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Parisian nobles, a Scottish princess, and the woman's voice in late medieval song*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Paula Higgins
Paula Higgins
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

Perhaps the best-known songs of Antoine Busnoys are those whose texts conceal in acrostics or puns some form of the name ‘Jacqueline d'Aqueville’ (for the song texts and translations see Appendix 1).The first letters in each line of A vous sans autre (no. 2) and Je ne puis vivre ainsi toujours (no. 3) yield the acrostics ‘A Iaqveljne’ and ‘Jaqueljne d'Aqvevjle’ respectively; the first line of A que ville est abhominable (no. 4) makes a pun on the surname ‘Aqueville’; and the incipit of Ja que lui ne si actende (no. 1) forms an ambiguous series of monosyllables that can also be read as the name ‘Jaqueline’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 10 , October 1991 , pp. 145 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Droz, E., Thibault, G. and Rokseth, Y., eds., Trois chansonniers français du xve siècle, Documents Artistiques du xve Siècle 4 (Paris, 1927; repr. New York, 1978), pp. xi and 118Google Scholar.

2 Reese, G., Music in the Renaissance (New York, 1959), p. 101Google Scholar; Brown, H. M., Music in the Renaissance (Englewood Cliffs, 1976), p. 84Google Scholar; Perkins, L. L., ‘Antoine Busnois and the d'Hacqueville Connection’, Musique naturelle et musique artificielle: In memoriam Gustav [sic] Reese, ed. Winn, M. B., Le Moyen Français 5 (Montreal, 1979), pp. 49–64Google Scholar; Picker, M., ‘Busnois [de Busne], Antoine’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Sadie, S., 20 vols. (London, 1980), iii, p. 504Google Scholar. On Je ne puis vivre, see also Arlt, W., ‘Vom Überlieferungsbefund zum Kompositionsprozess: Beobachtungen an den zwei Fassungen von Busnois' “Je ne puis vivre ainsy”’, Festschrift Arno Forchert zum 60. Geburtstag am 29. Dezember 1985, ed. Allroggen, G. and Altenburg, D. (Kassel, 1986), pp. 27–40Google Scholar.

3 Perkins's article (see note 2) was the first serious attempt to determine the precise nature of Busnoys's ‘Hacqueville Connection’. Perkins added a fifth song, A une dame jay fait veu, to the original group because the colours blue and yellow mentioned in the text are those featured in the Hacqueville family arms. But the Hacqueville arms include not only blue and yellow, but silver and sable as well: ‘un escu d'argent au chevron de sable chargé de cinq aiglettes d'or et accompagné de trois testes de paon arrachées d'azur’. See Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 1182, fol. 274v and de La Chesnaye-Desbois, F. A. A., Dictionnaire de la noblesse, 3rd edn, 19 vols. (Paris, 1863–1876; repr. Nendeln, 1969), iii, p. 192Google Scholar. Moreover, the extant sources for the poem do not agree on the colours. The text of A une dame in Dij, which contains all of the Hacqueville songs, translated reads ‘blue and white’ instead of ‘blue and yellow’, and in the poetry anthology F-Pn fr. 1719, fol. 113, the word ‘jaune’ is crossed out and replaced by ‘noir’. Blue and white are in fact the colours mentioned in the text of Ja que lui ne si actende, where the poet declares that the colours her lover will wear are those of her name, one ‘perse’ (blue-green) and the other ‘blanche’. Blue and white are also the colours of the flowers decorating A que ville est abhominable in Dij, fols. 18v–19 (see below, p. 150), significant not only because Dij alone transmits all of the Hacqueville songs, but especially because of its primacy as a source of Busnoys's music. If colour symbolism is the rationale for adding a piece to the group, it would seem reasonable to expect the songs to refer consistently to the same colours. Therefore, the song may belong to the group, but not quite for the reasons Perkins proposed. In this study I shall focus only on the four songs whose references to Jacqueline are explicit. My subsequent work on the Hacqueville songs has led me to conclusions differing considerably from those of Perkins, but I am indebted to the structural framework and stimulating point of departure his article provided.

