Songs, Scribes, and Society: The History and Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers (review)

The 1970s and 1980s were heady days for scholars interested in French secular song of the fifteenth century; at the time there was always one more chansonnier yet to be studied and edited by anyone looking for a dissertation topic, or another archive to comb through for biographical information on chanson composers. As a result, many fine studies, editions, and catalogs were produced during the last forty years, but to date no one has attempted a synthesis of this abundance of scholarly activity. Jane Alden's Songs, Scribes, and Society: The History and Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers is a first step in that direction. Her study focuses on the "Loire Valley Chansonniers"—five fifteenth-century no-tated secular song collections from central France known as the Copenhagen, Dijon, Laborde, Nivelle, and Wolfenbüttel chansonniers—examining their history and what they might have meant to their owners and admirers. She adroitly culls information from nearly every relevant source published through mid-2008 to weave a picture of the environment that gave rise to these musical documents and to address some of the issues regarding their physical production.

Chapter 1, "Discovering Chansonniers," describes how the Laborde and Dijon chansonniers came to the attention of European scholars and how the importance of these artifacts to the history of early music was subsequently revealed. Alden attempts to correct the view that the work on the topic of the fifteenth-century chanson by the pioneering music historian R. G. Kiesewetter was motivated by nationalist fervor, and in this she is largely successful. This chapter is a fine addition to the literature written during the last ten to fifteen years intended to explain "How Musicology Came to Be Where it is Today." Chapters 2 and 3 are chiefly concerned with the physical makeup of the Loire Valley Chansonniers and their relative datings, while chapter 4 is, for the most part, a discussion of much of what is currently known about the general working procedures of music scribes. In chapter 5, "Owners, Readers, and Bookish Culture," she explains the socio-cultural backgrounds of the patrons whom she believes were the main commissioning agents and owners of chansonniers—French royal court secretaries and notaries. Noting that the Wolfenbüttel chansonnier was probably prepared for the French courtier and secretary Étienne Petit, Alden delves into the Petit family history in new and considerable detail, and then proceeds to show that the Laborde chansonnier may have been owned at some point by another royal court habitué, the physician and diplomat Adam Fumée. Supporting appendices and high-resolution color photo reproductions of the illustrations found throughout the pages of Alden's study are provided by Oxford University Press in a companion Web site (www.oup.com /us/companion.websites/9780195381528 /resources/?view=usa, accessed 6 July 2011).

While readers will find much that is useful in this book, there is also much that is problematic. These issues chiefly involve the larger conclusions that Alden draws throughout chapters 2 through 5, conclusions that either do not rest on a firm foundation of evidence or ignore the full range of evidence and are therefore drawn too narrowly.

Among the first problems are Alden's arguments for redating the relative chronology of these chansonniers, with her ultimate conclusion that the Nivelle manuscript—currently assumed to have been copied first—should instead be placed third in the general chronology, after the main layers of Laborde and Wolfenbüttel. She bases her conclusion primarily on paleographic and reportorial grounds. Showing that the index and seven songs in the Dijon manuscript were later additions and then claiming that only a certain form of the majuscule E in tenor-voice designations occurs in these added entries and nowhere else, Alden concludes that whenever that particular form of E occurs, the scribe was writing in...