The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 32 (2026) No. 1

Italian Spice and the Catholic Menace: The Paradox of Italian Musical Influence in the Cultural Formation of Early Modern England

Nicholas Ezra Field*

Abstract

During the 1670s London experienced a wave of interest in Italian music and art. Cultural chronicler Roger North remarked retrospectively that “nothing in the town had relish without the spice of Italy.” Paradoxically, the 1670s also saw a crescendo of anti-Catholic pamphleteering, and anti-Papist zeal was accompanied by a phobic demonization of Roman-Italian influence. Thus, English antipathy for a religion that was central to Italian identity rose to a fever pitch just when London society was most receptive to Italian music. The tension between anti-Catholicism and the admiration of Italian music in seventeenth-century England highlights the paradox between cultivated demand for cosmopolitanism and the need to protect a carefully nurtured Protestant national identity. To evade cultural associations between Italian music and Catholicism, musicians and patrons distanced their work from dangerous political and religious contexts by positioning music as a form of scientific scholarship necessary to the cultural formation of a modern cosmopolitan nation.

1. Introduction

2. English Protestant Society and the Foreign Catholic Menace

3. The Spice of Italy

4. The Cosmopolitan Science of Music

5. Conclusion: Italian Spice and the Catholic Menace

Acknowledgments

References

1. Introduction

1.1 In 1678 fear swept among the English populace that a Catholic conspiracy, the so-called “Popish Plot,” was underway to murder their king and overthrow the government.^[1] This spurious apprehension had dreadful consequences: Catholics were exiled, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Suspicion was widespread but especially targeted Catholic foreigners, immigrants, and their friends. Among the accused were well-known public figures, including Samuel Pepys, the admired English statesman and former Secretary of the Navy, as well as his friend and music teacher Cesare Morelli, a London guitarist.^[2] Morelli was accused of sedition because he was an Italian Catholic, and Pepys was charged with treason merely for studying music with Morelli and spending hours singing and playing the guitar with him.^[3]

1.2 The defense Pepys made was that Morelli had not taught him a religious confession, but a wealth of philosophical and musical knowledge. Pepys argued successfully that Morelli’s knowledge and artistic learning outweighed any confessional misdemeanor associated with his Italian-Catholic heritage: “[Morelli’s] qualifications are these: He is a thorough-bred Scholar, and may be the greatest Master of Music of any we have.”^[4] Pepys’s defense was essentially a claim of academic immunity, positioning musical study as a form of learned scholarship: the nature of his work with Morelli was a project of legitimate research that both required and extenuated the danger of working so closely with an Italian Catholic colleague. Crucially, Pepys proposed that he conducted this musical research not for self-gain but for the collective good of the English nation: by identifying Morelli as “the greatest Master of Music of any we have,” Pepys positioned his musical study as a contribution to the project of modern England itself—the information he gained from Morelli was in fact intelligence gathered in the service of his country. His defense was grounded in modernist nationalism that sought foreign expertise to refine a rapidly evolving London society destined soon to equal the cosmopolitan sophistication of any city in the world. For Pepys and the educated gentry to whom he offered his defense, the dangers of foreign contact were a necessary risk if they hoped to enjoy international status and prestige among the community of European nations.

1.3 Protestant England’s existential fear of a Catholic menace looming from Rome during the 1670s seems incompatible with notions of an England eager to embrace musical ideas and styles from Italy, but contemporary attitudes regarding contact with Italians and the reception of Italian cultural influence were paradoxical, especially in London where most of such contact occurred.^[5] The persecution of Samuel Pepys and Cesare Morelli illuminates the intersection of nationality, cosmopolitanism, and religious confession in the forging of a modern nation by an educated elite that sought to accumulate the most beneficial and preeminent cultural ideas and practices available, whether domestic or foreign, to be synthesized with the strongest aspects of English culture in the creation of an internationally prestigious London that would be the cultural equal of any city in Europe.^[6] It also reveals the tension that contemporary Londoners experienced between patriotic anti-Catholicism and admiration for Italian musical prowess, while illustrating a means of negotiating this conflict:^[7] by couching musical study in the language of scientific progress serving the national interest.

