| Description: |
The rather artificial term “lifestyle” brings together in this chapter all the books in the 1501 corpus that were written or read with the intention of shaping the reader’s actions, regimen or character—in short, addressing the question of how to live well. In section 1.1 we consider all the books connected with school-age education, which themselves connect the education of children intimately with forming character and establishing a regimen of healthy and upright habits. In these books we find on the one hand that music and dance are banished from the classroom as distractions from study, while on the other hand students were trained in the skills of memorisation, metrical organisation, and extemporisation that prepared them well to participate in the contemporary culture of sung verse. Section 1.2 turns to so-called “conduct” literature, in 1501 still an incipient genre, giving particular attention to Giovanni Pontano’s ethical treatises, which in many respects anticipate the classic account of courtly musical conduct found in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. Books on regimen and the practice of medicine are the focus of section 1.3, where we find two distinct musical pathways through the terrain of humoural medicine, one concerned with the measures (mostly dietary) that might preserve and improve a singing voice, the other with the prescription of music in the treatment of disease. Finally, section 1.4 presents how music and musicianship were aligned with the properties of the celestial bodies in astrological literature printed in 1501. |