ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to establish a link between culture and the different forms of communication—oral, visual, written—used as instruments in the construction of the Iberian empires, as well as to examine the cultural practices that served to distinguish their communities and spaces, without overlooking the scale of individual lives. In 1639, F. M. Melo stated that the titled nobles of the Iberian peninsula devoted themselves to what he expressly described as the “culture of the person”. The Iberian cultures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were dominated by conflict—visible not only in the force or prejudice shown towards those who seemed different to them, but also in the continuous internal clashes. There are numerous examples of how the realities of that ever-larger world were reflected in cultural manifestations. Music was considered to be one of the cultural experiences that revealed the links between the different parts of the Iberian world.
