Sacred music in Prague, 1580--1612

In 1600, Prague was the bustling capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Czechs rubbed shoulders with Italians and Germans; Catholics and Utraquists (followers of Jan Hus) lived alongside Lutherans, Jews, and religious refugees drawn to the city by the relatively tolerant policies of the Habsburg Emperor, Rudolf II. My dissertation charts the creation and performance of sacred music by these groups, using music by composers such as Philippe de Monte and Jacobus Gallus as a lens through which to view the fraught relationship between rival denominations on the eve of the Thirty Years War (1618--1648). In doing so, it exposes the tensions between an indigenous policy of pragmatic toleration and the ideologically-motivated move, largely by foreign diplomats, towards Catholic exclusionism. While other studies of this repertory have been bounded by categories of linguistic or religious affiliation, mine discards these a priori constraints, emphasizing instead the circulation of sacred music across such lines.;The first chapter establishes Prague's sacred soundscape, while the second surveys the books and manuscripts that transmitted sacred music in Bohemia, seeing them as nodes in a vast network of composers, printers, scribes, and patrons. Chapter Three concerns music's engagement in cultural politics, arguing that music was used to lay claim to contested areas (physical or abstract) via the processes of invocation, representation, and commemoration. Chapter Four looks at Eucharistic piety, delineating music's role in increasingly belligerent Catholic efforts to reclaim Bohemia for Rome. Turning from the externalizing celebrations of Corpus Christi to internalizing meditations on the virtues of the Virgin Mary, the final chapter connects motets and spiritual madrigals written in Prague to supra-regional trends in devotion.