Kate Van Orden Materialities Books, Readers, PDF

Materialities
Series Editor Jane F. Fulcher

Series Board
Members: Celia Applegate
Philip Bohlman
Kate van Orden
Michael P. Steinberg
Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Staging the French Revolution:

Music in Other Worlds Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera,
Vanessa Agnew 1789–1794
Mark Darlow
Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the
Belle Epoque Music, Piety, and Propaganda:
Katherine Bergeron The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation
Bavaria
Songs, Scribes, and Societies:
Alexander J. Fisher
The History and Reception of the
Loire Valley Chansonniers The Politics of Appropriation:
Jane Alden German Romantic Music and the
Ancient Greek Legacy
Harmony and Discord: Music and
Jason Geary
the Transformation of Russian
Cultural Life Defining Deutschtum: Political
Lynn M. Sargeant Ideology, German Identity, and
Music-Critical Discourse in
Musical Renderings of the
Liberal Vienna
Philippine Nation
David Brodbeck
Christi-Anne Castro
Materialities: Books, Readers, and the
The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning
Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe
in France, 1260–1330
Kate van Orden
Emma Dillon
Materialities
K at e Books, Readers, and the
va n O r d e n Chanson in Sixteenth-Century
Europe
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of
Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by

Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
© Oxford University Press 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law,
by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization.
Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

van Orden, Kate.
Materialities: books, readers, and the chanson in 16th-c. Europe/Kate van Orden.
pages cm.—(New cultural history of music series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–936064–2
1. Music publishing—Europe—History—16th century 2. Songbooks—Europe—16th century—
History and criticism. I. Title.
ML112.V34 2014
070.5′79409409031—dc23
2014028992
This volume is published with the generous support of the Margarita M. Hanson Endowment of the
American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Grandma Van for teaching me my ABCs,
Diane McVey for teaching me my notes and rests,
and the folks at Eble Music Co. in Iowa City, Iowa
for always knowing what I needed for my next lesson,
even when all I could remember was “it’s called ‘sonata’.”
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Music Examples xiii
Acknowledgments xv
List of Abbreviations xix
PART I A Material History of the Chanson
C h a p t e r O n e Introduction: Livres de chansons 3
Chapter Two Feuilles volantes, Distribution and Sales 39
C h a p t e r T h r e e Early Collectors and Modern Libraries 67
PART II Learning to Read
Chapter Four Literacy and Song 117

Chapter Five Latin Primers 132
Chapter Six Civilities and Chansons 167
C h a p t e r S e v e n A New Generation of Musical Civilities:
The Quatrains de Pibrac 228
Postscript: Cultures of Music 267

Glossary 273
Bibliography 277
Index 305
viii | c o n t e n t s
List of I l lustr ations
1.1 Abraham Bosse, L’Ouye (“Hearing”), etching, ca. 1638. Image copy-
right © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art
Resource, NY 5
1.2 Madrigali di Verdelot et de altri autori, a sei voci (Venice: Gardane, 1546).
Photo: author 10
1.3 Specimen of music type designed for single-impression printing.
Photo: author 13
1.4 Sixiesme livre contenant xxvij. Chansons nouvelles a quatre parties en ung
volume et en deux (Paris: Attaingnant and Jullet, 1539), title page.
Accademia Filarmonica di Verona, 207/1. Photo courtesy of the
Accademia Filarmonica di Verona 14
1.5 Quinziesme livre contenant xxx. Chansons nouvelles a quatre parties en deux
volumes (Paris: Attaingnant and Jullet, 1544), title page. Accademia
Filarmonica di Verona, 207/11. Photo courtesy of the Accademia
Filarmonica di Verona 15
1.6 Giovanni Maria Crespi, “Sportelli di Libreria” (ca. 1720–30), detail 20
2.1 Comparison of common formats for chansonniers 47
2.2 Filippo Nicoletti, Il Primo libro de Madrigali a 5 (Venice: Gardane,
1578), cover of the Bassus partbook. Accademia Filarmonica di Verona,
Fondo Musicale Antico, n.134. Photo courtesy of the Accademia
Filarmonica di Verona 57
2.3 A tract volume of seven books of chansons (1570–78). Music Division,
the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations, Music Reserve *MN C696 59
3.1 Binding of Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Musikabteilung,
4o Mus. pr. 182. Reprinted by permission of the Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek 89
3.2 The first opening of Le parangon des chansons, book 1 (Lyon: Moderne,
[1538]). Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Musikabteilung,
4o Mus. pr. 182. Reprinted by permission of the Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek 90
3.3 Binding of Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Musikabteilung,
4o Rar. 900. Reprinted by permission of the Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek 99
3.4 Ferrante Imperato, Dell’historia naturale . . . (Naples: C. Vitale, 1599),
plate depicting Imperato’s collection of marvels. Houghton Library,
Harvard University, Typ 525.99.461 100
3.5 La Fleur de poesie francoyse (Paris: Alain Lotrian, 1543), sig. Aiiv–Aiiir.
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Ye 2718 109
4.1 The Ass at School, Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Brueghel the Elder,
engraving, 1557. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Image source: Art Resource, NY 116
4.2 Jacques Cossard, Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain
chant, et compter (Paris, 1633), 101. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
France, Rés. X 1947 119
4.4 Giovanni Della Casa, Le Galatee, premierement composé en Italien par J.
de la Case, & depuis mis en François, Latin, & Espagnol par divers auteurs
(Lyon: Jean II de Tournes, 1598), 2–3. © The British Library Board,
8405.a.64 122
5.1 Colporteur hawking ABCs and books of hours, from the series “Les
cris de Paris” (16th c.). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal
Estampes Rés. 24, fol. 1r 133
5.2 Le ABC des Chrestiens, a pamphlet bound into Heures de Nostre Dame
à l’usage de Chartres (Paris: Jacques Kerver, 1581), sig. Cir. Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, B 27833 134
5.3 “Paraphrase du Te Deum laudamus,” in Michel Coyssard, Paraphrase des
Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz pour chanter avecque la Doctrine chrestienne
(Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1592), fols. 25v–26r. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
de France, Département de la Musique, Rés. Vmd 14 141
5.4 Manuscript canon for seven voices at the unison in Michel Coyssard,
Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz pour chanter avecque la
x | l i s t o f i l l u s t r a t i o n s
Doctrine chrestienne (Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1592), fol. 21r. Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Rés.
Vmd 14 145
5.5 Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne (Paris: Marc Locqueneulx, 1589),
fol. 34r. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, D 27199 146
5.6 Pierre Certon, Pater noster–Ave Maria, Quinta and Sexta Pars, in
Certon, Institutoris Symphoniacorum puerorum . . . modulorum editio
(Paris: Attaingnant and Jullet, 1542), Contratenor, fol. 2r. Vienna,
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, SA.87.C.1 155
5.7 Manuscript fauxbourdon in Cornelius Blockland, Le IIe Livre du Jardin
de musique semé d’excellentes et harmonieuses chansons et voix de ville, mises
en musique à quatre parties (Lyon: Jean II de Tournes, 1579), Superius,
verso of last printed folio. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Département de la Musique, Cons. Rés. 421 163
5.8 Manuscript additions to a Quintus partbook. Paris, Bibliothèque natio-
nale de France, Département de la Musique, Cons. Rés. 623–623 bis,
recto of last flyleaf 164
6.1 Pierre Sandrin, Si j’ay du bien, in Le premier trophée de musique
(Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559), Bassus, p. 3. © The British Library
Board, K.8.i.4 176
6.2 Pierre Sandrin, Si j’ay du bien, in Premier recueil de chansons (Paris: Le
Roy & Ballard, 1554), Bassus, fol. 3v. © The British Library Board,
K.8.i.4 177
6.3 Jacques Peletier du Mans, Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ e prononciacion françoęsɇ
(Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1555), 23. FB 1209, Bibliothèque Universitaire,
Fonds Ferdinand Brunot, Tours – Bibliothèques Virtuelles
Humanistes 183
6.4 The phonetic spelling system of Jean-Antoine de Baïf. Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, MS fr.
19140 184
6.6 Puisque vivre en servitude, text by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, as given in
Jean Chardavoine, Le Recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons en forme
de voix de ville (Paris: Claude Micard, 1576), fol. 88v. Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Rés. Vm Coirault
184 206
6.7 The “Brieve et facile instruction pour bien apprendre la musicque,”
in Livre septieme des chansons vulgaires, de diverses auteurs a quatre parties
l i s t o f i l l u s t r a t i o n s | xi
(Antwerp: Pierre Phalèse, 1613), Superius, fol. 1v. By permission of the
Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, University of California, Berkeley,
M2082.4 L5P 212
6.8 Orlande de Lassus, Le thresor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus, 3rd ed.
(Cologne: Paul Marceau, 1594), Superius, verso of last folio. Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Rés.
Vm7 237 214
6.9 Orlande de Lassus, Le thresor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus, 3rd ed.
(Cologne: Paul Marceau, 1594), Superius, fol. 1r. Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Rés. Vm7 237 215
7.1 Nouvel exemplaire pour apprendre à escrire (Antwerp: for Robert Granjon,
1565), sig. Ciii. Houghton Library, Harvard University, TypW
530.65.616 234
7.2 La Civilité puerile & honneste pour l’instruction des enfans (Troyes: Nicolas
Oudot, 1649), title page. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés.
p. R 117 237
7.3 Nouveau recueil et élite de plusieurs belles chansons joyeuses, honnestes,
et amoureuses . . . Avec les quatrains du S. de Pibac aussi en Musique
(Rouen: Thomas Mallard [1580]), fol. 78r–v. Bibliothèque municipale de
Versailles, Rés. a 83 244
xii | l i s t o f i l l u s t r a t i o n s
LIST OF Music Ex a mples
4.1 Ave Maria, second antiphon of Second Vespers for the Annunciation of
the Blessed Virgin Mary, 25 March, rhythmicized and with text underlay
as in the polyphonic setting of Pierre Certon 128
5.1 Pierre Certon, Ave Maria a 3, mm. 1–20 150
5.2 Pierre Certon, Pater noster–Ave Maria a 6, mm. 1–16 153
6.1 Jean Maillard, Si comm’espoir à 4 196
6.2 Cadences in Jean Maillard, Amour brusle à 4, mm. 8–10 and
18–21 201
6.3 Pierre Sandrin, Puisque vivre en servitude à 4 203
6.4 Tielman Susato, Doulce memoire à 2 ou à 3, mm. 1–34 218
6.5 Openings of tenor parts in Tielman Susato, Premier livre des chansons a
deux ou a troix parties (Antwerp: Susato, [1544]) 221
6.6 Antonio Gardane, Doulce memoire à 2, mm. 1–36 223
7.1 Guillaume Boni, Ne va suivant à 4, mm. 1–8 259
7.2 Guillaume Boni, Dieu tout premier à 4, mm. 1–6 260
Ack now ledgments
“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.

“No, no! the adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone; “explanations take
such a dreadful time.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (“The Lobster Quadrille”)
A slew of adventures play into this book, and before the explanations
begin, I must thank the institutions that supported my travels and the
friends, colleagues, librarians, students, and teachers who conspired to make
the research so addictive.
The White Rabbit that led me to Materialities was my dissertation on
the French chanson, and the influence of my advisors at the University of
Chicago has remained remarkably persistent: Howard Mayer Brown contrib-
uted respect for ephemera and popular song, Martha Feldman the framing
concept of print cultures, Philip Gossett a sophisticated notion of textual criti-
cism, and Philippe Desan a strongly economic perspective. My plunge into
the Wonderland of book history also came during those Chicago years, in two
transformative seminars, one taught by Feldman and the second by Roger
Chartier. Feldman subsequently suggested that I edit a volume of essays, Music
and the Cultures of Print (2000), and Chartier contributed an afterword to the
collection, for which I am extremely grateful.
In 2003, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique granted me a
Studium Fellowship that became my laissez-passer to explore troves of books
in French libraries. It also landed me in the magic kingdom of the Centre
d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France, under the direction
of Philippe Vendrix. When I imagine Alice’s looking-glass, it is the magnifi-
cent mirror over the fireplace in the office I shared for two life-changing years
at the CESR. The intellectual environment at the Center proved thoroughly
energizing, and Tours was a launching point for valuable ongoing exchanges
with a host of wonderful characters: Pascal Brioist, Philippe Canguilhem,
Marie-Alexis Colin, Marc Desmet, Frank Dobbins, Thierry Favier, David Fiala,
John Griffiths, Nicoletta Guidobaldi, Laurent Guillo, Isabelle His, Théodora
Psychoyou, Philippe Vendrix, and, later, Xavier Bisaro. Tours also provided a
meeting place for the group that came together in 2005 for the session “Music
and the History of the Book in Manuscript and Print” at the 30th Annual
Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music, at which Elizabeth Eva Leach,
Emma Dillon, Jane Alden, Henri Vanhulst, and Iain Fenlon all kindly agreed
to speak. On this side of the Atlantic, I am deeply grateful to Jane Bernstein,
Anthony Newcomb, and Jessie Ann Owens for contributing blockbuster papers
to the session “Print Culture in the Renaissance” at the Sixty-Ninth Annual
Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Houston, TX in 2003, and
to all the authors who wrote field-defining essays for Music and the Cultures of
Print in 2000: Tim Carter, Katherine Bergeron, Thomas Christensen, Robert
R. Holzer, James Haar, Martha Feldman, Thomas Bauman, Lisa Perella, and
Roger Chartier. In these forums we first shared many of the methodologies
employed here, and my debts will be evident. Nearer to publication, in 2014
Jennifer Richards and Richard Wistreich drew me into their AHRC research
network project on reading, “Voices and Books, 1500–1800,” which brought a
number of matters into sharp focus as this book went to press.
Portions of chapters 4 and 5 first appeared in the article “Children’s
Voices: Singing and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century France,” Early Music History
25 (2006): 209–56, © Cambridge University Press, reprinted with permission.
I am grateful to Iain Fenlon for first seeing that work into print.
Thanking the colleagues who fine-tuned my thinking after hearing these
“explanations” in colloquia really would take a dreadfully long time, so in lieu
of that let me express gratitude to all who invited me to speak, queried my
analyses after talks, and passed along great tips at various points, especially
Margaret Bent, Philippe Canguilhem, Mireille Huchon, Neil Rhodes, and
Gary Tomlinson. Jane A. Bernstein, Bonnie J. Blackburn, Ann Blair, Stanley
Boorman, Marie-Alexis Colin, Cristle Collins Judd, Frank Dobbins, Richard
Freedman, Daniel Heartz, Joseph Kerman, John Milsom, Davitt Moroney,
Jennifer Richards, Joshua Rifkin, Katelijne Schiltz, Kay Kaufman Shelemay,
H. Colin Slim, Henri Vanhulst, Richard Wistreich, and an anonymous reader
xvi | a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
for the press commented on some or all of the manuscript at various points
in its evolution, in every case improving the result. Nicholas Manjoine pol-
ished my translations and adjusted my attitude along the way. And Peter
Koch taught me all about typography at his “real lead” press in Berkeley,
California.
During my Berkeley years, several generations of undergraduate students
cheerfully helped spring the music I study in the second part of this book
back into action by learning to play the viola da gamba and committing to
read chansons from photocopied partbooks. My thanks to the viol players and
to Elisabeth Reed, who coached us and helped me launch that course, and
to my dear colleague Davitt Moroney, who amplified enthusiasm for reading
from original notation with his University Baroque Ensemble. Meanwhile a
succession of graduate students pursued their own cultural research on music
books in seminars, independent studies, and dissertations. These tough, honest
young scholars workshopped several chapters of this book in 2007 and 2010,
improving them greatly. I also learned much from the fine dissertations of
Michael Markham (2006), Esther Criscuola de Laix (2009), Rebekah Ahrendt
(2011), and Scott Edwards (2012), each of which brings fresh perspectives to
the field. On the material level, Esther assisted by providing photographs of
binder’s volumes taken during her research stints in Germany, Leon Chisholm
tirelessly checked bibliographic references in spare moments during his own
dissertation research, and Margaret Jones commented on the entire manuscript
as she assisted me with production.
Research and writing were generously supported by a President’s Research
Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of California Office of
the President in 2006–2007, a Humanities Research Fellowship from the
University of California, Berkeley, and research grants from the Committee
on Research at Berkeley. A Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Fellowship for
Research in Venice and the Veneto allowed me to track down chansonniers in
Italy in 2008. Publication was supported by a subvention from the American
Musicological Society. I am grateful to all of these institutions, along with the
CNRS, for underwriting this research.
“The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off
with his head!’ she said, without even looking round.” Researchers who study
early books inevitably encounter foul-tempered librarians who insist that under
no circumstances can you see the book you requested, no matter that you wrote
in advance and have just traveled halfway around the world, losing your lug-
gage in the process. But like the King of Hearts, who quietly pardons subjects
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s | xvii
when the Queen is not looking, most of the special collections librarians I met
in my adventures were lifesavers. Marco Materassi and Michele Magnabosco
allowed me to work at the Accademia Filarmonica di Verona during a sum-
mertime closure, for which I am eternally grateful, and they subsequently
filled multiple requests for photographs of items in their remarkable collection.
At the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica in Bologna, Alfredo
Vitolo and I spent weeks together back in the stacks piecing together the prov-
enance of a huge cache of early books acquired by Padre Martini, a once-in-a-
lifetime discovery that owes entirely to Alfredo’s professional generosity to the
researchers who enter his library. Archivists at the Plantin-Moretus Museum
kindly checked my transcriptions of particularly gnarly entries in Plantin’s led-
gers. At the British Library, Christopher Scobie answered involved requests to
verify the contents of binder’s volumes, as did librarians at Houghton Library
of Harvard University and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.
In 2006 librarians at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich arranged for
me to see the whole of Herwart’s collection on a very compressed research
trip during which Katelijne Schiltz spent hours making sure I missed noth-
ing of interest in the collection she knows so well. Pascal Brioist resolved a
bibliographic mystery for me. Finally, I owe very special thanks to the guard-
ians of the two libraries whose music collections have been second homes: the
Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library
at the University of California, Berkeley. John Roberts, John Shepard, and
Manuel Erviti have been helpful at every stage of research and production, and
had I not been able to teach with the extraordinary collection at Berkeley, my
research would have been at a severe disadvantage as well.
Last but not least, thanks to Skip Sempé for giving me his copy of Heartz’s
Attaingnant catalogue and making a spot for me under his harpsichord when-
ever I needed to work in Paris. And for those who have been lucky enough to
spot him, the Cheshire Cat in this story is Dan Eakins, smiling, mischievous,
and helpful in weird and wonderful ways.
xviii | a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
List of A bbr ev i ations
APM Archives of the Plantin Moretus Museum

BnF Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Bologna MIBM Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica
Munich BSB Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
RISM Répertoire International des Sources Musicales
Vienna ÖNB Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Materialities
PA R T I
A Material History of the Chanson

Chapter One Introduction: Livres de chansons
A nticipation followed by surprise. How many times, for generations,

have scholars working in special collections libraries across the world
waited at their desks for the items they ordered, poring over something else,
only to be interrupted by the delivery of their books. We all know the moment.
For a second, we hesitate, surprised, because there is often no telling what will
arrive, what this book will be, the book that was made of the text we want to
study. Large, small, bound in colored leather, in good condition or bad, maybe
just barely held together by threads or laced into parchment bindings, you
never know. And then there are the music books. Some are the biggest books
of the age, with “elephant” broadside pages bound in leather-covered wooden
boards that can barely be lifted onto your desk; others are tiny enough to slip
into a pocket. Often we get several when we ordered one because the title we
want to see has been bound with others. Sometimes we look at the other titles,
sometimes not. As with the size, condition, and bindings, so much is extrane-
ous to the notes we want to study. The typography and layout might catch our
eye, but time is short. We jot down a reminder of what the book looked like
and then move on to the music.
This study, by contrast, lingers in that moment of physical encounter when
we pause to consider music’s materiality, and significantly, it does so at pre-
cisely the moment in history when the experience of consulting early books in
person is becoming a thing of the past. I have been asking you to play along
with me, knowing that many readers may not have had the experience I just
described. Truly fantastic projects to digitize early books have been revolu-
tionizing scholarly access to the content of primary sources, but even as they
allow us to forego the hassles of travel to libraries and the wait for our books,
they severely limit our experience of the sources we work with. The images
we scrutinize on computer screens deny to us a whole range of information
about everything from paper quality to format and binding, abstracting texts
from the books that contain them, decontextualizing pages once bound into
physical relationships with one another, resizing, rendering texts newly—and
remarkably—transportable, yes, but disembodying them as well. I will sug-
gest in what follows that there is much to learn from books “in the flesh,” and
we might begin by considering what it means to speak of a “book” of music
in the first place.
In the sixteenth century, most polyphonic music was printed not in scores
but in parts. In fact, scores were quite rare, and seem not to have been used
by composers.1 Consequently the world of music was one of parts, with each
individual voice from a polyphonic work printed or written out separately
from the others, sometimes—as in the large choirbooks used by chapels and
cathedral choirs—with the parts arranged in the four quadrants of a single
opening, but even more usually with each part relegated to a separate booklet
or “partbook.” Most of the music books I traveled to see over the last twenty
years contained French polyphonic songs or “chansons,” and they illustrate
the fragmentary nature of music sources perfectly. Usually written for four
singers, a sixteenth-century “book” of chansons normally consists of four slim
partbooks, one for the superius or highest voice, and one each for the con-
tratenor, tenor, and bass voices (for brief definitions of technical musical and
bibliographic terms, see the glossary at the back of this book). A practical
arrangement, partbooks allowed musicians to hold their individual parts or to
sit around a table with the parts set before them, something instrumentalists
required, since their hands were not free (see figure 1.1).
This simple bibliographic fact immediately confronts the scholar with a
conundrum: a single individual cannot “read” partbooks. The music’s very
legibility requires a modern edition in which the separate parts are vertically
aligned for study. Paradoxically, musicians can “read” early music books with-
out too much trouble, in the sense of getting a group together to sing or play
from them. For while editing usually resolves some questions of time signa-
tures, note lengths, and pitches that today’s musicians might find difficult to
interpret, these small deviations from modern notation can quickly be learned
in the same way that one learns to read antiquated spellings and older letter
forms (like the s in the shape of an ∫ that occurs so often in French books of
1
See Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work, 42–56.
4 | a m a t e r i a l h i s t o r y o f t h e c h a n s o n
F i g u r e 1.1 Abraham Bosse, L’Ouye (“Hearing”), etching, ca. 1638. Five musicians
gather around a table in a salon, reading from their separate parts of a polyphonic
song that begins “Cloris de quoy te sert,” presumably a love song treating the story
of Chloris and Tircis. The partbooks are all nicely bound with silk ties; more music
books lie piled on the stool.
the sixteenth century). Over the years, my music students helped me put many
chansons together in just such collaborative sessions of “reading aloud.”
Eminently practical for singers and instrumentalists, partbooks confound
the scholar sitting alone in the library.2 On those days when I was fortunate
enough to find all four partbooks of a chansonnier together in the same library,
I could sketch out a score that allowed me a synoptic view of a couple of songs.
This scoring up involves a literal process of “scoring”—marking vertical mea-
sure lines in the parts—as well as modernizing the notation and cleaning up
errors that become apparent when the parts do not align or harmonize. Score
2
This is not to suggest that early modern readers required scores to study polyphonic
works in silence. For a nuanced discussion of the possiblities, see Anthony Newcomb,
“Notations of Notation,” and Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory,
9–16, in part responding to Stanley Boorman, “Early Music Printing,” 222–27, who
maintained that study of music in parts would have been “if not impossible, very
tedious” (222) for early modern readers. Instrumental intabulations also allowed for
synoptic views.
i n t r o d u c t i o n | 5
in hand, I could leave those old partbooks behind and get down to studying
“the music itself.”
The radical interventions I have just described completely transform
the object of study, turning the scripts for a noisy performance into a score
designed for the cool-headed silent reading appropriate to the decorum of
a library. Scoring eliminates a social dynamic in which multiple readers
depended on each other for information, repositioning all the notes squarely
before an all-knowing modern reader. To wit, look closely at the scene of
music-making in figure 1.1.3 The song being sung is just visible in the part-
book before the viola da gambist, Cloris de quoy te sert, a pastoral gem about
the nymph Chloris.
Like a little drama, singing the song has the group deeply engaged with
one another. The gambist leans in, trying to get a good look at his part while
turning to the side to make room for his bow. Next to him, a child holds
his partbook close, concentrating on the notes and words. By contrast, the
lutenist—a mother, sister, aunt, friend?—looks up as she sings, as though the
partbook is no help, possibly because most amateur lutenists preferred tabla-
ture when they used music at all. Leaning toward the boy, she listens or maybe
raises her voice encouragingly. Perhaps the boy, on the top part, has just hit a
melodic turn suggesting to the others that a cadence or resting point is about
to arrive. Cadences often induce smiles and relief, especially when a piece has
just verged on falling apart. The stronger musicians carry the others along,
they all breathe together at the cadence and start out again, composed.
The woman to the left looks out as she sings, possibly at the man next to
her, who holds his partbook and beats time. She has her hand on the table as
if to keep her stake in the game or keep time for herself. Indeed, the scene
projects the atmosphere of a card game in which players constantly judge each
other’s hands, for no one can see how all the parts fit together from his or her
own partbook. The need for ensemble keeps the singers looking up, leaning in,
beating time, and this despite the fact that each partbook contains notes and
words, which are hard to read simultaneously. The instrumentalists, moreover,
will be checking to see what fret a finger has landed on or watch out for a
string crossing.
If this is reading at all, it is of a virtuosic sort, eyes darting from word to
note to fellow singers, all in a timeline that forbids turning back to reread.
But we might also see it as something entirely apart from reading, a reminder
3
See Richard Wistreich, “Music Books and Sociability,” 235–37, on the social dynamics
of singing from music books visible in this and three other images from the time.
that music notation was itself a latecomer to the page and began as pen strokes
above liturgical texts, what Richard Wistreich has called “singer’s graffiti.” 4
These inky graphemes recorded the gestures that singers made to help their
voices rise and fall together, and although they cropped up between the lines
of verbal texts, the notation is not itself essentially textual. Over the centuries
these written prescriptions took fuller forms that tell us increasing amounts
about what singers did, but no matter how completely notes and staff lines
dominate the pages of partbooks, their meanings lie in communal acts of
music-making, not verbal discourse. The lutenist looks away from her book.
The gesturing hand remains.
Gatherings of paper containing words and other marks brought together in
bindings—the outward form of music books is entirely bookish, and a printed
chansonnier will draw little attention in the rare books reading room if some-
one else nearby has a fine medieval manuscript with colorful illuminations.
Music seems like Greek or Latin, just another scholarly language, another tex-
tual form to master. But I want to argue for the non-discursive nature of music
and the particular embeddedness of music books in non-verbal practices that
engage the body and the voice and need to be interpreted against the back-
ground of early modern cultures of performance. Set in action, chansonniers
operated like board games, tarot cards, and other pastimes that required a bit
of equipment, and while in the sixteenth century literacy did come to include
reading notes, their logic is as close to numbers, calendars, horoscopes, and
maps as it is to letters, each with its distinct cultural contexts and interpretive
strategies that operate through the page.
I thought of none of this on my first research trips to Paris. I wanted to be
a scholar of the French chanson, and so I went to libraries to find chansonniers.
It seemed self-evident. Working with partbooks was a nuisance, to be sure,
and time-consuming, but it came with the trade. Modern editions provided
some relief, with valuable hours saved by the piles of chansons fast becoming
available in scores in the 1990s.5 And yet I kept going back to France, circling
outward from Paris to provincial bibliothèques municipales, eventually tracking
down chansonniers in Germany and Italy. Each book proved so different from
4
Richard Wistreich, “Introduction: Musical Materials and Cultural Spaces,” 4. For a
richly illustrated account of these beginnings, see the opening chapters of Thomas
Forrest Kelly, Capturing Music.
5
I have relied especially heavily on series The Sixteenth-Century Chanson, edited by
Jane A. Bernstein, the editions of the Centre de Musique Ancienne in Tours, and the
Collection “Epitome musical” from the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance
published by Brepols.
the last, each encounter releasing a unique little bit of past lives like the scent
of stale tobacco wafting up from a decaying leather binding: A partbook from
a collège with scales penned into some empty staves, some music bound with a
book of hours, a book with multiple ex-libris charting a century of second-hand
exchanges. Even the plain pages of chansonniers, filled to the brim with music,
pointed intriguingly to readerships well beyond the book-conscious circles of
humanists, hinting at the dime-a-dozen market for songs.
My attraction to the chanson had always gravitated to its credibility—its
connectedness to an urban song culture that printing made accessible to, say,
a merchant in Amiens or the children of a jeweler in Venice. I sought the his-
tory of amateur singers whose names we will never know, of students whose
teachers penned rounds into the flyleaf of a song book, of people who owned
only a chansonnier or two. It was this desire to understand chanson culture
more holistically that kept me heading back to the silent reading rooms of
libraries, to see—collectively—how the physical forms of the books could play
into stylistic analyses of the songs they contained. “We can best understand
the connections between printing and the people,” Natalie Zemon Davis has
said, “if we consider a printed book not merely as a source for ideas and images,
but as a carrier of relationships.”6 According to such histories, texts cannot be
studied in abstraction from the objects that captured them and through which
they became gifts, commodities, social pastimes, and even refuse. And so I
determined to test what those sometimes rough-hewn books of song verse and
music could reveal about their early owners and music-making at the time.
Materialities thus became a book that is as much about how to study printed
music culturally as it is about “the music itself,” and it does so by beginning
with the books themselves.
What Is a Book of Music? Some Bibliographic Basics

SIZES, Formats, and Layouts
Partbooks come in various sizes, which were determined by two factors: the
size of the paper on which the music was printed and the number of times
each sheet was folded. Far from being arcana of library science, paper sizes and
formats matter greatly to this project because they provide a basic indication of
a book’s value and market. “Small” books were less costly, yes, but size needs
to be calculated according to the quantity of paper that went into a copy. Paper
6
Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture, 192.
costs varied, with some estimates putting them at as much as 60 to 75 percent
of the cost of a printed book (unbound), making paper a significant share of a
printer’s expense.7 Prices fluctuated greatly according to supply and difficulties
of transporting the paper, and not all printing centers enjoyed easy access to
high-grade supplies. So while Venetian printers profited from the proximity of
paper mills in the Veneto, in Antwerp, the great printer Christopher Plantin
had to import paper from France and Germany, since the little paper that was
manufactured in the Netherlands was not of sufficient quality.8 In printing
contracts and inventories, paper sheets are described as small, medium, “royal,”
and “imperial” in size, rough standards that allowed printers to design books
in a consistent way and reduce unnecessary waste with overly large margins of
paper hanging off the bed of the press.9 It can be difficult to gauge paper sizes
based on surviving copies, which have been trimmed, but the relative sizes of
music books from French presses show that the main Parisian printers, Pierre
Attaingnant (active 1528–50) and his successors Nicolas Du Chemin (1549–76)
and Adrian Le Roy & Robert Ballard (1551–98), all chose paper with the musi-
cal genre in mind, using smaller sheets for anthologies of chansons and motets,
middling sheets for single-composer books of motets, and reserving the largest
papers for books of masses. The weight of paper was also crucial, since print-
ing required heavier papers with sizing, whereas lighter and blemished papers
could only be used for blotting, wrapping, and so forth.
In addition to paper size, format bore heavily on the cost of printed music.10
For chansonniers, paper was generally printed up with four “pages” on each
7
Paper costs are estimated in Iain Fenlon, Music, Print, and Culture in Early
Sixteenth-Century Italy, 29.
8
For an account of paper production during the first century of printing, see Andrew
Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 17–19, and Jane A. Bernstein, Print Culture and
Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice, 34–35. On the Plantin press and paper supplies, see
Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses, 2:19.
9
On paper sizes, qualities, and their bearing on printing, with excellent details from
archival sources, see David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550,
13–21; also see J. A. Bernstein, Print Culture and Music, 34–35. The standardized paper
sizes established at Bologna at the end of the fourteenth century do not correlate in any
clear way with the output of French music presses studied here, even accounting for
trimming; what is clear, though, is that “small,” “medium,” “large,” and “extra-large”
sheets were in use and that printers used the largest paper and the folio format for
luxury choirbooks such as Francisco Guerrero, Liber primus missarum (Paris, 1566),
the paper for which measured over 510 × 640 mm and corresponded roughly to the
Bolognese “Imperiale” (500 × 740).
10
Incorrect reporting of formats in catalogues and bibliographies is not unusual. As an
online resource, the Universal Short Title Catalogue is highly reliable.
side of a sheet. The sheets were then folded into quarters, for which this for-
mat is called “quarto”; sewn together with other sheets folded in this way, four
sheets would produce a typical partbook of sixteen folios like those shown in
figure 1.2. Quarto was a common format for chansonniers and motet antholo-
gies, as was “octavo,” in which each sheet was printed and folded into eighths,
F i g u r e 1. 2 Madrigali di Verdelot et de altri autori, a sei voci (Venice: Gardane,

1546), Cantus, Altus, Quintus, and Bassus parts; the Tenor and Sextus parts are
missing. A typical set of sixteenth-century partbooks in (modern) paper covers.
Each part is a slight sixteen folios long and required just four sheets of paper to
produce.
producing a book half the size of a quarto volume. Also visible in figure 1.2
is the unusual orientation of the page: partbooks were regularly printed in
“oblong” formats (an orientation known today as “landscape”), which made
for longer staves and easier reading. The broad floppy pages and short spines
also allowed the books to lie open more easily, as we can see in the part-
books from which the instrumentalists are playing in figure 1.1.11 Oblong
formats are virtually exclusive to music books from the time, giving music
a unique look—only books of engravings and handwriting manuals used
oblong formats as well.12 The unusual format made it impossible to bind
music printed in this way with other sorts of printed matter. Venetian music
presses gradually shifted to upright quarto formats for their music books
beginning around 1560, and English printers regularly used upright formats,
but French printers continued to print partbooks in oblong through the end
of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, these old oblong part-
books began to look antiquated as printers abandoned them for most vocal
genres, though seventeenth- and eighteenth-century engravers used oblong
formats for instrumental music and even today sheet music for organ is still
often printed in oblong.
Finally, Parisian printers tended to use the partbook layout for everything
except masses and liturgical music. Partbooks saved paper, since parts of vari-
ous lengths could be compacted into booklets designed to fit them, and the
music did not have to be printed in the large scale that was required by choirs
that read their parts from a single choirbook placed on a cathedral lectern.
Space-saving and economical, printed partbooks proved a handy form in which
to disseminate polyphony, and Venetian printers even used them for books of
masses.13
11
On the relationship between instrumental performance and the origins of oblong part-
books, see David Fallows, “The Early History of the Tenorlied and its Ensembles.”
On Petrucci’s switch from oblong prints in choirbook layout to oblong partbooks, see
Stanley Boorman, Ottaviano Petrucci, 150–51.
12
See D. W. Krummel, “Oblong Format in Early Music Books.” For an overview, consult
the Universal Short Title Catalogue, where a search for “oblong quarto” will turn up
thousands of music books and about four dozen handwriting manuals.
13
Some churches purchased sacred music in partbooks and then copied it into large
manuscript choirbooks. On two early examples, Munich BSB Mus. MS 66 and one of
the Milan codices, see Boorman, Ottaviano Petrucci, 366–69. The dimensions of those
manuscripts are approximately 400 × 300 mm, so about twice the size of the part-
books from which the pieces were copied. On a series of German choirbooks in large
folio dated 1570–97 that include music copied from printed partbooks, see Elisabeth
Gieselbrecht, “Crossing Boundaries,” 141–65.
Serial Publication
In addition to partbooks, one other fundamental determined the mate-
rial forms in which polyphony was printed and collected in the sixteenth
century: serial publication. From the beginnings defined by the Venetian
printer Ottaviano Petrucci and his Harmonice musices Odhecaton A (1501),
Canti B numero cinquanta (1502), and Canti C numero cento cinquanta (1504),
printers regularly issued music in series, usually numbered. This proclivity
for series is particularly remarkable in the chanson repertoire, and it seems
tied to the economic need for a consistent baseline of bread-and-butter
production that printers could count on for regular sales. Strikingly, most
music printers in the North launched their presses with spates of chanson
anthologies, following the lead of the first printer to commercialize the
printed production of music books, Pierre Attaingnant, whose chansonniers
they even drew on for material.14 Attaingnant rejected the cumbersome
multiple-impression printing methods and woodcuts developed by Petrucci,
Andrea Antico, and other first-wave printers of music, turning instead to
a single-impression technology based on moveable type, which he began
to employ around 1528.15 This style of type is shown in figure 1.3, where
it can be identified by the broken staff lines: each piece of type included a
note, rest, or other symbol and a small portion of the staff lines that made
up each staff. This allowed notes and staves to be printed simultaneously
with the text and woodcut capital initials, greatly speeding production and
reducing cost by eliminating the registration errors that could easily occur
in multiple-impression printing.16
This technical innovation is noteworthy in itself, but we should also see in
Attaingnant a discerning businessman with sufficient acumen to select and
print music that expanded the market for printed polyphony even as he helped
establish it. His style-setting anthologies of French chansons for four voices
14
See the Parangon des chansons series of Jacques Moderne in Lyon, begun in 1538, and the
Livre des chansons series of Tielman Susato, begun in 1543.
15
Attaingnant cannot be credited with the invention or first use of single-impression
music printing from moveable type, though he was certainly its primary developer;
on earlier precedents in England see John Milsom, “Songs and Society in Early Tudor
London.” Nor was Attaingnant the first printer of polyphony in France, for his publi-
cations were preceded by possibly as many as fifteen editions of chansons and motets
printed in Lyon from woodblocks beginning in 1525. See Laurent Guillo, “L’Édition
musicale en France au XVIe siècle,” 145.
16
For a nice synopsis of the technical difficulties music presented to printers by compari-
son with alphabetic texts, see Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 172–76.
F i g u r e 1.3 Specimen of music type designed for single-impression printing.
Instead of running each sheet through the press twice, once for the staff lines and
once for the noteheads and text, this form of musical type joined staff lines to the
noteheads or other signs on a single piece of type. This allowed musical notation
to be compiled in the same way as alphabetic texts. From the standpoint of book
design, the broken staff lines are undesirable, and some printers continued to use
woodcuts and double-impression methods for music, but the commercial benefits of
single-impression printing proved significant. At the end of the sixteenth century,
engraving techniques would solve the problem of broken staff lines in a new way and
provide a new alternative to typographic techniques for music printing.
composed by Claudin de Sermisy, Pierre Sandrin, and Clément Janequin stood

at the core of his enterprise, and this light-hearted repertoire proved endur-
ingly popular. The so-called “Parisian” chansons printed by Attaingnant truly
seem to have attracted new consumers to the circles of those who enjoyed sing-
ing or playing part-songs. That Attaingnant’s prints sold well is verified by his
own output: between 1528 and 1551 he issued over two thousand chansons in
just over one hundred editions; of those, twenty-seven are second and third
editions (and these figures tally only surviving editions). Beginning in 1534,
possibly in an attempt to rationalize his burgeoning production, he began to
issue his books of motets and chansons in numbered series.
By 1536 Attaingnant had several chanson series running at once, each
with its own distinctive typography and layout (see figures 1.4 and 1.5), and
these series seem to have established a norm for the genre.17 Jacques Moderne
followed suit in Lyon, issuing a series titled Parangon des chansons (Premier–
Dixhuictieme livres) beginning in 1538. Later in the century, Tielman Susato
(Antwerp), Pierre Phalèse (Louvain), and Le Roy & Ballard (Paris) all continued
this publisher’s practice of issuing chansons in numbered series titled Livre de
chansons.18 In total, Parisian printers alone issued over 350 editions of chansons
17
See Daniel Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 72–76.
18
Le Roy & Ballard’s series ran to at least twenty-five volumes, whereas Susato had two
series, the Livre des chansons in-quarto (books 1–14) and the Fleur de chansons in-octavo
(books 1–6). See François Lesure and Geneviève Thibault, Bibliographie des Éditions
d’Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard, and Ute Meissner, Der Antwerpener Notendrucker
Tylman Susato.
F i g u r e 1. 4 Sixiesme livre contenant xxvij. Chansons nouvelles a quatre parties en
ung volume et en deux (Paris: Attaingnant and Jullet, 1539), Superius and Tenor.
Attaingnant launched this new series of chansonniers in partnership with Hubert
Jullet in 1537 with two voice parts in each partbook—Superius with Tenor and
Contratenor with Bassus—which would have been shared by singers sitting side
by side. With women on the higher voice parts and men on the lower ones, singing
together would have been an opportunity for amorous exchanges. The contents of
this book are printed in the Gothic typefaces used here for the title page.
between 1528 and 1598, most in series.19 Titles such as “First book of songs,”
“Second book of songs,” and so forth suggested chansons to buyers in collect-
ible series calculated to enhance sales and make sense of the large chanson
repertoire and all its little pieces of music. Buyers could also presume that the
chansons in earlier volumes would not be repeated in later ones, forcing them
to pay for something they already owned.
19
Only known editions are counted here. Other printers avidly reissued chansons first
printed by Attaingnant. See Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 147–53 on Jacques Moderne,
and ibid., 156 and Audrey Boucaut-Graille, “L’Imprimeur et son conseiller musical,”
11–14 on Du Chemin. Series eventually became serials: the Ballard family issued
monthly offerings of Airs into the 1730s, all printed in oblong format, just like their
sixteenth-century predecessors.
F i g u r e 1.5 Quinziesme livre contenant xxx. Chansons nouvelles a quatre parties
en deux volumes (Paris: Attaingnant and Jullet, 1544), Superius and Tenor. Begun
simultaneously with the “Gothic” series of chansonniers, the modern design of
this series employed graceful combinations of roman types and an italic that may
have been cut by Claude Garamond, giving it the appeal of fashionable Parisian
typography.
Unbound Parts and Binder’s

or Tract Volumes
Serial publication dominated the world of commercial music printing to such
a great extent and titles such as Premier livre de chansons, Primo libro di madri-
gali, Ierste musyck boexken, Liber primus Modulorum, and Liber primus sex missas
continens are so ubiquitous that they keep the terms for “book” ever before
our eyes.20 To scan the catalogue of virtually any sixteenth-century music
printer, to consult a bibliography of primary sources for printed polyphony,
to review the works list of a prolific composer, or to play or sing from fac-
similes is to encounter “livre,” “libro,” and “liber” at every turn. The single
most popular print of the century—Il primo libro di madrigali d’Archadelt
a quatro, which was published in at least fifty-six editions by twenty-five
20
A significant exception are the titles of German prints, both vernacular and Latin, in
which “Buch” or “liber” are not commonly used.
different publishers into the seventeenth century—is titled “First book,” just
like countless others.21 “Book” is so common, so naturalized, that it seems
to need no definition.
My concern here is to define the nature of a music “book” in the sixteenth
century, not least because the printed objects that bore such titles at the
time were not books at all by early modern standards.22 In the first place,
partbooks tended to be quite flimsy, each part usually consisting of just four
sheets of paper assembled into quarto pamphlets of sixteen folios, as can be
seen in figure 1.2. At best, they would have been sold tied into a half-sheet
of paper that served as a cover, but otherwise were sold as is. Some buyers
used them this way; others—far fewer from what survival rates tell us—
sometimes bound them together. Only at this moment of binding did these
“Livres de chansons” became true books, at least in the modern sense of the
word. Already in the seventeenth century, though, binding proved a central
part of the definition of “livre,” as in the first edition of the Dictionnaire de
l’Académie française (1694):
LIVRE. s. m. Volume, plusieurs feuilles de papier, velin, parchemin, ou
autre chose semblable, escrites à la main ou imprimées, & reliées ensem-
ble avec une couverture de parchemin, de veau, de maroquin, &c.23
[BOOK. noun, masculine. Volume, several sheets of paper, vellum,
parchment, or other similar thing, written by hand or printed, and
bound together with a cover of parchment, of calfskin, of morocco, &c.]
Still remarkably consistent is our modern-day definition of a book as “a written
or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and
bound in covers,” a definition that hardly pertains to a trade in which printed
sheets were sold unbound and partbooks of music were often left that way.24
21
See Thomas W. Bridges, “The Publishing of Arcadelt’s First Book of Madrigals.”
For descriptions of those editions published by Gardane see Mary S. Lewis, Antonio
Gardano, 1:182–207 and ff.; for the Scotto press see Jane A. Bernstein, Music Printing in
Renaissance Venice, 259–61 and ff.
22
On a similar problem encountered in the cataloguing of incunables, see Joseph A. Dane,
The Myth of Print Culture, chs. 2 and 3. Dane’s handbook What Is a Book? is a very useful
tool for spotting and addressing basic bibliographic issues such as this.
23
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 657. Here we should note that the Academicians
also defined “livre” as “Une des principales parties en quoy un livre est divisé” (the
last definition). Even so, it would be hard to argue that it was in this sense that
sixteenth-century publishers titled elements of their chanson series “livre.”
24
This is the first definition given in The New Oxford American Dictionary, 193.
The commercial separation between printing and actual book production
in the sense of binding meant that printed matter circulated in extremely vari-
able forms: copies of the same edition can vary dramatically from one another.
“Printers do not print books,” Peter Stallybrass has emphatically reminded us,
drawing attention to the distinctiveness of these two métiers. “It is the process
of gathering, folding, stitching, and sometimes binding that transforms printed
sheets into a pamphlet or book.”25 Anyone who has had to open the uncut edges
of a book themselves will know from experience that even in the twentieth cen-
tury not all books were sold in finished forms that were ready to read.
For music, a layer of complexity is added by the fact that even binding did
not turn a “book” of chansons printed in parts into a single bound object of
the sort that would allow for the one-to-one equation of “a written or printed
work” with a book you can hold in your hand. To take a revealing example:
in 1539, a German bibliophile, Henry of Castell, traveled to Paris, where he
purchased a quantity of music printed by Attaingnant. Twenty-two of the
titles he acquired were printed in octavo partbooks with four to each set, and
five of the titles were from the Livre de chansons nouvelles series Attaingnant
introduced in 1538 in a new two-in-one layout of the parts that made for two
quarto partbooks per set (see figure 1.4).26 What exactly did Castell take home
with him? Certainly it was not a trunk filled with ninety-eight bound part-
books (twenty-two sets of four and five sets of two). Rather, it appears that he
bought the music unbound—probably directly from Attaingnant’s shop in the
Rue de la Harpe, since much of it was back stock dating to 1529—and had it
bound upon his return to Germany. Moreover, since bindings were expensive
and the little sixteen-folio partbooks were too slight to bother binding sepa-
rately, Castell grouped his music together into just six “binder’s volumes” or
volumes in which more than one title is bound together. (Other terms for this
sort of book are “tract volume” and “collector’s volume,” and I use them inter-
changeably; foreign terms include “recueils factices” and “Sammelbände.”) All
the octavo prints were bound according to voice type in four thick partbooks
(Superius, Contratenor, Tenor, and Bassus, each with approximately 350 folios)
and the quarto volumes were bound in two partbooks (Superius/Tenor and
Contratenor/Bassus, each with eighty folios).27 Castell then signed the bound
25
See Peter Stallybrass, “‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution,” 315.
26
See Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 133–35 and catalogue nos. 6–9, 12, 15, 17–20, 30–31,
40–42, 44–45, 54–55, 62, 65, 80–83, 86. A short-title list of the contents of the surviv-
ing volume in-octavo is given in my table 5.1 below.
27
One volume of each set survived the centuries: the Superius of the in-octavo prints was
owned by Alfred Cortot; the Contratenor/Bassus volume in-quarto is still in Castell.
See Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 133–34.
volumes and inside the front cover of the Superius volume he wrote “bought
at Paris with the other three parts for 2 crowns, 10½ sous in the year 1539,” a
price that certainly indicates that they were purchased unbound.28
Bound volumes were much more expensive by comparison. For example,
another German collector, Sebastian Grolande of Nuremberg, purchased books
1–9 of Jacques Moderne’s Parangon des chansons series, a set of oblong quarto
prints in table layout that taken together made for a thick book of 288 folios.
Although the original binding was replaced in the nineteenth century by con-
servators at the British Library, where the volume is now preserved, we can
assume that Grolande—unlike Castell—bought his music nicely bound, since
he inscribed the flyleaf “Anno i54i A di 3 Augusti In Lyon In frannekreych hab
Ich Sebastian grolande Diss Buch gekaufft Vmb xii goltt krane” (Year 1541 on
3 August in Lyon in France I, Sebastian Grolande, bought this book for twelve
gold crowns).29 Twelve crowns made Grolande’s purchase almost six times the
cost of Castell’s, a difference that can only be accounted for if the prints were
bound at the time of the purchase, probably in leather-covered boards rather
than the cheaper and more utilitarian parchment that was a standard sort of
binding for centuries (see figure 1.6).
These two examples complicate our understanding of what “livre de chan-
sons” meant in the sixteenth century. As we noted above, a bound “book”
of music was generally not a single bibliographic unit containing a complete
musical text but more usually a partbook containing only one vocal part of a
series of polyphonic pieces for several voices. “Livre,” “liber,” and “libro” were
terms used by printers to title serial publications, but as physical objects, a
single “book” of music printed in partbooks consisted of a number of smaller
pamphlet-sized parts that were no match, physically, for other sorts of books
from the age. Indeed, one might argue that serial publication helped print-
ers and collectors make sense of stacks of partbooks. Printers regularly gave
sequential signature marks to successive books in a series, and the numbers
they employed in the titles (“Premier livre,” “Second livre,” and so forth) sug-
gested to buyers that music in book-length sets could be bound together, as we
have seen in the case of Grolande’s Parangon des chansons volume and Castell’s
Livre de chansons nouvelles volumes and as nicely illustrated by the partbooks
shown in figure 1.1.
But to further complicate matters, while printers clearly thought of serial pub-
lication in terms of “books” and collectors often obliged by buying the whole
run of a series and having the partbooks bound together according to voice type,
28
Ibid.
29
The shelfmark is K.10.a.9; see Samuel Pogue, Jacques Moderne, 138.
consumers might just as readily choose to leave their music unbound, using it
like sheet music. The rare copies of many early prints that survive today often do
so because collectors such as Castell had them bound. Not only did the bindings
preserve the contents, they greatly enhanced the value of the prints, which helped
guarantee their future. Nonetheless, these bound music books are extraordinary
objects, ones that skew our understanding of how music was used and preserved
in early modern Europe.
Much music seems to have been treated rather like the pamphlets and feuilles
volantes (literally “flying sheets”) that people used up with wear and tear. If this
strikes the modern-day bibliophile as a rather offhand way to describe such a
relatively luxurious item as printed music, one need only consider the high prices
we still pay for sheet music that we, too, leave in its paper covers on the music
stand, a shelf, or in the piano bench. My copy of Eugene Bozza’s “Duettino” for
two bassoons would cost $44.95 to replace today, and it consists of just two parts,
each of six folios, one of which is stapled into a lovely paper cover. Even my more
economical edition of Vivaldi cello sonatas published by Edition Peters (a solo
part, continuo part, and separate piano part—thirty-eight folios in all) would cost
$39.00 for six solo sonatas. Page per page, part music has always been expensive,
but even so, it is designed for performance, which makes it ephemeral by nature.
Cataloguing
In its material forms, sixteenth-century music resisted book-like modes of
presentation and preservation. It also resists the standards of modern biblio-
graphical description. This accounts in part for the specialized nature of music
bibliography and the segregation of music libraries and music collections
from other sorts of materials, divisions that date from the sixteenth century,
if not before. In the measure that books were understood to be bound texts,
music was often not, in this sense, a book at all. Gabriel Naudé, who acquired
books for Cardinal Mazarin and wrote one of the first handbooks on how to
build one’s library, gives otherwise comprehensive advice in his Advis pour
dresser une bibliothèque (1627), but fails to mention music at all in his treatise.30
It owes perhaps to this personal predilection that the Bibliothèque Mazarine
is, of all the principal Parisian libraries, the least rich in musical sources, even
today. Subsequent classification schemes proposed by French bibliographers and
librarians throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also excluded
music, most notably that established for the Bibliothèque du Roy circa 1680
30
Naudé was also librarian to Cardinals Bagni and Barberini in Italy and Jean des Cordes,
Richelieu, and Mazarin in France. See Jack A. Clarke, Gabriel Naudé.
F i g u r e 1.6 Giovanni Maria Crespi, “Sportelli di Libreria” (ca. 1720–30),
detail, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, Bologna. This rendering
shows the library shelves of Padre Giambattista Martini, one of Europe’s first
historians of music and an avid collector of sixteenth-century books of music and
music theory. At bottom right we see a book in the oblong format favored by
music printers across the sixteenth century, from Petrucci’s Odhecaton through the
first period of commercial printing developed by Attaingnant, Girolamo Scotto,
and Antonio Gardane.
and still in use at the Bibliothèque nationale de France today.31 Like engravings,
maps, broadsheets, or medallions, music was collected and used differently than
the bound or bindable manuscripts and prints that formed the mainstay of early
libraries.
31
See Claude Jolly, “Naissance de la ‘science’ des bibliothèques.”
F i g u r e 1.6 Continued
The practices according to which printed music is catalogued, cited,

microfilmed, and digitized can make it difficult to study binder’s volumes,
despite their value to the history of book ownership.32 Some libraries assign
a single call number to a tract volume and add numbers in parentheses to
indicate the various titles bound together within. So, for example, the British
Library shelfmark for the Grolande book discussed above is K.10.a.9, and
32
Mary S. Lewis, “The Printed Music Book in Context” called scholarly attention to
tract volumes already in 1990. Whereas Lewis foregrounded anonymous collectors,
subsequent studies have largely focused on owners who can be identified. In addi-
tion to the studies of Herwart, Werdenstein, and Lumley cited in Ch. 3 below, see
Jane A. Bernstein, “Buyers and Collectors”; Richard Charteris, “Newly Identified Music
Editions”; idem, “A Neglected Anthology”; Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, 101–
102, 140–70; and Martin Morell, “Georg Knoff.”
the shelfmark for Le Parangon des chansons quart livre is K.10.a.9 (4), since it
is the fourth title in the volume. But had the same book—the same physi-
cal object once owned by Grolande—been catalogued at the Bibliothèque
nationale de France, it would bear separate call numbers for each title, mak-
ing it impossible to know from the catalogue what is bound together. To
make matters worse, huge numbers of tract volumes were removed from
their bindings in the nineteenth century. In some cases, well-intentioned
librarians sought to modernize their collections, but in doing so destroyed
a considerable wealth of physical evidence relevant to the history of private
libraries and habits of early modern collectors.33 Thomas Oliphant initi-
ated such a project at the British Library in 1842, apparently splitting up
volumes with multiple titles, either because the bindings were deteriorating
or, more likely, because separating them made cataloguing and shelving
easier.34 Gaetano Gaspari did the same with many of Padre Giambattista
Martini’s music books at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna when he took over
as librarian there in 1855 as part of a large project to reorganize the col-
lection. Among the many books affected were some eighty-four tract vol-
umes containing 241 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century titles that were
purchased by Martini as a set in Rome in 1747. When Gaspari discarded
their bindings, he obscured the shared provenance of the books, which
together form one of the most substantial music collections to survive from
the Renaissance, as has only recently been fully realized.35 Individuals with
motives less lofty than those of Gaspari or Oliphant also broke up a number
of books in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as antiquarian book
dealers sought to maximize their stock. One such was the German dealer
Otto Vollbehr, who sold thousands of books to the Huntington Library
and Library of Congress in the twentieth century.36 He apparently sepa-
rated bound items—even composite books intended as single editions by
their printers—presumably to inflate the number of “lots” in his sales. Here
again, we see little regard for the ramifications of dismantling early books
33
For the example of the Nonsuch library of John, Lord Lumley (d. 1609), now in the
British Library, see the reconstruction of the collection and its binder’s volumes pro-
posed by John Milsom, “The Nonsuch Music Library.”
34
On the cataloguing, see Alec Hyatt King, Printed Music in the British Museum, ch. 2.
35
See Kate van Orden and Alfredo Vitolo, “Padre Martini.”
36
Dane, The Myth of Print Culture, 55, 57–75. For a vivid description of Vollbehr’s
sales to the Huntington see Donald C. Dickenson, Henry E. Huntington’s Library of
Libraries, 207–9.
that were produced under a different set of attitudes toward miscellanies,
authorship, and the nature of an edition.37
Some music bibliographies include lists of tract volumes, but this valuable ref-
erence tool has yet to be broadly adopted.38 Scholars are further distanced from the
materiality of printed music by the practicalities of microfilms and digitized ver-
sions of them, which generally transmit the contents of a single title with the parts
filmed sequentially (SCTB and so forth). Microfilms and electronic copies present
the separate voice parts as a textual unit—they are reproduced together—and
make it easy to forget that the partbooks were not themselves bound.39 More so
than for manuscripts, in which the uniqueness of the object is privileged with
bibliographic descriptions ever conscious of the book’s material form (the binding,
size, signs of ownership, and so forth), prints are regularly subjected to layers of
bibliographic abstraction. The sheer number of early prints makes it difficult to
represent the sources with the detail and particularity of, say, the Census-Catalogue
of Music Manuscripts.40 But as books—as physical objects—early copies survive in
unique forms, as we shall see. Out of necessity, bibliographic records reduce music
prints to lists of like titles, erasing their particularities, playing up the uniform
ity attributed to printing more generally.41 One ambitious and standard-setting
catalogue from 1969, Daniel Heartz’s magisterial Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer
of Music, gives titles in diplomatic transcriptions that reproduce the line breaks,
spelling, capitalization schemes, and typography. But even Heartz, who is so sen-
sitive to the individuality of each edition, provides no list of binder’s volumes.
If the assumption is that printing “stamped out” the variety and uniqueness of
manuscripts, then attention to individual objects (all presumed to be the same) is
less relevant. Even research into stop-press corrections and hidden editions, which
could be leveraged to critique the false notion of print’s sameness, usually serves
37
On one such composite collection, see Nancy J. Vickers, “The Unauthored 1539 Volume.”
38
See Lewis, Antonio Gardano, 1:123–62, 2:155–66, and 3:453–68, and J. A. Bernstein,
Music Printing in Renaissance Venice, app. C.
39
It is extremely rare to find partbooks bound together SCTB in sixteenth-century bindings,
since it made them impossible to use. For one example in Bologna, see Luca Marenzio,
Quinto libro delle villanelle a 3 (Venice: Scotto, 1591), Bologna MIBM S. 407, which once
belonged to Gaetano Gaspari. See van Orden and Vitolo, “Padre Martini,” 286.
40
Herbert Kellman, ed., Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music,
1400–1550. For an early call that musicologists attend to the uniqueness of individual
printed books of music, see Mary S. Lewis, “The Printed Music Book in Context.”
41
On this basic problem of bibliography, see Dane, What Is a Book?, part 2. One catalogue
that provides extensive descriptions of individual copies is Boorman, Ottaviano Petrucci.
Margaret Jones has argued this point in relation to a series of seventeenth-century
music prints in Jones, “Alfabeto Tablature Prints and their Readers.”
the cataloguing effort alone.42 Thus by treating the text itself as the primary
object of study, bibliographies shear away the domain of the paratextual that
attracts such attention in manuscript study.
A related process operates full force in the critical editions bibliography
supports: sixteenth-century chansons that originally circulated in parts are
scored up with the voices vertically aligned, often with note values halved,
time signatures and clefs modernized, and bar lines (and ties) inserted, all
with the goal of presenting a “clean” redaction of the text from which the
mess of variants and other anomalies present in the sources are relegated
to a critical appendix. Again, practicality dictates some changes in order
to render the music legible to modern readers, and this book does contain
scored up music examples. But the analyses they support resist the anachro-
nistic style of reading promoted by modern scores and the ideologies of tex-
tual control and compositional authority that stand behind them, favoring
instead the collaborative, part-by-part mentality promoted by the material
form of separate partbooks.43
The preparation of critical editions and study of the music in them are
worthy pursuits, and I am certainly not proposing to replace them with
descriptive bibliography. Nor is my intention simply to move bibliographic
studies away from individual titles and toward collector’s volumes. Rather, I
believe that significant benefits follow from treating printed books more like
manuscripts, studying them one by one (without fetishizing them), and put-
ting the cumulative results toward cultural histories. Together, they reveal
patterns of ownership, attitudes of collectors, the perception of composers
as “authors,” and the uses to which partbooks were put. Typographic con-
ventions that differentiate between roman typefaces and French caractères de
civilité delineate separate communities of readers and the social milieus pre-
sumed by graphic design. Layouts stage physical relationships among sing-
ers. To begin with this fundamental question—what is a book of music?—is
to interrogate material objects directly, triggering a history of music that
42
For a detailed explanation of the working methods of a music press, see Boorman,
Ottaviano Petrucci, ch. 6. David McKitterick pursues a sustained critique of the notion
of print’s sameness in McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, chs. 4
and 5. For a new online edition that digitally collates variants and manuscript addi-
tions in printed editions, see the Marenzio Online Digital Edition, directed by Mauro
Calcagno, Giuseppe Gerbino, and Laurent Pugin. It stands to redefine the meanings of
“edition” and “state” for early printed music.
43
According to Owens, Composers at Work, 51–56, even composers regularly relied on sing-
ers to perform a new work so that it might be heard, judged, and corrected.
triangulates “texts” (in the abstracted sense of “the music”), objects, and the
cultures that produced them.
Book History, Music Bibliography, and the Chanson

