SINGING AND DEVOTION IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LOW COUNTRIES

It has been thirty-four years since the publication of Music in Late Medieval Bruges, Reinhard Strohm’s study contextualising the Lucca choirbook in the urban metropolis of late medieval Bruges.1 His monograph was seminal for many reasons, not least for its ability to appeal – still today – to scholars across the various methodological quarters of musicology. Strohm’s evocative, Huizinga-inspired opening chapter, ‘Townscape – Soundscape’, animates much of the current work on urban music, and has been especially relevant to the ‘sonic turn’ across the humanities. At the same time, the bulk of the study attended to thoroughly traditional musicological concerns of source studies, the cultivation of polyphony, patronage, and the history of institutions. Music in Late Medieval Bruges was important in yet another way, namely its rejection of a long-standing view of the fifteenthand sixteenth-century Low Countries2 as a training ground for musicians who then migrated to work elsewhere. Music in Late Medieval Bruges insisted that the late medieval and Renaissance Low Countries