Long acknowledged as a leading authority on Italian music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Claude V. Palisca here collects nineteen essays that provide a corpus of significant research into the music of the Italian Renaissance. The book is in two parts, providing studies on the history of Italian music theory and studies in the history of Italian music. The thread that runs through the book is the interaction between music theory and practice and between the humanist revival of antiquity and modern ideals of expression in the decades around 1600, a time of transition between the Renaissance and Baroque. A prefactory note accompanies each of the older essays, reviewing recent research on the topic, including the author's and other critic's reactions to the original article. Footnote references have been brought up to date and the text is complemented by over a hundred music examples and a number of illustrations.