Monteverdi studies have been associated with the so-called ‘new musicology’ since the first time the latter was mentioned in print, in a column reviewing the 1991 meeting of the American Musicological Society for the New York Times. Papers on Bob Dylan, desire in Skryabin, reflections of Nazi ideology in German musicology during the Second World War, and the gendered rhetoric of the Monteverdi/Artusi controversy served the author as signs of

Using the phrase ‘new musicology’ three more times as he cautiously welcomed a ‘classic paradigm shift’, the writer conferred the status of a movement on an eclectic group of papers whose authors had never met. Yet the label, and the sense that it referred to some kind of movement, stuck. It was in part because the Monteverdi paper sparked criticism when it was published, leading the author to compare ‘new musicology’ to the ‘second practice’, that the label ‘new musicology’ has had a special resonance in Monteverdi studies. This essay will survey the intersections of Monteverdi studies with the new approaches to music scholarship that emerged, mainly in the United States, over the last twenty years.