Melanie L. Marshall is a Lecturer in Music and a Marie Curie International Fellow at University College Cork, Ireland. Linda L. Carroll is Professor of Italian at Tulane University, USA. Katherine A. McIver is Professor of Art History (Emerita) at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA.

• Contents: Introduction: playing with boundaries, Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll and Katherine A. McIver. Part I Performing Sexuality: Visual pleasures, sensual sounds: music, morality, and sexuality in paintings by Titian, Katherine A. McIver; ’Galeotto fu la metafora’: language and sex in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Catherine Baxter; ’Balla la mona e salta il babuino’: performing obscenity in a musical dialogue, Paul Schleuse. Part II The Erotics of Religion: Sexuality and depictions of the female saint in medieval Tuscany, Catherine Lawless; Leonine lasciviousness and Luther, Anthony M. Cummings; The Roman Church and sexuality: some notes on prelates and regular clergy in sixteenth-seventeenth-century Italian courts, Flavio Rurale. Part III Images of Country Life, Realistic and Artistic: Tradition and gender transgression: the iconography of the shepherd couple in Venetian pastoral landscape during the sixteenth century, Christophe Brouard; ’(El) ge sa bon laorare’: female wealth, male competition, musical festivities, and the Venetian patriciate in Ruzante’s pavan, Linda L. Carroll; ’Farò quel che mi piacerà’: fictional women in villotta voice resistance, Melanie L. Marshall. Bibliography; Index.

'The contributors to this volume provide a series of vivid episodes that enliven our appreciation of the differences, as well as similarities, between explicit expression both early and modern.' Renaissance Studies '... if the purpose of a potpourri is to please, this collection has succeeded in its objectives: it will be useful to both scholars and students, and the musical scores will enrich the Renaissance repertoire.' Renaissance Quarterly