1.4 Musical ideas and styles flowed across early-modern national boundaries as educated Europeans, including Britons, sought the latest musical fashions and expertise. Scholars scrutinize the ability of music in seventeenth-century Europe to cross national, physical, and social barriers, and to slip provocatively between “public” and “private” spaces, as well as across confessional boundaries.^[8] Don Fader’s work spotlights the international exchange of music and musicians in the late seventeenth century, tracing intense interest in the transnational movement and attendant crosspollination of musical ideas, aesthetics, and national styles throughout Western Europe.^[9] Laura J. Rosenthal shows that a spirit of “Restoration cosmopolitanism” prevailed in England, infusing musical tastes with “a form of cosmopolitics born out of the newly energized merger of vigorous global ambitions with an intensified striving for sophistication,” driving the English to embrace “the new, the foreign, and the exotic” as never before.^[10] Andrew Walkling details the Restoration court’s eager patronage of foreign musicians, illustrated by the central position of the court ensemble known as “The King’s Italian Musicians.”^[11] The restored Stuart court in London redressed a sense of cultural inferiority by promoting encounters with foreign performers and ideas, encouraging English people to exercise a cosmopolitan appetite and to explore “intellectual experiences of the foreign” for incorporation into their own national culture.^[12]

1.5 The circulation of European musical practices and performers was complex and international, but the musical trends finding the greatest demand in London and across Europe came from Italy.^[13] Italian ideas permeated musical practices in continental cities, chapels, and courts, often hybridizing with neighboring traditions while making their way to London.  Charles II personally admired and patronized French music, and reformed the music at his Restoration court in open imitation of customs he had learned during years spent in France.^[14] As Ester Lebedinski observes, however, many of the musical practices he borrowed were themselves cosmopolitan and largely stemmed from Italian genres, having been imported to France by Cardinal Mazarin (prime minister to the kings of France, 1642–61) but originating in Rome.^[15] Musical ideas blended and hybridized as they moved across cultures, but most contemporaries regarded Italy as the ultimate source of the leading cosmopolitan trends.

1.6 As they had in France, Italian musicians offered England a strongly cosmopolitan infusion, creating in London by the 1670s a musical scene characterized by “English fervour for the Italian idiom.”^[16] To English audiences it seemed that Italians were somehow endowed with a “natural inclination” towards music.^[17] Conspicuous appreciation of Italian music was so crucial to the London zeitgeist that it became a well-known trope portrayed and parodied in contemporary theater, where the ostentatious and exclusive preference of Italian music became de rigueur among well-bred characters.^[18] Charles II, regardless of any personal Francophilia, sent his court musical director Nicholas Staggins in 1676 to study music in Italy for the purpose of gaining “new experience, knowledge, and credentials.”^[19] The king’s Groom of the Bedchamber Thomas Killigrew, who had served as ambassador to Venice and had repeatedly visited Rome “to hear good music,” used his connections to recruit for London nine Italian musicians “from several Courts in Cristendome.”^[20] For the court and for cosmopolitan-minded Londoners, Italian music offered contact with international sophistication, and Italian musicians seemed to serve as apostles of musical accomplishment and virtuosity.

1.7 But in Restoration England the progress of Italian music also met a peculiarly hostile reception in the smoldering Protestant antipathy towards Catholics and an overwhelming tendency among Britons to conflate Italian identity and culture with visions of tyrannical Catholic aggression.^[21] Fear and hatred of Catholics pervaded all social classes of the English public and was both well understood and intentional, rather than the manipulation of the masses by a political elite.^[22] Popular agency drove and sustained contemporary displays of anti-Catholicism, including menacing pope-burning processions occurring in cities throughout Great Britain during the 1670s.^[23] This rising tide of “mass anti-Catholic hysteria” inflamed not just London, but the countryside as well; all Catholics in England were presumed by “almost everyone” to be participants in a violent insurgency against the Crown and the nation.^[24] Deep suspicions that English Protestants held against Catholics grew only more intense from the early 1670s through the reign of James II, according to which they “were convinced that their faith was being threatened by a plot to reestablish Catholicism … that this plot might lead to the execution of Protestant martyrs … that the plot extended to the highest authorities … [and that] the monarch could not necessarily be trusted to rescue the nation from the plot.”^[25] Contemporary English Protestants understood Catholicism as an alien ideology, quintessential to the character and identity of “vain French and wicked Italians.”^[26] Clearly, English admiration for Italian music during the Restoration period sat awkwardly against contemporary paranoia towards Italian-Catholic cultural power.

