Ep 5. Violin maker Andrea Amati Part 2 Amati and the Reformation, bring out the violins!

The Violin Chronicles Podcast

Explore the captivating story of Andrea Amati, the pioneering violin maker whose artistry revolutionized the world of music. Discover his iconic designs, unrivalled craftsmanship, and enduring influence on violin making. Join us on this enchanting journey through history and immerse yourself in the legacy of Andrea Amati. Subscribe now to "The Violin Chronicles" and delve into the extraordinary world of violin making.

In this second episode we look at Andrea Amati's life in Cremona and how church music and the reformation influenced the world of the artisans in this city.

The music you have heard in this podcast is as follows.

Bloom – Roo Walker

Mafioso – Theo Gerard

Casuarinas – Dan Barracuda

Danny Yeadon Gamba

Industrial music box – Kevin MacLeod

Budapest - Christian Larssen

Music of Cathedrals and forgotten temples

Kevin MacLeod – Brandenburg Concerto No 4

Josquin des Pres – Missa l’homme Arme – Tallis Scholars

Palestrina – Missa Papae Marcelli – Tallis Scholars

Spem in Alium – Tallis Scholars

ACO – Live in the studio Boccherini

Transcript

  Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicle. A podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history

Welcome back to Cremona, city of industry and war like inhabitants. In the last episode about Andrea Amati, we looked at the city and its population top heavy with artisans. and a booming textile industry. We also saw Andrea Amati growing up in a world disrupted by war, but also uplifted with the artists, thinkers, and musicians of the Renaissance.

When Andrea Amati was in his 30s, the city of Cremona becomes part of the Spanish Empire, heralding in a more peaceful, or at least less deadly, age for the people of Lombardy. But as people were taking a short break from invading northern Italy, the printing presses were ramping up. And an altogether new revolution was about to take place.

The Spanish monarchy took over from the Sforza in 1535 and would retain power that would last for the next 200 years or thereabouts. This same period of Spanish occupation would coincide with a golden period of violin making in Cremona and would englobe the lives of the four next generations of our Amati family.

And so it was into this bubble of peace and prosperity that the now married Andrea Amati welcomed his first son into the world. They called their son Antonio Amati and as time went on, and with the help of all that new Spanish silver, Italians would invest their money in art and beautiful objects of every kind, including instruments.

These would be handed down in women's dowries or inherited by family members.

Today, where we might invest in property, in a peaceful, non war ridden country, and economy, it seems a sure bet, but if you lived in a town that was regularly trampled by the passing armies, it may be more prudent to spend your money on mobile objects.

Among the artisans, and artists, who profited by this spending were the instrument makers, and Andrea Amati was one of those.

Andrea Amati was good at what he did, and thanks to the savings he had been making over the years, was almost ready to head out and set up his own workshop. But what was it like for a violin maker living in Spanish Lombardy? The Spanish presence was fairly light. The pre-existing magistrates were mostly maintained, as was the process of electing them.

There was a Castilian, appointed by the king, with a handful of men. The council around which the city politics revolved had about 150 members, and they would meet in the ancient town hall. It was a mixture of local and, at the top end, Spanish representatives, and was responsible for public order, supplies, the budget, customs duties, and heritage.

They had a sort of parliament where for two or three times a month, topics were addressed and debates and voting took place. It was one guy's job to provide arguments contrary to every proposal put forward.

I spoke to Dr. John Gagne about how the city of Cremona functioned under Spanish rule.

Yes, so, in a nutshell, the entire duchy of Milan is ruled by, well, a governor. In the Spanish period, there's a Spanish governor who sits in Milan and basically rules the entire duchy. The body that works for the governor is the Senate. Which is appointed for life, mostly elite men, 15 20 men.

Are they Cremonese?

No, they're all Milanese or they're actually, they're representative of the Duchy. So the Milanese Senate is, you know, often aristocrats from around the duchy in some cases some Spaniards, but it's mostly Italians.

Oh, yeah, so you're talking about Milan

Oh, yeah, which I'm setting up the so that's the kind of state right but then at the local level you've got two main administrators there's the Podesta Which is a magistrate that's existed since the middle ages and that was kind of often a foreigner, even in the middle ages, from another city, even if he's Italian, brought in to be an impartial overlooker to judicial matters. So in other words, there was so much tumult in the middle ages that they wanted their chief magistrate to be. Not from the city, so that he wouldn't be partial.

