Conference Agenda

Tomás Luis de Victoria (c. 1548-1611) was a man of many talents. As a composer, organist, teacher, and priest, he was a well-connected member of his Catholic communities and a relentless self-promotor who made himself a fixture within the post-Tridentine sociopolitical landscape. Publishing and republishing his works on his own dime and circulating them throughout his extensive network, Victoria ensured his voice would reverberate far and wide. I argue that Victoria’s career reflected more than savvy business strategy and compositional talent; it was a way of crafting and distributing his Catholic identity and, in turn, that of his community during the Counter-Reformation.

I use the conceptual framework of the mirror to examine how Victoria constructed his identity through his life and works. During his lifetime, mirrors were understood as physical, metaphorical, and social tools for shaping the self through external reflections. I first examine this mirroring activity, in which individuals often strove toward ideal images in an iterative, dynamic process that extended subjectivity beyond personal corporeal boundaries. I then trace aspects of Victoria’s biography that functioned as social mirrors, noting his family’s converso lineage and position in Ávila’s emerging class of “new men,” his connections with influential leaders in Counter-Reformation Europe, and his involvement with Jesuit and Spanish institutions. Finally, I examine his prints, publishing process, and distribution networks, emphasizing Victoria's publications as material mirrors through which he crafted an identity that was at once inward, refining his spiritual beliefs, and public, shared with other members of his faith to strengthen their commitment to the Catholic Church.

My work draws from scholarship on Victoria’s biography (Daniele Filippi, Noel O’Regan, Owen Rees, and Robert Stevenson), cultural and cognitive history (Stephen Greenblatt, John O’Malley, Jodi Bilinkoff, and Miranda Anderson), and material culture (Jane Bernstein and Herbert Grabes). Synthesizing these voices with my own archival research, I frame disparate elements of Victoria’s life as a cohesive, enactive self-fashioning process. Not only does this attest to the distributed nature of identity during his cultural moment, but it also positions Victoria as a prominent face in the institutional mirroring process of Catholicism’s post-Tridentine faith re-formation.

The matter of “Netherlands Court Scribe B” remains complex and contentious. For almost a century, this scribe of some of the most important manuscripts from the early sixteenth century, such as the famous Chigi Codex and Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, Ms. 9126, was thought to have been one Martin Bourgeois, a member of the Habsburg-Burgundian court chapel who was paid for the production of court music books. The apparent lack of substantiation for this initially tentative hypothesis has led in recent decades to this scribe’s eventual anonymization. Nevertheless, for the duration of these discussions in the relevant literature, the work of this scribe (named or not) has depended on the negative association with the more famous Netherlandish scribe, Petrus Alamire. Following the identification of Alamire's work in a larger corpus of manuscripts, scholars settled on Bourgeois/Scribe B as his predecessor at the court.

Yet only after this dichotomy had taken root did Flynn Warmington demonstrate how little Alamire's hand actually appears in "his" manuscripts, and that the script traditionally assigned to him was in fact the work of a long roster of anonymous assistants. Despite this fundamental revision, however, the implications for the identitiy of the copyist of the Scribe B manuscripts was never considered.

In this paper, I present paleographical evidence that the identity of Scribe B has been right in front of us all along: namely, that he was in fact Petrus Alamire himself. I lay out the historiographical circumstances that hid this ultimately unsurprising observation from view. I offer a new hypothesis for the date and production of Brussels Ms. 9126, and conclude by identifying the implications for the relationship among the “Scribe B” manuscripts, the Habsburg-Burgundian court, and the later corpus of manuscripts attributed to Alamire and his workshop.

Pipe organs were widespread in Venice’s many Catholic churches, both within the lagoon city and across its Mediterranean territories, as noted in many seventeenth-century accounts. In Crete, a Venetian territory for over 500 years, archival evidence shows that the Saint Titus Cathedral in Heraklion consistently maintained a pipe organ, and limited but extant sources indicate that some Greek Orthodox churches also employed portable organs. The multiconfessional function of the organ extends further when in 1628, Venetian authorities attempted to install, unsuccessfully, a pipe organ in the Spanish Synagogue of the Venetian ghetto to reinforce the musical celebrations for Simhat Torah. These episodes emerged during a critical time for the Republic following the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1571. In its aftermath, Venice adapted its sociopolitical strategies toward non-Catholic subjects in its maritime territories, because Ottoman victory depended largely on the allegiances of the local, Orthodox and Muslim populations. The Republic relaxed its previously draconian control over the Greek-Orthodox population in Crete, encouraging benevolent interactions cross-confessionally. The organ symbolized Venice’s revised strategies of imperial control that they achieved through the juxtaposition of a Catholic worship instrument and soft power over other confessions.

I argue that, after the 1571 cessation of Cyprus prompted Venice to adjust its treatment of non-Catholic subjects in Crete, the pipe organ came to function not only as a liturgical instrument but a political and pedagogical tool through which Venice asserted its new cultural policy while maintaining hegemony over the remaining maritime territories. I examine Girolamo Diruta’s 1593 treatise, Il Transilvano, to show the political and ideological significance of the organ for Venice. Diruta links musical practice and political theory and demonstrates how organ pedagogy afforded a model of disciplined embodiment, civic virtue, and affective control that resonated with the Republic’s philosophies. In particular, Diruta’s anthropomorphic language casts the organ as a body and the organist as its “tongue”; this anthropomorphization generates a microcosmic relationship between Venice and its subjects, and articulates a political vision of civic unity that encapsulates all Venetian subjects, regardless of confession, through the Diruta’s metaphorical language applied to the pipe organ.