UCLA

This dissertation examines musical settings of moral poetry in France from 1556-1652. Rooted in the history of philosophy and modern ethical theory, this research illuminates the emergence of musical settings of moral poetry as a response to the trauma of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. I argue that these settings offered Catholics and Protestants a means of collective repair, through the moral content of the text and through edifying experiences of repetition and beauty built into the musical settings. With their focus on virtue, these collections occupied an unusually neutral space in the otherwise polemical landscape of Francophone musical print culture. Furthermore, they emerged as part of a nascent “moral” genre, a domain of musical print culture that resists categorization as either sacred or secular. Because musical settings of moral poetry were used alongside confessionally-marked sacred texts in Catholic and Protestant education and domestic contexts, they were linked together under the broader banner of edifying music, sometimes labeled “chaste” or “honneste.” However, as the content of these moral texts were rooted in ancient philosophy, rather than in the authority of church tradition, they participated in the late sixteenth-century process of secularizing ethics. Through an analysis of their production and use, I consider how the widespread practice of singing moral poetry played a role in popularizing rational, ethical reflection over religious belief as the foundation for repairing damaged communal relations.