Combining a close study of Monteverdi's secular works with recent research on late Renaissance history, Gary Tomlinson places the composer's creative career in its broad cultural context and illuminates the state of Italian music, poetry, and ideology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Gary Tomlinson is Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and a 1988 MacArthur Fellow.

"[A] very stimulating overview of Monteverdi's work."—John Whenham, Times Higher Education Supplement

"The scholarship underlying Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance is breathtaking. Tomlinson's control of the literature, ancient and modern, on both Italian Renaissance music and poetry is formidable. . . . It is distinguished, moreover, by crystalline prose; elegance as well as accuracy of translations (which are unfailingly provided with the originals); helpfulness of documentation. . . ; music examples adroitly chosen to illuminate and undergird analytic comments; and generosity in acknowledging the work of other scholars."—H. Wiley Hitchcock, Renaissance Quarterly

"In a manner worthy of the comprehensive power of Claudio Monteverdi's own musical intelligence, musicologist Gary Tomlinson has united in this extraordinary and provocative interdisciplinary study the skills of an astute historian with those of a sensitive literary scholar and perceptive music critic."—Barbara R. Hanning, American Historical Review

ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, American Society of Music Composers, Authors and Publishers