1.8 This article proposes that a paradox inherent in the London musical scene of the 1670s—that to be patriotically English was to be anti-Catholic, while receptivity to Italian music was a key to fashionable sophistication—reflects tensions between elite cosmopolitan interests and those of local English nationality arising from London’s inexorable formation as a center of international power. Protestant English gentry, who yearned for prominence among the community of modern European nations but for whom national identity was inextricably tied to religious distinctiveness, hungered for a cosmopolitanism that they also feared. They allayed this fear by attempting to sift foreign influence for desirable and constructive arts and sciences while debarring ideas they considered degenerative, dangerous, or heretical. Drawing upon Thomas Turino’s theory of modernist reformism, I argue that musicians exploited this tension to negotiate passage across confessional boundaries by positioning music as a secular science distinct from any religious associations with its culture of origin.^[27] Turino’s theory of “twin paradoxes,” that nationalism is simultaneously dependent on and threatened by both cosmopolitanism and local distinctiveness, and that the needs and threats of these paradoxes are engaged through the gradual and modernizing synthesis of the best available ideas and practices taken from both local and foreign cultures, captures the trepidatious pursuit of foreign ideas that characterized the London musical scene during the 1670s.

1.9 Thus, the argument that protected Pepys from the accusation of colluding treasonously with an Italian Catholic was that the study of music was an entirely reasonable undertaking for an educated Englishman, that the scientific merit of music superseded religious affiliation, and that the cosmopolitan value of musical knowledge prevailed regardless of its author’s religion. Pepys successfully proposed that the study of music was the pursuit of a secular natural philosophy appropriate to the intellectual curiosity of a modern man of the world. This fruitful strategy of defensively distancing music from its original cultural source not only evaded policies of intolerance but also positioned music as mediator between members of different religious and political factions.^[28] Music was not immune to socio-political controversy, but was convenient to the cosmopolitan designs of an emerging English nationalism in a way that allowed musicians to position the art as a science, thus the legitimate domain of all learned men, thereby distancing the art from religious entanglements relating to its cultural origin. I argue that music accordingly provided a cosmopolitan link between England and the continent while deemphasizing religion: to study music was to pursue scientific advancement and modern ideas, even when the musical ideas arrived from minds and societies that, from a Protestant perspective, seemed dreadfully Catholic.

2. English Protestant Society and the Foreign Catholic Menace 

2.1 The anti-Catholic furor of the kind that swept up Pepys and Morelli simmered progressively throughout the Restoration years, permeated early modern English society at every level, and reflected a passionate fear of international Catholicism as a threat to English national security.^[29] In a steady stream of publications during the 1670s, anti-Catholic writers flooded the London reading public with a barrage of propaganda based squarely upon demagoguery and fear. Pamphlets like John Milton’s 1673 Of True Religion and Andrew Marvell’s 1677 An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England (both published anonymously) are prime examples of such presentations that were articulate, forceful, and persuasive.^[30] The unknown author of the 1679 pamphlet titled An Appeal from the Country to the City demands a passionate response to the most personal outrages imaginable:

Imagine you see the whole town in a flame, occasioned this second time, by the same Popish malice which set it on fire before. At the same instant fancy, that amongst the distracted Crowd, you behold Troups of Papists, ravishing your Wives and your Daughters, dashing your little Childrens brains out against the walls, plundering your Houses, and cutting your own throats, by the Name of Heretick Dogs.… Also casting your eye towards Smithfield, imagine you see your Father, or your Mother, or some of your nearest and dearest Relations, tyed to a Stake in the midst of flames, when with hands and eyes lifted up to Heaven, they scream and cry out to that God for whose Cause they die; which was a frequent spectacle the last time Popery reign’ed amongst us.^[31]

2.2 This pamphlet spotlights the recent 1666 Great Fire of London—widely and baselessly blamed on Catholic saboteurs—and vividly references scenes of the widely read Acts and Monuments, John Foxe’s sixteenth-century treatise on Protestant history and martyrology.^[32] This work, known best to the public as The Book of Martyrs, was copiously reprinted for centuries; its hyperbolic accounts of the oppression and persecution of pious Protestants at the bloody hands of a monstrous Catholic Church were universally known to the English laity.^[33] Frequently read from the pulpit as scripture, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs formed a referential authority upon which anti-Papist pamphleteers could rely to horrify the public and presented the Catholic Church as an unrelenting enemy shared by all English Protestants.^[34] The fear of Catholics and their socio-political influence would drive or exacerbate the Popish Plot (1678–81), the Rye-House incident (1683), and the Rebellion of Monmouth (1685), and ultimately produce a Revolution in 1688 when, in the name of national security, Great Britain expelled its native English but Catholic monarch and imported the foreign Protestant William of Orange, who had commanded forces against England in the Third Anglo-Dutch War little more than a decade earlier.^[35] In this climate English Catholics were restricted in travel, denied education, subjected to punitive taxation upon applying for a civil license (e.g. for marriage), forbidden to practice law or medicine, and finally denied all government posts by the Test Act of 1673.^[36]