In the Spanish period, the Podestà is selected by the Senate in Milan. And so it could be a local Italian. It could be, you know, as they've done for centuries, someone from nearby. Who would be the, let's say, chief magistrate of the city. So that's number one. And then number two is a castellan, who is the sort of castle keeper of the city.

And the castellan is an appointee personally by the king. And that's basically a military man who is essentially acting as governor in the city, who runs the, all the other aspects that are not judicial. Let's say they're, you know, administrative, military, to oversee the city. So, often the Castellan or the Podestá has a sort of group of advisors who work under him.

It's basically, let's say, a two pole system. Speaking for, in terms of religion a bishop who will oversee the spiritual matters. The interesting thing about Cremona is that there is no bishop resident for almost a century, from the mid 15th century to the mid 16th century. And part of the effort of the Catholic Reformation in the mid 16th century was to make sure that Cremona had a bishop in place because as we discussed earlier, Cremona was a hotbed of Lutheran and Calvinist ideas.

So those are the sort of the three people who would be chief overseers of the city would be the castellan, the protesta, and then the bishop. But then they had a sort of a council of elected members as well. There was a city council they're often appointed ministers with certain portfolios and that would, yeah, so they, and that would be, that would report to the senate of Milan.

So you've got, let's say, a diffuse organizational system that runs the city that represents different interests. In terms of who wants to control what aspects of city's functioning. Mm-Hmm. So with the, the hotbed of Protestantism.

Yeah. Why do you think that? Cremona was one of the biggest it was the city with one of the biggest Protestant populations.

A very, in the statistics it had about 50% artisans. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's a big aspect to it. I mean, you, you might think maybe the university town would be a great place for Protestantism to erupt because Lutheranism and Calvinism were religions of text. They were about a return to biblical scripture and therefore the literate tends to go for Protestantism first.

But yes, because Cremona was if not a university town, it was the hub of business aside from the metropole of Milan. There's a lot of traffic of people, there's a lot of money, and there are lots of artisans who are making things, whether it's, you know, sort of merchants who oversee textile production, or often, you know, even music instrument makers.

Those are people who succeed in the business by being literate. So I think the theory is that basically it's a city with a high amount of connection to the outside world through motion traffic, and it also is predisposed to textual influence because of its literate population. And therefore, it becomes a kind of breeding ground for Protestant activity.

And, as I mentioned before, there's also no titular bishop who lives in the city for the first half of the 16th century, which is exactly the time when Protestantism is on the rise. That's frankly not uncommon around a lot of European cities that, you know, the bishop lives elsewhere and receives revenue from a town, but this may have been part of the reason why there was no one there to, let's say, squash initial growth of heterodox views, was because, yeah, he was living elsewhere.

The year after Andrea Amati’s first son Antonio Amati was born, 1537, Andrea Amati opened his own workshop, and a year after that, the family moved again into a house in the parish of San Fristino, an area well known for its artisans.

Andrea Amati was now known as a master maker in the artisan class, and the new home he found for his family and workshop was on a small block consisting of a shop facing the street. Towards the back of the building was a small courtyard with a well in the paved centre to collect water, and down a few stone steps beyond the well was a cellar.

Above the shop were comfortable rooms for the family to live in, and it was into this house that Andrea Amati moved his family. Over the next 200 years, here would live his children, his grandchildren, and his great grandchildren. The Amatis parish had always been a place filled with artisans and artists.

Amongst their neighbours were famed woodcarvers, sculptors, painters and architects. These people were a mostly educated literate class. Cremona, being proud of its tradition of schools and, and let's not forget that this was the renaissance, Cremona was a well connected city and up to date with all things renaissance y.

One of the movements in the renaissance was humanism, and I asked Jean Gagné to explain what it was all about.

