My primary research examines how music mediated political, legal, and sacral authority in late medieval and early modern France, focusing on the sonic dimensions of sovereignty in both courtly and contested civic-religious/urban space spanning 1490–1540. My work suggests that paraliturgical motets of the French royal chapel were initially cultivated not for public spectacle (known as “occasional motets” in current historiography), but as ideologically and narratively charged media circulating between courts. I contend that only in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, as a function of religious and political discord between Parisian institutions and the monarchy, did the chapel and its motets emerge as a primary means of asserting sovereign presence in the French civic-religious sphere.

My work has been supported by a 2021–22 Fulbright Advanced Research fellowship (extended by a King Arthur Peters Award) and funding from the CRIM Project of Haverford College and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, with additional studies at the Conservatoire de Paris. My DMA thesis (“‘Musica, cur siles?’ Sounding the Funeral of Anne of Brittany”) at The Juilliard School, advised by Thomas Forrest Kelly, received the Richard F. French Award for outstanding dissertation work.

Listen:

"Consolator captivorum”: A Saint-Louis motet restored (Cut Circle and Stanford’s CCRMA)

La musique autour des funérailles d'Anne de Bretagne (France Musique radio broadcast)

Read:

“Mathieu Gascongne, Christus vincit, et la politique de la cérémonie sacrée.” In Vie musicale et identité urbaine dans la France de la Renaissance (ca. 1500 – ca. 1650), edited by Alexander Robinson and Philippe Vendrix. Paris: Classiques Garnier, forthcoming.

Network, ritual, and strife in Claudin de Sermisy’s Missa plurium motettorum (CRIM Project, Haverford College/Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance)