In France the châteaux of the Loire are mostly connected in many people’s minds with royalty. This is because the men who built them were scarcely less wealthy than the king, often richer and usually heavily involved with him. The fine limestone the châteaux of the Loire were built from occurred naturally in a vast retaining wall that runs all along the right bank of the Loire Valley from Blois to Tours, where it is mingled with sandstone, millstone grit and potter’s clay.

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While being associated with entertainment and frivolity, music is also a powerful form of communication vital to our health and inner well-being. At what point meaningful, communicative sounds began cannot be established. What we do know is that we all make sounds first before we learn to talk. So we could say that music is the first language that we learn and an important step in the creation of the spoken word.

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If beauty was accompanied by intelligence those who used both attributes skilfully seemed to have been the most successful. Fifteenth century beauty Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566) was considered an ‘ardent feminist sure of her own worth – and a child of her time’. She had all the attributes, plus a strong will and a great strength of purpose. These were both very necessary skills for survival in the world of political intrigue that surrounded the court of the last medieval and first Renaissance King of France Francois I whose court was the envy of Europe.

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The European medieval mind concerned itself with matters of the soul, harmony and music as major aspects of the kósmos, which was conceived as a tightly structured, hierarchical system centred on the earth and the human race.

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