Historians of the late medieval Angevin court are all too aware of some of the difficulties of this area of research. The significant loss of archival materials and the undocumented dispersal of patrimony might seemingly offer unsurmountable obstacles. In this light alone, Merkley’s new book on the musical culture of the court of René d’Anjou (1409–1480), the last Duke of Anjou, sometimes King of Naples, and titular King of Jerusalem, is a remarkable contribution. The book focuses on the court of René d’Anjou and his queens, particularly Jeanne de Laval, at Angers and Aix-en-Provence. Merkley explores music’s place in the literary and ceremonial culture of the court, including its broader links with contemporary French courtly culture. Merkley succeeds in providing a lucid account of musical culture in the late Angevin court and contributes to a growing body of literature examining the role of Angevin queens and duchesses in matters of artistic patronage. This book will undoubtedly be of tremendous interest to scholars of Josquin des Prez and of other contemporary Franco-Flemish composers and musicians. Those working on 15th-century French courtly and religious art, book production, literary culture and women’s studies will also find much of worth in this book.
To achieve the book’s synthesis and development of existing and new evidence, Merkley draws upon a wide range of archival, artistic, literary and musical sources, and brings them together in productive dialogue through rigorous historical method. The backbone of this book is its newer approaches to analyzing archival documentation for indications of networks of social interaction, patronage and exchange. As noted (1–2), the research grew out of the archival work that Merkley and Lora L.M. Merkley (Matthews) conducted earlier on the Sforza court of Milan. That earlier research resulted in a dramatic revision to the biography of the most outstanding composer of the age, Josquin des Prez, disentangling his career from similarly named composers active earlier in Milan. Newly reported discoveries from the archives enhance and expand earlier documentary evidence for Josquin’s career at the court of René for 1477–78. While this feature alone will gain the keen attention of music historians, Merkley’s approach to reading archival evidence is complemented by his concern for reconstructing networks of social relations and systems of patronage. This form of social network analysis, when applied to notary documents, especially wills and church benefices, expands the horizon of traditional archival enquiry beyond the simple discovery of the name of a musician or composer to the evaluation of what that document reveals about the social networks and patronage of those individuals named in the document. Around this documentary framework, Merkley assembles additional evidence from artistic, literary and musical analyses. By his own admission, scholarly speculation also plays an important methodological role in drawing together multiple threads of enquiry: this facet of Merkley’s approach is both productive and sometimes challenging for the reader. Some readers might struggle with the more speculative conclusions, although others might find that each represents a sufficiently cogent reading of available evidence and an acknowledgement of one of the inevitable and omnipresent limitations of historiography itself.
The first chapter provides the foundation for the rest of the book by examining the mid-fifteenth century establishment of a polyphonic chapel in René’s court and the creation of ceremonial offices for which it provided music. Merkley accompanies a clear description of the institutions of René’s Order of the Crescent and the construction of physical chapels at Angers and Aix-en-Provence with detailed summaries of evidence for each singer in the musical chapel from as early as 1447. This includes, among others, composers such as Bertrand Feragut and Marbrianus de Orto. Merkley reserves a detailed discussion of new archival evidence of Josquin des Prez’s presence at the Angevin court until Chapter 9, which also set about to answer questions about which of his works might have been composed for and/or performed at René’s court.
The significance of another singer described in Chapter 1 does not become fully apparent until Chapter 3. There, in an examination of which chansonniers might be connected with the Angevin court, Merkley proposes that the singer Philippon des Hayes, who is documented in René’s chapel in the late 1470s, might be the composer of several unique works in the Chansonnier Nivelle de la Chaussée. Merkley in turn proposes that Nivelle might be closely tied to the Angevin court. Jane Alden, in her well-known examination of the so-called Loire Valley chansonniers (Scribes, Songs, and Society. Oxford, 2010), shifts the dating of this song book forward from the 1460s to the early 1470s. Merkley’s hypothesis invites further consideration of the chronology of the so-called Loire Valley chansonniers. Merkley further speculates that a collection of works added slightly later to Nivelle, which bear the unusual inscription “par despit”, might in fact be early works attributable to (among others) Josquin. The proposal is interesting but requires further evaluation. Further analysis of these songs from Nivelle might prove resistant to conventional techniques of stylistic analysis, particularly if, as Merkley proposes, the young Josquin intentionally adapted his style to the distinctive musical poetics of René’s court.