This book concentrates on bibliographic analysis and what it can tell us about
the consumption of polyphonic songs, and in its methods, it aligns with
histories of the book initially developed by European scholars such as
Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier, and Donald F. McKenzie, and the
American historians Robert Darnton, Anthony Grafton, and Adrian Johns.44
I use the terms “book history” and “history of the book” in order to include
manuscript cultures—always very much alive for musicians—and to differ-
entiate the theoretical models I espouse from the notion of a singular print
culture developed by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change (1979).45 Eisenstein’s theory that print standardized knowledge differs
from the approaches of Chartier, McKenzie, Darnton, and their schools, which
have tended to rely more directly on the examination of primary sources; it
received prominent critique beginning with the publication of Adrian Johns,
The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998).46
In its earliest formulations, the relatively recent field of book history
emerged from the Annales School of French historians and their employment
of social scientific methods that moved history away from political, military,
and biographical narratives and into the vaster social terrains that could be
mapped through the analysis of quantitative data. L’Apparition du livre (1958),
44
The now-classic studies are Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the
Book; Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, eds., Histoire de l’édition française; Roger
Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print; D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of
Texts; Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette; and, more recently, Adrian Johns, The
Nature of the Book. For an excellent overview that includes excerpts from these and other
central texts, see David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader.
45
On the anachronistic separation of manuscript and print in bibliography, modern
libraries, and studies of the early modern period, see McKitterick, Print, Manuscript,
and the Search for Order, and on manuscript production in the age of printing, see Brian
Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy, and Harold Love, The Culture and
Commerce of Texts.
46
In addition to Johns, The Nature of the Book, 10–19, see the exchanges in the American
Historical Review Forum organized and introduced by Anthony Grafton: “How
Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?,” which includes position papers by Adrian
Johns, “How to Acknowledge a Revolution,” and Elisabeth L. Eisenstein, “An
Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited.”
the landmark study of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, marshaled sta-
tistics and extensive comparative analysis in an attempt to describe the social
impact of printing across the entire globe and the whole of the period 1450
to 1800, the longue durée.47 Studies of book ownership such as Alexander H.
Schutz, Vernacular Books in Parisian Private Libraries of the Sixteenth Century
according to the Notarial Inventories [1955] and Albert Labarre, Le Livre dans la
vie amiénoise du seizième siècle (1971) contributed centrally to this bottom-up
perspective. My own objectives are not nearly as ambitious in chronological or
geographical scope, though readers will find my analyses of pressruns, survival
rates, and prices sympathetic to the Annalistes’ love of data. I have tried to
present as much information as possible in tabular form, to make my material
descriptions as readable as possible, and to launch comparative analyses only in
the service of conclusive arguments.
The focus of Annalistes on social history drew them toward relatively
uncharted zones of activity, ones that coexisted with the more visible layers of
economic and political life upon which most histories had, until that time, been
based. This preference for the social strata that operate beneath the hegemonic
position of the politically powerful strongly motivates my choice of the chanson as
my object of study. Tuneful, lightly scored, and setting straightforward, charming
lyrics, the French chansons first popularized in print by Pierre Attaingnant were
probably the most broadly disseminated polyphony of the sixteenth century, and
to follow their extensive reach across Europe and through most classes of society
brings us close to the horizon of what we can know about musical life at the time.
The edge that chansons inhabit near oral culture and the written evidence of it,
thick with the habits of both performance and composition (if one can really distin-
guish between the two), is where much of this book operates, close to the everyday
practices of musicians. It is this realm of the everyday and the possibility of writing
a history of that which seemed to have no history—singing, reading, the effects
of the page on the voice, a missing partbook—that charts the course of my study.
Although Fernand Braudel wrote on economic history and was not particu-
larly drawn to cultural topics, the description of layered zones he gives in the
introduction to The Structures of Everyday Life aptly captures the essence of the
alternate world that fascinates me. It is, he says,
another, shadowy zone, often hard to see for lack of adequate historical
documents, lying underneath the market economy: this is that elemen-
tary basic activity which went on everywhere and the volume of which
is truly fantastic. This rich zone, like a layer covering the earth, I have
47
Translated into English as The Coming of the Book.
called for want of a better expression, material life or material civilization.
These are obviously ambiguous expressions. But I imagine that if my
view of what happened in the past is accepted . . . a proper term will one
day be found to describe the infra-economy, the informal other half of
economic activity, the world of self-sufficiency and barter of goods and
services within a very small radius.48
Braudel’s “material life” stands behind my choice of Materialities as a title, signal-
ing both the fantastically ample world of song and singing that is often hard to
see for lack of historical documents and the embeddedness of those documents we
do have—printed music foremost among them—in the day-to-day lives of early
moderns.49 Printed partbooks, primers, chapbooks of poetry, and single-sheet
how-tos on singing are—in my telling—“material witnesses” to the practices that
shaped how, when, and why those notes came to the page. Many of these practices
are strictly musical, and they include the realization of canons, singing in faux-
bourdon, improvising accompaniments, and the way music students learned to
read mensural notation. Other practices are more bookish or textual, things like
attributions, typography, conventional layouts (and the restrictions they imposed),
the modal orderings printers used to organize collections, and the kinds of music
printed for profit. I have tried to hold the materials examined here in a respectful
balance with the oral cultures and virtuosic improvisations they do not repre-
sent, using print, where appropriate, as negative evidence of music-making that
required no textual apparatus at all. Finally, the “material” in Materialities signals
the importance of books as objects.
In Braudel’s reading, clothing, grain, wine, building materials, furniture,
carriages, metalwork, and paper products (including books) bluntly defined
the limits of what was possible in the pre-industrial world, but historians of
material culture see them in complex relationships to those who made and
48
Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 23–24.
49
On the evolution of Braudel’s “material civilization” and the philosophies of the
Annales school toward the study of material culture, see the introduction to Daniel
Roche, A History of Everyday Things, 1–8. For a deft analysis and critique of “cultural
materialism” and the “new materialism” as it was emerging in British and American
scholarship see Douglas Bruster, “The New Materialism in Renaissance Studies.” Also
see Things, the special issue of Critical Inquiry edited by Bill Brown and fronted by his
field-defining essay “Thing Theory,” with a key introduction to the particularities of
pre-capitalist attitudes toward things in the contribution of Peter Stallybrass and Ann
Roselind Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe.” They argue that gloves
“materialized the power of people to be condensed and absorbed into things and of
things to become persons” (116) in an age when humans and things existed in strongly
constituitive relationships.
used them, with meanings that were culturally constructed.50 More than mere
commodities, objects defined cultural spheres and constituted the identities
of their users, and books, too, can be studied as objects signaling multiple
cultural affiliations through the texts they joined together, woodcuts, typogra-
phy, format, and bindings.51 They can also be examined as mere objects made
from rags and printed with a paste of lampblack and varnish applied to type
produced in hot foundries, the fonts cut by hand into the tips of steel rods;
once printed, their textuality might matter little depending on the circum-
stances, as when being carted in bales, or—nicely bound and decorating the
shelves of a private library—when being sold by the yard at the death of a
collector. Books fell apart, lost their covers (if they had them), and ended up
repurposed as scrap.52 Those in gorgeous bindings made splendid gifts. But
unlike damask, fans, feathers, and mirrors, books contain texts that invite
readings both noisy and silent, and given that my fascination with early books
originated as something of a distraction while embroiled in stylistic study of
the late sixteenth-century chanson, I see no reason to give up musical analysis
in favor of a material history exclusive of texts. In this respect, my approach
aligns more directly with book history than it does with the new materialism
per se. Hence, my readings of musical texts (the “music itself”) are paired with
analyses of the physical objects that contained them in a way that helps locate
particular works or subgenres in relation to other genres (whether musical,
literary, or devotional) or social spheres (court, pulpit, schoolroom).53
Materialities is not a history of music printers nor a history of the musicians
who had their music printed, but a cultural history geared to the consumption
end of the producer-consumer equation. It is nonetheless heavily dependent
on studies of music printing. Indeed, my work would not have been possible
without the exacting research of music bibliographers. Many volumes of the
Répertoire International des Sources Musicales and the catalogues of French
50
See, for instance, Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds.,
Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture; and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass,
Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory.
51
See Robin Bernstein’s theory of “Scriptive Things,” in Racial Innocence, ch. 2, which
joins performance studies to thing theory and allows for the recovery of social attitudes
scripted by books. For a good example of how book history and the approaches of new
materialism can converge, see Vickers, “The Unauthored 1539 Volume.”
52
On nineteenth-century it-narratives in the voice of books—some in tatters—see Leah
Price, “From The History of a Book,” which opens with a state-of-the-art review of
research in the history of reading.
53
Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, and Martha Feldman, City Culture have been
particularly helpful models.
music printers compiled by François Lesure and Geneviève Thibault, Samuel
Pogue, Daniel Heartz, Henri Vanhulst, and Laurent Guillo—to name but a
few—have been invaluable resources (some of them now lie in tatters on my
desk), as has the research into music printing firms, book production, distri-
bution, marketing, and privileges fronting these catalogues and published in
journal articles by many of the same authors.54 I want to stress my debt to the
enormous collective effort represented by this legion of bibliographic descrip-
tions, catalogues, inventories, and production-end histories not only because
music bibliography has been such a long-standing strength of our discipline,
but also because the particular sort of cultural history that evolves from it
speaks, I like to believe, to the heart of a series of questions that have long
concerned musicologists.
One of the dominant subjects of musicological research between about 1970
and 1995 was musical manuscripts. Often beautifully calligraphed, manu-
scripts attracted intensive interest in provenance, scribal production, the selec-
tion and circulation of repertoire, and the occasions served by gifts of music
books; these studies regularly circled outward from assessments of gathering
structure, concordances, and filiation to broader questions of the cultural val-
ues held by the makers and early owners of manuscripts. But of course, luxury
objects such as the Chansonnier Cordiforme or the Machaut manuscripts hardly
prompt the less elitist histories generally favored by cultural historians, some-
thing true of many of the other manuscripts that have enjoyed sustained atten-
tion from musicologists (the Medici Codex would be another prime example);
conversely, the smaller, quickly inscribed, paper manuscripts that would now
invite more broadly cultural questions were once usually treated within the
same tenacious intellectual frameworks defined by the study of fine codices.55
Even so, manuscripts did lead some musicologists to a sort of book history in the
54
Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant; Pogue, Jacques Moderne; Lesure and Thibault, “Bibliographie
des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas du Chemin (1549–1576)”; Lesure and
Thibault, Bibliographie des Éditions d’Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard; Henri Vanhulst,
Catalogue des éditions de musique publiées à Louvain par Pierre Phalèse; Laurent Guillo,
Les Éditions musicales de la Renaissance lyonnaise; idem, Pierre I Ballard et Robert III
Ballard. Major catalogues of Italian and English printers have likewise been invaluable:
Boorman, Ottaviano Petrucci; Lewis, Antonio Gardano; J. A. Bernstein, Music Printing
in Renaissance Venice; Suzanne G. Cusick, Valerio Dorico; Richard J. Agee, The Gardano
Music Printing Firms; Jeremy L. Smith, Thomas East; as well as Donald W. Krummel
and Stanley Sadie, eds., Music Printing and Publishing.
55
See Kate van Orden, Review of Anthony M. Cummings, MS Florence, Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale, Magl. XIX, 164–167, a useful expression of this point, though I now
regret the unnecessarily harsh tone I took there.
1980s, before its principles were well defined. In his 1982 article on “Emulation,
Competition, and Homage,” for instance, Howard Mayer Brown argued that
the musical practice of “imitatio” was grounded in the Renaissance culture
of humanism, and he did so by beginning with the manuscript chansonnier
Uppsala, Universitetsbiblioteket MS 76a and the songs worked out there by a
composition student. From his examination of the trial-and-error counterpoint
exercises at the end of a set of paper partbooks, Brown’s study opened into a
series of cultural arguments that attempted to relate practices of musical com-
position to the habits entrained by the studia humanitatis.
By comparison with manuscript studies, print was something of a poor
cousin in those years: by 1960, RISM Series B/I, Recueils imprimés du XVIe
siècle (Printed Anthologies from the 16th Century) was published, the labori-
ous compilation of the Series A/I was underway, and catalogues of several
individual printing firms were available, but increasing control of printed
source materials failed to incite studies pairing descriptive bibliography
and musical analysis. One of the great exceptions was Daniel Heartz’s
1971 article “Au pres de vous—Claudin’s Chanson and the Commerce of
Publisher’s Arrangements” on chanson arrangements and the market for
printed music, which is nothing short of book history avant la lettre and a
model yet today.56
Certainly one dampening force that restricted interest in cultural histories
of music books was the polarized attitude toward textual criticism in musi-
cology during the 1980s and 1990s. A genuine flashpoint came in 1985 with
the publication of Joseph Kerman’s deliberately provocative Contemplating Music:
Challenges to Musicology, which unleashed a fury of reviews in reaction to Kerman’s
characterization of musicology as overwhelmingly absorbed in music editing
and analysis to the disadvantage of what he termed “criticism” or “the study
of the meaning and value of art works.”57 While Kerman envisioned criticism
as a brand of analysis that would consider both the internal structures of an art
work and “history, communication, affect, texts and programmes, the existence
of other works of art, and so much else,” his polemic against a musicology that
spent too much time “establishing texts” and too little time “interpreting them”
magnified the apparent gap between textual scholars and so-called critics.58 But
histories of the book operate precisely in the space where editing, bibliography,
56
Daniel Heartz, “Au pres de vous.” An analysis of the interrelations between history, bib-
liography, and literary studies with great relevance to the cultural history of printed
music books can be found in Leslie Howsam, Old Books & New Histories.
57
Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music, 16.
58
Ibid., 42–48, 226.
and philology meet interpretation, and by damning textual scholarship as low-
level fact-collecting and characterizing interpretation as a more advanced level
of scholarship that built on the spadework of editors and bibliographers, even
the best cultural histories of books risked coming off as perilously close to blunt
“positivism.” One of the fullest rejoinders to Kerman came from Leo Treitler in
“The Power of Positivist Thinking,” a review of Kerman’s book in the Journal of
the American Musicological Society.59 Though not in name, Treitler argued the side
of book history, highlighting the interpretive moves implicit in all engagements
that respect the expressive value of distant notational forms:
What is a text? What is the nature and status of the music that it rep-
resents? . . . How do the notations in which musical texts have been pre-
sented function? Do the modern notations in which we present editions
function on the same principles as the older ones in which the same music
was first written down? Do our editions take account of the differences?
These questions occupy a territory that is (or ought to be) shared by tex-
tual studies and musical criticism, for they cannot be answered without
addressing the qualities and values of the music, but they are raised by
any really thoughtful approach to the preparation of a musical text.60
Implicit in Treitler’s defense of editing as a point of origin for music criti-
cism was an appreciation for the cultural and sociological strands being woven
together with hard-core bibliography in those years in the work of scholars such
as Roger Chartier and D. F. McKenzie, as well as the revitalizing effect the
new “facts” emerging from textual criticism were having on literary studies.61
Only in the years leading up to 2000 did a series of books take more explic-
itly cultural approaches to music, print, authorship, and reading, and initially
they all concentrated on Italy: Iain Fenlon, Music, Print, and Culture in Early
Sixteenth-Century Italy (1995) examined the uneven traction music printing
achieved in its first decades, while Jane A. Bernstein, Print Culture and Music
in Sixteenth-Century Venice (2001) concentrated on the commercial networks
linking composers, printers, and patrons beginning in the boom years of the
1540s. In Music, Patronage, and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence (2000), Tim
Carter drew an evocative picture of the printing backwater of Florence around
1600, detailing the troubles Florentines had competing with Venetian presses
59
See Leo Treitler, “The Power of Positivist Thinking,” published in 1989.
60
Ibid., 395. Also see p. 400.
61
Treitler references the arguments of Jerome J. McGann at some length (ibid., 376–77),
as did Margaret Bent in her review of Contemplating Music, for which see Margaret Bent,
“Fact and Value in Contemporary Musical Scholarship,” 89 n. 14.
and moving stock from their shelves. Finally, the first monograph to pair book
history with musical analysis—and a model for my own study—was Martha
Feldman’s City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (1995), which gave a musi-
cally intricate account of the Venetian cultural forms expressed in printed
madrigal books.
As these titles illustrate, cultural studies of printed music have clustered
in the sixteenth century. One important contribution of the essays collected
in Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. van Orden (2000), was to broaden the
chronological scope beyond the first century of music printing and dig into
a particular problematic: how printing refracts the authority of composers
and complicates the history of musical authorship. Two important books on
medieval musical manuscripts further enriched this material history of author-
ship by establishing the “authority” exercised by scribes in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries: Emma Dillon, Medieval Music-Making and the Roman
de Fauvel (2002), and Jane Alden, Songs, Scribes, and Society: The History and
Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers (2010). For the seventeenth century,
Harold Love’s study of scribal publication in England, The Culture and Commerce
of Texts (1998), includes sustained consideration of music copying, standing as
a reminder that for many genres authors continued to count on handwritten
dissemination in the era of print.
Historians of music theory have also contributed key studies to book his-
tory: in Reading Renaissance Music Theory: Hearing with the Eyes (2000) Cristle
Collins Judd tackled the big question of who read printed polyphony by study-
ing the book culture of music theorists and their students, and in a recent
article that attempts to move beyond the discursive practices of humanism,
Thomas Christensen has sought the essence of music theory outside of books
altogether, arguing that—like music-making—music theory can be seen “as a
social act in which elements of performance and memory elude the fixation of
textual codification.”62
Christensen’s rallying cry evinces the move of recent studies into the
green fields of reading, reception, and practice. Further archival research will
be required before musicologists possess Annaliste-style data concerning lit-
eracy rates and readerships for music, but scholars are already working with
music books from an essentially performative standpoint in order to identify
the interpretive communities to which they belonged. In 2012, in an issue of
Renaissance Studies devoted to music books, guest editor and singer-musicologist
Richard Wistreich insisted on the centrality of performance to book history
62
Christensen, “Fragile Texts, Hidden Theory,” 207.
and extolled the richness of its destabilizing effects, which turn attention away
from authorship and toward the spectacular physiology of reading aloud.63
The history of reading allows us to put sustained musical analysis at the
center of book history, not in service of style history, generic evolution, or com-
positional greatness, but in new histories generated from a dynamic view of the
social functions of music books. In Materialities, I focus on the smaller riff-raff
books of poetry and song designed for pleasurable passetemps, musical primers,
ABC books, broadsides, scribbles, and marginalia, and I privilege beginners
and amateurs, the inept readers who could nonetheless sing chansons quite
happily and well, the avid readers of limited musical ability, in short, musi-
cians with quite different talents than the standardized capabilities modern
conservatories hammer home in professional training programs.
Employing critical methods adopted primarily from Roger Chartier, this
book begins with concentrated study of the physical forms in which musical
texts were conveyed. “There is no text apart from the physical support that
offers it for reading (or hearing),” Chartier daringly proclaimed in The Order
of Books (1994).64 By disrupting scholarly fixation on the content of texts and
focusing instead on the forms in which texts reached their readers, Chartier
sought to recover the space between text and object, between the author’s text
and the handwritten, engraved, or printed objects made of it. In his 1987 study
of the bibliothèque bleue, for instance, he analyzed the publishing formulas by
which Holy Scripture, religious texts, lives of saints, chivalric romances, and
works of literature were marketed to a broad public.65 From texts originating
in literate culture, the publishers of the bibliothèque bleue created a “popular”
catalogue by shortening texts, simplifying them, setting them in small formats,
adding illustrations, breaking them into brief chapters, and adding signposts
such as chapter headings for readers who read in fits and starts. Analysis of
these adjustments, Chartier discovered, revealed that publishers of the biblio-
thèque bleue presumed a certain style of reading on the part of their clientele, one
favoring brevity and frequent closure, often at the expense of logical continuity.
What made these works “popular,” in other words, were not the texts them-
selves, but the marginally literate ways of reading the bleue corpus presupposed.
Chartier was not alone in his push toward what has come to be known
as book history. D. F. McKenzie, in his 1985 Panizzi Lectures at the British
63
Wistreich, “Introduction: Musical Materials and Cultural Spaces,” 3. Also see the arti-
cles in Imparare, leggere, comprare musica, from the round table convened by Paolo Cecchi
and Iain Fenlon at the Colloquio del “Saggiatore Musicale,” Bologna, 2009.
64
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, 9.
65
Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print, ch. 7.
Library, stressed how “the material form of books, the non-verbal elements of
the typographic notations within them, [and] the very disposition of space
itself” have an expressive function in conveying meaning.66 And in his pivotal
chapter titled “What is the History of Books?” (1990), Robert Darnton charted
the agents involved in the “communications circuit” from author through
publisher, printer, shippers, booksellers, and readers, a veritable cast of thou-
sands who affected texts as they became books read by readers whose reac-
tions were, in turn, anticipated by or responded to by authors, thereby closing
the cycle.67 I have already cited Peter Stallybrass’s essay “‘Little Jobs’,” on the
quickly turned out single-sheet editions that kept printers’ finances in the
black; equally influential has been his research into material culture at its most
ephemeral: a slip of printed paper, a glove, a book with erasable pages.68 But of
the many scholars working in the history of the book, Chartier has influenced
my project most directly through his consistent attention to readers, reading,
and the reception of books, a subject that he has approached with the utmost
respect for the orality of written texts and the performances prompted by and
encoded in them. His own Panizzi Lectures of 1998 took a theatrical approach
to literature, revealing what he called “a lasting nostalgia for a lost orality, for
the text as performance” in written works. Not just the pamphlets of the biblio-
thèque bleue, but even “literary monuments” might be analyzed as indebted to a
“ritual poetic word” present in and behind the text.69 As we are still discover-
ing, embodied utterances resonate in a great many early modern texts. With
my own work, I hope to add a register of new sonorities to the history of the
book that he has been so fundamental in shaping.
Materialities is divided into two parts, the first of which tracks the mate-
rial life-span of a chansonnier, from sixteenth-century printed sheets to the
leather-bound survivors preserved in modern research libraries. In so doing,
it seeks a different sort of bibliographic control than that provided by cata-
logues and studies of music printing, for on the one hand it operates at the
level of individual book-objects, studying binder’s volumes and investigating
66
McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 8. For this and other foundational
essays see The Book History Reader, ed. Finkelstein and McCleery.
67
Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, 107–36.
68
See Peter Stallybrass, “Material Culture: Introduction,” and idem, Roger Chartier, J.
Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tablets,” on erasable tablets in the
Renaissance.
69
Roger Chartier, Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe, 8–10.
provenances in a census-like manner, and on the other it works backward
through discernible histories of multiple ownership and preservation to recover
a textured understanding of just how great the toll of history has been on the
songbooks that first came off the press in sheets.
These histories become murkier the further back one goes, never more so
than for songs conveyed in the most ephemeral forms of scrolls, partleaves, and
octavo partbooks. Chapter 2 digs into the archives to show that the smallest
printed chansonniers sold particularly well. I outline the basics of distribution,
market, and pricing and trace a shipment of octavo chansonniers from Paris to
booksellers and clients in Antwerp, Breda, and Brussels. One upshot is to stress
that for book dealers, music was not a niche market, but part of a larger trade in
which polyphonic chansonniers traveled right alongside books of hours, prayer
books, small books of classical texts, and other quick-selling items.
Circling outward to buyers, Chapter 3 follows printed chansonniers into
the hands of musicians, teachers, schools, librarians, and bibliophiles, and here
too, a primary concern has been to see music in the context of the other sorts
of print that came into people’s lives. Estate inventories, archival records, cata-
logues of early modern collections, and bindings provide the principal evidence
for some dismal conclusions concerning the status of printed music in people’s
homes, namely that it was often literally at the bottom of heaps of printed
matter and had an unusually bad chance of survival, which entirely concords
with its essentially practical nature. Remarkably, so few chansonniers remain
from the vast production of the sixteenth century that it is possible to ana-
lyze their provenances, bringing this history into the present and exposing
the extraordinary historical currents that brought together the precious—and
contrasting—collections now settled in the libraries of Western Europe.
Part II, titled “Learning to Read,” begins by situating rudimentary
reading strategies in the context of oral musical practices. Historians are
only beginning to recognize how regularly works printed for a mass mar-
ket mobilized the musical knowledge of insecure readers, whose memory of
phrase-lengths and cadences helped them “read” familiar prayers and poems
based on favorite songs. “Literacy and Song” (Ch. 4) establishes the theoreti-
cal importance of music to the history of reading and lays out the rationale
for the following chapters, which together retrace the curriculum by which
students learned to read in France, beginning with Latin catechisms (Ch. 5)
and then moving to civility books in the vernacular (Chs. 6 and 7). For
this second step, the French initially relied on translations of Erasmus’s
manual on manners for children, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus (1530),
and Baldassar Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (1528); after 1576, the moralizing
Quatrains of Guy du Faur de Pibrac became the new standard. In keeping
with the vocal orientation of this study, my first step in each case has been
to stress the performative nature of these verbal texts and the face-to-face
instructional contexts of parochial school, catechism class, Jesuit collège, and
private lessons in courtesy, comportment, and deference that resonate in
their dialogic forms.
Each chapter in Part II analyzes a type of music that operated for readers
in a zone between “déchiffrage” (to use the French word for sight-reading)
and aide-mémoire. Based on classroom experiments made using facsimi
lies and charting real-time experiences of reading, these analyses attempt
to recapture the formulas regular performance ingrained as haptic knowl-
edge lodged in the vocal chords, fingers, and memory. Chapter 5 explores
the music associated with Latin catechisms and argues that many Latin
motets would have been fairly accessible to a public beyond the circles of
clergymen, choristers, and literati. By working outward from the canons
sung in Sunday schools and Jesuit ABC classes, it shows how the canonic
voices of large-scale imitative motets might have been taken by beginners.
Chapter 6 analyzes mid-century Parisian chansons à 4, highlighting the
melodic and contrapuntal formulas that appeared in piece after piece and
established a baseline vocabulary singers could anticipate when encounter-
ing new songs.70 Duo arrangements of these chansons permit even closer
examination of reading strategies, revealing that editors such as Gardane
built specific lessons into the structures of their duos in order to help
students make the leap from singing by ear to genuine reading. Finally,
Chapter 7 examines the chansons spirituelles, psalms, and other moralizing
genres of vernacular song that became so popular during the last third of
the century by concentrating on Guillaume Boni’s Les Quatrains du Sieur de
Pybrac of 1582. Boni’s modally-ordered collection stands out as a pedagogi-
cal text, particularly given its light imitative textures, fauxbourdon-like
harmonizations, and the didactic potential of its modal exempla, but it
also provokes questions about the usefulness of mode as a part of musical
ABCs and its relevance for sixteenth-century singers. In sum, this series
of bottom-up musical analyses approaches theoretical concepts like mode
from a practical standpoint and considers the extent to which singers might
have experienced compositional structures like cantus firmus and canon as
drawing on great tunes they already knew by heart.
70
See Richard Freedman, “The Renaissance Chanson Goes Digital,” for a new project
that crowdsources multiple editorial solutions through a matrix of just such contrapun-
tal conventions, which are outlined in a musical thesaurus.
Readers will notice that Materialities is largely a book without authors.
The history of authorship is an important component of book history, and
those seeking this fuller picture are encouraged to read Materialities in con-
junction with my recent study Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First
Century of Print, which forms a companion volume to this one. It tests the
limits of the compositional authority that could be projected through the
new medium of the printed book, and it does so by pitting the author-
ity of composers against that of the performers who “made” music in its
most immediate, audible sense. The turn, in Materialities, to communities
of readers hinges on the effects of performance itself, which tends to sever
works from their authors, cutting pieces loose from their origins and scatter-
ing them to the four winds. Petrarch played on this truth when he charm-
ingly titled his quite bookish and authoritative Canzoniere “Rime sparse”
or “scattered rhymes,” and we should note with some irony how quickly
they, too, coursed into networks of oral transmission relatively unconcerned
with authorship. This was nothing new—Petrarch’s great forebear, Dante
Alighieri, had already complained about blacksmiths singing unauthorized
versions of his Divine Comedy at the local forge, which goes to show how
grasping and assimilative the oral traffic in poetry could be, even of highly
literate verse by renowned authors.71
Thick with the coded forms of oral poetry and music, French chansons
were especially susceptible to appropriation, piracy, and arrangement, and
they regularly bubble up in the written record without any mention of
their authors. Indeed, Attaingnant initially seems to have conceived of
chansons as music that had no authors, for the first seven of his surviv-
ing printed chansonniers contain no attributions at all.72 In its neglect of
authorship, therefore, Materialities simply mirrors the prejudices of the
anthologies, recueils de chansons, and miscellanies it studies, its bricolages
aptly reflecting the sixteenth-century jumbles of songs I have worked
71
A setting of Petrarch’s madrigal “Non al suo amante” survives in a version by Jacopo da
Bologna, though Petrarch’s larger verse forms came into their own as poesia per musica
only in the late fifteenth century with the Petrarchistic songs of Il Chariteo and Serafino
dall’Aquila and the sonnet settings of the frottolists. On Dante, see John Ahern,
“Singing the Book,” and for the sixteenth century see Brian Richardson, “‘Recitato
e cantato’.” For an expanded treatment with substantial consideration of singing and
improvisation, see Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy, ch. 6.
72
See Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, catalogue nos. 2, 5–10; the point was made by Martha
Feldman, “Authors and Anonyms,” 168, though she misreported the attributions
recorded by Heartz. One case is difficult to interpret: the Trente et quatre chansons musi-
cales of 1529 (Heartz catalogue no. 5); it contains no attributions.
with as a historian and the anonymous forms in which they circulated. In
place of composers, this study takes collectors and readers as its authori-
ties; its logic is that of amateur musicians and their books. Through fields
of lyric, readers roved freely, singing and playing and occasionally put-
ting together materials into songsters of their own, and while the books
we wait for with anticipation at our desks in special collections libraries
will ever be before us in this study—books I love with the passion of a
bibliophile—my goal is to see through them to the cultures of perfor-
mance that lay just beyond.
Chapter Two Feuilles volantes, Distribution
and Sales
Scripts for Performance
This study inevitably concentrates on the written and printed chansonniers
that I have been able to study, that is, the music that survives. Residing now
in libraries from Berkeley and New York to Paris, Munich, and Verona, these
copies are the hundreds that remain of tens of thousands lost in fires, floods,
shipwrecks, and revolutionary book burnings. With only a couple of excep-
tions, they are printed, not manuscript, and even given the much larger pro-
duction enabled by printing, their number is low indeed. Of the rest, many
simply fell apart through wear and tear, still others were discarded when their
unbarred mensural notation became illegible and new musical fashions super-
seded their style of part-writing. As their tunes and composers receded into
obscurity, some chansonniers were probably sold by the pound as scrap paper,
used as wrappers, or salvaged as binding material. Those editions that survive
do so in just a few exemplars, if that, and often in incomplete sets with one or
more parts missing; sometimes a title is known only from a sixteenth-century
inventory or bibliography, a “ghost” from the distant past.
Binding played a decisive role in securing futures for the chansonniers that
did survive, adding considerable value to the printed sheets and protecting
them from harm. Indeed, bindings and binder’s volumes have proven so inte-
gral to the material dimension of the book history I essay here that they fea-
ture prominently in several chapters. But the same bindings that have brought
this music down to us and reveal so much about ownership have a tendency,
though their prevalence, to obscure the unfortunate events through which
much more music has vanished. Here it is important to dwell for a moment on
the music that is lost to us and account for its ephemerality.
One of the reasons partbooks were not bound—and certainly not bound
together—is that, like the parts of a string quartet, they needed to be used
separately, leaving us with editions bearing titles like Premier livre de chansons a
quatre, the four partbooks of which cannot usefully be bound as a unit, and sets
of individual partbooks that might be bound with others of like vocal ranges,
but would nonetheless fail to contain a complete text (since each was only one
part of the whole). In this last respect, partbooks are bibliographically unlike
any other sort of book from the era. Even printed plays (another genre made
up of “parts”) contained all of the spoken parts, as did each manuscript “book
of the play” kept by the companies and registered, in Elizabethan England, at
the Stationer’s hall, in order to secure claims of ownership. The manuscript
parts from which the actors learned their lines, by contrast, included only
each individual player’s part with minimal cues consisting of two or three
words. But these were not book-like in design—of the very few examples that
remain, several were originally in the form of narrow rolls (or “roles”) mea-
suring anywhere from four to seventeen feet long.1 As a bibliographic form,
they mark a holdover from the scrolls on which ancient texts were inscribed
before the codex gradually replaced them in the early Middle Ages, a material
transformation that allowed for the production of larger books, the compiling
of miscellaneous books or a book containing an entire corpus, more flexible
reading, and better preservation. But for unitary texts designed to be read
consecutively, like a role in a play or a voice part in a piece of music, scrolls
continued to prove useful.2
At least until the fourteenth century, polyphony, too, was commonly writ-
ten out in rotuli, and although few examples survive, even at the end of the
sixteenth century, some polyphonic music was still described as having been
written on “scrolls” or “rolls.”3 Probably the clearest account is that in Thomas
1
See the classic study of Walter Wilson Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan
Playhouses, 173–81, and Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance, 236–45.
2
On the shift from scroll to codex, see Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 4–6, and
Armando Petrucci, “From the Unitary Book to the Miscellany,” in his Writers and
Readers in Medieval Italy, 1–18.
3
Among the better-known medieval rotuli are the Rotulus Maggs, known from a partial
facsimile published in 1928; Wrocław, Biblioteka Universytecka, MS Ak1955; Brussels,
Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 19606; and BnF MS Collection de Picardie 67.
Manuscripts sometimes depict rolls in the initials of Psalm 97; see Christopher Page,
“An English Motet.”
Morley’s A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (London, 1597), where
the student asks for “songs” to use as guides in composition and to sing for fun.
The master then produces the music, saying: “take these scrolles, wherein there
be some grave [pieces], and some light, some of more parts and some of fewer,
and according as you shall have occasion use them.”4 Clearly, the scrolls con-
tained polyphony. John Milsom, in assessing the persistence of music scrolls
in Tudor England, has identified records of polyphonic masses and anthems
written out on parchment scrolls (now lost) at Worcester Cathedral, which he
believes were probably sets of single voice parts inscribed on separate strips
of parchment and stored together in rolls.5 Smaller works for two or three
parts like carols, catches, and rounds that could have been sung from a single
scroll do also survive from the time, but the logistics of performance and the
length of sacred settings tended to encourage separation of the voice parts of
polyphonic compositions onto individual pieces of parchment or paper, mak-
ing the parts slight indeed.6 In the English theater “scrolls” were props meant
to be read aloud on stage: letters, proclamations, bills, and songs that were
copied out separately from the actors’ parts.7 Just as fleeting as parts, actors
would have used such song sheets for musical rehearsals with instrumental-
ists. Significantly, the words of songs were often not included in the prompter’s
book. Songs might also be cut or replaced in subsequent stagings depend-
ing on an actor’s voice. Thus as a result of their material form—scrolls and
sheets—and their semi-permanent status relative to the rest of the play, theat-
rical songs likely ended up as scrap paper if the company’s musicians failed to
keep track of their performing materials.
Clearly some (and perhaps much) music circulated in extremely ephemeral
forms that came down to as little as a few single pages or half sheets folded
once into small pamphlets of two folios. Such sets of parts were perfect for
performance or sending in letters, but bad for preservation. One extraordinary
collection of such Renaissance “sheet music” has been conserved at Peterhouse,
Cambridge, and it includes eight sets of Tudor compositions written out on sin-
gle leaves of paper. In his study of the collection, Milsom suggests that we call
4
Thomas Morley, A plaine and easie introduction, 182.
5
See John Milsom, “The Culture of Partleaves,” and the inventories cited in Frank Ll.
Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain, 187. My thanks to Milsom for sharing his work
in draft.
6
Milsom, “The Culture of Partleaves,” citing the Trinity Carol Roll and the Lant Roll,
described in Iain Fenlon, Cambridge Music Manuscripts, 900–1700, 88–90, 137–39. Also
see “A rolle of Cannons” discussed in Milsom, “The Nonsuch Music Library,” 170.
7
See Stern, Documents of Performance, ch. 6, and eadem, “Re-Patching the Play.”
f e u i l l e s v o l a n t e s , D i s t r i b u t i o n a n d S a l e s | 41
this bibliographic form of polyphonic music a “partleaf,” which he defines as
requiring “no stitching, quiring or other means of being united with a further
leaf or leaves.” Alongside those in Cambridge, surviving examples of manu-
script partleaves include several collections of loose leaves subsequently gath-
ered into bound collections now in Paris and Munich.8 Some printed partleaves
with occasional chansons and motets for weddings, baptisms, or funerals sur-
vive in low but significant numbers from early seventeenth-century Germany,
showing that this must have been a fairly common form there, despite its vir-
tual disappearance from our view.9 Finally, many “partbooks” were as small as
a single sheet of paper folded into quarto booklets, as we find in the parts for
Alessandro Striggio’s Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno in the Bibliothèque natio-
nale in Paris.10 Scant though it may be, the evidence provided by these sources
reminds us that much music circulated in small and workaday material forms
meant to be used with little thought for preservation. As parts for players and
singers that were designed for music-making, some were not much larger than
the Souza marches sized to fit in the music lyres of wind players in marching
bands: many obviously met ends similar to those of the long-lost parts strewn
around the band room of my junior high school.
Actors’ parts are perhaps the closest analogue to the separate partleaves
and partbooks on which polyphony was notated, but in the theater, by con-
trast, the ephemerality of parts was understood—hence the importance of the
promptbooks that were used in a way not dissimilar to a conductor’s score
and also kept as a matter of record, when records were kept at all.11 As the
example of theatrical songs attests, the distance between the text of a play and
what was spoken on stage could be great indeed, all the more so when one
factors in variables such as diction, pace of delivery, simultaneous speech, audi-
ence interventions, and so on.12 By contrast, part music afforded singers and
players less latitude. Coordinated by the tactus, simultaneous, and relatively
8
On the collections in Munich see JoAnn Taricani, “A Renaissance Bibliophile,”
1366–67 and 1384. The collection in Paris is BnF Cons. Rés. 1591.
9
See Milsom, “The Culture of Partleaves,” on printed partleaves of a wedding chanson
by Jean de Castro (Cologne, 1597); Stephen Rose, “Schein’s Occasional Music”; and
Esther Criscuola de Laix, “‘Venus’s Cupid Commands Me to Sing’,” 236–42 on prints
from Hamburg.
10
See Davitt Moroney, “Alessandro Striggio’s Mass in Forty and Sixty Parts,” 57–58.
11
Estimates posit that 60% of early modern plays are now lost entirely, either because
they were never published or because no copy survives. See Roger Chartier, Cardenio, 6.
12
See Stephen Orgel, “Acting Scripts, Performing Texts,” in idem, The Authentic Shakespeare
and Other Problems, ch. 4; and idem, “The Book of the Play.”
continuous, the regularity of polyphony made a prompter and a “book of the
play” unnecessary. Indeed, the rules of counterpoint were so binding that it is
possible to rewrite parts that have been lost when partbooks for some voices
no longer exist.13
The fact that sixteenth-century singers apparently lacked any need for the
vertically aligned scores that existed in the thirteenth century and returned
again at the end of the sixteenth means that partbooks are the only written
form in which many polyphonic genres were preserved, despite their physi-
cal ephemerality and their unsuitability for preservation (scattered as the
parts were across several separate booklets). By nature and design, partbooks
belonged to the (unbound) world of performance also inhabited by rolls and
scrolls and other workaday sheets that helped people do something well or
pursue a pastime together, a world that—in the case of the chanson—included
many amateurs, enough to make printing music worth the investment.
This chapter concentrates on the abundance of chansonniers printed in
Paris and Lyon and the distribution chains along which they traveled in sheets
bundled together with other printed matter. (I do not categorically exclude
manuscripts, but for the chanson, manuscript evidence is extremely limited.)
I take stock of the titles being shipped and sold alongside songs in order to
assess the relative importance of music in the book trade and test the limits
of distribution from Paris and Lyon, using this data to gauge the geographic
reach of polyphonic music printed in France. Where possible, I concentrate on
the chanson, but in the first instance, my goal is to situate printed polyphony
in the book trade more generally. Finally, this chapter leverages the evidence
of the music sales recorded in the archives of the Plantin-Moretus Museum
in Antwerp to highlight the strong distribution and quick sales enjoyed by
the smallest chansonniers—diminutive octavo editions of chansons à 3. Few
of these extremely small chansonniers survive, but Christopher Plantin’s sales
document his interest in this end of the market for music. Rich in details con-
cerning his pricing strategies, the archives of the Officina Plantiniana witness
the day-to-day exchanges with booksellers and clients through which chansons
traded hands in Paris and Antwerp.
These analyses concentrate not on chansons as a genre, but on chanson-
niers as commercial goods in a market for smaller (and cheaper) forms of
printed polyphony that was still ramping up in Paris and the Low Countries
13
See Freedman, “The Renaissance Chanson Goes Digital” on the rules by which scholars
are composing the missing voices of eighty chansons for which the Contratenor and
Bassus books are lost.
in the years around 1550. In short, I begin by studying music as a commod-
ified object rather than a sounding performance, for doing so allows us to
understand who dealt in sheet music, who collected it, how it was valued,
and—ultimately—where these things we study were used to make music.
Distribution “en blanc”
As we have already noted, printed matter left the print shop en blanc or “white”
(= unbound). This facilitated distribution by keeping weight and bulk to a
minimum, but it also represents a professional divide between imprimeurs
(printers), who printed sheets, the libraires (booksellers) who sold print and
other paper goods, and the relieurs (bookbinders) who made covers to order.
Booksellers will be our primary concern, since they also acted as distributors,
but it is important to note that French printers of music often sold books
as well: to this hybrid class of imprimeur-libraire belong Pierre Attaingnant
and Nicolas Du Chemin in Paris and Jacques Moderne in Lyon. About their
bookselling operations virtually nothing can be ascertained for certain—
even the catalogues of their output are surely partial—but we do know that
Attaingnant’s widow purchased a large number of liturgical books, books of
hours, some motets and masses, and ruled paper in 1554, presumably for sale
at the bookshop in the Rue de la Harpe.14 These purchases complemented
the strengths of Attaingnant’s own output (he printed breviaries and mis-
sals as well as music) and suggest the range of stock being sold. The music
might have been imported or come from down the street, for in those years Du
Chemin was also printing and selling music nearby, as was the imprimeur and
libraire Michel Fezandat and—right around the corner from Du Chemin and
Fezandat—the printers who would dominate music production in the second
half of the century: Le Roy & Ballard.15 The fact that Fezandat’s shop shared a
wall with that of Le Roy & Ballard certainly suggests his adjoining storefront
as one outlet for their music books, illustrating the tight relations printers had
with the booksellers who moved their stock. Taken together with what little
we know about Attaingnant’s business in the Rue de la Harpe, we can guess
that all of these imprimeurs-libraires dealt in music printed by others, including
imports from Lyon and Antwerp.
14
See Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 191, doc. 28.
15
On these tight relations, see Daniel Heartz, “Parisian Music Publishing under Henry II.”
Some large booksellers also traded in second-hand music books, which
certainly retained their value if in good condition.16 In 1562, the Parisian
imprimeur-libraire Gilles Corrozet acquired fifty books from the estate of a royal
secretary, of which a dozen volumes were of music.17 Corrozet specialized in
printing emblem books, translations of the classics, and poetry, and although
music was not a going concern for him, he clearly took it when it came along.18
Booksellers regularly operated as distributors for music books shipped to
destinations outside of Paris.19 Printed sheets that had been folded once for
storage were tied into bales and crated or packed in barrels or baskets for
transport by water or overland via established trade routes.20 It is very difficult
to piece together an accurate picture of how French music prints circulated in
the sixteenth century; most of what we do know is based on stocklists included
in the inventaires après décès (estate inventories) of booksellers, the archives of
the printing firm of Christopher Plantin in Antwerp, and lists of books in the
estates of private individuals (this last is a subject we will take up in the fol-
lowing chapter).
Some representative evidence of distribution can be gleaned from the
inventaire après décès of Marie Cousin, the wife of Jean Caron, marchand
libraire in Amiens and one of the two principal booksellers in the city. The
inventory dates from 1583 and lists the stock of the bookshop at the time of
Cousin’s death.21 In addition to 1,759 printed volumes valued at 250 livres,
the firm held paper products valued at 337 livres, a good reminder of the
healthy manuscript culture that supported sales of blank books, paper, and
ruled music paper, as well as the paper trade often conducted as an ancillary
16
For physical evidence, see van Orden and Vitolo, “Padre Martini,” 271.
17
Jérome Pichon and Georges Vicaire, Documents pour servir à l’histoire des libraires de Paris,
1486–1600, 124–25. Judging from the price, the music was probably unbound.
18
Also see ibid., 153–54 on the libraire Jehan Mancelet, who acquired thirteen books and
four packets of “livres imparfaits” from the estate of a deceased Parisian merchant in
1565, including two “livres de musique.”
19
On music distributors working out of Paris and Lyon, see Henri Vanhulst, “Suppliers
and Clients,” 564.
20
It is not known for certain whether sheets were shipped folded or flat. Jeanne
Veyrin-Forrer, “Fabriquer un livre au XVIe siècle,” 295, believes that the sheets were
stacked in full-volume sets by the printer and folded once for storage at a warehouse or
for shipping to retailers. For some seventeenth-century images, see Henri-Jean Martin,
“Renouvellements et concurrences,” 392–93.
21
Labarre, Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise, 56–7. A marchand libraire or publisher-bookseller
financed editions printed by others.
business by booksellers.22 Most of the prints were schoolbooks of various
sorts (tutors, dictionaries, civilities, and so forth); others were books of hours,
classics, and some modern titles in the vernacular. At the end of the inven-
tory, listed among the paper goods, are two entries concerning music: “trente
huit livres de rioeul [recueil] en musicque prisé II s. VI d. pièce” and “Treize
petits volumes de musicque d’Arcadet prisé II s. VI d. pièce” (“thirty-eight
books of music collection valued at 2 sous 6 deniers apiece” and “thirteen
little volumes of music of Arcadelt valued at 2 sous 6 deniers apiece”).23
None of the music was bound (indeed, of the entire stock of 1,759 prints,
only thirty-four volumes had bindings, all red calfskin), and the price at
which the music prints were valued placed them among the 400 or so books
the notary described in bulk as “Cent soixante livres de plusieurs sortes prisé
II s. la pièce,” “Cinquante et ung livres de plusieurs sortes prisé II s. VI d. la
pièce,” and so forth.
The presence of this music in Amiens verifies that polyphony was dis-
tributed to the provinces, even if not in great variety, which would fit with
Albert Labarre’s assessment of Amiens as a mediocre place for the book
trade, a city where life was hard and relatively unintellectual.24 The “thir-
teen small volumes of music of Arcadelt” probably came from the presses of
Le Roy & Ballard, who issued a series of octavo chansonniers in the 1570s
under the title Premier–Neufiesme livre de chansons à quatre parties dArcadet &
autres. Sadly, though, the music evidently ended up in the piles of books of
lesser value, right by the reams of blank sheets. Given that many partbooks
were only sixteen folios long, even a set of four parts ran to only sixty-four
folios. And if I have identified the “petits volumes . . . d’Arcadet” correctly,
the parts were in a truly tiny format. It is a mistake to calculate book prices
solely by the paper costs, but paper was certainly the fundamental expense
in single-impression printing with moveable type, where it could account
for the lion’s share of the cost of the finished product en blanc.25 The octavo
format alone would have made Le Roy & Ballard’s “Arcadelt” series relatively
cheap. Each set of four partbooks required only eight sheets of paper, which
22
For an analogous case from Milan see Kevin M. Stevens, “Vincenzo Giradone and the
Popular Press.” On the paper trade, see Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 72.
23
Labarre, Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise, 361.
24
Ibid., 55.
25
For instance, at the Plantin firm in Antwerp, paper generally represented 60–65% of
the cost of the finished product and up to 75% for large printings. But Plantin had to
import paper from France and Germany, which raised the price. See Voet, The Golden
Compasses, 2:19, and Fenlon, Music, Print, and Culture, 29.
F i g u r e 2 .1 Comparison of common formats for chansonniers. Here a quarto
partbook from Attaingnant’s Livre de chansons series has been overlaid with an
octavo from Le Roy & Ballard’s Recueil de chansons series, equivalent to their Livres
de chansons. They are reproduced here at approximately half their actual size.
brought them into the price range of chapbooks and other printed ephemera
(see figure 2.1 for a comparison of quarto and octavo sizes).
To the north, trade was steady between Paris and Flanders, largely thanks
to Christopher Plantin, who not only ran one of the largest and most ambi-
tious printing enterprises in the Low Countries, but who also established an
office in Paris in 1567 that received regular shipments of books.26 The pack-
ages made the journey from Antwerp to Paris by sea to Le Havre and then by
barge up the Seine or—more probably—in wagons run by carters who spe-
cialized in overland transport.27 Some consignments included shipments from
26
Henri-Jean Martin, Print, Power, and People in 17th-Century France, 200–209; on the
packaging and shipping of books, see Voet, The Golden Compasses, 2:426–39.
27
Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 222. The relative costs of transporting books
overland versus by inland waterways is still up for debate. See ibid., 348–49 n. 327
for the argument in favor of river transport, and for the contrary opinion see Fernand
Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, 350–61. Flemish merchants shipped textiles from
third parties addressed to Adrian Le Roy.28 The commerce in music books
along these routes was reciprocal, for thanks to the pathbreaking research
of Henri Vanhulst, we know that long before Plantin began printing music
in 1578, the Paris branch of the Officina shipped music printed by Le Roy
& Ballard to Plantin’s bookshop in Antwerp to be sold there and distributed
to other booksellers in Flanders and Germany. In 1566, for example, Plantin
sold Pierre de La Tombe, a bookseller in Brussels, a package of unbound
music that included some of Le Roy & Ballard’s most popular titles, most
of them for two or three voices—two copies of a livre de chansons a deux par-
ties (ca. 1555), two copies of villanelle a 3 (1565), a copy of Antoine Cartier’s
Vingt et une chansons . . . a trois parties (1557), six copies of a livre de chansons 4o
a 3 parties, and one set of the four-voice Livre de chansons series, books 1–18
(1554–65).29 Plantin also received music from the Parisian printer-bookseller
Martin Le Jeusne, another intermediary though which Parisian prints came
to the Officina, and at least one consignment with four books of madrigals
from Italy came by way of the libraire Jehan Mareschal in Lyon.30 Until he
started to deal with Pierre Phalèse directly, most of Plantin’s music suppliers
were booksellers, not printers, though he did buy some music directly from
Jean Bogard in Douai.31
What these records illustrate is that music—like other books—was
shipped unbound in small consignments brokered by booksellers who dealt
in a large variety of material.32 As customers of the imprimeurs, booksellers
took pressure off printers by relieving them of stock, providing quick return
on investment, and sharing risk. They in turn needed to know their market
and shop carefully for what they sold. Just two copies of any given music
print could satisfy the market in a middling city such as Brussels, and simi-
larly, a dozen prints of various titles might make up the entire consignment
of music in a shipment between Antwerp and Paris that comprised a wide
Antwerp to Italy by overland routes, which strongly suggests similar choices for printed
matter. See John H. Munro, “The Low Countries’ Export Trade in Textiles.” On routes
from Antwerp to Spain, see Iain Fenlon, “Music Printing and the Book Trade,” 7–9.
28
Vanhulst, “Suppliers and Clients,” 562.
29
Ibid., 576. For a full account of the sale, see APM, français no. 44, fol. 8r (the Journal,
1566). The sale also included paper and a large number of almanacs, books of hours,
and other books in small formats, most of them unbound. All told, La Tombe took 102
prints for which he paid 25 fl. 13¾ st. The music books cost 5 fl. 4 st. or about 20% of
the sale.
30
Vanhulst, “Suppliers and Clients,” chronological list nos. 32 and 11 respectively.
31
Ibid., chronological list no. 171.
32
On the size of consignments, see Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 220–22.
assortment of books.33 When Plantin began printing music himself with the
luxurious Octo missae (1578) of George de La Hèle, in-folio on imperial-size
paper, thirty-five exemplars left the warehouse of the Golden Compasses in
Antwerp between July and November of that year. This relatively large num-
ber of sales was the result of a significant marketing effort, for in October
Plantin sent broadside “Affiches de S. Augustin et Missae de La Hele” to Paris
“to post at the Crossroads” there in order to advertise his monumental edition
of the works of St. Augustine (1577) and his first edition of polyphonic music.34
Distribution was essential to the survival of a press, but even for the most
active entrepreneurs, the book trade was slow and required a large invest-
ment of capital that might be tied up in stock for years. As Tim Carter has
shown, Filippo and Jacopo Giunti, the preeminent printer-booksellers in
Florence, complained more than once that twenty-five, thirty, or forty books
were enough copies of any given title to satisfy “the whole state”—without
adequate distribution, they ended up gathering dust or became “wrappings
for grocer’s wares” (and here the Giunti were talking about all sorts of books,
not music specifically).35 For a printer in Florence, where the book trade was
relatively weak, distribution to Venice with its concentration of booksellers and
continual influx of clients was the only way to sell an edition of 500 or 1,000
copies. But even in the printing capital of Paris, the sale catalogues and inven-
tories of the Ballard press show that between 1639 and 1751 their back-stock
included items well over a hundred years old.36 These accounts provide some
sense of how uneven the market for printed music could be.
To the south, inventories made in 1561 and 1563 of stock in the book-
shop of Joan Guardiola in Barcelona are particularly revealing of French
music distribution, the age of some titles stocked for sale, and the types of
books that might be bound for ready sale.37 Guardiola sold a great variety
of books—theological and devotional texts, legal texts, and books of gram-
mar, history, rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry both classical and modern—mostly
33
Booksellers generally kept only two or three copies of a particular title on hand. See the
inventories discussed below and Tim Carter, “Music-Selling in Late Sixteenth-Century
Florence,” 493–94 and app. 1.
34
Vanhulst, “Suppliers and Clients,” 563.
35
Tim Carter, “Music-Printing in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century
Florence,” 34–35.
36
Guillo, Pierre I Ballard, 1:165–75. For a surprisingly up-to-date stocklist from Nancy,
1612, see ibid., 1:72. In Geneva and Lyon, Guillo, “Notes sur la librairie musicale,”
found much old music for sale, including Parisian editions from Attaingnant and Le
Roy & Ballard on the shelves in 1670.
37
See Tess Knighton, “Petrucci’s Books in Early Sixteenth-Century Spain.”
from printers in Lyon, France’s second great printing capital after Paris. At the
time of his death, he had in stock 279 copies of thirty-five different music items
including eight copies of the Morales Missarum liber primus (Lyon: Moderne,
1546), thirty-nine “libres de cançons en frances a 4 . . . lio[n]‌,” twenty-six copies
of the Musicque de joye (Lyon: Moderne, ca. 1550), some madrigals from Venice, an
Attaingnant print, printed music paper, and—remarkably—six or possibly even
seven Petrucci prints dating from as early as 1503. All of these prints were being
sold “white” save for a nondescript little tutor, a “llibre de pratiga de musica” in
quarto.38 This is of a total stock of almost 9,000 copies of 1,121 titles (of which
only 430 were bound). Guardiola’s holdings imply that even the largest booksell-
ers with multiple copies of some titles rarely offered music bound, something
more common for books of hours and other religious texts that sold reliably.39
Damage, loss, theft, and seizure imperiled the fragile books “in sheets”
on their journeys. Thanks to records of an entreaty to the Doge made by
the Venetian printer Francesco d’Asola, we know that all sorts of misadven-
tures befell shipments of music books, including highway robbery.40 In 1536,
Francesco ordered a package of prints from Paris with the intention of reprint-
ing them, but after they made it across the Alps, they were confiscated by
“li Guasconi” at Turin for reasons he never recites. Among the books was
“uno libretto di canto canzon’ venti nove di Paris,” the Vingt et neuf chansons of
Attaingnant (1530). Ferdinand Columbus, the son of the famous explorer, lost
1,638 books in a shipment that sank at sea en route from Venice to Seville in
1521.41 Between bad weather and pirates, sea transport presented risks per-
sistent enough to sustain, in the seventeenth century, a burgeoning insurance
industry, of which Edward Lloyd of London was one famous entrepreneur.42
At the very least, a cart caught in a heavy downpour, a sodden barge, or a
38
Ibid., 629. Another Spanish stocklist dated 1557 concerns a member of the Giunta fam-
ily, Giovanni, a printer-bookseller in Burgos. He had numerous plainsong manuals in
stock (Arte de canto llano), chant books printed in Venice by Luc’Antonio Giunta, and
some music treatises, but no polyphony, only intabulations for vihuela. None of the
music was bound, though of the 15,827 volumes inventoried, only 4% had bindings.
See William Pettas, A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Bookstore, 9, 104, 105.
39
For an Italian example see Carter, “Music-Selling in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence,”
on Piero di Giuliano Morosi, who arranged bindings for customers, but did not stock
music bound.
40
For his petition to the Venetian Senate, see Geneviève Thibault, “De la vogue de
quelques livres français à Venise”; on the export of Attaingnant’s books from Paris, see
Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 124–25.
41
Catherine Weeks Chapman, “Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music,” 39–41.
42
Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, 361–69.
ship with water in the hold could result in water-damaged packages. Piero di
Giuliano Morosi, who ran a bookshop in Florence catering largely to religious
institutions and dealing in music from Venice, complained of one shipment
he received that the first eight sheets of one book were “tutti mangiati dalla
piena” (“all consumed by the flood”).43 They might have been stored at the
bottom of a pile in a warehouse in flood-prone Venice or Florence or packed
at the edge of a bale that got soaked on the trip. In an attempt to attain some
control over distribution, the Venetian music printer Girolamo Scotto estab-
lished a network of agents and family members in Milan, Mantua, Rome,
Florence, and elsewhere.44 As Jane A. Bernstein has shown, not only did Scotto
broker the transport of books issued by smaller Venetian presses to other cit-
ies, he bought interests in the shipping industry, perhaps even acquiring his
own barges and sea-faring vessels.45 But clearly the risk of damage and loss
remained significant.
Between the perils and expense of transport and the difficulty in estab-
lishing trade circuits reliable enough to sustain international distribution,
we have to assume that many books did not travel great distances.46 Some
commerce along the route linking Paris to Lyon and Turin is witnessed by the
acquisitions of Ferdinand Columbus: During a trip to Lyon in 1535, he pur-
chased four dozen music books, about half of which came from Attaingnant’s
press in Paris, and we also know that he bought at least one chansonnier
printed in Lyon on the other side of the Alps in 1531, while passing through
Turin.47 But the very fact that Francesco d’Asola planned to reprint the Vingt
et neuf chansons in Venice suggests either that Attaingnant’s books were not
widely available in Italy or that a growing market for them was not ade-
quately supplied through transalpine trade. During the 1530s and 1540s, we
find Gardane reprinting in Venice chansons of Janequin that had been issued
by Attaingnant and motets from Moderne’s Motteti del Fiore series; Moderne
in turn reprinted in Lyon Valerio Dorico’s Roman editions of the masses of
Cristóbal de Morales and whole swaths of chansons from Attaingnant, and so
on and so forth. One might imagine that music books from Lyon regularly
made it south of the Alps, but if the surviving late sixteenth-century stock-
lists of Italian booksellers are any indication, musicians in provincial centers
such as Milan and Florence rarely found titles from Paris, Antwerp, Lyon, or
43
Paul F. Gehl, “‘Mancha uno alfabeto intero’,” 328.
44
J. A. Bernstein, Print Culture and Music, ch. 4.
45
Ibid., 86.
46
For an overview see Dinko Fabris, “Les Voyages des livres de musique.”
47
Chapman, “Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music,” 53–55, 78–81.
Germany for sale in local shops, and even the selection, newness, and quantity
of music from Venetian presses was limited.48 Records of the book fairs in
Frankfurt show hardly any music from Paris or Lyon there, something under-
scored by the paltry number of music books from Attaingnant and Moderne
included in the 1548 music bibliography of Conrad Gesner, written in Basel
and Zurich.49
In France, the same weakness of distribution pertains to the provinces. We
have already considered the example of Amiens, and to take one more example,
the inventories of two booksellers in Bordeaux—one of them with over 3,000
books and both with large stocks of books from Lyon—show no music being
sold there.50 Nonetheless, one interesting counterexample can balance out this
scenario of restricted interest in music books: the business deal struck by Jehan
Hiesse, a merchant bookseller in Rouen, and Robert Granjon, a printer work-
ing in Lyon.51 When Granjon decided to get back into the music printing
business in 1557, he and Hiesse formed a consortium with a third partner to
finance the publication of a series of chansonniers. As part of their contract,
Hiesse received 500 copies of each edition, though the deal has left no trace of
the books in Normandy.
Distribution between printing capitals was limited not only by trans-
port, but also by a contrasting business model: rather than shipping printed
music, reprint it locally. Here, a negative example is instructive: even the tight
exchanges Plantin established between Paris and Antwerp did not facilitate
northern sales of the most desirable music from Paris, for there is no evidence
that Plantin imported any of the splendid large chansonniers printed by Le Roy
& Ballard in the 1570s. No copies of the Musique de Guillaume Costeley (1570), the
Mellange de chansons (1572), Philippe de Monte’s Sonetz de P. de Ronsard (1575), the
Mellange d’Orlande de Lassus (1570), or the Livre de chansons nouvelles . . . d’Orlande
de Lassus (1572) are recorded as having been received at the Officina Plantiniana.
No doubt the reason was because the works of Lassus could be had right in
48
See Carter, “Music-Selling in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence,” 491; Iain Fenlon, “Il
foglio volante editoriale Tini, circa il 1596”; Patrizio Barbieri and Ken F. Hurry, “Music
Printers and Booksellers in Rome (1583–1600)”; and Paul Kast, “Die Musikdrucke des
Kataloges Giunta von 1604.” Conclusions concerning distribution should also factor in
the religious wars, which diminished French production between 1580 and 1600.
49
Albert Göhler, Verzeichnis, and Lawrence F. Bernstein, “The Bibliography of Music.”
50
For the 1552 inventory, which lists 665 titles (2,000 book copies), see Françoise Giteau,
“Inventaire du libraire Etienne Thoulouze,” and for the 1571 inventory, with some 3,000
titles, see Francis Higman, Yann Morvant, and Marc Vial, “A Bookseller’s World: The
Inventaire of Vincent Réal.”
51
On their contract, see Claude Dalbanne, “Robert Granjon, imprimeur de musique.”
Antwerp from the printer-bookseller Jean Bellère and his partner Pierre Phalèse
in Louvain, who slavishly copied Le Roy & Ballard’s prints of Lassus and other
titles.52 In the very same year that Le Roy & Ballard issued Monte’s Sonetz (1575),
Bellère and Phalèse printed a duplicate edition, copying the layout right down
to the casting off of type.53 Cornelius Phalèse, Pierre’s son, copied the first book
of Adam Berg’s gorgeous folio Patrocinium musices Orlandi de Lasso (1573) as soon
as it was out, packing it into marketable oblong quarto partbooks for quicker
sale.54 Such reprints were not at all uncommon, particularly given the limited
reach of privileges.55 Indeed, knock-offs of Le Roy & Ballard’s 1570 Mellange
d’Orlande de Lassus were also printed the same year in London by Thomas
Vautrollier, a French Huguenot refugee, and in following years—with texts
“spiritualized”—in La Rochelle and Geneva.56 In La Rochelle, Pierre Haultin
also brought out four books of Lassus motets in 1576 that were based on the work
of Le Roy & Ballard, whose editions from Catholic Paris may have been hard
to come by in this Protestant city.57 These patterns persisted, for of the twenty-
five French music titles in the 1609 stocklist of the bookshop of Cornelis Claesz
in Amsterdam, only three actually came from French presses—the rest were
52
See Vanhulst, Catalogue des éditions de musique publiées à Louvain par Pierre Phalèse, for
instance: catalogue nos. 152, 153, 154, and 159. On Phalèse’s borrowing practices and
the identification of some missing Parisian editions from Phalèse’s output, see idem,
“Les Emprunts aux éditions perdues de Le Roy et Ballard.”
53
It is fairly clear that the Phalèse–Bellère edition is a copy. For instance, it has an error
between signatures B and C of the Tenor partbook, where several notes are missing
from the residuum of Hé Dieu du ciel as it runs across pages, notes that are present in
the Le Roy & Ballard edition. The Flemish edition also reproduces and compounds the
errors in foliation and the table present in the Le Roy & Ballard partbook.
54
The firm also issued quarto editions of the Patrocinium musices, vols. 2–4 in 1578. See
Vanhulst, Catalogue des éditions de musique publiées à Louvain par Pierre Phalèse, catalogue
nos. 172, 185, 188, 189.
55
On music privileges in Italy, see Richard J. Agee, “The Venetian Privilege and Music-
Printing”; on French book privileges generally, see Elizabeth Armstrong, Before
Copyright. On German reprints of Italian music, see Giselbrecht, “Crossing Boundaries,”
213–25.
56
Richard Freedman, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso, 1–2, 136–75. On Vautrollier and
the first slow stages of music printing in London, see J. L. Smith, Thomas East, 19–37;
East printed a chansonnier as well, Charles Tessier, Premier livre de chansons et airs de cour
(London, 1597), on which see ibid., 88–98.
57
Protestant Geneva appears to have been equally isolated. The publisher Laurent de
Normandie had 35,000 volumes inventoried after his death in 1569, but only one entry
for music: eighteen copies of Proverbs en musique in-8, most likely François Gindron,
Les Proverbes de Salomon, from nearby Lausanne. See H. L. Schlaepfer, “Laurent de
Normandie,” 212.
Flemish.58 Even more telling, of the sixty-two prints of Italian madrigals Claesz
had in stock, most had been printed in Antwerp (by Pierre II Phalèse or Pierre
II Phalèse & Jean Bellère)—as few as eight actually came from Venice.
Whereas at least some music from the presses of Attaingnant, Moderne, and
Le Roy & Ballard was evidently distributed quite broadly, at least in single cop-
ies, the publications of smaller printer-booksellers in the provinces who delved
occasionally into the niche market of polyphony may not have made it very far
from home. My study concentrates on the output of the largest French music
presses in Paris and Lyon, but it is important to signal that some polyphony was
occasionally printed elsewhere: in Avignon by Jean de Channey; in Caen by Simon
Mangeant and his son Jacques; in Douai (then part of Flanders), initially by Jean
Bogard and later by Balthazar Bellère, who married Bogard’s daughter; in Orléans
and Orthez by Louis Rabier; in Poitiers by Nicolas Logerois; in La Rochelle by
the Huguenot printer Pierre Haultin and his nephew Jérôme.59 In Rouen, the bit
printer Thomas Mallard got hold of type for mensural music, which he used to
add monophonic notation to a book of song texts sometime around 1580.60 Some
prints were of local interest (Logerois’s only known music print contains psalm
settings by the organist at the cathedral in Poitiers, Pierre Santerre; Rabier printed
a psalter in Occitan when he moved to Orthez); other printers got into the music
business only for a title or two (Channey’s difficult foray into printing polyphony
was financed in part by the local composer, Carpentras). In printing capitals, some
entrepreneurs found repertorial niches in which to work, as did Michel Fezandat
in Paris and Jan de Laet in Antwerp.61 Still, it may be significant that during the
58
Henri Vanhulst, “La Musique dans le ‘Catalogue des livres françois’ de Cornelis Claesz.”
59
Studies of this class of music printer have been uneven. On Channey, see Heartz, Pierre
Attaingnant, 110–17; on Bogard, see Guido Persoons, “Joannes I Bogardus, Jean II
Bogard en Pierre Bogard”; on Rabier, see Louis Desgraves, “L’Imprimeur Louis Rabier
d’Orléans en Béarn”; on Jérôme Haultin, see Louis Desgraves, Les Haultin. A number
of Huguenot printers fled Paris and Lyon during the Wars of Religion, and Geneva
especially became an outpost for French music printing. Production was limited, but
included editions from Simon Du Bosc, a printer who worked in Paris, Lyon, and pos-
sibly Alençon before moving to Geneva; Pierre Haultin, who printed spiritualized ver-
sions of Lassus’s chansons in La Rochelle; and Bernhard Jobin, who printed Huguenot
chansons spirituelles in Strasbourg. On Jobin, see William Young, “Music Printing in
Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg.”
60
Nouveau recueil et élite de plusieurs belles chansons joyeuses, honnestes, et amoureuses, Partie mises
en Musique, en une voix (Rouen: Thomas Mallard [1580]).
61
On Fezandat, who specialized in tablature, see Heartz, “Parisian Music Publishing
under Henry II”; on Jan de Laet, Antwerp’s town printer from 1549 to 1566 and a small
producer of music books, see Robert L. Weaver, A Descriptive Bibliographical Catalog of
the Music Printed by Hubert Waelrant and Jan de Laet, and idem, Waelrant and Laet.
last part of the century we find polyphony suddenly being printed in some of
France’s most politicized cities—La Rochelle was a Protestant stronghold; Rouen
was a bastion of the Catholic League; and it was to Caen that royalist parliamen-
tarians fled from Rouen in 1589.62 It may well be that Paris and Lyon monopo-
lized production until the religious wars disrupted distribution to middling cities
and towns and the chanson itself came to be affected by confessional battles.63
To conclude, then, it is important to understand the distribution of printed
music as concentrated in specific centers and—to a lesser extent—operating
regionally and internationally along trade routes that depended on enterprising
booksellers. There is no evidence that music flew from Attaingnant’s presses in
Paris into shops and homes across Europe; on the contrary, local interests often
impeded distribution.64 Avid collectors such as Henry of Castell and Sebastian
Grolande traveled internationally to purchase their chansonniers, which they
picked up during stays in Paris and Lyon.65 Late in the century, printers in
Caen and La Rochelle entered the market for part music with editions of chan-
sons, airs, chansons spirituelles, psalms, and motets that presumably held some
local interest and might sell well in Paris or Antwerp. But in many places
and for many kinds of music, markets for printed music developed slowly and
manuscript production of chansonniers must have remained quite healthy, as
in Flanders before Tielman Susato opened up shop in Antwerp in 1543.66
Music Sales and Some Evidence of Stock Bindings

Only when printed music reached the bookseller’s shop, whether it was yards or
leagues away from the press, were the sheets assembled into books. Complaints
about missing sheets abound as printers received anxious requests for replace-
ment sheets from booksellers who held incomplete volumes. The Florentine
bookseller Morosi, who kept a detailed list of the defective books that arrived
at his shop in the decades around 1600, recorded numerous books missing
62
A good share of the music published by Mangeant in Caen was by the royalist
Guillaume de Chastillon de La Tour, who dedicated his Airs of 1593 to Henri IV; it is
possible that Chastillon helped finance the publication.
63
See Kate van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France, ch. 4.
64
True after 1600 as well. See Guillo, Pierre I Ballard, 1:71–76.
65
On Castell’s books from Paris and Venice, see Eva Pleticha, Adel und Buch, 110–13.
66
Some Flemish manuscripts (now lost) can be tracked through binding orders like those
in table 2.1. Among the survivors are the Winchester Partbooks studied by Kristine
K. Forney, “A Gift of Madrigals and Chansons,” 54–55, the Stonyhurst Manuscript, and
Bologna Q 26.
sheets and half-sheets and with various printing errors as egregious as sheets
being printed “backwards” (i.e. with the second forme inverted, making it
impossible to fold into a book).67
Folded and assembled, books were often sold with nothing but a thread
holding the gatherings together within paper wrappers. Many of them stayed
that way. Like the livrets of the seventeenth-century bibliothèque bleue—so-
called for the blue stock used to cover these chapbook editions—music, too,
might spend its lifetime without protective binding.68 Even so, rare is the
music that one finds today still in white or blue paper covers. Nineteenth-
century preservation campaigns such as that at the Liceo Musicale in
Bologna were especially effective in regularizing the outward appearance of
early books, removing them from their original coverings and rebinding in
stock covers. One isolated example of partbooks in the state in which they
left the bookseller is BnF Rés. Vm7 255, a set of six partbooks owned by the
great collector Sébastien de Brossard (1655–1730). Remarkably intact, only
the Dessus and Haute-contre are missing a couple of pages from the outsides
of the booklet.69
To avoid having the pages tear away from music books, many collectors tied
them into cardboard covers.70 Cardboard provided a perfectly fine binding for
individual partbooks, which hardly merited leather-covered boards when left
on their own. The remarkably well-preserved collection of sixteenth-century
partbooks at the Accademia Filarmonica di Verona (founded in 1543) is
largely in cardboard covers. The one shown in figure 2.2 was labeled in the
sixteenth century with a shelfmark (“29”), the composer’s name, and a short
title (“[Filipp]o Nicoletti l[ibr]o p[rim]o a 5”), and the voice part (“Basso”).
The Nicoletti parts—and seven other sets of partbooks—were given to the
Accademia by Bartolomeo Carteri, a composer, teacher, and member of the
academy, as indicated on the cover of this one.71
67
Morosi’s records are extensive. See Gehl, “‘Mancha uno alfabeto intero’,” and
McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 149–50.
68
On the bibliothèque bleue see Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print, ch. 7.
69
The Brossard title is Mélanges de musique de Jacques Le Fevre (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1613).
For other examples, see Anne Tatnall Gross, “A Musicological Puzzle,” 307.
70
On a large collection in limp bindings, see Laurent Guillo, “Les Livres de musique de
Hugues Picardet (1560–1641),” especially BnF Cons. Rés. 217.
71
On the books donated by Carteri as well as another donation of five prints from Count
Giovanni Severino, see Giuseppe Turrini, L’Accademia Filarmonica di Verona, 145–46.
Carteri appears to have chosen these bindings himself, since the handwriting on
the covers matches contemporary documents in his hand. On Carteri, see Pierpaolo
Brugnoli, “Nuovi documenti sul musico Bartolomeo Carteri.”
F i g u r e 2 . 2 Filippo Nicoletti, Il Primo libro de Madrigali a 5 (Venice: Gardane,
1578), cover of the Bassus partbook. The owner of this set of partbooks, a
professional musician, chose workaday cardboard for his bindings.
Of the sturdier bindings for music, common coverings were parchment or

vellum, a fine parchment made of calf’s skin.72 Parchment was strong, light,
cheap, and flexible and popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for
binding workaday books such as academic texts and music. The gatherings
were sewn onto strips of vellum or leather and easily laced into the limp cov-
ers, which were wonderfully hard-wearing, though they stiffen with time, and
if exposed to extreme heat or a spell in the sun, the covers could curl up “like
a brace of white brandy-snaps.”73 Ties of silk ribbon or leather thong helped
keep the books in shape. Another style of binding common in Italy is found
in quantity at the Accademia Filarmonica di Verona, where a number of vol-
umes reinforce cardboard bindings with parchment spines, an optimal choice
for durability at a low cost and one consistent with the apparent objectives of
the Accademia to create a stock of music for performance and to lend out to
members. Inexpensive bindings could also be fashioned from recycled pieces of
parchment—discarded legal documents and pages from books in manuscript
72
On coverings, see Mirjam M. Foot, Bookbinders at Work, esp. 58–64.
73
Cited in Philippa J. M. Marks, The British Library Guide to Bookbinding, 36.
regularly show up in bindings (from which fragments of early chant manu-
scripts are still being recovered as well). The binding of choice for all sorts
of ordinary books, parchment and vellum satisfied the need for affordability
and comfort. Scholars, especially, preferred these cheap limp bindings for their
books, and we know that some even bound their chapbooks this way: Joseph
Scaliger, for one, declared that he could not bear to read books unbound (pos-
sibly for the same sorts of reasons that singers inevitably use ringbinders for
photocopied sheet music but instrumentalists are often fine reading from a
sheaf of loose leaves on their music stands).74 Lightweight parchment also
allowed singers to hold a partbook in one hand while beating time with the
other or marking their place in the music. For connoisseurs who desired some-
thing fancier, slick white vellum covers could be dressed up with gold tooling
and gilt edges, decoration one finds on a number of chansonniers and collec-
tions of airs from around 1600 (see figure 2.3).
The beautiful chansonnier shown in figure 2.3 bears early shelfmarks that
show it came from a substantial collection. Its shelfmarks also match those on
another large set of chansonniers in similar bindings with goffered gold edges
and colorful silk ties at the New York Public Library. Whoever ordered these
bindings probably had a well-appointed music room or library filled with a few
shelves of matching books bound in their house style.
Booksellers regularly contracted with binders to service such clients’
needs. Indeed, the two professions shared a common guild in France, the
Confrérie des Libraires, Relieurs, Enlumineurs, Ecrivains et Parcheminiers
(the Confraternity of Booksellers, Bookbinders, Illuminators, Scribes, and
Parchment Sellers), an organization that predated the invention of printing.
This meant that although imprimeurs did not involve themselves with the busi-
ness of binding, libraires did, as did printer-booksellers such as Attaingnant,
Plantin, and the Ballards, who sold a variety of books and paper goods and
could offer bindings on the side.
Christopher Plantin operated his business on all of these levels, buying
and reselling music imported from Paris, filling binding orders for clients,
and even having stock bindings made for books he believed would sell well,
music included. The archives of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp
provide the most comprehensive information from the age concerning the
sale of bound music books, not only because the press was one of the largest
and longest standing of early modern Europe, but because bindings comprised
74
See Anthony Grafton, “The Humanist as Reader,” 193–94, on Scaliger and humanist
bindings
F i g u r e 2 .3 A tract volume of seven books of chansons from Paris, Lyon,
and Louvain (1570–78) now in the New York Public Library, *MN C696. Bassus
partbook bound in white vellum with gold stamping, gold goffered edges, and blue
and gold silk ties. It is the lone survivor of this set of partbooks, but it once belonged
to a larger collection of which NYPL Music Reserve *MN P534 was also a part.
a significant portion of Plantin’s business. Plantin himself trained as a binder

but gave up the trade and became a printer in 1555, allegedly after having been
stabbed in the shoulder when he was mistaken for a musician against whom
someone held a grudge.75 Despite the injury, he continued to produce luxury
bindings for an exclusive clientele of rich bibliophiles, and the bookshop con-
tracted out a large amount of other work to craftsmen in Antwerp and even
Paris, work that was recorded in the Livres des relieurs kept by the Officina. The
books bound for Plantin included both those from his press and from other
printers and represented a significant proportion of the firm’s business. In the
years 1566–67, for example, Plantin paid for 12,546 bindings, orders that were
filled by twelve different local craftsmen.76
75
On Plantin’s career as a binder, see Voet, The Golden Compasses, 2:244–52, and, on the
attack, 1:18–19. Also see Forney, “A Gift of Madrigals and Chansons,” 54–55.
76
Voet, The Golden Compasses, 2:247–48. My research at the APM concentrated on these
two years in order to build on the data compiled by Voet for 1566–67 and Vanhulst,
“Suppliers and Clients,” for 1566–78.
Most of the binding orders were stock bindings for best-sellers. At the top
of the list were Bibles by the hundreds, followed by prayer books, catechisms
in small formats, almanacs, books of psalms, grammars, dictionaries, emblem
books, gospels, classics such as Cicero and Aristotle, Pierre Boaistuau’s Théâtre
du Monde, books of hours, Aesop’s fables, ABCs, chivalric romances, and other
quick-selling titles. Ordered in bulk, the stock bindings were invariably ordi-
nary: basane (basan or sheepskin), veau (calfskin), or parchemin (parchment).
Plantin sometimes ordered bindings with silk ribbons, but anything more
extravagant was a special order for a client.
In these same years, Plantin ordered some 125 bindings for “livres de
musique” (see table 2.1). One was a fancy personalized binding for a manu-
script chansonnier belonging to Marie de Aranda (member of a Spanish mer-
chant family in Bruges), but most of the rest were generic bindings designed
to be sold “prêt-à-porter.” What is particularly striking about this list is the
preponderance of chansons and especially what appear to be chansons à 3.77
Plantin certainly dealt in other genres of music—motets, tablatures, and so
forth—but these records suggest that chansons sold quite well, enough to have
books of them bound on spec with reasonable assurance of a quick return on
the investment. Like catechisms, almanacs, and psalters, chansonniers turned
a speedy profit.
The last entry in table 2.1 is of particular interest because it is possible to
follow the sale of these volumes to other booksellers and individual clients.
In the months after the octavo volumes came back from the binder in July
1566, Plantin sold a rash of music identified variously as “Livre de Musique
3 vollumes 8o,” “Recueil des Chansons etc. 3 vollumes parchemin,” “Livre en
musique 8o 3 vollumes Paris ligature” and variations of the same (see table 2.2).
Working back from the sales records, I suspect that this large binding order
included some of the “Recueil[s]‌des Chansons etc. 8o 3 vollumes ligature” sold
beginning in August; doubtless the chansonniers listed in entry 2 of table 2.1
also contributed to this flow. It is impossible to say for certain whether the
words “vollumes,” “pieces,” and “parties” refer to volumes of a series or the
number of voice parts, but with bound items, it is reasonable to presume that
77
See table 2.1, entries 2, 3, 8, and 9. If my estimates are correct, three-voice works account
for over 80% of the music bindings ordered in those years. It is hard to reconstruct pre-
cisely when and from whom Plantin purchased the music that he had bound because
the Journaux des affaires and Grands livres des affaires begin only in 1566. Judging from
the items sold to Pierre de La Tombe on 20 January 1566 (see n. 29), Plantin received
a shipment from Paris in 1565 that included a number of chansons à 3 in quarto and
chansons à 4 in octavo.
T A B L E 2 .1 Christopher Plantin’s binding orders for music, 1566–1567 (by name
of binder)
Joos de Hertoch, Relieur
1. 14 March 1566 (APM 756, fol. 2r)
13 Livres de musique 4o esquil de soye 2 fl. 12 st.
[13 Music books, quarto, silk ribbons]
2. 3 September 1566 (APM 756, fol. 6r) a
12 Recul des chansons 3 voll. en veau, 8o 3 fl. 12 st.
[12 Collections of chansons, 3 volumes in calfskin, octavo]
6 Chansons de 3 voll. in parch[emin] de veau. 4 complet, 8o 12 st.
[6 Chansons in 3 volumes in calf parchment, 4 complete, octavo]
3. 20 January 1567 (APM 756, fol. 8v)
3 Livretz en Musiq[ue] petit 4o p[a]‌rchemin de veau, esg[uil] de soye. 9 st.
[3 Booklets of music, small quarto, calf parchment, silk ribbons]
4. 20 March 1567 (APM 756, fol. 9r)
Item p[ou]r Maistre Lestiene Il a liez 5 p[ieces] de Musiq[ue]
e[n] p[ar]che[m]i[n] de veau lesquelles il faict escrire a mon conte 1 fl.
[Also for M. Lestiene (possibly the Antwerp bookseller G. Lesteens)
He bound 5 volumes of music in calf parchment, which he put
on my account]
Gommer, Relieur
5. 1 March 1566 (APM 756, fol. 21v)
P[our] avoir plie et batu 1: Motetta Clementis 1 fl.
[For having folded and beaten 1 Motets of Clemens]
6. 2 January 1567 (APM 756 fol. 25r)
1 Rec des chansons 8o parch[emin] 3
2 st.
[1 Collection of chansons, octavo, parchment—possibly a book of poetry]
Laurents [Cecile] Relieur
7. 21 July 1567 (APM 756, fol. 36v)
1 Livre de Chansons pour la 4o dore escriptz a la main
escrire d’ung coste Marie de Ara[n]da
et de laultre coste anno 1567 dore [last word illegible] 1 fl. 4 st.
[1 Book of chansons, quarto, gilded, manuscript,
inscribed on one side “Marie de Aranda”
and on the other side “Anno 1567,” gilded {?}]
Jan Mollino [Jan du Molin]
8. 27 May 1566 (APM 756, fol. 55r)
1 Chans[ons] 8o 3 voll. parch[emin] de veau 7 st.
[1 Book of chansons, octavo, three volumes, calf parchment]
( continued )
T A B L E 2 .1 Continued
9. 3 July 1566 (APM 756, fol. 55v)
59 voll. 8o de [illegible word] livres de Musique 7 fl. 7 st.
12 12 11 rendu en 3. et 1 imp[arfait]
[59 volumes, octavo, of {?} books of music
12 12 11 given back in 3. and 1 imperfect] b
a
Orders such as those listed in this entry are far from clear, but judging from the prices, the first
payment was for thirty-six bindings, and the second for six, each binding costing 2 stuivers or patards.
On the average, Joos de Hertoch (one of Plantin’s principal binders) charged 2 stuivers for an octavo
binding in calfskin or calf parchment (basan was a little cheaper at 1¼ stuivers). See Voet, The Golden
Compasses, 2:249–50. These relative prices make it possible to discern how many separate booklets
Plantin is describing in his entries. The two “incomplete” books may have been missing anything from a
half-sheet or sheet to one number of a series.
b
The numbers “12 12 11” do not add up to fifty-nine, of course, but given that the entries were made
while checking inventory, the annotation may represent a counting off by twelve in which only the last
three dozen were noted down, precisely because a problem had been discovered. One rendering: the
(part)books were given back (to Plantin) in (sets of) 3, with one imperfect (partbook, leaving a partial
set of two).
these terms refer to the number of objects on the counter rather than their
contents.78
One obstacle to identifying the titles is that no obvious candidates in
octavo survive with publication dates near 1566. Henri Vanhulst has sup-
posed that Plantin was selling volumes from the Premier–Quart Livre du
Recueil des recueilz de chansons à quatre parties (Paris: Nicolas Du Chemin,
1561–67), a series known to scholars only from a Parisian sale catalogue from
1904.79 But Du Chemin’s Livre de chansons series and his Livres de danseries
were all in oblong quarto. The octavo designation in the Livre des relieurs, the
Journal des affaires, and the Grands livres des affaires from the Plantin archives
is explicit and I doubt that it is a mistake—not only would the format have
been obvious to the binders, the format was used to calculate the price of the
78
That is, only the octavo format is clear. “Three” may refer to trios or the three volumes
of a numbered series like the octavo Fleur de chansons books 1–6 (Antwerp: Susato,
1552), which included some volumes à 3 and some à 4; the “Livres de musique” bound
by Jan du Molin may have been motets in octavo (Susato printed some in that format,
for four or more voices). I hazard the guess that the books were chansons à 3 from Le
Roy & Ballard because they used octavo for several series of chansons à 4 (the extensive
Livre de chansons series, plus a series from 1554–55 titled Recueil de chansons [see figure
2.1], and a series dated 1561–73 titled Recueil des recueils); moreover, their two octavo
series à 3 ran to three numbers.
79
See Vanhulst, “Suppliers and Clients,” 578, chronological list no. 16; and Lesure and
Thibault, “Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas du Chemin,” cata-
logue nos. 78, 79, 85.
TA BL E 2.2 Christopher Plantin’s sales of bound octavo chansonniers, 1566–1567
The material in this table is derived from the chronological list given in Vanhulst,
“Suppliers and Clients,” 576–83. Entries that do not specify binding are included
where the prices are consistent with those of the bound volumes.
1566
12 August over-the-counter sale
1 Livre en Musique 3 vollumes 8o (bound?) 3 fl. 10 st.
14 August Gasparus van Zurich (financier for Plantin)
1 Recueil des Chansons etc. 3 vollumes parchemin 3 fl.
14 August Dominus Cornelius de Bomberghen (associate of Plantin)
1 Recueil des Chansons etc. 8o 3 vollumes ligature 3 fl.
16 August Monseigneur Marcus Peres (Spanish bibliophile)
1 Livre en Musique 8o 3 vollumes Paris ligature 3 fl. 15 st.
16 August Maître Joos Laurents
1 Livre en musique 3 volumes lié en parchemin de veau 8o 3 fl. 10 st.
16 August Guerardt van Campen (Breda bookseller)
1 Recuel des chansons 3 vollumes 8o parchemin de veau 2 fl. 14 st.
18 August Monseigneur Alexander Grapheus (secretary, city of Antwerp)
1 Livre de Musique 3 vollumes ligature 4 fl.
(on 29 Aug. he returns them for Idem blanc, 2 copies for 8 fl.)
1 Livre en Musique 3 vollumes ligature 3 fl. 10 st.
1 Receul des chansons en 3 volumes parchemin de veau 3 fl. 10 st.
22 September over-the-counter sale
1 Recuel des Chansons a 3 parties 8o en parchemin de veau 4 fl.
29 September over-the-counter sale
1 Recuel des Chansons a 3 parties (bound?) 3 fl. 10 st.
1 3e partie des chansons 8o lié (one of the incomplete volumes?) 1 fl. 6 st.
4 October Gueraert Janssen van Campen (Breda bookseller)
1 Recuel de Cansons a 3 parties ligature 2 fl. 14 st.
13 October over-the-counter sale
1 Recueil des chansons 8o 3 vollumes (bound?) 4 fl.
16 October Joannes Waesbergen (Antwerp bookseller)
1 Recueil des Chansons 8o 3 parties (bound?) 3 fl. 17 st.
24 December over-the-counter sale
1 Recuel des chansons 3 volumes ligature 3 fl. 14 st.
1567
16 January over-the-counter sale
1 Recueil de chansons 8o ligature 3 fl. 15 st.
( continued )
T A B L E 2 . 2 Continued
11 February over-the-counter sale
1 Recueil des chansons 3 volumes 8o ligature 3 fl. 10 st.
1 March over-the-counter sale
1 Recueil des chansons 3 vollumes parchemin 3 fl. 19 st.
3 March Monseigneur Le Secretaire de Witte (secretary, council of Brabant)
1 Recueil des chansons 8o Gift
binding and sale price of the books. For this reason, I suspect that Plantin’s
binding order was for a different series, perhaps a missing early edition of Le
Roy & Ballard’s Premier–Tiers Livres de chansons à 3 (1578). That later edition
was printed in octavo and contains older chansons, many of which Le Roy &
Ballard had printed in 1553 and 1573.80 There is no reason not to suppose that
the 1578 edition is a reprint of an earlier publication. But even if we cannot
know precisely what titles Plantin sent to the binder, the difficulties figuring
out which chansonniers the archives refer to demonstrate another point: the
survival rates for chanson anthologies are abysmal, so much so that entire
series have to be posited from a single copy of a posterior edition or an entry in
a century-old auction catalogue. For all we know, the chansonniers may have
come from the presses of Michel Fezandat, a Parisian printer who produced a
few livres de chansons in octavo formats, though the sole survivors are all à 4
and date from 1556.81
Whatever their identity, Plantin sold a number of bound octavo chanson-
niers between August 1566 and March 1567 (see table 2.2), probably from the
batch contracted out to Jan du Molin. Most were sold over the counter or went to
friends and associates, but even booksellers—who were predisposed to purchase
books en blanc—took a couple of copies bound. Prices ranged from the whole-
sale rates of 2 fl. 14 st. (Breda bookseller) and 3 fl. (friends and associates) to the
retail price of 4 fl. (over-the-counter sales), with 3 fl. 10 st. being the most com-
mon amount paid for the books. Compared to the prices of the same volumes
unbound (2 fl. 10 st. wholesale, 3 fl. retail), Plantin made almost an extra florin
profit on some sales, depending on the client. The prices varied so much because
personal and professional relationships counted in such real terms in Plantin’s
enterprise, something evident not just in the high prices put on walk-in sales,
80
On the 1553 edition see Courtney S. Adams, ed., The Tiers livre de chansons. Unique in
Le Roy & Ballard’s output, it was printed in choirbook layout in a single quarto volume
(170 × 230 mm).
81
RISM 155620 and 155621. Only the Bassus survives from each edition.
but also in the gift of chansons to the secretary of the council of Brabant, which
seems to have cleared out Plantin’s stock of the bound volumes. We should also
see in these uneven prices the sophistication of a system that relied heavily on
booksellers as middlemen who could buy in quantity at super-wholesale prices
or traffic smaller numbers of titles at wholesale and still make a profit from retail
sales. Plantin operated here as master distributor and retailer, something only
a large and canny printer-bookseller could manage. The quick little transac-
tions listed in table 2.2, which began with standing clients, circled outward to a
series of over-the-counter sales, and ended with a gift, represent half of Plantin’s
income from music between August 1566 and March 1567.
Despite these healthy sales, the Officina rarely dealt in bound music vol-
umes. Indeed, the chansonnier venture was unique—there are no analogous
binding orders or sales of bound music in the years 1566 to 1578. I presume
that Plantin chose to speculate on this large quantity of music books because
smaller-voiced chansons had been selling so well in those years and because
the octavo bindings were fairly cheap (40% of the price of a quarto binding).
The month after the bound octavo chansonniers went on sale, Plantin received
a shipment of “25 Chansons a 3 parties 8o” (50 fl.) and “12 idem 3e volume 8o”
(9 fl.) from Martin Le Jeusne in Paris, presumably more of the same Parisian
stock he was selling bound.82
Although chansons did not always figure so prominently in his sales, in
these years Plantin was desperately trying to rebuild his business after the
disaster of 1562, when he was accused of printing a heretical book. His prop-
erty was seized and sold at auction, which left him gravely in need of funds
when he finally managed to clear his name and set up shop again at the very
end of 1563.83 The books that rolled off his new presses in 1564 were all calcu-
lated to bring swift returns: First came a sextodecimo edition of Virgil’s works
in a print-run of 2,500 copies, then an ABC for children, followed by a year
that saw an overwhelming preponderance of best-sellers in octavo and smaller
formats. Like the successful breviary that subsidized Plantin’s four-year pro-
duction of the Biblia polyglotta (1569–73), these little books required fewer
sheets of paper, were quickly made, and fed reliable markets, which meant
82
Vanhulst, “Suppliers and Clients,” chronological list no. 32. For these prices to make
sense, the first item would have been for twenty-five copies of books 1–3 of a series
(225 partbooks) and the second “idem” for twelve copies of the third book alone. The
money for the sale was “mis au compte de Martin le Jeusne et Pierre Haultin.” Haultin
cut types for Du Chemin and Plantin and eventually set up shop in La Rochelle. See
Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 49–59, and Desgraves, Les Haultin.
83
Voet, The Golden Compasses, 1:35–46, and Florence Edler, “Cost Accounting in the
Sixteenth Century.”
that they would not languish in the bookshop or warehouse tying up scarce
resources.84
Plantin is justly famous for monumental publications such as the Polyglot
Bible and—for music—the magnificent Octo missae of George de La Hèle. But
smaller books like the sextodecimo Virgil and single-sheet jobs like commer-
cial announcements, civic ordinances, edicts, and almanacs represented the
bread and butter of even the largest presses. “Printers were businessmen, pur-
suing profit,” Peter Stallybrass reminds us in his essay on the “little jobs” that
sustained printers during the handpress era, “and profit was rarely to be made
by publishing huge folios that required major capital investments.” 85 Just as
study of broadsides and other work undertaken for profit speaks directly to the
bottom-line operations of a press, Plantin’s swift trade in Parisian chansons
vividly underscores the lucrative nature of importing small chansonniers and
the desirability of the least expensive music books.
The bound volumes appear to have sold out, and—significantly—Plantin’s
most reliable distributors were not on the list of buyers. Pierre de La Tombe,
the Brussels bookseller with whom he had regular dealings, bought two copies
blanc but none bound, and even one of the over-the-counter sales (to Alexander
Grapheus, on 8 August 1566) was returned a couple of weeks later for two
unbound copies of the same title (for which Plantin charged the premium
price of 4 fl. each). The parchment bindings he ordered for the chansonniers
must have satisfied the needs of some musicians, who probably cared more
about singing and playing than the look of their library. On the other hand,
though, many purchasers did want to decide for themselves how (and whether)
to bind their music. They might not have wanted to pay the extra florin for the
bindings, and should they have wished to gather their sheet music together in
books, they might have preferred to put it together in larger volumes of their
own design or to have it bound in a way that matched the other music or books
in their collections. Off it went in paper covers, out the door of the bookseller’s
shop, to any number of possible ends.
84
On the breviary, see Stallybrass, “Little Jobs,” 322.
85
Ibid., 320. On financing the Octo missae, see van Orden, Music, Authorship, and the
Book, 66–67.
Chapter Three Early Collectors and Modern
Libraries
I heard from a friend who is a priest in a little village that he saw [a music book] in the
hands of a hunter who was using it to load his musket, and I believe that it was titled
Odechaton de’ musici, which I would not have believed if I did not hold the cleric who
told me about it in such esteem.1
— Giuseppe Maria Patuzzi to Padre Giambattista Martini, 10 November 1753
T wo and a half centuries after Ottaviano Petrucci published the first

polyphonic chansonnier in Venice in 1501, Padre Giambattista Martini,
the Continent’s greatest music historian and collector of early music, was hot
on the trail of an Odhecaton to add to his library. Agents across Italy worked
to help him acquire the books he sought, and knowing as he apparently did
the historical significance of Petrucci’s prints, they were high on his list of
desirables. Giuseppe Maria Patuzzi managed to find the hunter he wrote to
1
“Da un amico curato in un picciol villaggio n’è stato veduto in mano ad un cacciatore che
se ne serviva per caricare lo schioppo, e credo fosse quello intitolato l’Odechaton de’ musici;
che non l’avrei creduto, se non tenessi in buona stima il religioso che me lo ha raccontato.”
Letter from Giuseppe Maria Patuzzi to Padre Giambattista Martini, Limone sul Garda, 10
November 1753. Shelfmark I. 18.38, Bologna, MIBM. My thanks to Alfredo Vitolo for this
transcription. The letters are cited in Anne Schnoebelen, “The Growth of Padre Martini’s
Library,” 389, and discussed in Elisabetta Pasquini, Giambattista Martini, 70.
Martini about in November 1753, but the man refused to part with his dimin-
ishing copy of the Odhecaton, the pages of which must have been the perfect
size and consistency for securing the powder in his gun. That book met its
end, song by song and shot by shot, but Martini’s lust for music books saved
others on his lists, making his library in Bologna one of the world’s treasure
chests of sixteenth-century music. The Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della
Musica possesses unique first editions of the Harmonice musices Odhecaton A
(1501), Canti B (1502), and Motetti A (1502) among its extremely rich holdings
of twenty-eight of Petrucci’s books.2 Martini amassed what became the larg-
est single collection of Petrucci prints to survive to this day, and thanks to his
broad interests, we can still see a copy of the chanson anthology that marked
the outset of polyphonic printing.
In this chapter, I argue that most of the printed music books we work
with today survive thanks to a very limited number of collectors, individuals
who liked music and books, and especially those who liked to bind things for
their libraries and put them away safely, beautifully packaged. I concentrate
on chansonniers, but given that collectors often bound chansons with motets,
madrigals, Lieder, psalms, and even masses, my object-based history inevita-
bly roves beyond generic confines. While I begin in France, this account of
acquisition and preservation also traverses proto-national borders and crosses
into Italian- and particularly German-speaking lands, for whereas present-day
collections of chansonniers in France have little historical depth of provenance,
the music library consolidated by the dukes of Bavaria in the years around
1590 and now held at the Bavarian State Library in Munich constitutes one
of Europe’s principal repositories of sixteenth-century chanson prints, most of
them from Paris and Lyon; moreover, the records of the books’ provenances
are rivaled only by those for the chansonniers at the Accademia Filarmonica
di Verona, making Munich a plentiful site for research. Harder to describe are
the fortunes of printed music that does not survive, the huge quantities now
destroyed, but this history of loss is also of central interest, since it suggests a
relatively low material status for printed music by comparison with other sorts
of books. The reception of music, then, its physical reception and preservation
as an object, can tell us something of what it meant to those who acquired it.
No matter how great the artistic merit of the works, furthermore, this par-
ticularly materialistic reception history plays importantly against the intrinsic
value historians assign to works and their composers, forcing a reappraisal
2
See Boorman, Ottaviano Petrucci, 342–49 and catalogue nos. 1–3, 5. On Martini’s
library, see Elisabetta Pasquini, “A ‘vast suite’,” with details on the Odhecaton at p. 100.
of the cultural importance of music books as potential classics meant to be
safeguarded in Renaissance libraries. It also sharpens our understanding of
the provenance of the early printed books on which histories of music depend.
Book Ownership and the First Bibliographies

In sixteenth-century Paris, most book collectors were magistrates, jurists, and
ecclesiastics, which is to say, those who made their careers with the pen and the
word.3 This fact alone suggests that the public for printed music was limited.
Book collectors from other professions—doctors, merchants, bourgeois, nobles,
artisans, and so forth—comprised only about a third of the buying public in
absolute numbers, and on the average each owned fewer books than lawyers
and clergymen.4 For those who did own more than just a family Bible or book
of hours, the kinds of books individuals collected are predictable—clerics
owned missals, breviaries, collections of sermons and other sacred texts, and
lawyers had commentaries on canon and Roman law. Lawyers proved to be
the most avid readers, branching out from professional literature to the great
texts of antiquity. Humanists in outlook and education, they formed a bureau-
cratic corps centered on the law courts on the Île de la Cité in Paris, very near
the heart of the printing trade. Indeed, the Palais de Justice housed a series
of booksellers’ stalls in its corridors, galleries, and between the pillars of the
Great Hall, which were patronized by the royal officers, magistrates, and par-
liamentarians whose work contributed to the growing paper chase of French
government.5 Unlike the older military aristocracy, which was notoriously less
lettered, these nobles de la robe (so-called for the robes of their legal attire)
gained social mobility through the book, and they argued for a new defini-
tion of nobility based on classical erudition.6 Their interest in classical poetry,
oratory, and history supported an important trade in humanistic titles, and
they were among the first significant consumers of the new vernacular lyric of
the Pléiade poets that was widely set to music after 1570. Nonetheless, if the
evidence of sixteenth-century private libraries is any indication, the works of
3
For an analysis of book ownership according to profession, see Pierre Aquilon, “Petites
et moyennes bibliothèques, 1530–1660,” 185–95.
4
Robert Doucet, Les Bibliothèques parisiennes, and Henri-Jean Martin, “Livres et société,”
543–47.
5
See Arthur Tilley, “A Paris Bookseller,” 44–45.
6
See George Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes. The old aristocracy gradually became
more humanistic. See Donna Bohanan, “The Education of Nobles.”
e a r l y c o l l e c t o r s a n d m o d e r n l i b r a r i e s | 69
François Rabelais, Clément Marot, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Pierre de Ronsard,
and other contemporary authors in the vernacular were not nearly as popular
as tried-and-true romans de chevalerie such as Lancelot or Godefroy de Bouillon, old
poetry by François Villon, and the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose.7
Where did music fit into this world of books? The chansonniers printed by
Attaingnant contain many settings of the poetry of Marot and Saint-Gelais,
something that has always been taken as a sign of their potential popularity.
But even this brief consideration of the book-buying public in Paris cautions
that the appeal of these polyphonic prints did not rest on the ultimate fame
of the poets who penned their verse. As much as literary historians value this
poetry today, there is little evidence that it attracted a large public when it was
first coming off the press. Finally, despite the impressive range of books owned
by some readers, it is important to always hold in mind that some priests and
canons, some lawyers, and even wealthy merchants with significant fortunes
often did not own any books at all.8 If all manner of printing might for this
reason be considered a specialty trade, music was so to an even greater degree.
This did not make printed music precious. On the contrary, surviving
estate inventories reveal that compared to other sorts of books, printed part
music was misprized. When we find it in inventaires après décès at all, the entries
for music books tend to come at the end with other items of lesser worth,
the values ascribed to music are lower, and the prints are often described as
bundled in pacquets about which details are lacking. Small and esoteric, music
books fared badly in collections dominated by theological and legal works,
editions of classics, and devotional texts such as psalters, Bibles, and books of
hours, these last having been the absolute sustenance of the printing trade in
Paris.9 The records on book ownership—estate inventories, early catalogues
of royal libraries, sale catalogues, and inventories drawn up for transfers of
ownership—challenge a number of assumptions about who purchased pas-
time music like chansons, how and whether they bound their chansonniers
7
Many of these titles were published by Galliot Du Pré, who sold at the Palais de Justice.
See Tilley, “A Paris Bookseller.” On the consumption of vernacular literature in Paris,
see Alexander H. Schutz, Vernacular Books, and at the court, see Jacquline Boucher,
Société et mentalities, 3:852–92. On the book trade in France, see Pettegree, The Book in
the Renaissance, 250–54.
8
See Doucet, Les Bibliothèques parisiennes, who found 194 inventaires with books out of the
“centaines” he examined (p. 20); and Labarre, Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise, who studied
4,442 inventaires après décès from Amiens, of which 886 included books.
9
For some hard numbers see Virginia Reinburg, “Books of Hours.” For cautions against
overestimating the market for printed polyphony in London, see Jeremy L. Smith,
“Print Culture and the Elizabethan Composer.”
for preservation, and the extent to which music lovers collected manuscripts
as well as prints.10
Music likewise fit awkwardly into the world of books described by the
great contemporary bibliographers, whose catalogues many must have used as
a guide to collecting. One of the first was La Libraria (1550) of Anton Francesco
Doni, a skilled musician and writer whose Dialogo della musica (1544) had given
readers a glimpse of the musical, social, and literary goings-on in Venetian
salons of the age.11 His Libraria included a special section at the end devoted
to music, in which he listed all of the prints known to him, including a num-
ber of anthologies such as La couronne et fleur des chansons a troys (Venice, 1536),
“Del fiore,” “Del frutto,” and duos of “diversi autori,” probably the very pop-
ular chanson arrangements and madrigals a 2 by Jhan Gero and Gardane.
Doni’s list of music titles is far from exhaustive, but it did establish the cul-
tural significance of music in literary circles, at least in the Veneto, and it no
doubt reminded those desirous to acquire the attributes of cultured Italians
that music belonged in any good household.12 The Venetian bias of Doni’s
Libraria excluded the French prints of Attaingnant and Moderne and with it
most chansonniers—a lacuna he had hoped to remedy—but his attention to
anthologies is nonetheless significant, for it shows the mentality of a music-
lover who knew that anthologies counted among the most desirable music
books to be had.13 Similarly, Conrad Gesner included a hefty section on music
and music theory in his Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium libri XIX
(1548), including 140 volumes of printed music, most of them anthologies.14
It doubtless owes to the musicality of Gesner and Doni that subsequent
bibliographers included music in their works at all. But those who followed
in their footsteps adopted a different classification scheme that left no place
for anthologies and, as a result, little place for the chanson, which tended
to be printed in collective volumes. Take, for instance, the Bibliotheque of
François de La Croix du Maine (Paris, 1584), which explicitly attempted to
outdo Doni’s Libraria and achieve for French vernacular literature what had
10
The modern presumption that printed books and manuscripts are categorically dif-
ferent from one another did not pertain in the early modern period. See McKitterick,
Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order. Also see Love, The Culture and Commerce of
Texts, 23–31 on the scribal publication of viol music in seventeenth-century England.
11
Anton Francesco Doni, La Libraria (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1550).
12
See James Haar, “The Libraria of Antonfrancesco Doni.”
13
Ibid., 103. Doni asked Jacques Buus to obtain a list of French music for him.
14
For the music entries and an analysis, see L. F. Bernstein, “The Bibliography of
Music”; on Doni and Gesner, see Camilla Cavicchi and Philippe Vendrix, “L’Érudit et
l’amateur,” 30–35.
been done for Italian authors by Doni (whose Libraria had just been reprinted
in 1580).15 The sheer number of entries compiled by La Croix du Maine (over
3,000 compared to less than 1,000 in Doni) and the historical dimension of
the project (which reaches back to the thirteenth century) certainly outstrips
Doni in many respects, but La Croix du Maine’s use of authorship as the
means of defining and organizing his bibliography meant that many of the
greatest composers of chansons were not included because their works had
been issued in anthologies. Clément Janequin, whose lengthy onomatopo-
etic chansons had broken the mold for chanson prints and been published in
single-composer volumes, receives an entry from La Croix du Maine, but Jean
Mouton, Claudin de Sermisy, Pierre Certon, and Claude Le Jeune—all com-
posers in royal service—were ignored. The same is true for the Bibliotheque of
Antoine Du Verdier, which followed on the heels of La Croix du Maine’s bib-
liography the next year.16 Here, too, the entries are by author, and anthologies
and anonymous works are excluded. The organizing principle of authorship
made chanson prints less visible, less identifiable, and relegated them to the
same bibliographic limbo as the chapbooks of anonymous poetry that came
off presses in great numbers but were rarely treated to the fine bindings that
would assure their place on the library shelf. So in addition to the obvious
limits of music literacy and the skills required to actually use polyphonic
prints, the music trade must have been isolated in some respect by music’s
exclusion from contemporary notions of what constituted a collectible book,
which left chansonniers at the end of inventories among the unnamed piles
of printed matter.
Small and Middling Music Collections

With all of these caveats in place about the difficulties of locating music in
inventorial documents and its uncertain bibliographic status, we can turn to
the records we do have of music ownership to try to discern from them how
and where chansonniers were used. Certainly one market for printed chansons
was music teachers and their students. Titles and “avertissements” addressed to
“amateurs de la science de musicque,” duos and trios aimed at beginners, and
the didactic aides penned into the flyleaves of chansonniers show that many of
15
François de La Croix du Maine, Premier volume de la bibliotheque (Paris: Abel l’Angelier,
1584). He mentions Doni in the dedication to the king.
16
Antoine Du Verdier, La Bibliotheque d’Antoine Du Verdier (Lyon: Barthélémy Honorat,
1585).
them served teachers and their students in an age before books of rudiments,
études, and exercises were common.
To my knowledge we have only one sixteenth-century record describing
the collection of a professional music teacher, that of Francesco Scudieri, who
lived in the Veneto; the inventory of his possessions was discovered by Giulio
Ongaro.17 Scudieri owned a few dozen books (including over twenty books of
music in manuscript and print, most of it unbound), a significant amount of
writing paper (some lined with staves), and a table with eight music stands.
The music was slightly dated by 1560 and shows the long-standing appeal
of certain titles: motets and madrigals of Cipriano de Rore, the chansons of
Clément Janequin, four books of madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt, madrigals
of Jhan Gero a 3, and “canzoni napolitane” a 4 and a 3. Taken as a whole,
Scudieri’s collection beautifully illustrates the needs of a professional music
teacher—paper ruled for writing out parts and intabulations and the most
popular prints of the century in their paper wrappers, with duplicates of favorite
music, if the three entries titled variously “Bataglie franzese di Janequino a 4,”
“Bataglie franzesi a cinque di Janequino slegate stampa di Paris,” and “Tre
libri delle bataglie francesi di Janequino” are any indication.18
It would appear that Scudieri kept extra copies of the Janequin chansons in
order to lend or sell them to students, and in an age when lending, trading, and
dealing in books second-hand were essential means by which they circulated,
we should also see the books of private music clubs such as the urban acad-
emies in Italy and Paris as resources for their members.19 By far the greatest
amount is known about the Accademia Filarmonica di Verona, a mixed group
of amateur and professional musicians established in 1543, whose collection of
books has survived remarkably intact. They, too, had copies of the chansons of
Janequin, which must have been fairly popular, since they apparently lost their
“Canzone Francese di Gianequin In carton” to a member who failed to return
it (it is listed in an inventory of 1564 of “cose che Amancano ne l’Academia
nostra,” a list of “things that are missing from our Academy,” which included
a number of single partbooks and several entire sets, as well as instruments).20
Likewise appropriate for amateurs at the Accademia Filarmonica would have
17
See Giulio M. Ongaro, “The Library of a Sixteenth-Century Music Teacher.”
18
Many collectors acquired second copies of works they already owned. The library of
Jean Grolier contained approximately 20% duplicate copies. See Annie Charon-Parent,
“Les Grandes Collections du XVIe siècle,” 98.
19
For a set of madrigal partbooks owned by a group of friends, see Philippe Canguilhem,
“Lorenzo Corsini’s ‘Libri di canzone’,” 6.
20
For a transcription of the list, see Turrini, L’Accademia Filarmonica di Verona, 95.
been chansons à 4 from the set of nine Attaingnant chansonniers dating
1539–44 and bound beautifully in leather-covered boards. These volumes
were purchased early on by the first music director of the Accademia, Jan
Nasco, who was appointed in 1547.21 Singers could have cut their teeth on
chansons by Sandrin, Claudin, Janequin, and Certon before moving on to the
other music owned by the Accademia, thicker-textured madrigals and motets
in the Venetian style of Adrian Willaert or Nasco himself.
European music teachers regularly stocked chansons as teaching pieces.
From Basel we have four sets of partbooks that were copied out in 1546 for
a young student there by his music teacher, Christoph Piperinus. Piperinus
included the rudiments of music, German Lieder, chansons, and a few motets,
and judging from the concordances, he may have owned a couple of Attaingnant
prints from which he excerpted Tant que vivray, Dont vien cela, Languir me fait,
Secourez moy (all by Sermisy), and others of the chansons that made the first
generation of Parisian chansonniers so collectible.22
As with the materials owned by music teachers and professional musicians,
information is predictably sparse concerning other small collections, but even
fleeting references to music books verify their place throughout many strata of
society. Table 3.1 reproduces the music items among the inventaires après décès
studied by Albert Labarre, who analyzed 4,442 inventories from Amiens.23
Twenty percent of the estates included books, and of those, six included music.
The social distribution of the music books in this list is particularly strik-
ing: a provincial nobleman owned a “livre à chanter,” a priest owned music
books almost exclusively, one merchant owned a book of dances, another
merchant owned four books that we might suppose were partbooks of chan-
sons or motets, and a stonemason owned “un livre de chant.” It is also revealing
that in two cases—Jean Le Prevost, the stonemason, and Nicolas Seneschal, a
cloth merchant—music was all the person owned in the way of books. Perhaps
whatever trade books, pattern books, and other professional items they had
belonged to their businesses and were not catalogued among their personal pos-
sessions. In the case of priests, who sang plainchant at the very least, the writ-
ten music tied to their profession would have been institutionally owned, by
church or monastery, though some clerics did own books of motets.24 But one
21
Ibid., 57.
22
See John Kmetz, The Sixteenth-Century Basel Songbooks, ch. 4 and, for the concordances
of Basel, University Library MS F. X. 22–24, see Inventory F (pp. 260–62).
23
Labarre, Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise. For the music items see inventory nos. 257, 372,
374, 683, 762, and 877, and p. 224.
24
Doucet, Les Bibliothèques parisiennes, 63.
T a b l e 3 .1 Owners of music books in Amiens according to inventaires après décès,
1503–1576
Date Owner and Inventory of Music Books
1537 François de La Viefville, chevalier, seigneur du dit lieu et de Frestoy (70 books total)
“Un livre à chanter”
1545 Jean Le Prevost, maitre maçon (1 book total)
“Un livre de chant”
1545 Nicolas Seneschal, marchand drapier (4 books total)
“4 livres de musique”
1563 Me Jean Lherreulx, prêtre (32 books total)
“26 livres en musicques”
“Deux grands livres en musicque”
“Ung aultre grand livre aussi en musicque”
1568 Antoine Peze, bourgeois et marchand (35 books total)
“Un livre des basse danses”
1576 Jean Hennouyn, chapelain de la cathedral (66 books total)
“Quatre petits livres de musicque”
conclusion we might draw from this information is that some people happily
played and sang music in their homes even when reading was not a favorite pas-
time. The other is that book-buying of all sorts increased as the century wore
on, something particularly true for recreational materials. Music trended along
with the growing market for romances, poetry, and pleasant tales, and whereas
before the sixteenth century books belonged primarily to the wealthy and were
“prized objects” keyed to the needs of worship, scholarship, or a professional
activity, by the middle of the century, book ownership reached much further
down the social scale, as witnessed by the example of Amiens.25 Table 3.1 does
seem to bear this out.
In the second part of the century, a medium-sized private library might
have had anywhere from a few dozen titles to two hundred, and while the
25
Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 176. To wit, Jean de Badonvilliers, a bourgeois de
Paris and member of the royal chancellery owned at least four sets of bound partbooks
printed by Attaingnant (all chansons and motets), some masses (also bound in parts),
and a number of music books en blanc at his death in 1544. This may not seem like
much music in a library that contained over 200 volumes, but it is one of the larger
private French music collections we have on record from before 1550. See the inventory
in Doucet, Les Bibliothèques parisiennes, 24–32, and Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 126–27
on the music.
whole notion of a “library” and what it should include tended, in France,
toward theological, legal, and classical texts (and, at the most intensive level
of collecting, toward books in manuscript), some music does crop up along-
side the more typical items in private collections. For instance, the royal sec-
retary and notary Pierre Lalemant owned at least fifty books at his death in
1562, twelve of them unspecified “volumes de musique”—probably three or
four sets of unbound partbooks, judging from the low price paid for them and
the little interest they held for the notary, who for most other entries in the
inventory indicated titles and bibliographic details such as the number of vol-
umes and style of bindings.26 The Pléiade poet Rémy Belleau passed away in
1577 in possession of “a packet of twelve volumes of music, in quarto” along
with a lute and a cittern, fitting accoutrements for a lyric poet.27 Also from
1577 is the estate inventory of the Count of Vaudémont in Lorraine. The 122
books recorded by the notary included only one entry for music—“Le pre-
mier libvre de chansons gaillardes et pavannes réduites en tablature de Guy
Tern,”—a smile-inducing rendering of Guillaume Morlaye’s Le premier livre de
chansons, gaillardes, pavannes . . . reduictz en tablature de Guiterne (Paris: Granjon
and Fezandat, 1552).28
The cases just cited represent a fairly full haul of information pertain-
ing to music from the considerable number of studies of book ownership
in sixteenth-century France.29 Remarkably, no music books turn up in the
forty-three extant inventories of the contents of French Renaissance châteaux,
even those housing substantial libraries, supporting a chapel, and containing
musical instruments.30 Clearly some inventaires après décès await discovery and
analysis, but the returns for music historians will remain fragmentary and
uneven, the search itself akin to panning for archival gold, which leads to our
last case in point. One brilliant character discovered by Jeanice Brooks was
Justinien Pense, a wealthy cloth merchant and avid musician who moved from
26
Pichon and Vicaire, Documents pour servir à l’histoire des libraires, 124–25.
27
M. Connat, “Mort et Testament,” 353, from a list of over two hundred books.
28
M. F. de Chanteau, “Collections lorraines,” 351. For another (later) provincial library,
see Guillo, “Les Livres de musique de Hugues Picardet (1560–1641)”; Picardet was a
magistrate from Burgundy who owned some 2,000 books, including 200 to 300 music
titles.
29
On the Low Countries, see Christian Coppens, ed., Printers and Readers in the Sixteenth
Century, 175–76 and 411–12, for comparative studies of twenty-five private collections
belonging to canons and city officials; only six included music. Looking ahead into the
seventeenth century reveals little change. See Albert Cohen, “Musicians, Amateurs and
Collectors.”
30
Sophie Pickford, “Music in the French Domestic Interior,” 84.
Lyon to Paris sometime after 1580.31 The inventory of his estate made at his
death in 1586 includes a beautifully bound set of five partbooks in manuscript,
six other sets of partbooks, a packet of unbound music, and numerous instru-
ments; in total his library contained well over 120 volumes, most of them in the
vernacular (which bucked the general tendency of the market to favor books in
Latin). With a chest of viols, consorts of recorders and cornets, a lute, and a dul-
cian among his possessions, gatherings at his household must have constituted
a veritable a musical salon, a place for amateurs and professionals to mingle,
play, sing, and listen to music. His nicest music books—copied on vellum,
richly illuminated, and in intricately blind-stamped bindings—contained set-
tings by Jean de Castro of Pense’s own verse. Like the whole of Pense’s collec-
tion, these books are small but incredibly special.
Renaissance Bibliophiles and State Libraries