It comes from a slang term for the teachers of letters called Umanisti, who taught sort of humanist subjects like philosophy, literature, poetry and that was distinct from most of the teaching that was going on in the universities, which was much more classic medieval philosophy. And so the humanists were interested in these subjects I just described. Inside the Curriculum of humanism was moral education, philosophy, history, all the things that were designed to improve your, you know, humanity, essentially, to make you a self-reflective person, to make you, you know, in touch with moral and ethical issues. And so, humanist education ideally produced that kind of person, but it also then became a kind of working method, which was an attention to good quality classical sources because bad quality classical sources often have errors in them and therefore would teach you the wrong things.

So, one of the programs of humanism was to find good quality texts from antiquity, the best kind you could, or to build them yourselves through various different copies that then you would sort of collate and address and in doing that process, hundreds of texts from antiquity were recovered. And the recovery of those hundreds of texts often opened up new doors to all kinds of so far unknown aspects of ancient culture, which included things like treatises on, you know, physical education or on food or on money or on all varieties of life that had sort of been left in the dust for several centuries.

So the method of humanism was this sort of, let's call it textual criticism method, but it also then produced a whole bunch of new areas of learning in a variety of disciplines that, you know, were, were emergent in the Renaissance.

And is that sort of the science's? came from that as well?

Yeah. Yes. So there were, obviously that regime of textual study goes back to all of the ancient scientists, Pythagoras and others, who whose texts became increasingly interesting to the people of the, 15 and 16th centurys.

There were schools, of course there were schools run by parishes usually. And so that's where they got their first teachings. But I'm sure that they went to some kind of elementary school. They all knew how to use it. They were not illiterate. Later makers such as Guadagnini was illiterate.

Not social status necessarily, but cultural status. Many of Cremona's artisans were educated and literate, having attended school, and the Renaissance principles of construction and measuring would not have been out of their reach. And so they had this tool to be able to experiment with and develop the violin and its form.

Andrea Amati was now established with his young family. The wars that had so disrupted their lives appeared to have resolved themselves. But was this just the calm before the storm? Conversations and gossip among the artisans were in full swing. Dangerous ideas were spreading through the city. A movement that was quite sensational and that would have had a direct impact on the work artisans were commissioned to undertake was taking place, and care would have to be taken not to get themselves into trouble.

Accusation of heresy was a serious thing in the Spanish governed Cremona, so when the Reformation came to town, a lot of Andrea Amati’s artisan friends and neighbours would have been walking on eggshells. It is difficult to emphasize just how far reaching the Reformation was and the sheer number of people it would have affected.

As the people of Cremona were finally coming out of years of war, they were now faced with a spiritual revolution that was challenging one of the most powerful structures in their culture and questioning not only how they lived their lives, but who had authority over their spiritual beings and immortal souls and this is important because in the world of the Amati family, life, religion, and the church were very much intertwined. Music and art were heavily influenced by religious structures, and for an artisan, one of their main clients, livelihoods, and sources of income came from the Roman Catholic Church.

So what exactly was the Reformation, and why does it matter?

And how would it have affected Andrea Amati and the lives of his family?

My name is Peter Jensen. I'm a minister in the Anglican Church here in Sydney. I've been a principal of a college and a bishop, but my study, which I did at Oxford, was on the Reformation in England. And I'm interested in lots of things, of course, not just the Reformation, but I have I teach what's called Christian Doctrine. I'm a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University.

So I asked Peter Jensen to briefly tell us what the Reformation was about.

Yes. The Reformation is a a huge movement, which in some ways created the modern world. It was like all movements, it was sometime coming, you could see it coming. But there was a crucial moment in 1517, when a German monk by the name of Martin Luther, who was an expert of the reading of the Bible, became convinced by observing what the church was doing in those days.

And saying in those days that the church had got the Bible wrong. And so he put up on a church door, which is one way of communicating in those days, something called the 95 Theses. And these were his opinions about what the church should believe as opposed to what it did believe. And that really sparked this thing called the Protestant Reformation. The big thing was the Bible. Was the church really teaching what the Bible said? That was really important. It was to do with how one gets to be saved. Was the church really teaching the right way for people to be saved? And Martin Luther and the other Protestants said no. And then so there was the Bible and there was salvation.

And then, of course, was the Church right to have the Pope as its head? Is that true to the Bible? And there are a whole range of other issues which arose. The more they thought about it, the more they were saying no. The church has got the Bible wrong and we have to reform the church, a reformation. Or if the church won't have us, we will have to leave the church. And basically that's what happened right across Europe.

