Interrogating the Treasury of Petrus Alamire: History and Historiography of Music Manuscripts in the Low Countries, 1500-1535

The scribe, composer, and diplomat Petrus Alamire (ca. 1470-1536) has gained wide notoriety even outside sixteenth-century music studies, having been credited with the direction of a Habsburg-Burgundian court scriptorium of music manuscripts that produced over fifty extant books and fragments now distributed across Europe. Yet in recent decades, questions have emerged about his role in this phenomenon, and indeed the existence of a single court scriptorium at all. This project deploys paleographic, codicological, archival, and digital research methods to challenge the traditional and durable narrative behind Alamire’s court scriptorium. The project identifies and circumvents contested court- and Flanders-centric historiographies of Renaissance music history to revise our understanding of how the relevant sources relate to each other, to Petrus Alamire, and to the Habsburg-Burgundian court. In so doing, a wealth of essential and unavailable information will be made available via the established and widely used Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM), complementing and enhancing its existing repository of high-resolution scans of the manuscripts.

Keywords:Petrus Alamire, scriptorium, Renaissance, Habsburg-Burgundian court

Disciplines:Archival, repository and related sciences, Historiography