Music and Power at the Court of Louis XIII

What role did sacred music play in mediating Louis XIII's grip on power in the early seventeenth century? How can a study of music as 'sounding liturgy' contribute to the wider discourse on absolutism and 'the arts' in early modern France? Taking the scholarship of the so-called 'ceremonialists' as a point of departure Peter Bennett engages with Weber's seminal formulation of power to consider the contexts in which liturgy music and ceremonial legitimated the power of a king almost continuously engaged in religious conflict. Numerous musical settings show that David the psalmist musician king and agent of the Holy Spirit provided the most enduring model of kingship; but in the final decade of his life as Louis dedicated the Kingdom to the Virgin Mary the model of 'Christ the King' became even more potent – a model reflected in a flowering of musical publication and famous paintings by Vouet and Champaigne.