Merkley’s focus on literary devices in Chapter 2 sets the stage for one of the most significant proposals in Chapter 6. René ensured that this favorite device “Ardent désir” assumed a prominent thematic role in his residences, his writings and even in his funeral monument. Several song lyrics in Nivelle seem to reference this this device, and René self-consciously fashioned the character of Ardent desir in his Le livre du cueur d’amore epris (1457). In view of the prominence of this device in the Angevin court, Merkley’s proposal that one of the most enigmatic anonymous polyphonic masses of the 1460s or 1470s, which is uniquely transmitted in an early Sistine Chapel manuscript alongside some of the most notable contemporary examples of this genre, was composed for René, is original and plausible. Less plausible is the author’s acceptance of an outdated hypothesis that Antoine Busnoys can be attributed as the composer of the Missa L’Ardant desir. Although Busnoys’s songs are numerous in Nivelle, other composers like Delahaye himself cannot be excluded. If this reviewer is permitted to take this argument one step further than Merkley dares, a polyphonic mass on René’s favorite secular device invites further speculation that the mass was associated with the Order of the Crescent, offering a musical parallel to the early Missa L’homme armé tradition, which several musicologists have argued was originally associated with the political program of the contemporaneous Duke of Burgundy. Merkley’s conclusion itself invites future stylistic musical analysis and repertory comparison, possibly along the lines that are emerging in “big data” music corpus studies at present.
The focus in Chapter 2 on intertextuality as a witness to literary connections between René’s court and other prominent French literary figures, including Charles d’Orléans, Alain Chartier and even the infamous François Villon, is paralleled by a highly topical examination in Chapters 5–7 of how existing lyrics and their musical settings might have been used in sacred and secular theater performances at René’s court. The presence of lyric inserts in farces, morality plays, and mystery plays affords the possibility that members of René’s musical chapel, including Josquin, presented their musical settings during theatrical performances. Indebted in part to the research of Howard Mayer Brown, the focus of these chapters nonetheless highlights the fascinating though poorly understood intersection of music and theater in this period. Bearing in mind similar but earlier developments in Florence and other Italian centers from the 1440s, there are still outstanding questions about the use of music in 15th-century theater that need to be answered before historians might reach a more comprehensive understanding of early theatrical performance. Merkley follows in the footsteps of pioneers like Nino Pirrotta and Brown. His account does much to inform developments that occurred at one of the most spectacular courts of late medieval Europe, whose location afforded it the unique opportunity to bridge developments in this performance art from both north and south of the Alps.
This short review is scarcely able to do justice to the wealth of detail in this book. Overarching themes include the cult of Mary Magdalen in the vein of Jacob de Voraigne’s Golden Legend and King René’s program of Marian devotion. Both themes add further grist to the mill when it comes situating art, literature and music in the Angevin court. This same wealth of detail sometimes leads to minor inaccuracies, such as when the facsimile of an early 15th-century manuscript is cited as the edition of a motet D’Ardant desir (193), rather than the edition by Ursula Günther given in the bibliography. Readers without a sound knowledge of 15th-century French will find parts of this book hard going: French poetry is not translated as a matter of course. On the other hand, Latin documents, particularly those concerning Josquin in Chapter 9, are deftly translated. Understandably, translating all French texts would have ballooned this book well beyond its present 414 pages: today, well known web sites (like Peter Woetmann Christoffersen’s ‘Loire Valley’ Chansonniers, https://chansonniers.pwch.dk) might well assist less linguistically skilled readers in making fuller use of this book. Another apparent deficiency is the book’s bibliographic currency: the most recent item is from 2013, and there are several key omissions, for example, this author’s own discussion of the Missa L’Ardant desir (Music & Letters 2010), which summarizes current positions on its attribution.
Despite these shortcomings, Merkley’s book is a significant contribution to the history of musical culture at the late medieval Angevin court. By the author’s own admission, it often relies upon informed speculation to reach several conclusions. Yet, as with all good scholarship, Merkley has set up a series of further research questions and challenges for future scholarship. This in its own right is a vital contribution to the field: it provides the foundations for further in-depth investigation of topics in the musical history of the Angevin court.