Renaissance Choirbooks in Digital Perspective

The research project is devoted to complex cross-media combinations of music, texts and images in sixteenth-century illuminated choirbooks produced for the Wittelsbach court in Munich. Starting point has been MS 2129 of the music collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna—a lavishly decorated choirbook produced by Richard of Genoa, singer and scribe of the Wittelsbach music chapel, in the aftermath of the wedding of William V and Renata of Lorraine (1568). This spectacular choirbook, hardly known even to Orlando di Lasso scholarship, was scrutinized in 2016 from a multidisciplinary perspective (Autopsie eines Gesamtkunstwerks, conference funded by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung, proceedings published in 2020, open access).

Current research includes the much more famous Penitential Psalms (Bavarian State Library, Mus.ms. A) of which digital copies with high-resolution scans are already available online. However, only an ambitious digital research platform, including a critical edition of the pertinent Declarationes written by the humanist Samuel Quicchelberg, will allow readers to fully realize and experience these bibliophile objects in a comprehensive way.