A Music Book for Mary Tudor, Queen of France
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A MUSIC BOOK FOR MARY TUDOR, QUEEN OF FRANCE Item Type Article Authors Brobeck, John T. Citation A MUSIC BOOK FOR MARY TUDOR, QUEEN OF FRANCE 2016, 35:1 Early Music History DOI 10.1017/S0261127916000024 Publisher Cambridge University Press Journal Early Music History Rights © Cambridge University Press 2016. Download date 26/09/2021 04:46:32 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Version Final accepted manuscript Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/621897 Brobeck - 1 <special sorts: {#} (space); flat sign ({fl} in file); sharp sign ({sh} in file); natural sign ({na} in file); double flat sign ({2fl} in file [these flats are close together, not spaced]); mensuration sign cut-C ({C/} in file; see pdf> <running heads: John T. Brobeck | A Music Book for Mary Tudor, Queen of France> Early Music History (2016) Volume 35. © Cambridge University Press doi: 10.1017/S0261127916000024 JOHN T. BROBECK Email: [email protected] _________________________________________________________________________________________ A MUSIC BOOK FOR MARY TUDOR, QUEEN OF FRANCE Frank Dobbins in memoriam In 1976 Louise Litterick proposed that Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library MS 1760 was originally prepared for Louis XII and Anne of Brittany of France but was gifted to Henry VIII of England in 1509. That the manuscript actually was prepared as a wedding gift from Louis to his third wife Mary Tudor in 1514, however, is indicated by its decorative and textual imagery, which mirrors the decoration of a book of hours given by Louis to Mary and the textual imagery used in her four royal entries. Analysis of the manuscript’s tabula and texts suggests that MS 1760 was planned by Louis’s chapelmaster Hilaire Bernonneau (d. 1524) at the king’s behest. The new theory elucidates the content and significance of Gascongne’s twelve-voice canon Ista est speciosa, which appeared beneath an original portrait of Mary Tudor and was intended to mirror the perfection of the Blessed Virgin and her ‘godchild’ Mary. Although there is general agreement within the scholarly community that the well-known music manuscript Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys MS 1760 was created at the French royal court during the first two decades of the sixteenth century, scholars have not been able to agree about the specific circumstances that inspired its creation.1 The manuscript (which 1 A facsimile edition of Pepys MS 1760 was published by Howard Mayer Brown in 1988 as volume 2 in his series Renaissance Music Sources in Facsimile (New York: Garland, 1988– ). Brobeck - 2 was part of the personal library of the English naval administrator, diarist, musician and bibliophile Samuel Pepys, 1633–1703, and contains his bookplates on the front and back flyleaves) gives every appearance of having been created either for the personal use of a monarch or as an expensive gift to a member of the nobility. At a mere 222 mm. by 147 mm. it is one of the smallest of the nearly 3,000 volumes in the Pepys Library.2 Because of its original gold cloth covers it is one of only twenty-two volumes for which Pepys did not provide his own full leather binding, but rather added a partial leather binding covering just the spine of the manuscript to make it resemble the other volumes in his collection. Every page of the parchment manuscript possesses illuminated majuscules or other fine artwork, most prominently on folios Iv and IIr, whose borders are completely covered in depictions of flora and fauna set against a gold background. There are no obvious cancellations or corrections in the manuscript, which appears to have been copied by one hand (unless the text and music scribes are different).3 More recently the manuscript has been published online in colour by the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), which may be seen at http://www.diamm.ac.uk/jsp/Descriptions?op=SOURCE&sourceKey=1671#imageList. The images are used here by permission of the Pepys Library, Cambridge University. Much of the relevant scholarly literature pertaining to the dating and provenance of the manuscript is identified in its entry in the Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music 1400–1550, Renaissance Manuscript Studies, 1, gen. ed. C. Hamm, University of Illinois Musicological Archives for Renaissance Manuscript Studies, 5 vols. (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology/Hänssler-Verlag, 1979–88). All music manuscripts mentioned in this article are cited according to their sigla in the Census-Catalogue. The sigla of printed books refers to the listing in Recueils imprimés XVIe–XVIIe siècles, ed. F. Lesure (Répertoire international des sources musicales; Munich-Duisberg, 1960). 