Musical nationalism is sometimes looked on as a transient phenomenon, characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and closely associated with political nationalism. But such a view is only a half-truth: national characteristics have had a way of turning up in the music of most ages, and we find them not only in periods of militant political nationalism and parochialism, but also, often to a striking degree, at times when frontiers seemed to imply no cultural barriers. Medieval civilization was international to an extent that would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century; yet there is no mistaking the quintessential italianità of, say, Landini. The Italian and English madrigal schools of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries could be regarded as closely-related phases of one great cultural flowering; yet one need not look at the words to assign madrigals by Marenzio and Weelkes, or Gastoldi and Morley, to their respective countries.