2.3 The “Popish Plot” of 1678 that entangled Pepys and Morelli, an episode of politically consequential hysteria and violence arising from tenuous allegations by an obviously spurious witness, illustrates the level of genuine fear that the specter of international Catholicism engendered in the hearts of English Protestants. Concocted by notorious perjurer Titus Oates, this fictitious “plot” imagined a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II. The episode begat accusations and violence against Catholics of all social ranks, including prominent members of parliament—even the King’s brother the Duke of York. English citizens were widely encouraged to despise Catholics and curse the Pope.^[37] All Catholics were exiled from the city of London, and dozens of executions took place before it became satisfactorily established that Oates’s testimonies were entirely fabricated.^[38] Government efforts to rein in the anti-Papist movement only further inflamed religious passions and roiled the political waters, igniting a smoldering sense that the monarchy was riddled with Catholic sympathizers and collaborators brazenly led by the Duke of York enthralled by his Italian wife.^[39] While the foundational accusations of the crisis were known by 1681 to be completely false, the social panic they motivated would rage well into the next decade. When tensions enflamed by this calamity reached a denouement in 1688, as word spread that the Dutch Protestant Prince William of Orange would invade the country to prevent a Catholic dynasty in England, the citizenry of London ecstatically arose to destroy and burn every Catholic chapel in the city, attacking and looting the embassies of the Catholic states of Venice, Spain, Tuscany, and the Palatinate of the Rhine.^[40] For them the Catholic menace was no abstract ideology, but a dreadful peril that for even the most equanimous citizen could stir violent instincts of self-preservation. However substantial their confessional differences, persuasions, or denominations, for English Protestants the threat from Rome was real.

2.4 Anti-Catholicism, for all its terrors, provided a point of national common ground for a Protestant movement in England so diverse that it otherwise nearly defied characterization. The Presbyterians, Anabaptist, Quakers, Fifth-Monarchists, Ranters, Antinomians, and many other factions and persuasions that flourished during Cromwell’s Interregnum were united by nothing so much as their execration of Popery.^[41] The threat of Roman Catholicism created social coherence by connecting large sectors of an otherwise badly divided English society, providing an external Other against which to construct ideas of a modern nation state.^[42] Linda Colley argues that modern British identity arose at the turn of the eighteenth century from “much older alignments and loyalties,” but the force of English nationalism evolved from the tensions between domestic Protestantism and foreign Catholicism that simmered throughout the Restoration.^[43]

2.5 The permeating conviction that Roman Catholicism comprised a network of foreign machinations orchestrated from Italy galvanized a sense of English nationalism in opposition to cosmopolitanism in the early modern age.^[44] The Roman Papacy formed “an emblem of evil against which a modern, centralized nation-state could be organized in England,” as English national sentiment coalesced around a conviction that the intelligence behind the Catholic threat lay in Rome, rather than with any “poor lay fools deluded by Romish subtlety.”^[45] English nationalism doggedly constructed a binary opposition between “the polarity of true Protestants and the antichristian Catholics … reason and unreason, English and foreign.”^[46] Civil, cultural, and confessional conflict reflected sharp disagreement regarding the national ontology, but partisans on all sides generally considered themselves both English and Protestant. Catholics, however, were widely perceived by Protestants of all denominations as potentially treasonous servants of an antipathetic foreign power.^[47]

2.6 The threat of Roman Catholicism cemented Protestantism as a central tenet of modern English identity, but the hostility it stirred towards individuals and groups perceived as Catholic was inherently anti-Italian. For English Protestants, Italian Rome was the nerve center of an aggressive international Catholic conspiracy seeking to control English religion, government, and culture.^[48] Words like ‘Papist’ and ‘Romish’—terms universally used in anti-Catholic discourse throughout the Restoration period—implicitly designate Catholic identity as Italian.^[49] Many English people manifested anti-Italianism as part of the Protestant zeal that they felt served the national interest. For them, to be faithfully British necessitated constant and often violent vigilance against the perceived spiritual, social, and political menace of Catholicism perennially projected from Italy.^[50]