So here's how things were set up in Cremona from a religious point of view. During Andrea Amati’s lifetime, there was a bishop appointed by the Pope. He was the bishop of a number of cities and so did not live in Cremona. He controlled the diocese through a vicar who lived in the bishop's palace and his job was to deal with important things such as rent revenue, supervision of tenants, and finally, if he really had to, pastoral care.

The vicar spent a lot of time trying to keep the bishop's palace to himself, not letting other high ranking members of the church move in. His duties were to make sure the books were being kept well, the relics were being preserved, the oils used and incense were in stock. He kept an eye on the church's income and that the births, deaths and marriages registries were being kept.

We can thank the vicar for this because historians are able to use a lot of information about our violin makers from these registries. Finally, his job was to look after the souls of his parish. He had to record the number of inhabitants. And the possible presence of heretics and concubines, or unconfessed. How he went about doing this, I'm not quite sure, but he also had to handle complaints. So in effect, he was doing stock, inventories, and was the complete human resources department all rolled into one. Some complaints to come his way were things such as; There was a priest in one of the parishes, in Bordolano for example, a certain Don Alessandro “He does not wear the clerical habit and plays dice”. In another, the complaints are that the priest is ignorant and illiterate. In another, the priest was living with a woman and they had four children, and so on and so forth. The bishop in all this was a distant figure, and it was a source of constant complaints from the Cremonese who thought they deserved an in house papal rep of their own. The organisation of the priests in the parishes was a bit sloppy, and they themselves felt they were not being supported. Faith in the system was wearing thin. So when Luther's ideas and thinking arrived in Lombardy, most likely merchants coming from the north, many people in Cremona embraced them and from there, the city had one of the largest Protestant populations in Northern Italy. I spoke to John Gagne about the connection between the Protestant and artisanal classes in Europe during the Reformation.

A large Protestant population were the artisanal class as well. That's definitely, I mean, Lyon is a huge city for the growth of Protestantism and What do we have in Lyon? We've got a huge printing industry, a lot of manual merchants who are making all kinds of goods. Obviously the printing industry is a major pusher of Protestantism because it’s a business that deals with text. There is a big printing industry in Cremona too, which is also not irrelevant. For instance, Cremona was also the first place where The first Italian pamphlet against Luther was printed. So as much as it was a hotbed, it was also a site where they could print responses to Lutheran ideas.

And in the cathedral, sort of in the main nave, the dome on the inside, there's this painting and on the painting you have, you have Jesus sitting on his throne in heaven with a book and on one side you have, I think it's on his right, you've got the Pope and the Roman Catholic bishop and on his left is a Jew and a Lutheran the're going to hell and that's on this, this huge, like in the cathedral in Cremona. Yeah. Well, you know, it tells us something about the points of view that are, you know, most in people's minds when that painting was made. Yeah. And so they probably wouldn't have needed to do that if they didn't have such a strong Protestant population to sort of say this to.

No, it's true. I mean, it's actually quite unusual to see Lutherans depicted in Catholic art in Italy in the 16th century. It's kind of, yeah, it's rare. So yes, you're right. I mean, the fact that they exist means that they were, you know, on people's minds, for sure.

It's not very subtle.

No, but you know 16th century Catholicism is on one hand, you know, highly refined and very subtle, but also in terms of popular teaching, quite clear that, you know, either you believe orthodoxy or, you know, it's, it's, you're damned.

So this is why Europe of the 16th and 17th century are so tumultuous. I mean, they're, Europe is fighting, would fight 150 years or more over a political settlement for the fracture of Catholicism that came in 1517. And it took, you know, generations in which people needed to work through the social challenges of more than one kind of Christianity in Europe.

So, you know it's sort of tragic to think of the way in which Europe broke down according to this irresolvable problem of religion because it really did take centuries. It led to a diaspora in the 17th and 18th centuries. You know, it was a story of decay and, you know, in terms of an imagined prior unity of Catholicism.

