The Chigi Codex makes available for the first time a critical edition and comprehensive study of a late fifteenth-century anthology of sacred musical works.

Compiled between 1500 and 1504, The Chigi Codex contains the complete contents of an extraordinary illuminated manuscript, an anthology of forty polyphonic masses and motets associated with the royal courts of France and Burgundy. This edition includes nearly the complete oeuvre of Johannes Ockeghem, five motets by Johannes Regis, and compositions by Josquin des Prez, Henricus Isaac, Antoine Busnoys, Pierre de la Rue, Jean Mouton, Alexander Agricola, and others. Twelve works are unique to The Chigi Codex; seven motets were added by a Spanish scribe after 1515. The complete contents are presented here with transcriptions of the music accessible to musicians today, with a critical commentary on the music and concordant sources. The Codex transmits works that were copied in manuscripts and prints throughout Europe later in the sixteenth century.

In addition to its monumental repertory, The Chigi Codex includes notable works of visual art in the double-folio openings of thirty-six works with miniature paintings, coats of arms, inhabited capitals, family mottos, bizarre creatures, and colorful borders, all in the famed Ghent-Bruges style. Herbert Kellman discusses these as well as the history of the Codex and its long journey from its original patron, the Burgundian seigneur Philippe Bouton, to the Spanish families Folch de Cardona and Fernández de Córdoba, and finally to Rome and to the library of Fabio Chigi, Pope Alexander VII. The Chigi library is now an important part of the Vatican Library.  

Making the manuscript accessible to the public and musicians, this edition of The Chigi Codex supports the study, performance, and understanding of its music and art in the musical, cultural, and historical contexts of its creation.

Edward F. Houghton is professor emeritus of music and former dean of the Arts Division at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was honored with the Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award for the 2023–24 academic year. Herbert Kellman is professor emeritus of music and medieval studies of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was cofounder with Charles Hamm of the Musicological Archives for Renaissance Manuscript Studies and editor of its five-volume Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music 1400–1550. He is the senior research fellow of the Alamire Foundation in Belgium.