The Singing of Laude and Musical Sensibilities in Early Seventeenth‐Century Confraternity Devotion: Part I

In this article, we explore the devotional use of avant‐garde music in a remarkable Florentine youth confraternity, the Compagnia dell’arcangelo Raffaello , in the early seventeenth century. We point to traits of the close relationship between the religious and musical practices in the confraternity, which shed light on the development of an aesthetic sensibility towards music. In the coming second part of the article, this will form the background for a discussion of the function and context of an unusual (probably seventeenth‐century) manuscript of polyphonic laude from the Cathedral archives in Florence, to our knowledge not previously discussed in scholarship.