On an altogether grander scale are the private libraries about which we
have the greatest information, those amassed by wealthy bibliophiles such
as Ferdinand Columbus (1488–1539), members of the Fugger dynasty such as
Johann (Hans) Jakob Fugger (1516–75) and Raimund Fugger the Younger
(1528–69), Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel (d. 1580), and Jean Grolier
de Servières, vicomte d’Aguisy (d. 1565), whose delight in sumptuous bind-
ings defined a new style of luxury in mid-century Paris, and whose glittering
collection contained around 3,000 volumes at his death.32 The most ambitious
collectors aimed at completeness and were just the type for whom Gesner’s
Pandectae, Doni’s Libraria, and La Croix du Maine’s Bibliotheque would have
been useful reference tools. Columbus, the Fuggers, and Arundel all accumu-
lated massive libraries with considerable amounts of music. Indeed, so com-
prehensive were Columbus’s acquisitions that the catalogues of the Biblioteca
Colombina effectively provide a working bibliography of the total output of
European music printers up to 1535, the date of Ferdinand’s last book-buying
31
See Jeanice Brooks, “Manuscripts of Jean de Castro,” with music inventory at p. 32; on
the manuscript partbooks see eadem, “Jean de Castro, the Pense Partbooks.”
32
On Grolier, see Charon-Parent, “Les Grandes Collections du XVIe siècle.” On the oth-
ers, see below. For a more inclusive overview of the largest sixteenth-century music
collections and relevant bibliography, see van Orden and Vitolo, “Padre Martini,”
244–45. One magnificent collection outside the scope of this study (comprised as it was
of masses, motets, and liturgical books) belonged to Mary of Hungary; see Edmond
vander Straeten, La Musique aux Pays-Bas, 7:476–93 for a partial catalogue.
trip, which included several months in Lyon and a haul of two dozen chan-
sonniers.33 Had the 20,000 volumes in the Fernandina (as the library was
then called) survived the death of their owner, the Colombina would hold
the richest store of early books in Europe; the list of printed music books
alone totals 172 titles, and there were manuscripts as well. But Ferdinand’s
nephew, Luís, took little interest in the library, and eventually it was trans-
ferred to Seville Cathedral. Decades of vandalization ravaged the collection
such that by 1684 only 4,000 to 5,000 volumes remained; the pillage con-
tinued in the nineteenth century when unscrupulous book dealers flooded
the rare book market with items from Seville, including leaves torn from
a precious fifteenth-century chansonnier, repackaged with portions of other
manuscripts, and sold to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1885 at a
time when that library sought to build its cultural patrimony.34 Another leg-
endary music collection with deep stores of sixteenth-century books belonged
to King João IV of Portugal, but it was destroyed along with the rest of the
library in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.35
Books have long played a role in state-building: the origins of modern
institutions such as the Bavarian State Library and the British Library owe
entirely to the ambitions of early modern dukes and kings. Already in the
seventeenth century large private collections were being purchased by ruling
houses anxious to maintain comprehensive collections of their own; in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were transferred to national and state
libraries. This was the case, for example, with the Nonsuch Library, begun by
Arundel and expanded by his son-in-law, John, Lord Lumley.36 Much of the
music—the largest private collection in Elizabethan England—was acquired
by the crown at Lumley’s death, subsequently passing to the British Museum
shortly after its foundation in 1753. Lumley’s music, though largely rebound
in the nineteenth century, can still be seen at the British Library today.37
33
See the remarkable work of Chapman, “Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music,” on
the Columbus library at various stages of acquisition, with information on the French
purchases at 53–55 and 78–81. Iain Fenlon, “Hernando Colón,” provides valuable
context.
34
On the Colombina’s losses, see Dragan Plamenac, “A Reconstruction,” 502–8.
35
See the music catalogue Primera Parte do Index da Livraria de Musica (Lisbon: Paulo
Craesbeek, 1649), and Bernadette Nelson, “Building a Library” on the collection’s ori-
gins. Though not its strength, João IV did own numerous chansonniers printed by
Attaingnant, Scotto, Susato, and Granjon.
36
See Sears Jayne and Francis R. Johnson, eds., The Lumley Library, 284–86, and Charles
W. Warren, “Music at Nonesuch.”
37
Milsom, “The Nonsuch Music Library,” reconstructs the original tract volumes.
Similar situations were at play in the history of the music collections at the
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, where
many of the Fugger family’s books came to rest.38
Unfortunately for the historian of the French chanson, the origins of the
music collection at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris are far more recent. The
Département de la Musique was formed only after World War II, from the col-
lections of the Bibliothèque royale, the Conservatoire de Paris (est. 1795), and
the Opéra, none of them rich in sixteenth-century music.39 Though instituted
in the fourteenth century by Charles V and containing over 1,600 volumes,
the royal library included only one chansonnier when the collection at Blois
was catalogued in 1518. By 1544, when it was transferred to Fontainebleau and
united with the collection there, the music holdings had increased to fifteen
“livres de chapelle en musique” and twenty-eight “livres de chapelle en plain
chant,” yet by 1676 there were only eighty-two books of music.40 According to
these catalogues, the library did not include the books that ostensibly would
have come to the crown as a result of the dépôt légal, a law requiring printers to
provide the royal library with a copy of every book printed under a royal privi-
lege. In 1617, the number of copies required by the dépôt was raised to two, but
the law proved unenforceable, and until the mid-seventeenth century, the royal
library remained primarily a collection of manuscripts.41 The Royal Printers
of Music—Pierre Attaingnant, Adrian Le Roy, and Robert Ballard and his
successors—apparently did not bother to register individual prints for protec-
tion (they had royal privileges and virtual monopolies already), nor—appar-
ently—did they contribute books to the library. François Lesure and Frayda
Lindemann have estimated that in 1720 the livres de privilège in the library
numbered around 200 for music.42 For the Département des Livres impri-
més, the lacunae from the sixteenth century were partially rectified only with
the phenomenal expansion of the library in the nineteenth century thanks to
revolutionary confiscations, the purchase of private collections, and the spoils
38
On the Fugger dynasty see William E. Hettrick, “Fugger”; JoAnn Taricani, “A
Chansonnier from a Library in Renaissance Augsburg,” 2–32; and Mary S. Lewis, “The
Italian Madrigal,” 638–40 and app. 2–3. Richard Schaal, “Die Musikbibliothek von
Raimund Fugger d. J.,” gives the 1566 inventory of that collection.
39
For an overview, see François Lesure and Frayda B. Lindemann, “The Music Department
of the Bibliothèque nationale.” The Opéra did hold material from the Académie royale
de musique (est. 1669), but much burned in fires that destroyed the theater of the
Palais-Royal in 1763 and again in 1781.
40
Ibid., 251–52, and Simone Balayé, “La Naissance de la Bibliothèque du Roi.”
41
Bernard Barbiche, “Le Régime de l’édition,” 372, and Martin, “Livres et société,” 548.
42
Lesure and Lindemann, “The Music Department of the Bibliothèque nationale,” 252.
of war.43 But even so, bibliographers estimate that the Bibliothèque natio-
nale de France still lacks 40–50 percent of the sixteenth-century books that
it should initially have acquired under the dépôt legal.44 For the Département
de la Musique, the situation is easily as bad, despite valuable acquisitions of
early music from the important private collections of Geneviève Thibault,
Comtesse de Chambure, Henry Prunières, Alfred Cortot, and others.45 The
only analogous acquisition before the twentieth century was the purchase in
1725 of the library of Sébastien de Brossard, which contained 525 music prints
and 120 manuscripts, but only a very few prints of sixteenth-century music,
most of them of sacred repertoire.46 Also providing a substantial foundation
to the collection at the Bibliothèque nationale are the books gathered together
in Versailles after the Revolution by Jean-Louis Bêche. They came from the
Musique du Roi, the Maison de Saint Louis de Saint Cyr, and various aristo-
cratic collections: some stayed in Versailles and are now in the Bibliothèque de
Versailles and others went into the library of the Conservatoire de Paris and
from there to the Bibliothèque nationale, but once again, very little of this
music dated from the sixteenth century, Saint Cyr, for instance, only having
been founded in 1686, and the Musique du Roi only under Louis XIV.47 One
sixteenth-century partbook at the Bibliothèque nationale bears an ex-libris
from the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, the part of the royal household responsible for
ceremonies, festivities, and court spectacle, and a binder’s volume in the col-
lection was signed by a court harpsichordist under Henri II, Louis Cramoisy,
but not much more.48
It is impossible to know how severely the Revolution ravaged the treasures
of French noble households and institutional collections begun during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, when the passion for libraries accelerated
43
See Simone Balayé, “La Bibliothèque nationale pendant la Révolution.”
44
Balayé, “La Naissance de la Bibliothèque du Roi,” 80.
45
See Catherine Massip and Florence Getreau, “Les Collections Henry Prunières et
Geneviève Thibault de Chambure.” By contrast, Alfred Cortot’s remarkable collection,
rich in chansonniers, was scattered as far afield as London, Lexington, and Berkeley.
See Frank Traficante, “Dispersal of the Cortot Collection”; Alec Hyatt King and O. W.
Neighbour, “Printed Music”; and John H. Roberts, “The Cortot Collection,” 271 on the
BnF and initial sales and 286–88 on subsequent ones. For an overview of the collection
see Albi Rosenthal, “Alfred Cortot as Collector of Music.”
46
See Yolande de Brossard, La Collection Sébastien de Brossard, an edition of Sébastien’s
manuscript catalogue of his music.
47
For a fascinating account of Bêche and these transfers, see Denis Herlin, Catalogue du
fonds musical de la Bibliothèque de Versailles, xvi–xxxvii.
48
See, respectively, BnF Cons. Rés. 262, and BnF Rés. Vmf 13 (1–17).
in France. We still have six more or less complete sets of tract volumes of
sixteenth-century music that came to the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève after its
library was put into order by La Rochefoucauld between 1624 and 1640, all
of varied provenance.49 From the Collège d’Harcourt in Paris (now the Lycée
Saint-Louis) we have the Tenor and Bassus parts from a set of huge volumes
in white parchment bindings, all chansons and motets of Lassus, Guillaume
Boni, Guillaume Costeley, and Anthoine de Bertrand printed by Le Roy &
Ballard in the 1570s (they are now at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal).50 In
the provinces, some music has probably remained close to its original home,
though the sources are incomplete, usually preserving just one partbook from
a set of four or five. The municipal libraries of Rouen, Épinal, Orléans, and
Nantes each own one or two sizeable partbooks containing as many as twenty
titles; the Ancienne Bibliothèque du Chapitre in Noyon owns substantial sets
of the mass and motet series printed by Attaingnant, and while the number of
items in Le Mans is not great, almost all of the editions are rare if not unique.51
Unsurprisingly, given that it contains the debris of one of the great princely librar-
ies of the Ancien Régime, the Musée Condé in Chantilly is relatively rich by com-
parison, with two substantial Bassus binder’s volumes containing almost thirty
partbooks between them, and a Tenor volume with half a dozen titles to boot,
primarily editions from Le Roy & Ballard.52 This inventory catches only the high
points, but the very fact that it is possible to enumerate the sources in this way
says much in itself. Few in number and the mostly lone survivors from their sets,
49
Paris, Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève, Rés. Vm 41–49, ex-libris of the Abbey from 1753; Rés.
58–60; Rés. 61–64, signed by the poet Jacques Poille (d. 1623); Rés. Vm 76–80, ex-libris
of the Abbey. On Rés. Vm 83–94, with three ex-libris that predate the founding of the
library, see Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 346: “Ex libris Sta. Catharina Parisii”; “Michel
Prevost”; and, on rear flyleaf, “Dessus. Livre pour chanter sus l’orme. Appartenant a
Jehan Bele[?]‌on, en l’eglise Saint Germain le vieul. Cité de Paris. A paris 1607.” Finally,
Rés. 215–223: the back flyleaf of the Superius is signed “monsieur Masieu 1630,” and
each table of contents is signed “S. Briget.”
50
See van Orden, Music, Authorship, and the Book, 136–39 for details.
51
In order of importance, see the tract volumes Rouen, Bibl. de la Ville, Leber 1701 (Le
Roy & Ballard); Épinal, Bibl. de la Ville, 27683 (Le Roy & Ballard); Orléans, Bibl. de la
Ville, Rés. 8o C 3462 (Le Roy & Ballard) and Rés. 8o C 3459 (Du Chemin); Nantes, Bibl.
du Musée, Th. Dobrée, 367 and 503 as well as the single titles 499, 500, and 501 (all
Du Chemin). On Noyon, see Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, catalogue nos. 46–53, 56, 57,
60, 63, 64, 68, 85, 93, and 138. On Le Mans, see Lesure and Thibault, “Bibliographie
des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas du Chemin,” catalogue nos. 26, 80, 95, and
100; and Lesure and Thibault, Bibliographie des Éditions d’Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard,
catalogue nos. 196 and 197.
52
See Chantilly, Musée Condé, XID 98 and XIID 78 (both Bassus), and XIID 79 (Tenor).
these volumes are nonetheless quite precious given the fragmentary state of all the
sources of French music from this time.
In his essay on “Rare Books and Revolutionaries,” which reconstructs the
fate of religious and aristocratic libraries during the immediate aftermath of
the French Revolution, Andrew Pettegree issued an important reminder to
attend to the bibliothèques municipales, declaring their extraordinary collective
holdings to be “one of the great unknown treasures of the library world.”53
That does seem to be corroborated by the music books just cited, which merit
further investigation. Indeed, Philippe Canguilhem’s remarkable discovery in
the bibliothèque municipale of Montauban of a tract volume once belonging to
the Augustins of Toulouse and containing two unknown Attaingnant Tenor
partbooks should inspire systematic research.54 But globally, the picture is
such that even the most exciting future discoveries are likely to be of an iso-
lated tract volume, for nowhere, in France, do we find a substantial collec-
tions of sixteenth-century printed music with historical depth and clarity of
provenance.
The long-standing poverty of the Bibliothèque royale in printed music and
the disruptions of the Revolution complicate research into the habits of col-
lectors and institutional libraries, and force the historian of the chanson to
parts abroad, where it is still possible to examine several sixteenth-century
music collections relatively intact. Four of the largest private music libraries in
Europe belonged to individuals living in and around Augsburg: Hans Jakob
and Raimund Fugger, Hans Heinrich Herwart (1520–83), and Johann Georg
von Werdenstein (1542–1608). Inventories of the music collections of Raimund
Fugger, Herwart, and Werdenstein show that each topped 400 items, far out-
stripping Columbus’s holdings of music and many times the size of Arundel’s
fine library at Nonsuch.55 Fortunately for this study, these Germans avidly
collected printed chansonniers, about half of which are now in Munich at the
Bavarian State Library.56
53
See Andrew Pettegree, The French Book, ch. 1; quotation at p. 1.
54
Philippe Canguilhem, “Deux recueils inconnus.” The volume contains three Tenor
partbooks, two books of Italian organ tablature, and a section in manuscript.
55
Inventories in Schaal, “Die Musikbibliothek von Raimund Fugger d. J.”; H. Colin Slim,
“The Music Library of the Augsburg Patrician, Hans Heinrich Herwart”; Richard
Charteris, Johann Georg von Werdenstein.
56
Raimund Fugger’s chansonniers remain unlocated: sizeable tract volmes of Susato’s
Livre des chansons, books 1–10 and Attaingnant’s Livre de chansons, books 1–23, chanson-
niers from Moderne, Du Chemin, Le Roy & Ballard, Waelrunt & Laet, Gardane, and
Granjon’s precious Second trophée de musique and Chansons of Beaulaigue, both 1559. See
Schaal, “Die Musikbibliothek von Raimund Fugger d. J.”
The origins of the music collection in Munich began with Hans Jakob
Fugger, who became superintendent of music at the Bavarian court in 1565.57
He and Duke Albrecht V founded the court library, to which he contributed
his own collection of music and other books.58 By that time, Albrecht already
possessed some true treasures, foremost among them the breathtakingly beau-
tiful illuminated choirbook of Rore motets from 1559, Munich BSB Mus. MS
B (its copying overseen by Orlande de Lassus), and the elegant presentation
copy of Lassus’s own Prophetiae Sibyllarum made as a gift for Albrecht around
the same time, Vienna ÖNB Mus. Hs. 18744.59 Albrecht’s son Wilhelm
inherited his bibliomania, and the library grew apace. Even though the ducal
chapel was downsized in 1579 when Wilhelm acceded to the throne, books
were not neglected, and during his reign the court library became one of
the largest in Europe. Late in the sixteenth century, Wilhelm purchased the
music-laden private libraries of Herwart and Werdenstein (the latter sale tak-
ing place only after the duke exerted a good deal of pressure on the owner).
In the nineteenth century, these books were transferred to the Bavarian State
Library, where they form the core of one of the most comprehensive collec-
tions of Renaissance polyphony in the world. Incredibly, the libraries once
belonging to Herwart and Werdenstein can be reconstructed “in the flesh”
thanks to inventories that were drawn up in the sixteenth century. They also
endowed the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek with a remarkably precious holding
of French chansons, making Munich’s collection the rival of the Bibliothèque
nationale in Paris. Thus the legacy of sixteenth-century collectors shapes the
course of research today.
The largest music collection belonged to Herwart, who initially concentrated
on French music and only later expanded to books from Italian and German
printers.60 Indeed, the crown jewels of his music collection are chansonniers: his
magnificently bound pair of Attaingnant’s Livre de chansons, books 1 to 35, and a
hefty set of Moderne’s Parangon des chansons, books 1 to 10, in a fine blind-stamped
binding. All of his books were catalogued shortly after his death by the ducal sec-
retary in anticipation of their purchase by Duke Wilhelm in 1586. Consisting of
some 456 printed titles and a number of manuscripts and miscellanies, over half
57
Hettrick, “Fugger.”
58
In 1571, Albrecht V purchased 10,000 volumes from Hans Jakob Fugger. See Charteris,
Johann Georg von Werdenstein, 12.
59
On Albrecht V as a bibliophile see B. A. Wallner, ‘Die Gründung der Münchener
Hofbibliothek.” On Munich BSB Mus. MS B, see Jessie Ann Owens, “An Illuminated
Manuscript of Motets,” and on Vienna ÖNB Mus. Hs. 18744, see eadem, ed., Vienna,
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, Mus. Hs. 18.744.
60
Taricani, “A Chansonnier from a Library in Renaissance Augsburg,” 50.
of the music collection was unbound at the time of Herwart’s death.61 According
to the catalogue drawn up by Wolfgang Prommer, these unbound items were
shoved into forty-three sacks, the last three of which were described as containing
“Laütter Kinderwerk und nichts werth”—mere children’s works worth nothing.
Among these sheaves of manuscript pages were probably the materials subse-
quently bound as Munich BSB manuscripts 274a and 1503a–e.62 They contain
chansons, madrigals, and motets copied out onto loose sheets or fascicles, and they
represent music in its most ephemeral state—literally “flying sheets,” as broad-
sides were called in France. Two chansons by Jachet Berchem even appear to have
been sent to Augsburg by mail, a practice that we know of from letters that once
enclosed desirable music sent by request and as gifts.63 Thus Herwart’s music ran
the full gamut from bound volumes to loose sheets, showing not only the variety
of states in which music circulated at the time, but also a collection in action, with
a quantity of unbound parts and leaves in manuscript for performance. Though
far larger than the collection owned by the music teacher Francesco Scudieri,
its complexion is remarkably similar: music in manuscript and print, most of it
unbound.
The music inventoried by Prommer in anticipation of the sale of
Werdenstein’s library in 1592 was more upscale than Herwart’s, and a much
smaller portion of his collection of 9,000 volumes (containing tens of thou-
sands of titles), leaving the strong impression that Werdenstein was a biblio-
phile first and musician only second, if at all. In the first place, there were no
manuscripts. Perhaps he owned none or withheld them from sale as personal
items separate from the official library, or perhaps the duke refused them, but
for whatever reason, there were no bound partbooks in manuscript or sheet
music of any kind included in the sale. Like Herwart’s collection, however,
half of the 451 items in his music collection were en blanc. But unlike Herwart,
Werdenstein seemed to have been systematic about binding his music, for in
general, the older prints were bound. He may have preferred bindings and
simply have fallen behind in the process. Binding has always been the bane of
music libraries—in 1816, for instance, library of the Conservatoire de Paris con-
tained 9,374 volumes and 697 “bundles of old music,” much of it surely sheet
61
The sale included 2,066 non-music books (1,120 bound, 946 unbound). Marie Louise
Martinez-Göllner, “Die Augsburger Bibliotek Herwart,” 30 n. 4.
62
See Taricani, “A Renaissance Bibliophile.”
63
On the Berchem chansons, see ibid., 1384 n. 62. On music sent in letters, see John
Milsom and Iain Fenlon, “‘Ruled Paper Imprinted’,” 143–44, who cite Munich BSB
Mus. MSS 1503a, 1503b, 1511c, and 1511d (all discussed by Taricani) and BnF Cons.
Rés. 1591. Also see Milsom, “The Culture of Partleaves.”
music and partleaves.64 And it appears that after disassembling the binder’s
volumes purchased by Padre Martini in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
parchment bindings, Gaetano Gaspari or his successors at the Liceo Musicale
in Bologna also gave up his extensive project to bind the partbooks individu-
ally and placed what had not yet been rebound in paper folders instead.65 But
it may also be that Werdenstein’s attention to binding reflected priorities in the
collection. The majority of his music in German and Latin was bound, whereas
less than a third of his French chansons and psalms were, despite the fact that
a number of titles were over twenty years old.
The Herwart and Werdenstein collections reveal, then, that even the great-
est music libraries of the age contained large proportions of unbound music.
The same was true for the collection of Raimund Fugger the Younger, over
half of whose almost two hundred printed partbooks were unbound.66 And the
music collection of Sir Charles Somerset, when inventoried in 1622, consisted
of nine sets of vellum-bound partbooks and a “flatt trunke in the warde-robe,
full of paper bookes, musike-bookes, and loose papers.”67
Binder’s Volumes
The inventories of these collections—along with the surviving volumes—also wit-
ness the manner in which music did tend to be bound, which was generally in
binder’s volumes. We have already encountered a few such books, those once owned
by Henry of Castell and Sebastian Grolande described at the outset of Chapter 1.
The inventories of the Herwart and Werdenstein collections confirm what scholars
who work with sixteenth-century sources already know anecdotally—those prints
that survive in sixteenth-century bindings are rarely found alone.68
Herwart’s bound books never included fewer than three titles and they
might contain dozens, as in the most striking set of partbooks in his collec-
tion: magnificent volumes over 500 folios long that contained books 1–35 of
Attaingnant’s Livre de chansons series. Sometimes Herwart’s volumes adopt pub-
lishers’ series in this way (and these books may well have been bound in Paris),
but more often his prints are mixed together in eclectic volumes. Chansons
are bound with madrigals or motets, and the wares of different publishers also
64
Lesure and Lindemann, “The Music Department of the Bibliothèque nationale,” 256.
65
van Orden and Vitolo, “Padre Martini,” 262–64, and Pasquini, “A ‘vast suite’,” 111–12.
66
Schaal, “Die Musikbibliothek von Raimund Fugger d. J.”
67
Michael G. Brennan, “Sir Charles Somerset’s Music Books (1622),” app. 1 and p. 509.
68
Arundel, too, preferred tract volumes; his taste for Flemish bindings suggests that his
books arrived in England bound. See Milsom, “The Nonsuch Music Library,” 172.
T a b l e 3 . 2 Contents of Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 4o Mus. pr. 52
(SATBQS) (Herwart inventory, vol. 3)
Bound in brown leather-covered boards (restored), with simple tooled border
and gold stamped fleur-de-lys motif in corners. Voice part names stamped in
gold on front covers in roman block capitals. Metal tabs.
Willaert, Musicorum sex vocum . . . liber primus. Venice: Gardane, 1542
Buus, Il primo libro di canzoni francese a sei voci. Venice: Gardane, 1543
Madrigali di Verdelot et de altri. Venice: Gardane, 1546
Rore, Il primo libro de madrigali cromatici a cinque. Venice: Gardane, 1552
Di Cipriano de Rore il secondo libro de madrigali a cinque. Venice: Gardane, 1551
Musica di Cipriano Rore sopra le stanze del Petrarcha . . . et altri madrigali a cinque. Venice:
Gardane, 1548
Buus, Libro primo delle canzoni francese a cinque. Venice: Scotto, 1550
Le dotte, et eccelente compositioni de i madrigali a cinque. Venice: Scotto, 1540
Di Verdelotto tutti li madrigali . . . Venice: Scotto, 1540
Madrigali a Quattro voci di messer Claudio Veggio. Venice: Scotto, 1540
Phinot, Premier livre contenant 37 chansons. Lyon: Berengus, 1548
Phinot, Second livre contenant 26 chansons. Lyon: Berengus, 1548
Lupi, Tiers livre . . . contenant 35 chansons. Lyon: Berengus, 1548
Janequin, Les chansons de la guerre, la chasse . . . Paris: Attaingnant, 1537
often find themselves frequent partners in books. Munich BSB 4o Mus. pr. 52 is
a wonderful example (table 3.2). In it, Herwart had Venetian prints by Gardane
and Scotto bound together with French ones from Lyon and Paris, most notably
Attaingnant’s print of Janequin’s Chansons de la guerre . . . of 1537.
It is rare to find Attaingnant’s chanson prints bound with the work of
other printers because he experimented so much with formats.69 In the first
years he used an oblong octavo that matched some wares of Antico and
Giunta, but in 1536 he started issuing editions with all the parts printed in
a single oblong quarto volume.70 Subsequently he switched to two parts in
one quarto book (as in the series shown in figures 1.4 and 1.5). The edition
included here, the Chansons of Janequin, is an exception to Attaingnant’s
later style and was printed in four partbooks. Unlike the big Venetian
firms, whose standardized prints were ready-made to mix and match in
69
Du Chemin and Le Roy & Ballard also maintained physical differences between prints
of masses, motets, and chansons, which placed restrictions on collectors. Le Roy &
Ballard reserved their oblong quarto for sacred music (172 × 230 mm) and published
chanson anthologies in octavo (85 × 125 mm).
70
Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, catalogue nos. 69–74.
volumes such as Munich BSB 4o Mus. pr. 52, Attaingnant’s all-in-one and
two-in-one books could only logically go with each other, at least if the
tract volumes were intended for performance rather than as a source from
which music might be copied.71 What we see in the standardization of for-
mat and layout is publishers facilitating flexibility for readers, who could
compile books in whatever ways suited them. Venetian firms tended toward
uniform sizes and formats across genres as well, which meant that read-
ers could mix chansons, motets, madrigals, and masses with full liberty,
a disregard for generic distinctions that is consistent with the contents of
manuscript partbooks from the time.72
Herwart’s bindings were just as varied as the contents of his books, to such a
degree, in fact, that were it not for Prommer’s inventory, it would be impossible
to reconstruct the library based on the bindings alone (as is occasionally possible
for other collections).73 Some of the bindings were French, others undoubtedly
the work of local craftsmen; in style they ranged from exquisite colored and
gold-stamped leather to run-of-the-mill parchment.74 Werdenstein’s library, by
contrast, was uniform and well organized, with genres bound separately in a
consistent style. He, too, preferred fairly thick volumes—most sets include four
or more titles—and vellum bindings with green silk ties and green edges.75 In
style, they easily made the transition into the ducal library, where music books
were similarly bound in white vellum with chamois ties.
Such simple bindings were standard for the age, as we have seen from
Plantin’s binding orders. A few of these volumes were probably purchased
in stock bindings from a printer-bookseller.76 Other bound volumes came
into the collection second-hand. Werdenstein acquired a number of volumes
already bound, mostly of older Italian titles from the 1550s and early 1560s
71
Nonetheless, the desire to safeguard music in bindings could create odd pairings: Paris,
Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève, Rés. Vm 41–48, a Quinta partbook, is filled out with an incom-
plete copy of Petrucci’s Frottole libro quinto (1506), printed in choirbook layout.
72
For a Bassus volume mixing masses and chansons, see London, British Library K.11.e.2.
73
One French collector identifiable through bindings is Louis Bizeau. See Guillo, Pierre
I Ballard, 1:180, and Eugène Olivier, Georges Hermal, and R. de Roton, Manuel de
l’amateur de reliures, 5, pl. 486. Bound in leather, the music books have gold-stamped
initials, gold edges, painted endpapers, ruled pages, and tables of contents.
74
Fugger’s music collection included fewer tract volumes and many leather bindings. See
the inventory in Schaal, “Die Musikbibliothek von Raimund Fugger d. J.”
75
For a plate of one such binding, see Charteris, Johann Georg von Werdenstein, 39.
76
See Munich BSB 4o Mus. pr. 142, a tract volume of motets and chansons printed in
1570 and 1571 by Le Roy & Ballard and owned by Herwart. Its stock parchment bind-
ing includes recycled French legal documents dating ca. 1560.
(at which time he was still quite young).77 Most impressive was his acquisi-
tion of a dozen Petrucci prints from the first decade of the century.78 By the
time Werdenstein started collecting, these leather-bound volumes had prob-
ably already changed hands more than once and were true collector’s items;
a previous owner of Petrucci’s Frottole, books 1–8, had paid 48 kroner for the
set, a royal sum based just as much on the fancy bindings with gold tooling
as on the rarity of the contents.79 In the bibliographic world, books really
were judged by their covers. Even the simplest leather binding increased the
value of a book several-fold, and inventories of estates often tell us more about
the bindings of music books than their contents. At the highest end of the
market, some aficionados collected books explicitly for their bindings. In the
seventeenth century, Grolier’s books were still highly prized for their lavish
covers. Samuel Pepys was but one of many bibliophiles who sought out the
work of specific binders in a market for used books that was often motivated
by consumers’ lust for beautiful objects and the bibliomania of private col-
lectors such as the Fuggers, whose libraries outshone those of their princes.80
Survival Rates
It was probably thanks to elegant bindings like the nicely tooled leather covers
on the book shown in figure 3.1 that some music survived even its first decades
in print. Of Petrucci’s series of frottola prints, Werdenstein’s volumes contain
the sole extant copies of books 4, 7, and 8, which were still trading hands in
1592, thanks in some measure to their leather covers. The protective benefits
and absolute value of bindings also suggest some chilling statistics concerning
the general survival rate of music across the centuries. Of the thirty-five titles in
Munich BSB 4o Rar 900, Herwart’s magnificent set of Attaingnant chansonniers,
twenty-seven are the sole surviving copies of those editions, editions that Daniel
Heartz has estimated were printed in runs of about 1,000 copies.81 Had these
77
Such as Munich BSB 4o Mus. pr. 192, and 4o Mus. pr. 117. See Charteris, Johann Georg
von Werdenstein, 45, 48–51.
78
Ibid., 45. Werdenstein also acquired an unbound copy of Josquin’s masses, which may
have been sold “new” half a century after publication (ibid., catalogue 1, print no. 305).
79
Ibid., catalogue 1, print nos. 82–86 and 87–90, and Boorman, Ottaviano Petrucci, cata-
logue nos. 16–18, 23, 25, 26, 35, 36, 48.
80
Howard M. Nixon, Catalogue of the Pepys Library, 6: xvi.
81
Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 120–25. This may be inflated. Pogue placed contemporary
print-runs from Moderne at 500 (see Jacques Moderne, 45–46), while Boorman estimated
300–500 for editions printed before the 1540s (Ottaviano Petrucci, 360–66).
F i g u r e 3 .1 Binding of Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Musikabteilung,
4o Mus. pr. 182. This blind-tooled leather binding was made for the Parangon des
chansons series, books 1–10 (Lyon: Moderne, 1538–43), a tract volume once belonging
to Hans Heinrich Herwart. The book is stamped “Chansons Noveles LX,” and its
ties are now worn away.
items not been bound and collected by Herwart, and had they not then been
acquired by the dukes of Bavaria from whose collection they ultimately came to
rest in the safe haven of the library vault in Munich, one quarter of Attaingnant’s
output of chansonniers would be unknown to us today. Indeed, dozens of titles
from the Herwart collection and eighty-two titles from Werdenstein’s library are
unica.82
Sadly, such statistics appear to be the norm for music, especially secular
genres. Here we can use Jacques Moderne’s Parangon des chansons series as an
example. The series was printed in Lyon in a table layout with all the parts visible
on an opening (see figure 3.2); the format was a sizeable oblong quarto measur-
ing approximately 240 × 175 mm. Since the books included all the parts in one
volume, they evaded the perils of being sold as scrap paper when one partbook
went missing; nonetheless, their survival rates are shocking indeed. According
82
See Slim, “The Music Library of the Augsburg Patrician,” 76–77, adding the unica in
Munich BSB 4o Rar 900, and Charteris, Johann Georg von Werdenstein, 30–34.
F i g u r e 3 . 2 The first opening of Le parangon des chansons, book 1 (Lyon:
Moderne, [1538]), fols. iv–iir, showing Pierre Sandrin, Ce qui souloit, a popular song,
judging from its placement here and its appearance in several other chansonniers.
Printed in a table layout, players could have placed the book in the center of a
table and read their parts from facing sides.
to the sixteenth-century bibliography of Antoine Du Verdier, Moderne’s series

ran to eighteen books,83 but only the first ten numbers survive today, thanks
almost entirely to two binder’s volumes containing books 1–10: British Library
K.10.a.9 (the copy owned by Sebastian Grolande) and the Herwart volume in
Munich, BSB 4o Mus. pr. 182 shown in figure 3.1. (Herwart also owned a second
copy of books 1–3, Munich BSB 4o Mus. pr. 183.) Additionally, copies of books
1–4 survive in a sixteenth-century binding in Lüneburg and copies of books
1–5 in Vienna.84 With the exception of a lone copy of book 4 in the British
Library, K.4.d.e., at least four of these five tract volumes and possibly all five of
83
See Du Verdier, La Bibliotheque, 1079, and Pogue, Jacques Moderne, 18, 46–55, and cata-
logue nos. 10–14, 20–21, 26, 28–31, 37–39.
84
Lüneburg, Ratsbücherei, Mus. Ant. Pract. KN 634 and Vienna ÖNB, S.A.78.C.8 1
Mus 19. The Viennese volume came from the court library (S.A. = Sala Augustina).
F i g u r e 3 . 2 Continued
the surviving Parangon volumes were bound in the sixteenth century. This fact
and the figures on which it relies are all the more staggering when we calculate
how many individual copies of the Parangon series have been lost. Using the
figure of 500 for the print-runs and taking Du Verdier at face value and plac-
ing the number of books in the series at eighteen (but not assuming any second
or third editions beyond those that are known from extant copies), the series
would have run to 12,000 copies, of which but thirty-three remain, giving us a
survival rate of .03 percent. One can only imagine the many fates of all that lost
music—the unsold sheets used to wrap grocers’ wares, the unbound volumes
coming apart and used in loose fascicles (something actually facilitated by the
table layout), copies being discarded as the repertory and old typefaces used to
print the music fell out of fashion and experimental layouts like Moderne’s were
superseded by the (temporary) triumph of the standardized partbooks produced
by the large Venetian presses.
It is difficult to estimate survival rates accurately, since exact pressruns
are known for only a handful of music titles, but since the size of editions has
been so fundamental to arguments concerning print culture—and so contro-
versial, especially where incunables are concerned—it is useful to review the
cases in which we do know the pressruns for music books to see what they can
tell us, both about edition size and survival rates.85 In placing Attaingnant’s
print-runs at 1,000, Daniel Heartz relied in part on the calculations Lucien
Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin made in their hugely influential L’Apparition
du livre (1958), where they estimated books of general interest to have been
printed in pressruns of 1,000–1,500.86 Recently, scholars have edged toward
more conservative figures: printing contracts for non-music books show that
pressruns for titles with commercial interest were closer to 1,000 copies; for
Plantin’s presses in Antwerp, we know that the figure was 1,250 for ordinary
editions and 1,000 for black-and-red liturgical books.87 But for music books,
other numbers appear to be the norm when we assess the stock of facts that
music historians have discovered in the last thirty years. The financing of a
publication, its salability, and its intended market (sacred institutions or lay
musicians) could all affect pressruns quite significantly, so we really cannot
speak of an “average” print-run for books of polyphony. Moreover, print-runs
for music tend to vary according to format and content, for which reason table
3.3 is divided into three categories: partbooks, tablatures for lute or vihuela,
and choirbooks of sacred music printed in folio. All of the choirbooks were
printed in “royal” folio on extra-large sheets of paper, which added to their
cost and value.
In general, the pressruns for first editions of music shown in table 3.3 aver-
age around 500 for partbooks and choirbooks, and 1,000 or more for books
in tablature (even given that formats in this category range from octavo to
folio). This difference is significant in itself and indicates that the market for
tablature was probably much broader than that for mensural music, which
stands to reason given the accessibility of tablature as a notational form and
the popularity at the time of lute, guitar, vihuela, and cittern. Learning the
lute was highly recommended for French aristocrats, for instance, and since
intabulations could be realized by a single player, these books of solos could be
used to make music whenever one liked.88
85
On the controversy over fifteenth-century print-runs, see Dane, The Myth of Print
Culture, ch. 2, where he argues that estimates are greatly inflated. On sixteenth-century
print-runs, see Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 71, with specific examples at
84–85 (Erasmus stipulating that none of his works should be printed in editions of
fewer than 1,500 copies) and 136. For a good assessment of early seventeenth-century
Leipzig, including music books, see Stephen Rose, “Music Printing in Leipzig,” 341–44.
86
Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 218–20.
87
See, for instance, Beatrice Beech, “Charlotte Guillard,” 351. On Plantin, see Voet, The
Golden Compasses, 2:169–73.
88
See Richard J. Agee, “A Venetian Music Printing Contract,” 64, on pressruns of tablature,
and van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 16–17, 44–53, on French nobles and the lute.
T A B L E 3 .3 Survival rates for sixteenth-century music editions with known print-runs
Surviving copies based on RISM unless otherwise indicated. For partbooks, complete
sets are given in whole numbers. Incomplete sets are given in parentheses and expressed
in decimals as portions of complete sets (.5 for two parts from an edition printed in four
partbooks, 1.125 for nine parts from an edition printed in eight partbooks, and so forth).
Date Author, Title Surviving Copies/
Print-Run
PARTBOOKS
1526 Matheo Bosca, Libro primo de musica de la salamandra 0/550a
(Rome)
1559 Barthélemy Beaulaigue, Chansons (Lyon: R. Granjon) 0(1.25)/1500b
1565 Paolo Ferrarese, Passions, 1 (.5)/500c
Lamentationes . . . (Venice: O. Scotto)
1579 Jacob de Brouck, Cantiones Sacrae (Antwerp: 4 (1.125)/500d
C. Plantin)
1589 André Pevernage, Chansons book 1 4/500e
(Antwerp: C. Plantin)
1590 André Pevernage, Chansons book 2 3 (1.5)/500
(Antwerp: Plantin-Moretus)
1591 Intermedii e concerti [intermedi to La pellegrina] 1 (.29)/116f
(Venice: Vincenti)
1602 Duarte Lobo, Opuscula (Antwerp: Plantin-Moretus) 0 (3)/500g
TABLATURE (in-folio unless otherwise specified)
1552 Albert de Rippe, Premier livre (Paris: M. Fezandat), 3/1200h
in-4o obl.
1554 Miguel de Fuenllana, Orphenica Lyra (Seville: M. de 12/1000i
Montesdoca)
1576 Esteban Daza, El Parnasso (Valladolid: D. Fernández 4/1500j
de Córdoba), in-8o obl.
1578 Antonio de Cabezón, Obras (Madrid: F. Sánchez) 11/1225k
1600 John Dowland, Second booke of Songs (London: 7/1023l
Th. East)
CHOIRBOOKS OF SACRED MUSIC (in-folio)
1516 Liber quindecim missarum (Rome: A. Antico) 17(1)/1008m
[1532] Carpentras, Liber primus missarum (Avignon: J. de 3/500n
Channey)
[1532] Carpentras, Liber lamentationum Hieremiae prophetae 3/500
(Avignon: J. de Channey)
( continued )
T A B L E 3 .3 Continued
[1533] Carpentras, Liber hymnorum (Avignon: J. de Channey) 3/500
[1536] Carpentras, Liber cantici Magnificat (Avignon: J. de 3/500
Channey)
1544 Cristóbal de Morales, Missarum liber primus 25/525o
(Rome: V. Dorico)
1600 Tomás Luis de Victoria, Missae, Magnificat, motecta, 2(4.75)/200p
psalmi (Madrid: J. Junti de Modesti)
a
Bonnie J. Blackburn, “The Printing Contract.”
b
Dalbanne, “Robert Granjon, imprimeur de musique,” and Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, 124, 148.
c
Agee, “A Venetian Music Printing Contract.”
d
Stellfeld, Bibliographie des éditions musicales plantiniennes, 46–54.
e
For this and the following three titles, see ibid., 135–36.
f
Warren Kirkendale, Emilio de’ Cavalieri ‘Gentiluomo romano’, 162.
g
Stellfeld, Bibliographie des éditions musicales plantiniennes, 141.
h
Jacques Prod’homme, “Guillaume Morlaye.” RISM 155434, 155435, 155436, and 155536 were probably
issued under the same terms; of each title, one copy survives. According to François-Joseph Fétis,
Catalogue de la Bibliothèque, 351, no. 2897, the series ran to six volumes.
i
Klaus Wagner, Martin de Montesdoca, 35.
j
John Griffiths, “The Printing of Instrumental Music.”
k
Cristóbal Peréz Pastor, “Escrituras de concierto.”
l
Margaret Dowling, ‘The Printing of John Dowland’s Second Booke.”
m
Catherine Weeks Chapman, “Andrea Antico,” 54–61, and J. A. Bernstein, Print Culture and Music, 75.
n
On this and the following three volumes see Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 110–17.
o
Cusick, Valerio Dorico, 95–101. Seven of the surviving copies are incomplete. Morales, Missarum liber
secundus (1544) may have been issued under the same terms; ten copies survive, two incomplete.
p
Victoria, Opera Omnia, ed. Felipe Pedrell, 8: lxxxv.
More surprising than the figures for pressruns are the survival rates indi-
cated by table 3.3, which are miserable all around. It does appear that folio
prints escaped destruction a little more often than other sorts of music prints,
but the numbers look bad when compared to non-musical publications of
similar format. To draw but two quick comparisons, the most recent censuses
register 228 extant copies of the Shakespeare first folio of 1623 from a print-
run of 750, and 147 copies of the royal-folio printing of Baldassar Castiglione’s
Cortegiano from the 1,030 copies Castiglione requested from the Aldine press.89
89
Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio, vol. 2, census, and on the Castiglione
see Conor Fahy, “Royal-Paper Copies of Aldine Editions.” Another well-studied publi-
cation is Copernicus, De Revolutionibus, printed in two editions estimated at 500 copies
These figures easily trump the dismal fate of Cristóbal de Morales’s royal-sized
folio choirbook, the Missarum liber primus (Rome, 1544), which was issued in
525 copies, of which only twenty-five survive. Partbooks fared even less well,
possibly because of the problems of preservation associated with the separate
parts, but equally likely because of their smaller formats, something they have
in common with the lute tablatures printed by Fezandat and Daza’s El Parnasso
for vihuela. Size, it would seem, really did matter in this regard—not just the
format of the print, but the number of folios as well. Nicolas Du Chemin, for
instance, brought out a number of single mass prints in 1568. Despite their
having been printed on royal-sized sheets of paper, each print was but twelve
to sixteen folios long. They were easily employed unbound for services, as may
have been the practice with some manuscripts at the Papal Chapel, and per-
haps as result of this, a couple of masses from this series—one by Pierre Certon,
the other by Claudin de Sermisy—survive in only single copies.90 Despite the
“royal” dimensions of the paper, the exquisite fonts used to produce the prints,
and the fact that both Certon and Sermisy were in the king’s employ (each
called symphoniographus Regius), the music itself was clearly a medium for per-
formance that got “used up” or discarded over time.
Even large volumes that almost certainly would have had to be used
bound because the music ran across the gatherings might not stand the test
of time very well. An inventory of 1562 from the church of San Luigi dei
Francesi in Rome lists its copy of Antico’s Liber quindecim missarum (1516)
as “tutto stracciato e senza coperta e sciolto” (all in shreds and without its
cover and falling apart).91 Of the 1,008 copies printed, only seventeen sur-
vive complete. And for other prints, the edition size might have been much
smaller—in 1589, Plantin agreed to print five masses of Jacob de Kerle in
a pressrun of only twelve copies, though his nephew Jean Moretus retracted
the offer.92 The occasional motets printed up singly in pamphlets for wed-
dings and funerals in early seventeenth-century Germany likewise probably
varied in edition size from as few as a couple dozen to several hundred,
depending on the circumstances.93
each, of which some 600 copies survive. See Owen Gingerich, An Annotated Census of
Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus.
90
Lesure and Thibault, “Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas du
Chemin,” catalogue nos. 88–93. On the Vatican manuscripts see Richard Sherr, Papal
Music Manuscripts, 1–2, and Jesse Rodin, “‘When in Rome . . .’,” 321, table 4, note c.
91
Quoted in Leeman L. Perkins, “Notes bibliographiques,” 60.
92
Jean-Auguste Stellfeld, Bibliographie des éditions musicales plantiniennes, 80–81.
93
Rose, “Schein’s Occasional Music,” 276–78.
These breathtaking records of loss illustrate the ephemerality of printed
polyphony. Like the performing parts of today, music prints rarely enjoyed
the safekeeping properties of bound books. And sheet music, as anyone
who has dug through stacks of it at the market or sorted through the pile
in the piano bench well knows, leads a very perilous existence. Judging
from sixteenth-century stocklists, Tim Carter estimates that for the Italian
secular music he studies, 15–20 percent of titles are now lost, and when
we consult Ferdinand Columbus’s collection of music, the figure comes in
at 25 percent for the number of lost editions in the catalogue.94 Bonnie
Blackburn has drawn up a distressing list of ghosts containing the chan-
sons of Josquin des Prez, including a three-volume series Du Chemin
reportedly devoted to the Prince of musicians in 1553.95 Judging from Du
Verdier, a third of the Parangon des chansons series has disappeared entirely
(quite believable, given the sketchy fortunes of books 7–10), and three-
quarters of Attaingnant’s Livre de chansons series survives in unique copies
in Munich BSB 4o Rar. 900. These depressingly high rates of loss force
the conclusion that at least some music was consumed very much like the
almanacs, how-to booklets, catechisms, and schoolbooks that were the live-
lihood of printers, no matter how costly.96 In his wide-ranging study, The
Book in the Renaissance, Andrew Pettegree estimated that less than 1 per-
cent of the total number of book copies printed in the sixteenth century
has survived to the present day, but for music books he remarks a “very
unusual pattern of survival. On the whole, expensive or complex books
tend to survive in larger numbers than cheap or ephemeral books . . .
yet this is not the case with musical part books.”97 True indeed, for a 1 per-
cent survival rate would give us fifteen complete four-partbook sets of the
Chansons of Barthélemy Beaulaigue rather than five mismatched partbooks
(.08 percent), and double the total number of partbooks in table 3.3.
One matter that has confused discussions about the way in which part-
books were used is the state of the surviving copies, most of which are per-
fectly clean and—when in original bindings—in tract volumes with leather,
parchment, or vellum covers. In their New Grove article on “partbooks,”
94
See Carter, “Music-Selling in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence,” 485–86, and Chapman,
“Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music.”
95
Bonnie J. Blackburn, “Josquin’s Chansons,” 63–66.
96
Stevens, “Vincenzo Girardone and the Popular Press,” 640. See Stallybrass, “‘Little
Jobs’,” on survival rates of broadsheets, and Chartier, Cardenio, 6, on early plays.
97
Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 334, 175–76.
John Morehen and Richard Rastall question the extent to which partbooks
were used for performance:
Printed partbooks have never been cheap, and even manuscript books
would have entailed considerable expense when a professional copyist
was involved. Many sets of partbooks survive in such excellent condi-
tion that it seems unlikely that they were ever used in performance;
in other examples the high incidence of undetected (or uncorrected)
errors, some of which are in themselves relatively insignificant, strongly
suggests that the books could not possibly have served as performing
material.98
But to make such an assertion is to miss the point entirely that the tiny fraction
of sources that do survive became library books in their own time and, as such,
were handled differently than the majority of copies now lost to our view. By the
eighteenth century, Padre Giambattista Martini’s bookman in Rome could turn
up a pile of cinquecento madrigal partbooks being sold by weight in a pizziche-
ria for the price of the paper, and as we know from the opening of this chapter,
Patuzzi, another of Martini’s agents on the lookout for Petrucci prints, despaired
when he was unable to retrieve the Odhecaton from the hunter who owned it for
scrap.99
In the case of the chanson series printed by Attaingnant and Moderne,
the books of just a few Renaissance bibliophiles account for a wildly dispro-
portionate number of the extant copies. Indeed, it has barely been recog-
nized to what extent the habits of a handful of institutions and individuals
such as the Fuggers, Arundel, Lumley, Herwart, and Werdenstein shape our
present-day notions of how music was used. As seen above in the case of the
Parangon des chansons series, five binder’s volumes account for virtually all
that is left, and of those volumes, two belonged to Herwart. The chansons
of André Pevernage listed in table 3.3 are known to us today thanks only to
Werdenstein’s bound copy of all four books. Herwart owned one of the four
surviving copies of Jacob de Brouck’s Cantiones sacres listed in the same table.
And the book of four Carpentras prints now in Vienna once belonged to
Raimund Fugger the Younger. If we had more inventories of the major music
collections of the sixteenth century and more means of identifying the prov-
enance of surviving exemplars, I daresay it would only confirm what these
examples suggest—the rare book holdings of today’s music libraries house
98
John Morehen and Richard Rastall, “Partbooks.”
99
See above, n. 1.
the collections of shockingly few early modern libraries. In fact, the music
originally collected by Herwart and Werdenstein, taken together, accounts
for 81 percent of the Bavarian State Library’s 1,236 music prints from the
sixteenth century.
Books in the Cabinet

To look at the books themselves makes the point about sixteenth-century
libraries and survival all the more strongly, an argument illustrated with
particular beauty by several chansonniers owned by Herwart. The first item
catalogued by Prommer in the inventory he drew up for the duke was the
set of Attaingnant Livre de chansons prints discussed above, Munich BSB 4o
Rar. 900. Prommer probably inventoried this pair of binder’s volumes first
because they were the most magnificent items in the music collection (see
figure 3.3). The splendid bindings have leather-covered boards decorated with
interlacing strapwork tooled in gold, painted leather, and gilded and goffered
edges. The bindings are in the French style, reminiscent of the books bound
for Fontainebleau in the period just before the more famous “fanfare” bind-
ings made for Jean Grolier and Thomas Mahieu around 1550.100 In short, the
Attaingnant chansonniers are real collector’s items of the sort that Cardinal
Mazarin’s “librarian” joked about when he censured aristocrats who dispensed
exorbitant sums on bindings rather than building the content of their librar-
ies. Better to have a large number of books in ordinary covers, he maintained,
than to fill some gilded little washroom with “toute sorte de mignardise, de
luxe & superfluité.”101 Naudé criticized the high end of the book trade and
those who liked to deck out their libraries in “every sort of preciousness,
luxury, and superfluity,” but even the erudite Samuel Pepys was known not
only to have collected books for their bindings, but also to have had other
volumes rebound as a matter of décor, “to make them suit with my study.”102
100
See Marie-Pierre Lafitte and Fabienne Le Bars, Reliures royales de la Renaissance, 151–69,
and Wotton Binder A and B (ca. 1547) in the “Database of Bookbindings.”
101
Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque, 107–8. “Le quatriesme [precepte] est de
retrancher la despense superfluë que beaucoup prodiguent mal à propos à la relieure
& à l’ornement de leurs volumes . . . il est bien plus utile & necessaire d’avoir, par
exemple, grande quantité de livres fort bien reliez à l’ordinaire, que d’en avoir seule-
ment plein quelque petite chambre ou cabinet de lavez, dorez, reglez, & enrichis avec
toute sorte de mignardise, de luxe & superfluité.”
102
Nixon, Catalogue of the Pepys Library, 6: xvi.
F i g u r e 3 .3 Binding of Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Musikabteilung, 4o
Rar. 900, Altus–Bassus partbook. This beautifully bound partbook once belonged
to Hans Heinrich Herwart. One of a pair, the set contains the Livre de chansons series,
books 1–35 (Paris: Attaingnant, 1539–50). The luxurious bindings are Parisian, with
gold-tooled interlacing strapwork and arabasques that match the style of bindings
made for Fontainebleau in the years 1549 to 1551.
In this sense, then, we might see Herwart’s Attaingnant volumes as objects

destined for the library-cum-Wunderkammer, just as were musical instruments
wrought from ivory, ebony, and silver, and telescopes, globes, coins, antiques,
busts, vases, and curiosity cabinets filled with rare shells, minerals, and other
F i g u r e 3 . 4 Ferrante Imperato, Dell’historia naturale di Ferrante Imperato
napoletano libri XXVIII (Naples: C. Vitale, 1599), plate before sig. bi depicting
Imperato’s rarities of natural history.
wonders (see figure 3.4).103 Books shared the cabinet de travail of Catherine de’
Medici with semi-precious stones, terra cotta figurines, fans, masks, and stuffed
crocodiles (like the trophy depicted so centrally in the collection of Ferrante
Imperato); Michel Tiraqueau, a friend of Rabelais, kept paintings, sculptures, a
thousand medals, curiosities from far-off lands, and the feathered headdresses and
other clothing of “savages” in his library.104 More stately was Arundel’s library at
Nonsuch Palace, described in 1582 as of such magnificence that should Ptolemy
come back to life, “he would die again of envy when he saw this library, with its
books on the arts, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, mathematics, theology
and history, and spheres, globes, bronze and paper instruments of all kinds.”105
The rooms in which books were kept—called a cabinet, galerie, or, most
often estude—also made apt sites for music-making, an association that defines
the quiet reflection captured at the opening of this “blason de l’estude” by
103
On curiosity cabinets, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order
of Nature. On music in the humanistic studiolo and instruments that were not meant to
be played, see Cavicchi and Vendrix, “L’Érudit et l’amateur,” 36–51.
104
Charon-Parent, “Les Grandes Collections du XVIe siècle,” 86–88.
105
Quoted in John Dent, The Quest for Nonsuch, 59.
Gilles Corrozet, the poet and antiquarian we encountered earlier in his guise
as book dealer:
O saincte estude, O Estude prisée,
Repos sacré des Muses Pernasines
Sejour tant doulx des Nymphes Cabalines.
Chambre de paix, de silence et concorde,
Ou le doulx Lucz et taisant manicorde
Rendent leurs sons tant souefz et paciffiques
Estude belle entre les magniffiques.
Ou est comprinse une Bibliotheque,
Autant latine Hebraique, que Grecque . . .106
[O holy study, o prized study, sacred repose of the Parnassian Muses,
sweet resting place of the Cabalistic Nymphs. Room of peace, of silence
and concord, where the soft lute and muffled clavichord produce their
sweet and peaceful sounds, beautiful study among the magnificent ones,
where there is included a library, as much Latin and Hebrew as Greek.]
Corrozet’s blason culminated a series of poems elaborating the art of furnish-
ing “une maison honneste,” an ideal residence designed in the spirit of the
new age, in which the books Corrozet bought and sold to the lettered elites of
Paris sustained or ornamented a lifestyle suggesting a nobility of spirit refined
though hours of contemplation with book or lute in hand. The Blasons domes-
tiques date from 1539, but the tendency to see music as a spiritual pursuit
consonant with the moral uplift achievable through study of the works of
antiquity was only to intensify as time went along. The Academy of Poetry and
Music established by Jean-Antoine de Baïf and Joachim Thibault de Courville
in Paris in 1570, with its plan to restore moral order to France by reviving song
in the style described by Plato, the many late sixteenth-century treatises on
nobility that recommended studying music along with letters, and the institu-
tion of mandatory lute instruction at the French military academies in the sev-
enteenth century all can be seen as related to the strain of musical humanism
inspiring Corrozet’s depiction of the estude as a music room.107
106
Gilles Corrozet, Les Blasons domestiques, fol. 34v; also see Charon-Parent, “Les Grandes
Collections du XVIe siècle,” 92–93.
107
On Baïf and Courville’s Academy, see Frances A. Yates, The French Academies, and on
French nobles, see van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, ch. 2. On musical instru-
ments inventoried in a cabinet or étude in the period 1600–50, see Tarek Berrada,
“Music at Home,” 293–99.
Corrozet’s blason is more than just a metaphor: many bibliophiles collected
instruments just as avidly as books. Raimund Fugger owned over 140 lutes,
including ones made from ivory, whalebone, Indian cane, ebony, cypress, and
guaiacum wood from the New World.108 Even less extreme examples show that
bibliophilia and instrument collecting went hand in hand. Because of their
size and lavish decoration, we occasionally find records of keyboard instru-
ments included along with furniture in inventaires après décès (while smaller
instruments such as lutes and citterns are less traceable). The textile merchant
Henri Guimier, for example, owned two harpsichords, a large one covered in
orange and blue damask with an ornate stand and a smaller, locked one (per-
haps a spinet) covered in leather and apparently lined with orange and green
damask.109 He surely owned some music, even though there is no record of it,
and we have to suppose that this was often the case, since even larger collec-
tions have disappeared without a trace. We know that Claude-Catherine de
Clermont, Countess of Retz, owned many beautiful instruments.110 An able
lutenist, she was known by the sobriquet Pasithée (after the fourth Grace and
leader of the muses, Pasithea), and it was to the countess that Pontus de Tyard
dedicated the 1575 edition of his Solitaire premier, a dialogue on music and
poetry in which Pasithée was one of the interlocutors. She was also a lute stu-
dent of Adrian Le Roy and dedicatee of both his Instruction pour le luth [1571]
and his Livre d’airs de cour miz sur le luth (1571). Yet about her music books,
which must have been numerous, we know nothing.
The most pristine sixteenth-century partbooks may have decorated the
shelves of cabinets alongside impractically constructed instruments like the
beautiful ebony lute once owned by Isabella d’Este, which must have sounded
harsh by comparison with those made of softer woods.111 It is hard for me not
to sense some dimension of “uselessness” in Herwart’s beautifully preserved set
of Attaingnant chansonniers, Munich BSB 4o Rar. 900, though this does not
mean that the music it contains was never used for performance. Keen to keep
these extraordinary books in good shape, Herwart had a number of favorite
songs copied into manuscript partbooks, and thanks to the fact that his col-
lection was kept intact, the manuscript copies survive to this day. Munich BSB
Mus. MS 1508 includes at least thirty chansons that appear to have been copied
directly from the Attaingnant volumes and the Parangon des chansons—JoAnn
108
Inventory in Richard Schaal, “Die Musikinstrumenten-Sammlung,” 212–16.
109
Madeleine Jurgens, La Musique au XVIe siècle, fol. 5, document dated August 1596.
110
See the inventories in Jeanice Brooks, “La Comtesse de Retz et l’air de cour.”
111
William F. Prizer, “Isabella d’Este,” 116–117 and 105–7 on her studiolo and lutes.
Taricani has even ascertained that a few spots of ink in the prints seem to have
accidentally dripped from the scribe’s pen onto the printed volumes when the
manuscript was being copied.112 Certainly the Attaingnant volumes were worth
protecting from daily use in this way; less clear is whether or not the same
objective pertained in copying chansons from the Parangon des chansons volume
(see figure 3.1). It is not as magnificently bound as the Attaingnant chansonniers,
but is nonetheless in a fine leather binding, though Herwart may have had the
separate parts produced from the chansons in the Parangon volume because he
preferred them to the table layout employed by Moderne. As an amateur viola da
gamba player, he may have found it easier to read from his own part.113
Messy, visibly used music books stand to tell us the most about music-
making in the sixteenth century, but they are few in number. One well-worn
volume, BnF Rés. Vmf 13, contains the Superius parts of Le Roy & Ballard’s
Livre de chansons series from the years around 1560. It seems to have provided
repertory for a professional keyboardist, Louis Cramoisy, the royal harpsi-
chordist under Henri II. He—unusually—marked it up with bar lines and
added a tune on some empty staves; he also used the back flyleaf to tutor stu-
dents in the gamut and hexachords. For the most part, though, the music that
comes down to us today seems to have been for reference. Just as the kings
of France filled the royal library at Fontainebleau with books for scholars to
consult within the safety of the château, and medieval libraries chained the
Summas of Aquinas, biblical commentaries, dictionaries, and concordances to
lecterns for safekeeping, many of the primary sources we work with as musi-
cologists may have been more akin to the non-circulating scores in modern
music libraries than the music we play from on stage and at home.
A telling remark from the age is that of Charles IX, who so loved Lassus’s
Sibylline Prophesies that he commanded Adrian Le Roy to print them “so that
they would not be lost.”114 Lassus never relinquished the music, which he had
already presented to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria as a gift in manuscript, and
112
Taricani, “A Chansonnier from a Library in Renaissance Augsburg,” 183–84. Similarly,
British Library Royal App. 58 (once probably at Nonsuch) includes chansons possibly
copied from an Attaingnant print, RISM 15283. See Jane A. Bernstein, “The Chanson
in England,” 30–36.
113
Slim, “The Music Library of the Augsburg Patrician,” 69.
114
Reported in a letter from Adrian Le Roy to Lassus dated 14 January 1574.
Reproduced in Lesure and Thibault, Bibliographie des Éditions d’Adrian Le Roy,
36–37: “Je vous puis asseurer que quand il l’a ouye, qu’il en a esté sy ravy que ne le
vous puis escripre. J’ay dict a Sa Magesté qu’en aviez faict davantage et que je pensois
bientost la recevoir. Allors il m’a respondu et commandé que je l’imprimasse, craignant
qu’elle ne se perde.”
indeed, it was never published in his lifetime.115 An example of musica secreta
for the court, the music survived quite nicely, then, without being printed,
copied as it had been for the duke’s library. Lassus, who oversaw the music
collection in Munich, had the parts copied by Johannes Pollet and decorated
by Hans Mielich, the court painter.116 Now in Vienna, still in their original
bindings of red velvet with ornate metal corners and clasps, they remind us
that a beautiful copy, a set of leather covers, and a good home offered more
certitude of preservation than printing. Guillaume Costeley worried enough
that the only manuscript copy of his works would be stolen that he brought
them to light in 1570—probably with a subvention from Charles IX—but
still only one complete set of partbooks of Costeley’s Musique survives, thanks
to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.117 Likewise, Gabriel du Minut warned
Anthoine de Bertrand in a liminary sonnet printed in the Bassus partbook of
the composer’s Second livre des Amours de P. de Ronsard (Paris, 1578) that he was
wise to publish his chansons before mice gnawed up the manuscript or some
puppy tore it to bits, but even so, we have only one complete copy.118
If velvet and gold-stamped leather destined some very few books for the
library shelf, the contents did as well, for in some sense binder’s volumes
were themselves small music libraries. French and Flemish printers of chan-
sons remained remarkably faithful to extensive series such as Attaingnant’s
Premier to Trente-cinquieme livre de chansons and Moderne’s Parangon des chan-
sons, series that invited buyers to purchase entire runs, presumably with
assurance that none of the songs would be duplicated book to book. With
around twenty-five chansons per print, Herwart’s larger Parangon volume
contains some 300 chansons, and his Attaingnant series almost 900 more,
easily a lifetime supply of songs given the fact that the few thousand German
Lieder in circulation around 1850 seem to have satisfied the avid market
for that genre. With anthologies like these, publishers could offer a whole
“library” of chansons to consumers in one series. They presage the sense of
the term “library” as it would be used by seventeenth-century English pub-
lishers such as John Dunton, who issued The Compleat Library; or, News for the
Ingenious . . . beginning in 1692. In their comprehensiveness, they also hint
at the use of libraria and bibliothèque to mean both a large collection of books
115
Peter Bergquist, “The Poems of Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Prophetiae Sibyllarum’.”
116
On the production of the manuscript, see Owens, ed., Vienna, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, Mus. Hs. 18.744, 4–5. Horst Leuchtmann, Orlando
di Lasso, 1:124–5 n. 144, believes Lassus was the copyist.
117
See the preface in Guillaume Costeley, Selected Chansons, ed. Jane A. Bernstein, xix.
118
For Minut’s sonnet see Olivier Trachier, ed., Renaissance française, 4:115.
and a bibliography of all the books one might have. Among its possible uses,
the bibliographer Conrad Gesner intended for copies of the Bibliotheca univer-
salis (1545) to function as catalogues for collectors in which they might mark
off the books they owned.119
Even more significantly, tract volumes of printed music evince attitudes
toward the bound book and its uses that are consistent with manuscript
collections predating the printed book. Miscellanies such as Munich BSB
4o Mus. pr. 52 (listed in table 3.2) have such varied and comprehensive con-
tents and privilege the desires of collectors to such an extent that they can
only have been assembled by readers. Indeed, they resist the book-forms
suggested and possibly sold by publishers. They are like small private
libraries all on their own, the individual printed “books” from which they
were compiled having been bound and preserved not within the walls of a
separate room but within leather covers. In this respect, they recall the very
origin of the codex around 300 c.e. as a means of containing texts with varied
authorship and subject matter. As Armando Petrucci explains in his essay
“From Unitary Book to Miscellany,” whereas the classical Greco-Latin world
knew and used unitary books made up of only one work or several works of
the same author gathered into an organic “corpus,” the early medieval world
was characterized by the widespread use of miscellanies, in which several texts
of different authors were juxtaposed in a single codex.120 Originating appar-
ently in Egypt and at the same time that the codex began to replace the scroll,
miscellanies were simple books in small formats formed by leaves obtained
from rolls cut for the purpose and written in hurried scripts with only some
ornamental lines and crude titles to divide one text from another. In their
material forms, then, they were “popular” books, and their contents suggest
products designed for private use. This revolution “from below” was followed,
in Gothic Italy, by the appearance of great organic miscellanies, their pro-
duction often elegant and formal, in semiuncial or uncial script, and their
patristic or scriptural texts interrelated. Finally, the early Middle Ages saw
the return of the incoherent miscellany, in which completely heterogeneous
texts were contained within the same covers. Although the miscellaneous
book became less important in the written culture of the West after the rise
of scholasticism, which privileged individual texts as a means of articulating
the different disciplines that made up the medieval university, Petrucci sees
the hodgepodge style of the miscellany surviving in the margins of written
119
See L. F. Bernstein, “The Bibliography of Music,” 127.
120
Petrucci, Writers and Readers, 1–18.
culture, “in the private practice of individual scholars and especially, in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the vernacular zibaldoni of the urban
bourgeoisie.”121
The music manuscripts that generally catch the eye of scholars tend to be
larger, generically coherent collections and books of calligraphic beauty, books
such as the Medici Codex, or the Chigi Codex and the Occo Codex, which
were produced by the workshop of Petrus Alamire in the Netherlands during
the first decades of the sixteenth century. But small miscellanies do exist.122 A
student of Heinrich Glarean, for example, owned at least two manuscript com-
pilations of music—the first, St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 464, is a little
twelve-folio set of partbooks with chansons and motets copied out by six dif-
ferent hands primarily in the years before 1520.123 Aegidius Tschudi (1505–72),
who came into possession of the volume last, copied out the final two songs in
his own hand (two of the great hits of the time: D’amours je suis desheritée and
Cela sans plus). Half the hands are those of novices, hurried or labored, with
blotches and deletions, while two other hands show practice and ease. At the
end is a diagram of the seven octave species and resultant modes that may have
been written by Glarean himself.124 The partbooks give the impression, then,
of having been workbooks copied from teacher’s exemplars, used to learn the
rudiments of music, and passed down through a series of students as second-
hand textbooks. Though very short, they remind me of how long it took me
to get through the Rubank and Breeze-Easy method books when I was young,
and of the fact that to this day I have still not exhausted the repertoire in the
three (slim) books of piano music I own. A little music goes a long way for
amateurs. Tschudi turned out to be an avid music student, so much so that
after a little study he wanted to follow Glarean to Paris. His father vetoed the
plan and Aegidius went on to become a famous magistrate and historian, but
he continued with his music studies nonetheless. Eventually “graduating” from
the little student manuscript St. Gallen MS 464, he put together a grander set
of partbooks, St. Gallen MS 463, into which he recopied all the pieces from the
former, adding to them two hundred works for three to eight voices including
Mass Ordinary sections, hymns, motets, chansons, Lieder, and canzoni. One
121
Ibid., 18, 183, 187.
122
Herwart owned a set of manuscript partbooks, Munich BSB Mus. MS 1501, that con-
tains a grab bag of sacred and secular music in Latin, German, French, and Italian, cop-
ied in three different hands. Also see Munich BSB Mus. MS 1516, copied from prints.
123
Donald Glenn Loach, “Aegidius Tschudi’s Songbook (St. Gall MS 463),” 57–66.
124
See Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, 170–76, on St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS
463 and MS 464, and Glarean’s Dodecachordon as modal commonplace books.
object of that set was to compile a music book organized according to Glarean’s
modal theories, but the repertoire also covered the full gamut of genres ca.
1540, represented by popular examples of each. As a book, it was a fine music
library all on its own.125
Chansonniers and Chapbooks of Poetry

The complexion of such miscellanies—whether tract volumes of prints
or manuscript miscellanies—provides one background against which the
publishing strategies for “popular music” can be assessed. At a time when
many book owners possessed only a book of hours and even the largest
libraries included only a small proportion of music, one music book like
Tschudi’s that contained the “best of the best” could well suffice. The very
precedence of the anthology for vernacular genres and the motet prior to
1540 (when Venetians began to publish quantities of madrigals and motets
in single-author volumes), and the continuing output of anthologies from
northern presses late into the century implies that for titles of broad dis-
semination, the work of few composers merited being printed or collected
on its own. The titles of printed anthologies, too, advertised their contents
in language suggesting that they were “selectissimae” or the “best of the
best.” Standard appellations for chanson anthologies include two series of
Fleurs put out by Tielman Susato and Pierre Phalèse, Moderne’s Parangons,
and Robert Granjon’s Trophées de musique. In the 1550s, Le Roy & Ballard
issued songs under the titles Premier recueil de chansons, Second recueil, and so
forth; in the following decade they changed the titles to Recueil des recueils
(“The Collection of collections”). At a tiny 3.5 × 4.75 inches (85 × 125 mm),
the Recueils des recueils were, along with the Livre de chansons series Le Roy
& Ballard issued concurrently, by far the smallest polyphonic prints on the
market, surely designed to appeal to those of modest means who wanted
a handful of good chansons by Arcadelt, Sandrin, Pierre Certon, Jean
Maillard, and other established composers. These diminutive chansonniers
are the ones we identified in the bookshop of Jean Caron in Amiens and
found Christopher Plantin importing from Paris.
125
A more beautiful miscellany in partbooks that may have comprised an entire private
music library is Cambrai, Médiathèque Municipale, MSS 125–28. Copied in 1542 for
Zeghere van Male (1504–1601), a merchant in Bruges, it contains 229 pieces, includ-
ing masses, motets, French, Flemish and Italian secular pieces, and textless works. See
George Karl Diehl, “The Partbooks of a Renaissance Merchant.”
In title and material form, prints of polyphonic chansons intersected
with a literary sphere familiar to lovers of French verse from the comedies
and farces they might have heard at the town theater.126 The horticultural
metaphors used in the titles of chansonniers such as La Fleur de chansons, Le
Jardin de musique, and Le Printans recalled the garden as a site for lovemaking,
dance, and song, and the defining effect of lyric on the entire tradition of
courtly love from the time of the troubadours onwards. The thirteenth-cen-
tury Roman de la Rose—still stunningly popular in the sixteenth century—
was full of singing, carols, and round dances in bucolic settings that helped
make the association between greenery and love complete, as did the songs
of the medieval pastourelle tradition still evident in the sixteenth century
in courtly and popular lyrics such as “Pastourelle jolie” and “L’amour de
moy” (“My love is enclosed in a pleasant little garden where the rose and
the lily thrive . . .”).127 After mid-century, Ronsard would assign to the royal
family roles as singing shepherds and shepherdesses in his Bergerie, Honoré
d’Urfé’s Astree would raise pastoral to new rhetorical heights in France, and
Il pastor fido would become a favorite source for lyrics among madrigalists.
But long before these evolutions, lyric anthologies in France commonly bore
titles such as Jardin de plaisance, Fleur de poesie, Printemps des chansons nouvelles,
Rosier des chansons nouvelles, Joyeux bouquet des belles chansons nouvelles, and ver-
dant variations of the same, in addition to standards such as Beau recueil de
chansons, Sommaire de tous les recueils, and so forth. By appealing to the pub-
lishing formulas of inexpensive poetry collections and anthologies of literary
extracts—also called Florilegia—printers of polyphonic songs defined their
wares in such a way that they would be instantly recognizable to the audi-
ence for recreational books. Many recueils de poésie even included the titles of
tunes to which the poems could be sung, making them true chansonniers.
So close were the ties between these two sorts of French lyric—the one
“en musique” and the other printed without—that the exchanges were recip-
rocal. In one instance, a little recueil de chansons without music was pulled
together by stripping the texts from chansons in Attaingnant’s Livre de chan-
sons series and reprinting them in this “reduced” form (without the notes,
126
Howard Mayer Brown, Music in the French Secular Theater.
127
The bookseller Galliot Du Pré had 160 copies of the Roman de la Rose in stock at his
death in 1561, on which see Schutz, Vernacular Books, 67. The Roman de la Rose was
also popular at court—Charles IX owned four manuscript copies. See Ernest Quentin-
Bauchart, La Bibliothèque de Fontainebleau, 155–56. On the pastourelle tradition see
Richard Freedman, “‘Pastourelle jolie’.”
F i g u r e 3 .5 La Fleur de poesie francoyse. Recueil joyeulx contenant plusieurs
huictains, dixains, quatrains, chansons, & aultres dictez de diverses matieres mis en
nottes musicalles par plusieurs autheurs, & reduictz en ce petit livre (Paris: Alain
Lotrian, 1543), sig. Aiiv–Aiiir.
but still eminently singable for those who knew the tunes).128 The full title
reads: La Fleur de poesie francoyse. Recueil joyeulx contenant plusieurs huictains,
dixains, quatrains, chansons, & aultres dictez de diverses matieres mis en nottes
musicalles par plusieurs autheurs, & reduictz en ce petit livre (“The Flower of
French poetry. Joyous Collection containing a great number of Huitains,
Dixains, Quatrains, Chansons, and Other Ditties on Diverse Matters Set to
Music [polyphony] by several Authors and Reduced in This Little Book”).
See figure 3.5.
128
See Hubert Daschner, Die gedruckten mehrstimmigen Chansons von 1500–1600, xxxii.
A sextodecimo recueil de chansons from Lyon even borrowed its title from Moderne’s
extensive chanson series: Le parangon des chansons nouvelles (Lyon: Benoist Rigaud,
1577). The title was no coincidence—Rigaud dabbled in printing polyphony at least
once, issuing a Premier livre de chansons spirituelles in sextodecimo (RISM 15689—N.B.
RISM incorrectly lists the format as 8vo). On Rigaud, see Kate van Orden, “Cheap
Print and Street Song,” 281 and 318 n. 25.
In this form, chansons were the stuff of a chapbook trade that fed the
market for easy-to-read poems in the vernacular, their brief epigrammatic
forms making them perfect for readers of marginal literacy. Printers such
as Benoist Rigaud in Lyon and the Bonfons family in Paris sustained their
enterprises with bouquins full of lyric poetry that shared the baskets of street
vendors with Christian ABCs and books of hours (see below, figure 5.1), and
it is here, in the trays of colporteurs, that we find chanson lyrics being sold
right alongside smaller books.129 A seventeenth-century account of colporteurs
describes them hawking songs and chivalric romances:
There are others of them who carry here and there almanacs, ABC pam-
phlets, daily gossip rags . . . and little romances of Mélusine, of Maugis,
of the Quatre fils Aymon, . . . pastimes, dirty and nasty secular songs,
written down by an unclean spirit, vaudevilles, villanelles, airs de cour,
chansons à boire.130
Not unlike the polyphonic chansonniers whose texts came to be trafficked in
such pamphlets, recueils de chansons nourished a trade dominated by publishers’
hunger for material and marked by familiarity rather than novelty, anonymity
rather than authorship, and replication unregulated by royal privileges, which
printers rarely sought for these opuscules. Songs were reprinted for decades,
new songs were written to the tunes of old ones, and songsters were among
the cheapest and most ubiquitous books in print: around 1580, a songster sold
for about 1 sou—quite a bargain considering that even an unbound set of
Arcadelt’s chansons cost 2½ sous, and a volume of motets easily cost 12 sous.131
It is a leap to imagine similar publics for the music contained in Munich
BSB 4o Rar. 900 (figure 3.3) and the Fleur de poesie (figure 3.5). Yet we need to
129
Production levels were healthy, and some thirty recueils de chansons from Rigaud
and Bonfons survive from 1565–85. See my “Vernacular Culture and the Chanson,”
239–68 and app. A.
130
Cited by Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire, 23: “Il y en a d’autres qui portent çá
et lá des almanachs, livrets d’Abécé, la gazette ordinaire et extraordinaire, des legends
et petits romans de Mélusine, de Maugis, des quatre fils Aymond, de Geoffroy à la
grand’dent, de Valentin et Ourson, des chasse-ennuys, des chansons mondaines sales
et vilaines dictées par l’esprit immonde, vaudevilles, villanelles, airs de cour, chansons
à boire . . .”
131
Labarre, Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise, 342–62. Average prices for books in 1544 are
summarized by Paul Mellottée in L’Imprimerie sous l’Ancien Régime, 440 ff.
recall that most high-end consumers of print generally purchased theological
works, books on canon and civil law, scientific tracts, devotional texts, and
philosophical works in Latin, not chansons or vernacular lyric.132 Like music,
French verse appears to have been barely library-worthy, even when penned
by the greatest authors of the age: the poetry of Mellin de Saint-Gelais,
Rabelais, Marot, and Ronsard was very unevenly collected and often com-
pletely neglected, even in the largest collections.133 And while Attaingnant’s
two-in-one prints in oblong quarto measured a comfortably large 210 ×
170 mm, as we saw already in fi gure 2.1, Le Roy & Ballard’s small chanson
prints were about half the size (85 × 120 mm) and matched the dimensions
of octavo recueils de chansons like the Fleur de poesie francoyse that sold so well
at the time.
Imagine the Attaingnant parts unbound, each flimsy sixteen-folio booklet
shared between a couple of singers or laid open on a table for viol players or
flautists, and the gap between polyphony and an anonymous book of recycled
verse seems less vast. To mentally disassemble a chansonnier as beautiful as
Munich BSB 4o Rar. 900 is in some sense to degrade the music, to be sure,
but much evidence insists that we do so in order to understand how and why
music was put on the page the way it was, how those texts were collected and
used, and their cultural value relative to other sorts of texts. To dismember this
luxury object in our minds is to return it to action, asking it to stand in for the
other copies falling apart, torn, worm-eaten, and waterlogged that never came
down to us. After all, anthologies had no single authorial presence guiding their
compilation (save that, perhaps, of an editor anxious to fill the sixteen folios of
an oblong partbook with as many “chansons nouvelles” as possible). The songs
were not composed as sets nor were they meant to be performed sequentially.
Rather, the anthology was a textually incoherent repository for chansons that
might subsequently find themselves bound together with motets, madrigals,
and even masses or treated like loose pieces of sheet music, as witnessed by their
dismal survival rates.
Musicologists are hardly alone in finding it a difficult exercise to unbind
books in the mind, for the magnetism books exert on most of us trained in
the humanities is complete. The often-cited letter from Jacobo Antiquario
132
To take just one well-documented example, Gaston Olivier (d. 1552), whose library of
775 titles consisted almost entirely of printed books, owned no music or music theory,
and no French verse either. See Françoise Lehoux, Gaston Olivier, aumônier du roi Henri II.
133
Doucet, Les Bibliothèques parisiennes, 49–50, 79–80, and Schutz, Vernacular Books.
to Angelo Poliziano concerning Poliziano’s Miscellanea is an excellent case
in point, one nicely scrutinized by Joseph Dane in The Myth of Print Culture.
Writing on 13 November 1489, Antiquario says he first saw a copy of
Poliziano’s book in the hands of youths, distributed in individual quires
among them, each with a bit of an item that was hot off the press.134 Dane
observes that Anthony Grafton, in citing the letter, describes the book as
having been “taken apart,” but, as Dane rightly argues, it is likely that the
book had never been “put together.” It could have been read most quickly
by the group of students unbound, and of course it would have been sold
unbound in the first place.135 In his interpretation of this passage, Grafton
imagines that the book has been taken to pieces, unable on some level to
give it up to the ill fortunes we know befell even the texts we value quite
highly today.
The example of music—the chansons penned into letters, sheaves of
unbound folios, and bundles of partbooks that got sold off en blanc at a
music-lover’s death—shows that even items requiring extraordinary forms
of literacy were passed from hand to hand in fragile states. Scrutiny of their
material forms and paths of transmission argue that we reposition chan-
sonniers closer to the “smaller” works sold by the colporteur and packed
together like rags by the notary or bookseller. I overstate my case only
slightly in saying that chansonniers were marginalia in the world of books.
Like the flowers and gardens referred to in their titles, we might begin to
imagine them as delicate, transient objects that gave much pleasure but led
fleeting lives.
To imagine lives for chansons outside the pressure of luxury bindings is
not to demote them to the status of deli-paper. Rather, it is to open them up
to performance by the musicians who traded them, copied them, and shared
them around until they fell apart at their lightly threaded seams. It is to these
musicians that we now turn.
134
Angelus Politianus, Opera miscellanea et epistulae, 3:18.
135
See Dane, The Myth of Print Culture, 62, discussing Anthony Grafton, “Quattrocento
Humanism and Classical Scholarship,” 53.
PART II
Learning to Read
F i g u r e 4 . 1 The Ass at
School, Pieter van der Heyden,
after Pieter Brueghel the
Elder, engraving, 1557.
Harris Brisbane Dick
Fund, 1928 28.4(21). The
Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, NY, USA.
Image copyright © The
Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Image source: Art
Resource, NY. The caption
explains that even if you
send an ass to school in
Paris, it will not become a
horse. The schoolchildren
in the yard, grimacing and
pulling up their robes,
have not yet learned the
manners recommended in
Erasmus’s De civilitate. The
Ass, however, cloistered in
his stall, has graduated from
studying letters to reading
mensural music.
Chapter Four Literacy and Song
A round 1600, students in France learned to read with printed primers.1

They began with the letters of the alphabet, which they learned by
playing with little wooden or pasteboard “ABC” cards of the sort tied
to the stool in the schoolyard depicted by Pieter Brueghel the Elder and
shown in figure 4.1. The children crowded around the teacher are hold-
ing single sheets of paper and small pamphlets bearing the alphabet or a
few words in large letters, while in the foreground Brueghel has shown
the other forms in which children might first encounter texts: one child
holds a scroll and has another little roll of paper tucked under his or her
belt, another child unloads books from a basket, including one bound in
leather-covered boards with clasps, and a couple of kids pick letters and
phrases out of larger books apparently designed for fully literate readers.
The spirit of distraction suggests a noisy environment in which books dou-
ble as playthings and educators try to sugarcoat the learning process with
fun and games before resorting to the switch (located in the teacher’s hat-
band). The playfulness of the scene echoes the recommendations made by
Erasmus in De recta pronuntiatione (1528), where he recounts a host of ways
to trick kids into enjoying their ABCs: pin felt letters to their clothes, give
them ivory letters to name and make into syllables and words, and try bak-
ing bread dough into letter shapes so that “when the child gives the right
1
François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing, 74–78. I paraphrase p. 75.
Also see Roger Chartier et al., L’Éducation en France, esp. 46, 127. For a full bibliogra-
phy of textbooks see Ferdinand Buisson, Répertoire des ouvrages pédagogiques.
name for a particular letter, his reward is to eat it!”2 All sorts of materials
might be enlisted in teaching children the letters of the alphabet, which
they presumably learned to say out loud or with an alphabet song.
After they learned their letters, children moved on to syllables, for which
they used syllabaries printed in large letters and containing the Pater nos-
ter, Ave Maria, Credo, Confiteor, and the Benedicite, all in Latin and all part
of the catechism of Christian doctrine. When they began to spell out and
pronounce whole words, children progressed to another syllabary contain-
ing the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, Salve Regina, Seven Penitential Psalms,
and the litanies of the Saints, all of them common prayers. Two pages from
Jacques Cossard’s Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant,
et compter (Paris, 1633) can give us some idea of what these early modern
primers looked like (see figures 4.2 and 4.3). In the first lesson the text of the
Pater noster is broken into syllables, whereas in the second lesson, the students
must discern the syllables of the Ave Maria themselves, a task aided by the
small numbers Cossard has placed beneath the text to show how many letters
should be read together as a syllable.
Striking here is the fact that children were taught to read Latin first,
and only later—if ever—progressed to reading French. Clearly catechistic
educational programs organized this curriculum, which frontloaded learn-
ing the basic tenets of the faith. But another significant reason pedagogues
delayed induction into vernacular letters was because they believed that
children vocalized truer sounds from Latin syllabaries.3 Far more orderly
than French, Latin texts were believed to project regular patterns of letters
and syllables into the mind, allowing children to associate the sounds of
vowels and consonants with letter shapes in one-to-one relationships that
established a foundation for good elocution. Indeed Erasmus, who encour-
aged teachers to begin with Latin and Greek, did so in order to promote
good pronunciation, upon which depended not just literacy and a child’s
command of knowledge but social success:
So if we exercise care about straightening children’s legs in order that
they shall walk properly, if we try to shape their cheeks, their mouths,
their faces, and other parts of their body with bandages to increase their
beauty . . . then surely we should be even more concerned about their
tongues and the proper formation of them. There is no other part of the
body so quick and so pliable and so ready to take up different shapes, nor
2
Desiderius Erasmus, The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek, 400.
3
On this point, Erasmus was firm. See ibid., 389–90, 471.
118 | l e a r n i n g t o r e a d
F i g u r e 4 . 2 Jacques Cossard, Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le
plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633), 101. Cossard’s text, as can be observed from
the directions in small type meant for the instructor, did double duty as a teacher’s
manual and a syllabary from which the examples in larger fonts could be read by
students. At over 350 pages, it was not in itself a book for beginners.
any other on which a man’s acceptability and success so much depends.

