Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres

Jacomien Prins is a Global Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (CSR) of the University of Warwick. She has worked extensively on the interaction between music theory and philosophy in the Renaissance. Her work includes Harmonisch labyrint (Hilversum: Verloren, 2007), Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2014), and Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on the Timaeus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a book, titled A well-tempered Life: Music, Health and Happiness in Renaissance Learning. Maude Vanhaelen is Associate Professor in the Departments of Classics and Italian at the University of Warwick. She has published articles on the reception of Platonism in 15th and 16th century Italy. she is the author of Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on the Parmenides (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Introduction

Jacomien Prins and Maude Vanhaelen

Part I: Ancient and Medieval sources

1. Eight Singing Sirens: Heavenly Harmonies in Plato and the Neoplatonists

Francesco Pelosi

2. Latin and Arabic Ideas of Sympathetic Vibration as the Causes of Effects between Heaven and Earth

Charles Burnett

3. Theory of Cosmic Harmony in Jewish and Muslim Sources

Amnon Shiloah

4. Medieval Variations on a Cosmic Theme

Gabriela Currie

5. "Therout com so gret a noyse": The Harmony of the Spheres and Chaucerian Poetics

Wolfram Keller

Part II: The Revival of the Doctrine of the Pythagorean Harmony of the Universe in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Italy and Germany

6. Cosmic Harmony, Demons, and the Mnemonic Power of Music in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Marsilio Ficino

Maude Vanhaelen

7. Francesco Giorgi on the Harmony of the Creation and the Catholic Censorship of His Views

Leen Spruit

8. Francesco Patrizi and the ‘Weakest Echo of the Harmony of the Spheres’

Jacomien Prins

9. The Reception of Ficino’s Theory of World Harmony in Germany

Grantley McDonald

Part III: The Tradition of the Harmony of the Spheres in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-centuries Europe and New Spain

10. Cosmic Play in a Symbolic Harmonic Universe: The Reception of Cusanus and Kircher in Seventeenth-century New Spain

Linda Baez-Rubi

11. Andrea Torelli and His Orphic Lyre

Concetta Pennuto

12. The Harmony of the Spheres in English Musical Mathematics, 1650–1750

Benjamin Wardhaugh

13. William Stukeley’s ‘Music of the Spheres’ Manuscript: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Newtonianism, c. 1720

Tom Dixon

Bibliography and Further Reading

Index

Entry