities, it did indeed ... |