Timothy J. McGee is an honorary professor at Trent University and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

Contents Illustrations Foreward Improvisation in the Arts by Domenico Pietropaolo Music Cantare all'improvviso: Improvising to Poetry in Late Medieval Italy by Timothy J. McGee Performance Practice, Experimental Archaeology, and the Problem of the Respectability of Results by Randall A. Rosenfeld Instrumentalists and Performance Practices in Dance Music, c. 1500 by Keith Polk Dance Improvisation and Embellishment in Popular and Art Dances in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy by Barbara Sparti Disorder in Order: Improvisation in Italian Choreographed Dances of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries by Jennifer Nevile Ornamentation and Improvisation in Sixteenth-Century Dance by G. Yvonne Kendall Drama Improvisation in Medieval Drama by Clifford Davidson Medieval and Modern Deletions of Repellent Passages by Linda Marie Zaerr Shakespeare's Rhetorical Riffs by Jane Freeman The Improvising Vice in Renaissance England by David N. Klausner Art Improvisation in the Visual Arts: The View from Sixteenth-Century Italy by Leslie Korrick Index