Vanscheeuwijck, MarcRoberts, Holly2020-09-242020-09-242020-09-24https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25637There is little doubt among scholars that mysticism played a prominent role in early modern devotional practices. Stemming from a desire to guide – even compel – the individual toward heightened emotionality and an empathetic response to doctrinal subjects, theologians, artists, and composers focused their output on works aimed at stirring the laity’s affections. While the existence of mysticism in early modern literature and iconography is clear (e.g. the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius, or Bernini’s representation of Saint Teresa’s ecstasy), its presence in music is less easily identified. This dissertation examines the intersection of music with the mystic concepts of divine love, ecstasy, and death, and how these themes are expressed in literature, iconography, and music from the late Middle Ages through the Baroque era. I begin by tracing correlations between death and musical rapture in writings by and about late medieval mystics and visionaries. While baroque representations of musical ecstasy are rooted in late-medieval concepts, they exhibit significant influence from societal changes that occurred during the Italian Renaissance, when Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, and Baldessar Castiglione rearticulated the incorporation of Neoplatonic philosophies within Christianity. As a result of the widespread dissemination of their writings, Renaissance Neoplatonism became the preeminent philosophical frame for Renaissance and baroque literary, iconographic, and musical representations of ecstatic transcendence. Of paramount importance to this study is how composers musically signaled female saints’ erotic raptures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian oratorios (a genre designed to instruct lay audiences in doctrinal matters while appealing to their senses through affective music), specifically those performed in Bologna, Modena, and Rome. The research presented here, in case studies from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, serves as a foundation for deciphering how established societal understandings of ecstasy and death as sensual, devotional events influenced late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century composers’ musical representations of rapture, the performances of which resulted in the erotic objectification of female saints. Overall, I argue that the concept of ecstatic death – as it is described by medieval and early modern mystics, and depicted by early modern artists – is intrinsically tied to music as well as to contemporaneous devotional genres.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Alessandro ScarlattiecstasyiconographyNeoplatonismoratorioQuirino ColombaniElectronic Thesis or Dissertation