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 are progressively processed before being made public on the website. These files gather a wide variety of structured data on the singers, such as the multilingual variants of their names, their dates and places of activities, the identification of their patrons or their ecclesiastical and beneficial careers, together with their fully written-out 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.

Project history
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 (Fiala 2002), the project began in 2007 with a research campaign funded by the French National Research Agency (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: Loire Valley Institute for Advanced Studies. In 2010, the PCR was aligned with the information from Rob Wegman's Bibliography of Singers in Continental Europe, 1450-1500 (Wegman BSCE), a major forerunner of PCR which has ever only been accessible as an unpublished printout of an old database (on the ancestor of all these projects, which never came to life, see Perkins 1987). A further important step in the enrichment of the database was the systematic inclusion of the biographies of all singers employed in French Saintes-Chapelles in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, in the frame of another project funded by the ANR in 2011-2015 (for the Saintes-Chapelles of Paris and Bourges: Szpirglas 2015). A first public online interface was released in 2017, which gives full access to 4557 entries but in very diverse editorial states (link below). This old interface, which has not been maintained, nor corrected nor enriched since then, is now being replaced by this one, which offers much more editorial control and structured data.

Scope and caracteristics of the database
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.

PCR side ressources
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

External links

Former interface of PCR (2017) (Full access to the data of the PCR in their 2017 stage, in very diverse editorial states)

Bibliography

[Fiala 2002]

Fiala, D., 2002, Le mécénat musical des ducs de Bourgogne et des princes de la maison de Habsbourgs : 1467-1506 : étude documentaire et prosopographique, Thèse de doctorat soutenue à Tours, 2002 http://www.sudoc.fr/069901945.

[Perkins 1987]

Perkins, L. L., 1987, RENARC: A Data Base of Archival References concerning Music and Musicians of the Renaissance, Acta Musicologica, 59, p. 300‑307 https://www.jstor.org/stable/932950 (consulté le 12 septembre 2025).

[Szpirglas 2015]

Szpirglas, J., 2015, Prosopographie des musiciens des Saintes-Chapelles de Paris (1248 - ca1640) et de Bourges (1405 - ca1640), Thèse de doctorat soutenue à , 2015 https://theses.fr/2015TOUR2027 (consulté le 27 avril 2024).

[Wegman BSCE]

Wegman, R. C., 1990, Bibliography of singers in Continental Europe (1450-1500) https://www.academia.edu/128192308/Rob_C_Wegman_Bibliography_of_Singers_in_Continental_Europe_1990_.

Contributors

Jane Alden

collab_surname Guillaume Avocat

Stefano Maria Cingolani

Theodor Dumitrescu