Yeah, I feel like you had this well for Cremona, for example, you had all these wars, and that just as they're coming out of all this war and into a sort of peaceful era of under the Spanish rule, then they have this war of like it was like a revolution really, because it's one aspect of Christianity trying to overthrow the other, because the Catholic Church had a lot of power and the Lutheran ideas are kind of taking away all that power. So you had this big war of ideas after the physical wars

Yes and maybe the other thing to say about that is that, you know, all the monarchs of Europe had nicknames. And the French monarch was known as the most Christian king. And the Spanish was known as the Catholic Majesty and the Spaniards were particularly, as they grew in power over the 16th century, they saw themselves as the defenders of the Catholic faith in Europe and abroad. Maybe that's one of the other aspects of what you're describing is that the Spanish were the Catholic hardliners in Europe. They really saw themselves as holding the line against the potential dissolution of Catholicism in the continent.

And so that's another aspect of the tensions in Cremona is that not only does a Bishop finally return to, to Cremona in the 1550s, and this would be largely thanks to the impulse of reformists in Milan, who were keen to make sure that Rome. sending bishops back to Cremona, but also the secular overseers of the city of Cremona were representatives of, you know the Catholic majesties.

And so they wanted to make sure that resistance to Catholicism would be quashed. So I think, you know, that you can understand the sort of social tensions that would have existed in that environment where it wasn't just, let's say, Italians dealing with Italians, it was Spaniards who were real orthodox Catholics making sure that the city of Cremona would follow Rome.

In 1545, Andrea Amati is in his early 40s. He has a well established workshop and family. Hints and influences of the Reformation were showing in town. A priest was questioned because he was reading from an Italian translation of the Bible and not a Latin one. In the streets of Cremona, where the people were talking in town squares, there was a great fear amongst the religious institutions as the Lutheran tendencies of the priests were anti clerical and had a clearly anti institutional attitude.

People were clearly unhappy about how the shop was being run. The Protestant numbers in Cremona were on the rise, and this was representative of many parts of northern Italy. And so the church had to respond in some way.

Peter Jensen.

In those days, the mass was the chief service of the church was in Latin so that people didn't really understand, the ordinary person, mainly illiterate, didn't really understand church, it was all rather mysterious. There were also many statues, of Jesus, and of the Virgin Mary. There were prayers to the saint. There was a whole system where if you had sinned, you went to the priest and confessed your sin, and you may also pray to the saints.

It was a very different setup, if I can put it like that. But the church really was really central to the lives of people. The Reformation, of course swept through Europe. In some places protestantism became the dominant religion, as in Scotland, as in England. In other places, it became very strong but didn't become dominant, as in France, for example. In Germany, it became very strong as well. And so nations were divided. Very often, the question as to whether a nation would be Protestant or not depended upon the ruling family, the king or the queen. So in England, the Protestant Reformation really became successful. in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who was a Protestant queen.

It had been there before, but it became really successful then. So two things were happening. First, there was the spread of the Reformation amongst scholars, amongst ordinary people, and that was made possible particularly by printing. The printed book became a wonderful thing in the, what was it, the 1460s, if I remember correctly and by the time you got to the 16th century, the Reformation, it meant that many more people were reading, illiteracy had begun to decline, but also books were being written in the language of the people, not just in Latin, for example, so that people were reading. So it just depended which part of Europe you were in as to what happened.

So there were people in Italy who became Protestant but it didn't have as big an effect on Italy. As it did say on England, where the king and the queen went that way, or in France even. Where it looked at one stage as though Protestantism would really become the dominant religion, but then the king changed.

People are grumbling about their absent bishop. There is also tension between the church, the local ruling class, and the city council. Add to this the threat of Protestantism. There was a form of moral instability and disunity within the city. Compounding this all were cases of heresy. There are documents in which priests complain about having to deal with so many prisoners and heretics, it feels like a burden upon them, that they are weak and an ununited city because of it.

There is an interesting interaction between local priest and a shoemaker in the town square in which the shoemaker, Giuseppe is making a comment about the extravagant cost of building the cathedral. After having asked the parishioners for money to do so, the priest is telling him to stick to shoemaking and leave the affairs of the church to those who are in the clergy.

At this point, another priest, the shoemaker's friend, joins the argument. Stating that we're all priests and should have a say in the matter, revealing his Lutheran ideologies. This was quite dangerous, and he ended up being thrown into prison.

