Output details

Constructing Identities in a Music Manuscript: The Medici Codex as a Gift*

In this article of ca.18000 words, I use the anthropological theory of the gift to analyse a significant and controversial motet manuscript, placing it in the context of an extensive exchange of gifts – many of them paintings – associated with a politically important wedding. My aim was to uncover the manuscript’s role in shaping the identities of its donor and its recipients, specifically in relation to its character and qualities as a gift. At the time of publication the approach was very novel, contributing to an on-going change of emphasis in Renaissance source studies that can also be found in the recent work of Honey Meconi, Rob Wegman, Jane Alden and Michael Alan Anderson. Rather than treating music sources as repositories of repertoire to be edited, dated and attached to the oeuvre of a composer, the emphasis in this article and similar recent studies falls on the work accomplished by a source for the people who made, owned and used it.

Renaissance Quarterly is the leading interdisciplinary Renaissance journal, publishing around 16 articles per year with a very large international circulation.

Indicators of impact:

• The article has already been cited several times, including in a recent article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (65.3, 2012), and as suggested reading in Richard Freedman’s major new textbook, Music in the Renaissance (Norton, 2012).

• On the basis of this article I have been invited to speak at the 2013 conference of the major AHRC-funded research project ‘The Production and Reading of Music Sources’.

• On the basis of this article I was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Centre for Music, Gender and Identity, University of Huddersfield.