ABSTRACT
The importance of aristocratic patronage in Elizabethan culture has been connected, in recent music scholarship, with the development of secular keyboard music in general, and in particular with My Ladye Nevells Booke (1591). The present chapter seeks to refine this line of research by discussing concrete evidence for the various reflections of aristocratic culture in My Ladye Nevells Booke. The collection is discussed not as a product of a supposedly homogenous aristocratic culture, but in the context of different if intertwined cultural groups of the upper strata of Elizabethan society.
