This is a study of the secular music of Claudio Monteverdi, the foremost Italian composer of the late Renaissance. Gary Tomlinson bases his narrative on the works themselves - nine books of madrigals; three complete operas and a fragment of a fourth; and numerous canzonette, scherzi, and arie, all written between 1584 and 1642 - but his approach is as much literary and cultural as purely musical. The relationship between music, poetry, and cultural ideology is at the core of the discussion, and Tomlinson pays particular attention to Monteverdi's position within the context of late-Renaissance humanist and scholastic values. He also shows that the extraordinary variety of responses to poetry in Monteverdi's music was induced by the wide stylistic diversity of the poems themselves. For Monteverdi, the expressive power of music was a function of its relation to its text, and it is the unceasing imagination he brought to musical transfiguration of poetry which Tomlinson continually stresses in this book.