Prosopography of Renaissance Singers

The Prosopography of Renaissance Singers (PCR, after its original French title: Prosopographie des chantres de la Renaissance) is a database of biographies of professional singers employed in European princely chapels and major churches from c. 1350 to c. 1600. To this day, the database collects about 4500 entries which offer a wide variety of career profiles and information, from the variant names of the singers to their dates and places of activities, together with their full detailed biographies. Though the PCR inevitably includes most composers of the late middle ages and early modern period, its priority is to feed the biographies of their fellow colleagues who were employed in the same establishments but, not having been identified as authors of musical works, have received much less attention from musicologists and historians. The PCR is an ongoing project. Draft biographies stored in the back office are periodically validated for online publication and it is regularly enriched with new entries.

Originating as en enlargment of the prosopographical appendices of David Fiala's doctoral dissertation on the musicians of the court of Burgundy in the later 15th century (2002), the project began in 2007 with a research campaign funded by the French National Agency of Research (ANR), in collaboration with the University of Rouen, the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR) of the University of Tours, the CNRS and Le STUDIUM agency. The database primarily collects the results of biographical research concerning singers active in institutions of France, the Low Countries and Italy, but also considers the activities of singers in Spain, Germany and other European countries. There are different kinds of entries in the database. The user will find entries in progress, which propose just a few pieces of information, as well as complete entries, available in French and English. The user can query these by full-text search. Such queries are more successful in French than in English, as a large number of biographies are in French.

The PCR data model rests on the principle of biographies structured as series of events. An event is a nexus of data situated in time and connecting an individual to various elements such as : event type, role, place, institution. The production of events being the most time-consuming task of the PCR, they are only progressively attached to the biographies. The quality and precision of the results of advanced searches are directly depending on the availibity of corresponding events.

Beside its bibliography of several hundreds of references, the PCR maintains its own reference list of archival repositories accross Europe, while references to the documentation kept in libraries follow RISM sigla. It also maintains generic tools such as a multilingual thesaurus of given names (and their diminutives) which facilitates identifications accross different contexts, or tables of music patrons and musical establishments.

Musicologists interested in contributing are invited to contact the responsible of the project, David Fiala.

Files

Sample of 65 PCR bilingual biographies in French and English, December 2008

Contributors

Cingolani Stefano Maria

Dumitrescu Theodor

Fiala David