In short, it is the tongue which distinguishes human from animal.4
Later in the century, Pierre de La Primaudaye would argue for the primacy of
correct pronunciation on ethical grounds, since speech gave direct evidence
of a person’s morality:
For before the tongue and the mouth speak, and speech [la parole] is
formed in them, it is first necessary that it [la parole] be conceived and
4
Ibid., 370.
l i t e r a c y a n d s o n g | 119
F i g u r e 4 . 3 Jacques Cossard, Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter
le plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633), 103. Here the text is not visibly broken
into syllables with spaces, but students who doubt where the divisions fall can
consult the small numerals underneath, which indicate how many letters belong
together.
begot in the heart and the mind, and then put out, and pronounced by
the tongue and the mouth. . . . Just as the tree is known by its fruit,
so speech reveals the man, and his heart, and reason. This is why you
know someone better by hearing him speak than by seeing him before
you.5
5
Pierre de La Primaudaye, Suite de l’académie françoise, fol. 37r. “Car avant que la langue &
la bouche parlent, & que la parole soit formee en icelles, il faut premierement qu’elle
soit conceuë & engendree au coeur & en l’entendement, & puis mise hors, & prononcee
Such attention to the anatomy of speech production and the physiology of
verbal communication contributed to the fundamental connection between
learning to read and lessons in manners, for reading moral texts aloud was
believed to inculcate the tamed, artificial passions in children that were the
essence of good habits.6
Progress to the vernacular made the connection between reading, good
behavior, and the body explicit, for this second step toward literacy was
accomplished with the aid of a “civility” or book of manners. Many of these
books were translations of Erasmus’s manual on manners for children, De
civilitate morum puerilium libellus (Basel, 1530), or Baldassar Castiglione’s Il
cortegiano (1528), two books that contributed to the long-standing courtly
preoccupation with manners a textual apparatus that, by the end of the
century, sustained an educational agenda vesting physical habit with social
import.7 Castiglione and Erasmus wrote with rather different ends in
sight, for Erasmus had envisaged the regularization of manners throughout
Europe as a great equalizer that would smooth interaction among people
from different countries and social spheres—a common physical currency
for cross-cultural exchange—whereas the Italian strain of civility pro-
moted manners as a means of distinction. Yet in spite of these differences,
both Erasmian and Italian courtesy used the book as an agent. These texts
became primers of a second order, intertwining the processes of learning to
read and write with socialization.
Civilities printed in France often used a typeface approximating French
script, such as that employed in the edition of Giovanni Della Casa’s Il
Galatheo published by Jean II de Tournes in 1598 (see figure 4.4). A typo-
graphical primer in miniature, this edition employs a separate font for each
language, with the idea that each vernacular should be read in its appropriate
written form. Roman type was used for Latin, italics for Italian, and a font
called caractères de civilité for French. Thus the upright characters of Latin syl-
labaries contrasted with the elegant type of vernacular civilities, hinting at
the lessons in social grace contained therein. When the student could read
civility type fluently, the time had come for lessons in writing. In this way,
courtesy books not only taught good behavior—they laid a visual foundation
par la langue & la bouche. . . . Comme l’arbre est cognu par son fruict: ainsi la parole
manifeste l’homme, & le coeur, & l’entendement d’iceluy. Parquoy on le cognoistra
trop mieux à l’ouyr parler, qu’à le voir en face.”
6
See Johns, The Nature of the Book, ch. 6; on Protestants and reading aloud see Jean-
François Gilmont, “Protestant Reformations and Reading,” 224–30.
7
See Roger Chartier, “From Texts to Manners,” and Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Civility.”
F i g u r e 4 . 4 Giovanni Della Casa, Le Galatee, premierement composé en Italien par
J. de la Case, & depuis mis en François, Latin, & Espagnol par divers auteurs (Lyon: Jean
II de Tournes, 1598), 2–3. Note that while Latin, Italian, and French have each
achieved a unique typography, for Spanish, the printer has resorted to a roman
typeface. This use of roman type as a default had been the case for French until
Robert Granjon designed his lettre française de l’art de main in 1557; Granjon’s letters
came to be known as caractères de civilité in association with their use in French
courtesy manuals such as translations of Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium
libellus (trans. Pierre Saliat, 1537) and this translation of Della Casa’s Il Galatheo.
for the writing lessons that counted among the student’s first experiences of
physical discipline.8
The curricular segregation of reading from writing meant that many stu-
dents left school barely able to sound out printed Latin prayers they already
knew by heart, others could read print but not write, and still others were
fully literate, which meant that they could read various sorts of type and script
as well as write. Some primers even taught students to read musical nota-
tion and numbers. Cossard’s treatise, as the title indicates, was a “Method for
Teaching Reading, Writing, Singing Plainchant, and Counting,” and it took
8
See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter, 28–55.
the student through a series of lessons beginning, as we saw, with syllabizing
in Latin; then came lessons in writing vernacular texts in cursive—including
model letters from a schoolboy to his father that would have been perfect
exercises to copy out and send home—and it concluded with the Guidonian
hand, the gamut, clefs, chant notation, an introduction to white mensural
notation, and a brief section on numbers, counting, and rudimentary arithme-
tic. A synopsis of the musical section was also printed up as a broadsheet that
must surely have served for music lessons.9 We might also note the presence of
mensural notation in Brueghel’s engraving, where it represents a higher form
of literacy to which the ass aspires as an emblem of great learning, something
also figured by the glasses, candle, and inkpot surrounding the music and the
mention of Paris and its great university in the caption (see figure 4.1). Music
literacy was, for many, part of a good education. And singing, as we shall see,
played its role in learning to read, something hinted at by the source materials
examined in the following chapters: catechisms containing music, moralizing
quatrains meant to be sung to memorized timbres, and chorale-like settings
of the Latin primer texts, often in vernacular translations.
The diverse kinds and levels of literacy resulting from these educational
programs complicate our understanding of what literature and music was
destined for whom. After all, Latin prayers filled the role that Dick and Jane
primers do today, whereas little collections of French rhymes might have been
beyond those same beginning readers; children whose Sunday school cat-
echisms contained Latin songs they sang in processions might not have been
able to read the Superius part of a popular four-voice chanson such as Claudin
de Sermisy’s Tant que vivray; and even those students who could read a motet
printed in roman type might not have been able to decipher the words of a
song such as Pierre Sandrin’s Puisque vivre en servitude in the edition printed by
Robert Granjon, which employed civility type. The fact that some Latin pieces
were for illiterates blurs the stylistic distinctions between high (mass), middle
(motet), and low (chanson) that musicologists have elaborated based in part on
the definitions in Johannes Tinctoris’s Terminorum musicae diffinitorium.10 These
generic divisions have borne directly upon our understanding of the cultures
in which music circulated in the sixteenth century, framing it in terms of a
9
See BnF MS n.a.f. 4671, fol. 51, an enlargement of Cossard, Methodes, 266.
10
Available in facsimile, Terminorum musicae diffinitorium. On Tinctoris and the stylis-
tic concepts of high, medium, and low borrowed from Cicero’s Rhetorica see Manuel
Gustavo Erviti, “The Motet,” and for textbook definitions of the motet that take
Tinctoris as a guide, see most recently Allan W. Atlas, Renaissance Music, 86–88, and
Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 1:459–60.
highly literate tradition of church composers that reached its fullest expression
in the large-scale forms of the cyclic mass, a middling para-liturgical culture
of ritual and devotion in which motets were employed (again, by the highly
literate), and a popular culture of the chanson that intersected with oral tradi-
tions, memorized timbres, dance music, and the repertoires of possibly illiter-
ate minstrels.
By studying the process by which people learned to read, I hope to revise
our notions of the cleavages between oral and literate practices, where they
fell, and what music straddled them. I have deliberately separated discus-
sions of Latin-texted songs and motets (Ch. 5) from French chansons (Ch. 6)
and the moralizing songs that succeeded them during the era of heightened
attention to spiritual comportment brought on in part by the French Wars
of Religion at century’s end (Ch. 7). This organization mirrors that of edu-
cational programs, which began with the Latin catechism and progressed to
literacy in the vernacular; it also charts a rough chronology from a scholastic
culture that favored Latin literacy almost exclusively to those accepting of
French as a language of scholarship, learning, and—at the very end of the
sixteenth century, Catholic devotion.11 But the neatness of this arrangement
should not mask the considerable overlappings among these chapters, for the
Latin curriculum retained its precedence in French collèges throughout the
century, just as Latin orations, neo-Latin poetry, and motets continued to be
staples in many institutions and at court; conversely, teachers had doubtless
long been using vernacular translations of prayers in Sunday school classes,
for we find them in manuscript books of hours from the fifteenth century
and in little printed pamphlets titled ABC des Chrestiens across the sixteenth
century. Generic categories crystallized as greater social importance began to
be ascribed to what came out of children’s mouths, something we can track
in the musical repertoire as the free-for-all of songs in Latin and French (com-
monly called “motets” and “chansons”) acquired specific identities: “voix de
ville,” “airs de cour,” “pseaumes de David,” “chansons spirituelles,” “airs spi-
rituels,” and so forth. But just as the actual practices of the schoolroom and
court mixed Latin and French, we need to hear the French soundscape as
full of linguistic crossover and creolization, its speech communities perhaps
distinct but members moving from one to another. Indeed, “French” was
itself a linguistic meeting place centered on the quite mobile French court
and exclusive of the local dialects that were suppressed with the promotion
of French as a literary language, facts that stand as a good reminder that the
11
On the increased production of French-language books at the end of the sixteenth
century, see Henri-Jean Martin, “The Catholic Reformation and the Book.”
written and printed documents on which I have relied efface differences in
speech, sound, and pronunciation.
Analysis of musical texts plays a strong role in this second part of my
study as I seek to understand how musicians “read” the notation before them,
what kinds of pieces were used to facilitate the leap from learning note names
and rhythmic values to deciphering a line of music at sight, and what made
pieces easy or difficult to read. But textual analysis is not my only mode of
investigation, for in keeping with the inquiries launched in the first half of
this book, I pair musical analysis and cultural history with a thorough con-
sideration of the material forms in which texts circulated. Study of the choice
of typefaces, layout, and format used for musical texts can help us discover
their intended audience and the modes of reading they enabled.
In general, my object in the following three chapters is to consider books
and music for less-accomplished readers. This public made up the broadest
market for print, and in the broadsheets, pamphlets, and books designed to
appeal to them, we can see how authors and printers attracted new readers for
their wares by accommodating texts to the reading practices of the margin-
ally literate. The texts themselves were not necessarily “popular” in origin: as
Roger Chartier reminds us, “the works that made up the French stock of the
pedlar’s book trade had never been written for that purpose.”12 Rather, as
Chartier demonstrates through his analysis of the pamphlet literature of the
seventeenth-century bibliothèque bleue, these prints appeal to oral and memo-
rized practices for their logic: Through verbal codes, visual patterns, and
standardized forms printers imposed a recognizable style on the texts that
they replicated, one that caught the eye of readers who depended on memory
and familiarity in order to decipher new material.13
My concern with novice readers also has a musical dimension. Studying music
books designed for broad diffusion reveals that many employ the same publish-
ing strategies used by those in the business of printing poetry collections, little
devotional texts, and other sorts of ephemera pitched to a grand public. Many of
the texts in those chapbooks overlap with the musical repertoire. But even more
to the point for the history of reading is the fact that the marginally literate seem
to have relied to a significant degree on musical memory when “reading,” not just
in the vernacular, but in Latin as well. In Spain, Juan Luis Vives reports in his
Diálogos sobre la educación (1538) that children sang their Latin lessons to help with
memorization,14 and in his De recta pronuntiatione, Erasmus recommends singing
12
Roger Chartier, “Communities of Readers,” 13.
13
See ibid., and Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print, esp. chs. 5 and 7.
14
See Tess Knighton, “La música en la casa y capilla,” 65.
hymns as a way to learn proper accent and syllable length in Latin speech: “I do
not doubt that this was in fact how they were sung until the spread of illiteracy
and the resulting chaos of vowel pronunciation compelled resort to our modern
unjust way of treating them [syllable lengths] all the same.”15 In this way, sing-
ing familiar hymns such as Ave maris stella and Stabat Mater dolorosa could support
the correct pronunciation Erasmus sought to revive in schools.
The musical dimension of reading in Latin is likewise evident from the
primers themselves, which prompted students to syllabize the Ave Maria, Pater
noster, Salve Regina, and other prayers they already knew as songs. We know
that children who could barely talk sang the Ave Maria in their homes and the
streets and that huge numbers of the faithful sang litanies, hymns, the Salve
Regina, and Marian antiphons during processions.16 Boys led antiphons, girls
sang the Ave Maria in alternation with men and women, and whole groups
of pilgrims sang Te Deums “with great devotion and joy” when they arrived
at their destinations.17 Hubert Meurier, a canon at Reims Cathedral, tells us
that many lay persons—including women and small children—“knew most
of the office of the sacrament as if they had been brought up from the start
among ecclesiastics.”18 And indeed, primers usually included the responses of
the Mass, as one English source put it, “To helpe a prest to synge.”19 The use
of these pieces to regulate a child’s first concentrated experiences of reading
witnesses not simply the Church’s control of reading as an element of accul-
turation but the predominately vocal culture of rituals, sermons, feast-day
processions, and meal-time prayers that operated around these textual arti-
facts.20 These primer texts also witness the larger truth that many early mod-
ern texts operate sonically and need to be read that way. Their logic is oral,
15
Erasmus, The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek, 427.
16
See Hubert Meurier, Traicté de l’institution et vray usage des processions, esp. fols. 28r–v
and 41v.
17
See Nicolas Riquier, Recueil mémorable, 13. Also see the detailed descriptions of the
singing in Alexandre-Eusèbe Poquet, Histoire de Château-Thierry, 1:354–59; Jean
Pussot, Journalier, 18; and Le vray discours des grandes processions.
18
Meurier, Traicté de l’institution et vray usage des processions, fol. 43r. “Car non seulement
les gens d’Eglise & de Religion l’ont adoré [the host] teste nue & pieds nuds, & ont
chanté infinies louanges & de jour & de nuit, & à toute heure: mais aussi les per-
sonnes seculieres de toute qualité, jusques aux femmes, & petits enfans, qui sçavent la
plus part de l’office du Sacrement, comme s’ils avoient esté tousjours nourris entre les
Ecclesiastiques.”
19
See Horae Eboracenses, The Prymer or Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 26.
20
On English schooling, see Ian M. Green, The Christian’s ABC. According to Green,
English children learned to read from two officially approved texts: The ABC with the
catechisme and The primer and catechisme, both of which were allowed to be printed in
and—like musical notation or the script of a play—their sense depends on
performance, on speech, recitation, singing, sound, and the body.
More recollection than true discovery, reading catechistic texts activated a
matrix of background knowledge stored in musical forms—it recalled pitched
vowel sounds, pacing, and musical rhymes already lodged in the memories and
bodies of young readers. Let us take the Ave Maria chant as an example (see
example 4.1). The opening of this mode 1 antiphon is striking, both for its
sudden drop to the c′ below the final d′ and the leap to the reciting tone a′,
which is stressed with a plangent ornament on the b ♭′ a semitone above.21 It is
memorable in the way that the openings of so many well-loved hymns and anti-
phons were—one need only think of the Pange lingua, Ave maris stella, and the
Salve Regina to see that the aural hooks of their extraordinary incipits gave them
strong identities. From there, the melody unfolds with greater ease, dominated
by conjunct motion and articulating a tonal move up and away from the final
that is common to many hymns and monophonic songs reaching back to the
troubadours: the second phrase circles around the reciting tone where the first
phrase ended, matching the assonance of “Ma-ri-a” and “ple-na” with a musical
rhyme on a′. The third phrase moves from a′ down to the final, and the fourth
begins ambiguously on g′, moving on to press upon the e′ above the final before
settling upon d′. In this example, I preserve the rhythmic values and text under-
lay from Pierre Certon’s polyphonic setting of the chant—they can give us some
idea of the stress that was considered appropriate. Nonetheless, in most cases the
melodic contour of the chant, with its high points on “Ma-RI-a,” “DO-mi-nus
TE-cum,” “Be-ne-DI-cta tu,” better serves the cause of good declamation than
rhythm.22 Accent is keyed to a logical melody, one constructed of aphoristic
phrases that were memorable enough to stick in the mind.
Such melodies helped boys and girls keep their place in the dizzying jum-
ble of letters and syllables that confronted them as they labored through the
Latin prayers in their abécédaires. The ebb and flow of the melody gave order
to the letters printed in syllabaries such as Cossard’s, where words are bro-
ken apart and often hyphenated at the ends of lines (see figures 4.1 and 4.2).
Indeed, the only visual devices that give the phrases profile in Cossard’s book
runs of up to twice the normal limits of 1,250–1,500 established in 1587. See ibid.,
with information on print-runs and editions at 65–69, contents at 174–77, and the
initial steps and settings of instruction at 170–87.
21
The version of this antiphon I provide here is from the polyphonic setting by Pierre
Certon shown in figure 5.6 and transcribed in part in example 5.2.
22
To quote from the discussion of accent in Erasmus, The Right Way of Speaking Latin and
Greek, 423: “It is as if a musician were to play re re fa re re in the time of short, long,
E x a m p l e 4 . 1 Ave Maria, second antiphon of Second Vespers for the
Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 25 March, rhythmicized and with text
underlay as in the polyphonic setting of Pierre Certon
are punctuation and accents that—felicitously—correspond to the comely

melody of the chant.
If prayers and hymns made an apt aide-mémoire for children who were
learning to sound out written texts, it surely owed to the fact that the words
and melodies of these sacred songs had been conditioned by oral practices.23
We might almost say that those children who left school only able to read
their syllabary had not really learned to read at all, in the sense of decipher-
ing meaning from letters on a page, for their entire experience of the written
was inflected by oral experience. Michel de Certeau captured this essential
quality of reading—the oral source of its “authority”—with an important
definition that distinguished reading from writing and deciphering writ-
ten texts, a distinction particularly relevant to the sixteenth century, when
reading and writing were learned sequentially. Certeau maintained that
the construction of meaning was linked to oral transmission. Students did
not learn to read meaning by learning to decipher letters; rather, reading
enlisted the authority of oral practices in the deciphering of a written text.
Deciphering—sounding out, putting letters together, and syllabizing in the
ways taught by Cossard—might be learned in tandem with reading, but
reading was “preceded and made possible by oral communication.”24 “In
other words, cultural memory (acquired through listening, through oral tra-
dition) alone makes possible and gradually enriches the strategies of seman-
tic questioning whose expectations the deciphering of a written text refines,
clarifies, or corrects.”25 Certeau argued that all reading mobilizes expectations
first shaped by oral experiences, and here we need only think of the catechism
short, short, short—ămāvĕrĭmŭs. There are two syllables that are more fully sounded,
the second because of its length and the third because though short it carries a raised
accent.”
23
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 165–76. This key essay, “Reading
as Poaching,” is reproduced and introduced in Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone,
and Katie Halsey, eds., The History of Reading, along with Roger Chartier’s response,
“Communities of Readers.”
24
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 168.
25
Ibid.
lessons that preceded a child’s first encounter with the Latin prayers in his or
her abécédaire.
Against the argument advanced by some historians of print that texts
shaped and “imprinted” readers with their messages, Certeau offered a
new way of understanding reading that credited oral culture with greater
power, a theory that is of special relevance to my study.26 For the rela-
tionship between oral authority and “scriptural” authority examined by
Certeau first began to be renegotiated during the sixteenth century as
printing accelerated and the Reformation and Catholic Reform estab-
lished new textual foundations for their faiths. As we know, Protestants
encouraged direct access to Scripture, which brought with it a rise in
literacy and an increased production of texts, both verbal and musical.27
In Lyon and nearby Geneva, for example, the production of vernacular
Bibles, catechisms, psalters, and other books designed to support reli-
gious instruction and private devotion vastly outstripped the proportion
of Huguenots in the general population, which historians have estimated
at around 10 percent during the peak years of the 1560s.28 Catholic atti-
tudes toward reading varied greatly and changed over time, but at one end
of the continuum they overlapped significantly with those of Reformers
(themselves by no means consistent from sect to sect in sixteenth-century
Europe). French Catholics, as we shall see, countered Protestant book pro-
duction with their own catechisms, post-Tridentine editions of the book of
hours, and vernacular paraphrases of hymns meant to supplement reading
of the Vulgate Bible.29
But despite this response in kind to the material dimension of Reformation
ideology (a response spearheaded by the Jesuits), Catholics never fully
embraced the practice of placing sacred texts into the hands of children. As a
result, they continued their long-standing traditions of oral instruction, and
it is this insistence on the spoken word and its deep history reaching back into
the fifteenth century and forward into the seventeenth that is relevant here.
26
Certeau’s position counters the theories of print culture developed by Robert Mandrou,
De la culture populaire, who declared the literature of colportage to be the instrument of
a victorious process of acculturation.
27
Among the many studies on literacy, see especially Davis, Society and Culture, 189–226,
and Jean-François Gilmont, The Reformation and the Book.
28
See Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 30–33. Likewise, music printers in Lyon
and Geneva brought out large numbers of chansons spirituelles and harmonized psalters.
See Pogue, Jacques Moderne, and especially Guillo, Les Éditions musicales.
29
Henri-Jean Martin, The French Book, 12–20, and, for the musical repertoire, Denise
Launay, La Musique religieuse, 37–54.
One outcome of such ambivalence toward literacy was greater exclusion—in
the seventeenth century, Jesuit educators closed down their ABC classes for
local children whenever possible, and government officials tried to reserve
literacy for those born into the higher social orders.30 Girls also had limited
and uneven access to schooling, for girls’ schools numbered far fewer than
those for boys, and while many so-called écoles de garçons admitted girls as
well, under Louis XIV, for instance, mixing the sexes in classes was firmly
discouraged.31 In her study of women readers in early modern England,
Heidi Brayman Hackel observes that even while women represent the single
largest category of new readers during the period between 1530 and 1640,
“female readers are . . . disproportionately invisible as readers in the histori-
cal record.”32 The same pertains to France, where women such as Marguerite
de Navarre and Pernette du Guillet published stories and verse and aristo-
crats such as Catherine de Clermont achieved extraordinary erudition, but
little is known about the habits of those children—boys or girls—who were
excluded from collèges.
My larger intention, then, is not only to include singing and musical
literacy in the history of reading in sixteenth-century France, but also to elu-
cidate the doctrinal and social struggles in which music became embroiled
when Catholics bound it more firmly to catechistic instruction. That is to say,
a new history of literacy and music bears upon the broader history of Catholic
indoctrination and upper-class socialization in France, not least because sing-
ing remained an oral practice. Such a history of music restores to the his-
tory of scriptural authority triumphant a dimension of orality and draws our
attention to the autonomous vocal cultures that were not effaced by literacy.
Indeed, it takes up the challenge posed by Bruce R. Smith in The Acoustic
World of Early Modern England to attend to “the O-factor” and look for the
signs of the voice and the body in early modern texts:
In hindsight, it is easy for us to talk about the “triumph” of printing
in early modern Europe. What we are apt to miss is the resistance
of voice to the new medium. In a culture that still gave precedence
to voice—in legal practice, in rhetorical theory, in art made out of
30
See George Huppert, Public Schools, 117. For a broad analysis of Catholic attitudes
toward reading and literacy, which were far from unanimous or unwavering, see
Dominique Julia, “Reading and the Counter-Reformation,” 243–50, 257–66.
31
See Jean de Viguerie, L’Institution des enfants, 124–28, and Chartier et al., L’Éducation en
France, ch. 8.
32
Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 11.
words, in the transactions of daily life—we should be looking, not for
evidence of the hegemony of type technology, but for all the ways in
which that newly discovered resource was colonized by regimes of oral
communication.33
In the chapters that follow, I elaborate the ways in which print permit-
ted multiple readings, how musical texts met their readers halfway between
the oral and the written, and how print was feared as an agent of unau-
thorized reading practices. In fact, upon close examination it comes clear
that it was not the printing press that promised to modify moral behavior,
but the human technologies of the classroom, which relied on singing and
speaking texts aloud. Singing and recitation gave texts body, and—in the
same way that the Catholic sacraments and codes of civility disciplined the
body—performances enabled educators to discipline reading itself.
33
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World, 128–29. Two literary studies that rise to this
challenge are Christopher Marsh, ‘The Sound of Print,” and Jennifer Richards, Shared
Reading in the English Renaissance.
Chapter Five Latin Primers
Ave Maria and the ABCs

In the sixteenth century, books of hours were by far the most ubiquitous book
in French households, and they were regularly used to teach the rudiments
of reading.1 Parisian presses churned out truly vast quantities of Heures—
by some estimates, at least 595 editions were published between 1501 and
1535, which meant that as many as half a million copies were produced in a
city with a population of no more than 300,000.2 The Hours were printed in
Latin, sometimes with French prayers at the end, in side-by-side translations,
or entirely in French. Paris served the European market, with Hours designed
for local usage in Paris, Rome, Rouen, Verdun, and so forth. The small for-
mats in which they often appeared suggest the broadest possible audience, as
do estate inventories, which show the prevalence of Heures among the belong-
ings of merchants and artisans. Even if a person owned no other books, he or
she often owned a book of hours.3 And far from diminishing in popularity
as the century wore on, production continued apace. For example, between
1555 and 1589, Christopher Plantin published sixty-three editions of Hours,
1
On the fifteenth century, see Paul Saenger, “Books of Hours,” who shows that such
books were used for learning to read, oral recitation, and silent prayer.
2
Reinburg, “Books of Hours,” notes that production decreased as the century wore on.
Also see Jean-Pierre Babelon, Paris au XVIe siècle, 159–66 on the population.
3
On books of hours in inventaires après décès, see Karen Lee Bowen, Christopher Plantin’s
Books of Hours, 41–52, and Labarre, Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise.
F i g u r e 5 . 1 Colporteur hawking ABCs and books of hours, from the series “Les
cris de Paris” (16th c.). Traveling vendors sold a variety of small precious goods in
addition to printed matter, such as ribbons, combs, fans, gloves, and items made
from horn.
most in smaller formats such as 12o, 24o, and even 32o, presumably in large
print-runs of well over 1,000 copies.4
The connection between basic literacy and the Horae is evident in the word
“primer” itself, which some believe derives from the canonical hour of Prime.5
Whether or not this etymology is correct, it is certainly the case that sixteenth-
century books of hours often included the ABCs.6 That ABCs and the Heures
de Notre Dame went together is clear from the colporteur’s cry in the well-
known sixteenth-century woodcut “Beaulx ABC, Belles Heures” depicted in
figure 5.1.7 Undoubtedly, this vendor’s basket included pamphlets like the
4
Bowen, Christopher Plantin’s Books of Hours.
5
Though this has not been proved. See Horae Eboracenses, xxxvii–xliv.
6
On English Hours see ibid., xliii–xliv, 25.
7
On colportage see especially Henri-Jean Martin, “Culture écrite et culture orale,”
261–68, and Roger Chartier, “Pamphlets et gazettes.” The provincial haute bourgeoisie
l a t i n p r i m e r s | 133
F i g u r e 5 . 2 Le ABC des Chrestiens, a typical little abécédaire pamphlet of just
eight folios bound into Heures de Nostre Dame à l’usage de Chartres (Paris: Jacques
Kerver, 1581), sig. Cir. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, B-27833.
“Croix de par Dieu” in figure 5.2 that began with the cross (for which the
name), the alphabet, the Pater noster, Ave Maria, and Credo, and continued
with a traditional Latin grace, prayers, and responses for Mass, followed
by a series of French texts: translations of the Pater noster, Ave Maria, and
Credo, the last often in the rhyming quatrains that were a longtime favorite
of pedagogues. The Ten Commandments and the Commandments of the
Church usually appeared in similar form. Virtually ungraded in their leap
from the letters of the alphabet to Latin prayers, such pedagogical texts
required the presence of a teacher, rather like contemporary books for lute
and vihuela that began with a couple of folios explaining how to tune the
instrument and read tablature and gave way immediately to fully-fledged
musical texts.
also consumed the colporteur’s wares. See Jean-Pierre Gutton, La Sociabilité villageoise,
57–67, and Jean-Marie Constant, “Un groupe social ouvert.”
Pamphlets like the “Croix de par Dieu” were usually eight folios long,
and many of those that survive are found bound into books of hours at or
near the beginning, effectively prefacing the Hours with an alphabet and
set of primer texts.8 These little catechisms were the parents of syllabaries,
which began the same way and contained many of the same Latin texts. Thus
although they were largely in Latin, Horae promoted both Catholic piety and
general literacy, at least enough to sound out the Word of God.
Like an ABC song, the melodies of the Pater noster and Ave Maria were
among the first ones a child learned; conversely, these “songs” were just as
closely associated with the alphabet as the Croix de par Dieu or the alpha-
betic series of moralizing quatrains that children regularly learned to recite
and sing.9 The pride of place given to the Pater noster and Ave Maria in the
Catholic faith—as witnessed by the priority accorded them in books of hours,
catechisms, abécédaires, and syllabaries—seems to have inspired composers
and printers to place them at the beginning of music books as well. To men-
tion just a few examples, Adrian Willaert’s first book of motets a 4 opens
with a charming Ave Maria gratia plena that sets the chant most clearly in the
top voice (1539), and his first book of motets a 6 (1542) begins with a Pater
noster and an Ave Maria, both based on the chant melodies. Jacques Moderne’s
third book of Motteti del fiore a 4 opens with a Pater noster and an Ave Maria by
Francesco de Layolle in its 1539 edition; Pierre Certon began his Institutoris
Symphoniacorum puerorum . . . modulorum editio (1542) with a six-voice Pater nos-
ter in which the canonic Quinta and Sexta parts contain the Ave Maria chant
cited in Chapter 4; Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina opened his third book of
motets a 5 (1575) with a Pater noster and an Ave Maria, both of which para-
phrase the chant melodies, and Pietro Cerone opened his music theory trea-
tise, El melopeo y maestro (1613), with a magnificent engraving of the Virgin
surrounded by the parts to a canonic Ave Maria for twenty voices. One of the
earlier polyphonic settings of the Pater noster prayer also became one of the
century’s favorites—the famous Pater noster a 6 of Josquin des Prez, which set
8
See Paul Lacombe, Livres d’heures imprimés. Among the Hours I examined in Parisian
libraries, such ABC pamphlets can be found bound in BnF B-27833 (Lacombe, 471
and shown in figure 5.2) and B-27949 (Lacombe, 492); Bibl. historique de la ville de
Paris, Rés. 550542 (Lacombe, 468); Paris, Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève, Rés. BB-1492, Inv.
1650 (Lacombe, 412) and Rés. BB-1516, Inv. 1669 (Lacombe, 465). The dates range
from 1539 to 1589, with remarkable consistency in form and content.
9
See the examples in Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 235–38, and the moral-
izing recueils by Yves Rouspeau, Quatrains spirituels de l’honneste amour (Paris: pour Jean
Houze, 1584) and Quatrains spirituels de l’honneste amour, avec les Stances des louanges du
saint mariage (Pons: T. Portau, 1593).
the Ave Maria in its secunda pars and which Josquin asked to be sung before
his house in Condé during all the general processions of the year.10 It appears
in over two dozen sixteenth-century manuscripts and printed books, over a
dozen books of tablature, and it opens the large manuscript Padua, Biblioteca
Capitolare, MS A. 17, one of its earliest sources. Finally, for the best example
of all we need only turn to Ottaviano Petrucci’s Odhecaton, for the very first
book of printed polyphony begins with a four-voice Ave Maria by Marbriano
de Orto, its text underlaid in all the voices.11
One can imagine that the familiar texts and tunes of these settings enticed
more than a few shoppers to purchase these collections as they scanned the
opening folios. At the very least, their place of honor in music books reflected
their primacy in other books and in lay culture generally. Indeed, Petrucci’s
second motet book, Motetti de passione, de cruce, de sacramento, de beata virgine et
huiusmodi B of 1503 clearly seems to have taken the Horae as a model. Loosely
organized to reflect a suite of votive services, it mirrors the standard cycle
of offices that gave the book of hours its name—the Hours for the Feasts of
the Blessed Virgin, the Cross, and the Holy Spirit.12 In similar fashion, the
“ABC” designations Petrucci gave his Motetti and Canti volumes associated
them with other sorts of primers.
The foundational nature of the Pater noster and Ave Maria invite the ques-
tion of how polyphonic settings of these texts might have been intended as
musical primers. For the moment, let us leave aside the motets I have just
cited (to which we shall return) and turn instead to a polyphonic primer
explicitly designed for catechism classes, the Jesuit Father Michel Coyssard’s
Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz pour chanter avecque la Doctrine
chrestienne (Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1592). Coyssard (b. 1547) served as rec-
tor of the colleges at Tournon, Le Puy, and Vienne, and died in 1623 while
vice-provincial in Lyon.13 The college of Tournon was especially renowned
for its music-making, in which Coyssard surely had a hand. Students there
10
See Daniel E. Freeman, “On the Origins of the Pater noster-Ave Maria,” and Herbert
Kellman, “Josquin and the Courts of the Netherlands and France” for the testament.
11
For a list of Pater noster and Ave Maria settings, see Freeman, “On the Origins of the
Pater noster–Ave Maria,” app. 1. For more complete lists of those that open prints and
those in Petrucci’s chansonniers, see my “Children’s Voices,” 224 n. 30 and 246 n. 71.
On Petrucci’s marketing strategies, see John Kmetz, “Petrucci’s Alphabet Series.”
12
Howard Mayer Brown, “The Mirror of Man’s Salvation,” 764, argues that all of
Petrucci’s motet anthologies “might almost be described as the musical equivalent of
a book of hours.” Also see Julie E. Cumming, “Petrucci’s Publics,” 99–100.
13
See Launay, La Musique religieuse, 119–36 on Coyssard’s life and works. Also see Jean-
Claude Dhotel, Origines du catéchisme moderne, 133–36, 142–44.
participated in liturgical services, sang “figured” music, performed in lavish
plays and the occasional entry, and probably also studied the lute and other
instruments.14
As the title indicates, the Paraphrase des Hymnes contains French para-
phrases to sing “with the Christian Doctrine,” and, indeed, the texts it glosses
are precisely those of the catechism:
Le Credo
Le Pater noster
L’Ave Maria
Le Veni Creator
Veni Sancte Spiritus
Vexilla Regis
Le Salve Regina
L’Ave Maris stella
Stabat Mater
Les commandemens de Dieu
Les commandemens de l’Eglise
Conditor alme siderum
Pange lingua gloriosi
Te Deum laudamus
Kyrie pro litaniis
Coyssard’s polyphonic catechism was not meant to replace the Latin one, but
supplemented it with French paraphrases of the articles of the faith that children
learned by rote. This turn to the vernacular was less radical than it might seem,
given the strong Catholic resistance to the Huguenot psalter, for the Jesuits had
a substantial tradition of proselytizing with vernacular songs. Francis Xavier
taught his congregations in Ternate, Indonesia to sing the Credo, Pater noster,
Ave Maria, Confiteor, and the Commandments, perhaps in Malay, though prob-
ably in Portuguese, and he composed in verse a long Portuguese explanation
of the Credo drawn from the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, which he taught the
Portuguese and natives to sing by heart.15 In Brazil as well, Jesuit converts sang
a translation of the catechism, in Tupi (1577).16 With tuneful melodies, famil-
iar language, and the charm of rhyme, missionaries “spiced up” the catechism
14
van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 224–25; T. Frank Kennedy, “Jesuits and
Music”; and Thomas Culley, “Musical Activity.”
15
See Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier, 3:31, 153.
16
Paulo Castagna, “The Use of Music by the Jesuits,” 649. On singing the catechism in
Europe, see T. Frank Kennedy, “Some Unusual Genres of Sacred Music.”
and made it more palatable for children, whose souls would thereby receive the
imprint of the doctrine more readily.17
These missionary efforts were not so different from the (controversial)
methods of the Jesuits in France, who hoped that French translations of
hymns and other chants could be used as a “contrepoison” or antidote to halt
the spread of heresy via the Huguenot psalter. At the outset of the first War of
Religion in 1563, the Jesuit Edmond Auger wrote from Lyon to his general
in Rome to recommend that the court poet Pierre de Ronsard be asked to
write chansons spirituelles in French to quench the psalms of Clément Marot,
which had taken over the city. The idea was to provide faithful Catholics
with a repertoire they could sing “at home, in shops, and while traveling.”18
“For the French love singing very much,” Auger said, “and with this would
be a battle like that in the time of St. Chrysostom against the songs of the
Arians.” Ronsard did produce a paraphrase of the Te Deum laudamus, which
he dedicated to Jean de Monluc, Bishop of Valence, “pour chanter en son
église,” and the French delegation to the Council of Trent even proposed that
Catholics sing vernacular canticles during Mass.19 But the Council rejected
the idea, and it was abandoned until the end of the century.
Inside the Jesuit colleges, music was used early on in a variety of ways.
The best-known accounts are of the splendid year-end ceremonies for which
motets were sung and the annual cycle of theatrical events on Twelfth Night,
Carnival, Saint John’s Night, and other feast days, during which the students
performed plays larded with song and dance.20 But in the very lowest classes,
too, students learning their ABCs were taught to sing antiphons and prayers.
This last form of music-making was hardly unique to the Jesuits, for singing
sacred songs in the classroom was nothing other than a continuation of the
traditional Latin schooling originally intended for choirboys. Already in the
fifteenth century, the average grammar school employed one master to teach
singing and the rudiments of grammar and a second one to teach the liberal
arts, and into the seventeenth century, music maintained its role in elementary
17
I gloss Michel Coyssard, Traicté du profit que toute personne tire de chanter en la Doctrine
Chrestienne, & ailleurs, les Hymnes, & Chansons spirituelles en vulgaire: & du Mal qu’apportent
les Lascives, & Heretiques (Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1608), 20, 38–40.
18
Cited in Kennedy, “Jesuits and Music,” 82.
19
On Monluc and Trent, see Michel Jeanneret, Poésie et tradition biblique, 201–3.
20
On music and ballet at La Flèche and Tournon (where Coyssard was rector), see van
Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, ch. 5. Many Jesuit colleges did not allow liturgical
singing, but in Lyon and Tournon, it was preserved during a review in 1571, because it
had become a tradition there. See Culley, “Musical Activity,” 6, and Kennedy, “Jesuits
and Music,” 73–81.
schooling in even the smaller villages, where schoolmasters regularly doubled
as choirmaster of the local church.21 Much has been made of Luther’s insis-
tence that a schoolmaster must know how to sing, but in fact, singing was
a regular part of Catholic education as well. Whether we are talking about
Sunday school classes (in which the poorest children were taught a small cat-
echism by rote and learned to sing responses to the Mass), the écoles primaires
(where local children learned a little church Latin, to sing their Pater noster
and Ave Maria and sound them out from a book of hours or syllabary), or the
abécédaire classes managed by the Jesuits later in the sixteenth century, singing
in Latin was part of elementary education.22 Moreover, Huguenot children in
France often ended up being instructed by Jesuits, who were in some places
required to accept students of the Protestant faith.23 This was especially true
in those places where the Jesuits had been brought in as hired hands to take
over local colleges formerly managed by civic authorities.24
The Jesuits’ innovation was to furnish such educational programs with
new music. Coyssard was at the center of efforts to enlist song in Christian
education, and his several books would be reprinted until as late as 1657.25
The Paraphrase des Hymnes, published by the Jesuit press of Lyon in 1592,
was reedited in 1600, 1623, and 1655. Although it contains only songs, as
a book it was clearly designed to supplement the Latin catechism, since its
upright octavo format was very uncommon for French music books of the
1590s but perfect for binding with a catechism manual or book of hours.26
In subsequent publications, Coyssard explicitly stated that the hymns were
meant to be sung before and after the catechism, as in Les Hymnes sacrez et Odes
spirituelles pour chanter devant, et après la leçon du catéchisme (Antwerp, 1600).
Given that Latin prosody translated badly into French, the settings
in the Paraphrase des Hymnes are not at pains to retain the original chant
21
See Philippe Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale, ch. 7, and Xavier Bisaro, Chanter toujours,
ch. 1. On Antwerp, see Kristine K. Forney, “‘Nymphes gayes’,” 158–61.
22
On the schooling available to children see especially Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale,
ch. 7; Huppert, Public Schools; Charles Cappliez, L’École dominicale; and Dhotel, Origines
du catéchisme moderne. Latin song was certainly used in Germany, even under Luther. See
Bruce A. Bellingham, “The Bicinium in the Lutheran Latin Schools.”
23
For instance, the college in Tournon was forced to accept Huguenot students in 1576.
See Henri Fouqueray, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus en France, 2:31.
24
See Huppert, Public Schools, 104–15.
25
For a full bibliography see Launay, La Musique religieuse, 131–32.
26
Jacques Moderne used this upright format for several books (Misse familiares; Lart, sci-
ence, & practique de plaine musique; and the Misse solennes); in Lyon, Bibl. Municipale, Rés.
B 485063 they are bound with Ces presentes heures a lusaige de Lyon.
melodies; rather, the paraphrased texts are set to newly composed melodies
that were probably written and harmonized for four voices by Virgile Le
Blanc.27 The tunes, as the title page advertises, were designed in such a
way that those who did not wish to sing the songs in four parts could sing
the superius alone (“Qui ne les voudra chanter à quatre parties se pourra
servir du Superius seul”). The paraphrase of the Te Deum laudamus hymn is
shown in figure 5.3.
It is not hard to imagine that this memorable tune would please the
young pensioners in Coyssard’s charge. The triple time is catchy and the
meter changes break each five-line strophe into smaller segments. Parsed
in this way, the melody is especially aphoristic. It is easy to memorize. And
it has a certain charm: the alternation of triple and duple meters suggests
a pairing of dance and procession, or even of the great joy expressed by the
Te Deum. Some moments of surprising prosody, like the opening accent on
“DI-eu,” only underscore the extent to which the setting prioritizes infec-
tious meter over careful pronunciation. These vivid rhythms enlist dance in
the service of the church. They attract the attention, much like the delight-
ful triple meter and cadential hemiolas of the galliards that many of the
same children would have learned in their dance lessons, which also began
around age five.
Coyssard explained his designs in the Traicté du profit que toute personne tire
de chanter en la Doctrine Chrestienne, published in 1608.28 Quoting Saint Basil,
he says that spiritual song imprints itself more profoundly on the mind, “celle
s’imprime plus profondement en l’esprit.” “For it is natural,” he continues,
“that that which one has learned by force . . . is quickly forgotten, where, to
the contrary—I know not how—that which is insinuated by a pleasant delec-
tation . . . is captured more strongly in the memory.”29 True to this theory
of musical pleasure, Coyssard’s collections are full of heterometric verse and
strong meters, as though he believed that rhythm initiated a pleasant form
of cognitive conditioning. Classes could march through the texts in simul-
taneous declamation, the basic technique of verbatim memorization. And,
27
Only the Conditor alme siderum employs the meter of the original plainchant.
28
For context see Jean-Michel Vaccaro, “Le Livre d’airs spirituels d’Anthoine de
Bertrand,” 43–44, and Gérald Pau, “De l’usage de la chanson spirituelle par les
Jésuites.”
29
Coyssard, Traicté du profit, 21. “Parce que celle, qui est comprinse en vers & Poëmes
Musicaux, s’imprime plus profondement en l’esprit. Car nous voyons que c’est une
chose naturelle, que ce qu’on à apprins par force, & contre son gré, ne dure guiere, mais
s’oblie incontinent; où au contraire je ne sçay comment s’arreste plus fort en la memoire,
ce que par une plaisante delectation, & grace s’insinuë, ou glisse en nostre esprit.”

F i g u r e 5 . 3 “Paraphrase du Te Deum laudamus,” opening, in Michel Coyssard,
Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz pour chanter avecque la Doctrine chrestienne
(Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1592), fols. 25v–26r.
like the water that softens the paper before it is run through the press, music
helped words, like ink, adhere to the memory. For singing externalized read-
ing, subjected it to surveillance, and rhythmically impressed song texts upon
students. Homophonic songs taught children to speak together in time and
constrained their diction to the norms of the class, and by singing, students
incorporated texts, enticed by musical pleasures and the physicality of music,
which initiated an irresistible form of education beginning in the muscles
and the breath. Singing before and after catechism was a double-impression
method that reinforced memorized Latin prayers with French paraphrases
and used music to help students learn to read long printed texts. Thus, music
was part of an educational technology linking print, sacred texts, reading,
and memory. In some sense, those students who sang submitted to a form
of indoctrination that was more suited to the goals of Catholic Reformation
orthodoxy than books that tried to preserve scriptural authority in a world of
rampant piracy, printed heresy, and misreading.
Coyssard was not alone in his pedagogical efforts. In Valenciennes, the
Jesuit Father Guillaume Marci abandoned the Tridentine catechism because
“these sweet little idiots are not capable of such a large catechism.”30 Rather,
he taught them to sing, “some simply, some in music” [polyphony], and
says that “some time later I found it good to have them sing the Pater, Ave,
Credo, and the commandments of God and the Church; but this took up all
the time with things that the catechist should explain—it is the work of the
schoolmasters and mistresses to teach these little things to their students
that I call catechistic rudiments or firmium artis.”31 That is, catechism lessons
were being taken up with song. Shortly thereafter, Marci developed and had
printed a small catechism in dialogue format that was distributed for free
and in quantity throughout the town, a catechism that the children found so
delightful they reportedly amused themselves with it night and day.32
Here we should also note that Marci’s experiments backfired. Not only
were local book vendors unhappy that he undercut their sales of primers by
distributing his catechism for free, when the conflict moved from the courts
to the bishop of Cambrai, the bishop objected as well. For the catechism was
meant to be taught orally, not simultaneously with letters, and these little
books subverted the process, placing the written Word of God into the hands
of children deemed not yet ready to receive it.
It is good to teach the religious beliefs at the very beginning, then the
principal points of the faith, which are the duties of a good Christian.
It is good to teach someone to read and write and not to give any old
book to schoolchildren who do not first know of the beliefs, the
points of the faith, and the obligations of a [good] Christian.
It is better that school children know by heart the little catechism and
by this be furnished with things necessary for salvation, fearing
30
See Cappliez, L’École dominicale, 55: “Ces petits idiots ne sont pas capables de si grand
catéchisme comme est celui de Parme.” Edmond Auger also supported a small cat-
echism in France. For a bibliography of French catechisms (Huguenot and Catholic),
see Dhotel, Les Origines du catéchisme moderne, esp. 98–148. Marci subsequently issued
a song collection titled Les Rossignols spirituels (Valenciennes, 1616); see Marc Desmet,
“La Paraphrase des psaumes de Philippe Desportes,” 2:424–32.
31
Cappliez, L’École dominicale, 54–55: “Ce fut alors que je tirai tous les registres de mon
industrie, tantôt en formant des chansons spirituelles, tantôt représentant quelque
actionnette. Je m’estudiais à former aucuns à chanter simplement, aucuns en musique.
Quelque temps après, je trouvais bon de faire chanter le Pater, Ave, Credo, les com-
mandements de Dieu et de l’Eglise, mais cela emportait tout le temps en choses que le
catéchiste doit exposer, c’est le fait des maîtres et des maîtresses d’enseigner ces petites
choses à leurs escoliers que j’appelle rudiments catéchistiques ou firmium artis.”
32
Ibid., 56.
that these tradesmen would run about willy nilly (as they often do)
and work without knowing their obligations.33
In these three points of the acts drawn up by the magistrates and approved
by the bishop, we find spelled out quite clearly the priority of oral instruc-
tion in the face of Marci’s successful printed primers, which he was ordered
to burn. We should not underestimate the importance of the booksellers’
lobby in this matter, but more was at stake. For by giving children direct
access to the text of the catechism, Marci’s chapbooks subverted oral instruc-
tion, circumvented the physicality of simultaneous declamation in class, and,
we might posit, removed the catechism from the context of classes in which
the Jesuits oversaw the comportment of the children, their acts, words, and
deeds. They threatened a scriptural culture protective of its fixed texts and
authority, in which priests were the guardians and exegetes of the Word of
God. Classroom performances, by contrast, were understood to regulate the
inner lives of the children, who, with books in hand, might otherwise end up
running through the streets (like the tradesmen), playing with the articles of
the faith day and night.
The Catechists and the Canons

The culture of oral indoctrination makes itself felt in Coyssard’s Paraphrase
des Hymnes with its detachable superius part, which could have been taught
by rote to the children, and also in the strophic form and the page layout,
in which subsequent strophes of lengthy texts are on the pages following
the music. Much if not all of this might have been learned by ear in classes
that operated using the dialogic methods typical of catechistic teaching and
evident, for instance, in Coyssard’s Sommaire de la Doctrine chrestienne, mis en
vers François (1608): succinct questions, memorized responses, rhyming qua-
trains, and oral instruction. Like the sung responses to the Mass that all chil-
dren were expected to learn, these songs seem designed to be taught by rote
and sung from memory.
33
Ibid., 58. “On trouve bon qu’on enseigne les créances toutes premières, puis les points
principaux de la foi, de là l’office du bon chrétien. On trouve bon qu’on enseigne per-
sonne à lire et à écrire et qu’on ne donne livre quelconque aux écoliers qui ne sachent
premièrement les créances, les points de foi et les devoirs d’un chrétien. On trouve bon
que les écoliers sachent par coeur le petit catéchisme et soient par ainsi pourvus des
choses necessaires au salut, craignant que ces artisans ne s’en aillent courir les champs
(comme ils font souvent) et travailler sans connaître l’obligatoire.”
At the same time, we also know that many texts were being put into the
hands of children. Reading was being taught as well. Though they were not
always happy to be involved in the business of the primaires, which taught
basic reading and writing to children of lesser means, the Jesuit colleges did
run abécédaire classes. The separation between oral and written practices was
not complete, and, just like the catechisms they accompanied, books such as
Coyssard’s Paraphrase des Hymnes were perfect primers from which to pick out
notes to sing, learn to read in duple or triple time, and wrestle with rhythmic
values. They could provide an entrée to more complex forms of musical nota-
tion, and they offer significant clues as to how students learned to read music.
The leap from Coyssard’s homophonic Te Deum to a large work of imitative
polyphony such as Josquin’s six-voice Pater noster seems vast, but we do have
some written evidence of how it was made. Figure 5.4 reproduces a page from
the exemplar of Coyssard’s Paraphrase des Hymnes at the Bibliothèque natio-
nale de France, Rés. Vmd 14. This folio (21r) contains a printed canon for
four high voices at the unison that sets a paraphrase of the Commandments
of the Church, and on the empty staves below it, a sure hand has written out
a canon for seven voices at the unison. Canons might seem fairly advanced for
school children who could not yet read music—it would seem that readers
had trouble resolving the canons in Petrucci’s Canti series, for example—
yet imitation canons at the unison are nothing more than “rounds,” and a
surprising number of musical primers contain them.34 In one of the first
polyphonic catechisms, Mattheus Le Maistre’s Catechesis numeris musicis inclusa
(Nuremberg: Berg & Neuber, 1559), we find homophonic settings for high
voices of the Ten Commandments, the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and
so forth—though not the Ave Maria—paired with canonic settings of two
traditional mealtime prayers originating in Catholic usage.35 These last two
include canons for the high ranges that suggest children’s voices—the first
is at the unison in the middle voice—with the parts resolved in the printed
book. And in a Parisian catechism from 1589, Brief sommaire de la doctrine
chrestienne, we find, among others, a little three-voice canon meant to be sung
at the end of catechism lessons, Te coelitum parens.36
34
See Bonnie J. Blackburn, “Canonic Conundrums.” James Haar, “Petrucci as Bookman,”
argues that Petrucci’s Canti prints were designed for professionals, since their canons
are not resolved. On didactic canons, see Ralph Lorenz, “Canon as a Pedagogical Tool,”
and Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, 95.
35
See Mattheus Le Maistre, Catechesis and Gesenge, ed. Donald Gresch. The Latin cat-
echism texts set here are Philippist, not Lutheran (ibid., introduction).
36
Brief sommaire, fol. 33r.
In short, canons at the unison are children’s “rounds” by which they
could sing their first imitative polyphony. To be sure, not all canons are of
uniformly high quality, and the constraints posed by unison canons made
the pieces formulaic. The manuscript canon a 7 shown in figure 5.4, for
instance, includes jarring parallel fifths with the first voice when the fourth
voice enters (where a couple of notes are crossed out at the end of the first
line), an error that would have been repeated in every “bar” for the rest of
this piece, making it—at best—an object lesson in bad counterpoint. Far
better is the little canon on the text “Conditor alme siderum,” included in
the Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne and shown in figure 5.5. It builds
up in the standard manner of catches and rounds, with the second phrase
adding thirds and fifths to the first line of music, the third phrase for the
most part filling out the sonorities to produce root position triads, and
the fourth phrase doubling the root at the octave. The result is correct in
F i g u r e 5 . 4 Manuscript canon for seven voices at the unison in Michel

Coyssard, Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz pour chanter avecque la Doctrine
chrestienne (Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1592), fol. 21r. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
France, Département de la Musique, Rés. Vmd 14.
F i g u r e 5 . 5 Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne (Paris: Marc Locqueneulx,
1589), fol. 34r. This canon is headed with a rubric indicating that it can serve
for any hymn written in eight-syllable lines at any season of the year. Given the
roughly vertical alignment of the parts and the entrance of the voices line by line,
we can read the canon in a score-like fashion and see the sonorities that built up
as each voice joined the others to produce a simple progression of root-position
chords: F, F, g, F, a, g, g, F.
terms of voice-leading, but plain, to be sure. Finally, the Jesuit collection

Amphion sacré (Lyon: Louis Muguet, 1615) is full of imbecilic canons at the
unison that use catchy Parisian chanson rhythms and repeat ad infinitum
brief proverbs such as “Qui bien fait bien trouvera” (“He who does good
will find goodness”), “Tout avecque le temps” (“Everything with time”),
and “L’experience apprend plusieurs choses” (“Experience teaches a great
many things”). Indeed, the printed canon shown in figure 5.4 is analogous,
built as it is of basic imperatives: “Praise one God. Don’t blaspheme Him.
Observe the feasts. Honor your parents. Don’t be a murderer. Nor a liber-
tine. Nor a thief,” and so forth.
Of all the polyphonic texts left to us, the Brief sommaire de la doctrine
chrestienne is probably the best witness to the kinds of singing that went on
in Sunday school and abécédaire classes. As its full title makes clear—Brief
sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne: Ensemble les Prieres & oraisons & les Letanies que
l’on chante és processions par les Eglises, Reveu & augmenté de plusieurs Hymnes, &
Antiennes, le tout mis en chants de Musique—it is a small catechism (twelve folios
in question-and-answer form) to which is appended a polyphonic supple-
ment of the most useful prayers, litanies, hymns, and antiphons (“Musique”
indicates “figured music” or polyphony).37 Printed in a tiny 24o format, its
material form situates it with post-Tridentine texts of the broadest diffusion,
such as the diminutive Horae printed in quantity by Christopher Plantin. Its
printer, Marc Locqueneulx, specialized in small books with musical notation,
including plainchant in black neumes, polyphony in white mensural nota-
tion (as seen in figure 5.5), and monophonic timbres.38
The contents of the Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne include: a num-
ber of plainchant melodies for “Letanies romaines et du concile de Trente” (in
mensural notation); four-voice fauxbourdon timbres for the penitential psalms
“Miserere mei, Deus” and “De profundis clamavi,” as well as one for the Litany
of the Virgin, “Regina Virginum”; canonic litanies for three voices at the unison
such as another Litany of the Virgin, “O Sancta Maria, O dei genetrix precare
pro nobis”; and a four-voice canonic timbre for singing any octosyllabic hymn
followed by a year’s worth of texts, the Conditor alme siderum shown in figure
5.5. Monophonic tunes, fauxbourdon harmonizations, and canons at the uni-
son share the pages of this primer, verifying not only that polyphony was a fun-
dament of catechism classes, but that singing rudimental imitative polyphony
like canons remained part of the alphabet of Catholic practices learned by the
devout in the post-Tridentine era. For, as the book makes clear, these are pieces
for processions and should be learned as a child. Here, then, we have the stock
repertory for the great general processions in which Catholics participated on
the feasts of the Purification, Palm Sunday, Easter, Corpus Christi, Saint Mark,
and Rogation Days. The pieces, furthermore, match those sung during the
penitential fervor of the 1580s, when pilgrims crisscrossed the countryside of
northern France in processions blanches designed to rid the country of heresy.39
For the children, the Brief sommaire recommends that catechism classes process
in front of the clergy on ordinary days, lining up two by two and singing
37
On a similar catechism with musical notation from Antwerp, 1571, see Forney,
“‘Nymphes gayes’,” 164–65.
38
In addition to the Brief sommaire, see his monophonic Heures canoniales à l’usage de Paris,
nottées, revues, corrigées et augmentées de nouveau, from 1582 (Lacombe 472), and the mono-
phonic Le Recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons en forme de voix de ville (Paris, 1588).
39
For the pieces sung by the pilgrims, see the appendix “Ensuivent les litanies, hymnes”
in Meurier, Traicté de l’institution et vray usage des processions.
“modestly” in groups of twelve lead by a “douzinier.”40 Their visible participa-
tion in Sunday Mass promoted good behavior and displayed the self-discipline
that would prove so key to Catholic ideology in the seventeenth century.
We have already observed that the special status of the Ave Maria and Pater
noster chants often gave settings of them pride of place in motet books. By cor-
relating the settings in the Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne with those in
motet books, we can add to this repertoire another set of pieces that enjoyed
similar prominence in both catechisms and motet collections: those setting the
words “Sancta Maria . . . ora pro nobis.” The Brief sommaire includes this refrain
in several litanies to the Virgin, and it is set as a self-standing litany as well,
the canonic “O Sancta Maria” cited above. Coyssard’s polyphonic catechism
ends with a similar Kyrie pro litaniis, a four-voice homophonic timbre with the
text “Kyrie eleison, Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis.” Such Marian litanies appear
in other books as well, often at the end.41 For example, Attaingnant’s Liber
septimus. xxiiij. trium, quatuor, quinque, sexve vocum modulos of 1534 ends with a
slight three-voice Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis by one Maistre Gosse in
which the superius part could not be simpler—it opens in imitation of the con-
tratenor at the unison, virtually every phrase begins on c′, and all the cadences
are on a, the last of which are formulaic suspension cadences typical of the
Parisian chanson.42 Similarly, Attaingnant’s Liber decimustertius. xviij. musicales
habet modulos of 1535 ends with an anonymous Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro
peccatis nostris for four voices in canon.43 The posthumously-published Magnum
Opus Musicum of Orlande de Lassus, moreover, includes three four-in-two canons
on Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis at the end of the section of four-voice motets.44
In the first two settings, not only are the two parts from which the canons are
generated virtually identical, the two settings are themselves variations on the
same themes. At just seventeen and thirteen breves respectively, they are little
“extras” like the anonymous canon Attaingnant stuck in at the end of his Liber
decimustertius, the sort of piece that just as often probably did not make it into
40
Brief sommaire, fol. 13r. On plainchant in petits écoles and the way classroom rituals
sometimes mirrored liturgical ones, see Bisaro, Chanter toujours, 28–39.
41
Among the many settings not discussed here, see Bartolomeo Tromboncino and
Marchetto Cara, Sancta Maria ora pro nobis, in Laude libro secondo (Venice: Petrucci,
1508), which appears with the text “Me stesso incolpo” in Strambotti, ode, frottole, sonetti
. . . libro quarto (Venice: Petrucci, [1505]). This contrafact shows how close these little
motets were to the vernacular repertoire (it is only twenty breves long).
42
Albert Smijers and A. Tillman Merritt, eds., Treize livres de motets, 7:194–95.
43
Isabelle Cazeaux and John T. Brobeck, “Sermisy, Claudin de,” attribute this setting to
Sermisy.
44
Lassus, Magnum Opus Musicum (Munich: Nicolai Henrici, 1604), Cantus, fol. K4.
print at all (and in Lassus’s case were not, in fact, printed in his lifetime). Over
a century later, this litany had lost none of its allure, for Padre Giambattista
Martini published a four-in-one canonic Sancta Maria ora pro nobis on the title
page of Litaniae atque antiphonae finales B. Virginis Mariae, op. 1 (Bologna, 1734).
These works are one step along from canons at the unison, and they point the
way toward music demanding more sophisticated literacy such as the other
motets in the collections containing them. Taken together, settings of these
little prayers delineate the range of musical means by which students took their
first steps toward learning to read written polyphony.
Now we can return to the large number of polyphonic Ave Maria and Pater nos-
ter settings introduced earlier with a greater appreciation for how they might
have functioned as musical primers. For if these two prayers were songs that
children knew by heart, and singing canons was a regular part of catechism
classes even before reading was, then canons for high voices based on these
tunes may well have been sung by young children, even those who could barely
read music. We might thus think of canons as a musical code with a fairly large
social reach, one that gave beginners a toehold in composed polyphony.
The didactic potential of even the largest polyphonic settings is beau-
tifully illustrated by a collection from 1542, Pierre Certon’s Institutoris
Symphoniacorum puerorum . . . modulorum editio (Paris: Attaingnant and Jullet).
Certon directed the maîtrise for the choirboys at the Sainte-Chapelle, an
important pool from which the chapelle royale drew the six “petits chantres”
that made up its ranks at the time, and it is likely that Certon composed the
pieces in this book with the choirboys in mind.45 My attention was first drawn
to this collection by the series of five trios at its end, including an Ave Maria
in the high clefs indicating soprano or childrens’ voices (g2, g2, c1). This trio,
I thought, would certainly have been a real beginner’s piece, a kind of cross-
over polyphony suitable for the young choristers at the maîtrise and amateur
singers without, and in fact, the trio is faithful to the chant melody the
children would have known so well, particularly in the top part (see example
5.1). But each phrase of the chant is elaborated at its end, which demanded
real reading from the singers, not just recollection. This is to say, the trio
glosses the Ave Maria in the literate style typical of church polyphony. It has
some hallmarks of music for novices, for example the use of a familiar melody
and its epigrammatic disposition phrase by phrase. Even the elaborations
45
See Christelle Cazaux, La Musique à la cour, 152, 154, 156, on Certon’s appointment,
and 88–92 on the chapelle royale drawing boys from the Sainte-Chapelle. On the motets
see Sherman van Solkema, “The Liturgical Music of Pierre Certon,” esp. 75–76, 121.
E x a m p l e 5 . 1 Pierre Certon, Ave Maria, in Certon, Institutoris Symphoniacorum
puerorum . . . modulorum editio (Paris: Attaingnant and Jullet, 1542), fol. 19v (39v in
Contratenor), mm. 1–20
E x a m p l e 5 . 1 Continued
could be construed in the context of music education, for we know that writ-
ing exercises for students of polyphony usually began by constructing points
of imitation based on well-known tunes or composing out phrases of polyph-
ony using the work of others or a cantus prius factus as a starting point.46 But
these trios nonetheless draw students toward the world of polyphonic literacy
that was common coin for the most highly trained church musicians. Here
we should remember that the integration of boys into working choirs was
not systematic, and the amount and kind of polyphony sung by choirs varied
46
See Brown, “Emulation, Competition, and Homage,” 1–8.
greatly across Western Europe and across the sixteenth century. For instance,
in the first part of the century, the cathedral at Verona supported twenty-four
acolytes who were expected to participate in daily singing of a Marian Mass
and offices. But these positions went to local poor children, not necessarily
promising singers.47 By contrast, at Cambrai in the late sixteenth century,
choirboys were admitted on the basis of musical auditions and kept on trial
at first.48 Rome was another highly professionalized musical center, which
initially imported Franco-Flemish polyphonists from the North and even
boy singers, but eventually developed its own schools.49 Thus in some places
the skills expected of choristers might be limited to plainchant, while in oth-
ers choirs regularly sang notated polyphony and improvised counterpoint in
styles ranging from fauxbourdon and canons to imitative polyphony. Though
not particularly difficult, the trios in the Institutoris Symphoniacorum puerorum
cultivated the literate style of singing the young choristers in Certon’s own
maîtrise achieved.
The real beginner’s piece in the collection may in fact be the first one,
the big Pater noster for six voices, in which the second and third voices sing
an Ave Maria in canon (these are the Quinta and Sexta partes, cleffed c2 and,
when realized, in the range b ♭–b ♭′ and f–f′) (see example 5.2 and figure 5.6).
The canon is based on an almost literal presentation of the Ave Maria mel-
ody, divided into phrases separated by rests of three to five breves in length.
Indeed, counting the rests would have presented a far greater problem for the
children than actually singing their part, making this canon highly instruc-
tive as an exercise in keeping their place. The boys on the Quinta pars could
have been brought in by adult singers in the choir, who were used to giv-
ing each other visual and tactile cues during performances, not only of the
beat but also of where to sing the unwritten accidentals, musica ficta, which
they cued by tapping on their colleagues’ shoulders. As for the pitches, most
beginners’ canons are at the unison, which makes this one at the lower fifth
more difficult, but since the Sexta pars is too low for trebles, in a consort or
choir, it would not have been sung by the youngest voices.
Most noteworthy is the way this canon works by the ear sooner than by the
eye—it hardly needed to be “read” at all. There is no inscription to indicate
how the canon should be resolved in the partbook reproduced as figure 5.6, for
instance, where the singers of the Sexta pars take their pitch from the Quinta
pars. By comparison with the Ave Maria trio shown in example 5.1, the Ave
47
Judith Benfield, “Music in Verona, c. 1480–1530,” ch. 3.
48
Sandrine Dumont, “Choirboys and Vicaires in the Maîtrise of Cambrai,” 148–50.
49
Noel O’Regan, “Choirboys in Early Modern Rome.”
E x a m p l e 5 . 2 Pierre Certon, Pater noster–Ave Maria, in Certon, Institutoris
Symphoniacorum puerorum . . . modulorum editio (Paris: Attaingnant and Jullet, 1542),
fol. 1v (21v in Contratenor), mm. 1–16
F i g u r e 5 . 6 Pierre Certon, Pater noster–Ave Maria, Quinta and Sexta Pars, in
Certon, Institutoris Symphoniacorum puerorum . . . modulorum editio (Paris: Attaingnant
and Jullet, 1542), Contratenor, fol. 2r.
Maria canon embedded in Certon’s large setting of the Pater noster text is some-
thing that could readily have been memorized by children and even rehearsed
separately, since it makes musical sense on its own. After working out their
slice of the piece, the children on the Quinta pars could join the choir in sing-
ing a truly splendid piece of polyphonic writing.
What this comparison of musical catechisms and the canon in Certon’s
Pater noster–Ave Maria shows is that the spheres of the monophonic and
imitative, of oral and textual, or, to use Tinctoris’s distinctions, of low and
middle styles are not so distant from one another. Certainly the educational
environments of Sunday school class and maîtrise were distinct, and the chil-
dren memorizing a little litany for the Virgin written as a “round” were
not destined for choir school. The “Ave Maria” canon in Certon’s six-voice
setting required mental tenacity on the part of the singers, who would need
to remember where they were in the plodding and extended presentation of
chant, as well as the ability to hold their own in a swirl of polyphony. Were
they working from memory, the boys would still have had to learn a mensural
version of the chant that was written to conform to the rules of a canon at
the lower fifth and fit within a polyphonic composition. But we can see how,
with rehearsal, such pieces could have allowed children to participate in a
six-voice motet in a way that did not strictly depend on great literacy. The
musical context is that of a composed work, to be sure, but rendering these
parts makes stronger demands on counting and a secure sense of pitch than
it does on deciphering a text in real time. Motets with an easy second treble
part would have allowed the most junior members of the maîtrise to sing
along with the rest of the Sainte-Chapelle and the chapelle du roi when, as in
the procession against heresy of 1535, these massed forces turned out to sing
polyphonic motets in the streets of Paris.50
I would also argue, though, that Certon composed his Ave Maria for begin-
ners everywhere, for in both the three-voice setting and the six-voice Pater
noster–Ave Maria, he chose to set the most common version of the chant, the
one lay people learned. The choirboys, by contrast, would have known a variant
of the prayer, one with the text “Ave Maria, gratia dei plena per secula,” which
they were expected to sing in polyphony after Matins. So, for example, Antoine
Brumel, master of the choirboys at Notre-Dame from 1498 to 1500, set this
liturgical chant, and when Jean Mouton, Denis Prioris, and Claudin de Sermisy
wrote “Ave Maria” settings, they also used this versicle from the sequence Hac
clara die.51 Mouton’s motet a 4 appears to have been scored for boys on the upper
three parts and their master on the lowest. In similar manner, Sermisy, who was
a clerk at the Sainte-Chapelle early in his career, scored his motet for three high
voices, as did Brumel. But Certon, who served as master of the children at the
Sainte-Chapelle, nonetheless chose to publish settings of the “popular” prayer.
Despite the false advertising by which printed books so often recommended
themselves to buyers, in this case I believe we should take the prominence
of Certon’s title—Institutor Symphoniacorum puerorum—as significant, hinting at
the potential of the collection to aid in teaching all children polyphony. When,
in the early years of the century, printing separated motets from their frequent
context in manuscript anthologies of Vespers music, it liberated the motet
from its para-liturgical moorings and gave it—in the form of such printed
anthologies—the potential to become a genre of broad diffusion as cantiones
sacrae.52 By century’s end, French motet anthologies were joined by accessible
50
On the procession see John T. Brobeck, “Musical Patronage,” 220, and Cazaux, La
Musique à la cour, 175–79.
51
See Craig Wright, Music and Ceremony, 185–89. Prioris’s setting is, according to
Wright, designed for adults alone. Given the appointments of the composers who set
it, this chant may have been unique to the French royal chapel and Paris.
52
On manuscript anthologies see Julie E. Cumming, The Motet; on motet anthologies as
a phenomenon of print, eadem, “From Chapel Choirbook” and “Petrucci’s Publics.”
chansons spirituelles and polyphonic settings of Marot’s psalms—indeed, Certon
was one of the first to set the French psalter (Attaingnant, 1546)—but at
mid-century, some motets doubtless functioned as sacred music for students
who were just learning to read polyphony.
In sum, then, one can find in the motet repertoire—and indeed within a
single motet—written parts that required various levels of literacy to per-
form. Some chants would have been well known to singers, even to boys
just joining a choir school for their first lessons in “musique.” Around some
texts, a matrix of memorized songs operated in the background, ones famil-
iar to children in catechism classes, who sang litanies to the Virgin in plain-
chant or simple canons while marching in penitential processions, parish
rituals, feast-day processions, and in processions of their catechism classes.
If reading itself doubled as moral instruction and learning to sing was part
of this basic education, then it was also in singing that the outward signs
of civility and the moral uplift it was designed to produce came together.
And while homophonic hymns taught children to speak together in time
and constrained their diction to the norms of a group, canons taught them
to hold their place in more complex circumstances, to concentrate, and to
contribute a unique voice to the harmony.
Motets and Broad Readership

My goal in the preceding pages has been to cast the motet repertoire in a
significantly different light and to suggest that we should see at least some
motets as music of potentially broad consumption. Here I would like to
examine the material forms in which motets were marketed and collected,
using the conceptual frameworks developed in previous chapters. To begin,
it will come as no surprise that Pierre Attaingnant, whose chansonniers
launched the first large-scale marketing of polyphony, chose identical for-
mats for his very first books of motets. They were anthologies with French
titles, sixteen folios in length and in the same octavo format as his chanson-
niers. Indeed, one of the first books to come off his presses was an affordable
octavo that mixed the two genres together in just one volume: the Chansons
et motetz en canon.53 Nor was Attaingnant alone among printers in conceiv-
ing of the motet as a genre with the diverse appeal of chansons and other
vernacular songs. The Chansons et motetz en canon was itself copied from a
book printed by Andrea Antico in 1520, the Motetti novi et chanzoni franciose
53
Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, catalogue no. 3; idem, “A New Attaingnant Book.”
a quatro sopra doi.54 Other publications likewise mix chansons and motets: a
number of titles from those years attributed to Antico and Giunta have the
same complexion.55 Moreover, Petrucci’s first chanson anthologies, Harmonice
musices Odhecaton A (1501), Canti B numero cinquanta (1502), and Canti C
numero cento cinquanta (1504) each include a few Latin-texted numbers, many
of which are placed at the opening of the volume or begin the section of
trios in the middle of the book.56 Like the little canonic motets Attaingnant
and Antico mixed together with chansons, the well-known Latin prayers and
Marian antiphons in Petrucci’s chansonniers show that such pieces were in
some sense part of the vernacular repertoire of Franco-Flemish chansons. In
a similar spirit, Scotto and Gardane often titled their motet books in the
vernacular—Primo libro de i motetti, Motetti del frutto, Motetti del laberinto and
so forth—or added the formula “vulgo motecta nuncupatur” parenthetically
to their Latin titles.
How were these distinctions received by the public for printed polyph-
ony? One source of information is binder’s volumes, in which we can see
how collectors grouped together their music. The binder’s volumes that mix
motets and chansons are far too numerous to list here, but in order to limit
our survey, we can take as an example the binder’s volumes containing surviv-
ing copies of Attaingnant’s first motet books cited above, which, as we noted,
were of the same size and format as the chansonniers he was printing at the
time (see table 5.1). (This would change, as he switched to two-in-one and
all-in-one layouts for his chansonniers in 1536.)57
The largest volume listed here, once in the collection of Alfred Cortot,
was first owned by Henry of Castell (1525–95), who purchased it in Paris in
1539.58 Like the Contratenor partbook in Eichstätt and the set of partbooks
in Wolfenbüttel, it combines most of what Attaingnant had for sale at the
time of purchase in roughly the order the books came off the presses, with the
exception that the motets are grouped at the end of the volumes. These books
seem either to have been sold bound or bound immediately upon purchase,
and they preserve a sense of order and genre close to that of the print shop.
Intriguingly, all were in Germany already in the sixteenth century.59 Of a more
54
See Ludwig Finscher, “Attaingnantdrucke.”
55
See RISM [1521]6, [c.1521] 7, and [c.1526]5.
56
On this mixture see David Fallows, “Petrucci’s Canti Volumes,” 43–47.
57
See Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 73–76.
58
Ibid., 133–34.
59
On the relationships among them, see Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, 133–35, and Finscher,
“Attaingnantdrucke,” 37–39, with a description of the Wolfenbüttel copy at 35–36.
TABLE 5.1 Tract volumes containing Attaingnant motet prints from before 1534
Lausanne, Succession A. Cortot, Superius
Signed inside the cover H[einrich] G[raf] u[nd] H[err] zu Castell, dated 1539
Music printed in oblong octavo, 150 × 100 mm
Trente et quatre chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1531?]
Trente et cinq chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529]
Trente et deux chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529]
Trente chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529]
Trente et sept chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1532
Trente et huyt chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530
Six Gaillardes et six Pavanes avec Treze chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530
Vingt et neuf chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530
Trente et six chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1530
Neuf basses dances deux branles vingt et cinq Pavennes . . . Paris: Attaingnant, 1530
Trente et troys chansons nouvelles en musique Paris: Attaingnant, 1532
Vingt et huit chansons nouvelles en musique Paris: Attaingnant, 1532
Vingt et quatre chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1533
Chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1533
Vingt et sept chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1533
Trente chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534
Vingt et huyt chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534
Trente et une chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534
Vingt et huyt chansons musicalles Paris: Attaingnant, 1534
Vingt et six chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1535
Trente et une chansons musicales a troys parties Paris: Attaingnant, 1535
xii Motetz Paris: Attaingnant, 1529
2 folios of music in manuscript in containing the superius parts of a pavan, three galliards,
and Trium. Vray dieu d’aimer
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek,

on loan from the private collection of Graf Schweinitz (SATB)
Sixteenth-century leather-covered boards with gold tooling.
Chansons et motets en canon a quatre parties sur deux (in A only) Paris: Attaingnant, [1528]
Quarante et deux chansons musicales a troys parties (in STB only) Paris: Attaingnant 1529
Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin Paris: Attaingnant, [1528]
Trente et quatre chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1529
Trente et sept chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1529]
Trente et une chanson musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1529
Motetz nouvellement composez Paris: Attaingnant, [1529]
Manuscript addition on three blank staves of the xii Motetz (fol. xiv), untexted composition
for three voices, transcribed in Ludwig Finscher, “Attaingnantdrucke,” 37.
( continued )
TaBLE 5.1 Continued
Eichstätt, Staatliche Bibliothek, Lit O No. 38, Contratenor
Sixteenth-century leather-covered boards, stamped in gold: “Contratenor”
[Chansons et motets en canon a quatre parties sur deux] (fragment) Paris: Attaingnant, [1528]
Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin Paris: Attaingnant, [1528]
Trente et quatre chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, [1531?]
Trente et sept chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1532
Trente et une chanson musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1529
Neuf basses dances deux branles vingt et cinq Pavennes . . . Paris: Attaingnant, 1530
Trente et troys chansons nouvelles en musique Paris: Attaingnant, 1532
Vingt et huit chansons nouvelles en musique Paris: Attaingnant, 1532
Motetz nouvellement composez Paris: Attaingnant, [1529]
Versailles, Bibliothèque municipale, Fonds Goujet, 8o 32, Superius

Eighteenth-century brown calfskin binding with gold tooling.
First page signed and dated 1690. Manuscript additions contemporary with contents.
Chansons nouvelles en musique (Altus [i.e, Superius]–Tenor) Paris, Attaingnant, 1528
Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin (S) Paris: Attaingnant, [1528]
Motetz nouvellement composez (S) Paris: Attaingnant, [1529]
3 folios of music in manuscript containing the Superius to the chansons Quant j’estoys a
maints and Je suis desheritée (untexted)
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4º Mus. pr. 40 (SATB)

Formerly in the collection of Hans Heinrich Herwart
Listed in Herwart’s catalogue as bound in white velluma
Il secondo libro de Madrigali de Verdelotto . . . Adriano . . . Festa [Venice: Scotto] 1537
Il terzo libro di Madrigali de Verdelotto [Venice: Scotto] 1537
Venticinque Canzoni Francesi a quatro voci di Clement Jannequin Venice: Gardane, [1538]
Vingt et huit chansons nouvelles Paris: Attaingnant, 1532
Vingt et huyt chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534
Trente chansons musicales Paris: Attaingnant, 1534
a
See Slim, “The Music Library of the Augsburg Patrician,” 67–79.
idiosyncratic nature are the books now at Versailles and Munich, the latter once
owned by Herwart. The Versailles volume is faithful to Attaingnant, but binds
a Superius–Tenor partbook printed in a two-in-one layout with the Superius
parts of the Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin and the Motetz nouvellement com-
posez, both of which were printed in four volumes. Unlike the “prêt-à-porter”
binder’s volumes in Eichstätt, Wolfenbüttel, and the Cortot succession, the
Versailles book evinces more directly the habits of its owner, who mixed chan-
sons and motets and added a couple of chansons by hand at the end.60 Herwart’s
volumes also reveal something of his personal sense of order—chansons, madri-
gals, and motets are all bound together in volumes that mixed the publications
of Attaingnant with those of Gardane and Scotto. International in style and
provenance, they situate the four-voice motets being printed by Attaingnant
close to the Parisian chanson and the first wave of madrigals (predominately a 4)
by Verdelot, Festa, and Willaert. In this respect, they resemble the mixture of
madrigals and motets in manuscript in the Newberry partbooks presented as a
gift to Henry VIII of England circa 1527–29.61
Binder’s volumes are of interest not only because they confirm the freedom
with which collectors jumbled together chansons and motets, but because—
as we have already seen—they sometimes preserve a gathering or two of
music in manuscript. Even more telling than binder’s volumes, the manu-
script additions in early printed books occasionally cross the generic bound-
aries established by the printed book or books they accompany. Table 5.2
lists the contents of two tract volumes with manuscript additions that bridge
the gap between singing by heart and sight-singing with Latin-texted pieces.
The first volume on the list, BnF Cons. Rés. 419–421, contains three books
of chansons printed in Lyon. On the blank staves of the last page of Le IIe
Livre du Jardin de musique is a brief fauxbourdon a 4 setting the words “et cum
spiritu tuo, Amen” (“and with Thy spirit, Amen”) (see figure 5.7). Written in
a sure hand, this was one of the formulaic responses for singing the Mass that
children would have learned in their Sunday school classes. It is a pedagogical
text, a Latin primer piece in which the essential musical practices that went
along with catechism happened to be written into a book of chansons. That
one owner of the book was just learning to read and write music is further wit-
nessed by the shaky additions on the endpaper at the back of the book: ruled
rather badly with three staves, it includes just five ill-penned notes following
a rather elegant C-clef on the second line. Did the teacher plan a homework
60
The book has an ex-libris from 1690 and a binding likely from that time or later, but
the coherence of the contents suggests that they were bound together much earlier.
61
See H. Colin Slim, A Gift of Madrigals and Motets.
T A B L E 5 . 2 Two tract volumes of chansons with manuscript additions in Latin
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cons. Rés. 419–421 (S)
Binding refurbished in brown vellum.
La fleur de chansons premier livre Lyon: Jean Bavent, 1574
La fleur de chansons second livre Lyon: Jean Bavent, 1574
Le IIe Livre du Jardin de musique Lyon: Jean II de Tournes, 1579
Manuscript “et cum spiritu tuo, Amen” in fauxbourdon, Le IIe Livre, fol. 50v
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cons. Rés. 623–623bis (Q)

Binding refurbished in white vellum.
Lassus, Continuation du mélange Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1596
Lassus, Livre de chansons à 5 Paris: Ballard, 1599
Two folios with manuscript additions on endpapers (contemporary with prints). Fol.
1: staves ruled by hand, Laudate dominum omnes gentes (Ps. 116), superius of what was
probably a four-voice fauxbourdon setting, including doxology; fol. 2: a four-in-one
canonic chanson at the unison for high voices, Viens belle, and soft hexachord with
mnemonic terms for solmization syllables (“utiliter, realiter, mirabiliter, familiariter,
solemniter, lacrimabiliter”)
assignment here like those that Christoph Piperinus gave to his young stu-
dent Basilius Amerbach in Basel in the 1540s?62 Thanks to the research of
John Kmetz, we know that Amerbach’s education commenced with writing
exercises, with copying out pieces into partbooks he was instructed to make
himself, and with learning solmization syllables. Though far less detailed
than the Amerbach evidence studied by Kmetz, BnF Cons. Rés. 419–421
witnesses a similar phenomenon—a Superius partbook being used for added
instruction, literally “on the side.” Many are the volumes that include the
gamut or other teaching aids on a flyleaf or even the cover.63
Of an equally didactic nature are the manuscript additions to Paris BnF
Cons. Rés. 623–623bis, a tract volume containing two books of music by
Lassus: Continuation du mélange (Paris, 1596) and Livre de chansons à 5 (Paris,
1599). None of the pieces are in Latin, so there are no motets here, but on
a blank folio at the end of this Quintus book is written out what appears to
be the superius part to a fauxbourdon harmonization of Psalm 116, “Laudate
Dominum omnes gentes,” replete with doxology. Copied in a beautiful hand,
it resembles fi gure 5.7 and the harmonized psalm-tones given for Psalms 50
and 129 in the catechistic Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne of 1589 we
62
See John Kmetz, “The Piperinus-Amerbach Partbooks.”
63
See BnF Rés. Vmf 13 (1–17), owned by the royal harpsichordist Louis Cramoisy, BnF
Rés. Vmd 79, leather bound with the gold-stamped ex-libris “Andreve de Pelletier,”
and BnF Rés. Vm7 237, with a hexachord chart penned on its parchment cover.
F i g u r e 5 . 7 Manuscript fauxbourdon in Cornelius Blockland, Le IIe Livre du
Jardin de musique semé d’excellentes et harmonieuses chansons et voix de ville, mises en
musique à quatre parties (Lyon: Jean II de Tournes, 1579), Superius, verso of last
printed folio. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique,
Cons. Rés. 421. Note the unusual disposition of the voices, with the tenor to the
right of the superius, followed by bassus and contratenor on the lower staff.
examined above. Far simpler than any of the music by Lassus with which
it is bound, it sounds very much like a Latin primer piece, a place to start
that asks the singer to read just two notes, e′ and f ′, and two rhythmic val-
ues, minum and semibreve. In this respect, it resembles the little ABC des
Chrestiens pamphlets many owners stuck into their Horae so less accomplished
readers could gain their footing in the world of letters.
If there is any doubt that this “Laudate Dominum” was a teaching piece,
we need only turn the page, for on the last folio of end papers is written a
four-in-one canon for high voices at the unison and the soft hexachord on f ′
with mnemonics for the solmization syllables (see figure 5.8). The nicely
turned canon, with its sexy lean on e ♭ at the phrase “vient jouïr aux bois,”
epitomizes the round at its catchiest. The hexachord finds its place here in
relation to both the “Laudate dominum” in F with a flat in the signature
and the canon on the page it shares, and its copying may well have been
prompted by the question of how to solmize one of these melodies.
These three elements—hexachord, canon, and the simple harmonization of
a common Latin prayer—bring together in microcosm the rudiments that have
F i g u r e 5 . 8 Manuscript additions to a Quintus partbook. Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Cons. Rés. 623–623 bis, recto
of last flyleaf. On a blank folio at the end of this binder’s volume of chansons and
motets by Lassus, someone has written out a four-in-one canonic chanson at the
unison for high voices, Viens belle. Underneath is a soft hexachord with mnemonic
terms for solmization syllables (“utiliter, realiter, mirabiliter, familiariter,
solemniter, lacrimabiliter”). The recto of the previous folio contains the superius
part of Psalm 116, “Laudate Dominum omnes gentes,” written in a fauxbourdon
style. It is in a different hand.
concerned us throughout this chapter. Their material form—copied onto a fly-

leaf, a loose sheet bound into a volume—reminds us that literacy itself began
with highly fugitive teaching moments requiring just a scrap of paper, a mar-
gin, or a slate, if that.64 Small amounts of music spun into hours of classroom
singing, with ample lessons derived from the single line of a canon. Indeed,
the few surviving musical broadsides from the time largely contain canons,
some of them visually elaborate and engraved in circles and crosses.65 One of
64
Christensen argues similarly concerning partimento in “Fragile Texts, Hidden Theory.”
65
See Michael H. Lamla, “Musical Canons on Artistic Prints,” and Thomas Röder,
“Verborgene Botschaften? Augsburger Kanons von 1548.” My thanks to Katelijne
Schiltz for pointing me to the canonic broadsides in Munich BSB 2o Mus. pr. 156,
viewable online at https://www.bsb-muenchen.de.
the simplest is a “Laudate Dominum” devised by the Lutheran composer Sixt
Dietrich and printed in Augsburg in 1547. Though not particularly melodic,
it is nonetheless quite ingenious, for it could be resolved four different ways,
in three voices or four. In each version, the voices enter in different orders at
different transpositions. Once a group of singers committed the line to mem-
ory (something they could have learned by rote, simultaneously), executing
all the permutations would have brought them continual surprises as their
voices interlocked in shifting configurations like those exploited in works of
imitative polyphony. It serves to remind us that the most ephemeral forms of
print—arguably those with the broadest reach—were part of the system by
which Latin motets reached their audiences.
The material and musical evidence situates at least some motets much further
down the artistic hierarchy than many scholars have imagined. And why not? If
children learned to vocalize miscellaneous Latin words of two syllables during
their first exercises in reading, why shouldn’t they later sing a motet quite hap-
pily? Even if motets set the texts of the Bible—the fundamental text of literate
culture in the West—they are not fully part of scriptural culture. Rather, the
oral practices I have recovered here reveal that Catholic culture was largely vocal
at the time. The Word was learned by ear, it was something spoken and heard,
and even large-scale polyphonic works did not wholly depend on writing for
meaning, but relied on the authority of the voice, the ear, and the memory.
All this having been said, a fuller understanding of literacy has not been
the only obstacle to identifying motets as a repertoire with the broad appeal of
vernacular song. Print itself has been one culprit. Publishing formulas, mass
marketed anthologies, and the stylistic genericism that went along with the
transformation of music into an object of commercial exchange all contradict
the Romantic values of “art for art’s sake,” musical innovation, and genius inher-
ited by modern musicology. Studies of the motet have tended to frame analysis
in the terms established by the cyclic mass and its musically ambitious composi-
tional forms. To take but two examples, John Brobeck defined sixteenth-century
French “liturgical motets” as “‘motetlike’ in the sense that they are contrapun-
tally complex works of moderate length that make use of such standard compo-
sitional techniques as canon, cantus firmus, and melodic imitation”; and Anthony
M. Cummings, in his foundational study of motets at Rome and Florence, con-
cluded that “the use of complex polyphonic procedures inappropriate to some
liturgical contexts” was one hallmark of the genre.66 Both of these scholars were
66
John T. Brobeck, “Some ‘Liturgical Motets’,” 142, and Anthony M. Cummings,
“Toward an Interpretation of the Sixteenth-Century Motet,” 59.
largely preoccupied with matters of liturgical context: whether or when musi-
cally complex motets might have been performed during the celebration of the
Mass or Divine Office.67 Yet printing added another possibility outside the lit-
urgy, for printed dissemination made motets available to a greater variety of
readers.68 The material likeness of books of motets to books of hours and chanson-
niers argues that many sixteenth-century readers did not consider motets to be
para-liturgical. Rather, they were part of a culture of print in which the tastes of
a grand public began to shape the cultural objects it consumed. Furthermore, the
fact that canons had such a firm place in the curriculum of the schoolroom and
catechism classes likewise suggests that motets had broad appeal. Assimilating
the study of motets to the priorities consummate in polyphonic Mass cycles may
have saved the motet from the dirty ink of the press and the more popular cul-
tural spheres into which print delivered written works, but in the process, some
of its history was lost, and with it a valuable perspective on the school children
and amateur singers who enjoyed this so-called middling genre during the first
century of music printing.
67
Brown, “The Mirror of Man’s Salvation,” also delved into the liturgical question,
but in order to carve out an understanding of the genre as more devotional than
liturgical (753).
68
See supra, notes 12 and 52.
Chapter Six Civilities and Chansons
Learning to Read in French