4 For a useful summary of the conflicting views on personal poetry see Lacy, N. J., ‘Villon in his Work: the Testament and the Problem of Personal Poetry’, L'Esprit Créateur, 18 (1978), pp. 60–9Google Scholar.

5 Lacy, ‘Villon’, pp. 62–3.

6 Calin, W., ‘Le livre du voir-dit’, A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut, Studies in Romance Languages 9 (Lexington, KY, 1974), p. 167Google Scholar.

7 Paris, P., ed., Guillaume de Machaut: Le livre du voir-dit (Paris, 1875; repr. Geneva, 1969), pp. xxii–xxivGoogle Scholar. The name is concealed in an anagram formed by rearranging the first eight letters of verse 9030 together with all of the letters of verse 9029. See below, p. 174.

8 See Calin, ‘Le livre du voir-dit’, pp. 169–72, for a summary of various positions on the ‘truth or fiction’ of Toute Belle. Calin staunchly upholds the arguments of G. Hanf who was the first to attempt to prove that the Voir-dit was entirely a work of fiction. See ‘Ueber Guillaume de Machauts Voir dit’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 22 (1898), pp. 145–96Google Scholar.

9 See Gybbon-Monypenny, G. B., ‘Guillaume de Machaut's Erotic ‘Autobiography’: Precedents for the Form of the Voir-dit’, Studies in Medieval Literature and Languages in Memory of Frederick Whitehead, ed. Rothwell, W., Barron, W. R. J., Blamires, D. and Thorpe, L. (Manchester, 1973), pp. 133–52Google Scholar.

10 Brownlee, K., Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison, 1984), p. 239, n. 25Google Scholar.

11 Lowinsky, E. E., ‘Jan van Eyck's Tymotheos: Sculptor or Musician? With an Investigation of the Autobiographic Strain in French Poetry from Rutebeuf to Villon’, Studi Musicali, 13 (1984), pp. 33–105, especially p. 68Google Scholar.

12 Perkins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, p. 53.

13 Noting that the ‘harshness of tone and bitterness of sentiment’ are virtually unmatched in the vernacular verse of the period, Perkins earmarked this song as signalling the demise of the ‘affair’ between Busnoys and Jacqueline. Perkins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, p. 54.

14 Robert Auclou and Petrus de Castello. See Fallows, D., Dufay (London, 1982), pp. 29–31, 60–1Google Scholar. Fallows noted that most of Dufay's songs containing acrostics must have been completed before 1440, ‘possibly giving clues to hitherto unsuspected travels and associations in his early years’ (p. 54).

15 Both are mentioned in the text of In hydraulis. Busnoys worked for Charles, Count of Charolais, who later became Duke of Burgundy, from c. 1467 to 1477, and he was in all likelihood a personal acquaintance of Ockeghem, since they both worked contemporaneously at the church of St-Martin of Tours in the early 1460s. See Higgins, P., ‘In hydraulis Revisited: New Light on the Career of Antoine Busnois’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 39 (1986), pp. 41–61 and p. 76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 ‘saluteris tuis meritis per me Busnois illustris comitis de Chaulois [sic] indignum musicum’.

17 Busnoys's full name is concealed in the opening and concluding phrases of the text ‘Anthoni usque limina … Fiat in omnibus noys’.

18 ‘Alpha et o cephasque deutheri / cum post decet penulti[mum] queri / actoris qui nomer vult habere’. See Boer, C. L. W., Het Anthonius-Motet van Anthonius Busnois (Amsterdam 1940), p. 16Google Scholar.

19 That is, by assigning numerical values to the letters of Busnoys's last name (spelled with a ‘y’, as in the manuscript Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 5557) in accordance with the rules of gematria (a=1, b=2, etc.), the sum total of the letters equals 108.

