What role did sacred music play in mediating Louis XIII''s grip on power in the early seventeenth century? How can a study of music as ''sounding liturgy'' contribute to the wider discourse on absolutism and ''the arts'' in early modern France? Taking the scholarship of the so-called ''ceremonialists'' as a point of departure, Peter Bennett engages with Weber''s seminal formulation of power to consider the contexts in which liturgy, music and ceremonial legitimated the power of a king almost continuously engaged in religious conflict. Numerous musical settings show that David, the psalmist, musician, king and agent of the Holy Spirit, provided the most enduring model of kingship; but in the final decade of his life, as Louis dedicated the Kingdom to the Virgin Mary, the model of ''Christ the King'' became even more potent – a model reflected in a flowering of musical publication and famous paintings by Vouet and Champaigne.
