"This revelatory book distills thirty years of reflection on the sixteenth-century madrigal with an inimitable mixture of empathy, vivacity, conceptual boldness, and downright wisdom. Susan McClary renovates our understanding of the genre in the most fundamental terms and in the process rewrites a key chapter in the history of early modern culture. McClary gives us a different sixteenth-century Europe than ... Read morethe one we thought we knew. By asking what we can learn about the era from its music, and not just the other way around, she unveils a world of luxuriant introspection and complex self-division that we can actually learn to hear in the body of music for which she is now our most eloquent advocate." - Lawrence Kramer, author of Musical Meaning" Show Less