Reneisance Music and Culture in Croatia

This book is an attempt to register the traces of Renaissance music in Croatian lands. These traces are blurred and unreliable, insufficiently preserved, poorly researched. On the whole, the research of older Croatian music lags considerably behind the related studies of Croatian art historians, literary scholars and philosophers. These shortcomings of musicological research have somewhat paradoxically proved to be an advantage as well as incentive for various broader interdisciplinary insights. Being the first more comprehensive effort dedicated to the study of Croatian Renaissance music, this book certainly suffers from many imperfections, but also I hope has at least something of the attraction of all primi fiori & frutti. This is why it seems easier to say what the reader will not find in this book, than what heshe will find in it. The texts collected in this volume do not belong to the genre of national historiography typical of nations recently freed from foreign dictates and ideologies. Although the “Early modern era” was the period when various non-European and “small European” nations had the opportunity to grasp the colonial logic of “great European nations”, I have tried to steer clear of the trap of post-colonial theories. The book does not offer a sheaf of “microhistories”, which would make some new Montaillou or Menocchio the main theme of the narration. It is usually expected from political and cultural histories of “small nations” to be hardly visible, marginal or at least exotic, owing, if nothing else, to her geographical position and size. In case “the ideal reader” would expect something of the kind, he had better put this book aside. If he is ready to give this book a chance, he may find that the protagonists of “small histories” are not necessarily marginal. Sometimes the view offered from the margins offers a clearer, or at least different picture and understanding of the centre. On the pages of this book the dramatis personae comprise priests and heretics, noblemen and tradesmen, men of learning and illiterate fishermen, ladies from high society and courtesans, printers and scribes, patrons of the arts and their protégés – in other words, people participating in one way or another in cultural and artistic events.“ (Ennio Stipčević)