Secular Renaissance Music

Secular Renaissance Music explores the secular music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, showcasing an extraordinarily wide range of works and practices. This period includes courtly love songs, music for civic festivities, instrumental music, entertainments provided by minstrels, and the unwritten traditions of solo singing, among much else.

This collection of essays delves into many of these practices with a focus on polyphonic settings of vernacular texts. It examines their historical and stylistic contexts, their transmission in written and printed sources, questions of performance, as well as composers’ approaches to text setting.

The selected essays reflect the diverse range of topics that have engaged scholars in recent decades. Taken together, they highlight the broader significance of secular music within a wide complex of cultural practices and institutions.