Girolamo Mei: A Belated Humanist and Premature Aesthetician

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.