about

The Renaissance lies scattered before us. For more than 200 years, scholars in disciplines ranging from art history and literature to political history, geography, and music have collected and catalogued vast amounts of information—but many of the most crucial documents are buried in undigitized publications not easily accessible to specialists in one field, let alone to their colleagues in another.

Mapping the Musical Renaissance moves outward from fundamental histories in order to uncover connections among seemingly unrelated people and events. For now our work focuses on musicians from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. As the project develops, the map will expand to include artists, writers, political rulers, and other central figures. The project allows users to explore intersections between heterogeneous types of information while giving access to primary documents that underpin that information.

Project History

This is a new project. A 2022 grant from the France–UC Berkeley fund allowed us to form an international team of students and scholars and develop these ideas. We identified a core data set centered on musicians active in the years around 1500, above all the towering figure Josquin des Prez (1450–1521). Using Josquin’s world as our center of gravity, we developed an organizational scheme and workflow for data entry.

A 2024 Stanford Humanities Seed Grant has enabled us to build our mapping tool and expand our database. At present we have more than 3,500 events, ranging from letters by Ferrarese scribes to French royal chapel paylists to secondary literature that describes how one particular singer in Bruges was fired owing to his laziness, disobediance, and downright incompetence.

The Team

Emily Zazulia

Co-Director

Emily Zazulia is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing, which received the Early Music Award from the American Musicological Society and the Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Society for Music Theory. She has received other awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Musicological Society, Harvard University's Villa I Tatti, and the Hellman Foundation. Other current projects include a monograph on late-medieval "popular" music and a co-edited volume on Josquin des Prez.

Jesse Rodin

Co-Director

Short bio about the team member.

Benjamin Ory

Co-Director

Benjamin Ory is an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven. He received his PhD in musicology from Stanford University in 2022, and has since served as a Harvard University Villa I Tatti Digital Humanities Fellow, as visiting assistant professor of musicology at Williams College, and as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. He is the founder of The 1520s Project, an open-source repository of sixteenth-century music. Ory’s research focuses on sixteenth-century polyphony as well as the early history of Renaissance musicology.

Sam Bradley

Team Member

Sam Bradley received his PhD in Musicology from Boston University in 2024. He works on sources, style, compositional process, and performance practice in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century music.