2.7 Nationalism formed in opposition to Roman Catholicism was crucial to shaping institutions and ideas of the modern English nation. Even the modern format of adversarial political parties springs from nationalist debate over the correct response to the Catholic menace during the Restoration.^[51] As anti-Catholicism permeated notions of English patriotism, it laid the foundations of a modern nationalism that called not only for the defense of its own cultural identity, but also for a competitive position within the European “family of nations.”^[52] It was in the national interest not only to shun Catholicism, but also to pursue a course of modernist reform that would enrich the national culture through the incorporation of the most valuable aspects of “foreign ‘modern’ lifeways and technologies.”^[53] Italian culture at once fascinated English elites by its attractive cosmopolitan scientific and cultural proficiency and terrorized them through its religious threat to their distinct Protestantism. For musicians, this presented the problem of how to conduct an international exchange of Italian musical culture without seeming to carry intellectual contraband.

3. The Spice of Italy

3.1 In sharp contrast to the anxiety towards an Italian Catholic danger, there was a keen appetite for Italian music and musicians in England throughout the early modern period.^[54] Music in the Italian style, whether made by actual Italians or not, was a luxurious and stylish commodity reflecting the latest in musical science. Amplifying the still-reverberant echoes of the Renaissance, early modern Italians led the way in furthering artistic and musical knowledge. Art, music, fashion, and cuisine radiated from Italy, illuminating trends from Mazarin’s Paris to Queen Christina’s Stockholm, as political and social leaders competed to attract Italian musicians and musical expertise.^[55] England was no exception. Protestant Londoners might have recoiled at the thought of Italian Catholic influence, but for many, Italian music represented cultural refinement and prestige despite its associations with Roman Catholicism. Social sophistication required familiarity with Italian taste and even members of English society most deeply paranoid about Italian Catholicism made exceptions for music and art in the interest of enriching the national culture.

3.2 English gentry attracted to cosmopolitan cultural reform appreciated Italian musical learning within the broader context of Italian cultural information. In 1673 Giovanni Torriano, a resident of London and teacher of Italian, responded to demand for instruction in his native language and culture by producing The Italian Reviv’d, a textbook comprising a revision of John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary of 1659 together with newly composed dialogues. These conversations model a comparison between Italian and English perspectives regarding music, arts, and culture, illuminating positive attributes of both. One example describes London’s cultural “clubs,” praising the excellence and professionalism of court music director John Banister’s musical leadership and the professionalism of his orchestra, while acknowledging that English vocal music is “not to be compared with the Eunuchs of Italy; and the famous Women Singers.”^[56] The inclusion in a language primer of so deferential a comparison of English to Italian music suggests a covetous regard for Italian refinement among the book’s British readership.

3.3 For English musicians, Italian training and access to Italian musical knowledge became a crucially important asset. Travel to Italy or study with Italian teachers was a key to musical urbanity. John Evelyn wrote of a musical evening on 2 December 1674, that he had “[h]eard Signor Francesco [Galli] on the harpsichord, esteemed one of the most excellent masters in Europe on that instrument: Then came Nicholao [Matteis] with his violin and struck all mute, but Mrs. Knight, who sung incomparably and doubtlesse has the greatest reach of any English woman. She had lately ben roming in Italy and was much improv’d in that quality.”^[57] A few years later he wrote of a performance by Mr. Abel, “newly returned from Italy and indeede I have never heard a more excellent voice, one would have sworne it was a woman’s it was so high and so well and skillfully managed.”^[58] Italian musicians were the most sought after teachers in London. Evelyn enrolled his daughter in 1682 as a student of Bartholomeo Albrici as one of “the best masters” available.^[59] Diarist Roger North described the musical zeitgeist of London in the 1670s by declaring that “[n]othing in towne had a Relish without a spice of Italy.”^[60]

3.4 Educated English people respected Italian culture as the living legacy of classical achievement and learning, and many early modern Britons considered the “Grand Tour” an indispensable element of a finished education.^[61] Italy had inherited the mystique of Roman civilization, which educated English classes increasingly admired during the early modern period. It was seen as the leading edge of cultural currency—the Italians in music, painting, sculpture, and literature helped to drive early modernism itself.^[62] English scholars imagined the glories of Rome through the study of standard classical works: Pliny the Younger, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Varro, Ovid, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Lucretius, Cato, et al. Villas where these figures were thought to have lived were attractions celebrated by English tourists.^[63] English nobility and gentry visiting Italy in the seventeenth century often traveled with a tutor specifically to improve their classical or political education and to prepare for an administrative career.^[64]

