The book that everyone in musicology is talking about this year—not just those of us working in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; called simply Musicology in the English edition). In it, Kerman argues against what he calls positivism, which he defines as a rigid and non-judgmental pursuit of dry facts, and in favor of the higher criticism, by which he seems to mean analysis—or at least some penetrating discussion of the way individual pieces work and what makes them great—informed by a sense of history and written in a humanistic style, with a personal commitment on the part of the author to the quality of the music with which he is concerned.

It has become a commonplace that Tudor and early Stuart historical authors recognized a formal distinction between “antiquities” and “history,” yet neither the grounds nor the extent of the distinction has been explored in depth. Because some Tudor historical writers could and, on occasion, did ignore it in practice, the distinction has sometimes been deemed a technicality of only minor interest. Nearly twenty-five years ago, F. Smith Fussner described what he termed an English “historical revolution” between 1580 and 1640, a revolution which witnessed the rise of historical writing in something like its modern form. From Fussner's point of view, it mattered only that men were bringing new sources and innovative, critical research methods to the study of the past; whether they called themselves historians, scholars, philologists or antiquaries was of little importance.

What induced Marco Antonio Altieri, a Roman noble, to write a treatise on wedding ceremonies, at the beginning of the sixteenth century? It is the purpose of this article to suggest some possible answers to this question, and in so doing, to focus on the problems facing the Roman nobility in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Those problems have received little attention from historians. The present contribution can only hope to shed some light on the ideological concerns of one “committed” Roman noble. It does not aspire to an overall study of the Roman nobility. When necessary, however, it will refer to more general trends in the city of Rome during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Altieri's Li nuptiali is worthy of study if for no other reason than that it represents an important, perhaps unique, departure from the kind of writing associated with Renaissance Rome.