By the 1540s, it's perfectly obvious that there's a major revolution going on all around Europe. And obviously the Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church becomes very, very anxious about this. And so in what is the date? I think it's 1547, I think it is. Begins a council that lasts all 1563, on and off. Not the whole time, you'll be glad to hear. In Trent, which I think is northern Italy, isn't it? At any rate, and that's the place where it was held, and it was held, in a sense, sporadically. But the whole point of the Council of Trent was to, to look again at the Church's teachings, at practices, to reform them where they needed to be reformed.

And music came into that, so the Council of Trent also had a view on music. And I think both it and the Protestant Reformation thought music had become too complicated. During the Renaissance period, more and more people were playing music. This was partly due to the advent of the printing press making music more widely available, and at the same time, instruments were evolving.

Music was a more popular form of entertainment in wealthy circles, and indeed on a popular level, folk music had always had a place. But here I will be concentrating on sacred music. that for many musicians and composers who wanted to make something of themselves would have to have concentrated on. And yet during a seven year period from 1545 to 1563, the Council of Trent would start a change in this circumstance and sacred music would start to lose its dominance as secular music started its ascent.

Two areas of music were addressed during the Council of Trent. Firstly, music should promote a greater sense of worship in the congregation. Practically, this meant that they should cut back on polyphony, the layering of voices. At that time, religious music was predominantly vocal and in Latin. The use of polyphony, the multi layering of voices, created a beautiful yet almost impossible to understand text.

So the Council of Trent stipulated that the music must be easily understandable. People would at least know what they were singing. This was more or less successful, depending on composers and provinces. Two great composers of the time were Josquin Des Prez and Palestrina. Secondly was performance. It was decided that only the organ would be used in accompanying voices or playing solos, and that virtuoso or theatrical, vocal or instrumental displays were prohibited.

So leading up to the Reformation and the Council of Trent, sacred composition used a lot of polyphony, the layering of voices. Here is an example of a work by Josquin des Prez, pre Reformation, first published in 1505.

And now a work by Palestrina, another mass written in 1562, after the Council of Trent.

So there you go. Personally, I can't understand either, but that second one obviously got a tick from the Council of Trent. And finally, a motet by Thomas Tallis written in 1570. So this is also post Council of Trent. It's a 40 part Renaissance motet for eight choirs of five voices each. So who knows what was going on in the it has to be understandable department.

In any case, I think it's just so beautiful no one really cared.

These three excerpts are performed by the very talented Tallis scholars. You can look them up if you want to hear the rest of the pieces.

The Council of Trent then lays the foundation. It's not medieval Catholicism. It's the cleaning up of a house of medieval Catholicism. It's modern, modern in the sense of, it's just modern in its day and it sets out Catholic teaching and has become a standard of Catholic teaching right down to the 20th century and of course it’s Roman Catholic thinking, it still stands, but other things have happened since then. So one of the teachings, for example, is that you can't have assurance of salvation.

In Protestant theology, when properly understood, because there’s nothing we bring, we are simply relying on the cross of Christ as our salvation and our faith in the cross of Christ. You may have assurance, but you're not depending on yourself, you're depending on the Lord. In Catholic teaching, while yes, the cross is important, while yes, God's grace is important, it nonetheless is an element of your own good works.

You're not justified once and for all, you're justified over a period through your life. And therefore, rightly, the Council of Trent, rightly from their point of view says, You can't have assurance, because you can't yet be sure that you have enough for salvation and of course they have the doctrine of purgatory, going to purgatory after you die.

Whereas the Protestants said, no, there's no such thing as purgatory, it's never mentioned in the Bible, and once you've been saved by the Lord Jesus, through his death for you on the cross, you are saved. Your sins have been washed away, you don't need to purge them in purgatory. They're a big difference.

The Council of Churches is very intellectually important, by the way. Never underestimate the intellectual and, if you like, the spiritual power of a Catholic church. We must respect that. And I would say for the next 100, 150 years, you are in a period of counter reformation. We're in a period of counter reformation where the church is making some big changes.

We could ask the question, was Andrea Amati a Protestant? I think no. As we will see in future episodes, the Amati family would have several commissions from staunchly Catholic royal courts. And I don't think that the family would have lasted very long in Cremona if they had been of the Lutheran persuasion.

