Isaac Vossius's De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi, 1673

Dr Peter Martens provides the first complete edited English translation of, and commentary on, Issac Vossius¿s De poematum cantu et viribus rythmi, a late seventeenth-century work of Continental musical humanism, all the more interesting for being published in England and dedicated to royalist Henry Bennett, Duke of Arlington. This treatise plays an important but poorly understood role in the continued development of rhythmopoeia; Vossius continues the arguments of figures such as Vincenzo Galilei and Marin Mersenne - desiring to link linguistic rhythm, music, and the passions - by proposing a practical, if undemonstrated, method for doing so based on ancient poetic feet. This resuscitation of poetic feet in the service of affect is made explicit by Vossius, but is undoubtedly more familiar to musicologists from Wolfgang Caspar Printz''s 1696 Phrynis Mitilenaeus or Johann Mattheson''s 1739 Der vollkommene Capellmeister. Vossius, or more correctly, De