Women OF Renaissance

This book tells the history of the French Renaissance through the lives of its most prominent queens and mistresses, beginning with Agnès Sorel, the first officially recognized royal mistress in 1444; including Anne of Brittany, Catherine de Medici, Anne Pisseleu, Diane de Poitiers, and Marguerite de Valois, among others; and concluding with Gabrielle d'Estrées, Henry IV's powerful mistress during the 1590s.

Conductor Peter Phillips is one of the leading lights in the world of British choral music, best known as the director of the prolific and durable group The Tallis Scholars. He is also a noted scholar, radio and television presenter who has done much to popularize Renaissance music, a music label founder and executive, and an educator. Phillips was born on October 15, 1953, in Southampton, England. He studied at St. John's College, Oxford University, as an organ scholar. By the time he graduated in 1975, he had gained a grounding not only in choral and organ music but in music history, studying with two of the leading British musicologists of the day, Denis Arnold and David Wulstan. In 1973, Phillips assembled a group of singers from Oxford and Cambridge to perform Renaissance music and named them The Tallis Scholars in honor of English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis. The term "Scholars" was not merely fanciful, for the singers were all choral scholars from the various colleges of the two universities. Phillips held teaching posts at Oxford, the Royal College of Music, and Trinity College of Music, but the activities of The Tallis Scholars expanded after they established themselves formally in 1978.