Music and Power at the Court of Louis XIII: Sounding the Liturgy in Early Modern France

Peter Bennett (Case Western Reserve University, Ohio)

Music and Power at the Court of Louis XIII: Sounding the Liturgy in Early Modern France
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Country
United Kingdom
Published
27 May 2021
Pages
350
ISBN
9781108830638

Music and Power at the Court of Louis XIII: Sounding the Liturgy in Early Modern France

Peter Bennett (Case Western Reserve University, Ohio)

What role did sacred music play in mediating Louis XIII’s grip on power in the early seventeenth century? How can a study of music as ‘sounding liturgy’ contribute to the wider discourse on absolutism and ‘the arts’ in early modern France? Taking the scholarship of the so-called ‘ceremonialists’ as a point of departure, Peter Bennett engages with Weber’s seminal formulation of power to consider the contexts in which liturgy, music and ceremonial legitimated the power of a king almost continuously engaged in religious conflict. Numerous musical settings show that David, the psalmist, musician, king and agent of the Holy Spirit, provided the most enduring model of kingship; but in the final decade of his life, as Louis dedicated the Kingdom to the Virgin Mary, the model of ‘Christ the King’ became even more potent - a model reflected in a flowering of musical publication and famous paintings by Vouet and Champaigne.

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