The Inaudible Music of the Renaissance: From Marsilio Ficino to Robert Fludd

Roseen Giles is a musicologist with a specialty in early modern musical culture; she is also the curator of DUMIC (Duke University Musical Instrument Collections). In her research she examines the aesthetic, professional, and personal relationships between poets and musicians of the Italian seventeenth century. Her monograph (Cambridge University Press, 2023)— Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation—contributes to the histories of music and literature by arguing that the controversial experiments of seventeenth-century poets had a profound influence on techniques in musical composition, most notably in the works of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). Her most recent book—Lettera amorosa: Musical Love-Letters in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the musical history of epistolary poetry.She has published essays on music and philosophy in the Renaissance, memory and orality in the notation of medieval music, and the relationship between music and devotional practice in the seventeenth century.