A mirror of monarchy: Music and musicians in the household chapel of the Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII

Abstract

Ever since the publication of Frank Harrison's book Music in Medieval Britain in 1958, the study of the cultivation of liturgical music in late-medieval England has been based on the institutional structure of the Church: on the cathedrals, colleges and parish churches, and on the household chapels of the monarchy and higher nobility both spiritual and lay. In that and most subsequent studies, however, male figures have been seen to dominate the establishments under investigation. If art history (perhaps musicology's closest sister discipline) can be shown to have characterised the patronage of Renaissance art as a system dominated by ‘Big Men’, so too has musicology placed the development of English liturgical music in a culture shaped largely by noble male patrons – kings, princes, dukes, earls, archbishops, bishops and the like.