Germany, Switzerland & Austria (c. 1501-1800)
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The Munich Court Chapel at 500
Tradition, Devotion, Representation
This collection of essays is the first to focus exclusively on the Wittelsbach court of Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria (1493–1550). The contributors argue for a deeper understanding of this duke’s reign and acknowledge his crucial role in shaping the religious and cultural identity of the Duchy of Bavaria. By providing insights into the duke’s cultural aspirations the organisation of the court musical sources religious musical practice and everyday working life this book aims to: (1) situate the court of Wilhelm IV in the context of the religious and political upheavals of the early sixteenth century; (2) trace the development of the musical repertoire and personnel of the Bavarian court chapel between 1500 and 1550; and (3) critically assess the degree to which the Munich court could be considered ‘modern’ by re-evaluating the broader cultural religious and musical life of the court around 1520. The volume thus sheds light on the cultural ambitions of a duke who defined music and art as expressions of strategic elements that interwove tradition devotion and representation in a programme of governance based on humanist education—a duke whose foresight enabled the Munich court to quickly become one of the most prestigious and famous seats of power in the Holy Roman Empire.
Ars Habsburgica
New Perspectives on Sixteenth-Century Art
Starting from a political reality which is at the same time artistic and cultural the book Ars Hasburgica aims to review the still so common historiographical conception of the Renaissance that conceives this period from a geographically Italocentric artistically classicist and politically centered the idea of "national" arts and schools.
But Renaissance is a more global and complex phenomenon. What this book aims to offer is an idea of the art of that period that considers the role played by the Habsburg dynasty and its various courts in this period trying to verify whether by applying other historiographic models and having the art of the Casa de Austria as a focus traditional ideas can continue to be maintained well into the twenty-first century. We refer to the so-called "Vasari paradigm" on which art history of the sixteenth century has largely been built over the last centuries. It is also intended to structure concepts about the art of the period not so much around nationalist considerations and identities of the arts but to raise these issues throughout ideas such as that of the court as a political artistic and cultural sphere in the wake of the classical studies by Norbert Elias Amedeo Quondam or Carlo Ossola.
Court Festivals of the Holy Roman Empire, 1555–1619
Performing German Identity
This study represents a new approach to the analysis of early modern court festivals setting the question of identity at its heart. It explores identity as it was portrayed constructed and upheld through court festivals within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the period between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the coronation of Friedrich V Elector Palatine as King of Bohemia in 1619. Structured thematically this detailed analysis touches on core themes of early modern European history including state formation princely courts gender religion science and the natural world and cultural encounters. In doing so it draws on and speaks to scholarly literature not only from different historical sub-disciplines but also from sociology and anthropology. Ultimately Morris argues that these court festivals provided a flexible albeit contested rhetoric of identity grounded in the performance of humanist virtue. Through the performed material and literary rhetoric of court festivals the concept of nobility through virtue was reworked refined and given a new vocabulary within the German context. This was inextricably linked with politics in light of the reforms made to the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the fifteenth century the confessional divisions of the sixteenth century and the mounting tensions of the early seventeenth century which were to culminate in the Thirty Years War.