Although the musical achievements of the Franco-Flemish school have attracted many writers, this book is the first to show how the artists and composers of Bruges worked side by side to shape their acoustic and visual environment and to express their fellow citizens' spiritual needs in art. By combining the methods of modern musicology and those of local historiography, Strohm vividly recreates the music of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders in its socio-economic context, from the pageants and minstrelsy of the court to popular entertainments and the earliest public concerts.

This entirely new volume of NOHM takes account of developments in late-medieval music scholarship, along with significant changes in the performance practice of the late-medieval repertory, witnessed during the latter half of the 20th century.

An exploration of what self-referential compositions reveal about late medieval musical networks, linking choirboys to canons and performers to theorists.

This book collects twelve of the papers given at a conference held at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., on 1-3 April 1993, in conjunction with the exhibition `Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture'. A group of distinguished scholars considered music in medieval and Renaissance Rome. The volume presents a series of wide-ranging and original treatments of music written for and performed in the papal court from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. New discoveries are offered which force a radical reevaluation of the Italian papal court as a musical centre during the Great Schism. A series of motets for various popes are subject to close analysis. New interpretations and information are offered concerning the repertory of the papal chapel in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the institutional life of the papal singers, and the individual biographies of singers and composers. Thought-provoking, even controversial, evaluations of the music of composers connected with, or thought to be connected with, Rome and the papal court, such as Ninot le Petit, Josquin, and Palestrina round out the volume.

This book describes instrumental music and its context in German society of the late middle ages - from about 1350 to 1520. Players at that time improvised, much like jazz musicians of our day, but because they did not use notated music, only scant remnants of their activity have survived in written sources, and much has been left obscure. This book attempts to reconstruct an image of their music, discussing the instruments, ensembles, and performance practices of the time. What emerges from this study is a fundamental reappraisal of late medieval culture. A musical life is reconstructed which was not only extraordinary in its own time, but which also laid the foundations of an artistic culture that later produced such giants as Schütz, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.

Public religious practice lay at the heart of civic society in late medieval Europe. In this illuminating study, Andrew Brown draws on the rich and previously little-researched archives of Bruges, one of medieval Europe's wealthiest and most important towns, to explore the role of religion and ceremony in urban society. The author situates the religious practices of citizens - their investment in the liturgy, commemorative services, guilds and charity - within the contexts of Bruges' highly diversified society and of the changes and crises the town experienced. Focusing on the religious processions and festivities sponsored by the municipal government, the author challenges much current thinking on, for example, the nature of 'civic religion'. Re-evaluating the ceremonial links between Bruges and its rulers, he questions whether rulers could dominate the urban landscape by religious or ceremonial means, and offers new insight into the interplay between ritual and power of relevance throughout medieval Europe.

Bruges was undoubtedly one of the most important cities in medieval Europe. Bringing together specialists from both archaeology and history, this 'total' history presents an integrated view of the city's history from its very beginnings, tracing its astonishing expansion through to its subsequent decline in the sixteenth century. The authors' analysis of its commercial growth, industrial production, socio-political changes, and cultural creativity is grounded in an understanding of the city's structure, its landscape and its built environment. More than just a biography of a city, this book places Bruges within a wider network of urban and rural development and its history in a comparative framework, thereby offering new insights into the nature of a metropolis.