Preface

Summary

This book started from a simple question: what was Frescobaldi doing working in a hospital? While attempting to find the answer by exploring the administrative archive of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia, I discovered a wealth of material about this complex institution that employed some of the most respected physicians of the time and was a centre of medical education, while at the same time, was driven by religious conviction to care for social outcasts – unwanted babies, orphans and the sick poor. Crucially, it employed musicians and used music created by leading figures in Roman musical circles.

The variety and chronology of the sources that include the buildings themselves, administrative materials and an archive, albeit dispersed, of music manuscripts, renders a linear account of them difficult. Several key documents are reports written to satisfy papal authorities that are essentially reflective and backward-looking. Further, internal decrees were iterative and in force for long periods of time. Information extracted from such documents had to be mapped onto documents of a more mundane nature such as meeting minutes and financial documents that offered a more objective chronology. For this reason, the story of music in the Hospital has to some extent had to be told backwards.

The book is structured in two parts. The first provides a background to the institution and its foundation, exploring the relationship between religion and medicine and the role of music in both, while also outlining what was accepted as medical fact in the early modern world. The second part draws on the rich, but non-linear, archival material. Chapter 4 uses financial and documentary evidence to reflect on Bernadino da Cirillo's impact at the Hospital. Chapters 5 and 6 are broadly thematic, dealing with music in the church and the hospital wards respectively, while Chapter 7 is complementary to both Chapters 5 and 6, using iterations and revisions of a decree issued in 1644 to frame a broad chronological span from 1752 back to the late sixteenth century.