Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence

"Wilbourne offers an extensive and trail-brazing account of racialized voices in seventeenth-century Florence. Interdisciplinary in scope and meticulously researched, Wilbourne's incomparable work takes us on a tantalizing journey into the musical and performative worlds of early modern Italy's ""unsung voices."" This book will enthrall non-specialists and specialists alike, transforming our approaches to and understandings of enslavement, race, and the power of sound across the Mediterranean world. * Nicholas R. Jones, author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain * From one of the leading opera historians of her generation, Wilbourne's Voice, Slavery, and Race is a nuanced account of the reverberations between voice and race on the seventeenth-century stage. ""Act I"" reads the evidence of paintings, commedia dell'arte scenarios, libretti, and musical scores against a wealth of new documentation from Florentine archives, while ""Act II"" turns the spotlight on Giovannino Buonaccorsi, an enslaved Black soprano in the service of the Medici. In brilliant analyses that never skip a beat, Wilbourne pieces together a new and original history of racialized performances during the first century of Italian opera. * Kate van Orden, editor of Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550-1800, I Tatti Research Series 2 *"