Schooling in France underwent significant transformations during the six-
teenth century. Initially, lessons took place in a variety of locales and forms,
everything from old-fashioned cathedral schools and écoles de la ville to private
study with amateur or freelance tutors. The relatively unregulated nature of
primary education makes it impossible to generalize about curricula, at least
early on. But the new attention lavished on education in France in the second
third of the century brought a number of coherent programs into being, and
along with them came standardized texts and teaching methods. Between
1530 and 1560, for instance, larger towns and cities in France took control
of local education by establishing municipal collèges with abécédaire classes for
local children and, eventually, a graded series of six “classes” that came to be
known as the “Parisian style.”1 The lowest class, or sixième, was the abécédaire
class, where by mid-century children not only learned the alphabet in Latin,
but also in Greek, and where they practiced writing with a pen “until they
know how to read and pronounce words” (according to a representative con-
tract from 1565).2 In the cinquième, children continued to practice reading and
writing using textbooks such as Cato’s Disticha de moribus, Jean Despautère’s
1
See Huppert, Public Schools, 47–60, and Viguerie, L’Institution des enfants. On individ-
ual collèges, see Marie-Madeleine Compère and Dominique Julia, Les Collèges français.
2
Huppert, Public Schools, 53. This is essentially the program outlined by Erasmus in The
Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek, 387.
Commentarii grammatici, the Ars grammaticus of Aelius Donatus, and the works of
Cicero and Terence. Latin passages were translated into French and French into
Latin, but the curricula make no apparent room for French literature per se.3 It
was this newer style of collège that Michel de Montaigne attended from age six to
thirteen in Bordeaux, where he was fortunate enough to have a teacher who nur-
tured his love of literature (which was unusual, according to him—most nobles,
he maintained, carried away from school only a hatred of books).4
Such curricula explain to some extent the dearth of vernacular primers in
the early part of the century and the limited sorts of vernacular books that
enjoyed much success in print—children who read French literature did so
largely on their own. The results of this lack of institutional structure for
vernacular education can be measured in part by inventories of private librar-
ies. Like Montaigne, many students at the bigger collèges went on to law or
medical school and careers as notaries, bailiffs, doctors, professors, scribes,
and clerks, and judging from the inventories of Parisian private libraries of
the time, bourgeois lawyers, parliamentarians, and nobles de la robe comprised
the most avid public of readers. But their reading tastes in the vernacular
can hardly be described as ambitious—when their book collecting ranged
at all beyond Latin classics and the legal works necessary to their profession,
they tended to prefer the ever-popular chansons de geste, chronicles, and his-
tories such as the Mer des Histoires, the Chroniques of Philippe de Commines,
the Chronique of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Les Illustrations de Gaule of
Jean Lemaire de Belges, and the Guerre des Juifs of Flavius Josèphe, beauti-
fully illustrated folio volumes such as La Venerie of Jacques du Fouilloux,
and staples of Italian and French literature such as Castiglione’s Cortegiano,
Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Petrarch, and the Roman de la Rose.5 Some of these
books—notably La Venerie—were the “coffee-table” books of their time and
may even have served as “picture books” for wealthy adolescents (Louis XIII,
for instance, had a copy of La Venerie that he enjoyed when he was just four
or five).6 Other books, such as the histories and courtesy books, might have
been employed in private settings as educational texts. But most of these
vernacular titles were read for pleasure.7 Indeed, it is important to remember
3
On the books owned by students, see François de Dainville, “Librairies d’écoliers tou-
lousains à la fin du XVIme siècle.”
4
Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier, 1:175. On the his-
tory of the college (est. 1532), see Ernest Gaullieur, Histoire du collège de Guyenne.
5
Schutz, Vernacular Books.
6
On the dauphin’s books see Jean Héroard, Journal, ed. Madeleine Foisil, 1:147–54.
7
In the seventeenth century, certainly, a young nobleman’s education would have
included studying histories in the vernacular. See Mark Motley, Becoming a French
that many of the vernacular books in these libraries may have been remnants
of childhood, for Montaigne tells us that when he was at the Collège de
Guyenne around 1540, the other seven- and eight-year-olds were reading
Lancelot du Lac, Amadis, Huon de Bordeaux, and other similar opuscules from
the “jumble of books with which children amuse themselves.”8 Printed in
small formats and easily acquired for relatively little money, boys at Parisian
boarding schools such as the Collège du Plessis, Collège de Navarre, or, later,
at the Jesuit Collège de Clermont could have picked them up from a street
vendor, some bouquiniste along the Seine, or inside the Palais de Justice,
which was chock-a-block with bookstalls. But they certainly would have
been reading them in their rooms, not in class.
The slightly phantasmic quality of education in the vernacular stems very
much from the fact that it was spoken French, rather than French “letters,”
that was the object of study. If curricula mandated that Latin be taught in
the sixième, it was not so much because the children would necessarily gradu-
ate from their ABC class to the studia humanitatis, but because Latin erased
irregularities of pronunciation and laid the groundwork for beautiful speech
in French. Accents in Latin varied greatly from place to place in the sixteenth
century, but scholars such as Erasmus still believed that a classical purity of
speech could be recovered from ancient texts, and that children’s tongues
could be trained to produce clear sounds by learning their vowels and conso-
nants in Latin.
Even as Latin- and Greek-based curricula were being set in French collèges,
the vernacular was fast gaining ground as a language suitable for literature,
politics, and learned debate. Little about the Parisian style and its regular
succession of Latin textbooks reflects the new valorization of the vernacular,
but by mid-century French elites could not ignore a trend that would cul-
minate in the polite speech cultivated in salons of seventeenth-century Paris,
the so-called “classical” literature of the grand siècle, and the establishment of
the Académie française in 1634. Already in the 1550s, the French-language
poetry of the Pléiade was being embraced at court. Pierre de Ronsard—who
wrote almost exclusively in French—became court poet in 1558, and even
Pierre de La Ramée (Ramus), who held a chair in eloquence and philosophy
at the Collège des Lecteurs Royaux (the Collège de France), began translat-
ing his works into French and—it is said—lecturing in French as well. With
Aristocrat, 118, as well as pp. 95–96 on the education in 1680 of the Duke de
Vermandois (the illegitimate son of Louis XIV). For programs at French military acad-
emies in the early seventeenth century, see Ellery Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree, ch. 8.
8
Montaigne, Essais, ed. Villey and Saulnier, “De l’Institution des Enfans,” 1:175.
c i v i l i t i e s a n d c h a n s o n s | 169
royal support inspiring many of these initiatives, a slew of books and pamphlets
promoting the French language appeared in print around mid-century, of which
Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549) is the most
famous, but to which we should also add the work of French grammarians such
as Jacques Peletier du Mans and Ramus, who dedicated his Grammaire to the
Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici.9 Meanwhile, publishers began offering
translations of Latin pedagogical texts alongside the originals: Cato’s Disticha de
moribus had long been available in translation, and in the 1540s it was joined by
multiple translations of Cicero, of which Estienne Dolet’s translation Les Epistres
familieres of 1542 was remarkably popular. Courtesy books, too, began to appear
in French, with the first translation of Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium libel-
lus, made by Pierre Saliat, appearing in 1537, and Castiglione’s Cortegiano coming
out the same year in the translation of Jacques Colin.10 A quick assessment of the
waves of reprints suggest that Le Parfait Courtisan of Castiglione peaked first in
popularity, with most editions dating before 1550, at which point Erasmus’s La
Civilité puérile took off, with at least thirteen French-language editions by the end
of the century, from Paris, Tours, Lyon, Antwerp, Troyes, and Orléans.11 When
they came on the scene later in the century, Giovanni Della Casa’s Il Galatheo
(1559) and Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversatione (1574) were both translated into
French, the Guazzo by François de Belleforest, the royal historiographer.12 These
9
On the Grammaire (1572) of Ramus and the politics of promoting the French lan-
guage, see Kees Meerhoff, “La Ramée et Peletier du Mans.” On royal cultural policy
and its impact on vernacular book production, see Henri-Jean Martin, The French
Book, ch. 2.
10
Saliat’s translation of De civilitate morum puerilium libellus was combined with the trans-
lation of another of Erasmus’s pedagogical treatises, Declamatio de pueris statim ac lib-
eraliter instituendis, and issued under the title Déclamation contenant le manière de bien
instruire les enfants dès leur commencement, avec un petit traité de la civilité puérile et honnête,
le tout translaté nouvellement de latin en français (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1537). The
Castiglione translation came out in an octavo edition titled Le Courtisan, nouvellement
traduict de langue ytalicque en françoys (Paris: Jehan Longis and Vincent Sertenas, 1537).
For the broader history of which these translations were a part, see Peter Burke, The
Fortunes of the Courtier, ch. 4, and Chartier, “From Texts to Manners.”
11
These data were collected using the Universal Short Title Catalogue. The
French-language editions of La Civilité puérile superseded Latin editions right around
1551: of thirty-five Latin editions printed in France before 1600 (all in octavo), all but
two appear between 1537 and 1551.
12
La Civile Conversation du S. Estienne Guazzo gentilhomme Monferradois, divisee en quatre
livres, trans. François de Belleforest (Paris: Cavellat, 1579). For the first French transla-
tion of Il Galatheo, see the bilingual edition Giovanni Della Casa, Trattato de costumi,
opera di M. Giovanni della Casa (Lyon: Pierre Roussin et Alexandre Marsilius, 1573).
last two books explicitly addressed a wide range of conversational skills for nobles
and non-nobles alike, including, in the Guazzo, an entire section on polite con-
versation staged as a banquet that dramatizes the verbal skills Castiglione rep-
resented via the dialogue form in which Il cortegiano was written. Through their
illustration of the rhetorical codes of high society, these courtesy books function
as scripts for etiquette lessons that trained the pliable tongues of the young, pro-
jected honnesteté, and paved the way for their success in le monde.
It is the vocal dimension of vernacular education that concerns me here,
the performance of French, both spoken and sung. While this is admittedly
difficult to recover from written sources, the voices and bodies of early mod-
erns merit our attention for the very reason that written language was under-
stood to be a mirror of words spoken aloud, orthography a reflection of accent,
syllable length, and intonation, and texts scripts awaiting activation by read-
ers who performed them aloud.13 My way into orality and performance in this
chapter comes via typography and book design. As we sit silently reading
sixteenth-century books in the library or on our computer screens, admir-
ing their elegant combinations of roman and italic typefaces in a variety of
fonts, or drinking in their woodcuts both splendid and amusing, we encounter
graphic elements that early modern printers designed with particular kinds
of reading in mind. The very shapes of letters were aimed to encourage their
proper pronunciation, something witnessed by the overt concern of humanis-
tic printers from Aldo Manuzio to Robert Estienne with orthography, pronun-
ciation, and type design and a point most beautifully made by Geoffroy Tory
in his famous treatise on typography, Champ fleury (Paris, 1529), which began
with an exhortation to order the French tongue so that spoken French would
be more elegant, clear, and consistent (“Lexhortation a mettre & ordonner la
Langue Francoise par certaine Reigle de parler elegamment en bon & plussain
Langage Francois”).14 Typography evolved, at least in these humanistic circles,
in conjunction with concerns about pronunciation, and whereas the Champ
fleury fails to systemize spoken French and remarks only unevenly on vernacu-
lar accents, it does delve deeply into pronunciation, letter by letter, and it does
so as part of establishing the proper typographic form of each character. In one
sense, Tory projects a medieval philosophy of the connectedness of language
and knowledge, harking back to sentiments like those expressed by Eustache
Deschamps in his L’Art de dictier of 1392, who saw in the forms of letters a
13
For a remarkably parallel investigation of orthography, punctuation, and typography
as they pertained to the vocality of texts, see Richards, Shared Reading in the English
Renaissance. Prof. Richards kindly shared her introduction with me in draft.
14
On Manuzio, see Erasmus, The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek, 355–56.
direct path “a toute science”: “one reaches and learns all the other liberal arts
by the figures of the letters A, B, C, that children learn first, and by whose
learning and knowing one can reach all knowledge, and climb from the small-
est letter to the highest.”15 Tory labored over the composition of individual
letters at such length because they possessed moral value and symbolic depth
that allowed readers to access the meanings embedded in language, which
came from God.16 Thus right speech, right reading of letters, right reason,
and correct grammar for Latin and French all intertwined in projects that
attempted to shore up the potential of language to support knowledge in a
time when Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were being studied more critically than
ever before and European vernaculars were coming into their own as languages
of literature, history, and princely rule.
Two typographic initiatives of mid-century marked significant gains for
the French language in print. First was the reform of orthography proposed
in the rival treatises of Louis Meigret, Le Trętté de la grammęre françoęze (1550)
and Jacques Peletier du Mans, Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ e prononciacion françoęsɇ
(1550), both of which employed new characters that were designed to ren-
der written French phonetic. As can be seen in the titles, this particularly
affected the vowel “e,” which might be open, closed, or mute and required
a series of symbols to distinguish among these qualities. By rectifying the
fractured relationships between the spellings of French words and their cor-
rect pronunciation, these treatises functioned as transcripts of polite speech, a
sort of “phonogram” that accurately captured the sounds of French dipthongs
and the multiple pronunciations of “e” among gens de qualité. Indeed, so con-
cerned was Meigret to prescribe the sound of beautiful speech that he even
resorted to printing mensural notation above one series of his examples in
order to illustrate proper inflection of each phrase, making explicit the fact
that full literacy at the time included being able to read one’s part to a song.
The second typographic evolution that concerns us here is one we have
already glimpsed in the courtesy manual of Giovanni Della Casa, Il Galatheo,
in the extraordinary polyglot edition of Jean II de Tournes from 1598 with
side-by-side translations of the Italian into Latin, French, and Spanish (see
figure 4.4 above). By the time de Tournes printed this little sextodecimo
handbook, the type he used for the French translation had come to be known
as caractères de civilité owing to its regular employment in French-language
editions of Erasmus’s book of manners for children, De civilitate morum puer-
ilium libellus. Beginning in 1558, many courtesy books printed in France and
15
Timothy J. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery, and Imagination, 23–25.
16
Ibid., 42.
the Low Countries employed this special typeface, which its inventor, Robert
Granjon, initially dubbed lettre française d’art de main (“French handwriting
type”). As we shall see, the script-like quality of caractères de civilité allowed
these courtesy books to double as copybooks for handwriting exercises, neatly
tying together lessons in manners with a child’s first painstaking lessons in
penmanship. Some ABCs, vernacular catechisms, and other primer texts, like
translations of Cato’s distichs, were also printed in civility type for use in the
classroom.17 Clutching a pen, children relearned the shapes of all their let-
ters, drawing them one by one in the French forms of lettre courante, imitating
Granjon’s type, and sounding them out in French as well. Active and physi-
cal, learning to speak French correctly developed not just the hand’s control
over the vernacular, but the voice’s as well.
Through these intersecting practices, writing lessons polished speech, not
just script, and printing helped reform the disordered, unphonetic vernacu-
lar that was French. Singing chansons, I will suggest, also played a part in
courtesy lessons, something implied by a unique set of chansonniers printed
by Robert Granjon in 1559 in caractères de civilité for music. Though few
in number, these chansonniers open up to us a world in which aristocratic
educational programs fleetingly materialize in printed partbooks, thanks to
linguistic projects that used typography as their medium.
The Caractères de Civilité for Music of Robert Granjon

Robert Granjon (1513–89) was an extremely sought-after type designer,
punchcutter, and printer, and along with civility type, he designed a number
of enduring italics, the most disseminated of which was the “Parangon de
Granjon.”18 He ultimately ended his career in Rome cutting an extraordinary
series of specialty types in Armenian, Cyrillic, and Syrian, a type for plain-
chant notation, and five Arabic typefaces for the Stamperia Vaticana and the
17
To cite just three relevant volumes in civility type at the BnF, see the Alphabet, ou
Instruction chrestienne pour les petis Enfans (Lyon: Granjon, 1560); Dionysius Cato, Les
quatre livres de Caton, pour la doctrine de la jeunesse, par F. H. (Paris: Philippe Danfrie et
Richard Breton, 1559); and Les Pseaumes de David (Lyon: [Thomas de Straton], 1563),
which includes musical notation. On this last, see Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, cata-
logue no. 62.
18
On Granjon’s life and works see Hendrik D. L. Vervliet, The Palaeotypography of
the French Renaissance, 1:215–42, 2:321–64, 427–74, with a capsule biography at
2:430–32 and description of the petit-parangon italic at 2:339–40. On Granjon’s type-
faces for music see Kate van Orden, “Robert Granjon and Music.”
Oriental Press of the Medici. The creation of civility type required precisely
this high level of technical virtuosity, to which Granjon called attention in
the dedication of the first book he printed in the new caractères, Innocenzio
Ringhieri’s Dialogue de la vie et de la mort (Lyon, 1557). “I set out to cut our
French letters, to justify the matrices, to make the font from them, and finally
to prepare them carefully for the press,” he says, enumerating his labors in
no uncertain terms.19 The manual expertise that went into making the type
in some sense explains the project itself, which showed off Granjon’s crafts-
manship and gave the books printed in civility type a distinctive look that
undoubtedly appealed to many readers regardless of the contents. It also justi-
fied his ten-year privilege on the invention.20
In nature, Granjon’s project was not unique, for the second third of the
sixteenth century witnessed a phenomenal proliferation of typefaces in France
and a new elegance in French book design. After decades of printing in the
“Gothic” blackletter types used in the incunabula period came a revolution in
French typography supported by the book-loving François Ier. In the late 1520s
Simon de Colines appears to have been the first French printer to employ italics,
which gave his books a lighter and finer appearance. Geoffroy Tory, whose
extravagant Champ fleury elaborated a theory of roman type design based
on human proportions, was made Imprimeur du Roy in 1531, and in 1541
Claude Garamond (ca. 1480–1561) designed and cut three Greek typefaces
for a series of books ordered by François Ier and printed by the typographus
regius Robert Estienne, type that came to be known as the “Grecs du Roi.”
Garamond also devoted his skills to reinterpreting the roman letters of Aldo
Manuzio, creating elegant and staid designs still in use today and—along
with Granjon’s lacy italics—securing for their generation a lasting legacy.
Granjon and Garamond were among the first punchcutters to create vari-
ous sizes of type, each with its own appropriate balance and weight, which
allowed typesetters to combine fonts in more sophisticated typographical
arrangements on the page. All of this is to say that Granjon created civility
type at a time of rapid innovation in French typography.
Even so, Granjon made extensive cultural claims for his new invention,
which he believed remedied a severe shortcoming in French book production.
19
Innocenzio Ringhieri, Dialogue de la vie et de la mort, sig. aiiir. “Je me suis mis à tailler
nostre lettre Francoyse, justifier les Matricts, cy faire la fonte, et finablement la rendre
propre à l’Imprimerie.”
20
For the privilege, see Rémi Jimenes, Les Caractères de civilité, 17–18, and Maurits Sabbe
and Marius Audin, Die Civilité-Schriften, 9–10. Jimenes believes that this was the first
French privilege accorded to a typeface.
Whereas Italians printed their vernacular texts in italic type that resembled
the slanted open cursive of Italian handwriting, French books had no equiva-
lent typography to represent French script on the printed page. In his dedica-
tion to the Count d’Urfé, Granjon lamented:
When I call to mind how Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and even some
barbarous nations took such care of their own languages that they
scrupled and thought it a shame to use letters found out by any people
but their own, I could but blush for the heedlessness in this respect
of our forebears; for they, possessing the wherewithal to dispense with
help from others, yet preferred to borrow from neighbors.21
His creation thus provided French with a visual form that inscribed
Frenchness in the very curves of the letters, making their meanings more
legible, and reinforcing French culture with a typographical protest against
the elitist literature associated with roman letters and Latin. 22
Despite the fact that the civilities printed in Granjon’s new typeface were
simple texts, these were not books meant for all. Whereas primers, ABCs,
and syllabaries used open upright roman type, the hard-to-read letters of
civilities strengthened the divide maintained between classes in reading
and writing, between the passive consumption of the Latin catechism and
the active production of knowledge in French. Only those who had learned
to write could read handwritten materials such as letters or the documents
drawn up by notaries; likewise, only they could read civility type. The type-
face itself, then, marks a form of literacy reserved for the well educated. It
also locates these books in a particular sphere of vernacular culture, which
I will argue centered on the French court.
All of this would be of but tangential relevance to the history of music
were it not for the fact that Granjon also cut a civility type for music and used
it to print a series of chansonniers: the Premier and Second trophée de musique,
and the Chansons nouvelles of Barthélemy Beaulaigue, whose motets were
21
Ringhieri, Dialogue de la vie et de la mort, sig. aiiv, “Car en me proposant devant les
yeux combien les Hebrieux, les Grecs, les Latins, voyre plusieurs peuples barbares, ont
esté curieux de leur propre langue jusques à faire voyre conscience, et tenir à honte de
se servir des lettres par autres que par eux inventees, Je ne pouvois non rougir, de la
negligence de nos Maieurs en cest endroit, qui ayans de quoy se passer de leurs voisins,
ont mieux ayme estre leurs redevables, que de s’ayder de leur propre . . .” Translation
from Harry Graham Carter and H. D. L. Vervliet, Civilité Types, 11.
22
See Sabbe and Audin, Die Civilité-Schriften. On Granjon, also see Frank Dobbins, Music
in Renaissance Lyons, 154–58.
F i g u r e 6 . 1 Pierre Sandrin, Si j’ay du bien, in Le premier trophée de musique
(Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559), Bassus, 3.
also published at the same time (see figure 6.1).23 All came out in Lyon in
1559, and—as books for performance—they provoke a unique series of ques-
tions about the cultural significance of the new typeface, which Granjon had
invented only two years before.
Granjon’s cursive noteheads brought a new elegance to the page of chan-
sonniers, which until that time had been printed in clunky angular typefaces
such as that used by Le Roy & Ballard (see figure 6.2).24 Yet as beautiful as
it was, Granjon’s lettre française de l’art de main for music never really caught
on. The music typeface was copied virtually overnight in Paris by Philippe
Danfrie and then employed by Richard Breton for a one-off print of four-
voice Anacreontic odes, but after that time Danfrie’s sorts seem to have
knocked around unused save for a little monophonic chansonnier printed
in 1576; in Lyon, Granjon’s own type was used by Thomas de Straton for a
handful of prints and then much later by Jean II de Tournes for the third edi-
tion of Cornelius Blockland’s Instruction methodique (Geneva, 1587).25 Broadly
speaking, though, Europeans had to await the development of engraving
23
Granjon also printed Michel Ferrier, Quarante et neuf psalmes de David . . . à trois parties
(Lyon, 1559) in civility type. See Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, 122–25 and catalogue
nos. 38–42.
24
Guillo believes that Granjon may have modeled his teardrop-shaped noteheads on the
unique musical typeface Etienne Briard cut for Jean de Channey ca. 1532. Ibid., 124.
25
On subsequent books from Lyon using civility type for music see ibid., 122–25 and
catalogue nos. 62 and 96.
F i g u r e 6 . 2 Pierre Sandrin, Si j’ay du bien, in Premier recueil de chansons (Paris: Le
Roy & Ballard, 1554), Bassus, fol. 3v.
techniques for music before it would again appear with the graceful flu-
ency of script. In 1586, Simone Verovio, a Dutch calligrapher working in
Rome, began to print beautifully engraved music books (and copybooks as
well), solving the problems of graphic continuity endemic to typeset music,
though at what cost is unknown.
Not only did civility type for music thus turn out to be a dead end, the
chansons Granjon printed with it also destined his prints for obscurity, at least
among modern-day scholars. The two Trophées de musique are comprised almost
entirely of reprints of chansons that had already appeared in Parisian antholo-
gies issued by Pierre Attaingnant, Nicolas Du Chemin, and Le Roy & Ballard,
and with the exception of Laurent Guillo’s investigation in Les Éditions musicales
de la Renaissance lyonnaise, their lack of novelty seems to have consigned them
to little more than the obligatory bibliographical references in RISM.26 As for
Barthélemy Beaulaigue, the teenage choirboy from Marseilles who composed
chansons and motets, it is now believed that he never existed and that the story
told in the dedication of the Chansons nouvelles was a fabrication.27 The songs were
probably composed by some anonymous hack, their contrapuntal infelicities to
be excused by the tender age of their fictitious author, whose precociousness
is hyped in the dedication to Diane de Poitiers. In fact, the troubled printing
history of the Chansons nouvelles underscores the pressures on Granjon to acquire
26
Ibid. Also see Dobbins, Music in Renaissance Lyons, 231, 251.
27
See Antoine Auda, Barthélémy Beaulaigue and the review by H.-A. Durand.
music to print in his new typeface. He contracted with two partners, Guillaume
Guéroult, a proofreader and small-time publisher, and Jehan Hiesse, a Norman
book dealer who operated a strong trade between Lyon and Rouen. Granjon’s
partners promised to provide music for him to print and each Saturday during
the printing to pay for their share of the paper being used; in return, he cut the
punches required for the music type and produced print-runs of 1,500 copies,
500 for each partner in the association.28 But the three ended up in court when
Granjon stopped the presses, apparently after printing the Tenor partbook of the
Chansons nouvelles, for Guéroult had failed to pay for his share of the paper, and
Hiesse and Guéroult had not come up with enough music to make it worth it to
Granjon to devote his presses to their joint venture. The material nature of this
publishing alliance could not be clearer—repertoire is traded for punchcutting,
texts with the desired graphic elements are traded for type specially designed
to suit them, and the substantial costs of the paper are born equally among the
partners. Granjon completed the Beaulaigue edition only in 1559, along with
the Trophées de musique, which were anthologies thrown together almost entirely
of music that had already been issued in Paris.
The Beaulaigue story bears a striking resemblance to that of Louise Labé,
the poetess now believed to have been a creation of the Lyonnaise circle of
male poets around Maurice Scève.29 Another fiction that attributed new
works to a non-existent author, this poetess’s phenomenal Euvres fed the
presses of Jean de Tournes, who issued editions in 1555 and 1556. As is true
for so many sixteenth-century chanson prints, then, Granjon’s lead us to a
world of knock-offs and fakes, where copied editions and white lies calculated
for financial gain were commonplace. Like other mass-produced anthologies,
they turned music into an object of commercial exchange and promoted a lust
for consumption, in this case by giving the prints a unique visual appeal not
unlike the note nere or “black-note” madrigals issued by Scotto and Gardane in
Venice beginning in the 1540s, though without any added musical interest.
Emanating as they did from the most ephemeral level of printed produc-
tion, Granjon’s lovely little chansonniers also suffered the destruction typical
of pamphlet literature, broadsides, and other fragile sorts of printed matter. As
shown in table 6.1, there survives only one incomplete set of the Trophées (the
Tenor partbook is missing) and one full set of the Beaulaigue Chansons thanks
to a lone Tenor partbook preserved in the tract volume BnF Rés. Vm7 513–
515. The twelve individual partbooks that survived clearly did so thanks to the
28
See Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, 148–50 and documents 25 and 30, and Dalbanne,
“Robert Granjon, imprimeur de musique.”
29
On Labé, see Mireille Huchon, Louise Labé: Une créature de papier.
Table 6.1 Surviving copies of Granjon’s chansonniers in civility type for music
Titles marked with an asterisk are the sole surviving part from that edition.
London, British Library K.8.i.4 (Bassus only)
Leather-covered boards, gold edges, gold stamping “Succentor”
Title page inscribed: “Musica non lasciviae: sed laudando Deo Ac excitandis ad virtutem
Ingenijs, Mitigandisque curarum molestijs, coelitus donata est.”
Premier recueil de chansons (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1554)
Second recueil de chansons (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1555)
*Premier livre de chansons (Paris: Michel Fezandat, 1556)
*Second livre de chansons (Paris: Michel Fezandat, 1556)
*Premier livre de chansons (Paris: Nicolas Du Chemin, 1557)
*Second livre de chansons (Paris: Nicolas Du Chemin, 1557)
Clement Janequin, Verger de musique . . . à 4 & 5 (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1559)
Premier trophée de musique (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559)
Barthélemy Beaulaigue, Chansons nouvelles (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559)
La fleur de chansons et premier Lievre [sic] (Antwerp: Tielman Susato, [1552])
La fleur de chansons et second Livre (Antwerp: Tielman Susato, [1552])
Tiers livre contenant xxx nouvelles chansons à 2 ou à 3 parties (Antwerp: Tielman Susato, [1550])
La fleur de chansons et quatriesme Livre (Antwerp: Tielman Susato, [1552])
La fleur de chansons et cincquiesme Livre à 3 (Antwerp: Tielman Susato, 1552)
*La fleur de chansons et sixiesme Livre à 3 (Antwerp: Tielman Susato, [1552])
Selectissimorum triciniorum (Nuremberg: Berg & Neuber, [1560])
*Pierre Cler’eau, Premier livre de chansons à 3 (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1559)
*Antoine Cartier, Vingt et une chansons à 3 (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1557)
Gathering of paper ruled by hand
*Louis Bourgeois, Pseaulmes LXXXIII de David . . . (Lyon: Godefroy Beringen, 1554)
Clément Janequin, Proverbes de Salomon (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1558)
Mattheus Le Maistre, Catechesis numeris musicis inclusa (Nuremberg: Berg & Neuber, 1559)
Barthélemy Beaulaigue, Mottez (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559) (text in roman type)
Gathering of paper ruled by hand
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Vm7 192–194 (Superius, Contratenor, Bassus)
White vellum binding with gold stamping, gold edges, green ribbon ties worn away
Second trophée de musique (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559)
Barthélemy Beaulaigue, Mottez (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559) (text in roman type)
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés. Vm7 513–515 (Tenor only)
White vellum binding with gold stamping, gold edges, worn ribbon ties, ruled pages
Barthélemy Beaulaigue, Mottez (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559)
Clément Janequin, Proverbes de Salomon (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1558)
extraordinary gold-tooled vellum in which they were bound, a sign that they
had landed in the hands of wealthy music lovers from the start. We might also
observe how precious the British Library binder’s volume K.8.i.4 has turned
out to be, since eight of the prints it contains are the unique surviving parts
from their respective editions, all but the Bassus parts of which are now lost.
Given their contents, it stands to reason that Granjon’s small chansonniers
have escaped scholarly attention. After all, the chansons by Beaulaigue cer-
tainly do not support a traditional historiography based on the life and works
of authors—indeed, pity poor Antoine Auda, the scholar who devoted his 1957
monograph to Barthélémy Beaulaigue, poète et musicien prodige, for it was this study
that incited H.-A. Durand to declare the Beaulaigue prints a fraud.30 As for the
Trophée collections, they frustrate the attempt to construct a history of music
in Lyon at any level save for the most generic, since they primarily transmit
reprints of music from Paris. Just another edition of some of the most baldly
commercial music of the century, these chansonniers seem to be unique only in
presentation, making them little more a mass-produced typographical curio.
Nonetheless, the material form in which these songs are presented is
highly significant, and it is not to put too much pressure on the elegant
curves of their type to propose that they might reveal a few secrets of French
musical culture at mid-century. On the one hand, as octavo partbooks, they
are very small, even for music prints, which places them close to practical
books designed for activities such as reading aloud, praying, working out
calculations, and so forth. These chansonniers were used for more than silent
contemplative reading, which is why so few of them survive. On the other
hand, their elitist typeface suggests a courtly origin.
It is hardly revolutionary to suggest that chansons composed by Pierre
Sandrin, Jacques Arcadelt, and Claudin de Sermisy are courtly: Claudin
and “Sandrin”—actually a sobriquet for Pierre Reginault—were both long-
time singers in the royal chapel. In 1543, Claude Chappuys, the librarian of
François Ier, praised them explicitly in his panegyric of the court:
Chantres y sont qui ont voix argentines
Psalmodiantz les louenges divines
Et de David recitantz les chansons
Avec motetz de diverses facons,
Soit de Claudin pere aux musiciens:
Ou de Sandrin esgal aux anciens,31
[Singers there are (at the chapel) with silvery voices
Singing heavenly praises
And Psalms of David, reciting chansons
With motets of various sorts,
Whether by Claudin, father of musicians,
Or Sandrin, equal to the ancients.]
30
See Durand, Review of Auda, Barthélémy Beaulaigue.
31
Claude Chappuys, Discours de la court, sig. Civv.
Arcadelt, who had returned to France in 1551 to become maître de chapelle
for the Cardinal of Lorraine, also sang in the royal chapel between 1557 and
1560, and in an ode from 1559, Olivier de Magny mentions him among a
number of musicians active in the musique de la chambre.32 The fact of the mat-
ter, though, is that beyond establishing the employment of these composers
at court, scholars have had difficulty defining what in particular made their
chansons “courtly.” Chanson prints are notoriously blank and formulaic, with
titles in numbered series, chansons thrown together in anthologies, authors’
names missing, and no paratextual material such as a dedication to locate
them in a particular social context or sphere of patronage.33 The commercial
success of French chansons gives the impression that producing them was
a lucrative sideline for chapel masters such as Arcadelt or Claudin, but the
simplicity of the songs and the anonymous material forms in which they are
conveyed seem to point away from the court.
The chansonniers in civility type offer the opportunity to turn discussion
back toward aristocratic circles by decoding from their pages the elitist prac-
tices they were meant to support. The next section of this chapter works to
recover the performative nature of vernacular education in high society, which
emphasized not just good manners but beautiful speech. With this under-
standing of civility as active and verbal in place, I then evaluate the ways
in which Granjon’s Premier and Second trophée de musique related to the court
society served by the composers featured in them, and the chapter finishes by
investigating just how chansons probably worked as pedagogical texts.
Polite Speech and Its Texts

Granjon’s chansonniers scripted musical performances in a variety of ways:
they provided roles for four singers (with options for instruments), gave
detailed instructions for the coordination of the voices through specific pre-
scriptions of pitch and rhythm, and indicated what words to sing when.
Granjon’s text underlay is not as precise as that of the chansonniers printed
by Attaingnant, but it leaves few doubts concerning the alignment of words
and music. Tempi and dynamics, unspecified, remained up to the performers,
as did the very crucial element of pronunciation. So for all the acts, sounds,
and elements of vocalization these chansonniers do prescribe, details of vowel
32
Olivier de Magny, Les Odes, ed. Prosper Blanchemain, 287–90. On all three musi-
cians—Claudin, Sandrin, and Arcadelt—see Cazaux, La Musique à la cour, esp. 151–54.
33
van Orden, Music, Authorship, and the Book, ch. 1
sounds and consonants remain unclear. For without a phonetic correspondence
between text and speech, and in a time of strong regional accents, then as
now, performers of French chansons, plays, and lyric poetry lacked a textual
apparatus that would produce consistent results in pronunciation.34 Poems
rhymed “amere” with “claire,” giving two spellings—“e” and “ai”—for the
open “e” sound, whereas pairs of rhymes like “boys” and “noix” show up the
exchangeability of “y” for “i” and “x” for “s,” never mind the irrationality of
silent letters that left “ard” a perfectly fine rhyme for “depart.” Probably the
best example of an inconsistent spelling for the same sounds is the French
word for “French,” which might be spelled “français” or “francoys.”
Granjon aimed to tighten the visual links between French as a handwritten
language and its typographical forms, not to foster correct pronunciation per
se, but in its larger concern with “Frenchness,” his project resonates with those
of grammarians who sought to rectify the illogic of French orthography. We
have already encountered contemporary anxieties over the disorderliness of the
French language in the remarks of Geoffroy Tory from his treatise on typography
of 1529, and while Granjon’s stated concern was to redesign the shape of French
letters on the page, the books and chansonniers he printed in civility type joined
others that attacked the problem of French spelling and pronunciation head-on.
The failed attempts of Jacques Peletier du Mans to reform French orthogra-
phy in his Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ e prononciacion françoęsɇ (1550) is symptomatic
of contemporary concerns to standardize French pronunciation with recourse to
Latin roots and to make the relationship between written and spoken French
more absolute (see figure 6.3).35 Peletier’s phonetic orthography never caught
on, reliant as it was on innumerable new accents that rendered “pense” as
“pansɇ” and “est” as “ę́t,” but even so, the project witnesses the desire to codify
written French using the medium of the printed book. The printing required
a series of new characters for vowels, and both editions are printed in a delicate
italic type. The 1555 edition shown in figure 6.3, printed by Jean de Tournes,
employed a pica (12-point) italic type attributed to Robert Granjon, whose
trademark flair is visible in the florid lower-case v and z, the hooked tail on
the capital A, and the long-tailed R.36 A precursor to Granjon’s caractères de
34
For recent research into early French pronunciation, much of it aimed at singers, actors,
and actresses, see Eugène Green, La Parole baroque, and Olivier Bettens, “Chantez-vous
français?”
35
See Jacques Peletier du Mans, Dialogue de l’ortografe, ed. Lambert C. Porter. The first
edition was published in Poitiers in 1550, the second in Lyon in 1555.
36
See A. F. Johnson, “The Italic Types of Robert Granjon,” 293–94 and fig. 3, and
Vervliet, The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance, 2:334.
F i g u r e 6 . 3 Jacques Peletier du Mans, Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ e prononciacion
françoęsɇ (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1555), 23. The typeface employed here is
attributed to Robert Granjon.
civilité, Peletier’s Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ enlists typography to regulate pronun-

ciation, for his books permitted no confusion when read aloud, as if they had
been written in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).37 Of the same spirit
was Jean-Antoine de Baïf’s fantastical use of Greek characters in his manu-
script chansonnettes en vers mesurés à l’antique, which made visible the quantities
of the meters he had chosen (see figure 6.4).38 Here too, weird orthography
aimed both to represent and to order the sound of spoken French, to establish
a textual apparatus based on the authority of the verbal but one that would
also project its sovereignty over speech. In this tension between representa-
tion and reform, between past and future performances, these texts balanced
37
For an excellent overview of Peletier’s orthography and comparison with Meigret’s, see
Robert E. Bousquet, “The Sixteenth-Century Quest for a Reformed Orthography.”
38
See BnF MS fr. 19140, portions of which are edited with facing facsimiles in Jean-
Antoine de Baïf, Chansonnettes, ed. G. C. Bird.
F i g u r e 6 . 4 The phonetic spelling system of Jean-Antoine de Baïf. From the
autograph manuscript, Versions du Psautier et Chansonnettes, Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, MS fr. 19140, fol. 356v.
objectives similar to those motivating the writing down of scripts for plays and
notation for pieces of music—these texts recorded and prescribed at the same
time. Indeed, in addition to launching its own orthographic system for the ver-
nacular, Louis Meigret’s Le Trętté de la grammęre françoęze (1550) included actual
musical examples in mensural notation that were designed to show the pitched
accentuation that Meigret felt was integral to correct French.39
Speech was itself a manner subject to the same imperatives that pre-
scribed a pleasant mien, upright posture, and studied gestures, and like the
swaddling clothes that bound babies gruelingly tight in order to force their
legs to grow straight, these orthographic projects attempted to lace spoken
French into straits for its own improvement. Meigret’s treatise falls more
strongly onto the reformist side of the divide: in the first place, he aims to
“fit the letters and writing to the voice and to pronunciation,” but in choos-
ing his spellings and just which voices will stand behind his transcriptions,
he rejects certain accents, such as the overly tightlipped “e”s of “effeminate
mignons” at the court and the accents of Parisians who—by contrast—often
used an open “e” where the vowel should be closed.40 Meigret leaves the
impression of an enforcer working independently. Peletier, by contrast,
seems deliberately to have sought in his newly accented letters to capture
the French spoken at court, as he makes clear in the long “Apologiɇ a Louïs
Meigręt” that introduces his volume. No doubt a matter of some curios-
ity for many readers, Peletier’s spelling gained them virtual entry to this
exalted social sphere, something the author himself apparently managed
only with the help of well-placed acquaintances:
E par cɇ quɇ j’è tousjours etè dɇ l’opinion dɇ ceus qui ont dìt qu’an
notrɇ Francɇ n’i à androęt ou lon parlɇ pur Françoęs, fors la ou ę́t la
Court, ou bien la ou sont ceus qui i ont etè nourrìz : jɇ m’i suis voulon-
tiers gɇtè toutɇs les foęs qu’an è ù l’ocasion : laquelɇ assez dɇ foęs j’è üɇ,
principalɇment du vivant du Trecretien Roę Françoęs : duquel les g’ans
dɇ lętrɇs nɇ sauroę́t parler assez honorablɇmant. An la Court duquɇl
j’è ù assez bonnɇs antreɇs, par le moyen des connoęssancɇs quɇ j’avoę́
39
Louis Meigret, Le Trętté de la grammęre françoęze, fol. 133v ff. My sincere thanks to
Olivier Bettens for the reference to the music examples in Meigret’s treatise.
40
Ibid. “Suyvant donqes le devoęr qe doęt l’ecrittur’a la prononçíaçíon: ę preferant la verité
ao’faoses opiníons, ę mecontęntemęns dęs homes inveterez ęn leur abus, je m’efforçerey
de fęre qadrer lę’lettres, ę l’ecrittur’ao’voęs, ę a la prononçíaçíon sans avoęr egart ao’loęs
sophistiqes dę’ derivęzons, ę differęnçes: aoqęlles se sommęttet plus qe jamęs aocuns dę’
nostres, come beufs ao jou, sans avoęr ao demourant aocune consideraçíon de la lęcture”
(fol. 3v). For the remarks about courtly and Parisian accents, see fols. 6v–7r.
pratiqueɇs du tans qu’il renoę`t, m’aprochant des pęrsonnagɇs qui avoę́t
credit, faveur e manimant d’afęrɇs : qui sont ceus, qui parlɇt lɇ mieus.41
Peletier claims for this style of pronunciation the reflected authority of the
court by recounting with subtle insistence his many entrées into the circles
surrounding the king (“where I happily went every time I had the chance,”
“where I had quite good access”) and by registering the illustrious host of
personages populating the almost mythic halls of the Louvre (“men of letters
who know how to speak honorably enough,” “individuals of credit, favor,
and command,” and of course the “Most Christian King François” himself).
Here orthography is like the notation of an air de cour Peletier’s contem-
poraries would never hear, the echo of a courtly performance one hoped to
imitate. And in this sense, we need to understand pronunciation and indeed
the whole notion of “proper French” and instruction in the vernacular as part
of an education in courtiership and manners. “Il faut policer notrɇ Languɇ,”
Peletier says, using the term—police—that meant at once the measured grace
of courtesy and the rigorous discipline required to attain it.42
For the children of ultra-wealthy aristocrats, the best way to acquire courtly
manners was to be raised in the royal household alongside the dauphin, princes,
princesses, and other children of the sovereign’s extended family. Parents with
the means to do so invested small fortunes to have their children raised as
enfans d’honneur or ladies-in-waiting at court, where they learned the vocabu-
lary of deference and preference, developed style both physical and verbal, and
acquired the turns of phrase by which rulers established social hierarchy and
“créatures” ingratiated themselves with potential patrons. Claude Chappuys,
writing in 1543, described the court as “la fontaine de Civilité”:
Et ne fault point a aultre escolle aller
Affin d’apprendrɇ a bien dire & parler43
[And one need not go to another school
In order to learn to talk and speak well.]
The troupe of children there attended Mass together, participated in royal
ceremonies, dined together, and danced together in the court balls that were
41
Jacques Peletier du Mans, Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ, 2nd ed. (Lyon: Jean de Tournes,
1555), 23.
42
Ibid., 79. “C’ę́t donq principalɇmant pour lɇ tans a vɇnir qu’il faut policer notrɇ
Languɇ.”
43
Chappuys, Discours de la court, sig. Diiir. Note the use of the special typography for the
soft final “e” of “apprendrɇ.”
held on Thursday and Sunday evenings during the reigns of Henri III and
Henri IV, all activities that reinforced social hierarchy and trained children
in the graces of courtesy—the révérences, formulas of polite address, genuflec-
tions, and other expressions of deference that equipped them to enter le monde
of high society.44
For those of less stratospheric social standing, a firstborn son destined for
a career at court and in the military could of course be educated at home by
a battery of private instructors. This had the advantages of safety (a matter
of particular concern during the civil wars) and control, for sending a well-
bred child off to collège stood the chance of corrupting the beautiful French
he had learned at home. Some great noblemen even opened the doors of their
private “schools” to the sons of others. François de La Noue described such
arrangements in his Discours politiques et militaires (1587), by which nobles
of good standing but insufficient means might send their son or sons off to
serve as pages in a larger household. Indeed, La Noue had himself been a page
to Henri II and went on to become a brilliant general (we must thank the
Spanish for capturing him in 1580 and holding him prisoner for the five years
during which he wrote his Discours). Ever the astute critic of French aristo-
cratic society, his fifth discourse, “De la bonne nourriture & institution qu’il
est necessaire de donner aux jeunes gentils-hommes François,” encouraged
lords to take on the upbringing of pages, a “liberale honnesteté” he believed
the rich owed to their poorer neighbors. The elaboration of grateful obliga-
tion and friendship, he remarked, are themselves a “courtoisie” befitting the
first estate. But La Noue also critiqued these solutions, for oftentimes, he
said, princes and lords took so many pages into their homes that all care was
lost, not only to educate them, but even to dress them: “one sees some of
them without hose, bowling all the time with the lackeys and stable boys.”45
These costly forms of home schooling were meant to protect impression-
able children from coarse language and local dialects. Just as the abécédaire
classes insisted on Latin in order to eradicate crude pronunciation, parents
sometimes went to striking lengths to sequester their children from com-
mon speech.46 Those young nobles whose fathers did send them to boarding
44
See Orest Ranum, “Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the French State,
1630–1660,” and Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, 57–58, 148–49.
45
François de La Noue, Discours politiques et militaires, ed. F. E. Sutcliffe, 150–51. “Car le
nombre estoit si superabondant, qu’on perdoit le soin, non seulement de les instruire,
ains aussi de les vestir. Et en voyoit-on quelques uns, sans chausses, jouer ordinaire-
ment aux quilles avecques les laquais & garçons d’estable.”
46
See Cossard, Methodes, 10.
school in Paris—where social opportunities crucial to their futures were more
plentiful—were accompanied by servants and a tutor or tutors who supple-
mented the college curriculum with private instruction in their quarters in
history, manners, and a modern language such as Italian.47 On weekends they
might put their lessons in social graces to good use during visits to rela-
tives and family friends in the capital. Thus although the Latinate education
provided by collèges did not really fit the needs of the aristocracy and many
boys stayed only a few years, boarding schools did have the ancillary benefit
of social opportunities that introduced boys to the upper-class world they
were destined—or hoped—to inhabit. Still, as a cautionary measure tutors
were often charged to preserve the good manners French boys would have
otherwise have learned at home. Surely the most bizarre outcome of such
concerns to monitor the speech of children was the case of Montaigne’s early
education in the 1530s: shortly after he was born, Michel’s father hired as
a governor a German doctor who was fluent in Latin but spoke not a word
of French and instructed everyone in the household, friends, and visitors
to speak to the little boy only in Latin. Mother, father, servants all learned
enough Latin to implement the plan, and even the villagers picked up Latin
words here and there so that at the age of six, Michel still spoke only Latin.
Ironically, whereas most fathers worried that collège would ruin their sons’
French, Montaigne had the opposite experience—college ruined his Latin,
and it was the vernacular that he first encountered only then.48
Despite the downsides, some families did take advantage of the collèges,
though many boys skipped out on the full course and went off to riding
school in Italy in their teens. Collège was not a perfect solution for those
who sought to nurture in well-born children the natural grace of their class.
Montaigne complained that collegiate discipline and the emphasis on Latin
letters “twisted” the spirit.49 La Noue, as well, felt that collège and university
ill suited young men destined for the glory of arms—the traditional call-
ing of nobles—but until the establishment of military academies during the
reign of Henri IV, starting with a Latinate education and then attending
“finishing school” at the famous riding academies in Ferrara and Naples was
the best education French aristocrats could piece together.
In private chambers at the Collège du Plessis, in manor houses on great pro-
vincial estates, in apartments at court, and in bourgeois homes, children’s efforts
to form their vowels and consonants clearly, to find a pleasing tone of voice, and
47
Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, ch. 2.
48
Montaigne, Essais, ed. Villey and Saulnier, 1:xvii–xviii.
49
Ibid., “De l’Institution des Enfans,” 1:165.
to practice the verbal formulas of politesse were supported by the civility texts
mentioned at the opening of this chapter. By far the most broadly disseminated
of these was Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium libellus (1530), which enjoyed
at least twelve editions in the first year of its publication alone and was even-
tually translated into almost every major European language.50 Erasmus gave
only very basic rules that directly concern polite speech, but he pays striking
attention to the physicality of language: “the voice should be soft and calm,” he
says, “neither raucous like a farmer’s nor so subdued that it does not carry to the
person you are addressing.”51 Such moderation of tone was to be matched with
an even-paced delivery (“speech should not be precipitate and outstrip its mean-
ing, but slow and distinct”) without stuttering or stammering.
Mastering the prescriptions in Erasmus’s slight manual required much more
than reading or memorization, since the handbook functioned like the dance
treatises that only later came on the scene and explained how to walk beauti-
fully, bow, curtsey, doff one’s hat, pay respects, and avoid the social stumbles and
faux pas of the untutored.52 Chock-a-block with choreographic details vastly
surpassing anything attempted for dance, not a single raised eyebrow, sideways
glance, curl of the lips, akimbo arm, bent knee, or crossed leg escaped Erasmus’s
remark. Thus as a matter of physical discipline, learning the lessons in De civili-
tate would take much practice. Moreover, beginning with the second French
translation of De civilitate (that of Jehan Louveau, which came out in 1558),
French civilities were printed in the so-called caractères de civilité designed by
Granjon.53 This meant that French-language editions of De civilitate morum puer-
ilium libellus doubled as copybooks for handwriting lessons, making La Civilité
puérile not only a textbook for manners, but a pattern book for the shapes of let-
ters and, in essence, the sounds that went with them. Some editions even began
with the alphabet, making their usefulness as copybooks explicit.54
In light of the fact that the French spoken at court was being advanced
as the gold standard of pronunciation, it is significant that Granjon’s first
50
See Desiderius Erasmus, On Good Manners for Boys, 272.
51
Ibid., 287.
52
For dance treatises, see Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie (Langres, 1589) and François de
Lauze, Apologie de la Danse (1623), both of which begin with social courtesies.
53
On these first French civilities, see Chartier, “From Texts to Manners,” 76–79. Also see
Sabbe and Audin, Die Civilité-Schriften; Desiderius Erasmus, La Civilité puérile … par
Alcide Bonneau; Carter and Vervliet, Civilité Types; and Jimenes, Les Caractères de civilité.
54
See, for instance, La Civilité puerile & honneste pour l’instruction des enfans. En laquelle est
mise au commencement la maniere d’apprendre à bien lire, prononcer, & escrire. Reveuë, corrigée, &
augmentée des Quatrain du Sieur de Pibrac (Troyes: Nicolas Oudot, 1649) shown in
figure 7.2; for a page from one of Granjon’s copybooks, see figure 7.1.
book in civility type—Ringhieri’s Dialogue de la vie et de la mort—was
dedicated to Claude d’Urfé, gouverneur of the dauphin. Certainly Erasmus’s
egalitarian De civilitate was not, in content, terribly “courtly,” unlike
Castiglione’s Cortegiano, but the lettre française in which it was printed did
appeal to the vernacular culture of the aristocracy for its meaning. Along
with La Civilité puérile, Granjon also published in 1558 a manual explic-
itly designed to teach children to “read, pronounce, and write” in French
(“en lettre françoise”), Le Moyen de promptement et facilement apprendre en lettre
françoise, à bien lire, prononcer et escrire; this little primer was written by the
king’s calligrapher, Pierre Habert, and printed in caractères de civilité in an
eminently affordable octavo format.55 It is entirely possible that Granjon
based the shape of his characters on samples of Habert’s handwriting, in this
way following the lead of Claude Garamond, who had used the handwrit-
ing of Angelo Vergecio, the librarian at Fontainebleau, as the model for his
Grecs du Roi.56 But whether or not Habert had a hand in Granjon’s designs,
caractères de civilité and the books printed with them draw on royal associa-
tions to establish their credentials.57
Not only does Habert’s employment at court suggest that the new caractères
de civilité carried with them royal approbation, Le Moyen de promptement et facile-
ment apprendre en lettre françoise, à bien lire, prononcer et escrire was dedicated to the
king’s daughter, Marguerite de Valois, who was five years old and probably just
able to hold a pen. One of her tutors at this time was Joachim Du Bellay, who
maintained that the court was the “seule escolle ou voluntiers on apprent à bien
et proprement parler” (“the only school where one readily learns to speak well
and properly”).58 Another copybook in civility type even more suited to noble
education was the Nouvel exemplaire pour apprendre à escrire: Contenant plusieurs
belles sentences, extraictes des histoires anciennes, suyvant l’ordre de l’alphabet au grand
soulagement de la jeunesse: Le tout mise en rime françoise par A. de H.: Auec quelques
exemples de lettre italienne appropriés à la fin (Antwerp: pour Robert Granjon,
55
Pierre Habert, Le Moyen de promptement et facilement apprendre en lettre françoise was 28
folios long. Sometime between 1584 and 1590, Habert’s tutor was issued together
with Erasmus under the title La Civilité honneste pour l’instruction des enfans en laquelle est
mis au commencement la manière d’apprendre à bien lire, prononcer, et escrire (Troyes: Nicolas
De Ruau, s.d.), making the connection between the two texts complete.
56
Vervliet, The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance, 2:383–88.
57
Several of the books printed in civility type by Richard Breton also address an aristo-
cratic audience, though the dedications to Protestant nobles suggest a circle outside
the increasingly Catholic court. Breton was subsequently ordered arrested for dealing
in censured books. See Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, 132–36.
58
Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, ed. Jean-Charles Monferran and Ernesta Caldarini, 233.
1565).59 Like Habert’s treatise, it was just twenty-eight folios long, and in
addition to mining the histories that would be of greater interest to young boys
hoping for a military career, it included examples of the Italian cursive adoles-
cents encountered when they went to Italy to riding school.
Perhaps it is a tiny point, but we should remember that children practiced
saying letters, syllables, and words as they traced out their lines and curves,
just as they learned to read aloud. In this way writing really did “police la
langue,” polishing pronunciation, policing handwriting, and contributing
fundamentally to politeness. It is not without reason that handwriting exer-
cises often concentrated on the proper forms of address, greeting, and closure
when composing letters, for in correspondence, the impression of an indi-
vidual’s pen on the page, the mark of the hand, as it were, represented his
or her entire demeanor, making letter-writing in itself a textual rehearsal of
deference and courtesy otherwise expressed face to face. The student working
from Cossard’s treatise, for example, would have sounded out the syllables of “je
ne respire autre chose qu’à vous donner toutes sortes de contentement” (“I breathe
only to give you all kinds of joy”) while writing them down during an exercise
that would ultimately produce not just a silent little letter from a son to his father
but a beautifully turned phrase to exploit in polite conversation (see figure 6.5).60
These conversational moments and the verbal modalities of vernacular edu-
cation are difficult to recover, but the tightly constructed interrelationships
between instruction in reading, writing, pronunciation, and behavior do point
toward a conception of personal style in which the fundaments of reading and
writing ultimately served a cultural ideal that privileged not literacy for its own
sake, but literacy as a tool of self-fashioning in a highly theatrical society. The
very fact that civility books became more conversational in works of Della Casa,
Guazzo, and the bilingual conversation manuals that became popular in the sec-
ond half of the century witnesses this trend toward enlisting print in the refine-
ment of social exchange. “Shall we not have a chanson?” Maitre Jacques asks in
a conversation manual from Antwerp circa 1560.61 “Yes, six even, if you please,
59
For an excellent overview of the books of poetry, translations, polyglot editions, and
other books printed in civility type, see Jimenes, Les Caractères de civilité, 14–27.
60
For some examples, see Emil J. Polak, Medieval and Renaissance Letter Treatises, and
Pierre Habert, Le Chemin de bien vivre (Paris, 1572). Also see Motley, Becoming a French
Aristocrat, 89–90; Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell, eds., Letter-writing Manuals;
and Luc Vaillancourt, La Lettre familière. Brian Richardson neatly works through the
valence of various Italian hands in the Renaissance and how handwriting was taught
in Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy, ch. 2.
61
On French-Flemish conversation manuals with musical scenes see Henri Vanhulst,
“La Musique dans les manuels de conversation bilingues,” with this passage from
F i g u r e 6 . 5 Jacques Cossard, Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le
plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633), 234. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Rés. X 1947. Written on a blank page facing the same text printed in roman type,
this handwriting exercise has already been completed, probably as a model. Others
of the exercises illustrate the proper verbal forms of a receipt, a loan, and a rental
contract. Although this letter is written in the voice of a boy, Cossard intended for
the book to be used in teaching girls as well. He dedicated it to the six-year-old
princess Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, niece of Louis XIII; this copy bears the
ex-libris of Louyse Marie Siguier.
Monsieur!” says Rembert. A group has been invited to Maitre Jacques’ house
for dinner and after Guillaume returns from looking for the chansons à 4 and à
3 upstairs, Jacques passes out the partbooks: “Here, Theodora, take the Dessus,
the children will help you if it’s too high for you,” “Give me the Bass,” says
Rembert, and so forth. They look at their parts to see who begins first and who
has a rest, and they find their pitches. “Have you learned this song?” Jacques
asks one of his children. “No,” she says, “but we’ll sing it well.”
Such depictions of chanson-filled soirées appear only in the highly scripted
sort of conversation manual printed in Antwerp and London.62 But we can
see French civility texts and the caractères de civilité in which so many of them
were printed in the same light, for they persistently make social aptitude
their subject. In France especially, civility books prepared young aristocrats
and social climbers to enter a world that stressed physical grace and beautiful
speech far more than literacy, which is why learning to read and write ulti-
mately served the higher purpose of training the body and the voice.
Trophées de musique
If, as I am arguing, Granjon’s lettres faceon descripture were a typographical
representation of elite practices, we might also see in his curvaceous note-
heads allusion to a particular style of music-making readers hoped to access.
Certainly musical education was a matter of course among nobles, who learned
to sing and play instruments, particularly the lute. Henri II reputedly liked
to play the guitar while sitting on the lap of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers.63
Marguerite de Valois—who according to Pierre Brantôme also spoke and wrote
eloquently—sang, played the lute, and devised musical settings of her own
poetry, which she sang to her own accompaniment and taught to the choirboys
in her service.64 Louis XIII sang and played with instruments from age three
and began lute studies in earnest with Robert Ballard at age ten—ultimately
he went on to compose his own motets.65 Catherine de Clermont, Countess of
Retz, played lute and apparently sang and played keyboard as well.66
From what we can tell, music lessons often followed the scriptural pro-
grams of vernacular education, with students learning how to copy music
out virtually as soon as they learned to read it. John Kmetz has discovered
[Colloques de M. Jan Berthout en françoys et flamen] [Antwerp, between 1557 and 1569] at
119–20. Also see Rob C. Wegman, “From Maker to Composer,” 409–11. On manuals
for girls, see Henri Vanhulst, “La Musique et l’éducation des jeunes filles,” and Forney,
“‘Nymphes gayes’.”
62
On a French-English manual from London, 1573, see Wistreich, “Music Books and
Sociability,” 238–39.
63
R. J. Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici, 38.
64
Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Recueil des Dames, ed. Etienne Vaucheret, 155.
65
Héroard, Journal, ed. Foisil, 2:2049.
66
See Brooks, “La Comtesse de Retz et l’air de cour.”
records of private music lessons given in 1546 to a thirteen-year-old in Basle,
Basilius Amerbach, the son of a lawyer.67 For his first homework assignment,
Basilius was asked to fold and sew together four partbooks from paper given
him by his teacher, and at the next lesson he began to copy music into them.
Presumably the intention was to reinforce visual and aural comprehension
with the painstaking process of inscription. Many of the songs in Granjon’s
Trophées de musique would have made fine pieces for beginners. In fact,
Amerbach copied one of them into his partbooks, Maillard’s Amour brusle.68
He might have been working from a copy of Jacques Moderne’s Parangon des
chansons given him by his teacher, Christoph Piperinus, though the chan-
son had also appeared in Attaingnant’s chansonniers. Parisian chansons were
popular teaching pieces throughout Europe—not only are they found in the
music books of students such as Amerbach and Glarean’s pupil Aegidius
Tschudi, teachers apparently stocked chansonniers as textbooks, even in Italy
and Switzerland.
Granjon’s selection of chansons would have been delightful as a first book
of music—it includes a number of established “hits,” such as Pierre Cadéac’s
Je suis desheritée, Sandrin’s Si j’ay du bien, and Pierre Certon’s M’amie un jour, as
well as a healthy selection of chansons by reputable composers (see table 6.2).
Jacques Arcadelt, Jean Maillard, and Sandrin top the list, all musicians at
court, at least as far as we can tell. The case for court employment is clear for
Arcadelt and Sandrin, but far sketchier for Maillard, about whom nothing cer-
tain is known. Chansons under his name—of which there are fifty-eight—first
appeared in Attaingnant’s editions of the later 1530s and Moderne’s Parangon
series and continue through the 1560s; according to Marie-Alexis Colin and
Frank Dobbins, Maillard probably lived in Paris for part of his life.69 The
texts he set include poems by the court poets Clément Marot and Mellin de
Saint-Gelais, and while this does not necessarily mean that he was in direct
contact with either of them, it is worth mentioning with regard to the high
quality of the lyrics in Granjon’s chansonniers. About a third of the chansons
in the Trophées set verse by known poets—Marot, Saint-Gelais, Maurice Scève,
Magny, one text by the cardinal François de Tournon, and one by Pierre de
Ronsard, who had just been named aumônier du roi in 1558. The percent-
age of attributable lyric in the Trophées is relatively high, and even though it
probably does not represent a deliberate strategy on Granjon’s part given how
hard up he was for material, it does mean that the poetry in the chansonniers
67
See Kmetz, “The Piperinus-Amerbach Partbooks.”
68
On Basel, University Library, MS F. IX. 32–5, see John Kmetz, Die Handschriften der
Universitätsbibliothek Basel, 105–15.
69
Marie-Alexis Colin and Frank Dobbins, “Maillard [Maillart], Jean.”
T a b l e 6 . 2 Contents of the Premier and Second trophée de musique
Composer attributions as given in the prints and poetic attributions from Guillo,
Les Éditions musicales, catalogue nos. 40–41. Pieces for which this is the first known
printing are marked with an asterisk.
PREMIER TROPHEE DE MUSIQUE (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559)
Si j’ay du bien (Saint-Gelais) Sandrin Amour brusle Maillard
Voulant honneur Sandrin Je suis desheritée Cadeac
Vos huis sont ilz Godard *O que je vis (Du Peyrat) Lupi Second
Puis que vivre (Saint-Gelais) Arcadelt Voyez le tort d’amour Gentian
Amour se doit figurer Maillard Comme le cerf (Ps. 42) Jambe de Fer
Qui souhaittez Gentian *De mil ennuiz Arcadelt
Vous qui voulez Gentian *Si faux danger Arcadelt
*Un grand desir Maillard De qui plus tost (Saint-Gelais) Sandrin
Gentil esprit Mornable D’amour de vous Mornable
Le voir, l’ouyr (Scève) Viliers Honneur sans plus Lupus
*De son cueur Certon Dieu des amans (Marot) Arcadelt
Bouche de courail (Marot) Goudeau Venus avoit son filz Amour Viliers
SECOND TROPHEE DE MUSIQUE (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559)
Amour perdit (Scève) Maillard Est-il douleur Arcadelt
Douc’esperance Jacquet *O le grand bien Arcadelt
A l’ombre d’un verd buisson Maillard Il ne se trouve en amitié Sandrin
O comm’heureux Certon Si comm’espoir (Saint-Gelais) Maillard
Or sus Amour (Tournon) Claudin Ayant son cueur Maillard
Je cherch’autant amour Boyvin O temps qui es [Gentian]
M’ami un jour Certon C’est trop presté [Guyon]
Ce moys de May Godard *Ceste belle petite bouche [Maillard]
Souspirs ardans (Saint-Gelais) Arcadelt M’ami est tant honneste Sandrin
Me monstr’amour (Magny) Arcadelt Mon pensement ne gist Gombert
Mais de quoy (Ronsard) Arcadelt *Qui veut avoir liesse (Marot) Roussel
made for good reading. They also would have been lovely books to own for the
beauty of the printing alone.
The fact that we know nothing about Maillard is no reason to scorn his
chansons. The same is true for Gentian, Viliers, and others of the compos-
ers represented in the Trophées. Many musicians whose lives are untraceable
turned their hands to writing chansons, career singers probably not unlike
Sandrin, who made their livings performing and whose chansons were passed
along to printers from time to time. Granjon printed seven of Maillard’s
chansons in the Trophées, even giving pride of place in the Second trophée to
Amour perdit, on a dixain of local poet Maurice Scève. Maillard’s chansons are
very much in the style of Claudin and Sandrin, perhaps slightly more formu-
laic than theirs, which would have lent them precisely the hooks of familiar-
ity that made them instantly appealing. Si comm’espoir, on a decasyllabic poem
of nine lines by Saint-Gelais, is a fine case in point (see example 6.1).
E x a m p l e 6 . 1 Jean Maillard, Si comm’espoir, text by Mellin de Saint-Gelais,
in Le second trophée de musique (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559), 30–32. Based on The
Sixteenth-Century Chanson, ed. J. A. Bernstein, 26:67–69, emended to match
Granjon’s edition, with musica ficta included and the original note values restored
From the very beginning, we find the conventions of the Parisian chan-
son deployed in full force: the first four syllables of the text are set homo-
phonically to the dactylic rhythm that was a cliché of the genre, and the
second part of the opening line breaks into staggered entrances off the beat,
headed by a figure of three minims that repeat the same pitch.70 Fans of
the sixteenth-century chanson will recognize in this opening strain a strong
similarity to Mille regretz by Josquin des Prez and—itself reminiscent of the
Josquin—Nicolas Gombert’s Je prens congie, but I draw the comparison less to
suggest direct emulation than to observe the common stock of rhythmic and
melodic figures singers regularly encountered in chansons à 4.
The second line is paced very similarly in the superius, with semibreves
before the caesura. The same figure of three repeating minims beginning on
an offbeat from measures 3–4 returns at the same point in the second line, in
measures 9–10. This particular figure recurs throughout the chanson, as in
measures 15–16, measure 26 (middle voices), measures 28–30, and measures
37–38, as do the semibreves for the openings of lines. In fact, the superius
line in measures 13–15 nicely reverses the opening of the chanson as it moves
into the second section of text, progressing downward by step through the
fourth a′–e′ to come to rest on a breve. In the melody, the motion is predomi-
nately conjunct, with leaps at the caesura or breaks between lines.
Suspension cadences are the rule at points of structural importance such
as the ends of lines 2, 4, and 6 and the end of the piece. The stress on tonal
clarity and the melodic and rhythmic redundancies that make chansons easy
to read at sight is absolutely typical for settings of the opening lines, but this
restraint gives way to a middle section that is more adventuresome: a cadence
to A is elided in measure 17 as all the voices rush into the next line, with
a melismatic passage leading to an awkward suspension cadence on g at the
caesura of line 6 (measure 20—I can easily imagine singers of the superius
initially missing the f ♯′ they need to add in measure 19). Another gambit
with runs is quickly launched at measure 20 and spins itself out to a suspen-
sion cadence on c′ at measure 24. In the next line—“D’ont maugré moy”—
the whole settles down to relative homophony and slowly works its way back
to A harmonies by the end, though not without a bit of word-painting as the
cadence to A that is set up in measure 32 resolves to an unexpected D chord
at “O cas estrang’!” that surely provoked some smiles from the singers.
The irregular cadences I describe in the second half of Si comm’espoir are part
of Maillard’s style and standard for the genre as a whole. Amour brusle, which
70
On the nature and prevalence of these clichés, see Freedman, “The Renaissance
Chanson Goes Digital.”
E x a m p l e 6 . 2 Cadences in Jean Maillard, Amour brusle, in Le premier trophée
de musique (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559), 25–26, mm. 8–10 and 18–21. Based on
The Sixteenth-Century Chanson, ed. J. A. Bernstein, 25:63–64, emended to match
Granjon’s edition, with musica ficta included and the original note values restored
is also in A has some interesting evaded cadences that disrupt the norms laid
down so clearly in the first twenty measures of the piece. Indeed, it makes
a nice teaching piece: Amerbach, for instance, would have encountered a
strong suspension cadence to A in measure 10 that was cleverly rewritten as
a Phrygian cadence to E at the repeat in measures 20–21, certainly a lesson
to him, were he singing the superius part, to look ahead for the cadence tone
before taking it for granted that the suspension figure at the end of a line could
always be trusted to play out in a normal fashion (see example 6.2). Another
cadence to C is similarly evaded in measure 35 of that piece. Students reading
through a succession of Maillard’s chansons would have encountered superius
lines full of semiminim runs and turns like those in measures 3, 10, and else-
where in Si comm’espoir, as well as the figure of three repeating minims that
first appears in measures 3–4 of that chanson (example 6.1). In sum, chansons
like those of Maillard allowed students to gain conversance in the idiom fairly
quickly, with turns of phrase learned in one chanson providing a useful stock
of background knowledge not unlike the lists of expressions that students of
rhetoric committed to memory in order to have a “bon mot” at the ready for
any occasion. These simple songs readily allowed everyone to participate in
the social engagements staged by partbooks, four voices in musical conversa-
tion around a table or in a garden, four people leaning in toward each other,
smiling when they reach the cadence or a passage in close harmony, perhaps
one of them beating time, the whole generated by the pretty little chanson-
niers they shared in a festive round of song.71
The musically simple elocution of these chansons seems to mark them, in
the foregoing analyses, as music of broad dissemination. But their accessibility
in no way excludes the possibility that courtiers cherished them as well. What
we can discern of their provenance does locate the center of their production at
the French royal court, and given the preference for homophony in the musique
mesurée à l’antique, airs de cour, and ballets de cour that ruled at court later in the
century, the “courtliness” of the chansons of Sandrin, Claudin, and their fol-
lowers probably should be seen as a particular privileging of directness and
tunefulness, a predilection for what Howard Mayer Brown called “graceful but
quite straightforward lyrical miniatures with easy charming melodies.”72 That
the secular music preferred at court was of this simple sort is all the clearer as
time goes on, for in the years right around 1550, a new style of chanson began
to appear in print, one even more deliberately homophonic and syllabic than
the “classic” Parisian chansons in the style of Claudin and one strongly associ-
ated with the poetry of Saint-Gelais and Ronsard—in short, with the principal
poets of the Valois. It was called the voix de ville (literally “city voices”), and a
prime example of it is Puisque vivre en servitude from the Premier trophée, shown
in example 6.3.73 It sets a strophic poem by Saint-Gelais (only the first stanza
of which is given here) in catchy rhythms played up by the homophonic texture
of the writing. Pierre Certon’s Premier livre de chansons (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard,
1552) consisted entirely of such strictly chordal settings, a third of them setting
71
Wistreich, “Music Books and Sociability,” gives a perceptive account of the interac-
tions staged by partbooks.
72
Howard Mayer Brown and Richard Freedman, “Chanson.”
73
See Daniel Heartz, “Voix de ville,” 117–24.
E x a m p l e 6 . 3 Pierre Sandrin, Puisque vivre en servitude, as given in Le premier
trophée de musique (Lyon: Robert Granjon, 1559), 8–9, with the tenor part taken
from the Vingtsixiesme livre contenant xxvii. Chansons nouvelles a quatre parties (Paris:
Pierre Attaingnant, 1548), fol. xiv. This could also be barred in triple meter. Granjon
attributes the piece to Arcadelt, whereas Attaingnant attributes it to Sandrin.
verse by Saint-Gelais.74 The same year, Certon contributed a chordal setting in
fetching triple meter to the polyphonic supplement appended to Ronsard’s
Les Amours, and after his return to France in 1551, Arcadelt also produced a
number of chansons in this style.75 Of the chansons in Granjon’s Trophées, two of
those by Arcadelt are homophonic “chanson-galliards” like Puisque vivre based
on the spirited triple meter of that popular dance, namely De mil ennuiz and
Si faux danger—both printed there for the first time. Two more of the newest
songs are almost entirely homophonic, though in a patter style: Me monst’amour
(on a text by Olivier de Magny) and Mais de quoy (on the last strophe of an
ode by Ronsard).76 Granjon attributes the rollicking Puisque vivre en servitude
to Arcadelt as well, which is hardly surprising given its stylistic similarity to
the chanson-galliards by Arcadelt just cited, but Attaingnant, who had pub-
lished it in 1548, ascribed it to Sandrin.77 To further complicate the attribu-
tions, an almost identical setting appeared in Certon’s style-forward Premier
livre of 1552, and in 1576, Claude Micard printed a monophonic version in
Paris using civility type for the noteheads (figure 6.6).
The conflicting attributions and multiple versions of Puisque vivre are sig-
nificant, since their weak evidence of authorship forces the conclusion that
they do not witness an original written text but something far less tangible.
Long ago, Daniel Heartz suggested that the voix de ville was an essentially
courtly phenomenon promulgated in performance by Mellin de Saint-Gelais.
A skilled lutenist and singer, Saint-Gelais evidently sang his poems to the
sorts of dance tunes that would have been the stock-in-trade of instrumental-
ists. This astute analysis makes the voix de ville something apart, a strain of
chanson particularly tied to performers rather than “composers.” The multiple
versions of Puisque vivre, Heartz argued, most likely represented what Saint-
Gelais would have played on the lute, not necessarily an original work, but a
rendition based on commonplaces of the musique de la chambre and traditions so
rich and so keyed to habit that the musicians immersed in its stock repertory
might not have claimed authorship of the music of Puisque vivre, and certainly
not of the galliard rhythms that set the style for this and other songs.78
74
Adrian Le Roy labels his arrangements of Certon’s chansons with the relevant dance
type in the Second livre de guiterre (Paris, 1555). See Heartz, “Voix de ville,” 121.
75
On Arcadelt’s settings of Saint-Gelais see James Haar, “Arcadelt and the Frottola,” and
Philippe Desan and Kate van Orden, “De la chanson à l’ode.” Nicolas de La Grotte’s
Chansons de P. de Ronsard, Ph. Desportes, et autres (Paris, 1569) made the association of
this style with court poetry explicit.
76
These last two, along with Arcadelt’s Est-il douleur, were first printed in Paris in 1559.
77
On the attributions, see Jacques Arcadelt, Opera omnia, ed. Albert Seay, 9: xii.
78
Heartz, “Voix de ville,” 119–20.
F i g u r e 6 . 6 Puisque vivre en servitude, with text by Mellin de Saint-Gelais,
as given in Jean Chardavoine, Le Recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons en forme
de voix de ville (Paris: Claude Micard, 1576), fol. 88v. While not an exact match for
the superius part of the polyphonic version attributed to Sandrin, Chardavoine’s
melody is very close. The music type is a civility font copied from Granjon’s by
Philippe Danfrie in Paris in 1559 and used by the printer Richard Breton for
Richard Renvoisy, Les odes d’Anacréon (Paris, 1559).
We should also note how the polyphonic version of this chanson transcribes
a common oral practice for improvising four-voice harmony: the superius
mirrors the tenor in parallel sixths with octaves at the beginning and ends
of phrases; the bassus moves below the tenor in alternating thirds and fifths
with octaves at the beginnings and ends of phrases; and finally, the contratenor
moves in alternating thirds and fourths above the tenor, beginning and end-
ing phrases with a fifth (see example 6.3). Following these rules produces root
position chords with no errors in counterpoint—the arrangement scans as a
good “composition”—though the transcription of this improvisatory formula
probably also explains why the attributions of this setting are so fraught, for
it hardly supports claims of authorship, no matter how exuberant its effect in
performance.79
The melody transcribed by Jean Chardavoine in Le Recueil des plus belles et
excellentes chansons en forme de voix de ville and shown in figure 6.6 mismatches
the polyphonic version in a couple of telling spots worth noting here.80 Based
on the tenor and cleffed the same, it smoothes out the melody in line 2,
bringing it right down to the final, g, at “Je devois” before hooking back
into the end of the line as shown in measure 5 of example 6.3. This occurs
just where the polyphonic version presents ornaments in all the voices, a
moment of elastic performerly freedom before the voices regroup at line’s
end. The other significant difference in the monophonic version is the way
it switches out the spicy b ♮ in measure 14 of the polyphonic tenor for a plain
upper neighbor note keyed more directly to the logic of a single-line melody
than the half-step inflection required of the coming cadence to C in example
6.3. Inexact matches, each channels the decisions of performers in slightly
different ways.
The performative origins so easily discovered in the voix de ville contributed
greatly to older chansons in the style of Claudin as well. Just as the four-voice
settings of Puisque vivre are very likely arrangements of a lute song (itself based
on a dance tune), these transformations went both ways. The four-voice chan-
sons of Claudin, Sandrin, and Certon were susceptible to a huge variety of per-
formance practices, far more so than other polyphonic genres, and as an example
we need go no further than the first chanson in the Premier trophée, Sandrin’s Si
j’ay du bien on a decasyllabic dixain by Saint-Gelais. Potential buyers of chanson
collections probably scanned the first few songs in the Superius partbook look-
ing for nice music, and this piece is as good as they came, with deft melodies
setting a classic poem on unrequited love. In addition to the four-voice setting
first printed by Attaingnant in 1547, by 1559, when Granjon reprinted it, the
chanson had come out in a Christian version, arrangements for solo guitar and
guitar duo, a three-voice arrangement, and a pavan for solo lute, in addition to
the text having been printed on its own in a small songster (see table 6.3).81 The
very formulas that account for its easy charm also subjected it to appropriation,
79
See van Orden, Music, Authorship, and the Book, 150–58.
80
On the publication history of this collection and this edition in particular, see André
Verchaly, “Le Recueil authentique des chansons de Jehan Chardavoine.”
81
The chronology of the other texts printed in La Fleur de poesie and their sources strongly
suggests that “Si j’ay du bien” first appeared in an Attaingnant chansonnier dated
before 1543.
T a b l e 6 . 3 Prints and arrangements of Si j’ay du bien (in roughly chronological order)
Four-voice setting
Vingt deuxiesme livre contenant XXV chansons nouvelles (Paris: Pierre Attaingnant, 1547)
Premier recueil de chansons (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1554)
Premier recueil des recueils de chansons (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1561) also 1567, 1573
Text (presumably stripped from an Attaingnant chansonnier)
La Fleur de poesie francoyse. Recueil joyeulx contenant plusieurs huictains, dixains, quatrains,
chansons, & autres dictez . . . mis en nottes musicalles . . . et reduictz en ce petit livre
(Paris: Lotrain, 1543)
Spirtual Contrafact (à 4)
Tiers livre ou sont contenues plusieurs chansons tirées du recueil . . . desquelles avons changé la verbe
lubrique en lettre spirituelle et crestienne ([Geneva] S. du Bosc et G. Guéroult, 1555)
Trio arrangement
Claude Gervaise, Quart livre contenant XXVI chansons musicales a troys parties (Paris: Pierre
Attaingnant, 1550)
Melody alone (as a solmization exercise)
Cornelius Blockland de Montfort, Instruction methodique & fort facile pour apprendre la musique
practique (Geneva: Jean II de Tournes, 1587).
Guitar duo
Premier livre de tabulature de guiterre (Paris: Michel Fezandat, 1551)
Guitar solo
Quatrieme livre de tabulature de guiterre (Paris: Michel Fezandat, 1552)
Dance arrangement for solo lute (pavan)
Sixiesme livre de luth (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1559)
and just as the material evidence shows that the Parisian chanson was a genre
vulnerable to knock-off editions, reduction, poaching, and arrangement, such a
flurry of textual forms strongly suggests—at least to me—that at the center of
these multiple written representations are the practices of singers and instru-
mentalists. The detachable superius, the pavan-like rhythms, the tenor line
that often moves in parallel sixths below the melody, all of these features not
only made the four-voice chanson ripe for arrangement as a lute song or dance,
they show how completely the idiom depended on the performance traditions
of solo song and dance and the performers who lived and breathed those idioms
day in and day out. The printed voix de ville and airs de cour that succeeded them
are the crystallizations of a tendency toward reduction in the written represen-
tations of lyric.
As we know from professional renditions of G. F. Handel’s most simply writ-
ten opera seria arias, expert performers can electrify audiences with music that
looks elemental on the page. The Valois court employed numerous singers,
including some international stars, not just in the chapelle, where Sandrin and
Claudin were employed, but also in the musique de la chambre. The chambre had
eight to ten chantres beginning in the 1530s, for instance, foremost among them
Jeannet de Bouchefort, who had been rescued from imprisonment in Ferrara by
the intervention of François Ier himself, returned to France in 1536, and served
the court until at least 1572.82 From the court records, we know that he was
quite well paid, but nothing about his singing. In addition to citing the sil-
very voices of Sandrin and Claudin, Chappuys’ Discours de la court praised another
singer of the chapelle, Pierre d’Auxerre, “pour les doux chants qu’il sçait mesurer,”
and Attaingnant printed a “chanson d’Auxerre” (who also played violin and—
after 1547—worked as a “joueur de viole” in the chambre), but even for Sandrin
and Claudin it is impossible to piece together some sense of how they performed
their own works from the printed music and these shards of anecdotal evidence.83
Beginners sounding out these songs in distant Lyon probably came just as close to
a courtly style of delivery as the students of Jacques Peletier du Man’s Dialoguɇ dɇ
l’ortografɇ did, but for insiders at court and musicians with direct access to perfor-
mances there (think of Peletier’s claims to authority), the chansons in the Trophées
would have been wonderful vehicles for professional singers and instrumental-
ists.84 Anyone who has tried to learn a jazz standard from a fake book without
understanding the style and—better yet—having first heard a performance or
recording of it has probably come as close as we can to imagining the details
of rhythmic inflection, intonation, diction, and delivery that career singers at
court employed in their renditions, not to mention cadential flourishes and other
ornaments. White mensural notation printed in partbooks without barlines is
ill suited to conveying ornaments—indeed, the earliest examples of ornamented
vocal lines printed in France, in the Balet comique de la Royne (1582), provide only
the solo vocal part, leaving the accompaniment out altogether.85
The printed representations of Si j’ay du bien given in table 6.3 aptly indi-
cate the standard forms in which vocal music circulated: parts or intabulation.
Too clunky to convey the intricacies of an embellished delivery, professional
82
On the musique de la chambre in general and Bouchefort in particular, see Cazaux, La
Musique à la cour, 140–50 and 344–45, and Isabelle Handy, Musiciens au temps des derni-
ers Valois, 120–22, 127, 128, and 375.
83
For the lines on Auxerre added to the Discours de la court, see Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant,
337; also see Cazaux, La Musique à la cour, 149 and 339–40. Payments were still being
made to d’Auxerre in 1572. The chanson is Oeil peu constant.
84
To hear sophisticated interpretations of this particular repertoire, I recommend
Ensemble Doulce Mémoire, Denis Raisin-Dadre director, and The King’s Noyse,
David Douglass, director.
85
Balet comique de la Royne (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1582), fols. 19v–21r. Printing the
note values for these ornaments was a typographical feat at the time.
musicians probably used these publications as crib sheets (if that) from which
amateurs might get only half the story. Tim Carter has stressed precisely this
point in his study of the florid monody that began to come off Italian presses
after 1600: despite the fact that the notation is far more precise concerning
vocal embellishment than anything to come before and notwithstanding
lengthy prefaces like the one Giulio Caccini appended to his famous Le nuove
musiche (1602) in order to supply in commentary what the notation could
not indicate, these prints still continually refer to a “buona maniera di can-
tare” that could only be attained by hearing virtuosi in person and having the
details explained by a good teacher.86 Here too, print points back to a world of
courtly performers as its ultimate referent. Michael Markham, moreover, sees
in the simple formulae that underpin most of Caccini’s works the privileg-
ing—in the innermost sancta of Italian courts—of extemporaneous virtuosity,
whether theatrical, rhetorical, musical, or conversational.87
It should not surprise us that French courtiers, too, prized performance
over writing and print when it came to lyric genres. This can help us imagine
the beautiful Trophées in action, in the hands of aristocrats like Marguerite
de Valois and a circle of courtiers around a table; it also valorizes the struc-
tural simplicity of the voix de ville and explains one register of its appeal in
print. By 1555, instruction manuals in courtesy and proper pronunciation,
books of court poetry, and even musical performances were being trafficked
in print, and while there was no substitute for direct experience, books such
as Peletier’s Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ and Pierre Habert’s Le Moyen de prompte
ment et facilement apprendre en lettre françoise, à bien lire, prononcer et escrire, the
pirate prints of Mellin de Saint-Gelais’s poetry made in Lyon, and prints of
voix de ville promised book-buyers a certain bonne entrée into court society
and introduction to courtly habits of behavior, speech, and song. In 1550
Attaingnant even launched a new series of chansonniers containing “songs
chosen as the best and most frequent in princely courts” (RISM 154917). Not
a single chanson was new, but the designation certainly was. In 1571, Adrian
Le Roy renamed the voix de ville with a more marketable designation, calling
his collection of such songs Livre d’airs de cour.88 In the end, it may be that
the monophonic chansonnier from Paris shown in figure 6.6 is in some sense
the most courtly representation of all, more so than the polyphonic Trophées de
musique, and that the absence of polyphonic notation signals the kind of insid-
er’s knowledge one could only gain by moving in the right circles. Given
86
Tim Carter, “Printing the ‘New Music’,” 9 and 22–28.
87
Michael Markham, “Caccini’s Two Bodies,” and idem, “Caccini’s Stages.”
88
On the air de cour, see Jeanice Brooks, Courtly Song, with this collection discussed, 13–22.
what we know about courtiership and vernacular letters, it stands to reason
that extemporary skills trumped reading a written composition.
However suggestive, written records provide but that: a suggestion
of court performance. We have, for example, no direct written record of
Saint-Gelais’s music. His songs are part of a large documentary lacuna at
the center of the French court, one that forces us to write histories of perfor-
mance based on wildly incomplete material evidence—and in this category
of “performance” I would include both musical performances and the spoken
and physical performances of civility more generally. We know little more
of verbal conduct, really, and how the wordplay, dissimulation, and sprez-
zatura trafficked to readers of Il cortegiano were actually put into practice by
those who hoped to mask the artifice of careful practice with nonchalance. It
is not an easy gap to negotiate as a historian. But I do think it is crucial to
accept the cultural preeminence of performance and to interpret these songs
through those practices rather than declaring them compositions and invest-
ing those who wrote them down with the status of authors. To read them in
the same way we do more highly authoritative texts distracts attention from
the singers and lutenists whose habits gave them their distinctive forms and
obscures the cultural practices that make them courtly.
Duo Arrangements and Déchiffrage

