Abstract

In early modern Europe, music was the domain where body and soul came together, embodied in the notion of Quintilian’s virtus flexanima. The author uses this concept to examine the framework within which music and song were used to promote moral education and addresses Renaissance ideas of religion, discipline and music. The Renaissance has passed on to us an ostensibly obscure image of youth. Armed with crosses, hymns and drums, children and young people are both the quintessential trouble-makers and the guardians of public order and morality. How does music allow to express in the rituals of sociability those emotive impulses which theology, law and medicine regard as typical of adolescence? This contribution addresses these aspects in light of the French Wars of Religion in recent international historiography.