An unconventional, brilliant new biography of composer Claudio Monteverdi - from the bestselling biographer and acclaimed conductor John Eliot Gardiner.

This book positions Claudio Monteverdi amidst seven leading lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Bacon, Kepler, Rubens, Shakespeare and Caravaggio.

Using Monteverdi as the sun, centre of those six other greats, this book argues that across these tumultuous centuries when science was reconfiguring man's entire relation with the cosmos, and many were arguing for the 'science of music', Monteverdi became a key to understanding and bringing together all of this knowledge. As it became believed that art and music could, like nothing else, reflect the human soul, Monteverdi's music represented and unlocked the shift in human thought and the attitude toward modernity encapsulated by a sudden prizing of subjectivity and self-reflection.

This book will reintroduce Monteverdi in a new light, with a new significance, but it's also a wider study of these centuries and the speed at which thought and art were changing.