About

Roseen Giles is a musicologist with a specialty in early modern musical culture; she is also the curator of DUMIC (Duke University Musical Instrument Collections). In her research she examines the aesthetic, professional, and personal relationships between poets and musicians of the Italian seventeenth century. Her monograph (Cambridge University Press, 2023)— Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation—contributes to the histories of music and literature by arguing that the controversial experiments of seventeenth-century poets had a profound influence on techniques in musical composition, most notably in the works of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). Her most recent book—Lettera amorosa: Musical Love-Letters in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the musical history of epistolary poetry.She has published essays on music and philosophy in the Renaissance, memory and orality in the notation of medieval music, and the relationship between music and devotional practice in the seventeenth century.

Featured Work

Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation

2023
Monteverdi and the Marvellous

The marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and thought-provoking. The composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) created a new practice in which the expressive materials of music and poetry were placed in concert. This innovative new study of Monteverdi's literary personality integrates musical and poetic analysis to create an approach to text-music relations that addresses scholars of both literature and music. It illuminates how experiments in language and perception at the turn of the seventeenth century were influenced and informed by the work of musicians of that era. Giles provides a new perspective on the music and poetry of Monteverdi's madrigals through the poetics of the marvellous. In his madrigals, Monteverdi created a reciprocity between poetry and music which encouraged audiences to contemplate their interactions, and, consequently, to listen differently.

Other Works

  • Lettera amorosa: Love-Letters in Early Modern Italy

    2025