As much of its Protestant population left for Geneva. But in 1549, Cremona finally gets a local bishop from a Cremonese family. He would be a fellow citizen linked to this city and would understand the sensitive needs and interests of the people. By the time the new bishop arrived, there were Lutheran heretics, the dodgy priests, dubious convent inhabitants, and all these evils were put down to the fact that they didn't have a resident bishop.

So with him came new decrees for the clergy. They were things such as, and including, but not limited to, 1. The clergy must wear ecclesiastical habit. 2. They must carry no weapons. 3. Does not keep mistresses at home or the children he has with them. 4. Does not swear. 5. Does not go to taverns. 6. Does not go dancing or play cards or dice. 7. Does not exercise worldly professions. 8. Recites the divine office regularly. And 9. If ordered, celebrates Holy Mass.

Cremona had become the centre of Lombard Lutherism. There was even a reformed church now set up in Cremona. To deal with this, the Roman Catholic Church ordered severe sentences, exiled Lutherans, and even sentenced them to death.

So there were quite a few Protestants, and then what would happen is they would often with the head of Inquisition. And so often they would leave and go to Geneva. So there was a big Cremonese population in Geneva. And there was one Cremonese noble and he left and a few years later he was tried and he had his, all his property and assets seized, and then he was burnt at the stake in absentia.

Yeah. So, I mean, the way that often worked, I mean, in terms of, I suppose the first thing to say is that there were distinct secular and, and religious judicial systems. So if you were, although they became a little messy, you know, when often what happened was. If you were a heretic, you would be tried by the church tribunal, and then if they were, you were found guilty, the church would hand you over to the secular authorities for punishment. So because the church didn't want to be responsible for killing people, that was often the sort of pathway in which people were punished was a religious trial and then a secular execution.

But yes, often people, let's say, were Not around for their execution. And so, but the point could still be made by burning them in effigy or something like that, which was to show that even though you may be lacking, let's say, the physical substance of the person, their place in your society was essentially being rejected. You know, that they were being extinguished from society, even if it meant, you know, burning them in straw or something like that. Yeah, so this often happened that you could be punished. Even when you weren't there by finding some representation of you and destroying it. Like, they would do the same for kings.

Like, the whole symbolism of being able to do something to a person through an effigy. Like, the power of that for them. Yeah, I mean, the most famous case is the French kings who Well, this happened in England too. Often for funerals. The body was armed, but then an effigy would be paraded for a sort of serious Festival funeral and the effigy would be treated as you would treat the monarch. I mean they would be often they'd be given food or they might be put on you know up on a throne and the idea was to let's say separate the living tissue of the dead monarch from the idea of the monarch as a sovereign. So the effigy actually acted in place as they sort of universal and never ending life of the king or queen.

Whereas the body of every king and queen comes and goes, the idea of monarchy lives on and that's what the effigy would help to sustain is the idea of the of rulership not dying. And that's probably, you know, in reverse what's happening with punishments of heretics and absentia is that your you know, the flesh is kind of irrelevant.

What you're doing is making a point about their eternal being. Being extinguished from society. Which, which, like, from a Catholic point of view would have been quite severe. They're like, we've got what we've done.

But if they'd become Protestant anyway, they probably didn't care. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's They didn't hold to the, yeah.

Yes, I mean, yeah, it's true. If you don't believe in the, in the religious system, then maybe it doesn't matter as much, but it's still, let's say it's, it's a serious move in any culture to expunge someone. Yeah, I would like to be expunged.

The way different areas implemented these reforms differed, and we can see in Cremona that the cathedral still had musicians playing. But now, given these constraints and the tendency to be accused of heresy, secular music started doing its own thing. There were noble courts around where exactly this type of musical ability was nurtured, but something bigger was happening, and as we will see, ballet and opera were about to literally burst onto the scene.

We saw in this episode how the Reformation would have disrupted Andrea Amati's life. Church music would start to change and the influence of the Renaissance will nudge music into new art forms that we will encounter in upcoming episodes. The good news for Andrea Amati is that a powerful royal court is about to make an order from our Cremonese artisan and these instruments he is about to make will become the stuff of legends and much speculation.

This brings us to the end of this episode. I would like to thank my guests, Dr. Peter Jensen, Dr. John Gagne, and Carlo Chiesa.

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