20 Barret, E. pointed this out some years ago in ‘A Critical Edition of the Dijon Chansonnier: Dijon, Bibliothèque de la Ville, MS 517 (Ancien 295)’, 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, George Peabody College for Teachers of Vanderbilt University, 1981), i, p. 36Google Scholar.

21 Ibid.

22 Perkins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, pp. 50–1.

23 Several writers have described Je ne puis vivre ainsi as one of the most extraordinary songs in the fifteenth-century literature. Borren, C. Vanden concluded his Études sur le quinzième siècle musical (Antwerp, 1941)Google Scholar with an extract from this piece beginning with the modulating sequence on ‘Quelque confort’ and ending with the close of the A section. He remarked: ‘Il y a là en un bref espace, un tel flot de mélodie, une telle suavité dans la rencontre des voix, que le plus pur génie ne peut être dénié à l'inventeur des pareilles délices.’ (p. 281). George Perle considered ‘the wonderful subtlety and ingenuity of [Busnoys's] rhythmic ideas’ exhibited in this song ‘probably unsurpassed in the entire history of music’; ‘The Chansons of Antoine Busnois’, Music Review, 11 (1950), p. 94Google Scholar. For another discussion of the piece, see Higgins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, pp. 35–43.

24 An extensive discussion of the music of the Hacqueville songs will be published in my book Antoine Busnoys and Musical Culture in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, forthcoming).

25 F-Pan MC, Étude viii/4, 16 June 1482 is the date recorded on the act of succession of the estate; but an eighteenth-century copy of a now lost original document states that he was already deceased by 4 April 1474 (F-Pn DB 343 (Hacqueville), fol. 22v). A time-lag involved in the settlement of his estate undoubtedly accounts for the discrepancy between the two dates.

26 He was evidently the son of Jean de Hacqueville, a marchand drapier of Paris, and Jacqueline Dourdine. This contradicts information given in de La Chesnaye-Desbois, , Dictionnaire de la noblesse, iii, pp. 189–90Google Scholar, where it is stated that his father was Jean de Hacqueville, one of the deputies in 1463 from Paris to the court of Louis XI at Tours. This Jean de Hacqueville must have been Jacques's brother mentioned in the succession along with a deceased sister, Jehanne de Hacqueville. Another brother, Nicolas de Hacqueville, for whom Jacques had served as a testataire, died before 29 April 1439 (F-Pn DB 343 (Hacqueville), fol. 36). After the death of Jacques's father, his mother remarried, to one Pierre de Tremblay. Except where noted in parentheses, all of the foregoing information is taken from the original act of succession of the estate of Jacques de Hacqueville, F-Pan MC, Étude viii/4, 16 June 1482.

27 His name is frequently encountered in Parisian municipal documents and in the registers of compagnies françaises, the guild associations of France. See Favier, J., Le commerce fluvial dans la région parisienne an XVe siècle, i: Le registre des compagnies françaises (1449–1467) (Paris, 1975), p. 67Google Scholar (refs. 584, 610, 705, 768, 956, 1035).

28 A payment to him dated 19 May 1464 is entered in the household accounts of Louis xi for five ells of violet satin used to fashion a short robe for the king for the forthcoming Feast of Pentecost (F-Pan KK 59, fol. 37). See Higgins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, p. 176, n. 331, for a transcription of the document.

29 Dame d'Attichy, she later acquired the seigneurie of Onz-en-Bray from Gaspard de Montchevalier (de La Chesnaye-Desbois, , Dictionnaire de la noblesse, iii, p. 190)Google Scholar. An undated autograph letter of hers to Jean Bourré, seigneur du Plessis, asked him to intercede with the king on behalf of her son-in-law Gauchier Vivien, who was married to her daughter Jehanne (F-Pn fr. 20429, pièce no. 15). At some point after her husband's death she acquired a dwelling known as the ‘Séjour du roi’, near the Pont de Charenton in Paris. According to Lebeuf, J. (Histoire de la ville et tout le diocèse de Paris, 15 vols. (Paris 1754–1758), ii, p. 366)Google Scholar this was a gift from Louis xi.

