Voice of Virtue

The Voice of Virtue illuminates the musical practices at the heart of the Neostoic movement that spread across French lands during the Wars of Religion in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Guided by twin reparative traditions granting music and philosophy therapeutic power, composers and performers across the embattled Catholic and Protestant confessions turned to moral song as a means of repairing personal and collective virtue damaged by theongoing conflict. Moral song collections enlarged interest in Stoic philosophy by circulating its ethical program to a broader audience through attractive paraphrases of Stoic maxims set to music. Even more importantly, this skillfully composed repertoire of polyphonic song offered a multi-sensory moral practicethat would have resonated powerfully for those well-versed in the paradoxes of the Stoic tradition. Bringing together a repertoire of little-known music prints, a rich visual culture, and an impressive body of literary and philosophical sources, The Voice of Virtue not only illuminates the influence of Stoicism on music, but also reveals that we cannot fully understand Neostoicism as an intellectual or cultural movement without accounting for its vibrant musical sounds. Virtue, asvoiced in these Stoic practices, proves to be both rational and fully invested in the sensory processes of the singing body.

This vividly-written and strikingly original study shows how song could act as a crucial tool for individual and collective moral repair at a time when France was riven by war and religious dispute. Through a meticulously researched exploration of Stoic currents in musical culture, Latour convincingly argues that moral song became a significant mode of informal philosophy as early modern French people sought to live well, to cultivate virtue, and to face adversity., The Voice of Virtue is a superb study of the French poetry and music that Melinda Latour aptly calls 'singing Stoicism.' With impeccable scholarship and infectious enthusiasm, she illuminates an unfamiliar and remarkable phase of Neostoic thought, Can music make us better people? In this fascinating and groundbreaking book, Melinda Latour demonstrates how the understudied genre of moral song in the late French Renaissance created a distinctive Stoic sonic world to repair religious conflict and civil strife. The Voice of Virtue makes important links between late Renaissance moral philosophy, devotional poetry, painting, and musical expression. With its wide range of musical illustrations and online links it enables us to appreciate for the first time the intimate beauty of a body of music that has so often been overlooked, and to understand its serious purpose.

Melinda Latour is Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Arts and Assistant Professor of Musicology at Tufts University. Her scholarship on early music has appeared in Music and Letters, the Journal of Musicology, and the Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music. She has recently published an edited collection (co-edited with Robert Fink and Zachary Wallmark), The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbrein Popular Music (2018), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.