Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650) was the largest, most influential music treatise of the seventeenth century. Kircher was a Jesuit polymath who spent nearly fifty years as a professor at the Collegio Romano. This project examines Musurgia as a document of intellectual history and reconstructs the larger scholarly context from which it arose. In Rome, I will consult the principal holdings of Jesuit materials: the Archivio della Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, and Fondo Gesuitico of the Bibliotheca Nazionale, where Kircher’s manuscripts and correspondence are preserved, as well as the Archivium Romanum Societatis Iesu, which holds censors’ files and other important administrative materials. In addition to Jesuit archives, I will consult the papers and published writings of Kircher’s colleagues and adversaries, such as Leone Allacci and Melchior Inchofer, in smaller archives throughout the city.