The Media of Secular Music in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (1100-1650)

This book brings a new perspective to secular music sources from the Middle Ages and early modernity by viewing them as media communication tools, whose particular features shape the meaning of their contents. Ranging from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries, and across countries and genres, the chapters offer innovative insights into the historical relationship between music and its presentation in a wide variety of media. The lens of media enables contributors to expand music history beyond notated music manuscripts and instruments to include images, furniture, luxury items, and other objects, and to address uniquely visual and material aspects of music sources in books and literature. Drawing together an international group of contributors, the volume pays close attention to the medial and material dimensions of musical sources, considering them as multifaceted objects that not only contain but also determine the nature of the music they transmit. Transforming our understanding of musical media, this volume will be of interest to scholars of musicology, art history, and medieval and early modern cultures.

Vincenzo Borghetti is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Verona, Italy. His research interests include Renaissance polyphony and opera. His essays and articles have appeared in Early Music History, Acta musicologica, Journal of the Alamire Foundation, and Imago Musicae, among other journals, and in several edited collections. He is the co-editor with Tim Shephard of The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits (2023). Alexandros Maria Hatzikiriakos is Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research focuses on auditory history and cultural history of music in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. His publications include essays on sound and music in early modern Crete, medieval vernacular song, and the monograph Musiche da una corte effimera: Lo Chansonnier du Roi (Paris, BnF, fr. 844) e la Napoli dei primi angioini (2020).

Introduction PART 1: The Materiality of Song 1. The Codex Buranus, or The First Chansonnier 2. Parchment Poesis in Guillaume de Machaut's "Prologue" 3. Imaginary Chansonniers: Song, Desire, and Materiality in Vitsentzos Kornaros' Erotokritos PART 2: Songs, Books, Society 4. Verbal and Visual Paratexts: Strategies in Shaping Music Books in the Trecento Florentine Manuscript Tradition 5. Formes of Intimacy: Miniaturisation and Sociability in the Fifteenth-Century Chansonnier 6. The Materiality of Musical Knowledge in Sixteenth-Century Textbooks: Appropriation, Personalisation, and Self-Representation 7. The Modern Music Edition as Material Histor(iograph)y PART 3: Picturing Sound, Hearing Images 8. Secular Sounds in Late Medieval Lives of Saints and Their Pictorial Representations 9. The Sounds of Poliphilo and Polia 10. The Domestic Life of the Syrinx PART 4: Musical Objects 11. Music, Heraldry and Material Culture in the Late Middle Ages: Ars Nova Songs for Louis I of Anjou and Bertrand du Guesclin 12. Negotiating Identity and Status: Musicalia in the Relational Strategies of Duke Guidubaldo II della Rovere 13. Sacred Music Books Desacralised: Material Perspectives on Musical Fragments