3.5 The practice of the Grand Tour shows that the English elite viewed exposure to Italian art as crucial for refining and elevating educated minds.^[65] The Tour, which during the later seventeenth century ideally included an extended and contemplative exploration of the Italian peninsula, was increasingly considered an indispensable cap to a fine education—a direct encounter with the Italian inheritors of ancient Roman civilization.^[66] The point was to refine and broaden young English minds with a deep understanding of history and culture. Consequently, it almost invariably culminated with substantial exposure to the music, art, and architecture of Rome, including centers of Catholic worship and the experience of Catholic liturgy itself. Roger North describes the “numerous traine of yong travellers of the best quality and estates, that about this time went over into Itally and resided at Rome and Venice, where they heard the best musick and learnt of the best masters … they came home confirmed in the love of the Itallian manner.”^[67] English tourists walked a fine line between an invaluably enriching encounter with Italian art and culture and the manifold dangers of the Catholic religion that infused it. Italy was religiously perilous, but the canonic prestige of Italian music and art elevated it above the confessional fray.^[68]

3.6 Thus, Restoration England suffered internal tension between strong cultural demand for the cosmopolitan sophistication of Italian musical expertise and anxiety over its Catholic connections. This paradox exposes the negotiation in early modern England between a Protestant nationalism and a need for international status and cosmopolitan credibility. English audiences internalized the socio-political notions of Catholic wickedness but celebrated Italian painting, sculpture, and music as necessary keys to cultural reform.^[69] The practice of the Grand Tour shows that for many English people, having Italian taste formed a crucial part of what it meant to be culturally refined. An appreciation for Italian culture, especially its classical lineage, was for young English scholars the doorstep to membership in the prestigious aristocracy of educated Europeans. The Grand Tour offered an encounter with Italian intellectual currency and promoted international relevance and prestige through the study of Italian artistic knowledge. Similarly, musicians proffering and engaging the science of Italian music refined the English international image and effected the cosmopolitan reformation of national culture.

4. The Cosmopolitan Science of Music

4.1 For educated people in the late seventeenth century, music was not just an art, but a science. The seventeenth century saw the study of natural philosophy blossom into an international scientific community that sought earnestly to comprehend the workings of the physical world.^[70] Penelope Gouk has shown that late seventeenth-century British universities generated a growing population of educated young men who sought to understand the science of music as a matter of intellectual curiosity.^[71] Science minded scholars all over Europe shared a “universal care to find the correct method of procedure: if their findings tended in any direction, it was towards the adoption of mathematical techniques in a wide range of works, and towards a more self-conscious experimental empiricism.”^[72]

4.2 Contemporary musicians and philosophers saw music as a rules-based technology, an empirical accomplishment for the improvement of minds and advancement of human society.^[73] In his 1674 edition of Introduction to the Skill of Musick, a book containing a substantial section detailing “The Italian manner of Singing,” John Playford posits music as a “liberal science,” the study of which being educationally necessary for “the efficacy it hath in moving the Affections to Virtue.”^[74] Playford frames musical knowledge as an international science cultivated “in all Ages and in all Countries,” observing music as a learned and “rational” discipline common to the whole human community: “It hath been the study of millions of men for many thousand years, yet none ever attained the full scope and perfection thereof, but after all their deep search and laborious studies, there still appeared new matter for their inventions.” Playford identifies Italy as the leader of musical science and acknowledges its influence on the musical history of England: “King Henry the Eighth did much advance musick in the first part of his reign, when his mind was more intent upon arts and sciences, at which time he invited the best masters out of Italy.”^[75] For Playford, music is not a trifle or entertainment, but a field of humanistic study. Distancing music from the fray of confessional or religious alignment, Playford elevates the art to the level of scholarship. In the preface to the 1675 London printing of music he had composed for the operas Psyche and Tempest, Matthew Locke positions his work as an English adaptation of an Italian form of musical erudition, declaring that “Italy was, and is the great Academy of the World for that Science.”^[76] Similarly, Christopher Simpson, in describing the publication of his 1678 Compendium of Practical Music as an obligatory contribution “in common duty” to the body of musical understanding, places the arts and sciences on the same plane.^[77] Contemporary composer John Jenkins endorsed Simpson’s Compendium of Musick as a learned contribution: “a work as tends to the improvement of the whole frame; (I mean as to the least and most knowing capacities in the rudiments of that science).”^[78] The Italian composer Giovanni Maria Bononcini in his 1673 treatise Musico Prattico describes music as a thing that can be understood only through diligent practice; on the subject of practice in general, he clarifies: “provided that one possesses a good foundation in the art or science that one wishes to practice.”^[79] Thomas Mace in his 1676 treatise Musick’s Monument posits that the arts and sciences transcend the fluctuating currents of aesthetic fashion.^[80]

