Music, Medicine and Religion at the Ospedale Di Santo Spirito in Rome: 1550-1750

Explores the use of music as therapy and shows how it operated in the hospital’s institutional, social and historical contexts, undergoing change in response to broader cultural and religious movements.

This book explores connections between the physical care of the sick based on the study of medicine, concepts of healing founded on religious thought, and the practice of music at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito (Hospital of the Holy Spirit) in Rome. The hospital was a unique institution that was regulated by the Roman Catholic Church but simultaneously reflected the significant shifts in scientific thought emerging during the period that coincided with post-Tridentine reforms in the church.

The volume discusses the hospital’s foundation, architecture and links with the papacy. It also reflects on the then acceptable ＂ways of knowing＂ informed by religious concerns and medical traditions. The tripartite relationship between religion, medicine and music within the institution was complex. At times they existed side-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital’s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.

NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.