The articles published in this volume are based largely on the papers delivered at the international symposium on 'Urbanity, Identity Construction, and Humanism: Music, Art, and Culture in the Age of the Council of Basel.' The symposium profited from a fruitful dialogue conducted between scholars and performers at Basel University's Musicology Department during the 'Waning of the Middle Ages' Festival (August 2011). Our volume has been enlarged with the addition of further original articles that not only expand the overall picture of the topic, but enrich the book's underlying theses on the cultural history of music and the arts in the fifteenth century. Here, with a common set of questions, we have assembled articles from general historians and musicologists, as well as historians of art and literature, in order to search for possible answers to the question of identity construction in the fifteenth century. The early age of humanism, the internationalization of culture, the Council and conciliarism, and the urbanity of the late Middle Ages: all are mainstays of the culture-historical edifice that these articles, with their contrasting methodological approaches, demarcate and carry out in an interdisciplinary spirit.