4.3 Music as a form of scientific scholarship traversed national and political boundaries, rising above even virulent religious differences. Scientific internationalism was the cornerstone of a supra-confessional intellectual movement that flourished in seventeenth-century England and throughout Europe; cross-cultural research aligned musicians with the community of scholars inquiring into the workings of the natural world through persistent experiment and analysis.^[81] The 1660 founding of the Royal Society in London officially promoted the study of “natural things” and “all useful arts,” and specifically sought sustained communication with communities in other countries, calling directly for correspondence “with all sorts of foreigners” regardless of religious affiliation.^[82] The Royal Society produced not only experimental research on medical, chemical, and physical philosophy, but also investigations into the properties of sound and reviews of current international works on secular musical theory.^[83] As both a science and an art, music claimed the mantle of international scholarship while appealing directly to the aesthetic senses of the public in a way not possible for other fields of research.^[84] Framed as a scientifically objective practice detached from religious or cultural freight, music was no longer a threatening foreign influence but a cosmopolitan asset to British national interest.

4.4 In an age rife with confessional suspicion and violence, the principle that music was a science allowed musicians to distance their work from religious associations fraught with social danger even as they refined English culture through artistic proficiency. Communion with Italian musical knowledge rewarded the early modern English intelligentsia with the prestige of a cultural currency outweighing the risk to England’s distinctive Protestant identity, while musicians working to import musical science from Italy served the national interest by providing necessary cultural reform.

5. Conclusion: Italian Spice and the Catholic Menace

5.1 To sum up: The cultural formation of modern England in the seventeenth century depended on engagement with cosmopolitan ideas and technologies from abroad despite the threat such engagement posed to a carefully constructed Protestant identity. Restoration England was burdened by anti-Catholicism deeply entangled with anti-Italian sentiment. Simultaneously, Italian music and musicians served a need for cosmopolitan culture but created dangerous contact with the Catholicism. English people feared Catholicism as an aggressive foreign ideology radiating from Italy but eagerly sought to absorb Italy’s musical and artistic expertise. Musicians negotiated this conflict and strategically distanced their art from dangerous associations with Catholicism by positioning music as a secular, learned, and scientific discipline. Just as classical Roman writers—Italy’s ancient legacy of philosophy, history, and literature—and Italian science and natural philosophy were crucial elements of a finished English education necessary for membership in the aristocracy of international European prestige, music served as cosmopolitan knowledge indispensable for a well-formed modern nation. Musicians dissipated tensions generated by Italian music’s association with Catholic culture by regarding music as scholarship. Britons thus skirted the dangers of Catholicism by carefully curating a safe distance from any religious associations while enjoying the secular fruits of Italy, especially musical knowledge.

5.2 Despite Roger North’s recollection that nothing in 1670s London had relish without the spice of Italy, in 1670s London Italian music conjured associations with Catholicism that were paradoxically both terrifying and tantalizing to early modern Britons at every level of society. For many, to be English was to be anti-Catholic while to be musically fashionable was to have Italian taste. The alignment of music with the humanist study of science distanced music from religion sufficiently to allow this inherent paradox to flourish. Deeply ingrained social and political suspicions about religious motivation and identity did not prevent the spice of Italian musical ideas from reaching English audiences.

Acknowledgments

I wish to express deep thanks to Michael Largey, Melanie Batoff, Mark Clague, Stefano Mengozzi, Sean Field, Larry Field, Marcie Ray, and several anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments on earlier versions of this article. I read earlier versions at the 18th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music in Cremona, Italy, and the Biennial Conference of the North American British Music Studies Association in Logan, Utah, both in 2018.