Let us now turn our attention back to the notated texts of chansons and
broaden the circle outward from Granjon’s chansonniers in civility type
in order to reframe the question of how young elites learned to read in
sixteenth-century France. Clearly reading civility type constituted one sort
of literacy, and it was a style of reading that was highly performative in the
sense that it was learned along with writing, holding a pen, speaking clearly
in the vernacular, and following the rules of courteous behavior. But what
can we know of how beginners learned to read mensural notation? How did
they decode its strange ciphers, in time and in contest with the other voices
in a polyphonic work? To say that students learned music by rote is to evade
the question. True reading was required to render great numbers of chansons
polyphonically, particularly by those with limited musical skills, and clearly
many students did learn to read mensural music and sing chansons in more
complex textures than those of the voix de ville and air de cour. How did stu-
dents make the leap from singing or playing by ear to actual déchiffrage?
Ironically, the most often reprinted music tutor of the age reveals virtually
nothing about this transition. The Septiesme livre de chansons, published initially
F i g u r e 6 . 7 The “Brieve et facile instruction pour bien apprendre la musicque,”
in Livre septieme des chansons vulgaires, de diverses auteurs a quatre parties, convenables et
utiles a la jeunesse, toutes mises en ordre selon leurs tons: avec une brieve et facile instruction
pour bien apprendre la musicque (Antwerp: Pierre Phalèse, 1613), Superius, fol. 1v.
The top line shows the values of notes and rests using a few basic intervals (octave,
fifth, third); below to the left are clefs and the syllables used for mutation to a new
hexachord; to the right the natural hexachord from c′ to a′ is underlaid with its
solmization syllables, followed by mensuration signs and subdivisions of a semibreve.
by Phalèse in 1560 and reedited at least twenty-seven times in the next hun-
dred years by Phalèse and others, was an edition full of “classic” chansons of the
sort that we usually take to be perfect teaching pieces: Doulce memoire, Tant que
vivray, Suzanne ung jour, and other songs reaching right back to Attaingnant’s
first publications. From the outset, Phalèse had advertised that the songs were
“convenables tant aux instrumens comme à la voix,” and in 1601, he joined
to the Septiesme livre a one-page primer on how to read mensural notation, the
Brieve et facile instruction pour bien apprendre la musicque (see figure 6.7).89
The “Instruction” shows the clefs, mensuration signs, and the rhythmic
values of various notes, a few basic intervals (octave, fifth, and third), and which
89
See Henri Vanhulst, “Un succès de l’édition musicale” for a complete history and
bibliography.
syllable to use when mutating to another hexachord. It also gives the solmiza-
tion syllables for the hexachord from c′ to a′. Though rudimentary, it pulls
together a number of essentials in one place, providing a quick reference for ele-
ments that otherwise would have been taught by picking signs and individual
notes out of the book, looking through the various partbooks to see examples of
all the clefs, and memorizing solmization syllables using the hand.
That Phalèse chose to reprint so many old chansons from the Attaingnant
years in this particular collection and that he ultimately paired them with the
“Brieve & facile Instruction” would seem to verify the aptness of these stan-
dards for beginners.90 But the “Instruction” was not itself very instructive.
In one sense, it worked for music in the same way as the ABCs people bound
into their books of hours, providing an alphabet, but not actually putting the
letters together step by step. Even Cossard’s Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a
escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter (1633), which takes students through
syllabification in graduated lessons, gave up at precisely this point in the
brief section on mensural notation, ending the page-and-a-half instruction
on “Enseignant à chanter la Musique” by saying:
Knowing the above [pitches, solmization syllables, and note lengths]
without a book, one can start the student on a notated book, in such a
way that he should be able to sing any note or notes anywhere in the
book that you will ask him to, whether for a measure, a half measure,
quarter measure, &c. By playing with tablets, he will learn to sing his
part well, to tune the notes, & to stay with the other parts.91
The gap at this point in Cossard’s Methodes is bridged with games of tablets or
flashcards of the sort tied to the stool in the middle of figure 4.1, essentially with
little performative exercises keyed to brief texts. The repetition reinforces a con-
nection between the visual image of the note or notes and the student’s vocaliza-
tion of them, just as sounding out notes while copying music would have. Not
infrequently one finds simple scales penned into the empty staves at the bottom
of pages in printed partbooks or added to the flyleaves, where they could be used
for students to practice associating each note name with its proper place on the staff
90
Eighteen of the forty-one chansons in the 1560 edition of the Septiesme livre were first
published by Attaingnant, almost all before 1540. Among them are six chansons
attributed to Claudin and two to Sandrin.
91
Cossard, Methodes, 328. “Sçachant ce que dessus sans livre, on luy fera appliquer sur
un livre note, en telle sorte que par tout le livre il puisse bien chanter telle note, ou
notes, qu’on luy voudra demander, soit par mesure, demi mesure, quart de mesure &c.
Avec les jeux des tablettes, on aprendra à bien chanter sa partie, à bailler les tons, & à
remettre les autres parties.”
F i g u r e 6 . 8 Orlande de Lassus, Le thresor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus,
Superius, verso of last folio. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département
de la Musique, Rés. Vm7 237.
and to practice hexachord mutations.92 Hexachord charts are also common, particu-
larly in the Superius partbooks from which children would have sung.
One of the most extensive examples of a printed partbook having been used
for music instruction is the Superius partbook of Le thresor de musique d’Orlande de
Lassus (Cologne, 1594), BnF Rés. Vm7 237. Bound in common parchment, its
ties now missing, the cover sports a hexachord chart, and to the unprinted last
page have been added two sets of scales (see figure 6.8). The first pair, in c1 and
f3 clefs, has the note names written by letter designation on the appropriate line
or space so that the students could practice saying or singing them (and probably
the solmization syllables as well) while locating them on the staff; the second pair
of scales employs notes instead, obliging the students to recall the names and syl-
lables on their own, with only the position on the staff as a visual cue to remem-
ber which note was which.93 The next challenge was clearly mastering rhythmic
92
Munich BSB Mus. MS 1501, for instance, includes mutation exercises in each of the
four partbooks. Partbooks once belonging to the Collège d’Harcourt in Paris (BnF,
Arsenal Rés. N.F. 55.073) include numerous scales penned into empty staves in the
Bassus partbook. The Berkeley tract volume M2082.4 L5P, from which fi gure 6.7 is
drawn, also includes manuscript scales.
93
See Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, 19, 21, on letter names being used for notes
instead of Guidonian syllables.
F i g u r e 6 . 9 Orlande de Lassus, Le thresor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus,
Superius, fol. 1r. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la
Musique, Rés. Vm7 237.
values, and to see how that was accomplished we need only turn to the first page
of the Superius partbook, where the entire piece has been measured out in semi-
breves with barlines inserted using the same sort of brown ink found on the cover
(figure 6.9). Notes that tie over a bar receive a slash through the middle. A
few other pieces have similar additions, but not many and not all throughout,
so the object of the lesson must have been to forego this crutch as soon as pos-
sible. Or else the student gave up; one never knows. Still, the Thresor de musique
could have taken a budding musician a long way—like the collector’s volumes
discussed in Chapter 3, it contains a substantial selection of chansons, madri-
gals, and motets for four to six voices that would have provided endless hours of
material for practice and fun.
Another place to look for signs of how beginners learned to read music in
the sixteenth century is the repertoire of chansons à 2 and à 3. Agostino Licino,
whose duos in canon were destined for the sons of the dedicatee and their friends,
called his collection an “alfabeto in musica”; Heinrich Faber appended bicinia to
his popular textbook; and Tielman Susato dedicated his Premier livre des chansons
a deux ou a troix parties [1544] to “apprentices of the science of music.”94 Many
94
Agostino Licino, Secondo libro di duo cromatici; Heinrich Faber, Compendiolum musicae pro
incipientibus; Tielman Susato, Premier livre des chansons a deux ou a troix parties.
chansons à 2 or à 3 were arrangements of popular chansons from the four-voice
repertoire. Some publishers made the arrangements themselves, to wit: Gardane’s
Canzoni francese a due voce (1539) and Susato’s Premier livre and Tiers livre contenant
xxx nouvelles chansons à deux ou à trois [1550], all of which contain arrangements of
larger-voiced chansons.95 Others had house editors make them or hired compos-
ers to do so: Scotto apparently underwrote the publication of Jhan Gero’s Il primo
libro dei madrigali italiani & canzoni francese a doi voci [1540]; Du Chemin pur-
chased music from his editor Nicole Regnes, including collections of chansons
for two and three voices, and charged another of his editors, Loys Bisson, with
“arranging several excellent chansons en duo”; a house editor for Attaingnant,
Claude Gervaise, arranged a whole collection of chansons à 3; Le Roy & Ballard
printed numerous arrangements made by Didier Le Blanc, including duos and
trios, and so on and so forth.96 These networks long ago led Daniel Heartz to
identify few-voiced arrangements as “some of the first music written expressly
for publication.”97 The commercial viability of duos and trios is attested by their
place in the distribution patterns we studied in Chapter 2 and the sometimes
frequent reeditions of these works, certainly the case for the duos of Gero (at least
twenty-five editions appeared between 1540 and 1687) and La couronne et fleur des
chansons a troys (Venice: dell’Abbate and Antico, 1536), which was still providing
material for Le Roy & Ballard in 1578. Gardane probably issued duos in more
editions than we know; his own arrangements first appeared in the fourth book
of the Parangon des chanson series published by Jacques Moderne.98
Scholars have long recognized the didactic nature of works in smaller tex-
tures, and yet the ways that duo arrangements of chansons might have been
used during lessons has not been fully explored.99 The duos of Susato provide
95
On Gardane see Lewis, Antonio Gardano, 1: 220–23, and on Susato’s arrangements see
Lawrence F. Bernstein, “The Cantus-Firmus Chansons”; Kate van Orden, “Tielman
Susato”; and Meissner, Der Antwerpener Notendrucker Tylman Susato, 123–41, on the
optional bassus and for a bibliographic study.
96
On Gero and the publication history of his popular collection, see Lawrence F. Bernstein
and James Haar, eds., Il primo libro; Jane A. Bernstein, “Financial Arrangements,”
40–45; and eadem, Music Printing in Renaissance Venice, catalogue no. 16. On Du
Chemin, Regnes, and Bisson see Lesure and Thibault, “Bibliographie des éditions
musicales publiées par Nicolas du Chemin,” 273–4, 276, and catalogue no. 87. On
Attaingnant and Gervaise see Lawrence F. Bernstein, “Claude Gervaise as Chanson
Composer.” For Didier Le Blanc, see RISM 157817 and RISM 157815. For a compre-
hensive study of trios, see Courtney S. Adams, “The Three-Part Chanson.”
97
Heartz, “Au pres de vous,” 210.
98
Lewis, Antonio Gardano, 1:19 n. 8 on lost editions of Gardane.
99
For a wonderful exception, see Anne Smith, “Lasso’s Two-Part Fantasies as a Didactic
Tool,” who discovered that singing the duos with solmization syllables revealed jokes
a fine point of departure, since he announces in the preface to the Premier livre
that its smaller-voiced songs are ideal for beginners who are not quite ready
to sing “entre grande compaignie.” For students who lack the confidence
to sing or play in a large ensemble, Susato explained, these smaller pieces
could offer practice repertoire leading onward to larger works.100 The way he
structured his arrangements suggests some of the pedagogical practices they
might have supported.
Susato deployed the superius parts of the four-voice models virtually ver-
batim in his arrangements, adding a more elaborate tenor part underneath
that was probably taken by the teacher. Many of the models come from the
repertoire of Parisian chansons printed by Attaingnant—Doulce memoire, Ce qui
souloit, Vivre ne puis, Damours me plains, Je prens en gre, Pour ung plaisir, Aupres de
vous. The list goes on, and it is a veritable hit parade of songs by Sandrin and
Sermisy, with a number by Susato himself and a few from Thomas Crecquillon.
There is also an arrangement of Josquin des Prez’s Mille regretz. One hallmark
of Parisian chansons is tunefulness: their memorable superius parts shine above
the other voices in a texture that approaches melody and accompaniment, and
the way their tunes stick in the mind makes them an ideal lifeline for students
just learning to sing from partbooks. Susato’s arrangement of Doulce memoire
nicely shows how faithful he was to the superius part of Sandrin’s four-voice
setting (see example 6.4, in which I have scored up the superius and tenor
from Susato’s arrangement, leaving out the optional bassus. I also indicate the
measure numbers that correspond to the superius of Sandrin’s four-voice set-
ting in parentheses, and show the places where Susato’s arrangement deviates
from Sandrin’s superius with small inserts above the staff ).
In Susato’s arrangement of Doulce memoire, the tenor always leads, with
the superius usually in imitation—at the octave to begin, then at the sixth
and with more varied relationships between the voices as the piece goes on,
including a homophonic passage at the double bar that mirrors the texture of
Sandrin’s polyphonic original. Susato makes some small revisions, but all of
and lessons that otherwise remain hidden. In addition to the literature on specific
titles already cited, see Lawrence F. Bernstein, “French Duos,” on composers and styles
to 1550. On German sources see the sixty-nine chansons in Georg Rhau, Bicinia gal-
lica, latina, germanica, ed. Bruce Bellingham, and on editors’ choices, see Bellingham,
“The Bicinium in the Lutheran Latin Schools,” 241– 51, app. F. On chansons à 2 from
Venice, see Andrea Bornstein, Two-Part Italian Didactic Music, with an overview of
French precedents at 1:61–64.
100
See L. F. Bernstein, “The Cantus-Firmus Chansons,” on Susato’s Premier livre, with a trans-
lation of the preface (217), list of Susato’s models, and analysis of cantus firmus technique.
E x a m p l e 6 . 4 Tielman Susato, Doulce memoire, mm. 1–34, superius and tenor
only (bassus is optional). In Premier livre des chansons a deux ou a troix parties (Antwerp:
Susato, [1544]), fol. 2v. The measure numbers in parentheses refer to Sandrin’s four-
voice chanson. Susato has taken over Sandrin’s superius line virtually intact. Points of
deviation from Sandrin’s melody are given above the staff for reference.
them are geared toward regularizing the melody even further: he rewrites the
cadences in measures 8–9 and 23–24 as suspension cadences in the superius,
which was an absolutely standard formula for line-endings in superius parts
(as in mm. 5–6 and 12–13); he also condensed and displaced the superius
entrance in measure 18 (which normally would have begun the new line
of text in the second half of m. 17 on a breve) so that it ends up employ-
ing the same standard dactylic rhythm already used in measures 10 and 14.
This fidelity to the original superius melody, the tendency to have the tenor
lead, and the inclination toward regularization mark Susato’s basic working
procedures throughout the collection, and while they are not uncreative and
varied, they do operate within a certain range that would present beginners
with manageable challenges. I see arrangements like this as easing students
into reading music and preparing them to graduate from more homophonic
textures to imitative polyphony. One step along from a canon, Susato’s duos
trained students to hear imitation at different intervals around their part and
to hold their own amid a variety of entrances surrounding them. With the
addition of the optional bassus, the piece changed once again, harmonizing
the superius and tenor with a whole new set of sonorities for the student to
hear and negotiate.
In the tenor parts, too, we see Susato opting for consistency. He some-
times borrowed material from the lower voices of the models, but it was
not just this that further heightened the sense of familiarity, for those
who played or sang them encountered piece after piece that underscored
the superius with stock cadential patterns, regular cadence tones, and a
series of dead-ordinary melodic formulas usually drawn from the superius
itself. Where they do not give a preview of the superius melody, Susato’s
newly-composed tenor and bassus parts regularize the chansons quite
expressly. If, for example, we compare the opening gestures of the tenors,
it is plain to see that Susato’s accompaniments were just as formulaic as the
Parisian chansons upon which many of the songs were based, if not even
more so (see example 6.5). A sizeable number open with the formula of a
dotted rhythm and rising fourth in the tenor that recurs quite deliberately
from piece to piece. Dominated by conjunct motion, repeats, clear imi-
tation, and the regular—if sometimes deferred—arrival of cadences, the
duos are nonetheless enlivened by imitative points that at least occasionally
switch the entries of the voices and the distance between them. In sum,
however, they represent the work of a publisher-arranger aiming for acces-
sibility by favoring formulas over innovation. The interlocking relation-
ships between printed music, memorized tunes, and regular counterpoint
E x a m p l e 6 . 5 Openings of tenor parts in Tielman Susato, Premier livre des
chansons a deux ou a troix parties (Antwerp: Susato, [1544]). Clefs modernized for
comparison
shaped a matrix of familiar idioms that reveal the popularizing quality of
the Premier livre.101
If Susato’s arrangements prompt a kind of performance that—for the
superius—lies somewhere between singing by heart and reading the notes,
much more literate are the duos written by Gardane, in which the voices are
more equal, the organization of imitative entries is relatively diverse, and
the superius parts are altered significantly from the originals. Gardane’s duo
arrangement of Doulce memoire, the first part of which is given in example 6.6,
could not have been played or sung from memory by someone who knew
the tune from Sandrin’s four-voice setting. Not only does the superius
have to lead off in Gardane’s version, already in measure 5 the melody goes
awry, and in such a way that students who had Sandrin’s tune in their ears
might well try to raise the g′ at the beginning of measure 6 (or even in m.
5) rather than waiting until the end of the bar, a cruel trick considering
that the rewritten repeat that begins in measure 15 restores the cadence to
its former spot, here in measure 19, which does require the raised leading-
tone—and already on the third beat of the measure—even though the
cadence is undercut by the rest in the tenor in measure 20. The lesson
to listen to the tenor and to look ahead for rests when deciding where to
employ musica ficta could not be more calculated. Indeed, Gardane’s revi-
sions create situations in which memory is a liability, forcing performers
to pay attention to the page and sing or play what is written there. But
this is not to say that it strips them of liberty. The first time each melody
appears it has a number of written ornaments, but the second time it is
fairly “clean,” perhaps suggesting that on the repeat it might have been up
to the performer to ornament ad libitum, moving the student from reading
embellishments to improvising divisions. Gardane reportedly ran a music
school in Venice when he first arrived there.102
Thus we should not be too quick to assume that all duos were ideal for
beginners. In many ways, the four-voice originals of these chansons were
easier than duets. Gardane’s duo points toward fully imitative works such
as motets and madrigals, staging a gradus ad parnassum that progressed from
four-voice Parisian chansons to imitative works, all the while using the ear
and memory as an aid to reading. It seems firmly centered in a program
geared to acquiring musical literacy, with true déchiffrage as its endpoint.
Susato’s duos, too, though easier, point in the same direction, toward the
imitative polyphony that was, after all, a standard idiom in the north, even
101
Here I gloss Chartier, “Communities of Readers,” 13–14.
102
See Lewis, Antonio Gardano, 1:19 on the school and 17–34 on Gardane’s career.
E x a m p l e 6 . 6 Antonio Gardane, Doulce memoire, mm. 1–36. In Premier livre de
chansons à deux parties (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1578), fol. 12r. Based on The Sixteenth-
Century Chanson, ed. J. A. Bernstein, 15:128–30, with musica ficta included and the
original note values restored
for chansons. Often written for five or more voices and in pervasive imitation,
the Franco-Flemish style epitomized by the chansons of Nicolas Gombert
and amply evident in the output of Jacob Clemens non Papa and Thomas
Crecquillon (both of whom also wrote some songs in the “Parisian” style)
posed more technical difficulties than the chansons by Claudin and Sandrin
cultivated at the French court. The scene of song-singing from Antwerp cited
above featured just this sort of imitative chanson, since the singers need to
figure out who has rests at the opening and how their staggered entries fit
together so everyone can come in correctly. 103
Much evidence has been marshaled in the course of this book to estab-
lish the proximity of chansons to oral repertoires, their legibility, and the
way they cross the breaks in literacy delineated by printed texts and printed
mensural notation. But it is equally important—particularly in concluding
this chapter on education—to remember that imitative chansons à 5 and à 6
required advanced levels of literacy. In this light, we might view Granjon’s
four-voice Trophées as more primer-like than they first appear, and quintessen-
tially French as well. The preference for syllabic renderings, lighter textures,
and new songs in the style of the voix de ville certainly marks the Trophées with
courtly aspirations—if they are not outright courtly. (Indeed, one wonders
how Granjon got hold of the new songs by Arcadelt, Certon, and Maillard
that he apparently was the first to issue in print.) Their lovely presentation
in lettre française, moreover, suggests their appropriateness to the music les-
sons or leisure hours young aristocrats would have enjoyed together between
lessons with their tutors in dance, manners, and vernacular letters, whether
at home, as a page, as an enfant d’honneur, a lady-in-waiting, or at boarding
school.
Granjon’s Trophées de musique highlight the obstacles historians encounter

when studying the chanson. As a genre, it often resists the comfortable nar-
ratives defined by biography and authorship, its meanings refracted into
thickets of anonymity, misattribution, and mutability. But on the plus side,
what made chansons so accessible was precisely their openness to a variety of
readings and their proximity to oral and improvised invention. They bring us
close to musicians. The evidence of their reprinting in songsters like the Fleur
de poesie, monophonic chansonniers, and multiple arrangements suggests how
readers made polyphonic chansons into something their own. And like the
practices of reprinting and reduction that were responsible for the songsters
in the first place, we can discern something potentially heterodox in the read-
ings implied here. Melodies and lyrics stripped from polyphonic songs cir-
culate freely; publishers and readers pillage chansons in ways unforeseen by
their authors, making new sense of them in a reading strategy Michel de
Certeau has described as “poaching”: “Readers are travelers who move across
103
Vanhulst, “La Musique dans les manuels de conversation,” 119–20. For a similar scene
from London featuring an imitative song, see Wistreich, “Music and Sociability,”
139–44.
lands belonging to someone else like nomads poaching their way across fields
they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.”104
Chansonniers and recueils disseminated texts—some of courtly origin, some
of polyphonic origin—in forms that facilitated multiple reading strategies.
Seen as green fields for poachers, even civilities, which print out a cultural
agenda in black and white, cannot be taken at face value when we begin to
understand the highly divergent codes through which they were read—as
dance manual, calligraphy book, or primer for diction. Certeau cautions his-
torians to be en garde against effacing the creativeness of readers, who merit
significant autonomy in our accounts. For the sixteenth century, we need only
recall the example of Menocchio, the miller studied by Carlo Ginzburg in
The Cheese and the Worms, who read the Bible on his own idiosyncratic terms
and concluded, among other things, that the creation story described a rot-
ting hunk of cheese from which Adam and Eve emerged as maggots.105
Giving performers and readers the cultural power owed to them would
not be so complex for historians had printing not come along and revived
a host of myths surrounding the power of writing at exactly the time read-
ing publics in Europe expanded to include individuals like Menocchio. Just
when the Reformation was threatening Catholic institutions that relied
on face-to-face education in Church and catechism classes, champions of
the printing press credited the new invention with a divine ability to fur-
ther sectarian causes. In providential language, Martin Luther proclaimed
that printing was “God’s highest and extremest act of grace.”106 The anti-
clerical Rabelais attributed the invention of printed books to “inspiration
divine,” and in 1611 the translators of the King James Bible were inspired
to update Job 19:23–24 with the startling anachronism: “Oh that my words
were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book!”107 As Elizabeth
Eisenstein argues in Divine Art, Infernal Machine, printing amplifyed the
traditional claims made for writing—for scripture—by promising not just to
preserve texts, but to promote new ideologies.108 The language of the reli-
gious debates that circled back to printing, the panic to enforce the Index
of Forbidden Books, and the genuine trade in clandestine books all reinforce
a history that sees printing as effective in itself rather than conditioned by
104
105
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, ch. 27.
106
See Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 304, on this passage.
107
François Rabelais, Pantagruel, ed. V.-L. Saulnier, 44. The revised version of Job appears
in The Holy Bible (London: Roger Barker, 1611), sig. Aaair, discussed in McKitterick,
Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 23.
108
Eisenstein, Divine Art, 44–52.
communities of readers and their own control of the media they consumed.
But the Catholic reaction to printing must nonetheless be part of this story.
French chansons did not escape the confessional battles that drew print-
ing into their vortex, caused the Catholic Church to expand the Index, and
subjected music to new levels of scrutiny. We have already encountered this
strain of post-Tridentine rigor in the programs of Jesuit educators studied
in the previous chapter, and we return to them again now in the chapter
that follows.
Chapter Seven A New Generation of Musical
Civilities: The Quatrains de Pibrac
T
“ he French love singing very much.” So wrote the Jesuit father Edmond
Auger in 1563, and there is every reason to believe him.1 School children
sang in Latin, French Catholics sang the Salve Regina and litanies, and some
people knew all the responses to the liturgy by heart. Protestants sang French
translations of the psalms with such ardor as to cause alarm. The ability to read
mensural notation and take part in singing polyphonic chansons was one fun-
dament of upper-class education, and even before children learned to read in
French, they would have been exercising their voices in schoolyard songs and
rounds. We can suppose that parents and tutors used nursery rhymes, riddles,
French proverbs, little poems for children’s games (like today’s jump-rope
rhymes), lullabies, and songs that children would already have known when
helping them sound out their first texts in French. Pamphlet-sized recueils
de chansons full of quatrains and other short poems would have been useful
primer texts from which to pick out words here and there and sound out a
few lines in French, and many of these poems were known as songs (see La
Fleur de poesie francoyse depicted in figure 3.5 above). Clément Marot’s own
L’Adolescence clementine (1532) was full of strophic songs, including the popular
Jouyssance vous donneray and Tant que vivray, the latter of which Marot had him-
self modeled on an anonymous monophonic chanson, making its musicality
1
On Auger’s remark, see Kennedy, “Jesuits and Music,” 82, from which this translation
is drawn. For a good biographical sketch, see Jacqueline Boucher, “Auger.”
complete.2 Thus it is possible to see in the chanson repertoire materials that
were easily enlisted in teaching French and, conversely, the tunefulness of the
little rhymes that provided ideal entries into reading.
Chansons undoubtedly sweetened the sometimes bitter pill of a child’s
first confrontation with letters, and educators knowingly employed them this
way. Michel Coyssard said as much in his Traicté du profit of 1608 when he
spoke of mobilizing the pleasurable delectation of song in order to impress
the catechism upon his charges.3 We find an echo of this sentiment in the
London Bassus volume that contains a copy of Granjon’s Premier trophée (the
full contents of which are listed in table 6.1 above), which is fronted by a
handwritten title page bearing the following inscription: “Not for lascivi-
ousness, but for praising God and arousing Natures toward virtue, And for
soothing troubles of cares, has Music been given from heaven.”4 The part-
books belonged to a succentor (assistant to the precentor in some cathedrals)
and included a dozen books of four-voice chansons, duos and trios, Mattheus
Le Maistre’s polyphonic catechism, and psalms and motets a 4, making a
fine library of octavo prints that would have been useful for teaching the boy
choristers in his charge. It is so thick as to be almost cubic in dimensions.
But were the chansons the succentor had bound together with the musical
catechism, psalms, and motets actually “non lasciviae”? What kinds of poems
filled the chapbooks in the baskets of colporteurs and rang out to the tunes of
Parisian chansons? At mid-century, when Granjon was printing his civilities
and chansonniers, the texts used to teach the vernacular were not necessarily
moralizing, certainly not by comparison with those that were created by centu-
ry’s end, when vernacular musics suitable for education were eventually segre-
gated from the wash of love songs that cast up here and there in printed poetry
collections and polyphonic settings. Granjon’s Trophées de musique are a case in
point. Godard’s Vos huis sont ilz tous fermez fillettes? tells the young girls in the
poem to open their doors “if you love me . . . because . . . my love is enflamed”—
hardly sage advice for the chaste. Maillard’s A l’ombre d’un vert buisson retells a
story of pastoral lovemaking “in the shadow of a green bush,” a commonplace
2
The poetry and tune of Tant que vivray appear to have been modeled on the anonymous
monophonic chanson Resjouissons nous tous loyaulx amoureux. For the identification,
made by Lawrence Bernstein, see Leeman L. Perkins, “Toward a Typology of the
‘Renaissance’ Chanson,” 440.
3
Coyssard, Traicté du profit, 21.
4
“Musica non lasciviae: sed laudando Deo Ac excitandis ad virtutem Ingenijs,
Mitigandisque curarum molestijs, coelitus donata est.”
a n e w g e n e r a t i o n o f m u s i c a l c i v i l i t i e s | 229
that had already brought chanson lovers such favorites as Baisés moy tant tant
and Au joli bois je rencontray m’amye. Maillard’s song reads: “je la fringay gay
gay, mais je la fringay gay gay, qu’elle trouva bon” (“With her I fooled around,
round, round, which she found fine”), turning “fringay” (“fool around”) into a
happy nonsense syllable or happiness itself (“gay”). But no matter how uplift-
ing, the song’s expression fits strangely with the rules of comportment from
which civility type eventually took its name. Chansons regularly encouraged
sex directly or through double entendres, but apparently many music teachers
took little care to sanitize their teaching materials: Basilius Amerbach’s teacher
copied out Clément Janequin’s Martin menoit son porceau for his student, despite
the humorous lovemaking depicted in the chanson, in which Martin ties his
pig to his mistress’s leg in an attempt to liberate them from their charge so they
can get in a little sex on the way to market; comically, when Martin starts to
“pork” her, the pig takes fright and makes to escape.5 Clearly French song texts
might have had formal qualities that made them good for beginning readers,
and recueils de chansons printed them in material forms aimed at a wide spectrum
of readers, but on the whole, salubrious they were not.
Civilities were themselves indicative of the urgency with which some edu-
cators felt the need to generate more suitable texts for vernacular learning
and replace the recueils de chansons and other recreational literature that had
had to serve as primers until then. Vernacular translations of the psalms, the
proverbs of Solomon, and various canticles provided one source of healthy
reading material, and we find all of them coming out in polyphonic settings
right around mid-century, beginning with the psalm settings of Pierre Certon
and the psalms, commandments, and prayers set by Antoine Mornable (both
sets printed by Attaingnant in 1546).6 In addition to the continuing produc-
tion of psalm settings, these decades saw settings of Old Testament texts such
as the Proverbes de Salomon by François Gindron (1556), Janequin (1558) and
Nicolas Millot (1567).7 Not all of the composers of these vernacular settings
were Protestants or Protestant sympathizers: if their institutional affiliations
are any indication, Certon and Millot were both Catholic, employed as they
were at the chapelle royale. One notable translation of canticles was made by
5
On the contents of Basel, University Library, MS F. X. 5–9, see Kmetz, Die Handschriften
der Universitätsbibliothek Basel, 253–67.
6
See Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, catalogue nos. 142 and 143. For an excellent account of
the politics behind the production of biblical translations and translations of prayers,
see Launay, La Musique religieuse, 30–50.
7
See Gindron, Les Proverbes de Salomon, ensemble l’Ecclesiaste (Lausanne: Jean Rivery,
1556), and Lesure and Thibault, Bibliographie des Éditions d’Adrian Le Roy et Robert
Ballard, catalogue nos. 48 (Janequin) and 119 (Millot).
a Catholic bishop in Provence and set by a singer in the Sainte-Chapelle: Les
Cantiques de la Bible mis en vers françois par Lancelot de Carle, Evesque de Riez, et
mis en musique à quatre parties par Guillaume Belin (1560).8 Up until around
1567, the psalm translations of Marot and Théodore de Bèze were not as
politically charged as they ultimately became, and singing psalms provided
devout Catholics with wholesome pastimes. Marot was continually back and
forth between the French court and exile in Italy, beginning with the “affaire
des placards” in 1534 and ending only with his death in 1544, and the psalms
themselves fell in and out of favor, with Henri II singing them himself as a
boy and reputedly even devising his own melody for Marot’s translation of
Psalm 128, but then banning psalm-singing altogether in 1558.9 In 1559,
the year of Henri’s death, the royal printers of music, Le Roy & Ballard, began
to issue a large number of polyphonic settings of the French psalms, many
by Catholic maîtres de chapelle such as Arcadelt and Certon. But as the reli-
gious wars intensified and the Genevan psalter came to be entirely associated
with the heresy of Protestantism, Le Roy & Ballard backed off from printing
psalms, and during the 1570s they retreated to the standards of masses, Latin
motets, and chansons. At the same time, Tridentine controversies over whether
Catholics should sing translations of Latin prayers and biblical verse impeded
the production of an explicitly Catholic devotional repertoire that—to recall
the pleas of the Jesuits—might be put into battle against the Huguenot psal-
ter, and so even the spiritualization of secular songs like the contrafacts of
chansons by Lassus, Guillaume Boni, and Anthoine de Bertrand published in
Geneva, La Rochelle, and London in the 1570s were a Huguenot endeavor.10
The first polyphonic collection of explicitly Catholic songs in French came out
only in 1582: Anthoine de Bertrand’s Airs spirituels.
Into the void created by the banishment of Marot’s psalms and the sever-
ity of post-Tridentine scrutiny issued—in 1574—a French Catholic civility that
8
Ibid., catalogue no. 68bis, and Launay, La Musique religieuse, 49
9
Launay, La Musique religieuse, 44. Also see ibid., 37–54, for an excellent account of
the ambiguous status of psalms in the vernacular, which had a liturgical function for
Protestants, whereas Catholics sang them only outside of church. On prohibitions
against the psalms and the history of their publication in Paris, see Diefendorf, Beneath
the Cross, 136–44. One printer of the Huguenot psalter was Richard Breton, who also
traded in civility texts. See ibid., 132–36.
10
On these publications, many of them edited by the Huguenot Simon Goulart, see
Freedman, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso, primarily about contrafacts of the chansons
of Lassus, but with important information about spiritualized versions of the chansons
of Anthoine de Bertrand and Guillaume Boni at 1–2, 168–70; on the modal organiza-
tion of the collections see ch. 7.
T a b l e 7 . 1 Musical editions of Pibrac’s Quatrains
This table is based on the list of settings compiled in Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Colin,
xx–xxi, xxix–xxxii.
Nouveau recueil et élite de plusieurs belles chansons joyeuses, honnestes, et amoureuses, Partie mises
en Musique, en une voix: Recueillies de plusieurs excellens Poëtes François: Et plusieurs autres
chansons non encor’ veuës. Avec les quatrains du S. de Pibrac aussi en Musique (Rouen: Thomas
Mallard [1580]) (monophonic)
Nouveau recueil et élite de plusieurs belles chansons joyeuses, honnestes et amoureuses, Partie
mises en Musique, en une voix: Recueillies de plusieurs excellens Poëtes François non encor’
veuës. Avec les quatrains du S. de Pibrac aussi en Musique (Rouen: Richard l’Allemand,
1581) (monophonic)
Guillaume Boni, Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac mis en musique à 3. 4. 5. et 6. parties par
G. Boni (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1582)
Paschal de L’Estocart, Cent vingt et six quatrains du Sieur de Pibrac . . . de nouveau mis en
musique à deux, trois, quatre, cinq et six parties par Paschal de l’Estocart (Lyon: Barthélemy
Vincent, 1582)
Vingtdeuxieme livre de chansons à quatre et cinq parties, d’Orlande de Lassus et autres (Paris: Le
Roy & Ballard, 1583) (includes seven quatrains set by Lassus)
Jean Planson, Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac, ensemble quelques Sonetz, et Motetz, mis en Musique
à 3. 4. 5. et 7. parties, par J. Plançon (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1583) (nineteen quatrains)
Jean de Bournonville, Cinquante Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac mis en musique à II. III. et
IIII. parties par Jean de Bournonville (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1622)
became immediately and enduringly popular: the moralizing Quatrains of Guy

du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac (1529–84), a jurist and royal diplomat. First pub-
lished in 1574 in an edition of fifty quatrains (Paris: Gilles Gorbin), copies came
out the same year in Lyon (Jean II de Tournes) and Rouen (Martin Le Mesgissier),
a Continuation of fifty more quatrains was issued in 1575 (Paris: Frédéric Morel),
and by 1576, Morel was able to issue a complete edition of 126 quatrains that
overnight became the standard French primer.11 Between 1574 and 1584 alone
there were at least twenty-one editions, and beginning in 1580, musical settings
of the Quatrains began to appear from all quarters (see table 7.1).12 These settings
of Pibrac’s verse make vividly clear the point at which polyphony intersected with
the simple moralizing quatrains used to teach reading and writing in school, and
how quickly Pibrac’s primer replaced or at least supplemented the lyric poetry
and song that earlier in the century had served those who tried to teach children
French elocution, music, and other niceties of upper class behavior.
Pibrac’s choice of the quatrain as the medium of his message was central to
its success. Pierre Habert’s little courtesy book from 1570, Le Chemin de bien vivre
11
For a critical edition of the text see Guy du Faur de Pibrac, Les Quatrains, ed. Loris
Petris, with information about early editions at 125–38.
12
See Guillaume Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Marie-Alexis Colin, xi–xii, and Launay, La
Musique religieuse, 103–104.
avec le miroir de vertu, had been organized entirely as a series of rhyming quatrains
arranged according to the letters of the alphabet, as was the exquisite Nouvel
exemplaire pour apprendre à escrire printed in civility type for Robert Granjon in
1565, one of the more beautiful typeset copybooks to survive from the age (see
figure 7.1).13 Rhyming quatrains had also long been a fundament of Christian
education, and one can find them in vernacular editions of the book of hours
such as the Heures de Nostre Dame en francoys printed by Antoine Vérard (Paris,
1499), to take a famous example. Catechisms likewise often gave verse transla-
tions of the Credo, which were of course easier to memorize.14
In the 1580s, Pibrac’s Quatrains were joined by a wave of other
moralizing primers in quatrains, among them the Quatrains spirituels
de l’honneste amour of Yves Rouspeau, the Quatrains spirituels et moraux
extraicts des sainctes et divines sentences du très sage roy Salomon of Gilbert
de Gondouyn, and a variety of little moralizing ABC pamphlets that
resembled Habert’s Chemin de bien vivre.15 Also part of this trend were
multiple editions of the Octonaires sur la vanité et inconstance du monde of
the Protestant preacher Antoine de Chandieu, a set of fifty moralizing
huitains—really pairs of quatrains—originally printed in alphabetical
order in the style of an abécédaire (Strasbourg: Bernard Jobin, 1580), texts
that are well known to music historians thanks to the polyphonic settings
of Paschal de L’Estocart and Claude Le Jeune.16 Much earlier, but highly
significant, is the print of Philibert Jambe de Fer, Les XXII octonnaires du
psalme CXIX de David traduicts par Jean Poictevin (Lyon, 1561—now lost);
Ps. 119 was a series of eight-line verses that each began with a letter of
the Hebrew alphabet. If Jambe de Fer respected this ordering, he would
thus have produced a true ABC book in music.17 Finally, from England,
13
Claude Micard printed multiple editions of Habert’s moralizing alphabet beginning in 1570;
I consulted Habert, Le Chemin de bien vivre et miroir de vertu, Contenant plusieurs belles histoires, &
sentences moralles, par quatrains & distiques, le tout par Alphabet (1572).
14
See the pamphlets titled Alphabet & instruction des Chrestiens, probably printed by the
Kerver family in Paris (and often bound in Kerver Heures). They date 1530 to 1575.
15
Yves Rouspeau, Quatrains spirituels de l’honneste amour (1584); Gilbert de Gondouyn,
Quatrains spirituels et moraux (1587); and the Quatrains spirituels rédigez selon l’ordre de
l’Alphabet. A.I.C. (s.l., n.d.), to mention just a few.
16
On the alphabetical ordering of the Octonaires see Florence Mauger, “Les Octonaires.” The
polyphonic settings are Paschal de L’Estocart, Premier [-Second] livre des octonaires de la
vanité du monde (Geneva: Jean II de Laon pour Barthélemy Vincent, 1582) and Claude
Le Jeune, Octonaires de la vanité et inconstance du monde (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1606).
17
Also see the Cantiques of the Huguenot poet Étienne de Maisonfleur set by Didier
Le Blanc, Anthoine de Bertrand, and Antonio Condomirio. See André Verchaly,
“Desportes et la musique,” and Launay, La Musique religieuse, 102–103.
F i g u r e 7 . 1 Nouvel
exemplaire pour apprendre
à escrire: Contenant
plusieurs belles sentences,
extraictes des histoires
anciennes, suyvant
l’ordre de l’alphabet
au grand soulagement
de la jeunesse: Le tout
mise en rime françoise
par A. de H.: Auec
quelques exemples de
lettre italienne appropriés
à la fin (Antwerp: for
Robert Granjon,
1565), sig. Ciii. The
poem consists of two
quatrains that rhyme
abab. This page has
been used for copying,
and one can see a bird
and—trimmed—what
is probably a name
below: “A. K . . . rip.”
several ABC broadsides survive with quatrains meant to be sung to the
tunes of “The Young Man’s A.B.C.” and “Rogero” (presumably some ver-
sion of the Ruggiero tune), and it may be that the French, too, produced
ABC broadsides now lost.18
But nothing could compete with Pibrac, whose Quatrains gained broad
acceptance as the ultimate primer. It contained 126 quatrains, all in deca-
syllables and relentless abba rhymes. By 1600, the first quatrain of Pibrac
was invariably the first vernacular text that children learned to read and
recite from memory. Letters from the Montmorency household from 1600
to 1602 trace the initial stages of their five-year-old son’s education quite
clearly: first he learned “to recognize all the letters and to join them together
nicely”; six months later he began lessons in reading and writing, and at
seven he could read Latin and French in both standard handwriting and the
formal script of lettres missives, and “he knows all his letters and is beginning
to put them together [in syllables] . . . he knows the first quatrain of Mr.
Pibrac and a good deal of his little catechism, along with his little prayers,
which he recites and writes so nicely that everyone who listens to them
admires him.”19 Louis XIII, about whose youth we know a considerable
amount thanks to the remarkably detailed journal kept by his physician,
began to learn the Quatrains by heart at age four, in order, and slowly: the
first three by 24 January 1606, four more by June, and twenty-five by the
end of the year.20 This same year he began to read and write, and the follow-
ing year he was saying his quatrains “en musique.”21
The first part of this chapter assesses what made Pibrac’s Quatrains such
a popular second-generation civility text, and here I pay special attention
to the way Pibrac reduced Erasmian civility to a set of memorizable poetic
blocks that could be drilled into youngsters though repetition. Some prints
of the Quatrains were set in caractères de civilité, but for the most part we
will leave typographical imprinting behind and turn instead to vocal pro-
cesses of impressing good impulses on children. Although my concern is
primarily musical, it seems important to at least touch on the subject of
Aristotelian habituation, since part of the appeal of civility texts lay in
18
See, respectively, “The Virgins A.B.C.” and “A right Godly and Christian A.B.C.,”
reprinted in Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 236. Also see ibid., 102, 235–38, and
290, on ABC songs and broadsides.
19
Cited in Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, 78.
20
Héroard, Journal, ed. Foisil, 1:155–58.
21
See Pibrac, Les Quatrains, ed. Petris, 26, citing Héroard, Journal, ed. Foisil, 1:1296 (8
September 1607) and 1:1300 (17 September 1607).
their moral dimension. To some extent, the form of Pibrac’s text itself sug-
gests how the physical, repetitive process of hearing and memorizing the
quatrains was understood to condition children to behave morally by habit
(rather than deliberation); this analysis is strengthened when viewed in
light of Pibrac’s activities at the court of Henri III, for whom he organized
philosophical debates on the nature of the passions and how to control
them. Though dramatically different from the Neoplatonic experiments of
Jean-Antoine de Baïf with vers mesurés à l’antique and measured translations
of the psalms, it is probably fair to see in Pibrac’s Quatrains some reflec-
tion of academic pursuits at court (notoriously hard to trace, but recorded
in part by Pierre de La Primaudaye in his philosophical treatise Académie
françoise).
In the second half of this chapter, we turn to the musical settings of
the Quatrains, most of which came out between 1580 and 1583. Their
faddishness began with a monophonic recueil de chansons and then attracted
the attention of music printers in Paris and Lyon. I argue that the poly-
phonic settings need to be understood in light of the stunning success of
the Quatrains in print, and most particularly that Pibrac’s book might have
promised itself to music printers as something of a “new psalter”—that
is, a collection of Christian lyric with potential to tap into the large mar-
ket for catechisms and devotional handbooks that doubled as textbooks for
literacy.
Pibrac’s Quatrains and Moral Restraint

Originally titled . . . Quatrains contenans precepts & enseignemens utiles pour la
vie de l’homme, composez à l’imitation de Phocylides, d’Epicharmus, & autres anciens
poëtes grecs, Pibrac’s collection boiled down the essence of good Christian man-
ners into maxims that had their roots in the gnomic poetry of the Greeks.
The poems glossed the Ten Commandments and instructed children not to
overeat, to offer their seat at the theater to older folks, and not to talk too
much; they also delved deeply into morality and the proper formation of
the French spirit, prescribing moderation, temperance, sincerity, wisdom,
modesty, and civic virtues such as respect for the law and the king. Well into
the eighteenth century, they were the educational standard; often they were
coupled with La Civilité puérile, notably in the bibliothèque bleue editions from
Troyes, which also employed civility type, making their connection to civilité
complete (see figure 7.2).
F i g u r e 7 . 2 La Civilité puerile & honneste pour l’instruction des enfans. En laquelle
est mise au commencement la maniere d’apprendre à bien lire, prononcer, & escrire. Reveuë,
corrigée, & augmentée des Quatrain du Sieur de Pibrac (Troyes: Nicolas Oudot, 1649).
This seventeenth-century edition was part of the bibliothèque bleue.
It is important not to lose sight of the Quatrains’ courtly origins in the

face of their popularity and broad diffusion in oftentimes roughly printed
pamphlets. Pibrac spent most of his career serving the Valois and seems to
have quickly been drawn to the center of court politics, at least judging from
the critical nature of the diplomatic missions with which he was regularly
entrusted: in 1562, he was sent as one of three representatives of the King
of France to the Council of Trent; in 1573—at the request of Charles IX—
he wrote an important statement concerning the Saint Bartholomew’s
Day Massacre; and by 1573, he was made chancellor to the Henri, Duke
d’Anjou, who became king the following year.22 From 1574 until his death
in 1584, Pibrac acted as Henri’s envoy on multiple assignments abroad and
was charged with several notable diplomatic tasks, foremost among them
drawing up the Edict of Beaulieu that brought the fifth civil war to a close
in May 1576, a treaty that represented the most significant attempt to that
date to forge some sort of uneasy peace with the Protestants. He is cited by
Claude Binet as the originator of the Palace Academy that was a favorite
pastime of the king, and in February of 1576 he delivered to the Academy
one of five lectures on “anger,” a topic chosen by the king, who was preoc-
cupied with the advance of Protestant troops into central France and the list
of demands they had just presented to him.23 (These were the events that
culminated in the concessions of the Edict of Beaulieu.)
Pibrac’s lecture, “on anger and how to temper it,” seems writ large across
the Quatrains and aptly captures both their form and message. By the time
he completed them, Pibrac seems to have favored the early “politique” solu-
tion to civil war, which counseled Catholics to tolerate temporary coexistence
with Protestants as a means of achieving a badly needed end to the wars.
Jean Bodin, whose Six livres de la République (Paris, 1576) gives the clearest
explication of the rationales for religious toleration, dedicated his book to
Pibrac, who was just finishing up the Quatrains the same year. That these lit-
tle primer texts are in some sense “royal” became clear with the first full edi-
tion of the Quatrains printed in 1576 by Frédéric Morel, Imprimeur ordinaire
du Roy, when most editions began to include Pibrac’s title as “Conseiller du
Roy en son Conseil privé,” thus emphasizing his position at court and under-
scoring the crucial point that moral rigor might promote good citizenship,
peace, and fidelity to the king at a moment of social crisis. Like the songs
of Jean-Antoine de Baïf’s Académie de poésie et de musique, which were
designed to institute moral discipline through musical means, the Quatrains
were forged in the crucible of civil war and should be seen in its light.
A skilled negotiator, Pibrac clearly calculated the sober expression of the
Quatrains to establish a neutral terrain, something evident in the non-sectarian
nature of his poems, which aptly indexes the politique strategy of conciliation
between Catholics and Protestants. Quatrain 33, which reworks the tradi-
tional expression “une foi, une loi, un roi,” nicely captures the incisiveness
with which Pibrac called for measured behavior:
22
For a detailed chronology, see Pibrac, Les Quatrains, ed. Petris, 3–6.
23
For the passage from Binet, see Robert J. Sealy, The Palace Academy, 7, and for Pibrac’s
lecture “De l’ire et comme il la faut modérer,” see ibid., 44–45.
Ayme l’honneur plus que ta proper vie:
J’entens l’honneur, qui consiste au devoir,
Que rendre on doit, selon l’humain pouvoir,
A DIEU, au Roy, aux Loix, à sa Patrie.24
[Love honor more than your own life:
I mean the honor, which consists of duty,
That one must show, as much as humanly possible,
To GOD, the King, to the Law, and to his Country.]
Here we see a new consciousness of how crucial the codes of civil society (“la
patrie”) were to become as they round out the standard Gallic profession of
fidelity to God, King, and the legal code.25
I stress the political nature of the Quatrains because Pibrac appears to have
deliberately produced a rigorously structured text as a means of reinforcing its
messages of civil obedience, law, and restraint with a program of moral con-
ditioning: “I have not attempted to write this work in a pleasing style with
the aim of making it agreeable,” he explained, “since I intend to give it only
to those whose sole concern is good conduct.”26 This agenda fit nicely with
the goals of Erasmus’s De civilitate, by then widely adopted as a primer, but it
also did Erasmus one better by casting the maxims in pithy blunt quatrains,
and while we should certainly see in this process of versification a nod to the
long-standing use of quatrains in education and a rejoinder to the catchi-
ness of rhyming translations of the psalter, the ethical importance of Pibrac’s
Quatrains resonates strongly in their dully repetitive poetic form. These end-
less abba rhymes from the pen of a poet equally capable of more fluid verse—as
in Les Plaisirs de la vie rustique, for instance—seem designed to promote a
style of reading in which pleasure is constrained. Pibrac’s explicit rejection of
“un style doux” seems pointed given the enthusiasm among the Pléiade poets
and Desportes for verse that would unite pleasure and utility in the model of
Horace. Pibrac, by contrast, calls for a conduct manual unsweetened by poetic
charm, seeing in the rigors of quatrains a disciplinary medium that might cir-
cumvent the sensual delights of poetry and instead turn the regularity of verse
toward a more calisthentic outcome. Quatrain 61, in particular, comes close to
24
Pibrac, Les Quatrains, ed. Petris, 158.
25
Boni gives this last line a particularly elegant musical setting, with each word set off with
a two-note figure and repeated in the other voices. See Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Colin, 62.
26
Pibrac, Les Quatrains, ed. Petris, 146. “Je n’ay tasché cet oeuvre faconner D’un style doux,
à fin qu’il puisse plaire: Car aussi bien n’entens-je le donner Qu’à ceux qui n’ont soucy que
de bien faire.”
spelling out the process by which students were understood to internalize the
moral dicta that would provide their basic code of ethics:
Vertu és moeurs ne s’acquiert par l’estude,
Ne par argent, ne par faveur des Roys,
Ne par un acte, ou par deux, ou par trois,
Ains par constante & par longue habitude.27
[Moral virtue is not acquired by study,
Nor by money, nor by the favor of Kings,
Nor by one deed, nor two, nor three,
But by continual and long habit.]
The key term here is “habitude,” which signals the Aristotelian concept of
hexis: the tendency or disposition to have appropriate feelings or emotions.
These feelings are just that—passions, emotions—and differ significantly
from sheer knowledge of right and wrong not only owing to their emotional
dimension, but also because the disposition toward them is induced by habit-
uation, the repetition that conditioned the passions to respond consistently
in what was considered a desirable way.28 (Latin translations of Aristotle ren-
der hexis as habitus, hence the French “habitude.”)
The Aristotelian philosophical environment in which Pibrac wrote the
Quatrains can, to some extent, be pieced together, and it is useful to delve
into it briefly in order to appreciate the seriousness of intent behind his choice
of this seemingly benign little poetic form. Two sources are particularly
relevant—the lectures of the Palace Academy of Henri III, which was appar-
ently founded by Pibrac, and the philosophical treatise Académie françoise of
Pierre de La Primaudaye, a highly influential work first published in 1577
with a dedication to the king in which La Primaudaye claimed that lectures
of the Palace Academy he had heard early that year inspired the work.29 As
reconstructed by Robert J. Sealy, the sessions of the Palace Academy began in
January 1576 with a series of lectures concerning the moral virtues, including
their related vices (as in Pibrac’s lecture on anger), in imitation of Aristotle’s
27
Ibid., 168.
28
See R. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 74–81, on the power of the actions scripted by chil-
dren’s ABCs.
29
On the initial membership of the academy, see Sealy, The Palace Academy, 12–37; on the
sessions at Blois, also attended by Bodin and La Primaudaye, see ibid., 59–81. Frances
Yates has studied the historical circumstances in which La Primaudaye worked, which
is not easy given the scant biographical information available. See Yates, The French
Academies, 123–27, with a detailed publication history of the Académie françoise at 123
n. 4. The work was also quickly translated into English and Italian.
Nicomachean Ethics.30 These were private lectures, but when the court moved
to Blois in November of that year for the meeting of the Estates-General, the
lectures were moved to coincide with the midday meal of the king and were
then heard by the entire court. Jean Bodin seems to have been part of the
academy at that time, as well as Pierre de La Primaudaye, whose treatise also
follows this plan, with the first sections devoted to the moral and intellectual
virtues, respectively.31 La Primaudaye came from one of the leading Huguenot
families in Anjou and was a gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre of François,
the king’s younger brother. His Protestant background and the troubled rela-
tionship François had with the court meant that La Primaudaye would not
have spent much time in the circle of the king or frequenting Pibrac’s Palace
Academy, but for a brief time in 1577, Bodin, Pibrac, and La Primaudaye all
overlapped in Blois and participated in these academic debates.
In the main volume of La Primaudaye’s treatise, he briefly discusses the
education of children, citing the advice of Plato and Aristotle and following it
up with a Christian program that includes devotion to God and the rejection
of carnal pleasures and worldly goods.32 He ends with the commonplace that
“just as seals and stamps are easily imprinted on soft wax, so we easily mold
into the spirits of young children that which we would like them to learn”—
an apt metaphor for the habituation process—but the mechanics of this
“molding” are not detailed.33 Only in a subsequent volume, Suite de l’académie
françoise, in which La Primaudaye added natural history to his encyclopedia,
did he explain the workings of the human body and cognitive perception,
touching along the way on the physiology of reading, speech, and hearing.
The Suite begins with an important argument against Stoic philosophy
and its rejection of sensual experience as a foundation for knowledge—La
Primaudaye pointedly frames his presentation in terms that justify the util-
ity of the senses: “the senses serve greatly in the acquisition of knowledge:
& when they remain in their appropriate natural state [“leur droite habitude
naturelle”] . . . they never deceive an attentive mind.”34 Long anatomical
descriptions follow: of the eyes, eyelids, optical nerves, the ears, ear canal,
30
Sealy, The Palace Academy, 37–58.
31
Yates, The French Academies, 124–25.
32
Pierre de La Primaudaye, Académie françoise, fols. 264r–269v. See B. R. Smith, The
Acoustic World, ch. 4, on La Primaudaye in the English context.
33
La Primaudaye, Académie françoise, fol. 269r–v: “tout ainsi que les sceaux & cachets
s’impriment aisément en de la cire molle: aussi nous ne moulions facilement és esprits
des petits enfans, ce que nous leur voudrons faire apprendre.”
34
La Primaudaye, Suite de l’académie françoise, fol. 27v: “Eusebe disputant au contraire
[against the Stoics] monstre que les sens servent grandement à acquerir sapience: &
eardrums, tongue, larynx, and so forth, descriptions that persistently push
toward the hidden parts of the body in which the soul resided. Ultimately
we learn that the voice is capital among the agents of sensual experience
because it is through speech that the guidance and thoughts enclosed in
the heart—like “un thresor secret”—are brought forth into public.35 La
Primadauye sees this ability to communicate as part and parcel of intel-
ligence itself; it is also profoundly sacred, a God-given ability to share the
holy word. What I find key in this hierarchy of the senses is the precedence
of speech and hearing, which places recitation, preaching, singing, and con-
versation above sight, the perception of images, and reading. Printed letters
and the words they form enable communication across time and space, it is
true, but they are nonetheless still understood as a weak substitute for the
voice, a facsimile of “paroles” that allows them to speak to the eyes like they
speak to the ears.36 Thus the “printing” process that La Primaudaye evoked
in the Académie françoise turns out to be vocal, a circle of learning, speaking,
hearing, and internalization in which written texts are just a support to the
dissemination of words that are spoken aloud.
Of course, one does not need to invoke La Primaudaye’s physiology
of the sense organs to explain the phenomenal popularity of Pibrac’s
Quatrains, which enjoyed a long career as a pedagogical text outside the
court, in translation, and for centuries after the religious wars subsided
into uneasy peace, as witnessed by the editions from Troyes (such as that
shown in figure 7.2 above). Pibrac’s severity suited the strictness of educa-
tors, who took the body to be a lump of clay to be formed, just as the mind
was a soft surface awaiting the press. His rigid poems impressed constraint
upon the children, not just with moral imperatives, but by measuring out
language to unvarying rules that drained improper appetites from chil-
dren with drill. But what my reading of La Primaudaye does add to our
understanding is a keener appreciation of the importance of the Quatrains
as poems to be learned “by ear” and recited, and the fundamental place
of these vocal practices in the first stages of schooling. The appropriate-
ness of Pibrac’s moralizing quatrains to the educational agenda outlined
by La Primaudaye may also explain why La Primaudaye, too, published a
que quand ils demeurent en leur droite habitude naturelle, qu’ils ne deçoivent jamais
l’esprit bien attentif.”
35
Ibid., fol. 35v.
36
Ibid., fols. 39v–40r. For the comparison of visual and aural learning, see fol. 34r: “le
sens de l’ouye enseigne beaucoup plus des choses & plus grandes & plustost.”
collection of quatrains, ones that were even simpler and more repetitive
than those of Pibrac: the Quatrains du vray heur (Blois: C. de Montr’oeil and
J. Richer, 1589). Dedicated to Louise de Lorraine and kitted out with por-
traits of the author and dedicatee, it contained 150 quatrains beginning
“Heureux, qui . . .” that chart the path to Christian happiness through
a series of aphorisms. But by 1589 Pibrac had so completely cornered
the market for moralizing primers that La Primaudaye’s collection seems
never to have gained any traction after its first edition.
Pibrac, the Psalms, and the Business of Music Printing

The large number of musical settings of Pibrac’s Quatrains suggests that
they were “made for music” and perhaps even witnesses a desire to push
for moral uplift through song. After all, the direct precursor of the Palace
Academy was the Académie de poésie et de musique, an explicitly musical
academy with a moral agenda no less pointed than Pibrac’s own. Founded
by the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf and the musician Joachim Thibault de
Courville in 1570, the statutes of Baïf’s Academy state that “where music
is disordered, there morals are also depraved, and where it is well ordered,
there men are well disciplined morally.”37 Seeking to capture for French
song the musical effects described by Plato in the Republic, the musique
mesurée à l’antique developed at the Academy was a highly political attempt
to rectify social ills beginning with a musical disciplining of the soul. It was
Pibrac who defended the statutes of Baïf’s Academy before the Parlement
de Paris in 1570 in his role as the king’s lawyer, so he certainly knew of
Baïf’s project, even if we have no direct evidence that he believed music was
an important medium of moral reform.38
However appealing the thought that Pibrac’s agenda was partly musical,
scrutiny of the musical settings reveals how ill suited these little poems were
to song, beginning with the very first appearance of a monophonic timbre for
the Quatrains in 1580. The print from Rouen is a modest recueil de poésie with
some monophonic tunes thrown in. Thomas Mallard, who issued the edition,
specialized in octavo and sextodecimo prints of vernacular works with broad
37
Cited in Yates, The French Academies, 23. The full text of the statutes is given in her
Appendix 1.
38
Sealy, The Palace Academy, 29. On the relationship—or lack thereof—between Baïf’s
Académie and the Palace Academy of Henri III, see ibid., 31–33.

