Ignacio López Alemany received a fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the 2019-2020 academic year. This fellowship supports his research project on the “Vihuelists and Courtly Performance of Poetry in Early Modern Spain”. The early modern vihuelists—musicians who played the vihuela, a Spanish stringed instrument––selected, modified, and musicalized poems. They also wrote instructions on how to perform traditional and new Italianate verses in courtly settings. This way, these musicians served as active catalysts in the definition of the modern courtier and the role of poetry in the early modern period. With their cancioneros(songbooks) and their performances, vihuelists and courtiers were able to create an alternative poetic canon that coexisted with the one that the academies and universities were starting to formulate with their profuse annotations and scholarly commentaries.
