<i>Animals in Early Modern Histories of Music</i>

Abstract Although the place of animals in early modern musical thought has received some scholarly attention, their role in the works that inaugurated music historiography in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries remains unexplored. The present study seeks to address this gap by examining the representation of animal musicality in two foundational works of the genre: Wolfgang Caspar Printz’s Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst (1690) and the multi-authored Histoire de la musique, et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu’à présent (1715). It focuses on the specifically historical dimensions in the two sources’ engagement with animal musicality, exploring how this phenomenon is expressed through the historical example – the defining genre feature of the era’s historiography. The historical example, it will be argued, shapes the articulation of animal musicality in ways that reflect its three established epistemic functions – demonstrative, representative, and paradigmatic—each manifested through a distinct mode of reasoning in the source texts. Attention is also given to the underlying criteria by which knowledge of animal musicality is valued and justified in music-historical writing.