Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

In the three chapters that follow, three such pressures will be identified and described in turn. There
was the joint pressure of the new markets opened up by printing for secular music, and of the literary
movements that influenced the ways in which secular poetry was set. There was the pressure, already a
haunting presence in the last two chapters, of religious unrest. And there was the pressure of what might
be called “radical humanism,” the true Renaissance idea, which (paradoxically in the light of