F i g u r e 7 . 3 Nouveau recueil et élite de plusieurs belles chansons joyeuses, honnestes, et
amoureuses, Partie mises en Musique, en une voix: Recueillies de plusieurs excellens Poëtes
François: Et plusieurs autres chansons non encor’ veuës. Avec les quatrains du S. de Pibrac
aussi en Musique (Rouen: Thomas Mallard [1580]), fol. 78r–v. One of the rare
monophonic chansonniers to survive from the sixteenth century, this one exhibits
considerable errors in the music printing.
appeal; that he was not used to typesetting music is clear from the garbled
clefs plaguing the crudely printed timbre he provided for the Quatrains (see
figure 7.3).39 Timbres are also given for strophic chansons of Ronsard and
others, the “belles chansons joyeuses, honnestes, et amoureuses” announced
in the title, but they, too, are troubled by incorrect placement of some C
clefs. Judging from the printed paste-overs of music in the copy of this print
at Versailles, either stop-press corrections were necessary or the music was
proofread only after the sheets were printed.40 Mallard’s are not good books
for learning to read music notation, but at the very least they symbolize
the cultural importance of music literacy as a part of an all-around literacy
that—for vernacular letters—began with Pibrac and lyric poetry. They are
39
About half of the pieces printed in C clefs show errors of placement, with—for instance—c1
cleffing on one line and c2 on the next, though none is as extreme as this case.
40
Most corrections concern misplaced sections of music, that is, the music does not fol-
low correctly from one page to the next. See Bibl. municipale de Versailles, Rés. a 83.
also a good reminder that many timbres were little more than aide-mémoire,
“notes” to help recall a tune that had already been learned by ear.
The monophonic timbre for the Pibrac quatrain seems to lead us to
the world of the voix de ville, and indeed, some of the songs and melodies
in the Mallard print concord with those in Jean Chardavoine’s Recueil des
plus belles et excellentes chansons en forme de voix de ville (Paris: Claude Micard,
1576), shown in fi gure 6.6 above. But Pibrac’s Quatrains do not provide
very convincing material for this sort of performance. Decasyllabic qua-
trains were uncommon in the repertoire of the voix de ville, where shorter
lines and heterometric verse predominate, and when one does find a voix de
ville text that consists of decasyllabic lines, it rarely falls into quatrains—
tercets are more usual, with their lopsided charm, or a decasyllabic couplet
followed by the catchy zing of a short line. Slightly irregular poetic forms
and syllabic tunes that played them up gave the genre its distinctive char-
acter. Decasyllabic quatrains, when they occur, tend to fall out into aabb
rhymes—essentially pairs of couplets—which have the advantage of bring-
ing singers to a point of closure more quickly than abab or abba forms. Even
more rarely does one find abab or abba forms in which there is an alterna-
tion of masculine and feminine rhymes, a matter of some significance for
musical performances, since lines with feminine endings take eleven notes
rather than just ten. One of the awkward elements of the timbre provided
by Mallard is the slight jerkiness in the middle: each line employs the same
rhythm, but lines 2 and 3 are cut short by a minim to accommodate the
masculine “b” rhymes.41 This has a certain charm after one sings through a
few quatrains, and even the unconvincing tonal orientation of the melody
starts to sound less like a mode 2 plainchant hymn after a few quatrains are
sung in succession (this is assuming one sings the tune with a c1 clef and
that the notes are correct), but it is by no means a catchy tune and seems
not to have any pedigree as a voix de ville timbre, even as modest a one as
provenance in Chardavoine’s collection. In sum, Pibrac’s Quatrains were
not highly amenable to song. His rejection of pleasure and “un style doux”
comes out in his heedlessness of lyric necessities, which not only made his
verse awkward—or at least unappealing—to sing in the style of the voix
de ville, but likewise shows up how little concern he must have had for the
41
A useful comparison is provided by Chardavoine’s monophonic collection, Le Recueil
des plus belles et excellentes chansons en forme de voix de ville (1576). In the two chansons
(out of 190) in which he sets an abba quatrain (in both cases, mffm), he uses a minim
for the masculine rhyme and breaks it into two semiminims for the feminine rhyme
(see fol. 11v and fol. 266r), thus maintaining the same number of beats for each line.
precepts of Baïf’s chansonnettes mesurées à l’antique, for which Baïf composed
poetry with shorter stanzas, faster-paced rhymes, and heterometric verse.42
If Pibrac’s Quatrains are thus a bit plodding and dull in the simple syl-
labic performance suggested by Mallard’s tune or one like it, many of the
polyphonic settings are—by contrast—quite challenging, which seems even
more surprising given the decidedly elementary nature of the poems. Jean
Planson, a young Parisian organist, set the first nineteen quatrains in his
Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac (listed in table 7.1), a miscellany that, in the
second half, includes motets and sonnet settings as well. The print plays
up Pibrac’s name in the title and opens with the quatrain settings in order,
beginning with the catechistic Dieu tout premier puis Pere & Mere honore, giving
the music an abécédaire quality that would have fit nicely with the fact that
children apparently memorized the quatrains in order. There is a neatness to
the way Planson’s chansons mirror the form of Pibrac’s book. But judging
from the two partbooks that remain (of four), there is nothing particularly
didactic or accessible that distinguishes the Pibrac settings—ten of which
are for five voices—from the other largely imitative settings in the second
half of the collection. The same could be said of Lassus’s approach to Pibrac
in his settings, which exhibit his usual style of freely imitative counterpoint.
Only in the settings of Boni and L’Estocart do we find composers responding
to these primer texts with music that would have been accessible to stu-
dents and amateur singers of uneven ability. L’Estocart wagered correctly that
such a collection would be a valuable addition to the repertoire of spiritual
song, for he dedicated his Quatrains to Charles III, the duke of Lorraine, who
rewarded the composer with 60 écus the same year.43
The instructional nature of Boni’s and L’Estocart’s Quatrains is visible in
many facets of these prints, but none more than their multiple layers of com-
prehensiveness. In the first place, each composer set the whole of Pibrac’s col-
lection of 126 quatrains, which made the books sizeable, with each partbook
of the L’Estocart running to fifty-eight folios and the Boni partbooks coming
in at sixty-eight folios apiece in the large and beautifully typeset quarto format
Le Roy & Ballard reserved for motets and their more “important” chanson-
niers. Both collections include a large range of scorings rarely seen together in
42
Baïf championed the Alexandrine and invented a fifteen-syllable vers Baïfan, but his
sense of rhythm consistently leads him to intersperse longer lines with shorter ones
and to restrict his stanzas to three lines when using these longer forms. See Jacques
Mauduit, Chansonnettes mesurées de Jan Antoine de Baïf (Paris, 1586) and Claude Le
Jeune, Le Printans (Paris, 1603).
43
See Marc Honegger, “L’Estocart, Paschal de.”
a single book—from two to six voices for the L’Estocart and three to six voices
for the Boni.44 Works for two and three voices were normally edited sepa-
rately from those for four, five, or six voices because they required fewer part-
books. Marked as a separate genre and marketed for accordingly lower prices,
there was no good reason to go to the trouble of fitting duos and trios into
prints for four or more voices, which usually began with four-voiced works
and—depending on how many larger-voiced works there were—squeezed
any extra voice parts onto facing pages of the SCTB partbooks, or included
an extra thinner partbook or two with whatever other parts there might be,
quinta, sexta, and so forth. L’Estocart’s collection for two to six voices was
virtually unique given the standards of music printing, and Boni’s for three
to six voices highly unusual. The textures, too, range from strict homophony
to imitation, something particularly true of Boni’s collection, L’Estocart tend-
ing more consistently toward note-against-note counterpoint.45 In these two
prints, then, the Quatrains of Pibrac are presented in the manner of a book of
the Bible, the psalter, or book of hours—that is to say, as a sacred text that is
offered complete to readers as a self-enclosed whole, a book that could carry
a student far in life all on its own. They evince the same penchant for textual
coherence that decades earlier inspired complete polyphonic cycles of the 150
psalms by Philibert Jambe de Fer (Lyon, 1564), Richard Crassot (Lyon, 1564),
Hugues Sureau (Rouen, 1565), Jean Servin (Orléans, 1565), Pierre Santerre
(Poitiers, 1567), and Claude Goudimel (Paris, 1564). The prayer-book quality
of these publications was enhanced by an openness to being used in various
ways. Some of the simpler harmonizations, such as Crassot’s, were written so
that the monophonic tunes on which they were based could be sung alone,
and many of these books also included the Forme des Prieres, the Confessions
de Foy, and a Calendar, making them complete handbooks for home devotion.
Judging from the number of provincial presses that issued them, it seems safe
to conclude that they were much in demand.
Goudimel’s psalm settings—of which there are several series—are of
particular interest both because there were so many of them and because
they may have provided a model for the unusual form of Boni’s collection.
Goudimel was highly involved in commercial printing and clearly had a very
developed sense of how polyphony could be designed to be printed easily
44
It should be noted that L’Estocart’s collection contains mostly three-, four-, and
five-voice settings, with only one duo and one setting à 6.
45
For a smart comparison of the entire series of Pibrac settings, see Marie-Alexis Colin,
“Les Quatrains de Guy Du Faur de Pibrac en Musique,” and the introduction to Boni,
Les Quatrains, ed. Colin, xx–xxi.
and sell well. He worked as an editor and proofreader for Du Chemin—in
whose business he was a partner from 1552 to 1555—and Le Roy & Ballard
invested considerable resources in publishing his various psalm cycles.46 For
instance, at one hundred folios in quarto, a single set of partbooks for the
Goudimel edition of 1564 required 100 sheets of paper, by far the largest
and most expensive book Le Roy & Ballard had undertaken to print to that
date, even larger than the 1560 Meslanges de chansons and the impressive folio
Missae tres Jacobo Arcadet, a book we know to have been subvented by an
exchange of favors between Le Roy and Arcadelt’s employer, the Cardinal of
Lorraine.47 Le Roy & Ballard clearly expected Goudimel’s Les Cent cinquante
pseaumes de David to bring returns, and—seen in the context of their larger
output—so carefully is the publication keyed to the marketing strategies of
their press that I daresay it was the brainchild of a composer-bookman, either
Adrian Le Roy or Goudimel himself.
My point is that the conception of many larger publications like these
cycles of spiritual works was market driven, and while it may seem slightly
sacrilegious to say so, even for composers such as Goudimel, whose compo-
sitional output appears to have been inspired by strong confessional beliefs,
market trends probably had a formative influence as well. Goudimel was an
insider to the printing business from the start: he made sure that his own
works were included in Du Chemin’s chanson and motet anthologies and the
famous Supplément of model sonnet settings that Du Chemin printed to go
along with the 1552 edition of Ronsard’s Les Amours; he drew attention to his
labors as a proofreader in a prefatory poem of 1554 with the line “Buy this
book with money, you will see (believe me) no uncorrected work”; he wrote
knock-offs of Janequin’s astoundingly popular programmatic chansons for the
Unziesme livre de chansons (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1562); and after he left Du
Chemin, he provided Le Roy & Ballard with ten books of music between 1557
and 1566, virtually all of which were reprinted not once but twice.48 These
were all vernacular psalm settings—some freely composed in the form of
motets, some setting the melodies of the Genevan psalter in note-against-note
46
For an analysis of Goudimel’s effect on the printed output of Du Chemin, see
Boucaut-Graille, “L’Imprimeur et son conseiller musical,” who observes that
Goudimel’s employment coincided with the greatest dynamism at the press both in
terms of output and in variety. On Goudimel’s employment, see Lesure and Thibault,
“Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas du Chemin,” 274–75.
47
See van Orden, Authorship, Music, and the Book, 65.
48
The remark from 1554 comes in the Moduli undecim festorum, sig. Aiir, and is reprinted
with translation in Moduli undecim festorum, ed. J. Heywood Alexander, xxii–xxiii.
counterpoint or an imitative style—and they basically represented a new genre
of polyphony somewhere between French chanson and Latin motet. Goudimel
was the principal supplier of this sort of music to Le Roy & Ballard, who
issued about twenty-five editions of psalm settings between 1555 and 1566.
At the height of production (which dropped off abruptly with the onset of
the second religious war in 1567), all of the composers in the stable of Le Roy
& Ballard produced a book of psalms, either “au long (en forme de motetz)”
or in simpler settings issued in affordable octavo partbooks: Certon (1555),
Arcadelt (1559), Janequin (1559), and Claude Le Jeune (1564), who made his
debut in print with this publication.49 One wonders how many of these psalm
settings were solicited directly by the royal printers of music. At the presses
of Le Roy & Ballard, production of motet prints ceased entirely from 1557 to
1564 in favor of psalms, and it was Goudimel who rode the crest of this wave.
Goudimel’s death in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Lyon in 1572
may have made him a Huguenot martyr, but his devotion to psalm settings
also relates to his stakes in the book trade.
The Pibrac settings are part of a second smaller swell of Christian works in
the vernacular printed in Paris during the early 1580s, a decade that ultimately
witnessed the collapse of music printing in the capital owing to the religious
wars. Le Roy & Ballard reprinted the psalms of Le Jeune (1580) and brought
out a couple of new editions: the Airs spirituels of Bertrand (1582) and a set-
ting of all thirteen of the Cantiques du Sr de Maisonfleur (1582) by the Greek
composer Condomirio, who dedicated the volume to Cardinal René de Birague.
Étienne d’Huillier, the sieur de Maisonfleur, was a notable Reformer, but I delib-
erately avoid describing the Cantiques as Huguenot because there was a desire
among both Catholics and Protestants for sacred verse in the vernacular, and
some works—like the Cantiques and Pibrac’s Quatrains—do represent a middle
ground, as witnessed by the dedication of Condomirio’s settings. By contrast
with the sectarian ambiguity of many publications, though, Le Jeune’s Dix
Pseaumes included no “Profession de Foy,” a sure sign that he was a Huguenot.50
Pibrac’s Quatrains were clearly of interest to Le Roy & Ballard at the time—
indeed, Marie-Alexis Colin, the modern editor of Boni’s Quatrains du Sieur de
Pybrac (1582), has suggested that Le Roy may have asked Lassus to set Pibrac’s
entire work, of which the seven quatrains printed in the Vingtdeuxieme livre de
49
Goudimel’s Premier livre de psalmes de David . . . en forme de motetz was initially published
in 1551 by Du Chemin and reprinted by Le Roy & Ballard in 1557; two earlier edi-
tions of twenty-eight of the Janequin psalm settings were also printed in 1549 by Du
Chemin.
50
I am grateful to Marie-Alexis Colin for drawing this point to my attention.
chansons (1583) would have been the sole result.51 While Lassus frequently com-
posed liturgical works in book-length cycles (such as Magnificat settings or his
various Passions), the Prophetiae Sibyllarum seem to have been his only secular
cycle. Apparently happy to write chansons, madrigals, villanelle, and Lieder in
great number and unquestionably one of the most successful composers of the
century in print, Lassus nonetheless approached vernacular genres in a free-and-
easy spirit, choosing his texts with great liberty (sometimes from a striking range
of sources) and allowing them to be printed in anthologies and miscellanies pulled
together by printers such as Le Roy. The Planson settings of Pibrac may also have
been a failed attempt on Le Roy’s part to secure a new book of music (though
Colin believes that Planson’s inspiration was Boni’s book of 1582).52 While Le
Roy’s precise role in the genesis of these scattered Pibrac settings is unclear, there
is no doubt that he was at the center of this spate of quatrains en musique.
It was Le Roy who wrote the extensive preface to Boni’s Quatrains du Sieur
de Pybrac, the “Advertissement touchant l’ordre observé en la composition de
ces Quatrains,” in which he explains the organization of the print and claims
to have devised it himself.53 Printers occasionally wrote “advertissements” to
readers, and they regularly decided the order in which to print the pieces they
edited, but this particular editorial intervention is remarkable by virtue of
the fact that—if what Le Roy says is true—he must have come up with the
plan before Boni began to compose. Boni would have been filling a commission
with a number of stipulations. The 126 quatrains, Le Roy explains, have been
divided into ten sets of twelve, with the six left over at the end being set for
six voices. For the rest, each set of twelve is ordered according to the modes—
“Icelles Douzaines sont ordonnees selon l’ordre des Tons”—from mode 1 to
mode 10 (see table 7.2). Moreover, each dozen has been further divided into
two subsets of six—“Davantage chacque Douzaine est mi-partie en deux
Rangs, chacque Rang contenant six Quatrains”—to make twenty groups. Le
Roy clearly took these “rangs” to be the basic units of the collection and listed
the incipit of each in the table of contents. In fact, the partbooks give the labels
“premiere partie. A 4., Seconde partie. A 4, Troisieme partie. TRIA.,” and so
forth at the beginning of each quatrain, presenting each six-quatrain rang as a
multi-part work. This grouping of the quatrains by six is further emphasized
by the scorings of the collection, since each rang contains settings of two qua-
trains for four voices, two for three voices, and two for five voices (see table 7.2).
51
Colin, “Les Quatrains de Guy Du Faur de Pibrac en Musique,” 545.
52
Ibid., 541.
53
Boni, Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac, sig. Aiv–Aiir, reproduced in Boni, Les Quatrains,
ed. Colin, xliv.
T a b l e 7 . 2 Groupings by mode and scoring in Guillaume Boni, Les Quatrains
du Sieur de Pybrac (Paris, 1582)
This table summarizes the analysis in Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Colin, xxvi–xxviii.
Rang Incipit signature-final-cleffing Mode Scoring
of the rang as a whole
1 Dieu tout premier ♭-G-g2 1 (trans. up) 44-33-55
2 Tout l’univers ♭-G-g2 1 (trans. up) 44-33-55
3 A bien parler ♭-G-c1 2 (trans. up) 44-33-55
4 Ne va suivant ♭-G-c1 2 (trans. up) 44-33-55
5 Vertu qui gist ♮-E-c1 3/4 44-33-55
6 Le voyageur ♮-E-c1 3/4 44-33-55
7 En ton parler ♮-E-c1 3/4 44-33-55
8 L’homme de sang ♮-E-c1 3/4 44-33-55
9 Voy l’hypocrite ♭-F-g2 5 44-33-55
10 A l’indigent ♭-F-g2 5 44-33-55
11 Qui lit beaucoup ♭-F-c1 6 44-33-55
12 Un art sans plus ♭-F-c1 6 44-33-55
13 Parler beaucoup ♮-G-g2 7 44-33-55
14 A l’envieux ♮-G-g2 7 44-33-55
15 Le nombre sainct ♮-G-c1 8 44-33-55
16 Changer à coup de loy ♮-G-c1 8 44-33-55
17 Ri si tu veux ♮-A-g2 9 44-33-55
18 Je ne veis onc ♮-A-g2 9 44-33-55
19 Il est permis ♮-D-g2 10 44-33-55
20 Les gens de bien ♮-D-g2 10 44-33-55
21 Hausse tes yeux ♭-G-g2 1 (trans. up) 66-66-66
This, too, appears to have been part of Le Roy’s initial idea for the volume, and
it shows a printer’s hand in the conception, since this design allowed Le Roy to
produce four partbooks of equivalent length, with each six-section piece occu-
pying three openings in each partbook and with each piece beginning on the
same folio in each partbook—a convenience for both the typesetters and the
singers. In order to coordinate the Superius, Contratenor, and Tenor partbooks
with the Bassus (which contained no music for the trios and instead filled
the extra pages with quintus parts for the five-voice sections of each piece),
Le Roy also began the opening work Dieu tout premier on a verso page in each
book, which was not the usual practice at the press. Finally, Boni respected the
practicalities of this design by scoring all of the trios SCT, leaving the Bassus
partbook free to accommodate the quintus parts.
Taking the evidence at face value, it seems that Le Roy came up with the
project and then asked Boni to write the music. As he sat down to set each
quatrain, Boni would have known the number of voices, the ranges (SCTB,
SCT, SCTQB, S6CTQB), the mode (which dictated to a large extent the
signature, ranges, and tonal orientation of the piece), and the approximate
amount of music he could write, since each quatrain had to fit onto a single
page in the partbooks for the layout to work as planned. He was careful to be
consistent with the final sonorities of each rang, as seen in table 7.2, though
the inner sections do not necessarily cadence on the final of the rang, and the
“mode” of the pieces is not worked out as clearly as Le Roy’s preface implies.
The third column of table 7.2 describes the actual tonal configuration of
each rang using a shorthand comprising system (or signature, i.e. cantus durus
or cantus mollis), final (the bass or “root” of the final chord), and ambitus (or
cleffing, either chiavette, [high] clefs, or “normal,” low clefs).54 Unlike mod-
ern keys, the harmonic complexes used in sixteenth-century polyphony were
not absolutely “in” one mode or another—indeed, there is usually little evi-
dence to suggest that composers thought of themselves as composing “in” a
mode when they sat down to write, not least because the medieval system of
church modes did not, for instance, allow for pieces in C and A, which were
common in polyphony. Rather, mode was a culturally constructed concept,
and the practices by which composers organized the tonal dimension of their
music were not necessarily governed by it. This disjunction between theory
and practice precipitated numerous attempts to recast modal theory to make
it better fit with actual polyphonic practice, and by mid-century several sys-
tems existed at once (the traditional church modes, an eight-mode system
with Greek names, a twelve-mode system with Greek names, and so forth).
As Harold S. Powers has shown, polyphonic pieces might be assigned
to one or another modal category after the fact (as chants had been after
the development of modal theory in the ninth century), but such modal
designations were generally post-compositional categories used by editors
to organize music books, and pieces in several different “tonal types” (con-
figurations of system, final, and clefs) might be assigned to the same modal
category. This editorial practice is clear already in the books of Attaingnant
and Susato, who—lacking any other compelling means of ordering the pieces
in chansonniers—adopted the modes of plainchant as a sort of alphabetic
54
This nomenclature was first developed by Harold S. Powers, “Tonal Types and Modal
Categories,” whose arguments I summarize briefly here. For a list of the tonal configu-
rations of each quatrain, see Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Colin, xxvi–xxviii, on which table
7.2 is based.
system, placing pieces in D, E, F, and G together, almost in the manner
of a book of etudes structured according to the circle of fifths.55 Susato, for
instance, used these catagories to order the pieces in his Premier livre des chan-
sons a deux ou a troix parties (discussed in the previous chapter). Thus, whereas
editors like Le Roy were used to thinking in modal categories as a matter
of editorial practice, it is not certain that composers did, which means that
when Boni composed pieces designed to represent modes 1 through 10 for
Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac, the tonal configurations he should use were
not self-evident.56
We can see some of the tension between theory and practice even in the
blunt contrasts of range and tonality implied by the tonal types listed in table
7.2. For instance, all of the mode 9 and 10 rangs have equivalent ranges and
signatures and are built around final cadences to D and A. Normally, as rep-
resentatives of the lower plagal range, the pieces in mode 10 would have been
in A and employed lower clefs (♮-A-c1); here, however the difference between
authentic and plagal is signaled by the contrast of finals used at the end of
each rang.57 The finals denote not substantive differences but categorical ones
(possibly based on categories imposed by the editor). Troubles with pieces in
A also seem to have affected Boni’s mode 4 settings. In the case of modes 3
and 4, he appears to have been at a loss for a way to represent any difference
at all between authentic and plagal, and the mode 3 and 4 rangs all end in the
55
These organizational schemes are common in chanson anthologies printed in France.
Following Powers, “Tonal Types and Modal Categories,” who investigated the modal
ordering of Susato, Premier livre des chansons a deux ou a troix as an example (443–46),
the first concentrated study of the phenomenon in chanson anthologies was Howard
Mayer Brown, “Theory and Practice,” on the modal ordering of the thirty-five books
in Attaingnant’s Livre de chansons series. Freedman, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso, ch.
7, explores Le Roy’s editorial processes in depth and compares them with those of con-
temporary editors. Adams, “The Three-Part Chanson,” provides lists of system, final,
and clefs for a number of chansonniers (without getting into interpretive questions of
modal assignment), as does J. A. Bernstein for the volumes of Moderne and Le Roy &
Ballard in The Sixteenth-Century Chanson series.
56
For just a few studies of those rarer cases where it is possible to demonstrate that a
composer was thinking in modes from the start, see Powers, “Tonal Types and Modal
Categories,” 446–51 on Lassus and Palestrina; Feldman, City Culture, 224–49 on
Willaert; Jessie Ann Owens, “Mode in the Madrigals of Cipriano de Rore”; and Jeanice
Brooks, “‘Ses amours et les miennes ensemble’,” on Anthoine de Bertrand. On the ways
Renaissance theorists chose modal exempla, see Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory,
with excellent accounts of the book cultures conditioning theory.
57
The mode 9 rangs include sectional finals on E in addition to A, and the mode 10 rangs
include sectional finals on A in addition to D.
same tonal type, ♮-E-c1. Modes 3 and 4 often posed a problem spot in modally-
ordered collections (pieces in E tended to be in short supply and most that did
exist were in low clefs), and Attaingnant and Susato, for instance, regularly
placed pieces in A in the positions occupied by these modes.58 Boni may have
been concerned to avoid emphasizing the ♮-A-c1 tonal type usually assigned to
modes 3 or 4 in collections organized according to the old eight-mode system
so as not to create confusion with the ♮-A-g2 pieces at the end of the Quatrains,
which are enlisted to stand for mode 9 in this ten-mode cycle. Indeed, the
whole idea for a ten-mode cycle seems especially artificial when compared to
Boni’s two other publications, where he never writes in the tonal type ♮-A-g2
(mode 9 in the Quatrains). When he gets to mode 10 in the Quatrains, where
we might expect a tonal type of ♮-A-c1, the whole project seems to break
down, since it hardly does the student a favor to present here pieces that in
other circumstances were understood to represent mode 4.59 Instead we are
given pieces in ♮-D-g2, a tonal type Boni rarely used.60
I fail to see why Boni—in whose other books the music is arranged more
or less according to an eight-mode system—would suddenly have felt a
strong commitment to exemplifying A modes in the Quatrains.61 Adrian Le
Roy, by contrast, evinced a growing interest in clarifying the modal ordering
of the books he published: Richard Freedman has shown how Le Roy resolved
some of the modal ambiguities present in the Mellange d’Orlande (1570) when
it was reissued in 1576.62 He also observes that in Le Roy’s lute tutor of 1574
(an English translation of a lost French edition), Le Roy expresses frustra-
tion with the confusion surrounding the eight-mode system, saying “All our
58
See Powers, “Tonal Types and Modal Categories,” 448–49, and Brown, “Theory and
Practice,” 78–84.
59
Indeed, half of the sectional finals in the mode 3 and 4 rangs are on A—Boni had used
the ♮-A-c1 option there instead of saving it for mode 10. See the full list of tonal types
for each quatrain in Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Colin, xxvi–xxviii.
60
Pieces like these, in which the tenor ends on d′ (rather than the normal low d of modes
1 and 2), might just as often be grouped among mode 7 and 8 pieces as they were
assigned to modes 1 and 2, at least in earlier chansonniers. See Brown, “Theory and
Practice,” 90–91.
61
It is worth noting how uneven some of Boni’s prints are when it comes to modal
representation: the first book of the Sonetz de P. de Ronsard (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard,
1576) includes no pieces that could be construed as mode 7 and one third of it con-
sists of pieces in modes 1 and 2 transposed; the second book of Sonetz (1576) has two
anomalous pieces in tonal type ♭-A-g2 interspersed with the mode 5 pieces in ♭-F-g2
but apparently no pieces that represent mode 4, and the 1573 Primus liber modulorum,
for instance, is—by my reckoning—almost half modes 1 or 2, mostly transposed to G.
62
Freedman, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso, 139–53.
Musicke consisteth of eight tunes although Glarian and some other would
devide them into a greater number, as farre as twelve.”63 By 1583, he seems
to have accepted the fact that eight modes were not enough, for the little
handbook he printed that year, the Traicté de musique, gave budding compos-
ers a digest of Glarean’s twelve-mode system, including the modes on A.64
Scholars who have studied Boni’s Quatrains reject the idea that the elaborate
ordering of the collection originated with Le Roy, even though Le Roy was a
musician, composer, and theorist. Marie-Alexis Colin, who has published an
impeccable edition of the music, concludes: “Adrian Le Roy, in his foreword,
must . . . be considered more as a commentator a posteriori than as the initiator
of this undertaking, which represents a truly original success.”65 In reaching
this verdict, she relies in part on the research of Jeanice Brooks, editor of Boni’s
Primus liber modulorum (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1573), who believed not only
that Boni was responsible for the structure of the Quatrains, but also that he
composed the 1573 volume of motets as a coherent textual and modal cycle.
But in fact, there is little evidence of a latent textual cycle in the 1573 collec-
tion—with the exception of a pair of responsories from the Office of the Dead
(pieces 8 and 9 in the collection) there are no continuities in the sources of Boni’s
texts, either liturgical or biblical, certainly nothing approaching the Quatrains
and its presentation of Pibrac’s entire series of poems in order. As for the modal
arrangement of the motets in the 1573 Primus liber modulorum, modes were a
standard musical “alphabet” in the sixteenth century, and music editors were
just as immersed in thinking modally as composers might have been, since they
frequently used modes as a guide when putting prints together.66 It might have
been Le Roy who arranged the 1573 motets in the order they appear. What
63
Ibid., 143. Also see 142–47 for an excellent explanation of the tensions between modal
theory and compositional practice.
64
[Adrian Le Roy], Traicté de musique contenant une theorique succincte pour methodiquement
pratiquer la composition, available in facsimile in Trachier, ed., Renaissance française,
4:213–49.
65
Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Colin, xxv.
66
Basically, there were two standard musical means of organizing the pieces in a book
of music at the time: by increasing number of voices and according to the modes. In
larger collections, the number of voices would take precedence and the modes might
not be invoked at all (the Mellanges de chansons published in 1572 by Le Roy & Ballard
is one example of both sorts of ordering at work simultaneously). See supra, note 55
on Attaingnant, Susato, and Le Roy. Also see the fascinating study of Isabelle His,
“Plantin et l’organisation modale des Melanges de Claude Le Jeune,” on competing
modal systems in France and a book that uses Glarean’s system for pieces in French and
Gioseffo Zarlino’s for pieces in Italian.
is particularly misleading about these arguments, though, is their circularity:
Brooks posits that “Boni’s motet book was designed as an entity rather than a
heterogeneous assemblage of unrelated motets” based partly on the elaborate
design of the Quatrains, a plan that she says Le Roy simply “describes” in the
“Advertissement” fronting the collection.67 Brooks tacitly transfers credit for
the design of the Quatrains to Boni, going on to invoke the Quatrains as evi-
dence to support an interpretation of the 1573 Primus liber as cyclic; Colin then
cites the cyclicity Brooks saw in the 1573 print as evidence that it was Boni
who conceived the overall design of the Quatrains, all of this in disregard of Le
Roy’s statement that the plan was his own.
Much of this reasoning evinces an attitude toward compositional authority
that fixates on an originality located in the autonomous creation of a com-
poser working in isolation and with art-for-art’s-sake motivations. But why
should Boni not have been quite happy to fulfill such a commission from Le
Roy? It takes nothing away from the fine craftsmanship of Boni’s Quatrains to
suggest that they were written at Le Roy’s request. As maître des enfans at the
cathedral of Saint-Estienne in Toulouse, Boni would have known what suited
young singers, and his straightforward settings of Ronsard’s sonnets had clearly
proven some sort of hit with amateur musicians, given that Le Roy & Ballard
had printed second or third editions of both books by 1582.68 All sorts of
popular music today are produced by composers for hire, and Boni evidently
had a good relationship with Le Roy & Ballard, who had already printed his
Primus liber modulorum and multiple editions of his two books of Sonetz de P. de
Ronsard (1576), good enough, one imagines, for them to strike a deal over the
Quatrains. We know that much music for beginners originated in the printing
house: duos and trios were arranged or composed by house editors like Antoine
Cartier and printers such as Antonio Gardane and Tielman Susato, and I would
count the psalms of Goudimel in the same category, as a “publisher’s reper-
toire.” Le Roy’s “Advertissement” likewise suggests that the project for the
Quatrains started in-house, as does the book’s lack of a dedication from Boni.
If Romantic notions of authorship make it difficult to reconnect some
publications with the mercantile arrangements I am describing, another
obstacle is the modern fetishization of the book itself as the site of com-
positional authority. In the Quatrains we have an extraordinary example of
music being conceived as a book from the outset—a book of poetry is turned
into a book of music. It is a bibliographic “oeuvre,” not just a jumble of
67
Guillaume Boni, Motets, ed. Jeanice Brooks, xv.
68
For what is known of Boni’s biography see ibid., ix–xi and Boni, Les Quatrains, ed.
Colin, xiii.
pieces written at various times for various occasions and subsequently pulled
together for printing. It projects authorship in a material form. But in an age
when composers were musicians and employed to make music, not necessar-
ily to write it, the textual coherence of the Quatrains strongly suggests to me
that it was conceived by a bookman like Le Roy, who was used to thinking
of music as something printed as well as performed. “Voila, ami Lecteur,
ce que j’avois à t’expliquer de mon dessein,” Le Roy says at the end of the
“Advertissement”—“here, dear Reader, is what I wanted to explain to you of
my aim.” Considering the scope of the project, the way it fits with Le Roy’s
evident interest in printing Pibrac settings, and the investment of paper it
took to realize it (at sixty-eight sheets per copy, it ranks among the largest
books produced by Le Roy & Ballard), it makes sense to see it as initiated by
the printer. It fit nicely into the firm’s catalogue.
We need also consider the fact that by 1580, Huguenot music printers in
Geneva, La Rochelle, and even London were issuing competing editions of
chansons by Bertrand, Boni, and Lassus that were first brought out by Le Roy
& Ballard, including Boni’s Sonetz de P. de Ronsard.69 The books were spiritual
contrafacts—love songs that, through a few turns of phrase, were remade as
professions of faith—and they served a public avid for Christian polyphony
in the vernacular. Back in the 1550s and 1560s, Le Roy & Ballard had made
quite a business of printing polyphonic psalm settings, which fit a similar
bill, but nothing of this sort had come off their presses since Goudimel’s
Huitieme livre de pseaumes de David in 1567. Certainly the success of the spiri-
tual versions of Boni’s chansons being produced by expatriate Huguenots set
the stage for interest in a moralizing collection directly from his hands, but
it is also revealing to look back at Goudimel’s pseaumes mis au long en forme de
mottetz as a precursor to which Le Roy and his buyers had been quite dedi-
cated before the religious wars made it impossible to reprint them.
One of the selling points of Goudimel’s motet-psalms was their unusual
scoring: these long pieces sometimes set as many as ten (or twenty) stanzas
of text and included several sections, usually three or four, but sometimes as
many as six. Goudimel scored each section for a different number of voices,
generally beginning SCTB followed by a trio and then finishing up with a sec-
tion for four, five, or even six voices. Occasionally an internal section might be
a duo. The scorings of the trios seem deliberately to have been as varied as pos-
sible (SSC, CTB, and so forth). In its first edition (Paris: Du Chemin, 1551),
Goudimel’s first book played up this variety of scorings in the title: Pseaulmes
69
See Guillaume Boni, Sonetz chrestiens . . . premier [–second] livre, ed. Simon Goulart,
([Geneva]: [Jean Le Royer], 1578–79).
de David . . . Dont aulcuns vers (pour la commodité des musiciens) sont à trois, à qua-
tre, & à cinq parties, & aussi à voix pareilles. Singers or players looking for pieces
to suit their group would have had many choices in a single volume.
Given the strong association of duos and trios with music instruction, it
stands to reason that a primer text such as Pibrac’s Quatrains would attract
fewer-voiced settings like the duos and trios composed by Planson, Boni,
L’Estocart, and Bournonville. What is particularly significant in the Pibrac
settings is the way this behavioral manual is matched by virtually the full
panoply of vocal scorings. Like the interval tables in a counterpoint treatise,
lists of verb conjugations in a Latin primer, or multiplication tables that ran
into double digits, these collections of Quatrains are exemplary not just in the
moral rules propounded by their texts, but also in their illustration of musi-
cal fundaments—scorings, textures, and, in the case of the Boni, the tonal
relations that generated a structural grammar for polyphony.
Boni wrote a wonderful collection of music for beginners. It makes the
most of fairly straightforward text setting, relatively syllabic melodies, a
diatonic palette, and fairly steady pacing, with moments of imitative writ-
ing appropriate to chansons. It would have made a nice textbook, one full
of little jokes and conspiratorial winks in its musical readings of Pibrac’s
maxims, and it is not hard to imagine the delight of singers at passages such
as the repetitive opening of Parler beaucoup (“parler, parler beaucoup, parler,
parler, parler . . .”), the way the voices follow each other in close imitation
at the opening of Ne va suivant le troupeau, and other places where Pibrac’s
imperatives are momentarily undercut by the music itself (see example 7.1).
Elsewhere Boni takes advantage of every opportunity for laughing fast notes
(“Ris si tu veux”), running passagework (“Fuy jeune et vieil”), and poignant
exclamations (“Làs! que te sert,” “Hà, le dur coup”). And in a most delight-
ful dramatization of the significance of Pibrac’s first quatrain as the capital
primer text of the century, Boni opens the entire collection by setting the
first line of the Quatrains—the first commandment—using the improvi-
satory formula some children doubtless knew from singing harmonized
psalm-tones. We have already seen this type of written-out fauxbourdon à 4
in the arrangement of Saint-Gelais’s Puisque vivre en servitude studied in the
last chapter (example 6.3), and here it is again in its “rightful” place at the
threshold between memory and reading, where improvisatory practices give
way to written polyphony (see example 7.2).
The sweet, light style in which Boni robes these texts approximates the
sugar-coating described so nicely by the Jesuit Michel Coyssard as a “pleasant
delectation” that helped lessons print themselves in the memories of chil-
dren. Nonetheless, in the end it is not clear what specifically musical lessons
E x a m p l e 7 . 1 Guillaume Boni, Ne va suivant, mm. 1–8. In Les Quatrains du
Sieur de Pybrac mis en musique à 3. 4. 5. et 6. parties par G. Boni (Paris: Le Roy &
Ballard, 1582), fol. 11v. Based on Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Colin, 35, with original
note values restored
E x a m p l e 7 . 2 Guillaume Boni, Dieu tout premier, mm. 1–6. In Les Quatrains
du Sieur de Pybrac mis en musique à 3. 4. 5. et 6. parties par G. Boni (Paris: Le Roy &
Ballard, 1582), fol. 2v. Based on Boni, Les Quatrains, ed. Colin, 2, with original
note values restored
these books supported that might not have been taught just as handily with a
chansonnier and a couple of basic illustrations like the Brieve et facile instruction
Phalèse included in the Septiesme livre (depicted in figure 6.7 above). Teachers
looking for examples of pieces in a full range of recognizable tonal configura-
tions would have been better off grabbing a copy of the duos and untexted
“fantasies” a 2 by Lassus that Le Roy & Ballard published in 1578, Moduli
duarum vocum, a collection organized according to the eight-mode system.70
But even here, it is well worth asking whether teachers or their students were
70
See A. Smith, “Lasso’s Two-Part Fantasies as a Didactic Tool,” 288, 293–305, and
Powers, “Tonal Types and Modal Categories,” 451–52.
much concerned with modes at all. At the hands-on level of practice, the edi-
torial practice of modal ordering grouped together pieces with similar musical
structures, which helped musicians locate pieces that suited their voices or
instruments. A beginning viol player may well have wanted to avoid pieces
with a flat in the signature, which forced him or her into half position. So
too, for singers with limited ranges, one note in the wrong direction or a
particularly high or low tessitura would have made singing unpleasant—clefs
and finals helped them find pieces in a comfortable range. In the printshop,
grouping together songs of like tonal configurations rationalized compiling
and proofreading. But none of this has to do with modal theory per se.
The one sizeable polyphonic repertoire where modes mattered was
Magnificats, in which the settings (usually alternatim settings based on the
plainchant canticle-tones) needed to hook up with the antiphons that framed
them, yet in this repertoire a different tonal system was in operation, since
the finals of the canticle-tones were not always those of the antiphons (true for
the psalm-tones as well).71 Thus the pieces in which mode was necessarily and
explicitly in operation and even called attention to in titles (Octo cantica divae
Mariae virginis and so forth) inhabited a very specific world and could only
be completely understood in the context of the antiphons that were meant
to accompany them. This is not to say that the “world” of Magnificats was a
rarefied one—on the contrary, the eight psalm-tones and canticle-tones were
widely taught to children. “It will be useful to teach the children the eight
Tones of the Church” writes Jacques Cossard in his Methodes pour apprendre a
lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter, following it up with the plain-
chant tones for the Magnificat and psalms (underlaid with the incipit of the
first Psalm for Sunday Vespers, “Dixit Dominus Domino meo”).72 We have
already seen a simple harmonization of a psalm-tone turn up in the flyleaf of
71
See, for instance, the sets of Magnificats in the eight psalm-tones printed by Attaingnant
in 1534 and reproduced in Smijers and Merritt, eds., Treize livres de motets, volumes 5
and 6; the homophonic settings of alternate verses by Sermisy in Octo cantica divae
Mariae virginis (1564); and the sets by Lassus printed by Le Roy & Ballard in 1578 and
1586. For a good explanation of the relationships between polyphonic Magnificats and
the psalm-tones to which they related, see David Crook, Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation
Magnificats, esp. ch. 4; throughout these eight-mode cycles, one finds tonal types that
diverge from those in modally ordered chansonniers and motet anthologies. Mode 5
Magnificats are regularly in the tonal type ♭-A-c1 rather than ♭-F-g2, for instance, and
mode 7 Magnificats in the tonal type ♮-A-c1 rather than ♮-G-g2, choices that in both
cases reflect the finals of the canticle-tones on A.
72
Cossard, Methodes, 324. On plainchant instruction in parish schools, see Bisaro, Chanter
toujours, 20–26.
a chansonnier from around 1600, where it seems to have been part of a music
lesson (see the discussion of fi gure 5.8 above), but most children would have
learned the psalm-tones by ear and by heart, not using written music.
In the foreword to the Instruction pour apprendre a chanter a quatre parties, selon
le Plain chant, les Pseaumes, & Cantiques of 1582, the printer, Benedic Macé,
explains that whereas polyphony (“la musique figurée”) is hard to sing, “there
is not a parish, whether in the towns or the countryside, where those who are
called and ordained to celebrate the divine service do not understand plain-
chant perfectly.”73 Desiring to make it easy for everyone to sing the psalms and
canticles in harmony, Macé’s quarto handbook contains four-part renderings
of all eight canticle-tones along with their appropriate plainchant antiphons,
many of them based on the fauxbourdon formula employed at the opening of
Boni’s Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac. Like the canons at the unison designed for
catechism classes and printed in the Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne a few
years later, this was essentially sacred polyphony for musical illiterates, pieces
learned by ear, like the catechism itself.74 The Instruction, for its part, provided
a written reference to an unwritten practice—singing in fauxbourdon—of the
sort that cropped up increasingly in print as the century wore on: whereas the
choirs at the Sainte-Chapelle, chapelle royale, and Notre-Dame de Paris would
have known how to improvise the fauxbourdon harmonizations of psalm-tones
or the alternate verses of Magnificat settings, printed “instructions” and books
of music like Magnificat selon le plain chant de l’esglise (1549) and Octo cantica divae
Mariae virginis (1564) spelled out the practices of elite chapels so that readers
could achieve some simulacrum of them through the paint-by-numbers detail
of musical notation. “And note that on these Magnificats [in fauxbourdon] one
should be able to sing all the psalms according to their tones,” the preface to
the Magnificats selon le plain chant explains; “In this way the psalms are sung at
present in the chapels of the King and the princes of this kingdom.”75
73
Benedic Macé and Laurens Dandin, Instruction pour apprendre a chanter a quatre parties,
sig. Aiv. “Et d’autant qu’il se trouve peu de personnes, au regard des autres, qui enten-
dent & se puissent bien accorder à bien chanter la Musique figurée: & qu’au contraire,
il n’y a paroisse soit aux villes, ou aux champs, où ceux qui sont appellez & ordonnez
pour la celebration du service divin, n’entendent parfaitement le Plain chant: afin de
leur donner pareil contentement & plaisir qui s’ils chantoyent icelle Musique figurée,
je leur ay fait imprimer les huict Tons à quatre parties: dont la Teneur est le mesme
plain chant qui se chante ordinairement aux Eglises.” See Trachier, ed., Renaissance
française, 4:125–67, for the treatise in facsimile.
74
Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne (Paris: Marc Locqueneulx, 1589).
75
“Et notez que sur iceux Magnificatz se peullent chanter toutes pseaulmes selon les
tons dont elles sont. . . . Et ainsi se chantent a present les pseaulmes es chappelles
None of this brings us any closer to understanding why Boni’s Quatrains
du Sieur de Pybrac broached the theoretical subject of mode. Debutants hardly
needed to understand the conceptual background of tonal relations with
which composers worked in order to sing polyphonic music, and there is
nothing in the few handbooks on performance that survive from the time
to suggest that the church modes were taught in conjunction with polyph-
ony (the Brieve et facile instruction shown in figure 6.7 is a case in point).
Indeed, even in late sixteenth-century manuals such as Cornelius Blockland
de Montfort’s Instruction methodique & fort facile pour apprendre la musique prac-
tique, the French word “mode” still referred to the rhythmic relationship of
long to breve in mensuration; the word that did refer to the church modes—
“ton”—quite specifically meant psalm-tone, when the subject came up at
all.76 One highly significant exception is the anonymous composition treatise
printed by Le Roy & Ballard and possibly written by Adrian Le Roy (per-
haps with the assistance of Eustache Du Caurroy): Traicté de musique contenant
une theorique succincte pour methodiquement pratiquer la composition (1583).77 The
chapter “Des Modes ou Tons” presents the twelve-mode system of Glarean,
along with the Greek names, tables of the species of fourth and fifth from
which they are formed, and a table of the appropriate cadence tones for each
mode. Its coherent explanation of the modes and argument for the Aeolian
and Ionian pairs fit nicely with the theoretical ambitions of Boni’s Quatrains
du Sieur de Pybrac, perhaps more than the awkward way modes 9 and 10 are
worked out in practice in the songs. Indeed, the tensions within the Quatrains
du Sieur de Pybrac between the “dessein” articulated in Le Roy’s foreword
and Boni’s composing out of it seem almost exacerbated by the clarity of
the Traicté de musique printed by Le Roy the following year, as though the
unusual definition of “mode” in the treatise was meant to explain the theory
du Roy & princes de ce royaulme.” Preface, Magnificat selon le plain chant de l’esglise
(Paris: Attaingnant, 1549), Tenor, fol. iv. On fauxbourdon in France, beginning with
this print, see Canguilhem, “Deux recueils inconnus,” 474–79. Significantly, when Le
Roy & Ballard edited Sermisy’s Magnificats in 1564, they provided realizations of the
odd-numbered verses in fauxbourdon; in his edition of 1548, Attaingnant did not, but
singers could have used the Magnificat selon le plain chant as a guide (ibid., 474).
76
See Cornelius Blockland de Montfort, Instruction methodique & fort facile (Geneva,
1587) available in facsimile in Trachier, ed., Renaissance française, 4:251–310. Most of
Blockland’s Instruction concerns rhythm, and there is no talk of psalm-tones.
77
See [Le Roy], Traicté de musique. Isabelle His has discovered a manuscript attribution to
Du Caurroy in a copy of the 1602 edition of the treatise, though this does not defini-
tively exclude the possiblity that Le Roy authored the treatise, with or without Du
Caurroy’s input. Isabelle His, “Das Dodecacorde von Claude Le Jeune,” 241–47.
behind the modal groupings in Boni’s collection ex post facto. Muddied by
D pieces standing in for the Soubs-Aeolien and missing the Ionian modes
altogether, full exemplification of the twelve-mode system would only come
to fruition with the publication of Claude Le Jeune’s Dodecacorde in 1598. In
that print—followed in 1606 by Cécile Le Jeune’s posthumous publication of
the Octonaires—readers could finally find the perfect packaging of catechistic
texts as high-level “textbooks” for students interested in the twelve modes.
The regulatory urges of religious education were turned at last to disciplining
music. Le Jeune’s reception as a theoretical model persisted into the eigh-
teenth century, when Sébastien de Brossard noted of the Octonaires that it was
still being used to teach the rules of counterpoint to young students.78
The temptation to project the future carved out by Le Jeune back into the
1580s and across the whole of the musical landscape is great, yet we must
remember that even in 1598, Le Jeune presented his modal project not as an
abécédaire for beginners (despite the fact that he set what might be regarded
as “primer” texts) but as a high-level academic pursuit, one entirely in keep-
ing with the genesis of his modal interests in Baïf’s Neoplatonic Académie
de poésie et de musique and his encounters with the rarefied explanations
of the modes found in Glarean’s Dodecachordon (1547), Pontus de Tyard’s
Solitaire second (1555), and—most importantly—Gioseffo Zarlino’s Istitutioni
harmoniche (1558, rev. 1573).79 It is to conclude negatively, to be sure, but
given the extremely delimited diffusion of modal theory in France, the modal
ordering of Boni’s Pibrac settings can only rightly be described as esoteric—
just as esoteric as Le Jeune’s Dodecacorde. It is, moreover, awkwardly disjoint
from the direct and practical way Boni wraps Pibrac’s aphorisms in engag-
ing musical language. The novelty of Le Roy’s “Advertissement” may have
attracted some purchasers to these musical Quatrains, but in the end, the best
thing about the collection was its singability and the salubriousness guaran-
teed by Pibrac’s name.
Tracking the evolution of civility has brought us far from the riotous flux of
lyric poetry into which Granjon dipped to assemble the Trophées de musique
he printed in civility type in 1559. The delightfully chansonesque style
of Boni’s Quatrains still seems to channel something of that earlier time,
when risqué poems were not yet censured as “silly and lascivious” and grab
78
See Isabelle His, Claude Le Jeune, 385–93.
79
On the uniqueness of Le Jeune’s project, see ibid., 189–93. Le Jeune adopts the order
proposed by Zarlino in the revised edition of the Istitutioni harmoniche of 1573, which
begins with C as mode 1.
bags of chansons could be used for teaching beginners without concern, but
under the systematization that seems to have been so beloved of educators
(cycles of quatrains learned in order, the regular progression through a modal
cycle, cycles of scoring from two to seven voices), the whole sense of teach-
ing youngsters to think for themselves, exercise social judgment, and refine
their own sensibilities seems to swerve into the safer havens established by
rule-bound authority. The goal of this chapter has largely been to understand
Pibrac’s Quatrains and musical settings of them in the context of the chansons
spirituelles, Cantiques, Pseaumes de David, and other genres of polyphony in
French that competed with the chanson after 1550, and to see how civility
itself came to be dictated by the immense social crisis of the French Wars of
Religion. It would be overly dramatic to say that nothing escaped the reach
of the confessional battles raging in France or the terrors that caused politiques
such as Pibrac to preach tolerance, restraint, and respect for God and King.
Le Roy & Ballard continued to churn out their Livre de chansons series into
the 1580s, along with chansons, airs, villanelle, and even the ribald moresche
of Lassus. But in some ways, the success of French psalms marks the end of
unselfconscious chanson-singing and individual connoisseurship, and it may
be significant that the main supplier to Le Roy & Ballard of old-fashioned
chansons setting mostly anonymous love lyric was not a French composer
but Orlande de Lassus, who was writing at a safe distance from France. Thus
the style of musical civility presented so beautifully in Granjon’s Trophées
and marketed as the stuff of French refinement is not revised by the settings
of Pibrac as much as it is undone by them. In this sense, then, the Trophées
bore no progeny; they were the beginning and the end, and the chansons of
Certon, Arcadelt, and Maillard that Granjon printed in them remain a fragile
glimpse or fantasy of what it meant to be civilisé at a moment before ques-
tions of spiritual conscience intruded into jardins de poésie formerly secluded
from such concerns.
P o s t s c r i p t : C u l t u r e s o f M u s i c
M uch of this book has operated in the liminal zone between text and
performance, one inhabited by readers who themselves may have spent
their lives primarily at the threshold of the world of letters. Their activities
often left no trace, their readings just a gentle caress of the page with the eye
or maybe a glance at a part already learned by heart, their hands busy at a
fretboard and strings or their fingers wrapped around a flute. Certainly some
were students just beginning, in other lessons, to hold a pen. In Sunday school
classes, boys and girls would have sounded out catechistic texts from sylla-
baries and marched along singing Latin prayers as “rounds”; later they might
have learned French from civilities, practiced good grace and handwriting,
memorized moralizing quatrains, and sung polyphonic chansons. Some went
on to become favorite clients of booksellers, hosts of musical soirées, or great
bibliophiles. Each of these milieux—church, schoolroom, salon, library—used
books in ways that allow us to recover some sense of their cultures of music.
Nonetheless, I would like to signal in closing the vastness of what lies
beyond the textual zone that documents make available to historians, not just
the kinds of music-making that required no notation (as if that is not con-
siderable enough), but the cultures of reading that were negligent of “scrip-
tural” culture itself. Most of the musicians who sang and played from the
prints and manuscripts studied in this book left no marks because the culture
of writing, particularly of writing words, was not central to their activities.
Like the faithful saying their “Aves” and “Paters” before a book of hours or a
prince whose reader entertained him with Aristotle’s Politics or Amadis de Gaul,
these readings never aimed to produce new prayers or philosophical tracts
or chivalric romances.1 Whereas writers are founders and builders of texts,
busy accumulating verbal wealth, stockpiling words, and forestalling demise
though the expansionism of reproduction, creating, in short, not just authored
“works” but also precisely the marginal glosses, annotations, letters, reorder-
ings, and arrangements that allow us to understand their textual encounters,
many readers, by contrast, are drifters and vagrants. Michel de Certeau called
them nomads, travelers who journey across textual fields, always on the move.
“Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time . . . it does not keep
what it acquires, or it does so poorly.”2 In this interpretation, reading is writing-
free or, at the very least, liberated from writing.
Unsurprisingly, those documents that have allowed us to investigate
reading practices of the sixteenth century tend to come from the circles of
humanists—professional men of letters who made biblical exegesis, philology,
philosophy, law, theology, and writing their business. Among their ranks are
the early bibliographers relied on in this book—Anton Francesco Doni, Conrad
Gesner, La Croix du Maine, and Du Verdier—and the court librarians Angelo
Vergecio, Claude Chappuys, and Gabriel Naudé. The incomparable classicist
Erasmus has supplied key testimonies as to the physical behaviors, manners,
and pronunciation of early moderns in books that, it should be remembered,
used printing as their medium of dissemination. It is thanks to men of let-
ters like Montaigne that we know about educational paradigms, thanks to
the philosopher La Primaudaye that we know what linkages were believed
to operate between book, body, and soul, and thanks to Pibrac the statesman
that we understand the intentions behind some primers. Even the notaries
who drew up contracts engaging schoolteachers and recording the possessions
of the deceased were men of letters, in the sense that they made their business
writing and reading written documents for others.
The most extensive studies of early modern readers have recuperated read-
ing from writing, recovering their subjects’ engagement with texts through
letters, diaries, annotations, and commonplace books. In their field-defining
essay “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy,” Lisa Jardine
and Anthony Grafton relied on letters and Harvey’s own books to vividly
reconstruct the political environment in Elizabethan England that charged
1
On court readers see Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 40–41; William Nelson,
“From ‘Listen, Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader’”; and Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton,
“‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy.” Louis XIV apparently much
preferred to listen to literature read or declaimed rather than to read it himself, on
which see Martin, The French Book, 49–50.
2
268 | p o s t s c r i p t
Harvey’s readings with such intensity.3 Essentially, Harvey was a professional
reader engaged by members of the aristocracy to unpack texts with a bearing
on contemporary affairs of state, and his densely annotated copy of Livy’s his-
tory of ancient Rome served him for decades of reading and teaching begin-
ning around 1570.
For musicologists it is of more than passing interest to note that Harvey
had his Livy bound with—among other things—a commentary on the same
by Heinrich Glarean, one of the most deeply humanistic music theorists of
the Renaissance and a man better described as a humanist who also wrote
music theory than as a music theorist by trade.4 Cristle Collins Judd has pro-
vided a remarkable account of Glarean’s reading practices based on surviving
books from his library, a letter in his hand, and his annotations in a wide array
of books, from a set of manuscript partbooks of motets belonging to one of
his students to Glarean’s own copies of Petrucci’s Motetti C.5 Judd’s important
study shows how Glarean’s procedure in marshaling the sources cited in the
Dodecachordon tracked that for assembling a commonplace book. Her analysis
helped to situate theoretical “readings” of polyphony within the active reading
practices by which humanists working in other philosophical domains pro-
duced knowledge, and her findings help to square the history of music theory
with the broader intellectual frameworks operative in the Renaissance.
Studies like Grafton and Jardine’s contributed foundationally to a new his-
tory of reading as active and creative of knowledge, countering older notions
of reading as the passive internalization of a text. But their extension into
the musical realm has relied primarily on figures like Glarean, a writer who
was also an avid amateur musician. Professional musicians, by contrast, even
those who trained at cathedral schools, became maîtres de chapelle, and wrote
polyphony, often left no verbal texts behind. By all accounts, Sermisy was
happy to write music but unconcerned even to produce dedications for printed
editions of his works, let alone any instructions for how to use them; from
3
Jardine and Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’.”
4
Iain Fenlon and Inga Mai Groote, “Heinrich Glarean’s Books,” 305, underscore his
primary interest in “classics, history, and other language-related fields.”
5
Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory, part 3. More recently, Inga M. Groote,
“Heinrich Glarean Reading and Editing Boethius,” has studied annotations in books
owned by Glarean for what they reveal of his reading and editing processes; Ann Blair,
“Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” is also help-
ful in this regard. For an investigation of Glarean’s habits of collecting as suggested
by the contents of his library, see Fenlon, “Hernando Colón, Heinrich Glarean and
Others,” 55–69.
c u l t u r e s o f m u s i c | 269
Jacques Arcadelt we have only musical works, not a shred of other writing, as
is true for many of the most active composers of polyphony: Josquin des Prez,
Sandrin, Maillard, the list goes on and on. Guillaume Boni signed the dedi-
cation to his 1573 book of motets and an explanatory sonnet fronting a late
reedition of his Sonetz de P. de Ronsard, but evidently preferred to let the printer
Adrian Le Roy pen the preface to his Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac. The upshot
is that musicians—even those who wrote music—operated in a world distinct
from that of writers, tout court.
As comes equally clear from the material history drawn in the first part of
this book, the recreations chansonniers supported stood somewhat apart from
the discursive cultures of words that dominate histories of the book. Some few
bibliophiles integrated partbooks into their private libraries, assimilating them
to the forms of their other books with fine parchment or leather covers, gold
tooling, silk ties, and the like. But here again, the humanistic book culture tied
to dreams of a universal library and the attempts of collectors such as Herwart,
Werdenstein, and the Fuggers to amass comprehensive libraries overshadows
the darker history told by weighing the limited provenances of surviving books
against the high rates of loss. Missing entirely from our catalogues are whole series
of popular chansonniers, bibliographic victims of their own success. Gone as well,
apparently, are books belonging to the rich and famous, such as Catherine de
Clermont's copies of the music books dedicated to her by Guillaume Costeley and
Adrian Le Roy. A celebrated orator, musician, and muse to the poets, a couple of
surviving manuscripts bear her interlaced Cs on their bindings, but none contain
music. While surviving chansonniers often merit the epithet “Renaissance” with
its implied cultural context of humanists and their partiality for books, many
amateur musicians and their teachers used their music hard, until it fell apart.
Not merely studied for action, music books were set into action, rough handled in
lively social gatherings, the singers holding their music, laughing, gesturing, and
instrumentalists playing from parts laid open on a table. Borrowed, lent, copied,
used by many, it is hardly a wonder that most did not last a lifetime of being
transported from place to place for fun and games.
From this series of apparent negatives, though, a distinct positive has
emerged in the course of Materialities, thanks to the fact that musical read-
ings are so overtly physical. Partbooks are scripts for performances, read-
ings that polyphonic notation prescribes with remarkable detail. In our
own performances, we can begin to understand how early modern eyes and
voices and hands and intellects engaged with music books. For despite the
limits of what can be discovered by working with period instruments and
facsimiles of original sources, performing “historically” can establish valu-
able perspectives. My own readings of these texts (many of them begun
in classroom sessions) have aimed to comprehend—phenomenologically—
the factors that conditioned an early modern musician’s direct experiences
of singing and playing from early music books. Singing through Certon’s
Pater Noster–Ave Maria allows us to recover some sense of what a young
singer’s real-time engagement with a printed partbook might have been
like, what elements would have proven most difficult (counting rests, for
instance), what oral practices would have framed his or her experience, the
speed at which the singers read, and even some basics about where, why, for
whom, and with whom these readings took place. So too, duo arrangements
of chansons like Doulce memoire present virtual recordings of a sixteenth-
century music lesson that—in my readings—replay a series of interactions
between teacher and pupil more or less in real time. In a single duo we find
staged the meeting of two readers coming together from opposite sides of
the fuzzy divide separating literacy from illiteracy. Armed with an under-
standing of how early moderns improvised four-part harmony, we can catch
the insider’s joke Guillaume Boni placed at the opening of his catechistic
Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac, which dramatizes a student’s crossing of the
threshold from orality (fauxbourdon) to “the word” (written polyphony).
Lesser readers merit further study for the way the tabula rasa challenges
of first apprehension can reset our critical agendas, for such back-to-basics
approaches bear significantly not just on beginners but on the refined musi-
cal comprehension that is usually taken as an analytic point of departure.
Compositional techniques employed in structurally sophisticated musical
works—canon, cantus firmus, and imitation—had a reach well beyond the
inner circles of highly literate church composers and their singers. On the
other hand, some features of printed chansonniers, such as the Glarean-inspired
modal ordering of Boni’s Quatrains, come off as confusing to musicians when
examined from the standpoint of practice, an incursion from a separate world
of theory without much grounding in day-to-day musical realities.
My history of music and material culture necessarily runs out here, at that
edge where music books meet Music—the raw reverberant stuff that shaped
the books we study, the sounds that asserted themselves in notation and that
printing organized, reduced, stole, marketed, bastardized, and glorified. Much
of this study has worked along this very edge between material and immate-
rial, attending to the junctures between the material we work with as histori-
ans and the lost music it can reveal as a way of recovering some sense of what
lies beyond it, be it the chansonniers that ended up as scrap paper, the songs
that never got written down, or the social pressures to speak, sing, and behave
graciously in early modern France. This liminal strip between presence and
absence, between evidence and conjecture, is where the few chansonniers we
c u l t u r e s o f m u s i c | 271
have left implicate the various ends met by thousands of others; it is the place
where the curvaceous letters of Granjon’s Trophées de musique enticed students
toward musical literacy after years spent singing by ear; it is the moment when
a printer wrote out a song or two; and it is the space in which poetic antholo-
gies detained lyric normally scattered in song. The edge I have been traversing
is not unlike the place on the printed page where neatly aligned typography
gives way to the wonderful world of margins and flyleaves, where readers anno-
tate, doodle, and riff on texts and teachers add an extra example here and there.
Indeed, I would be happiest if readers turned this last page imagining this
book not as the whole of my history or even its center, but as an object embed-
ded in activities and relationships that extend beyond the white edges of the
paper and the security of this binding into a musical vastness hard to calculate
using the dimensions of a book as the measure.
GLOSSA RY
Air de cour. A homophonic genre of French polyphonic song for four or five voices from
the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that might also be performed by solo voice
with lute accompaniment.
Altus (It. and Eng. Alto). In four-voice polyphony, the second highest voice range, f–d″;
this term was also used to title partbooks bearing parts in the alto range.
Bassus (It. Basso, Eng. Bass). In polyphony, the lowest voice range, E–c′; this term was
also used to title partbooks bearing parts in the bass range.
Bibliothèque bleue. An enduring series of mass-produced and inexpensive books begun in
the seventeenth century in Troyes and sold by traveling vendors.
Binder’s volume (also Tract volume). Two or more editions bound together in a single
book; for music printed in parts, a binder’s volume would comprise two or more part-
books of the same voice type and would often be labeled as such: Superius, Altus,
Tenor, Bassus, and so forth.
Broadsheet (also Broadside). A sheet of paper printed on one side only, usually not folded.
Canzone napolitana (also “villanella”). A genre of popular song originating in Naples
and printed in polyphonic versions for three or four voices.
Cast off. A calculation of the amount of space a piece of copy will occupy when set in a
particular size and style of type.
Chanson. A polyphonic song setting a French text; in the sixteenth century, usually for
four voices.
Chanson-Galliard. A chanson based on the rhythms of the galliard, a dance in triple time.
Chapbook. A small pamphlet containing tales, songs, or other brief texts sold by travel-
ing vendors.
Choirbook. A book of music in manuscript or print in which all of the parts of a poly-
phonic work are laid out together on a single opening, usually with the superius and
tenor on the left-hand page and altus and bassus on the right-hand page. Because these
books often contained sacred works destined to be sung by choirs, they were often in
large folio formats.
Cittern. A plucked string instrument with frets and a flat back strung with wire strings,
common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Clef. A sign written or printed at the beginning of a staff to indicate the pitch of the notes
on the staff. In sixteenth-century music, clefs are strong indicators of the range of the
part, which was cleffed to keep the music on the staff as much as possible.
Colporteur. A traveling vendor who sold chapbooks, combs, ribbons, and other small
goods from a tray suspended around the neck.
Concordant. In three-voice polyphony, the lowest voice, usually in the alto or tenor range;
this term was also used to title partbooks bearing these low parts.
Contrafact. A new poem written to the tune of a pre-existent song. See also Timbre.
Contratenor (Fr. for Altus). In four-voice polyphony, the second highest voice range, f–d″;
this term was also used to title partbooks bearing parts in the contratenor range.
Dessus. A French term for a high voice part in a polyphonic work, roughly equivalent to
superius; also used to title partbooks bearing these parts.
Duo. A polyphonic work for two voices.
En blanc. “White” or unbound.
Flyleaf. A blank page at the beginning or end of a bound book.
Folio (also 2o). A format in which a sheet of paper is folded once to produce two leaves; also
“in folio,” a book comprised of sheets folded in this way. Folio volumes, particularly of
music, often used extra-large sheets of paper, termed “royal” (carta reale) or “imperial”
(carta imperiale).
Format. The shape and size of a book, usually described according to the number of times
the sheets of paper comprising it were folded (folio, quarto, octavo, sextodecimo, etc.)
and the disposition of the pages (upright or oblong).
Forme. A body of type secured in a frame (“chase”) for printing.
Gathering. In printed books, a set of sheets folded and gathered for binding; a gathering
might consist of only one sheet, but could also include two sheets, one folded inside
the other, a half-sheet at the center, or, in folio books, a nested series of sheets.
Goffered edges. The edges—usually gilt—of a book that have been embossed with a
repeating design.
Haute-Contre (Fr. for Altus). In four-voice polyphony, the second highest voice range, f–d″;
this term was also used to title partbooks bearing parts in the Haute-Contre range.
Homophonic music. Music for two or more voices in which the parts move in the same
rhythms.
Imprimeur-Libraire (printer-bookseller). A printer who also sold books.
Incunabulum (pl. incunabula). A book printed before 1501.
Inventaire après décès (Fr.). An estate inventory made at a person’s death.
Layout. In polyphonic music books, the way the parts of a piece are arranged, either in a
choirbook disposition with all the parts visible on a single opening or with the parts
separated into individual partbooks. Table layouts also occur, uncommonly.
Libraires jurés. Booksellers who were sworn officers of the university and subject to its
jurisdiction.
Lied (pl. Lieder). A polyphonic song setting a German text; in the sixteenth century, usu-
ally for four voices.
Lute. A plucked string instrument with frets, gut strings, and a rounded back, in the
sixteenth century usually with six courses or pairs of strings.
274 | g l o s s a r y
Madrigal. A polyphonic song setting an Italian text; in the sixteenth century, usually for
four or five voices.
Marchand libraire (merchant bookseller). A bookseller who also financed publications.
Mass. A polyphonic setting of the Latin Mass Ordinary; in the sixteenth century, usually
for four to six voices.
Mensural notation. A simplified white or void notation used commonly to write or print
polyphony in the sixteenth century.
Miscellany. A book containing works of various genres and authors.
Monophonic music. Music set for a single voice.
Motet. A polyphonic setting of a Latin text, often liturgical or paraliturgical; in the six-
teenth century, usually for four to six voices.
Musica ficta (literally “feigned music”). In polyphonic music before 1600, unwritten acci-
dentals that need to be supplied by the performer.
Octavo (also 8o). A format in which a sheet of paper is folded three times to produce eight
leaves; also “in octavo,” a book comprised of sheets folded in this way.
Paper sizes. Paper was generally described at the time in relative terms as “small,”
“medium,” and “large”; at the largest range, the terms “royal” (carta reale) and
“imperial” (carta imperiale) were frequently used to designate two sizes of extra-large
sheets.
Parchment. Sheep or goatskin with the hair removed that has been split, soaked, limed,
and dried under tension, not tanned like leather; often used for book bindings; fre-
quently used as a catch-all term to include vellum as well.
Partbook. A manuscript or printed book containing an individual voice part for a poly-
phonic composition; partbooks came in sets of two to six or more, depending on the
number of voices for which the music was written.
Partleaf. A manuscript or printed leaf of music containing an individual voice part for a
polyphonic composition; specifically, a leaf requiring no stitching, gathering, or other
means of being united with a further leaf or leaves.
Polyphonic music. Music of two or more parts; in the sixteenth century usually for
voices.
Print-run (also pressrun). The number of copies printed in an edition.
Quarto (also 4o). A format in which a sheet of paper is folded twice to produce four leaves;
also “in quarto,” a book comprised of sheets folded in this way.
Quinta pars. A fifth part added to the standard four voices of polyphony, most usually in
the soprano, alto, or tenor range.
Quintus. A partbook containing fifth-voice parts in polyphony. In works including a
sixth part, oftentimes the fifth and sixth voice parts were gathered together in a single
book and printed on facing pages so that singers could read together from the same
openings.
Recueil de chansons (also recueil de poésie). A collection of song texts or lyric poetry, often
printed in small formats.
Rotulus or Roll (also Scroll). A manuscript in the form of a long sheet of parchment or
paper that was rolled from bottom to top.
Sexta pars. A sixth voice part in a polyphonic piece, which could be in any range.
Sextodecimo (also 16o). A format in which a sheet of paper is (typically cut and) folded to
produce sixteen leaves; also “in 16mo,” a book comprised of sheets folded in this way.
g l o s s a r y | 275
Sextus. A partbook containing sixth-voice parts in polyphony. Often the fifth and sixth
voice parts were printed together in a single partbook titled either “Quintus” “Quinta
pars” or “Quinta & Sexta pars.”
Signature. Small letters or numbers printed at the beginning of each gathering or section
to indicate the order in which they were to be bound.
Superius (It. and Eng. Soprano). The highest voice range, c′–a″.
Tablature. A form of musical notation indicating fingering rather than the pitches of
notes written on lines corresponding to, for instance, the strings of a lute, cittern, or
vihuela.
Table layout. A book of music in which all of the parts of a polyphonic work are laid out
together on a single opening in such a way that the book can be read by all the singers
or players when placed in the center of a table (for instance, with two of the four voice
parts printed upside down).
Tenor. In four-voice polyphony, the second lowest voice range, B–g′; this term was also
used to title partbooks bearing parts in the tenor range.
Timbre. A popular melody or tune to which a new song text might be written; recueils de
chansons generally indicated the timbre with the phrase “sur le chant de . . .” (“to the
tune of . . .”) with the name of the tune.
Tract volume. See Binder’s volume.
Trio. A polyphonic work for three voices.
Uncial script. A script of rounded unjoined letters used in European manuscripts of the
fourth to eighth centuries and from which modern capital letters are derived.
Vellum. A fine parchment made from calfskin with the hair removed, which has been
soaked, limed, and dried under tension, not tanned like leather.
Vihuela. A plucked string instrument with frets and gut strings related to the lute and
viol and popular in Spain and areas of Spanish influence; in the sixteenth century usu-
ally with six or seven courses or pairs of strings.
Voix de ville (literally “city voices”). A genre of song of several strophes that might be
monophonic or chordal.
Zibaldone. A hodgepodge or miscellany book in manuscript common in fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century Italy; paper codices of small or medium format, lacking lining or
any ornamentation, written in cursive mercantile scripts reserved for private and pro-
fessional activities of businessmen and for writings in the vernacular.
276 | g l o s s a r y
BIBLIOGR A PH Y
Archival Materials
Archives of the Plantin Moretus Museum (APM)
Printed Sources
Adams, Courtney S. “The Three-Part Chanson during the Sixteenth Century: Changes
in Its Style and Importance.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1974.
——, ed. The Tiers livre de chansons Printed by Le Roy and Ballard (155322). Recent
Researches in the Music of the Renaissance 37. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1982.
Agee, Richard J. The Gardano Music Printing Firms: 1569–1611. Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 1998.
——. “A Venetian Music Printing Contract and Edition Size in the Sixteenth Century.”
Studi musicali 15 (1986): 59–65.
——. “The Venetian Privilege and Music-Printing in the Sixteenth Century.” Early
Music History 3 (1983): 1–42.
Ahern, John. “Singing the Book: Orality in the Reception of Dante’s Comedy.”
In Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci. Pp. 214–39.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Alden, Jane. Songs, Scribes, and Society: The History and Reception of the Loire Valley
Chansonniers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Aquilon, Pierre. “Petites et moyennes bibliothèques, 1530–1660.” In Les Bibliothèques
sous l’Ancien Régime, 1530–1789, ed. Claude Jolly. Vol. 2 of Histoire des bibliothèques
françaises, ed. André Vernet. Pp. 181–205. Paris: Promodis-Éditions du Cercle de la
Librairie, 1988–92.
Arbeau, Thoinot. Orchésographie. Et traicte en forme de dialogue, par lequel toutes personnes
peuvent facilement apprendre & practiquer l’honneste exercice [des] dances. Langres: Iehan
des Preyz, [1589].
Arcadelt, Jacques. Opera Omnia. Edited by Albert Seay. 10 vols. [Rome]: American
Institute of Musicology, 1965–70.
Ariès, Philippe. L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime. Paris: Plon, 1960.
Armstrong, Elizabeth. Before Copyright: The French Book-Privilege System, 1498–1526.
Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
Atlas, Allan W. Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400–1600.
New York: Norton, 1998.
Auda, Antoine. Barthélémy Beaulaigue, poète et musicien prodige. [Woluwe-St-Pierre, 1957].
Babelon, Jean-Pierre. Paris au XVIe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1986.
Baïf, Jean-Antoine de. Chansonnettes. Edited by G. C. Bird. Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 1964.
Balayé, Simone. “La Bibliothèque nationale pendant la Révolution.” In Les Bibliothèques
de la Révolution et du XIXe siècle, 1789–1914, ed. Dominique Varry. Vol. 3 of Histoire
des bibliothèques françaises, ed. André Vernet. Pp. 71–83. Paris: Promodis-Éditions du
Cercle de la Librairie, 1988–92.
——. “La Naissance de la Bibliothèque du Roi, 1490–1664.” In Les Bibliothèques sous
l’Ancien Régime, 1530–1789, ed. Claude Jolly. Vol. 2 of Histoire des bibliothèques fran-
çaises, ed. André Vernet. Pp. 77–83. Paris: Promodis-Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie,
1988–92.
Barbiche, Bernard. “Le Régime de l’édition.” In Le Livre conquérant: Du Moyen Âge au
milieu du XVIIe siècle. Vol. 1 of Histoire de l’édition française, ed. Henri-Jean Martin and
Roger Chartier. Pp. 367–77. Paris: Promodis, 1982–86.
Barbieri, Patrizio, and Ken F. Hurry. “Music Printers and Booksellers in Rome
(1583–1600), with New Documents on Coattino, Diani, Donangeli, Tornieri, and
Franzini.” Recercare 16 (2004): 69–112.
Beaulaigue, Barthélemy. Chansons nouvelles. Lyon: Granjon, 1559.
——. Mottez. Lyon: Granjon, 1559.
Beech, Beatrice. “Charlotte Guillard: A Sixteenth-Century Business Woman.”
Renaissance Quarterly 36 (1983): 345–67.
Bellingham, Bruce A. “The Bicinium in the Lutheran Latin Schools during the
Reformation Period.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1971.
Benfield, Judith. “Music in Verona, c. 1480–1530.” Ph.D. diss., University of
Cambridge, 1984.
Bent, Margaret. “Fact and Value in Contemporary Musical Scholarship.” Musical Times
127 (1986): 85–89.
Bergquist, Peter. “The Poems of Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Prophetiae Sibyllarum’ and their
Sources.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 32 (1979): 516–38.
Bernstein, Jane A. “Buyers and Collectors of Music Publications: Two Sixteenth-Century
Music Libraries Recovered.” In Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor
of Lewis Lockwood, ed. Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cummings. Pp. 21–33.
Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1997.
——. “The Chanson in England 1530–1640: A Study of Sources and Styles.” Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Berkeley, 1974.
——. “Financial Arrangements and the Role of Printer and Composer in
Sixteenth-Century Italian Music Printing.” Acta Musicologica 63 (1991): 39–56.
278 | b i b l i o g r a p h y
——. Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press, 1539–1572. New York: Oxford
——. Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice. New York and Oxford: Oxford
——, ed. The Sixteenth-Century Chanson. 30 vols. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.,
1987–95.
Bernstein, Lawrence F. “The Bibliography of Music in Conrad Gesner’s Pandectae (1548).”
Acta Musicologica 45 (1973): 119–63.
——. “The Cantus-Firmus Chansons of Tylman Susato.” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 22 (1969): 197–240.
——. “Claude Gervaise as Chanson Composer.” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 18 (1965): 359–81.
——. “French Duos in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century.” In Studies in Musicology
in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J. W. Hill. Pp. 43–87. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1980.
Bernstein, Lawrence F., and James Haar, eds. Il primo libro di madrigali italiani et canzoni
francese a due voci. Masters and Monuments of the Renaissance 1. New York: Broude
Brothers, 1980.
Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil
Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
Berrada, Tarek. “Music at Home: Spaces for Music in French Seventeenth-Century
Residential Architecture.” In The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy, ed.
Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti. Pp. 291–307. Oxford: Oxford University Press
for the British Academy, 2012.
Bettens, Olivier. “Chantez-vous français? Remarques curieuses sur le français chanté du
Moyen Âge à la période baroque, avec quelques considérations sur le latin chanté des
Français.” At http://virga.org, accessed 30 May 2014.
Bisaro, Xavier. Chanter toujours: Plain-chant et religion villageoise dans la France moderne
(XVIe–XIXe siècle). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010.
Blackburn, Bonnie J. “Canonic Conundrums: The Singer’s Petrucci.” Basler Jahrbuch für
Historische Musikpraxis 25 (2001): 53–69.
——. “Josquin’s Chansons: Ignored and Lost Sources.” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 29 (1976): 30–76.
——. “The Printing Contract for the Libro primo de musica de la salamandra (Rome,
1526).” Journal of Musicology 12 (1994): 345–56.
Blair, Ann. “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book.”
Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541–51.
Blockland de Montfort, Cornelius. Instruction methodique & fort facile pour apprendre la
musique practique. Geneva: Jean II de Tournes, 1587.
Bohanan, Donna. “The Education of Nobles in Seventeenth-Century Aix-en-Provence.”
Journal of Social History 20 (1987): 757–64.
Boni, Guillaume. Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac mis en musique à 3. 4. 5. et 6. parties par
G. Boni. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1582.
——. Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac (1582). Edited by Marie-Alexis Colin.
Tours: Centre de Musique Ancienne, 2000.
——. Motets (1573). Edited by Jeanice Brooks. Tours: Centre de Musique
Ancienne, 2000.
b i b l i o g r a p h y | 279
Boni, Guillaume. Sonetz chrestiens mis en musique à quatre parties par G. Boni de S. Flour
en Auvergne. Premier [–Second] livre. Edited by Simon Goulart. [Geneva]: [Jean Le
Royer], 1578–79.
——. Sonetz de P. de Ronsard, mis en musique à quatre parties . . . Premier livre. Paris: Le
Roy & Ballard, 1576.
——. Sonetz de P. de Ronsard mis en musique à quatre parties . . . Second livre. Paris: Le
Roy & Ballard, 1576.
Boorman, Stanley. “Early Music Printing: Working for a Specialized Market.” In
Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, ed.
Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim. Pp. 222–45. Newark, DE: University of
Delaware Press, 1986.
——. Ottaviano Petrucci: Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Bornstein, Andrea. Two-Part Italian Didactic Music: Printed Collections of the Renaissance
and Baroque, 1521–1744. 3 vols. Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2004.
Boucaut-Graille, Audrey. “L’Imprimeur et son conseiller musical: Les stratégies éditori
ales de Nicolas du Chemin (1549–1555).” Revue de musicologie 91 (2005): 5–25.
Boucher, Jacqueline. “Auger.” In Arlette Jouanna, Jacqueline Boucher, Dominique
Biloghi, and Guy Le Thiec, Histoire et dictionnaire des guerres de religion. Pp. 683–86.
Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998.
——. Société et mentalities autour du Henri III. 4 vols. Ph.D. diss., Université de Lille,
1977.
Bousquet, Robert E. “The Sixteenth-Century Quest for a Reformed Orthography: The
Alphabet of Honorat Rambaud.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 43
(1981): 545–66.
Bowen, Karen Lee. Christopher Plantin’s Books of Hours: Illustration and Production.
Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1997.
Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de. Recueil des Dames, poésies et tombeaux. Edited
by Etienne Vaucheret. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.
Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life. Vol. 1 of Civilization & Capitalism,
15th–18th Century. 3 vols. Translated by Siân Reynolds. London: Harper &
Row, 1982.
——. The Wheels of Commerce. Vol. 2 of Civilization & Capitalism, 15th–18th Century.
3 vols. Translated by Siân Reynolds. London: Harper & Row, 1986.
Brayman Hackel, Heidi. Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and
Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Brennan, Michael G. “Sir Charles Somerset’s Music Books (1622).” Music & Letters 74
(1993): 501–18.
Bridges, Thomas W. “The Publishing of Arcadelt’s First Book of Madrigals.” 2 vols.
Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1982.
Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne: Ensemble les Prieres & oraisons & les Letanies que l’on
chante és processions par les Eglises, Reveu & augmenté de plusieurs Hymnes, & Antiennes, le
tout mis en chants de Musique. Paris: Marc Locqueneulx, 1589.
Brobeck, John T. “Musical Patronage in the Royal Chapel of France under Francis
I (r. 1515–1547).” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1995): 187–239.
——. “Some ‘Liturgical Motets’ for the French Royal Court: A Reconsideration of Genre
in the Sixteenth-Century Motet.” Musica Disciplina 47 (1993): 123–57.
Brooks, Jeanice. “La Comtesse de Retz et l’air de cour des années 1570.” In Le Concert des
voix et des instruments à la Renaissance. Actes du XXXIVe Colloque International d’Études
Humanistes, Tours, CESR, 1–11 juillet, 1991, ed. Jean-Michel Vaccaro. Pp. 299–315. Paris:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1995.
——. Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000.
——. “Jean de Castro, the Pense Partbooks and Musical Culture in Sixteenth-Century
Lyons.” Early Music History 11 (1992): 91–149.
——. “Manuscripts of Jean de Castro in the Parisian Library of Justinien Pense.” Revue
belge de musicologie/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 50 (1996): 25–34.
——. “‘Ses amours et les miennes tout ensemble’: La structure cyclique du Premier Livre
de Anthoine de Bertrand.” Revue de musicologie 74 (1988): 201–20.
Brossard, Yolande de. La Collection Sébastien de Brossard, 1655–1730: Catalogue (Département
de la musique, Rés. Vm8. 20). Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1994.
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–22.
Brown, Howard Mayer. “Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories
of Imitation in the Renaissance.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 35
(1982): 1–48.
——. “The Mirror of Man’s Salvation: Music in Devotional Life about 1500.” Renaissance
Quarterly 43 (1990): 744–73.
——. Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400–1550. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
——. “Theory and Practice in the Sixteenth Century: Preliminary Notes on
Attaingnant’s Modally Ordered Chansonniers.” In Essays in Musicology: A Tribute
to Alvin Johnson, ed. Lewis Lockwood and Edward Roesner. Pp. 75–100.
Philadelphia: American Musicological Society, 1990.
Brown, Howard Mayer, and Richard Freedman, “Chanson,” §3. In Grove Music Online.
www.oxfordmusiconline.com, accessed 28 April 2011.
Brugnoli, Pierpaolo. “Nuovi documenti sul musico Bartolomeo Carteri.” In Vertemus.
Seconda serie di studi musicali e teatrali veronesi 2003, ed. Paolo Rigoli. Pp. 7–12.
Verona: Conservatorio Statale di Musica E. F. Dall’Abaco, 2003.
Bruster, Douglas. “The New Materialism in Renaissance Studies.” In Material Culture
and Cultural Materialisms, ed. Curtis Perry. Pp. 225–38. Arizona Studies in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance 5. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2001.
Buisson, Ferdinand. Repertoire des ouvrages pédagogiques du XVIe siècle. Paris: Imprimerie
nationale, 1886.
Burke, Peter. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano.
Cambridge: Polity Press; Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Canguilhem, Philippe. “Deux recueils inconnus de Pierre Attaingnant retrouvé à
Montauban.” Revue de musicologie 93 (2007): 469–81.
——. “Lorenzo Corsini’s ‘Libri di canzone’ and the Madrigal in Mid-Sixteenth-Century
Florence.” Early Music History 25 (2006): 1–57.
Cappliez, Charles. L’École dominicale de Valenciennes au seizième siècle. Geneva: Slatkine
Reprints, 1971.
Carter, Harry Graham, and H. D. L. Vervliet. Civilité Types. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966.
Carter, Tim. Music, Patronage, and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence. Aldershot,
Hampshire, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000.
——. “Music-Printing in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century
Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, Cristofano Marescotti, and Zanobi Pignoni.” Early
Music History 9 (1990): 27–72.
——. “Music-Selling in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence.” Music & Letters 70
(1989): 483–504.
——. “Printing the ‘New Music’.” In Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate van Orden with
an afterword by Roger Chartier. Pp. 3–37. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000.
Castagna, Paulo. “The Use of Music by the Jesuits in the Conversion of the Indigenous
Peoples of Brazil.” In The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John
W. O’Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy,
S.J. Pp. 641–58. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Castiglione, Baldassar. Le Courtisan, nouvellement traduict de langue ytalicque en françoys.
Translated by Jacques Colin. Paris: Jehan Longis and Vincent Sertenas, 1537.
Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of Reading in the West. Amherst
and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
Cavicchi, Camilla, and Philippe Vendrix, “L’Érudit et l’amateur: Collectionner la
musique à la Renaissance.” In Collectionner la musique: Histoires d’une passion, ed.
Herlin et al., pp. 25–54.
Cazaux, Christelle. La Musique à la cour de François Ier. Paris: École nationale des Chartes,
Programme “Ricercar,” 2002.
Cazeaux, Isabelle, and John T. Brobeck. “Sermisy, Claudin de.” In Grove Music Online,
www.oxfordmusiconline.com, accessed 25 November 2014.
Cerone, Pietro. El melopeo y maestro. Naples: Juan Bautista Gargano y Lucrecio
Nucci, 1613.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
Certon, Pierre. Institutoris Symphoniacorum puerorum . . . modulorum editio. Paris: Pierre
Attaingnant and Hubert Jullet, 1542.
Chandieu, Antoine de. Octonaires sur la vanité et inconstance du monde. Strasbourg: Bernard
Jobin, 1580.
Chanteau, M. F. de. “Collections lorraines aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles.” Mémoires de la
Société d’Archéologie de Lorrain, series 3, vol. 8 (1880): 281–358.
Chapman, Catherine Weeks. “Andrea Antico.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1964.
——. “Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music Owned by Ferdinand Columbus.”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 21 (1968): 34–84.
Chappuys, Claude. Discours de la court. Paris: Roffet, 1543.
Chardavoine, Jean. Le Recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons en forme de voix de ville.
Paris: Claude Micard, 1576.
Charon-Parent, Annie. “Les Grandes Collections du XVIe siècle.” In Les Bibliothèques
sous l’Ancien Régime, 1530–1789, ed. Claude Jolly. Vol. 2 of Histoire des biblio-
thèques françaises, ed. André Vernet. Pp. 85–99. Paris: Promodis-Éditions du
Cercle de la Librairie, 1988–92.
Charteris, Richard. Johann Georg von Werdenstein (1542–1608): A Major Collector of Early
Music Prints. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2006.
——. “A Neglected Anthology of Sacred Vocal Music Dating from the Sixteenth
Century.” Music & Letters 90 (2009): 1–34.
——. “Newly Identified Music Editions from the Private Library of Martin Luther.” In
Monte Artium: Journal of the Royal Library of Belgium 6 (2013): 41–96.
Chartier, Roger. Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play.
Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
——. “Communities of Readers.” In The Order of Books, 1–23.
——. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
——. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
——. “From Texts to Manners: A Concept and its Books. Civilité between Aristocratic
Distinction and Popular Appropriation.” In The Cultural Uses of Print, 71–109.
——. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and
Eighteenth Centuries. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994.
——. “Pamphlets et gazettes du début du XVIIe siècle à la Fronde.” In Le Livre con-
quérant: Du Moyen Âge au milieu du XVIIe siècle. Vol. 1 of Histoire de l’édition française,
ed. Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier. Pp. 405–25. Paris: Promodis, 1982–86.
——. Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe. The Panizzi Lectures 1998.
London: British Library, 1999.
Chartier, Roger, Dominique Julia, and Marie-Madeleine Compère. L’Éducation en France
du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1976.
Christensen, Thomas. “Fragile Texts, Hidden Theory.” Musica Humana 3 (2011): 117–
207. Also available in idem., The Work of Music Theory: Selected Essays. Pp. 55–73.
Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014.
Clarke, Jack A. Gabriel Naudé, 1600–1653. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970.
Cohen, Albert. “Musicians, Amateurs and Collectors: Early French Auction Catalogues
as Musical Sources.” Music & Letters 81 (2000): 1–12.
Colin, Marie-Alexis. “Les Quatrains de Guy Du Faur de Pibrac en Musique.” In
L’Humanisme à Toulouse (1480–1596), Actes du colloque international de Toulouse, mai
2004, ed. Nathalie Dauvois. Pp. 535–54. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006.
Colin, Marie-Alexis, and Frank Dobbins, “Maillard [Maillart], Jean,” In Grove Music
Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com, accessed 6 August 2010.
Compère, Marie-Madeleine, and Dominique Julia. Les Collèges français, 16e–18e siècles.
3 vols. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1984–2002.
Condomirio, Antonio. Cantiques du Sr. de Maisonfleur. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1582.
Connat, M. “Mort et Testament de Remy Belleau.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et
Renaissance 6 (1945): 328–56.
Constant, Jean-Marie. “Un groupe social ouvert et dynamique: La noblesse provinciale de
l’ouest au XVIe siècle.” In Noël Du Fail écrivain, ed. Catherine Magnien-Simonin. Pp.
11–22. Paris: Vrin, 1991.
Coppens, Christian, ed. Printers and Readers in the Sixteenth Century, including the
Proceedings from the Colloquium Organized by the Centre for European Culture, 9 June
2000. Turnhout and Brussels: Brepols and Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van
België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2005.
Corrozet, Gilles. Les Blasons domestiques par Gilles Corrozet. Paris: Société des Bibliophiles
françois, 1865.
Cossard, Jacques. Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter.
Paris: l’auteur, 1633.
Costeley, Guillaume. Guillaume Costeley, Selected Chansons. Edited by Jane A. Bernstein.
The Sixteenth-Century Chanson 8. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1989.
——. Musique de Guillaume Costeley. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1570.
Coyssard, Michel. Les Hymnes sacrez et Odes spirituelles pour chanter devant, et après la leçon
du catéchisme. Antwerp: J. Trognese, 1600.
——. Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz pour chanter avecque la Doctrine chresti-
enne. Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1592.
——. Sommaire de la Doctrine chrestienne, mis en vers François. Avec les Hymnes, & Odes spiri-
tuelles, qu’on chante devant, & après la leçon d’icelle. Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1608.
——. Traicté du profit que toute personne tire de chanter en la Doctrine Chrestienne, & ailleurs,
les Hymnes, & Chansons spirituelles en vulgaire: & du Mal qu’apportent les Lascives, &
Heretiques. Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1608.
Criscuola de Laix, Esther. “‘Venus’s Cupid Commands Me to Sing’: Jacob Praetorius and
Wedding Motets in Hamburg.” Musica Disciplina 55 (2010): 219–90.
Crook, David. Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation Magnificats for Counter-Reformation Munich.
Culley, Thomas. “Musical Activity in Some Sixteenth-Century Jesuit Colleges, with
Special Reference to the Venerable English College in Rome from 1579 to 1589.”
Analecta Musicologica 19 (1980): 1–29.
Cumming, Julie E. “From Chapel Choirbook to Print Partbook and Back Again.”
In Cappelle musicali fra Corte, Stato e Chiesa nell’italia del Rinascimento: Atti
del Convegno internazionale: Camaiore, 21–23 ottobre 2005, ed. Franco Piperno,
Gabriella Biagi Ravenni, and Andrea Chegai. Pp. 373–403. Florence: Olschki,
2007.
——. The Motet in the Age of Du Fay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
——. “Petrucci’s Publics for the First Motet Prints.” In Making Publics in Early Modern
Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin. Pp.
96–122. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Cummings, Anthony M. “Toward an Interpretation of the Sixteenth-Century Motet.”
Cusick, Suzanne G. Valerio Dorico: Music Printer in Sixteenth-Century Rome. Ann Arbor,
MI: UMI Research Press, 1981.
Dainville, François de. “Librairies d’écoliers toulousains à la fin du XVIme siècle.”
Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 9 (1947): 129–40.
Dalbanne, Claude. “Robert Granjon, imprimeur de musique.” Gutenberg Jahrbuch 14
(1939): 226–32.
Dane, Joseph A. The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographic
Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
——. What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books. Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2012.
Darnton, Robert. The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. Revised edition.
New York: Norton, 1990.
Daschner, Hubert. Die gedruckten mehrstimmigen Chansons von 1500–1600: Literarische
Quellen und Bibliographie. Ph.D. diss., Universität Bonn, 1958.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750.
New York: Zone Books, 1998.
“Database of Bookbindings.” British Library, www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings/,
accessed 14 July 2014.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford
de Grazia, Margreta, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Subject and Object in
Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Della Casa, Giovanni. Le Galatee, premierement composé en Italien par J. de la Case, & depuis
mis en François, Latin, & Espagnol par divers auteurs. Lyon: Jean II de Tournes, 1598.
——. Trattato de costumi, opera di M. Giovanni della Casa. Lyon: Pierre Roussin et
Alexandre Marsilius, 1573.
Dent, John. The Quest for Nonsuch. London: Hutchinson, 1962.
Desan, Philippe, and Kate van Orden, “De la chanson à l’ode: Musique et poésie sous le
mécénat du cardinal Charles de Lorraine.” In Le Mécénat et l’influence des Guises, ed.
Yvonne Bellenger. Pp. 463–87. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996.
Desgraves, Louis. Les Haultin (1571–1623). Geneva: Droz, 1960.
——. “L’Imprimeur Louis Rabier d’Orléans en Béarn, 1563–1606.” In De l’histoire de la
Brie à l’histoire des Réformés: Mélanges offerts au chanoine Michel Veissière, ed. M. Bardon
et al. Pp. 101–9. Paris: Fédération des Sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris
et de l’Ile-de-France, 1993.
Desmet, Marc. “La Paraphrase des psaumes de Philippe Desportes et ses différentes ver-
sions musicales: Contribution à l’histoire du psautier français de Henri IV et de Louis
XIII (1593–1643).” 4 vols. Ph.D. diss., Université de Tours, 1994.
Dhotel, Jean-Claude. Les Origines du catéchisme moderne d’après les premiers manuels imprimés
en France. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967.
Dickenson, Donald C. Henry E. Huntington’s Library of Libraries. San Marino,
CA: Huntington Library, 1995.
Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. Paris: J. P. Coignard, 1694.
Diefendorf, Barbara B. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Diehl, George Karl. “The Partbooks of a Renaissance Merchant: Cambrai, Bibliothèque
municipale, MSS 125–128.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1974.
Dillon, Emma. Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel. Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Dobbins, Frank. Music in Renaissance Lyons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Doni, Anton Francesco. La Libraria del Doni fiorentino. Nella quale sono scritti tutti gl’autori
vulgari con cento discorsi sopra quelli. Tutte le traduttioni fatte dall’altre lingue, nella nostra &
una tavola generalmente come si costuma fra librari. Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1550.
Doucet, Robert. Les Bibliothèques parisiennes au XVIe siècle. Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1956.
Dowling, Margaret. “The Printing of John Dowland’s Second Booke of Songs or Ayres.” The
Library, 4th series, 12 (1932): 365–80.
Du Bellay, Joachim. La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse & L’olive (Paris, 1549).
Edited by Jean-Charles Monferran and Ernesta Caldarini. Geneva: Droz, 2007.
Dumont, Sandrine. “Choirboys and Vicaires in the Maîtrise of Cambrai: A Socio-
anthropological Study (1550–1670).” In Young Choristers, 650–1700, ed. Susan
Boynton and Eric Rice. Pp. 146–62. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008.
Durand, H.-A. Review of Antoine Auda, Barthélémy Beaulaigue, poète et musicien prodige.
Provence historique 8 (1957–58): 176.
Du Verdier, Antoine. La Bibliotheque d’Antoine Du Verdier, Seigneur de Vauprivas: Contenant
le Catalogue de tous ceux qui ont escrit, ou traduict en François, et autres Dialectes de ce
Royaume. Lyon: Barthélémy Honorat, 1585.
Edler, Florence. “Cost Accounting in the Sixteenth Century: The Books of Account of
Christopher Plantin, Antwerp, Printer and Publisher.” Accounting Review 12 (1937): 226–37.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West
from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2011.
——. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations
in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols in 1. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1979.
——. “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited.” American Historical Review 107
(2002): 87–105, 126–28.
Erasmus, Desiderius. De civilitate morum puerilium libellus. Basel, 1530.
——. Déclamation contenant le manière de bien instruire les enfants dès leur commencement, avec
un petit traité de la civilité puérile et honnête, le tout translaté nouvellement de latin en fran-
çais. Translated by Pierre Saliat. Paris: Simon de Colines, 1537.
——. La Civilité puérile, précédé d’une notice sur les livres de civilité depuis le XVIe siècle par
Alcide Bonneau. Foreword by Philippe Ariès. Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1977.
——. On Good Manners for Boys / De civilitate. Translated and annotated by Brian McGregor.
In Literary and Educational Writings 3. Edited by J. Kelley Sowards. The Collected
Works of Erasmus, an Edition in English of the Correspondence and Major Writings 25.
Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
——. The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek: A Dialogue / De recta latini graecique ser-
monis pronuntiatione dialogus. Translated and annotated by Maurice Pope. In Literary
and Educational Writings 4. Edited by J. Kelley Sowards. The Collected Works of
Erasmus, an Edition in English of the Correspondence and Major Writings 26.
Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
Erviti, Manuel Gustavo. “The Motet as a Representation of Sociocultural Value Circa
1500.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997.
Faber, Heinrich. Compendiolum musicae pro incipientibus. Brunswick, 1548.
Fabris, Dinko, “Les Voyages des livres de musique.” In Collectionner la musique: Histoires
d’une passion, ed. Herlin et al., pp. 11–21.
Fahy, Conor. “Royal-Paper Copies of Aldine Editions, 1494–1550.” Studies in Bibliography
57 (2004–2005): 85–113.
Fallows, David. “The Early History of the Tenorlied and its Ensembles.” In Le Concert des
voix et des instruments à la Renaissance. Actes du XXXIVe Colloque International d’Études
Humanistes, Tours, CESR, 1–11 juillet, 1991, ed. Jean-Michel Vaccaro. Pp. 199–211.
Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1995.
——. “Petrucci’s Canti Volumes: Scope and Repertory.” Basler Jahrbuch für Historische
Musikpraxis 25 (2001): 39–52.
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing,
1450–1800. Translated by David Gerard. London and New York: Verso, 1976.
Feldman, Martha. “Authors and Anonyms: Recovering the Anonymous Subject in
Cinquecento Vernacular Objects.” In Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate van
Orden with an afterword by Roger Chartier. Pp. 163–99. New York: Garland
Publishing Inc., 2000.
——. City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1995.
Fenlon, Iain. Cambridge Music Manuscripts, 900–1700. Cambridge and
——. “Hernando Colón, Heinrich Glarean and Others: Early Sixteenth-Century
Collections of Printed Music.” In Collectionner la musique: Histoires d’une passion, ed.
Herlin et al., pp. 55–69.
——. “Il foglio volante editoriale dei Tini, circa il 1596.” Rivista italiana di musicologia 12
(1977): 231–51.
——. Music, Print, and Culture in Early Sixteenth-Century Italy. The Panizzi Lectures
1994. London: British Library, 1995.
——. “Music Printing and the Book Trade in Late-Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth-
Century Iberia.” In Music and the Book Trade from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century,
ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote. Pp. 1–24. New Castle and
London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2008.
Fenlon, Iain, and Inga Mai Groote. “Heinrich Glarean’s Books.” In Heinrich Glarean’s
Books: The Intellectual World of a Sixteenth-Century Musical Humanist, ed. Iain Fenlon
and Inga Mai Groote. Pp. 303–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Ferrier, Michel. Quarante et neuf psalmes de David . . . à trois parties. Lyon: Robert
Granjon, 1559.
Fétis, François-Joseph. Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de F. J. Fétis acquise par l’État Belge.
Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1877.
Finkelstein, David, and Alistair McCleery, eds. The Book History Reader. London and
New York: Routledge, 2002.
Finscher, Ludwig. “Attaingnantdrucke aus einer schlesischen Adelsbibliothek.” In
Festschrift Klaus Hortschansky zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Axel Beer and Laurenz Lütteken.
Pp. 33–42. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1995.
Foot, Mirjam M. Bookbinders at Work: Their Roles and Methods. London: British
Library, 2006.
Forney, Kristine K. “A Gift of Madrigals and Chansons: The Winchester Part Books and the
Courtship of Elizabeth I by Erik XIV of Sweden.” Journal of Musicology 17 (1999): 50–75.
——. “‘Nymphes gayes en abry du Laurier’: Music Instruction for the Bourgeois
Woman.” Musica Disciplina 49 (1995): 151–87.
Fouqueray, Henri. Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus en France des origines à la suppression,
1528–1762. 5 vols. Paris: A. Picard et Fils, 1910–25.
Freedman, Richard. The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and their Protestant Listeners: Music,
Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France. Eastman Studies in Music.
Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001.
——. “‘Pastourelle jolie’: The Chanson at the Court of Lorraine, c. 1500.” Journal of the
Royal Musical Association 116 (1991): 161–200.
Freedman, Richard. “The Renaissance Chanson Goes Digital: digitalduchemin.org.”
Early Music 42 (2014): 567–78.
Freeman, Daniel E. “On the Origins of the Pater noster–Ave Maria of Josquin des Prez.”
Musica Disciplina 45 (1991): 169–219.
Furet, François, and Jacques Ozouf. Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin
to Jules Ferry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris: La Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme, 1982.
Gardane, Antonio. Canzoni francese a due voce. Venice: Gardane, 1539.
Gaullieur, Ernest. Histoire du collège de Guyenne d’après un grand nombre de documents inédits.
Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1874.
Gehl, Paul F. “‘Mancha uno alfabeto intero”: Recording Defective Book Shipments in
Counter-Reformation Florence.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 93
(1999): 316–58.
Gilmont, Jean-François. “Protestant Reformations and Reading.” In A History of Reading
in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier. Pp. 213–37. Amherst and
Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
——. The Reformation and the Book. Translated by Karin Maag. Aldershot, Hants, and
Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998.
Gindron, François. Les Proverbes de Salomon, ensemble l’Ecclesiaste. Lausanne: Jean
Rivery, 1556.
Gingerich, Owen. An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543
and Basel, 1566). Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.
Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1980.
Giteau, Françoise. “Inventaire du libraire Etienne Thoulouze.” Bulletin et Mémoires de la
Société archéologique de Bordeaux 61 (1962): 47–82.
Göhler, Albert. Verzeichnis der in den Frankfurter und Leipziger Messkatalogen der Jahre 1564
bis 1759 angezeigten Musikalien. Hilversum: Knuf, 1965.
Goldberg, Jonathan. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Gondouyn, Gilbert de. Quatrains spirituels et moraux extraicts des sainctes et divines sentences
du très sage roy Salomon, servans d’instruction à toutes personnes. Paris: Bonfons, 1587.
Goudimel, Claude. Les Cent cinquante pseaumes de David nouvellement mis en Musique à qua-
tre parties. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1564.
Grafton, Anthony. “How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?” American Historical
Review 107 (2002): 84–86.
——. “The Humanist as Reader.” In A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo
Cavallo and Roger Chartier. Pp. 179–212. Amherst and Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1999.
——. “Quattrocento Humanism and Classical Scholarship.” In Humanism and the
Disciplines. Vol. 3 of Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert
Rabil, Jr. Pp. 23–66. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
Green, Eugène. La Parole baroque: Essai. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001.
Green, Ian M. The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740.
Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Greg, Walter Wilson. Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Stage Plots,
Actors’ Parts, Prompt Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.
Griffiths, John. “The Printing of Instrumental Music in Sixteenth-Century Spain.”
Revista de Musicología 16 (1993): 3309–21.
Groote, Inga M. “Heinrich Glarean Reading and Editing Boethius.” Acta Musicologica 80
(2008): 215–29.
Gross, Anne Tatnall. “A Musicological Puzzle: Scrambled Editions of the Phalèse Livre
Septième in Two London Libraries.” Fontes Artis Musicae 40 (1993): 283–313.
Guazzo, Stefano. La Civile Conversation du S. Estienne Guazzo gentilhomme Monferradois,
divisee en quatre livres. Translated by François de Belleforest. Paris: Cavellat, 1579.
Guillo, Laurent. “L’Édition musicale en France au XVIe siècle: État de la recherche.”
Fontes Artis Musicae 48 (2001): 145–55.
——. Les Éditions musicales de la Renaissance lyonnaise. Paris: Klincksieck, 1991.
——. “Les Livres de musique de Hugues Picardet (1560–1641), procureur général au
Parlement de Bourgogne.” Bulletin du Bibliophile 1 (2001): 58–85.
——. “Notes sur la librairie musicale à Lyon et à Genève au XVIIe siècle.” Fontes Artis
Musicae 36 (1989): 116–35.
——. Pierre I Ballard et Robert III Ballard: Imprimeurs du roy pour la musique, 1599–1673.
2 vols. Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2003.
Gutton, Jean-Pierre. La Sociabilité villageoise dans l’ancienne France: Solidarités et voisinages
du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1979.
Haar, James. “Arcadelt and the Frottola: The Italianate Chanson c. 1550.” In Res musicae:
Essays in Honor of James Worrell Pruett, ed. Paul Laird and Craig Russell. Pp. 97–109.
Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2001.
——. “The Libraria of Antonfrancesco Doni.” Music Disciplina 24 (1970): 101–23.
——. “Petrucci as Bookman.” In Venezia 1501, Petrucci e la stampa musicale: Atti del convegno
internazionale di studi, Venezia, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, 10–13 ottobre 2001, ed. Giulio
Cattin and Patrizia Dalla Vecchia. Pp. 155–74. Venice: Fondazione Levi, 2005.
Habert, Pierre. Le Chemin de bien vivre et miroir de vertu, Contenant plusieurs belles his-
toires, & sentences moralles, par quatrains & distiques, le tout par Alphabet, Avec le Stille
de composer toutes sortes de lettres missives, quittances & promesses. La ponctuation & accent
de la langue Françoise. L’instruction & secrets de l’art d’escripture. Propre pour tous peres
de familles, Escrivains, & precepteurs de la Jeunesse. Reveu & augmenté de nouveau par
l’Autheur. Paris: Claude Micard, 1572.
——. Le Moyen de promptement et facilement apprendre en lettre françoise, à bien lire, prononcer
et escrire. Paris: Granjon, 1558.
Handy, Isabelle. Musiciens au temps des derniers Valois (1547–1589). Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2008.
Harrison, Frank Ll. Music in Medieval Britain. 2nd ed. London: Routledge and
Paul, 1963.
Heartz, Daniel. “A New Attaingnant Book and the Beginnings of French Music
Printing.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 14 (1961): 9–23.
——. “Au pres de vous—Claudin’s Chanson and the Commerce of Publishers’
Arrangements.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 24 (1971): 193–225.
——. “Parisian Music Publishing under Henry II: A Propos of Four Recently Discovered
Guitar Books.” Musical Quarterly 46 (1960): 448–67.
Heartz, Daniel. Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music: A Historical Study and
Bibliographical Catalogue. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.
——. “Voix de ville: Between Humanist Ideals and Musical Realities.” In Words and
Music: The Scholar’s View, ed. Laurence Berman. Pp. 115–35. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1972.
Herlin, Denis. Catalogue du fonds musical de la Bibliothèque de Versailles. Paris: Société
Française de Musicologie and Klincksieck, 1995.
Herlin, Denis, Catherine Massip, Jean Duron, and Dinko Fabris, eds. Collectionner la
musique: Histoires d’une passion. Collectionner la Musique 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010.
——, Catherine Massip, and Jean Duron, eds. Collectionner la musique: Au cœur de
l’interprétation. Collectionner la Musique 2. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012.
Héroard, Jean. Journal. Edited by Madeleine Foisil. 2 vols. Paris: Fayard, 1989.
Hettrick, William E. “Fugger.” In Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com,
accessed 14 July 2014.
Higman, Francis, Yann Morvant, and Marc Vial. “A Bookseller’s World: The Inventaire
of Vincent Réal.” In The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book, ed. Andrew
Pettegree, Paul Nelles, and Philip Conner. Pp. 303–18. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
His, Isabelle. Claude Le Jeune (v. 1530–1600): Un compositeur entre Renaissance et Baroque.
Arles: Actes Sud, 2000.
——. “Das Dodecacorde von Claude Le Jeune (1598) im Kontext der französischen
Rezeption der Traktate von Glarean und Zarlino.” Trossinger Jahrbuch für
Renaissancemusik 3 (2005): 237–62.
——. “Plantin et l’organisation modale des Melanges de Claude Le Jeune (1585).”
In Music Fragments and Manuscripts in the Low Countries; Alta capella; Music
Printing in Antwerp and Europe in the 16th Century, ed. Eugeen Schreurs and Henri
Vanhulst. Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation 2. Pp. 353–65. Leuven: Alamire,
1997.
Holt, Mack P. The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
Honegger, Marc. “L’Estocart, Paschal de.” In Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusicon-
line.com, accessed 12 January 2014.
Horae Eboracenses. The Prymer of Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, according to the Use of the
Illustrious Church of York with Other Devotions as They were Used by the Lay-Folk in the
Northern Province in the XVth and XVIth Centuries. Durham: Andrews & Co. and
London: Bernard Quaritch, 1920.
Howsam, Leslie. Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print
Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Huchon, Mireille. Louise Labé: Une créature de papier. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2006.
Huppert, George. Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in
Renaissance France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
——. Public Schools in Renaissance France. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1984.
Imparare, leggere, comprare musica nell’Europa del Rinascimento, ed. Paolo Cecchi and Iain
Fenlon. Special issue of Saggiatore musicale 18 (2011): 173–244.
Jambe de Fer, Philibert. Les XXII octonnaires du psalme CXIX de David traduicts par Jean
Poictevin. Lyon, 1561.
Jardine, Lisa, and Anthony Grafton. “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read
His Livy.” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78.
Jayne, Sears, and Francis R. Johnson, eds. The Lumley Library—The Catalogue of 1609.
London: The Trustees of the British Museum, 1956.
Jeanneret, Michel. Poésie et tradition biblique au XVIe siècle. Paris: Librairie José
Corti, 1969.
Jimenes, Rémi. Les Caractères de civilité, typographie et calligraphie sous l’Ancien Régime,
France, XVIe–XIXe siècles. Reillanne: Atelier Perrousseaux, 2011.
Johns, Adrian. “How to Acknowledge a Revolution.” American Historical Review 107
(2002): 106–25.
——. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998.
Johnson, A. F. “The Italic Types of Robert Granjon.” The Library, 4th series, 21
(1940–41): 291–308.
Jolly, Claude. “Naissance de la ‘science’ des bibliothèques.” In Les Bibliothèques sous
l’Ancien Régime, 1530–1789, ed. Claude Jolly. Vol. 2 of Histoire des bibliothèques fran-
çaises, ed. André Vernet. Pp. 381–85. Paris: Promodis, 1988–92.
Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of
Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Jones, Margaret. “Alfabeto Tablature Prints and their Readers.” Unpublished paper,
University of California, Berkeley, 2011.
Jouanna, Arlette, Jacqueline Boucher, Dominique Biloghi, and Guy Le Thiec, Histoire et
dictionnaire des guerres de religion. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998.
Judd, Cristle Collins. Reading Renaissance Music Theory: Hearing with the Eyes.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Julia, Dominique. “Reading and the Counter-Reformation.” In A History of Reading
in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier. Pp. 238–68. Amherst and
Jurgens, Madeleine. La Musique au XVIe siècle: Minutes de notaire Jean Chazerets de 1577 à
1599, Liasses I. Unpublished typescript.
Kast, Paul. “Die Musikdrucke des Kataloges Giunta von 1604.” Analecta Musicologica 2
(1965): 41–71.
Kellman, Herbert. “Josquin and the Courts of the Netherlands and France: The
Evidence of the Sources.” In Josquin des Prez, Proceedings of the International
Josquin Festival-Conference. New York, 1971, ed. Edward E. Lowinsky in col-
laboration with Bonnie J. Blackburn. Pp. 181–216. London: Oxford University
Press, 1976.
Kellman, Herbert, ed. Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music,
1400–1550. 5 vols. Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology and
Hänssler-Verlag, 1979–88.
Kelly, Thomas Forrest. Capturing Music: The Story of Notation. New York: Norton, 2015.
Kennedy, T. Frank. “Jesuits and Music: Reconsidering the Early Years.” Studi musicali 17
(1988): 71–100.
——. “Some Unusual Genres of Sacred Music in the Early Modern Period: The
Catechism as a Musical Event in the Late Renaissance—Jesuits and ‘Our Way of
Proceeding’.” In Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J.,
ed. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel. Pp. 266–79. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2001.
Kerman, Joseph. Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
King, Alec Hyatt. Printed Music in the British Museum: An Account of the Collections, the
Catalogues, and their Formation, up to 1920. London: C. Bingley and New York:
K. G. Saur, 1979.
King, Alec Hyatt, and O. W. Neighbour. “Printed Music from the Collection of Alfred
Cortot.” British Museum Quarterly, 31 (1966): 8–16.
Kirkendale, Warren. Emilio de’ Cavalieri ‘Gentiluomo romano’: His Life and Letters, his
Role as Superintendent to all the Arts at the Medici Court, and his Musical Compositions.
Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2001.
Kmetz, John. Die Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Basel: Katalog der
Musikhandschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts. Quellenkritische und historische
Untersuchung. Verlag der Universitätsbibliothek Basel, 1988.
——. “Petrucci’s Alphabet Series: The ABC’s of Music, Memory, and Marketing.” Basler
Jahrbuch für Historische Musikpraxis 25 (2001): 127–42.
——. “The Piperinus-Amerbach Partbooks: Six Months of Music Lessons in
Renaissance Basle.” In Music in the German Renaissance, ed. John Kmetz. Pp. 215–34.
——. The Sixteenth-Century Basel Songbooks: Origins, Contents, Contexts. Bern: Verlag Paul
Haupt, 1995.
Knecht, R. J. Catherine de’ Medici. London and New York: Longman, 1998.
Knighton, Tess. “La música en la casa y capilla del príncipe Felipe (1543–56): Modelos y
contextos.” In Aspectos de la cultura musical en la Corte de Felipe II, ed. L. Robledo et al.
Pp. 35–97. Madrid: Alpuerto, 2000.
——. “Petrucci’s Books in Early Sixteenth-Century Spain.” In Venezia 1501, Petrucci e
la stampa musicale: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia, Palazzo Giustinian
Lolin, 10–13 ottobre 2001, ed. Giulio Cattin and Patrizia Dalla Vecchia. Pp. 623–42.
Venice: Fondazione Levi, 2005.
Krummel, D. W. “Oblong Format in Early Music Books.” The Library, series 5, 36
(1971): 312–24.
Krummel, D. W. and Stanley Sadie, eds. Music Printing and Publishing. New York:
Norton, 1990.
Labarre, Albert. Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise du seizième siècle. Paris: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts,
1971.
La Civilité puerile & honneste pour l’instruction des enfans. En laquelle est mise au commencement
la maniere d’apprendre à bien lire, prononcer, & escrire. Reveuë, corrigée, & augmentée des
Quatrain du Sieur de Pibrac. Troyes: Nicolas Oudot, 1649.
Lacombe, Paul. Livres d’heures imprimés au XVe et au XVIe siècle conservés dans les biblio-
thèques publiques de Paris. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1907.
La Croix du Maine, François de. Premier volume de la bibliotheque du sieur de la Croix du
Maine. Qui est un catalogue general de toutes sortes d’Autheurs, qui ont escrit en François
depuis cinq cents ans & plus, jusques à ce jourd’huy: avec trois mille qui sont compris en cet
oeuvre, ensemble un recit de leurs compositions, tant imprimees qu’autrement. Dedié et presenté
au roy. Sur le fin de ce livre se voyent les desseins & projects dudit sieur de la CROIX, lesquels
il presenta au Roy l’an 1583 pour dresser une Bibliotheque parfaite & accomplie en toutes
sortes. . . . Paris: Abel l’Angelier, 1584.
Lafitte, Marie-Pierre, and Fabienne Le Bars. Reliures royales de la Renaissance: La librai-
rie de Fontainebleau, 1544–1570. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1999.
Lamla, Michael H. “Musical Canons on Artistic Prints from the 16th to the 18th
Centuries.” In Music Fragments and Manuscripts in the Low Countries; Alta Capella;
Music Printing in Antwerp and Europe in the 16th Century, ed. Eugeen Schreurs and
Henri Vanhulst. Yearbook of the Alamire Foundation 2. Pp. 479–510. Leuven:
Alamire, 1997.
Landau, David, and Peter Parshall. The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1994.
La Noue, François de. Discours politiques et militaires (1587). Edited by F. E. Sutcliffe.
Geneva: Droz, 1967.
La Primaudaye, Pierre de. Académie françoise. 4th ed. Lyon: Jean Veirat, 1591.
——. Quatrains du vray heur. Blois: C. de Montr’oeil and J. Richer, 1589.
——. Suite de l’académie françoise. Paris: Chadiere, 1580.
Lassus, Orlande de. Le thresor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus, Prince des musiciens de nostre
temps, contenant ses chansons françoises, italiennes, & latines, à quatre, cinq, & six parties.
3rd ed. Cologne: Paul Marceau, 1594.
——. Magnum Opus Musicum. Munich: Nicolai Henrici, 1604.
——. Mellange d’Orlande de Lassus, contenant plusieurs chansons, tant en vers latins qu’en ryme
francoyse a quatre, cinq, six, huit, dix parties. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1570.
——. Patrocinium musices . . . cantionum . . . prima pars. Munich: Adam Berg, 1573.
Launay, Denise. La Musique religieuse en France du Concile de Trente à 1804. Paris: Société
Française de Musicologie–Éditions Klincksieck, 1993.
Lauze, François de. Apologie de la Danse et la parfaicte methode de l’enseigner tant aux
Cavaliers qu’aux dames. 1623.
Lehoux, Françoise. Gaston Olivier, aumônier du roi Henri II (1552): Bibliothèque parisienne et
mobilier du XVIe siècle. Paris: self-published, 1957.
Le Jeune, Claude. Octonaires de la vanité et inconstance du monde. Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1606.
——. Le Printans. Paris: Veuve Robert Ballard et Pierre Ballard, 1603.
Le Maistre, Mattheus. Catechesis numeris musicis inclusa (Nuremberg, 1559). Edited by
Donald Gresch as Catechesis and Gesenge. Recent Researches in the Music of the
Renaissance 39. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1982.
[Le Roy, Adrian]. Traicté de musique contenant une theorique succincte pour methodiquement pra-
tiquer la composition. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1583.
L’Estocart, Paschal de. Cent vingt et six quatrains du Sieur de Pibrac . . . de nouveau mis en
musique à deux, trois, quatre, cinq et six parties par Paschal de l’Estocart. Lyon: Barthélemy
Vincent, 1582.
——. Premier [-Second] livre des octonaires de la vanité du monde. Geneva: Jean II de Laon pour
Barthélemy Vincent, 1582.
Lesure, François, and Frayda B. Lindemann. “The Music Department of the Bibliothèque
nationale, Paris.” Music Library Association Notes, series 2, 35 (1978): 251–68.
Lesure, François, and Geneviève Thibault, Bibliographie des Éditions d’Adrian Le Roy et
Robert Ballard (1551–1598). Publications de la Société Française de Musicologie, 2nd
series, vol. 9. Paris: Société Française de Musicologie, 1955.
Lesure, François, and Geneviève Thibault. “Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées
par Nicolas du Chemin (1549–1576).” Annales musicologiques 1 (1953): 269–373.
Leuchtmann, Horst. Orlando di Lasso: Sein Leben (vol. 1), Briefe (vol. 2). Wiesbaden: Breitkopf
& Härtel, 1976–77.
Le vray discours des grandes processions qui se font depuis les frontires [sic] d’Allemagne jusques à la
France, dont jamais n’en fut faicte de semblable, & comme plus amplement vous sera monstré dans
le discours. Paris: no publisher, 1583.
Lewis, Mary S. Antonio Gardano, Venetian Music Printer, 1538–1569: A Descriptive Bibliography
and Historical Study. 3 vols. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1988–2005.
——. “The Italian Madrigal in Germany: A New Assessment of its Early
Reception.” In Uno gentile et subtile ingenio: Studies of Renaissance
Music in Honour of Bonnie J. Blackburn. Epitome musical. Pp. 637–48.
Turnhout: Brepols, 2009.
——. “The Printed Music Book in Context: Observations on some Sixteenth-Century
Editions,” Music Library Association Notes, series 2, 46 (1990): 899–918.
Licino, Agostino. Secondo libro di duo cromatici. Venice: Gardane, 1546.
Loach, Donald Glenn. “Aegidius Tschudi’s Songbook (St. Gall MS 463): A Humanistic
Document from the Circle of Heinrich Glarean.” Ph.D. diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 1969.
Lorenz, Ralph. “Canon as a Pedagogical Tool: Applications from Sixteenth-Century
Wittenberg.” Indiana Theory Review 16 (1995): 83–104.
Love, Harold. The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century
England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, [1998].
Macé, Benedic, and Laurens Dandin. Instruction pour apprendre a chanter a quatre parties,
selon le Plain chant, les Pseaumes, & Cantiques. Caen: Benedic Macé, 1582.
Magny, Olivier de. Les Odes d’Olivier de Magny. Edited by Prosper Blanchemain.
Lyon: Scheuring, 1876.
Mandrou, Robert. De la culture populaire aux 17 e et 18e siècles. Paris: Éditions Imago, 1985.
Marenzio Online Digital Edition. Mauro Calcagno, Giuseppe Gerbino, and Laurent
Pugin, directors. www.marenzio.org.
Markham, Michael. “Caccini’s Stages: Identity and Performance Space in the Late
Cinquecento Court.” In The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy, ed. Deborah
Howard and Laura Moretti. Pp. 195–210. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the
British Academy, 2012.
——. “Caccini’s Two Bodies: Problems of Text and Space in Early-Baroque Monody.” Gli
spazi della musica 2 (2013). www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/spazidellamusica, accessed 14
July 2014.
Marks, Philippa J. M. The British Library Guide to Bookbinding: History and Techniques.
Marsh, Christopher. “The Sound of Print in Early Modern England: The Broadside
Ballad as Song.” In The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. Julia Crick and
Alexandra Walsham. Pp. 171–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Martin, Henri-Jean. “The Catholic Reformation and the Book (1585–1650).” In The
French Book, ch. 1.
——. “Culture écrite et culture orale: Culture savante et culture populaire.” Journal des
savants (1975): 225–82.
——. The French Book: Religion, Absolutism, and Readership, 1585–1715. Translated by
Paul Saenger and Nadine Saenger. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996.
——. “Livres et société.” In Le livre conquérant: Du Moyen Âge au du XVIIe siècle. Vol. 1 of
Histoire de l’édition française, ed. Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier. Pp. 543–61.
Paris: Promodis, 1982–86.
——. Print, Power, and People in 17th-Century France. Translated by David Gerard.
Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1993.
——. “Renouvellements et concurrences.” In Le Livre conquérant: Du Moyen Âge au milieu
du XVIIe siècle. Vol. 1 of Histoire de l’édition française, ed. Henri-Jean Martin and Roger
Chartier. Pp. 79–403. Paris: Promodis, 1982–86.
Martin, Henri-Jean, and Roger Chartier, eds. Histoire de l’édition française. 4 vols.
Paris: Promodis, 1982–86.
Martinez-Göllner, Marie Louise. “Die Augsburger Bibliotek Herwart und ihre
Lautentabulaturen: Ein Musikbestand der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek aus dem 16.
Jahrhundert.” Fontes Artis Musicae 16 (1969): 29–48.
Martini, Giambattista. Litaniae atque antiphonae finales B. Virginis Mariae, op. 1. Bologna:
Laelius a Vulpe, 1734.
Massip, Catherine, and Florence Getreau. “Les Collections Henry Prunières et Geneviève
Thibault de Chambure: Formation, composition, interaction, valorisation.” In
Collectionner la musique: Histoires d’une passion, ed. Herlin et al., pp. 217–56.
Mauduit, Jacques. Chansonnettes mesurées de Jan Antoine de Baïf. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1586.
Mauger, Florence. “Les Octonaires . . . d’Antoine de Chandieu: Archéologie d’un titre.”
Revue d’histoire littéraire de France 99 (1999): 975–88.
McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. The Panizzi Lectures 1985.
McKitterick, David. Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830.
Meerhoff, Kees. “La Ramée et Peletier du Mans: Une Deffence du ‘naturel usage’.” Nouvelle
revue du XVIe siècle 18 (2000): 77–93.
Meigret, Louis. Le Trętté de la grammęre françoęze. Paris: Chrestien Wechel, 1550.
Meissner, Ute. Der Antwerpener Notendrucker Tylman Susato: Eine bibliogra-
phische Studie zur niederländischen Chansonpublikation in der ersten Hälfte des 16
Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Berliner Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 11. Berlin: Verlag
Merseburger, 1967.
Mellange de chansons tant des vieux autheurs que des modernes, a cinq. six. sept. et huict parties.
Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1572.
Mellottée, Paul. L’Imprimerie sous l’Ancien Régime. Vol. 1 of Histoire économique de
l’imprimerie, 1439–1789. Paris: Hachette, 1905.
Meurier, Hubert. Traicté de l’institution et vray usage des processions tant ordinaires,
qu’extraordinaires, qui se font en l’Eglise Catholique, contenant ample discours de ce qui s’est
passé pour ce regard en la Province de Champaigne, depuis le 22. de Juillet jusques au 25.
d’Octobre, 1583. Reims: Jean de Foigny, 1584.
Milsom, John. “The Culture of Partleaves: Peterhouse and Beyond.” In Music, Politics and
Religion in Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge: The Peterhouse Partbooks in Context, ed.
Scott Mandelbrote (forthcoming).
Milsom, John. “The Nonsuch Music Library.” In Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the
British Library Collections Presented to O. W. Neighbour on his 70th Birthday, ed. Malcolm
Turner, Chris Banks, and Arthur Searle. Pp. 146–82. London: British Library, 1993.
——. “Songs and Society in Early Tudor London.” Early Music History 16 (1997): 235–93.
Milsom, John, and Iain Fenlon. “‘Ruled Paper Imprinted’: Music Paper and Patents
in Sixteenth-Century England.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 37
(1984): 139–63.
Moduli undecim festorum (Paris: Du Chemin, 1554). Edited by J. Heywood Alexander.
Recent Researches in Music of the Renaissance 56. Madison, WI: A-R
Editions, 1983.
Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Edited by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier. 3 vols. 2nd ed.
Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988.
Morales, Cristóbal de. Missarum liber primus. Rome: Dorico, 1544.
——. Missarum liber primus. Lyon: Moderne, 1546.
Morehen, John, and Richard Rastall. “Partbooks.” In Grove Music Online. www.oxford-
musiconline.com, accessed 18 November 2010.
Morell, Martin. “Georg Knoff: Bibliophile and Devotee of Italian Music in Late
Sixteenth-Century Danzig.” In Music in the German Renaissance: Sources, Styles and
Contexts, ed. John Kmetz. Pp. 103–26. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
Morley, Thomas. A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke. London: Peter
Short, 1597.
Moroney, Davitt. “Alessandro Striggio’s Mass in Forty and Sixty Parts.” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 60 (2007): 1–70.
Motley, Mark. Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility.
Munro, John H. “The Low Countries’ Export Trade in Textiles with the Mediterranean
Basin, 1200-1600: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Comparative Advantages in Overland
and Maritime Trade Routes.” At http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10924/. Accessed
15 July 2014.
Naudé, Gabriel. Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque. Paris: François Targa, 1627.
Nelson, Bernadette. “Building a Library: Origins of John IV of Portugal’s Livraria de
Musica.” Paper read at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Utrecht,
July 2009.
Nelson, William. “From ‘Listen, Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader’.” University of Toronto
Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities 46 (1976–77): 110–24.
Newcomb, Anthony. “Notions of Notation.” Forthcoming in Saggiatore musicale 22
(2105).
The New Oxford American Dictionary. Edited by Erin McKean. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford
Nixon, Howard M. Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Volume 6: Bindings. Cambridge: Brewer, 1984.
Nouveau recueil et élite de plusieurs belles chansons joyeuses, honnestes, et amoureuses, Partie
mises en Musique, en une voix: Recueillies de plusieurs excellens Poëtes François: Et plu
sieurs autres chansons non encor’ veuës. Avec les quatrains du S. de Pibrac aussi en Musique.
Rouen: Thomas Mallard [1580].
Nouvel exemplaire pour apprendre à escrire: Contenant plusieurs belles sentences, extraictes des
histoires anciennes, suyvant l’ordre de l’alphabet au grand soulagement de la jeunesse: Le tout
mise en rime françoise par A. de H.: Auec quelques exemples de lettre italienne apropriés à la
fin. Antwerp: pour Robert Granjon, 1565.
Olivier, Eugène, Georges Hermal, and R. de Roton. Manuel de l’amateur de reliures
armoriées françaises. 29 vols. Paris: C. Bosse, 1924–35.
Ongaro, Giulio M. “The Library of a Sixteenth-Century Music Teacher.” Journal of
Musicology 12 (1994): 357–75.
O’Regan, Noel. “Choirboys in Early Modern Rome.” In Young Choristers, 650–1700, ed.
Susan Boynton and Eric Rice. Pp. 216–40. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008.
Orgel, Stephen. The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage.
——. “The Book of the Play.” In From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed.
Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel. Pp. 13–54. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.
Owens, Jessie Ann. “An Illuminated Manuscript of Motets by Cipriano de Rore.”
Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1978.
——. Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition, 1450–1600. Oxford: Oxford
——. “Mode in the Madrigals of Cipriano de Rore.” In Altro Polo, Essays on Italian
Music in the Cinquecento, ed. Richard Charteris. Pp. 1–15. Sydney: University of
Australia, 1990.
——, ed. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, Mus. Hs. 18.744, Renaissance
Music in Facsimile 25. New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1986.
Page, Christopher. “An English Motet of the 14th Century in Performance: Two
Contemporary Images.” Early Music 25 (1997): 7–32.
Pasquini, Elisabetta. Giambattista Martini. Palermo: L’Epos, 2007.
——. “A ‘vast suite of such various and singular events’: Padre Giambattista Martini as Music
Collector.” In Collectionner la musique: Histoires d’une passion, ed. Herlin et al., pp. 97–112.
Pau, Gérald. “De l’usage de la chanson spirituelle par les Jésuites au temps de la
contre-réforme.” In La Chanson à la Renaissance: Actes du XXe colloque d’études human-
istes du Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance de l’Université de Tours, juillet 1977,
ed. Jean-Michel Vaccaro. Pp. 15–34. Tours: Éditions Van de Velde, 1981.
Peletier du Mans, Jacques. Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ e prononciacion françoęsɇ. 2nd edition.
Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1555.
——. Dialogue de l’ortografe e prononciacion francoese (1555) suivi de la response de Louis
Meigret. Edited by Lambert C. Porter. Geneva: Droz, 1966.
Peréz Pastor, Cristóbal. “Escrituras de concierto para imprimir libros.” Revista de Archivos,
Bibliotecas y Museos 3a época, 1 (1897): 363–71.
Perkins, Leeman L. “Notes bibliographiques au sujet de l’ancien fond musical de l’Église
de Saint-Louis des Français à Rome.” Fontes Artis Musicae 16 (1969): 57–71.
——. “Toward a Typology of the ‘Renaissance’ Chanson.” Journal of Musicology 4
(1988): 421–47.
Persoons, Guido. “Joannes I Bogardus, Jean II Bogard en Pierre Bogard als muziekdruk-
kers te Douai van 1574 tot 1633 en hun betrekkingen met de Officina Plantiniana.”
De gulden passer 66–67 (1988): 613–66.
Petrucci, Armando. Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written
Culture. Edited and translated by Charles M. Radding. New Haven and London: Yale
Pettas, William. A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Bookstore: The Inventory of Juan de Junta.
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1995.
Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2010.
——. The French Book and the European Book World. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Pettegree, Andrew, Paul Nelles, and Philip Conner, eds. The Sixteenth-Century French
Religious Book. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
Pibrac, Guy du Faur de. Les Quatrains, Les plaisirs de la vie rustique, et autres poesies. Edited
by Loris Petris. Geneva: Droz, 2004.
Pichon, Jérome, and Georges Vicaire. Documents pour servir à l’histoire des libraires de Paris,
1486–1600. Paris: Librairie Techener, 1895.
Pickford, Sophie. “Music in the French Domestic Interior (1500–1600).” In The Music
Room in Early Modern France and Italy, ed. Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti. Pp.
79–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012.
Plamenac, Dragan. “A Reconstruction of the French Chansonnier in the Biblioteca
Colombina, Seville—I.” Musical Quarterly 37 (1951): 501–42.
Planson, Jean. Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac, ensemble quelques Sonetz, et Motetz, mis en
Musique à 3. 4. 5. et 7. parties, par J. Plançon. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1583.
Pleticha, Eva. Adel und Buch. Studien zur Geisteswelt des fränkischen Adels am Beispiel seiner
Bibliotheken vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Neustadt a. d. Aisch: Degener, 1983.
Pogue, Samuel F. Jacques Moderne: Lyons Music Printer of the Sixteenth Century.
Geneva: Droz, 1969.
Polak, Emil J. Medieval and Renaissance Letter Treatises and Form Letters: A Census of
Manuscripts Found in Part of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States of America.
Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1994.
Politianus, Angelus. Opera miscellanea et epistulae. Vol. 3 of Opera Omnia. 3 vols.
Monumenta politica philosophica humanistica rariora, series 1, vols. 16–18. Turin:
Bottega d’Erasmo, 1970–71.
Poquet, Alexandre-Eusèbe. Histoire de Château-Thierry. 2 vols. Château-Thierry:
A. Laurent, 1839.
Poster, Carol, and Linda C. Mitchell, eds. Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from
Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies. Columbia, SC: University
of South Carolina Press, 2007.
Powers, Harold S. “Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony.”
Price, Leah. “From The History of a Book to a ‘History of the Book’.” Representations 108
(2009): 120–38.
Prizer, William F. “Isabella d’Este and Lorenzo da Pavia, ‘Master Instrument-Maker’.”
Early Music History 2 (1982): 87–127.
Prod’homme, Jacques. “Guillaume Morlaye, éditeur d’Albert de Ripe, luthiste et bour-
geois de Paris.” Revue de musicologie 6 (1925): 157–67.
Pussot, Jean. Journalier ou mémoires de Jean Pussot, Maitre Charpentier en la Couture de Reims.
Edited by Édouard Henry. Reims: P. Regnier, 1856.
Quentin-Bauchart, Ernest. La Bibliothèque de Fontainebleau et les livres des derniers Valois à
la Bibliothèque Nationale (1515–1589). Paris: E. Paul, Huard et Guillemin, 1891.
Rabelais, François. Pantagruel. Edited by V.-L. Saulnier. Geneva: Droz, 1965.
Ranum, Orest. “Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the French State, 1630–1660.”
Journal of Modern History 52 (1980): 426–51.
Reinburg, Virginia. “Books of Hours.” In The Sixteenth-Century French Religious
Book, ed. Andrew Pettegree, Paul Nelles, and Philip Conner. Pp. 62–82.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
Reiss, Timothy J. Knowledge, Discovery, and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of
Aesthetic Rationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Revel, Jacques. “The Uses of Civility.” In Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, general eds. Philippe
Ariès and Georges Duby. Pp. 167–205. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap/
Harvard University Press, 1989.
Rhau, Georg. Bicinia gallica, latina, germanica, Tomus I, II, 1545. Edited by Bruce
Bellingham. Musikdrucke aus den Jahren 1538–1545 in praktischer Neuausgabe 6.
Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1980.
Richards, Jennifer. Shared Reading in the English Renaissance (forthcoming).
Richardson, Brian. Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge
——. “‘Recitato e cantato’: The Oral Diffusion of Lyric Poetry in Sixteenth-Century
Italy.” In Theatre, Opera, and Performance in Italy from the Fifteenth Century to the
Present: Essays in Honour of Richard Andrews, ed. Brian Richardson, Simon Gilson, and
Catherine Keen. Pp. 67–82. Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 2004.
Ringhieri, Innocenzio. Cento giuochi liberali, et d’ingegno. Bologna: A. Giaccarelli, 1551.
——. Dialogue de la vie et de la mort composé en toscan par maistre Innocent Ringhiere, gen-
tilhomme boulongnois, nouvellement traduit en francoys par Jehan Louveau. Lyon: Robert
Granjon, 1557.
Riquier, Nicolas. Recueil mémorable d’aulcuns cas advenus depuis l’an du salut 1573 tant
à Beauvais qu’ailleurs. Edited by Victor Leblond. Vol. 2 of Documents pour servir à
l’histoire de Beauvais et du Beauvaisis au XVIe siècle. Paris: Champion; Beauvais: Société
Académique de l’Oise, 1909.
Roberts, John H. “The Cortot Collection and the Hargrove Music Library, University of
California, Berkeley.” In Collectionner la musique: Au cœur de l’interprétation, ed. Herlin
et al., pp. 267–302.
Roche, Daniel. A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France,
1600–1800. Translated by Brian Pearce. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
Röder, Thomas. “Verborgene Botschaften? Augsburger Kanons von 1548.” In Canons
and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries. Proceedings of the International Conference,
Leuven, 4–6 October 2005, ed. Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn. Pp. 235–52.
Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2007.
Rodin, Jesse. “‘When in Rome . . .’: What Josquin Learned in the Sistine Chapel.”
Rose, Stephen. “Music Printing in Leipzig during the Thirty Years’ War.” Music Library
Association Notes, series 2, 61 (2004): 323–49.
Rose, Stephen. “Schein’s Occasional Music and the Social Order in 1620s Leipzig.” Early
Music History 23 (2004): 253–84.
Rosenthal, Albi. “Alfred Cortot as Collector of Music.” In Music and Bibliography:
Essays in Honour of Alec Hyatt King, ed. Oliver Neighbour. Pp. 204–14. New York:
K. G. Saur, 1980.
Rouspeau, Yves. Quatrains spirituels de l’honneste amour, avec les Stances des louanges du saint
mariage opposées à celles de Philippes Desportes. Pons: T. Portau, 1593.
——. Quatrains spirituels de l’honneste amour, nouvellement mis en lumiere. Paris: pour Jean
Houze, 1584.
Sabbe, Maurits, and Maruis Audin. Die Civilité-Schriften des Robert Granjon in
Lyon und die flämischen Drucker des 16. Jahrhunderts. Vienna: Bibliotheca
Typographica, 1929.
Saenger, Paul. “Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages.”
In The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, compiled
by Alain Boureau, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Pp. 141–71.
Schaal, Richard. “Die Musikbibliothek von Raimund Fugger d. J.: Ein Beitrag zur
Musiküberlieferung des 16. Jahrhunderts.” Acta Musicologica 29 (1957): 126–37.
——. “Die Musikinstrumenten-Sammlung von Raimund Fugger d. J.” Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft 21 (1964): 212–16.
Schalk, Ellery. From Valor to Pedigree: Ideals of Nobility in France in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Schlaepfer, H. L. “Laurent de Normandie.” In Aspects de la Propagande Religieuse. Travaux
d’Humanisme et Renaissance 28. Pp. 176–230. Geneva: Droz, 1957.
Schnoebelen, Anne. “The Growth of Padre Martini’s Library as Revealed in his
Correspondence.” Music & Letters 57 (1976): 379–97.
Schurhammer, Georg. Francis Xavier: His Life, his Times. Translated by M. Joseph
Costelloe. 4 vols. Rome: The Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973–82.
Schutz, Alexander H. Vernacular Books in Parisian Private Libraries of the Sixteenth Century
according to the Notarial Inventories. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press [1955].
Sealy, Robert J. The Palace Academy of Henry III. Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance
184. Geneva: Droz, 1981.
Sermisy, Claudin de. Octo cantica divae Mariae virginis. Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1564.
Sherr, Richard. Papal Music Manuscripts in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries.
Renaissance Manuscript Studies 5. Neuhausen: American Institute of Musicology
and Hänssler-Verlag, 1996.
Slim, H. Colin. A Gift of Madrigals and Motets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for
the Newberry Library, [1972].
——. “The Music Library of the Augsburg Patrician, Hans Heinrich Herwart
(1520–1583).” Annales musicologiques 7 (1964–77): 67–109.
Smijers, Albert, and A. Tillman Merritt, eds. Treize livres de motets parus chez Pierre
Attaingnant en 1534 et 1535. 14 vols. Paris and Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau Lyre,
1934–64.
Smith, Anne. “Lasso’s Two-Part Fantasies as a Didactic Tool for Solmization.” Journal of
the Alamire Foundation 4 (2012): 283–305.
Smith, Bruce R. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Smith, Jeremy L. “Print Culture and the Elizabethan Composer.” Fontes Artis Musicae 48
(2001): 156–72.
——. Thomas East and Music Publishing in Renaissance England. New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Stallybrass, Peter. “‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution.” In Agent of
Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Bacon,
Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin. Pp. 315–41. Amherst, MA and
——. “Material Culture: Introduction.” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 123–29.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Ann Rosalind Jones. “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance
Europe.” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 114–32.
Stallybrass, Peter, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe. “Hamlet’s
Tablets and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England.” Shakespeare
Quarterly 55 (2004): 379–419.
Stellfeld, Jean-Auguste. Bibliographie des éditions musicales plantiniennes. Académie royale
de Belgique, Classe des beaux-arts, Mémoires, series 2, vol. 5, fasc. 3. Brussels: Palais
des Académies, 1949.
Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge and
——. “Re-Patching the Play.” In From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter
Holland and Stephen Orgel. Pp. 151–77. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004.
Stevens, Kevin M. “Vincenzo Girardone and the Popular Press in Counter-Reformation
Milan: A Case Study (1570).” Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995): 639–59.
Susato, Tielman. Premier livre des chansons a deux ou a troix parties. Antwerp: Susato, [1544].
——. Tiers livre contenant xxx nouvelles chansons à deux ou à trois. Antwerp: Susato, [1550].
Taricani, JoAnn. “A Chansonnier from a Library in Renaissance Augsburg: Munich,
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. Ms. 1508.” Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 1986.
——. “A Renaissance Bibliophile as Musical Patron: The Evidence of the Herwart
Sketchbooks.” Music Library Association Notes, series 2, 49 (1993): 1357–89.
Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. 6 vols. New York: Oxford
Thibault, Geneviève. “De la vogue de quelques livres français à Venise.” Bibliothèque
d’Humanisme et Renaissance 2 (1935): 61–65.
Tilley, Arthur. “A Paris Bookseller of the Sixteenth Century: Galliot Du Pré.” The
Library 9 (1908): 36–65 and 143–72.
Tinctoris, Johannes. Terminorum musicae diffinitorium: Faksimile der Inkunabel Treviso 1495.
Translated into German by Heinrich Bellermann and with an afterword by Peter
Gülke. Documenta musicologica, Erste Reihe, 37. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1983.
Towheed, Shafquat, Rosalind Crone, and Katie Halsey, eds. The History of
Reading: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.
Trachier, Olivier, ed. Renaissance française: Traités, méthodes, préfaces, ouvrages generaux.
4 vols. Courlay, France: Éditions Fuzeau Classique, [2005].
Traficante, Frank. “Dispersal of the Cortot Collection: 290 Treatises in Lexington.” Music
Library Association Notes, series 2, 26 (1970): 713–17.
Treitler, Leo. “The Power of Positivist Thinking.” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 42 (1989): 375–402.
Turrini, Giuseppe. L’Accademia Filarmonica di Verona dalla fondazione (maggio 1543) al
1600 e il suo patrimonio musicale antico. Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia di Agricoltura
Scienze e Lettere di Verona, series 5, vol. 18. Verona: La Tipografica Veronese, 1941.
Universal Short Title Catalogue, http://ustc.ac.uk/index.php
Vaccaro, Jean-Michel. “Le Livre d’airs spirituels d’Anthoine de Bertrand.” Revue de musi-
cologie 56 (1970): 35–53.
Vaillancourt, Luc. La Lettre familière au XVIe siècle: Rhetorique humaniste de l’epistolaire.
Paris: Champion, 2003.
vander Straeten, Edmond. La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siècle. 8 vols.
Brussels: G-A van Trigt, 1867–88.
Vanhulst, Henri. Catalogue des éditions de musique publiées à Louvain par Pierre Phalèse et
ses fils, 1545–1578. Mémoires de la classe des beaux-arts, series 2, vol. 16. Brussels:
Palais des Académies, 1990.
——. “La Musique dans le ‘Catalogue des livres françois’ de Cornelis Claesz (Amsterdam,
1609).” Revue belge de musicologie/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 44
(1990): 57–77.
——. “La Musique dans les manuels de conversation bilingues de la Renaissance.” Revue
belge de musicologie/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 59 (2005): 93–124.
——. “La Musique et l’éducation des jeunes filles d’après La montaigne des pucelles/Den
maeghden-Bergh de Magdaleine Valéry (Leyde, 1599).” In Recevez ce mien petit
labour: Studies in Renaissance Music in Honour of Ignace Bossuyt, ed. Mark Delaere and
Pieter Bergé. Pp. 275–84. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008.
——. “Les Emprunts aux éditions perdues de Le Roy et Ballard identifiables dans le
répertoire pour instruments à cordes pincées publié à Louvain par Pierre Phalèse.”
Fontes Artis Musicae 48 (2001): 173–89.
——. “Suppliers and Clients of Christopher Plantin, Distributor of Polyphonic Music
in Antwerp (1566–1578).” In Musicology and Archival Research, ed. Barbara Haggh,
Frank Doelemans, and André Vanrie. Pp. 558–604. Brussels: Archives générales du
Royaume, 1994.
——, “Un succès de l’édition musicale: Le ‘Septiesme livre des chansons a quatre parties’
(1560–1661/3).” Revue belge de musicologie/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 32
(1978–79): 97–120.
van Orden, Kate. “Cheap Print and Street Song following the Saint Bartholomew’s
Massacres of 1572.” In Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate van Orden with
an afterword by Roger Chartier. Pp. 271–323. New York: Garland Publishing
Inc., 2000.
——. “Children’s Voices: Singing and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century France.” Early Music
History 25 (2006): 209–56.
——. Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2014.
——. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005.
——. Review of Anthony M. Cummings, MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
Magl. XIX, 164–167 (Aldershot, 2006), Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 264–66.
——. “Robert Granjon and Music during the Golden Age of Typography.” In Music
in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles, ed. Craig A. Monson and
Roberta Montemorra Marvin. Pp. 11–35. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press, 2013.
——. “Tielman Susato, Music, and the Cultures of Print.” In Tielman Susato and the Music
of his Time, ed. Keith Polk. Pp. 143–63. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 2005.
——. “Vernacular Culture and the Chanson in Paris, 1570–1580.” Ph.D. diss., University
of Chicago, 1996.
——, ed. Music and the Cultures of Print. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000.
van Orden, Kate, and Alfredo Vitolo, “Padre Martini, Gaetano Gaspari, and the
‘Pagliarini Collection’: A Renaissance Music Library Rediscovered.” Early Music
History 29 (2010): 241–324.
van Solkema, Sherman. “The Liturgical Music of Pierre Certon.” 2 vols. Ph.D. diss.,
University of Michigan, 1963.
Verchaly, André. “Desportes et la musique.” Annales musicologiques 2 (1954): 271–345.
——. “Le Recueil authentique des chansons de Jehan Chardavoine (1576).” Revue de musi-
cologie 49 (1963): 203–19.
Vervliet, Hendrik D. L. The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance: Selected papers on
Sixteenth-Century Typefaces. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
Veyrin-Forrer, Jeanne. “Fabriquer un livre au XVIe siècle.” In Le Livre con-
quérant: Du Moyen Âge au milieu du XVII e siècle. Vol. 1 of Histoire de l’édition fran-
çaise, ed. Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier. Pp. 278–301. Paris: Promodis,
1982–86.
Vickers, Nancy J. “The Unauthored 1539 Volume in which is Printed the Hectamophile,
The Flowers of French Poetry, and Other Soothing Things.” In Subject and Object in
Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter
Stallybrass. Pp. 166–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Victoria, Tomás Luis de. Thomae Ludovici Victoria Abulensis Opera Omnia. Edited by Felipe
Pedrell. 8 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1902–13.
Viguerie, Jean de. L’Institution des enfants: L’education en France, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles.
Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1978.
Vives, Juan Luis. Diálogos sobre la educación (1538). Edited by P. Rodríguez Santidrián.
Madrid: Alianza, 1987.
Voet, Leon. The Golden Compasses: A History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing
Activities of the Officina Plantiniana at Antwerp. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Vangendt &
Co., 1972.
Wagner, Klaus. Martin de Montesdoca y su prensa: Contribución al estudio de la imprenta y al
bibliografía sevillana del siglo XVI. Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1982.
Wallner, B. A. “Die Gründung der Münchener Hofbibliothek durch
Albrecht V. und Johann Jakob Fugger.” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 2
(1919–20): 299–305.
Warren, Charles W. “Music at Nonesuch.” Musical Quarterly 54 (1968): 47–57.
Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge
Weaver, Robert L. A Descriptive Bibliographical Catalog of the Music Printed by Hubert
Waelrant and Jan de Laet. Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1994.
——. Waelrant and Laet: Music Publishers in Antwerp’s Golden Age. Warren, MI: Harmonie
Park Press, 1995.
Wegman, Rob C. “From Maker to Composer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship
in the Low Countries, 1450–1500.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49
(1996): 409–79.
West, Anthony James. The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book. 2 vols.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001–2003.
Wistreich, Richard. “Introduction: Musical Materials and Cultural Spaces.” Renaissance
Studies 26 (2012): 1–12.
——. “Music Books and Sociability.” Saggiatore musicale 18 (2011): 230–44.
Wright, Craig. Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1500.
Yates, Frances A. The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. 2nd ed. London and
Young, William. “Music Printing in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg.” Renaissance
Quarterly 24 (1971): 486–501.
Index
A l’ombre d’un vert buisson (Maillard), 229–30 Aranda, Marie de, 60

