By now we are accustomed to considering how music may have created a sonic and ritual space that offered some convent women room to maneuver within a regimented system and to transcend its restrictions by working within and sometimes around external expectations and demands. Indeed, Gabriella Zarri cites music as one of two “major specializations” for convents during the early modern period (the other being the education of aristocratic young women). Scholars have also suggested how music might speak for nuns in the world beyond the convent wall. Less familiar is how music in relation to other arts might possibly affect general internal convent conformity, occasionally in ways different from more public artistic expressions.

The post-Tridentine convent wall marked a metaphorical and literal borderland, recently created around territory contested by differently minded groups: local bishops, often newly empowered, who represented a professional, ecclesiastical patriarchy; local secular rulers, who occasionally clashed with the ecclesiastical hierarchy over jurisdictional issues; local aristocracies, comprising powerful and sometimes rival families; regular religious congregations, variously linked to these ecclesiastical and lay hierarchies; and, of course, the women immured inside the cloister. Because the wall was the liminal marker, it remained the site of contention: problematic, dangerous. It calls to mind, perhaps, Gloria Anzaldúa's much more contemporary Frontera—“set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.”

The dissemination of music and of ideas about music preoccupied humanists long before the emergence of musicology as an academic specialty. How music has reached performers and listeners, the means of musical distribution, both in manuscript and in print; the modes through which creators, executants, and their critics have communicated; the methods and purposes of musical appropriation through the ages—all form the foundation and objects of musicological investigation.

Musicologists were investigating music's dissemination in print long before sixteenth-century printers caught the great tsunami of Renaissance musicology as it crested in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As disciplinary perspectives broadened beyond composers' biographies and editions of their works, several American scholars turned their attention to the printers who, after the familiar Ottaviano Petrucci, made much of that music available. By the 1970s, “publish or perish” even determined early modern composers’ inclusion in The New Grove Dictionary of Music: where all medieval composers secured a place in the dictionary, the only High Renaissance composers included were those whose works had found their way into print in their day. Musicological research extended to wider aspects of the printing phenomenon and its influences, what we have come to call “print culture.” Having expanded from sixteenth-century Italy to France and the Netherlands, musicological discussion of printing further fanned out chronologically and geographically to encompass the wider field of Western musical culture, and beyond the printed note to other forms of print culture that have mediated musical composition, theory, performance, and reception.

IN recent decades historians have frequently questioned the appropriateness of the long-accepted term “Counter-Reformation” within a wider European and world context of Catholicism. Various shifts in terminology, away from “Counter-Reformation,” which originated in northern-European historiography, where it seemed apt for German religious history, and toward Hubert Jedin's “Catholic Reformation,” Eric Cochrane's “Tridentine Reformation,” John O’Malley's “Early Modern Catholicism,” all acknowledged late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholicism's greater diversity and more pluralistic character. In addition, Jean Delumeau has chronicled the process of religious reform back long before the Council of Trent, to the thirteenth century, and its continuation down even into the eighteenth century.

All these approaches broaden the field to admit the wide variety that characterized the Catholic tradition of this period. They also recognize that the activities of the Council of Trent followed no clear agenda and were not all directed toward Protestant heresy ; that much activity of the early modern Catholic Church was not simply a reaction to events in northern Europe, but focused on the south and the New World ; that many important aspects of renewal and reform occurred outside the institutional Church, which had represented the Council's focus almost exclusively, and took place within less familiar, unofficial, or informal contexts, apart from parochial structures, which remained the ecclesiastical hierarchy's chief preoccupation.

Such broader terminology also serves music more effectively, for post-Tridentine Catholic church music encompassed a remarkably wide variety of practices beyond the Palestrina style, often perceived as paradigmatic. Many of these practices continued older traditions from before the Council of Trent, whose particular impact on music was less restrictive than often perceived. The musical activities of the Council were also less clearly focused than sometimes imagined, and the implementation of its published decrees, which were less specific in their details than musician historians have commonly made them out to be, was inconsistent and frequently contradictory.