St. Anne in Renaissance Music: Devotion and Politics by Michael Alan Anderson (review)

Michael Anderson’s book exposes the ferment of art and politics within the French, Habsburg, and Burgundian sphere around the turn of the sixteenth century by examining the way nobility called upon the intercessory powers of St. Anne. There are, of course, other books that treat these rich artistic traditions. What makes Anderson’s hermeneutic unique, though, is his interdisciplinary approach and his emphasis on the lives of women: Anne of Cyprus (later Anne of Savoy); Anne of France (daughter of Louis XI); Anne of Brittany (wife of Emperor Maximilian I, Charles VIII, and Louis XII); Anne of Bohemia and Hungary (wife of Emperor Ferdinand I); but also Marguerite of Navarre (sister of King Francis I); and above all Margaret of Austria. With scrupulous attention to detail, Anderson shows that these women relied on musicians, artists, and scribes to channel their political and domestic ambitions through devotion to St. Anne. Scrutinizing noble women’s harvest of St. Anne’s benevolence enables Anderson to connect ritual music in public spaces to the privy of women’s concerns for literacy, marriage and widowhood, and the problems of maternity, especially as related to women’s sense of duty to secure their dynastic inheritance through progeny. As a result, every chapter offers a fascinating blend of music criticism and storytelling.

The lives of noble women in Renaissance Europe were often complicated by marriages of state and child rearing, which would have fit them naturally as devotees of St. Anne. Anderson reviews the apocryphal vita of St. Anne and its reception among medieval exegetes in chapter 1, emphasizing those attributes that made her appealing to women. Anne was thrice married—to Joachim, Cleophas, and Salome (henceforth known as the Trinubium)—and bore each husband a daughter named Mary, who, in turn, each married and gave birth to children who would figure prominently in the New Testament (p. 7). As the mother of the Virgin Mary, St. Anne was the Mater matris and the grandmother saint of auspicious progeny, and she would be venerated as the matriarch of the ‘Holy Kinship’, whose power could be conjured to support the dynastic ambitions of her devotees. And because Anne’s marriages were successive, devotees also found solace in her dignified model of widowhood—particularly Margaret of Austria, who was twice a widow, and Anne of Brittany, who was thrice married and widow of Charles VIII.

Anderson opens his study of music in chapter 2 with some persistent sleuthing for the origins of the Turin Codex (Turin, Biblioteca nazionale, MS. J.II.9). It yields connections that extend from the Lusignan court in Cyprus to the ruling families of Brescia and Savoy. The manuscript (dated no earlier than 1413) includes 334 musical items—a full gamut of chant, including the offices of St. Anne and St. Hilarion, and French polyphonic songs. Through them, Anderson explores the broad relevance of music devoted to St. Anne within a rather tightly knit community of patrons in the Habsburg-Burgundian sphere.

To prove his assertions about music, Anderson makes effective use of visual art at several key stages. Witness, for example, Bernhard Strigel’s Portrait of Maximilian and Family in 1515 (Figure 1.4, p. 18), which identifies the emperor and family allegorically as members of St. Anne’s holy family. Installing this visual allegory early in the book establishes the Habsburgs as key players in the cult of St. Anne. Margaret of Austria, for example, surfaces frequently in Anderson’s narrative. Chapter 3 is devoted almost entirely to Margaret of Austria’s role in propagating La Rue’s Missa de Sancta Anna. Details about her patronage and biography in music take up the last twenty pages of the chapter. Adding to his argument the depiction of Margaret and her mother, Mary of Burgundy, kneeling at the St. Anne altar before a ‘St. Anne Trinitarian’, in the Church of St Nicholas in Ghent (Figure 3.2...