Music and the representation of princely power in the fifteenth and sixteenth century

In this article I study the origins and diffusion of the musical chapels in fifteenth and sixeenth-century European courts. By focusing on the "products" of courtly chapels (both repertories and manuscripts) I examine the political, social, cultural and ideological dimension of the use of music at courts in the fifteenth and sixeenth century. Recent writings on court culture across a range of disciplines (history, history of literature, history of art, social and cultural history) function as a point of departure from which I investigate, on the basis of detailed analysis of significant musical works (the six anonymous "L'homme armé" masses in the manuscript Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale VI E 40) and corpus of musical manuscripts (the Alamire codices), how the identity of the princely patron was constucted by means of music.