In Girolamo Mei: A Belated Humanist and Premature Aesthetician, Tsugami Eske discusses Mei, a sixteenth-century Italian scholar, as an independent thinker. While previous studies have generally treated him in connection with the birth of opera, this book examines his writings concerning the ancient theory of musical modality and the performance style of Greek tragedy in both their content and the historical perspective. Based also on analyses of Mei’s epigram De Phyllide and classification of the arts, Tsugami reveals him to have been inclined to declining humanism as well as emerging aesthetics.
Contents

Preface

Part I　THE ANCIENT THEORY OF THE MODES AND MEI'S IDEAL OF MUSIC

Chapter 1 Mei's Interpretation of the Ptolemaic Tonos System
　1.1. Ptolemy's system of the tonoi
　1.2. Mei's interpretation

Chapter 2　From the Theory of Music to the Aesthetics of Music
　2.1. Mei's view of ancient music
　2.2. Music's autonomous power of expressing emotions

Chapter 3　Music's Expressivity and Criticism of Polyphony
　3.1. Three arguments against polyphony
　3.2. Mei's thought compared with his contemporaries
　3.3. Music's expressivity and drama

Chapter 4　Introducing Alypius' System of Musical Notation
　4.1. Alypius and Mei
　4.2. Agreements and disagreements

Part II　THE PERFORMANCE OF ANCIENT TRAGEDY, AS RECONSTRUCTED FROM THE ARISTOTELIAN POETICS

Chapter 5　The Interpretations of the Poetics before Mei
　5.1. The current standard interpretation of the means of poetry
　5.2. The manuscript transmission of the Poetics
　5.3. Vettori's interpretation

Chapter 6　Mei's Interpretation of the Poetics: Ancient Tragedy as a Wholly Musical Drama
　6.1. The theoretical foundation found in Mei's letters to Vettori
　6.2. The picture of tragedy provided in On the Modes
　6.3. What Mei does and does not owe to Vettori
　6.4. The transmission of Mei's picture of tragedy

Chapter 7　Mei and the Recitative Theory of L'Euridice
　7.1. Peri's theory of the recitative
　7.2. Palisca's view
　7.3. Mei and Peri in historical perspective
　7.4. Boethius the mediator

PART III　THE AESTHETIC INTERPRETATION OF ARISTOTLE'S THEORY

Chapter 8　From the Means of Poetry to a System of the Arts
　8.1. The modern concept of “art”
　8.2. Mei's Classification of the arts
　8.3. Mei's view of the work of art
　8.4. Mei in the history of the concept

Chapter 9　Mei's Interpretation of Tragic Katharsis as the Culmination of his Aesthetic Thought
　9.1. Mei's mechanistic interpretation of katharsis
　9.2. Dancing and katharsis in the Poetics
　9.3. Mei's interpretation in historical perspective
　9.4. The aesthetics of katharsis

PART IV　MEI AND HUMANISM

Chapter 10　Methodology
　10.1. Mei's methods of research
　10.2. Textual criticism
　10.3. The Latin prose style of On the Modes

Chapter 11　The Epigram De Phyllide
　11.1. Cod. Vat. Barb. lat. 1819, fol. 93
　11.2. The Antigone excerpt
　11.3. The form and thought of De Phyllide

Conclusion　A Belated Humanist and Premature Aesthetician

References
　Manuscripts
　Printed books and articles

Indices
　Index of names and subjects
　Index of Italian words
　Index of Latin words
　Index of Greek words
　Index of quoted passages