Le ABC des Chrestiens (pamphlet), 124, 134 Arcadelt, Jacques
abécédaire classes, 139, 144, 146–47, 167 chanson-galliards and, 205
abécédaire pamphlets, 133–35, 134 as court musician, 180–81
Académie française, 169 Granjon’s chansonniers and, 194
Académie françoise (La Primaudaye), 236, popularity of, 107
240, 241–43 psalm settings of, 231, 249
Academy of Poetry and Music (Académie Scudieri and the madrigals of, 73
de poésie et de musique), 101, Ariosto, Ludovico, 168
238, 264 Aristotle, 240–41
Accademia Filarmonica di Verona, 56, 57, Ars grammaticus (Donatus), 167–68
57, 68, 73–74 L’Art de dictier (Deschamps), 171–72
The Acoustic World of Early Modern England Arundel, Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of, 77,
(B. Smith), 130 78, 82, 97
L’Adolescence clementine (Marot), 228–29 d’Asola, Francesco, 50, 51
Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Naudé), 19 The Ass at School (Heyden after Brueghel),
airs de cour, 202, 210 116, 117, 123
Airs spirituels (Bertrand), 231, 249 Astree (d’Urfé), 108
Alamire, Petrus, 106 Attaingnant, Pierre
Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, 83, 103–4 authorship and, 37
Alden, Jane, 32 as imprimeur-libraire, 44
Amerbach, Basilius, 161–62, 193–94, 230 music printed by: Accademia Filarmonica
Amour brusle (Maillard), 194, 200–202, 201 di Verona and, 73–74; chanson series,
Les Amours (Ronsard), 205, 248 12–14, 14–15; Columbus and, 51;
Amphion sacré, 146 formats and, 20, 86–87, 111, 157;
Ancienne Bibliothèque du Chapitre Henry of Castell and, 17–18; Liber
(Noyon), 81 decimustertius. xviij. musicales habet
Annales School, 25–26 modulos, 148–49; Liber septimus.
Antico, Andrea, 12, 86, 95, 157–58 xxiiij. trium, quatuor, quinque, sexve
Antiquario, Jacobo, 111–12 vocum modulos, 148; Maillard and,
L’Apparition du livre (Febvre and Martin), 194; Mornable and, 230; motet
25–26, 91–92 anthologies of, 157–58, 158–161,
Attaingnant, Pierre (Cont.) printed music in, 82, 83–84, 86, 89,
159–160; Si j’ay du bien (Sandrin) 90–91, 99, 99
and, 207; survival rates of, 91–92; Beaulaigue, Barthélemy, 96, 175–77
Vingt et neuf chansons, 50, 51 Bêche, Jean-Louis, 80
paper sizes and, 9 Belleau, Rémy, 76
as Royal Printer of Music, 79 Belleforest, François de, 170
single-impression printing and, 12–13 Bellère, Balthazar, 54
See also Livre de chansons series Bellère, Jean, 52–53, 54
(Attaingnant) Berchem, Jachet, 84
“Au pres de vous—Claudin’s Chanson and Berg, Adam, 53
the Commerce of Publisher’s Bergerie (Ronsard), 108
Arrangements” (Heartz), 30 Bernstein, Jane A., 31, 51
Auda, Antoine, 180 Bertrand, Anthoine de, 81, 104, 231, 249
Auger, Edmond, 138, 228 Bèze, Théodore de, 231
Augustine, St., 49 Biblia polyglotta, 65–66
authorship, 37–38, 256–57 bibliography, 16–17, 19–20, 33–34
d’Auxerre, Pierre, 209 Bibliotheca universalis (Gesner), 105
Ave Maria Bibliotheque (Du Verdier), 72
in books of hours, 134 Bibliotheque (La Croix du Maine), 71–72, 77
Certon (settings of), 127, 128, 149–57, bibliothèque bleue, 33, 56, 125, 236
150–51, 153–54, 155 Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 81
in chansonniers, 136 Bibliothèque du Roy, 19–20
learning to read and, 126, 135–36, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 19–20,
139, 149–57 21–22, 78, 79–80
melody of, 127, 128 Bibliothèque royale, 79
in Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 104
chanter le plain chant, et compter, 118 bibliothèques municipales, 81–82
in Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques binder’s volumes (tract volumes)
spirituelz pour chanter avecque la book collectors and, 85–88
Doctrine chrestienne, 136–37 booksellers and, 55–66
polyphonic settings of, 135–36, 149–156 cataloguing and, 19–24
singing of, 126, 137 examples of, 17–19, 59, 89–91, 99
importance of, 39
Badonvilliers, Jean de, 75n25 manuscript additions in, 161–65,
Baïf, Jean-Antoine de 162, 163–64
Academy of Poetry and Music and, 101, miscellany form of, 85–87, 86, 105–7,
238, 264 158–161, 159–160, 179, 229
chansonnettes en vers mesurés à l’antique of, motets and chansons together in, 158–161
183–85, 184, 236, 243, 245–46 binding, 16–19, 39–40, 55–60, 57, 59,
Balet comique de la Royne, 209 84–85. See also binder’s volumes
Ballard, Robert, 79, 193. See also Le Roy & (tract volumes); stock bindings;
Ballard unbound books
Ballard family, 14n19 Binet, Claude, 238
ballets de cour, 202 Birague, René de, 249
Barthélémy Beaulaigue, poète et musicien prodige Bisson, Loys, 216
(Auda), 180 Bizeau, Louis, 87n73
Basil, Saint, 140 Blackburn, Bonnie J., 96
Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Les Blasons domestiques (Corrozet), 100–101
Staatsbibliothek, Munich) Blockland de Montfort, Cornelius,
origins of, 68, 78, 79 176, 263
306 | i n d e x
Bodin, Jean, 238, 241 stocklists of, 45–46, 49–50, 52–54, 96,
Bogard, Jean, 48, 54 108n127
Bonfons family, 110 See also Plantin, Christopher
Boni, Guillaume books of hours, 132–36, 147
Catholicism and, 231 Boorman, Stanley, 5n2
dedications signed by, 270 Bosse, Abraham, 5
Goudimel as a model for, 247, 257–58 Boucaut-Graille, Audrey, 248n46
Le Roy & Ballard and, 81 Bouchefort, Jeannet de, 208–9
modal ordering and, 250–56, 251, 263–64 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de, 193
Quatrains (Pibrac) and, 239n25, 246–47, Braudel, Fernand, 26–28
249–259, 251, 259–260, 262–64 Breton, Richard, 176, 190n57, 231n9
scoring and, 246–47, 250–52, Brief sommaire de la doctrine chrestienne, 144,
251, 257–58 145–48, 146, 162–63, 262
spiritualized versions of chansons of, British Library (London), 21, 22, 78, 90, 179
231, 257 British Museum (London), 78
book, use of term, 15–16, 18 broadsheets (broadsides), 84, 123, 164–65,
book collector(s) 234–35
bibliographies and, 71–72, 77, 104–5 Brooks, Jeanice, 76–77, 255–56
cabinets and, 98–107 Brossard, Sébastien de, 56, 80, 264
Castell as, 17–18, 55, 85, 158 Brouck, Jacob de, 97
cataloguing and, 71–72 Brown, Howard Mayer, 30, 202
Columbus as, 50, 51, 77–78, 82, 96 Brueghel, Pieter, the Elder, 116, 117, 123
French Revolution and, 80–82 Brumel, Antoine, 156
Fuggers as, 77, 79, 82, 83, 85, 97
Grolande as, 18, 55, 85, 90 cabinets, 98–107, 100
Grolier as, 77, 88, 98 Caccini, Giulio, 210
importance of, 67–69 Cadéac, Pierre, 194
Labarre on, 74–75, 75 Calcagno, Mauro, 24n42
music teachers and students as, 72–75 Cambrai, 152
Nonsuch Library and, 22n33, 78, 82 Canguilhem, Philippe, 82, 263n75
Pense as, 76–77 canon(s), 143–157, 145, 146, 155,
second-hand books and, 81n49, 87–88, 106 163–65, 164
types of, 69–70 Canti B numero cinquanta, 12, 68, 158
value of printed music for, 70–71, 75–76 Canti C numero cento cinquanta, 12, 158
Werdenstein as, 82, 83, 84–85, 87–88, Cantiones sacres (Brouck), 97
97–98 Les Cantiques de la Bible mis en vers françois
See also Herwart, Hans Heinrich; Martini, par Lancelot de Carle, Evesque de Riez,
Giambattista et mis en musique à quatre parties par
bookfair, Frankfurt, 52 Guillaume Belin, 230–231
book history, 25–34 Cantiques du Sr de Maisonfleur (Condomirio), 249
The Book in the Renaissance (Pettegree), 96 cantus firmus, 150–51, 165
book lending, 73 canzone napolitana (“villanella”), 73
bookbinders, 44, 58 Canzoni francese a due voce, 216
booksellers Canzoniere (Petrarch), 37
antiquarian, 22, 78 caractères de civilité
binding and, 46, 49–50, 58 chansonniers and, 175–182, 176, 179,
distribution and, 44–55 193–211, 195, 196–99, 201, 203–4
imprimeurs as, 44–45 La Civilité puérile and, 189, 236, 237
music sales and, 55–66 copybooks and, 189–190, 234
second-hand books and, 45, 88 Il Galatheo (Della Casa) and, 121, 122
i n d e x | 307
caractères de civilité (Cont.) Premier livre de chansons, 202–5
Granjon and, 123, 172–182, 176, 179, Champ fleury (Tory), 171, 174
189–191, 193–211, 195, 196–99, Chandieu, Antoine de, 233
201, 203–4 Channey, Jean de, 54, 93–94, 176n24
models for, 176n24, 190 chanson-galliards, 205
Quatrains (Pibrac) and, 235, 237 chansonniers
Tournes and, 172–73 anthologies and, 12, 37, 71–72, 107–9,
See also civility books 111, 178, 181
cardboard covers, 56, 57 caractères de civilité and, 175–182, 176, 179,
Caron, Jean, 45, 107 196–99, 201, 203–4
Carter, Tim, 31–32, 49, 96, 210 chapbooks and, 107–12
Carteri, Bartolomeo, 56 distribution of, 43–55
Castell, Henry of, 17–18, 55, 85, 158 modal ordering of, 252–54
Castiglione, Baldassar, 94, 121, 168, 170 sales of, 55–66
Castro, Jean de, 77 survival rates of, 88–98, 93–94
cataloguing, 19–24, 71–72 See also partbooks; serial publication
Catechesis numeris musicis inclusa chansons (French polyphonic songs)
(Le Maistre), 144 arrangements of, 71, 207–8, 208,
catechism(s) 215–225, 218–19, 223–24, 256
civility type and, 173 authorship and, 37–38
learning to read and, 118, 134–149, 235 copies and fakes, 53, 177–78, 207–8, 248
manuals, 126n20, 129, 134–35, 134, Index of Forbidden Books and, 226–27
139, 142–43 reading and, 6–7, 211–225, 212, 218–19,
musical, 136–142, 141, 144–48, 146 221, 223–24
verse translations of, 233 scrolls and, 40–41
Catherine de’ Medici, 100, 170 serial publication and, 12–19
Catholicism sociability and, 6, 191–93, 202
Franch language and, 124 spiritual contrafacts of, 53, 208, 231, 257
literacy and, 129–130 style of, 195–211, 222–25
See also Jesuits See also partbooks
Cato, 167–68, 170 Chansons et motetz en canon, 157–58
Census-Catalogue of Music Manuscripts, 23 Chansons nouvelles (Beaulaigue), 96,
Les Cent cinquante pseaumes de David 175–78, 179
(Goudimel), 248 chapbooks, 107–12, 109, 125, 237
Cerone, Pietro, 135 Chappuys, Claude, 180, 186, 209
Certeau, Michel de, 128–29, Chardavoine, Jean, 207, 245
225–26, 267–68 Charles III, Duke of Lorraine, 246
Certon, Pierre Charles IX, King of France, 103, 104, 237
Du Chemin and, 95 Charles V, King of France, 79
La Croix du Maine and, 72 Chartier, Roger, 25, 31, 33, 125
popularity of, 107 The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg), 226
psalm settings of, 230–31, 249 Le Chemin de bien vivre avec le miroir de vertu
Certon, Pierre: works (Habert), 232–33
Ave Maria a 3, 127, 128, 149–157, 150–51 Chigi Codex, 106
Institutoris Symphoniacorum Christensen, Thomas, 32, 164n64
puerorum . . . modulorum editio, 135, Chronique (Monstrelet), 168
149–157, 150–51, 153–54, 155 Chroniques (Commines), 168
M’amie un jour, 194 Cicero, 167–68
Pater noster–Ave Maria a 6, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice
152–57, 153–54 (Feldman), 32
308 | i n d e x
La civil conversatione (Guazzo), 170–71 Contemplating Music (Kerman), 30
La Civilité puérile, 189, 236, 237 Continuation du mélange (Lassus), 162
civility books Copernicus, Nicolaus, 93n89
Il cortegiano (Castiglione) as, 94, 121, copybooks, 11, 173, 177, 189–191,
168, 170 232–33, 234
De civilitate morum puerilium libellus Corrozet, Gilles, 45, 100–101
(Erasmus) as, 121, 170, 172, Il cortegiano (Castiglione), 94, 121, 168, 170
189–190, 239 Cortot, Alfred, 80, 158
Il Galatheo (Della Casa) as, 121, 122, Cossard, Jacques. See Methodes pour apprendre
170–71, 172 a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant,
role of, 121–22, 170–71, 188–193 et compter (Cossard)
typefaces in, 121–22 Costeley, Guillaume, 81, 104
typography and book design in, 171–73 Council of Trent, 138, 237
See also caractères de civilité; La Civilité La couronne et fleur des chansons a troys, 71, 216
puérile; Quatrains (Pibrac) Courville, Joachim Thibault de, 101, 243
Claesz, Cornelis, 53–54 Cousin, Marie, 45–46
Claudin de Sermisy. See Sermisy, Claudin de Coyssard, Michel, 136–37, 259
Clemens non Papa, Jacob, 222–24 Coyssard, Michel: works
Clermont, Claude-Catherine de, Countess of Les Hymnes sacrez et Odes spirituelles pour
Retz, 102, 130, 193, 270 chanter devant, et après la leçon du
Cloris de quoy te sert (song), 5, 6 catéchisme, 139
Colin, Jacques, 170 Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz
Colin, Marie-Alexis, 194, 249–250, 255 pour chanter avecque la Doctrine
Colines, Simon de, 174 chrestienne, 136–37, 139–140, 141,
Collège de Clermont, 169 143–44, 145, 148
Collège de Guyenne, 168–69 Sommaire de la Doctrine chrestienne, mis en
Collège de Navarre, 169 vers François, 143
Collège des Lecteurs Royaux (Collège de Traicté du profit, 140–41, 229
France), 169 Cramoisy, Louis, 80, 103
Collège de Tournon, 136–37, 138n20 Crassot, Richard, 247
Collège d’Harcourt (later Lycée Crecquillon, Thomas, 217, 222–24
Saint-Louis), 81 Credo, 134
Collège du Plessis, 169 Crespi, Giovanni Maria, 20–21
collèges, 167–68, 187–88. See also specific “Croix de par Dieu” (pamplet), 13–34, 134
collèges The Culture and Commerce of Texts (Love), 32
colporteurs, 110, 112, 133–34, 133 Cummings, Anthony M., 165
Columbus, Ferdinand, 50, 51, 77–78, 82,
96 dance treatises, 189
Columbus, Luís, 78 Dane, Joseph, 111–12
Commentarii grammatici (Despautère), 167–68 Danfrie, Philippe, 176, 206
Commines, Philippe de, 168 Dante Alighieri, 37
commonplace books, 106n124, 202, 268–69 Darnton, Robert, 25, 34
The Compleat Library (Dunton), 104 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 8
Condomirio, Antonio, 249 Daza, Esteban, 95
Confrérie des Libraires, Relieurs, Enlumineurs, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus (Erasmus),
Ecrivains et Parcheminiers 121, 170, 172, 189–190, 239
(Confraternity of Booksellers, De mil ennuiz (Arcadelt), 205
Bookbinders, Illuminators, Scribes, De recta pronuntiatione (Erasmus), 117–19,
and Parchment Sellers), 58 125–26, 127n22
Conservatoire de Paris, 79, 84–85 De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 93n89
i n d e x | 309
déchiffrage, 149–155, 150–51, 211–225, 212, formats and, 62, 86n69
218–19, 221, 223–24 Goudimel and, 248
Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse as imprimeur-libraire, 44
(Du Bellay), 170 Josquin des Prez and, 96
Della Casa, Giovanni, 121, 122, 170–71, 172 paper sizes and, 9
Dell’historia naturale di Ferrante Imperato survival rates and, 95
napoletano libri XXVIII (Imperato), 100 Du Pré, Galliot, 108n127
dépôt légal, 79 Du Verdier, Antoine, 72, 89–91, 96
Deschamps, Eustache, 171–72 Dunton, John, 104
Despautère, Jean, 167–68 duo arrangements, 71, 215–225,
Dialogo della musica (Doni), 71 218–19, 223–24
Diálogos sobre la educación (Vives), 125–26 Durand, H.-A., 180
Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ e prononciacion françoęsɇ
(Peletier), 172, 182–83, 183, 209, 210 écoles primaires, 139
Dialogue de la vie et de la mort (Ringhieri), Les Éditions musicales de la Renaissance
174, 189–190 lyonnaise (Guillo), 177
Diane de Poitiers, 177–78, 193 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 25, 226
Dietrich, Sixt, 165 “Emulation, Competition, and Homage”
Dillon, Emma, 32 (Brown), 30
Discours de la court (Chappuys), 180, 186, 209 en blanc, 44–55
Discours politiques et militaires (La Noue), 187 enfans d’honneur, 186–87
Disticha de moribus (Cato), 167–68, 170 Les Epistres familieres (Dolet), 170
distribution of printed matter Erasmus, Desiderius, 169
booksellers and, 45, 48 Erasmus, Desiderius: works
difficulty, 50–52, 55 De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, 121,
international, 47–55 170, 172, 189–190, 239
master distributors, 48, 65 De recta pronuntiatione, 117–19, 125–26
means of transport, 47–48, 51 Este, Isabella d’, 102
packaging, 45 Estienne, Robert, 174
regional, 45–47, 49, 54–55 Euvres (Labé), 178
See also booksellers; Plantin, Christopher
Divine Comedy (Dante), 37 Faber, Heinrich, 215
Divine Art, Infernal Machine (Eisenstein), 226 fauxbourdon, 147, 152, 161–64, 163, 203–4,
Dix Pseaumes (Le Jeune), 249 206–7, 258, 260, 262–63
Dobbins, Frank, 194 Febvre, Lucien, 25–26, 91–92
Dodecachordon (Glarean), 264, 269 Feldman, Martha, 32
Dodecacorde (Le Jeune), 264 Fenlon, Iain, 31
Dolet, Estienne, 170 Ferrara, 188
Donatus, Aelius, 167–68 Fezandat, Michel, 44, 54, 64, 95
Doni, Anton Francesco, 71–72, 77 La Fleur de poesie francoyse, 108–9, 108, 111
Dorico, Valerio, 51 flyleaves, 72–73, 164, 213–14
Doulce memoire (Sandrin), 212, 217, 218–19 folio, 94–95
Gardane arrangement à 2, Fouilloux, Jacques du, 168
222–23, 223–24 Francis Xavier, 137
Susato arrangement à 2 and à 3, François, Duke of Anjou, 241
217–220, 218–19 François Ier, King of France, 174, 209
Du Bellay, Joachim, 170, 190 Freedman, Richard, 254
Du Bosc, Simon, 54n59 French (language)
Du Chemin, Nicolas books of hours and, 132
chansons for two and three voices learning to read in, 118, 121–22, 124–25,
and, 216 136–38, 167–173
310 | i n d e x
reform of orthography and, 172, Grammaire (Ramus), 170
182–86, 183–84 Granjon, Robert
See also caractères de civilité; civility books caractères de civilité and, 123, 172–182, 176,
French Wars of Religion 179, 189–191
distribution and, 55 chansonniers and, 175–182, 176, 193–211,
music printing and, 54n59, 249, 265 195, 196–99, 201, 203–4
politiques and, 238 Hiesse and, 52, 178
psalm-singing and, 138, 231 Nouvel exemplaire pour apprendre à escrire
“From Unitary Book to Miscellany” and, 232–33, 234
(Petrucci), 105 See also Trophées de musique (Granjon)
Fugger, Johann (Hans) Jakob, 77, 82, 83 Grecs du Roi, 174, 190
Fugger, Raimund the Younger, 77, 82, 85, Greek (language), 167
97, 102 Grolande, Sebastian, 18, 55, 85, 90
Fugger family, 79 Grolier de Servières, Jean, Viscount
d’Aguisy, 77, 88, 98
Il Galatheo (Della Casa), 121, 122, Guardiola, Joan, 49–50
170–71, 172 Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 108
Garamond, Claude, 15, 174, 190 Guazzo, Stefano, 170–71
Gardane, Antonio Guéroult, Guillaume, 178
Canzoni francese a due voce and, 216 Guerre des Juifs (Josèphe), 168
Doni and, 71 Guerrero, Francisco, 9n9
duo arrangements by, 222–23, 223–24 Guillet, Pernette du, 130
formats and, 20 Guillo, Laurent, 28–29, 177
Janequin and, 51 Guimier, Henri, 102
Madrigali di Verdelot et de altri autori, a sei guitar(s), 92, 207, 208
voci and, 10
motets and, 158, 161 Habert, Pierre, 190, 210, 232–33
music school of, 222 Hackel, Heidi Brayman, 130
note nere madrigals and, 178 Handel, George Frideric, 208
Gaspari, Gaetano, 22, 23n39, 85 handwriting, 122, 173, 175, 189–192, 235
Gerbino, Giuseppe, 24n42 Harmonice musices Odhecaton A
Gero, Jhan, 71, 73, 216 Ave Maria in, 136
Gervaise, Claude, 216 format of, 20
Gesner, Conrad, 52, 71, 77, 105 Martini and, 67–68, 97
Gindron, François, 230 motets in, 158
Ginzburg, Carlo, 226 serial publication and, 12
girls and women, 130 Harvey, Gabriel, 268–69
Giunta, Giovanni, 50n38 Haultin, Jérôme, 54
Giunta, Luc’Antonio, 50n38 Haultin, Pierre, 53, 54, 54n59, 65n82
Giunta family, 86, 158 Heartz, Daniel
Giunta, Filippo and Jacopo, 49 on Attaingnant chansonniers, 88
Glarean, Heinrich, 106–7, 194, 254–55, 264, 269 Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of
Godard, Robert, 229 Music, 23, 28–29
Godefroy de Bouillon, 69–70 on printed music, 30, 91–92, 216
Gombert, Nicolas, 200, 222–24 on voix de ville, 205
Gondouyn, Gilbert de, 233 Hèle, George de La, 49, 66
Gorbin, Gilles, 232 Henri II, King of France, 187, 193, 231
Gosse, Maistre, 148 Henri III, King of France, 236, 237–38
Goudimel, Claude, 247–49, 257–58 Henry VIII, King of England, 161
Grafton, Anthony, 12–13, 25, 112, Herwart, Hans Heinrich
268–69 binder’s volumes of, 85–87, 86
i n d e x | 311
Herwart, Hans Heinrich (Cont.) instruments in, 101–102
Livre de chansons series (Attaingnant) Pense and, 76–77
and, 83, 85–87, 88–89, 99, 98–99, Istitutioni harmoniche (Zarlino), 264
102–103, 104 Italian (language), 121, 175
motets and, 158–161 italic type, 175, 182
music library of, 82, 83–84, 97–98
Parangon des chansons series (Moderne) and, Jacopo da Bologna, 37n71
83, 89, 90, 102–3, 104 Jambe de Fer, Philibert, 233, 247
Heures de Nostre Dame en francoys, 233 Janequin, Clément, 12–13, 51, 72, 73, 230,
hexis, 240 248, 249
Heyden, Pieter van der, 116 Jardine, Lisa, 268–69
Hiesse, Jehan, 52, 178 Je prens congie (Gombert), 200
home schooling, 187 Je suis desheritée (Cadéac), 194
Huguenots, 129, 139, 238 Jesuits
printing and, 53, 55 canons and, 143–157
psalm settings and, 230–31, 248–49 literacy and, 129–130
d’Huillier, Étienne, 249 teaching methods of, 136–144
Huitieme livre de pseaumes de David See also Coyssard, Michel
(Goudimel), 257–58 João IV, King of Portugal, 78
humanists and humanism, 29, 32, 58, Jobin, Bernhard, 54n59
69–70, 101, 171, 268–270 Johns, Adrian, 25
Huntington Library, 22 Jones, Ann Roselind, 27n49
Les Hymnes sacrez et Odes spirituelles pour Josèphe, Flavius, 168
chanter devant, et après la leçon du Josquin des Prez, 96, 135–36, 200, 217
catéchisme (Coyssard), 139 Judd, Cristle Collins, 32, 269
Jullet, Hubert, 14
Les Illustrations de Gaule (Lemaire de
Belges), 168 Kerle, Jacob de, 95
imitative polyphony, 144–45, 148, 150–52, Kerman, Joseph, 30
155–56, 217–225, 246–49, 258. See King James Bible, 226
also canon(s) Kmetz, John, 162, 193–94
Imperato, Ferrante, 100
imprimeurs (printers). See printers La Croix du Maine, François de, 71–72, 77
imprimeurs-libraires (printer-booksellers). La Noue, François de, 187, 188
See printer-booksellers La Primaudaye, Pierre de, 119–120, 236,
improvisation, 27, 37n71, 152, 206–211, 222, 240, 241–43
258, 262. See also fauxbourdon La Rochefoucauld, François,
Index of Forbidden Books, 226–27 Duc de, 81
Institutoris Symphoniacorum puerorum . . . La Tombe, Pierre de, 48, 60n77, 66
modulorum editio (Certon), 135, 149–151, Labarre, Albert, 26, 46, 74–75, 75
149–157, 150–51, 153–54, 155 Labé, Louise, 178
Instruction methodique & fort facile pour ladies-in-waiting, 186–87
apprendre la musique practique Laet, Jan de, 54
(Blockland), 176, 263 Lalemant, Pierre, 76
Instruction pour apprendre a chanter a quatre Lancelot du Lac, 69–70, 169
parties, selon le Plain chant, les Pseaumes, Lassus, Orlande de
& Cantiques (Macé and Dandin), 262 Catholicism and, 231
instruments, 101–2, 193 copies of works by, 52–53
inventaires après décès (estate inventories) H. J. Fugger and, 83
book collectors and, 70–71, 74–77, 75 Le Roy & Ballard and, 81
booksellers and, 45–46, 49–50, 52 Le Roy and, 249–250
312 | i n d e x
Lassus, Orlande de: works Premier–Neufiesme livre de chansons à quatre
Continuation du mélange, 162 parties dArcadet & autres of, 46
Livre de chansons nouvelles . . . d’Orlande de Premier–Tiers Livre de chansons à 3 of, 64
Lassus, 52 psalm settings and, 231, 256–57
Magnum Opus Musicum, 148 Quatrains (Pibrac) and, 246–47
Mellange d’Orlande de Lassus, 52, 53, 254 titles of anthologies and, 107–8
Moduli duarum vocum, 260–61 Traicté de musique and, 255, 263–64
Patrocinium musices Orlandi de Lasso, 53 typefaces and, 176, 177
Prophetiae Sibyllarum, 83, 103–4, 250 learning to read
Le thresor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus, canons and, 143–157, 145, 146, 155,
214–15, 214–15 163–65, 164
Latin (language) déchiffrage and, 149–155, 150–51,
books of hours and, 132–36 211–225, 212, 218–19, 221, 223–24
learning to read in, 117–121, in French, 118, 121–22, 124–25, 167–173
124–28, 167–68 See also civility books
purity of, 118–19, 125–26, 169 in Latin, 117–121, 124–28, 167–68
lawyers, 69, 168 lessons in manners and, 121–22
Layolle, Francesco de, 135 lists and, 202, 258
Le Blanc, Didier, 216 manuscript additions in chansonniers and,
Le Blanc, Virgile, 140 161–65, 163, 164, 213–15, 214, 215
Le Jeune, Cécile, 264 motets and, 135–36, 148–49, 165–66
Le Jeune, Claude, 72, 233, 249, 264 musical notation and, 5–7, 122–23, 125
Le Jeusne, Martin, 48, 65 as oral experience, 128–131
Le Maistre, Mattheus, 144, 229 psalm settings and, 230–31
Le Mesgissier, Martin, 232 role of singing in, 123–28, 138–144
Le Prevost, Jean, 74 writing and, 122
Le Roy, Adrian Lemaire de Belges, Jean, 168
airs de cour and, 210 L’Estocart, Paschal de, 233, 246–47
Goudimel and, 248 Lesure, François, 28–29, 79
Livre d’airs de cour miz sur le luth, 102, 210 lettre française d’art de main, 173. See also
modal ordering and, 253–56, 263 caractères de civilité
Plantin and, 47–48 Lewis, Mary S., 21n32
Quatrains (Pibrac) and, 249–257 Liber primus missarum (Guerrero), 9n9
as Royal Printer of Music, 79, 103 Liber quindecim missarum, 95
Traicté de musique and, 263 libraires (booksellers). See booksellers
Le Roy & Ballard La Libraria (Doni), 71–72, 77
Boni and, 256–57 libraries. See book collector(s); book lending;
chansonniers of, 81 municipal libraries; national and
chansons for two and three voices and, 48, state libraries; specific libraries
64, 179, 216 Library of Congress, 22
distribution en blanc and, 47–48 Liceo Musicale (Bologna), 22, 56, 85
duplicate editions and, 52–53, 257 Licino, Agostino, 215
formats and, 47, 86n69, 111 Lindemann, Frayda, 79
Goudimel and, 248–49 “‘Little Jobs’” (Stallybrass), 34
as imprimeurs, 44 Livre d’airs de cour miz sur le luth (Le Roy),
Livre de chansons series of, 13, 46–48, 103, 102, 210
107, 248, 265 Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise du seizième siècle
Moduli duarum vocum (Lassus) and, (Labarre), 26
260–61 Livre de chansons à 5 (Lassus), 162
paper sizes and, 9 Livre de chansons nouvelles . . . d’Orlande de
Plantin and, 47–48, 52, 62–64 Lassus, 52
i n d e x | 313
Livre de chansons series (Attaingnant), 13–14 Marguerite de Navarre, 130
binder’s volumes and, 85–87 Marguerite de Valois, 190, 193
book collectors and, 104 Marian litanies, 148–49
Castell and, 17–18 Marot, Clément, 69–70, 111, 138, 194,
Herwart and, 83, 88, 98, 99, 102–3, 104 228–29, 231
poetry collection based on, 108–9 Martin, Henri-Jean, 25–26, 91–92
survival rates of, 96 Martin menoit son porceau (Janequin), 230
title pages of, 14, 15 Martini, Giambattista
Livre de chansons series (Du Chemin), 62 book agents and, 67–68, 97
Livre de chansons series (Le Roy & Ballard), Marian litanies in canon and, 149
13, 46–48, 103, 107, 248, 265 music books at the Liceo Musicale
Livre de chansons series (Phalèse), 13 and, 22, 85
Livre de danseries series (Du Chemin), 62 Petrucci prints and, 67–68, 97
Livre des chansons series (Susato), 12n14 “Sportelli di Libreria” and, 20
Le IIe Livre du Jardin de musique, 161–162, material culture, 26–28
162, 163 Mazarin, Cardinal Jules, 19, 98
livres de privilège, 79 McKenzie, Donald F., 25, 31, 33
Lloyd, Edward, 50 McKitterick, David, 24n42
Locqueneulx, Marc, 146, 147 Me monst’amour (Arcadelt), 205
Logerois, Nicolas, 54 Medici Codex, 106
Louis XIII, King of France, 168, 193, 235 Medici family, 173–74. See also Catherine
Louveau, Jehan, 189 de’ Medici
Love, Harold, 32 Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de
Lumley, Lord John, 22n33, 78 Fauvel (Dillon), 32
Luther, Martin, 139, 226 Meigret, Louis, 172, 185–86
Mellange de chansons, 52
Macé, Benedic, 262 Mellange d’Orlande de Lassus, 52, 53, 254
Madrigali di Verdelot et de altri autori, a sei El melopeo y maestro (Cerone), 135
voci, 10 Mer des Histoires, 168
Magnificat selon le plain chant de l’esglise, 262 Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter
Magnificat settings, 261–62 le plain chant, et compter (Cossard)
Magnum Opus Musicum (Lassus), 148 handwriting exercises in, 191, 192
Magny, Olivier de, 181, 194, 205 Magnificats and psalms in, 261
Mahieu, Thomas, 98 mensural notation in, 213
Maillard, Jean, 107, 194, 195–202, 196–99, musical notation and, 122–23
201, 229–230 Pater noster and Ave Maria in, 118, 119–120
Mais de quoy (Arcadelt), 205 syllabification in, 118, 119–120, 127–28
Maison de Saint Louis de Saint Cyr, 80 Meurier, Hubert, 126
Male, Zeghere van, 107n125 Micard, Claude, 205, 206, 233n13, 245
Mallard, Thomas, 54, 243–45, 244 Michael Markham, 210
M’amie un jour (Certon), 194 Mielich, Hans, 104
Mangeant, Jacques, 54 Mille regretz (Josquin des Prez), 200, 217
Mangeant, Simon, 54 Millot, Nicolas, 230–31
manuscripts, 23–25, 29–30, 40–41, 45–46, Milsom, John, 41–42
75–76, 105–10. See also music Minut, Gabriel du, 104
manuscripts Miscellanea (Poliziano), 111–12
Manuzio, Aldo, 174 miscellanies, 40, 105–7
Marci, Guillaume, 141–43 Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno
Marenzio Online Digital Edition, 24n42 (Striggio), 42
Mareschal, Jehan, 48 Missarum liber primus (Morales), 50, 95
314 | i n d e x
mode multiple-impression printing, 12
defined, 252, 263 municipal libraries, 81–82
Magnificats and, 261–62 Musée Condé (Chantilly), 81
in practice, 253–54, 260–64 Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della
Traicté de musique and, 255, 263 Musica (Bologna), 68
modal ordering Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First
Boni and, 250–56, 251, 263–64 Century of Print (van Orden), 37
of chanson anthologies, 252–54 Music, Patronage, and Printing in Late
Le Jeune and, 255n66, 264 Renaissance Florence (Carter), 31–32
Le Roy and, 253–56, 263 Music, Print, and Culture in Early
Moduli duarum vocum (Lassus) and, 260 Sixteenth-Century Italy (Fenlon), 31
modal system(s) Music and the Cultures of Print (ed. van
church modes, 252, 263 Orden), 32
of Glarean, 106–7, 254–55, 263, 264 music manuscripts
of Zarlino, 264 copied from printed music, 11n13,
Moderne, Jacques 102–3, 194
as imprimeur-libraire, 44 miscellany form of, 105–7, 161
Motteti del fiore series of, 51, 135 of motets, 136, 156
See also Parangon des chansons series (Moderne) paper ruled for, 44, 45–46, 50, 73
Moduli duarum vocum (Lassus), 260–61 persistence of, 55
Molin, Jan du, 64 presence in music collections, 79–80
Monluc, Jean de, 138 preservation and, 103–4
Monstrelet, Enguerrand de, 168 scribal publication and, 71n10
Montaigne, Michel de, 168–69, 188 in sheets and partleaves, 40–43, 84, 93
Monte, Philippe de, 52, 53 study of, 23–25, 29–30
Morales, Cristóbal de, 50, 51, 95 See also book collector(s)
Morehen, John, 96–97 music notation, nature of, 6–7
Morel, Frédéric, 232, 238 music teachers and students, 29, 72–74,
Moretus, Jean, 95 106–7, 161–65, 193–94,
Morlaye, Guillaume, 76 216–222, 260–61
Morley, Thomas, 40–41 musica ficta (“feigned music”), 152, 222
Mornable, Antoine, 230 musica secreta, 104
Morosi, Piero di Giuliano, 50n39, 51, 55–56 Musicque de joye, 50
motets Musique de Guillaume Costeley, 52, 104
books of hours and, 135–36 musique de la chambre, 208–9
learning to read and, 135–36, 148–49, Musique du Roi, 80
165–66 musique mesurée à l’antique, 183–85, 184, 202,
marketing and collection of, 107, 157–166, 236, 243, 245–46
159–160 The Myth of Print Culture (Dane), 111–12
as a middling genre, 123–24, 165–66
See also Ave Maria; Pater noster Naples, 188
Motetti A, 68 Nasco, Jan, 74
Motetti de passione, de cruce, de sacramento, de national and state libraries, 78–80. See also
beata virgine et huiusmodi B, 136 specific libraries
Motetti novi et chanzoni franciose a quatro sopra The Nature of the Book (Johns), 25
doi, 157–58 Naudé, Gabriel, 19, 98
Mouton, Jean, 72, 156 New York Public Library, 58
Le Moyen de promptement et facilement apprendre Newcomb, Anthony, 5n2
en lettre françoise, à bien lire, prononcer Nicoletti, Filippo, 57
et escrire (Habert), 190, 210 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 240–41
i n d e x | 315
nobles de la robe, 69, 168 Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques spirituelz
Nonsuch Library, 22n33, 78, 82, 100 pour chanter avecque la Doctrine
Normandie, Laurent de, 53n57 chrestienne (Coyssard), 136–37,
note nere madrigals, 178 139–140, 141, 143–44, 145, 148
Nouvel exemplaire pour apprendre à escrire, parchment, 57–58
190–91, 232–33, 234 Parisian style, 167–68
Le nuove musiche (Caccini), 210 El Parnasso (Daza), 95
partbooks
Occo Codex, 106 binding and, 16–19, 40, 55–58, 57
octavo definition of, 4
chansonniers in, 60–66, 63–64, 178–180, 179 formats and layouts of, 8–11, 10, 16,
format, 10–11, 47 46–47, 47
motet books in, 157–161, 159–160 Granjon’s chansonniers and, 178–79
See also Trophées de musique in L’Ouye (Bosse), 5–7, 5
Octo cantica divae Mariae virginis, 262 reading from, 5–7, 5, 42–43, 103, 152,
Octo missae (Hèle), 49, 66 191–93, 202, 222
Octonaires de la vanité et inconstance du monde scholars and, 4–8
(Le Jeune), 233, 264 survival rates of, 95–97
Les XXII octonnaires du psalme CXIX de use of, 5–7, 5, 41–43, 96–97
David traduicts par Jean Poictevin See also binder’s volumes
(Jambe de Fer), 233 partleaves, 41–42
Octonaires sur la vanité et inconstance du monde Il pastor fido (Guarini), 108
(Chandieu), 233 pastourelle tradition, 108
Oliphant, Thomas, 22 Pater noster
Ongaro, Giulio M., 73 in books of hours, 134
Opéra (Paris), 79 in books of music, 135–36
The Order of Books (Chartier), 33 catechism and, 118, 134–35, 134
Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 168 Certon (setting of), 152–57, 153–54, 155
orthography, 172, 182–86, 183–84 Josquin des Prez (setting of), 135–36
Orto, Marbriano de, 136 learning to read and, 118, 126, 135–36,
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 79 139, 149, 152–57
L’Ouye (Bosse), 5 in Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre,
chanter le plain chant, et compter, 118, 119
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 135 Palestrina (setting of), 135
Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium libri in Paraphrase des Hymnes et Cantiques
XIX (Gesner), 71, 77 spirituelz pour chanter avecque la
paper and paper sizes, 8–11, 46–47, 47 Doctrine chrestienne, 136–37
paper, ruled for music, 44, 45–46, 50, 73 Patrocinium musices Orlandi de Lasso, 53
Parangon des chansons series (Moderne) Patuzzi, Giuseppe Maria, 67–68, 97
Attaingnant chansonniers and, 12n14, 13 Peletier du Mans, Jacques
binder’s volumes and, 89–90, 89, 97 reform of orthography and, 172, 182–83,
book collectors and, 104 183, 185–86, 209, 210
Gardane and, 216 royal support and, 169–170
Grolande and, 18 Pense, Justinien, 76–77
Herwart and, 83, 97, 102–3, 104 Pepys, Samuel, 88, 98
Maillard and, 194 Petrarch, 37, 168
musical education and, 194 Petrucci, Armando, 105–6
survival rates of, 89–90, 96–97 Petrucci, Ottaviano
table layout of, 18, 89–91, 90–91, 103 Canti series of, 12, 144, 158
title of, 107 Frottole series of, 88
316 | i n d e x
Harmonice musices Odhecaton A and, 12, 20, Premier trophée de musique (Granjon), 175–78,
67–68, 97, 136, 158 176, 179, 195, 201, 203–4, 229
Martini and, 67–68, 97 Premier–Neufiesme livre de chansons à quatre
Motetti de passione, de cruce, de sacramento, de parties dArcadet & autres, 46
beata virgine et huiusmodi B and, 136 Premier–Quart Livre du Recueil des recueilz de
multiple-impression printing and, 12 chansons à quatre parties, 62
Werdenstein and, 88 Premier–Tiers Livre de chansons à 3, 64
Pettegree, Andrew, 82, 96 primary education, 167–69, 186–88. See also
Pevernage, André, 97 learning to read
Phalèse, Cornelius, 53 Il Primo libro de Madrigali a 5 (Nicoletti), 57
Phalèse, Pierre Il primo libro dei madrigali italiani & canzoni
chansonniers of, 13, 107, 211–13, 212, francese a doi voci (Gero), 216
258–260 Il primo libro di madrigali d’Archadelt a
Lassus and, 52–53 quatro, 15–16
Plantin and, 48 Primus liber modulorum (Boni), 254n61,
Phalèse, Pierre II, 54 255, 256
Pibrac, Guy du Faur, Seigneur de, 232, Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century
236–243. See also Quatrains (Pibrac) Venice (J. A. Bernstein), 31
Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music print-runs (pressruns), 88–95
(Heartz), 23, 28 printed music, scholarship on, 30–34
Piperinus, Christoph, 74, 161–62, 194 printers, 44–48. See also Granjon, Robert;
A plaine and easie introduction to practicall Le Roy & Ballard
musicke (Morley), 40–41 printer-booksellers, 44–48, 52–54, 58–66.
Les Plaisirs de la vie rustique (Pibrac), 239 See also Attaingnant, Pierre; Corrozet,
Planson, Jean, 246, 249 Gilles; Du Chemin, Nicolas; Fezendat,
Plantin, Christopher Michel; Gardane, Antonio; Moderne,
archives of, 45 Jacques; Plantin, Christopher
as binder, 58–59 printing
books of hours and, 132–33, 147 cultural studies of, 8, 24–25, 32–34, 125,
as imprimeur-libraire, 47–48, 49, 52–53 129, 226
Livres des relieurs of, 59 duplicate editions and, 52–53, 257
music sales by, 58–66, 61–62, errors, 12, 53n53, 55–56, 243–44, 244
63–64, 107 false uniformity of, 23–24
paper and, 9, 46n25 marketing broadsides and stocklists,
survival rates and, 92, 95 49, 51–54
Plantin-Moretus Museum (Antwerp), 43, multiple-impression, 12
45, 58–59 proofreading and, 244, 248
Plato, 101, 243 in the provinces, 54–55
plays, 40, 41, 42–43 single-impression, 12–13, 13, 46
Pléiade poets, 69, 169 stop-press corrections and, 23
Pogue, Samuel, 28–29 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
Poliziano, Angelo, 111–12 (Eisenstein), 25
Pollet, Johannes, 104 Prioris, Denis, 156
“The Power of Positivist Thinking” Prommer, Wolfgang, 84, 87, 98
(Treitler), 31 promptbooks, 42
Powers, Harold S., 252 Prophetiae Sibyllarum (Lassus), 83, 103–4, 250
Le premier livre de chansons, gaillardes, pavannes Proverbes de Salomon (Gindron), 230
(Morlaye), 76 Prunières, Henry, 80
Premier livre des chansons a deux ou a troix psalm settings, 230–31, 248–49, 257–58
parties (Susato), 215, 221 Pugin, Laurent, 24n42
i n d e x | 317
Puisque vivre en servitude (Sandrin), 123, 202, Bergerie, 108
203–4, 205–7 Certon and, 205
Puisque vivre en servitude (Chardavoine), as court poet, 169
205–7, 206 Du Chemin and, 248
Granjon’s chansonniers and, 194
quarto format, 10, 47 pastourelle tradition and, 108
quatrains, 135, 233–35. See also Quatrains popularity of, 69–70, 111
(Pibrac) Rore, Cipriano de, 73, 253n56
Quatrains (Pibrac) rotuli (scrolls), 40–41, 105, 117
moral restraint and, 235–243, 237 Rouspeau, Yves, 233
musical settings of, 236, 243–264, 244, Royal Printers of Music, 79
251, 259–260
popularity of, 232–35, 232 Saint-Gelais, Mellin de, 69–70, 111, 194,
Trophées de musique and, 264–66 195, 202, 205
Quatrains spirituels de l’honneste amour Saliat, Pierre, 170
(Rouspeau), 233 Sammelbände. See binder’s volumes (tract
Quatrains spirituels et moraux extraicts des volumes)
sainctes et divines sentences du très sage San Luigi dei Francesi (Rome), 95
roy Salomon (Gondouyn), 233 Sancta Maria ora pro nobis, 148–49
Sandrin, Pierre
Rabelais, François, 69–70, 111, 226 as court musician, 180
Rabier, Louis, 54 songs by: Attaingnant chansonniers and,
Ramée, Pierre de La (Ramus), 169, 170 12–13; children and, 123; popularity
“Rare Books and Revolutionaries” of, 107; Susato and, 217
(Pettegree), 82 Sandrin, Pierre: works
Rastall, Richard, 96–97 Doulce memoire, 212, 217, 218–19
reading. See learning to read Puisque vivre en servitude, 123, 202,
readers, professional, 267–69 203–4, 205–7
Reading Renaissance Music Theory (Judd), 32 Si j’ay du bien, 176–77, 194, 207–210, 208
Le Recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons Santerre, Pierre, 247
en forme de voix de ville (Chardavoine), Scaliger, Joseph, 58
205–7, 206, 245 Scève, Maurice, 178, 194, 195
Recueil des recueils series (Le Roy & Ballard), 107 Schutz, Alexander H., 26
recueils de chansons, 108–11, 228–29 scores, 4, 5–6, 24, 43
recueils factices. See binder’s volumes (tract Scotto, Girolamo, 20, 51, 158, 161, 178, 216
volumes) scrolls (rotuli), 40–41, 105, 117
Recueils imprimés du XVIe siècle (RISM Series Scudieri, Francesco, 73, 84
B/I), 30 Sealy, Robert J., 240–41
Reginault, Pierre. See Sandrin, Pierre Second livre des Amours de P. de Ronsard
Regnes, Nicole, 216 (Bertrand), 104
relieurs (bookbinders). See bookbinders Second trophée de musique, 175–78, 179,
Republic (Plato), 243 195, 196–99
riding academies, 188 second-hand music books, 45, 81n49, 87–88,
Rigaud, Benoist, 110 106. See also book collectors
Ringhieri, Innocenzio, 174, 189–190 Seneschal, Nicolas, 74
Roman de la Rose, 69–70, 108, 168 Septiesme livre de chansons, 211–13, 212, 258–260
romans de chevalerie, 33, 60, 69–70, 110, serial publication, 12–19
168–69 Sermisy, Claudin de
Rome, 152 Aupres de vous, 217
Ronsard, Pierre de Ave Maria settings of, 156
Auger and, 138 as court musician, 180
318 | i n d e x
music by: Attaingnant chansonniers Tant que vivray (Sermisy), 74, 123,
and, 12–13; children and, 123; Du 212, 228–29
Chemin and, 95; La Croix du Maine Taricani, JoAnn, 102–3
and, 72; Susato and, 217 Te Deum laudamus, 126, 138, 140, 141
Tant que vivray, 74, 123, 212, 228–29 Terence, 167–68
Servin, Jean, 247 Terminorum musicae diffinitorium
Shakespeare, William, 94 (Tinctoris), 123
Si comm’espoir (Maillard), 195–202, 196–99 Thibault, Geneviève, Comtesse de
Si faux danger (Arcadelt), 205 Chambure, 28–29, 80
Si j’ay du bien (Sandrin), 176–77, 194, Le thresor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus,
207–10, 208 214–15, 214–15
single-impression printing, 12–13, 13, 46 Tinctoris, Johannes, 123
Six livres de la République (Bodin), 238 Tiraqueau, Michel, 100
Smith, Bruce R., 130–31 Tory, Geoffroy, 171, 174, 182
Solitaire second (Tyard), 264 Tournes, Jean de, 178, 182
Sommaire de la Doctrine chrestienne, mis en vers Tournes, Jean II de, 121, 172, 176, 232
François (Coyssard), 143 Tournon, François de, 194
Sonetz de P. de Ronsard (Boni), 254n61, tract volumes. See binder’s volumes (tract
256–57, 270 volumes)
Sonetz de P. de Ronsard (Monte), 52, 53 Traicté de musique contenant une theorique
Songs, Scribes, and Society (Alden), 32 succincte pour methodiquement pratiquer
“Sportelli di Libreria” (Crespi), 20–21 la composition, 255, 263–64
Stallybrass, Peter, 17, 27n49, 34, 66 Traicté du profit (Coyssard), 140–41, 229
Stamperia Vaticana, 173–74 Treitler, Leo, 31
stock bindings, 46, 49–50, 60–66, 61–62 Le Trętté de la grammęre françoęze (Meigret),
Straton, Thomas de, 176 172, 185–86
Striggio, Alessandro, 42 trio arrangements, 215–225
The Structures of Everyday Life trio scorings, 246–47, 250–52, 251, 257–58
(Braudel), 26–27 Trophées de musique
Suite de l’académie françoise (La caractères de civilité and, 175–78, 176, 179
Primaudaye), 241–43 musical education and, 193–211
Sunday school classes, 139, 146–47 Quatrains (Pibrac) and, 264–66
Sureau, Hugues, 247 title of, 107
Susato, Tielman types of poems and songs in, 229–230
chansonniers of, 13 Tschudi, Aegidius, 106–7, 194
Doulce memoire, 217–222, 218–19 Tyard, Pontus de, 102, 264
as imprimeur-libraire, 55 typography
Livre des chansons series of, 12n14 music, 12–13, 13, 14, 15, 209n85
modal ordering and, 252–55 significance of, 15, 33, 121, 122, 171–75,
Premier livre des chansons a deux ou a troix 182–83, 190–91
parties, 215, 216, 216–222, 221, 253 See also caractères de civilité.
Tiers livre contenant xxx nouvelles chansons à
deux ou à trois, 216 uncial script, 105
titles of anthologies and, 107–8 unbound books, 44–55
syllabaries, 118, 135. See also Methodes pour Urfé, Honoré d’, 108, 189–190
apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le
plain chant, et compter (Cossard) van Orden, Kate, 32, 37
Vanhulst, Henri, 28–29, 48, 62
tablatures, 6, 50n38, 92–95, 93, 208, Vaudémont, Count of, 76
table layout, 18, 89–91, 90–91, 103 Vautrollier, Thomas, 53
i n d e x | 319
vellum, 57 vivre en servitude (Sandrin and
La Venerie (Fouilloux), 168 Chardavoine)
Vérard, Antoine, 233 Vollbehr, Otto, 22
Vergecio, Angelo, 190 Vos huis sont ilz tous fermez fillettes?
vernacular. See French (language); Italian (Godard), 229
(language)
Vernacular Books in Parisian Private Libraries Werdenstein, Johann Georg von, 82, 83,
of the Sixteenth Century according to the 84–85, 87–88, 97–98
Notarial Inventories (Schutz), 26 “What is the History of Books?”
Verona, 152 (Darnton), 34
Verovio, Simone, 177 Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria, 83
Veyrin-Forrer, Jeanne, 45n20 Willaert, Adrian, 74, 135
Villon, François, 69–70 Wistreich, Richard, 6–7, 32–33
Vingt et neuf chansons, 50, 51 women readers, 130
Vives, Juan Luis, 125–26 writing. See handwriting
voix de ville (“city voices”), 202–11, 203–4,
206, 225, 245–46. See also Puisque Zarlino, Gioseffo, 264
320 | i n d e x

Kate Van Orden Materialities Books, Readers, PDF

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Kate Van Orden Materialities Books, Readers, PDF

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Materialities

Series Editor Jane F. Fulcher

Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Staging the French Revolution:

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

Published in the United States of America by

© Oxford University Press 2015

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

PART I A Material History of the Chanson

PART II Learning to Read

Chapter Four Literacy and Song 117

Postscript: Cultures of Music 267

“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.

APM Archives of the Plantin Moretus Museum

A Material History of the Chanson

A nticipation followed by surprise. How many times, for generations,

What Is a Book of Music? Some Bibliographic Basics

F i g u r e 1. 2 Madrigali di Verdelot et de altri autori, a sei voci (Venice: Gardane,

composed by Claudin de Sermisy, Pierre Sandrin, and Clément Janequin stood

Unbound Parts and Binder’s

The practices according to which printed music is catalogued, cited,

Book History, Music Bibliography, and the Chanson

Music Sales and Some Evidence of Stock Bindings

Of the sturdier bindings for music, common coverings were parchment or

a significant portion of Plantin’s business. Plantin himself trained as a binder

T wo and a half centuries after Ottaviano Petrucci published the first

Book Ownership and the First Bibliographies

Small and Middling Music Collections

Renaissance Bibliophiles and State Libraries

to the sixteenth-century bibliography of Antoine Du Verdier, Moderne’s series

Books in the Cabinet

In this sense, then, we might see Herwart’s Attaingnant volumes as objects

Chansonniers and Chapbooks of Poetry

A round 1600, students in France learned to read with printed primers.1

any other on which a man’s acceptability and success so much depends.

are punctuation and accents that—felicitously—correspond to the comely

Ave Maria and the ABCs

The Catechists and the Canons

F i g u r e 5 . 4 Manuscript canon for seven voices at the unison in Michel

terms of voice-leading, but plain, to be sure. Finally, the Jesuit collection

Motets and Broad Readership

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek,

Versailles, Bibliothèque municipale, Fonds Goujet, 8o 32, Superius

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4º Mus. pr. 40 (SATB)

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cons. Rés. 623–623bis (Q)

concerned us throughout this chapter. Their material form—copied onto a fly-

Learning to Read in French

The Caractères de Civilité for Music of Robert Granjon

Polite Speech and Its Texts

civilité, Peletier’s Dialoguɇ dɇ l’ortografɇ enlists typography to regulate pronun-

Duo Arrangements and Déchiffrage

Granjon’s Trophées de musique highlight the obstacles historians encounter

became immediately and enduringly popular: the moralizing Quatrains of Guy

Pibrac’s Quatrains and Moral Restraint

It is important not to lose sight of the Quatrains’ courtly origins in the

Pibrac, the Psalms, and the Business of Music Printing

A l’ombre d’un vert buisson (Maillard), 229–30 Aranda, Marie de, 60

Вам также может понравиться