2 The Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge is of considerable importance for scholars in many disciplines, and has been widely discussed in the scholarly literature. The entire contents of the library are exhaustively catalogued and described in Pepys Library, Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, gen. ed. R. Latham, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 1978–92). The principal description of MS 1760 is in volume 4 of this series. An earlier published catalogue of the portion of the collection including Pepys 1760 appears in M. R. James, Bibliotheca Pepysiana: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Samuel Pepys, Part 3, Mediaeval Manuscripts (London, 1923). A pictorial introduction to the Pepys Library and a useful discussion of its history appears in A. Hobson, Great Libraries (New York, 1970), pp. 213–21. 3 It is not clear if the music and text were written by the same or different scribes. All the music appears to have been copied by a single hand, and all the texts appear to have been copied by a single hand, but the music clefs clearly were written with a pen having a wider nib than the pen used for the texts (my thanks to Bonnie Blackburn for pointing this out). The text hand used throughout the MS includes elements found in both bâtarde handwriting and humanistic book script. Humanistic elements include, among others, straight-backed d; use of tall s; roundness of aspect, well separated letters; use of two compartment g; and the use of the ct ligature. For examples of batârde and humanistic book scripts, see M. P. Brown, A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (London, 1990), pp. 108-11, 126-7, and 130–1. Iain Brobeck - 3 COMPOSERS REPRESENTED IN THE MS That MS 1760 originated at the French royal court is strongly suggested by its musical content, since the great majority of its fifty-seven chansons and motets can be attributed to musicians who worked for one or more of three royal patrons, King Louis XII of France (r. 1498–1515), his queen Anne of Brittany (r. 1491–1514) and King Francis I of France (r. 1515–47) (see Table 1 and the complete concordance for MS 1760 in Appendix I). Over half the compositions in the manuscript can be assigned to either Antoine de Févin or Mathieu Gascongne. Févin served as a priest and singer for King Louis XII from at least 1506 until his death in late 1511 or early 1512. That he was a particular favourite of the king is suggested by a letter written by Louis on 18 April 1507 from Asti, Italy to his friend Guillaume de Montmorency in France to request that a chanson of Févin’s and a portrait painted by the court painter Jean Perréal (c. 1450–c. 1530) be sent to him.4 Gascongne’s only documented professional affiliation was with the French royal court, and several of his motets published in Pierre Attaingnant’s 1534–5 series of motet prints contain textual references suggesting that he was an intimate of the court during the second decade of the century, after Févin’s death.5 Curiously, however, he was not one of the thirty singers in Louis XII’s or Anne of Brittany’s chapels who were named in papal supplications between Fenlon stated that MS 1760 was written by a single hand throughout in his description of the manuscript in Cambridge Music Manuscripts, 900–1700 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 123–6. He described the script as ‘a finely formed bâtarde hand’. 4 The most thorough analysis in print of the meagre evidence pertaining to Févin’s biography and the de Févin family of Arras remains E. Clinkscale, ‘The Complete Works of Antoine de Févin’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1965), pp. 1–25. Archival evidence placing Févin in Blois in 1506 appeared in T. Dumitrescu, ‘The Chapel Musicians of Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne at Blois: New Documents, New Singers, and a Prioris Problem’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Québec City (Nov. 2007). 5 For example, his motet Caro mea vero est cibus appears to have been composed in 1512–13 as a royal response to Louis XII’s excommunication by Pope Julius II; Christus vincit Christus regnat sets a version of the Laudes regiae, a text recited at Francis I’s coronation in Jan. 1515; and the militaristic text of Deus regnorum, which begs God to give peace and ‘da servo tuo Francisco regi nostro de hoste triumphum’ may well have been inspired by Francis’s victorious Italian campaign of 1515–16. Concerning Caro mea see J. T. Brobeck, ‘Style and Authenticity in the Motets of Claudin de Sermisy’, Journal of Musicology, 16 (1998), pp. 26-90. For discussion of the style of Gascongne’s motets and an alphabetical list of concordant sources by piece see Brobeck, ‘The Motet at the Court of Francis I’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991), pp. 467–91. M.- A. Colin, ‘The Motets of Mathieu Gascongne: A Preliminary Report’, in T.