Italian Music and Lyric Poetry of the Renaissance

From approximately 1450–1650, several hundred anthologies of lyric poetry were written and published in Italy. We estimate that there may be as many as 500,000 poems in this literature with a multiple of this number of variants, and as many as 50,000 musical settings. The goal of the project is the development of databases incorporating both full-text transcriptions of Italian lyric poetry from the beginnings of printing to 1650, and bibliographic records of the sources. The texts will be derived initially from contemporary printed anthologies, both literary and musical, and eventually from manuscripts as well. A second goal is the development of another large database of whole texts of abstract Italian instrumental music of the Renaissance.