Conference Agenda

The Novus thesaurus musicus, a motet anthology printed by Antonio Gardano in Venice in 1568, is one of the largest music prints of the sixteenth century (five volumes in six partbooks of 468 pages each) and an important source of music by composers active at the Austrian Habsburg courts. The print served as Habsburg propaganda, apparent in its paratexts (effusive dedication to Emperor Maximilian II, woodcuts of imperial family members, laudatory poems) and in the text itself; in particular, the fifth volume consists almost entirely of settings of Latin poems extolling the Habsburgs and their allies. A luxury item, the print was widely distributed and treated with care; forty-nine exemplars survive today (a remarkable number), many in original bindings and/or with annotations establishing ownership by a broad range of people, from Catholic and Protestant rulers and churchmen to members of the German, Czech, Moravian, and Polish nobility.

The print clearly served as an important means by which Habsburg court culture circulated throughout the Holy Roman Empire, but scholars have disagreed about its political and religious messaging: David Crawford has used the contents of the first volume to argue for Protestant sympathies, while Walter Pass has used the organization of the fourth volume to place the print squarely into the Catholic Counter-Reformation. I propose that this ambiguity was intentional. Through close readings of the texts and paratexts, and by drawing upon evidence of the ownership and use of the book from my ongoing project of examining each exemplar, I argue that the Novus thesaurus functioned not only as a vehicle for Habsburg political power but also as a means by which citizens could claim their place in the Empire, sometimes turning the book into a site for political resistance. They did this through such methods as removing pages, emending texts, and including illustrations and texts on the cover that contested and pushed back against the Habsburg power proclaimed in the print. The Novus thesaurus thus allowed readers to construct their own definition of the Holy Roman Empire: roomy enough for varying confessional and political allegiances but stamped with a Habsburg image.

The musician John Mundy, known principally for his 1594 collection Songs and Psalmes and as a longtime organist of Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor, left a small corpus of remarkably diverse, evocative Latin polyphony. Surviving mostly as manuscript copies by his colleague John Baldwin, Mundy’s seven motets show a well-read, intellectually facile, and unexpectedly ardent Catholic composer at work near the heart of the Elizabethan church—not unlike his older contemporary William Byrd. We see this, for example, in his Iuxta est dies Domini (thinly disguised as a Lamentations setting), which uses an apocalyptic text about dangers to the “bark of Peter” taken from an anonymous motet published in 1547 by Tielman Susato of Antwerp. Mundy’s almost unknown body of Latin-texted work also includes a concentrically-structured psalmic motet, a Catholic lament based on a humanist Latin translation of the Hebrew book of Isaiah, and several filial nods to composers of the period 1550-1575, including his father, London musician William Mundy.

This paper places John Mundy’s motets in the context of late-Elizabethan musical, religious, and political thought and activity. These well-crafted works deepen our understanding of the status of Latin-texted polyphony after 1559 and the complex motivations for its composition. We find there parallels to the ‘Jerusalem’ motets of Byrd as well as compositions helping define the last phase of the Elizabethan musical culture of emulation and remembrance. Similarly. his psalm cento is part of an important literary and musical genre (widespread but little studied) and associates him more with Byrd than with his father’s generation, who usually set whole psalms. Similarly, we encounter a link between Alfonso Ferrabosco and Mundy’s pseudo-Lamentations setting.

A holistic consideration of Mundy’s works and personal connections unveils a portrait of an artist directly linked to the crypo-Catholic or ‘church papist’ circle of early madrigalists centered on publisher Thomas East and protected in part by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Like the near-miraculous survival of much contemporaneous music, the preservation of Mundy’s motets as unica emphasizes the fragmentary survival and ambiguous usage patterns of unpublished Tudor music, as well as the hiddenness of his confessional allegiances.

Scholars of music from the late medieval period through the early modern transition have long assumed that around 1500, paraliturgical French-court motets played a prominent role in royal ceremonies. This view has sustained a historiographical construction of the "occasional motet," meaning works believed destined for events such as coronations, funerals, and processions. Although this practice is documented later in the sixteenth century, a reassessment of earlier evidence indicates that under the patronage of Anne of Brittany, Louis XII, and in the early reign of Francis I, paraliturgical motets were not mere ceremonial ornaments. Evidence drawn from pay records, court chronicles, prayer books, liturgical practice, and iconography shows that the long-standing attributions of three important court motets to royal funerals or coronations ca. 1514–15—Jean Mouton’s Quis dabit oculis, Jean Richafort’s Consolator captivorum, and Mathieu Gascongne’s Christus vincit—are untenable. These examples serve to clarify how such motets were instead initially cultivated to inscribe political narratives and sacral sovereignty through circulation in intimate social and devotional royal spaces.

This revised paradigm for paraliturgical motets around 1500 highlights the inflection point where a governing crisis in Paris over ecclesiastical reform efforts caused them to be marshalled as active instruments of royal enforcement in the urban civic-religious sphere. Evidence of this shift comes from a previously unexamined 1527 Mass at Notre-Dame, Paris. There, as Francis I returned to a hostile capital after his capture at the Battle of Pavia, royal-chapel singers usurped the bishop’s ritual and spatial dominion at the cathedral’s high altar through the suffocating sound of motets. A reconstruction of this event through archival records, legal and doctrinal disputes, and political diaries situates this unprecedented use of chapel polyphony within a volatile politico-theological discourse on the nature and scope of royal prerogative. That such motets were first crafted as a narrative medium within and between courts rather than as ritual ornaments underscores the significance and motivation of their subsequent emergence in urban space as audible instruments of ideological contestation. More broadly, these findings offer a new model of how (and why) polyphony came to articulate and enact political authority in early modern Europe.