30 F-Pn DB 343 (Hacqueville), fol. 36. I have reconsidered my perhaps unduly cautious position (Higgins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, p. 177, n. 333) on this source which consists of eighteenth-century copies of registers of the Auditeur du Châtelet. The reference states that Jacques de Hacqueville ‘a épousé’ Gillette Hennequin on 30 April 1444.

31 F-Pn DB 343 (Hacqueville), fol. 22v, 4 April 1474. The minor children listed there are Nicolas, Raoul, Ragonde, Henry and Jean.

32 In other words, none of the five minor children could have been born before 1457. It is likely, then, that the remaining siblings, including Jacqueline, had been born between 1445 (the year following her parents' marriage) and 1457.

33 The exact date of Hacqueville's union with Bochart is unknown. According to eighteenth-century copies of original fifteenth-century documents she was already married to him in 1474. See F-Pn DB 343 (Hacqueville), fol. 36v.

34 Membership in the Parlement of Paris carried considerable prestige. Considered as an extension or embodiment of the king's honour, the Parlement had to be respected as such at all costs. Severe penalties were imposed upon anyone – whether an ordinary citizen or a high-ranking official of the realm – who dared to utter a word against one of its members, even the lowliest huissier, living or deceased. (Aubert, F., Histoire du Parlement de Paris de l'origine à François ler (1250–1515), 2 vols. (Paris, 1884), i, p. 124)Google Scholar. Among the numerous examples of individuals punished for insulting a member of the Parlement were two gentlemen who were imprisoned in the Conciergerie when numerous insulting and injurious statements against a deceased counsellor were found in their dossiers. The target of their insults, according to the document, was ‘the late Maistre Jehan Bochart’, Jacqueline's husband. (Ibid., p. 124, n. 1, citing F-Pan Xla 1511, fol. 208). The document in question states that the guilty parties were imprisoned on 28 July 1508, thus leaving no doubt that the ‘late Maistre Jehan Bochart’ refers to the elder Jean and not to his son Jean, who died in 1532. For further references to Jean Bochart see Maugis, E., Histoire du Parlement de Paris de l'avènement des rois Valois à la mort d'Henri IV, 3 vols. (Paris, 1913–1916; repr. New York, 1967)Google Scholar, infra.

35 Fournier, M., La faculté de décret de l'Université de Paris au XVe siècle, iii (Paris, 1913), p. 444, n. 2, citing F-Pn Clairambault 765, p. 403Google Scholar.

36 Maugis, , Histoire du Parlement, iii, p. 135Google Scholar, gives Bochart's date of death as 24 June 1507. The inventaire après décès of his son, dated 19 September 1532, provides the terminus ante quem for the death of Jacqueline de Hacqueville. The first item on the inventory of papers attesting to his territorial holdings and inheritance of capital is a brevet, dated 22–3 March 1508 (n.s.), containing the succession of his parents, both of whom are referred to as ‘deffunctz’. See Higgins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, p. 185, n. 363.

37 F-Pn DB 104 (Bochart), fol. lv, and Maugis, , Histoire du Panlement, iii, p. 135Google Scholar. F-Pn DB 343 (Hacqueville), fol. 36v, also says that Jacqueline de Hacqueville was interred with her husband at St-Benoît, ‘vis à vis l'image de la Magdaleine près le jubé’. Their sarcophagus must have been impressive, judging from a contemporary allusion to it. A contract made in February 1525 between a Parisian tombsmith and the deacon of Paris, Jacques Barthomier, for the creation of a tomb specified that it must be 9 feet long by 4 feet wide ‘en laquelle aura deulx personnaiges engravez d'hommne et de femme, avecques pareille ou meilleur ouvraige estant à la tombe de feu monsieur Bochart, qui est à Sainct-Benoist’; see Coyecque, E., Recueil d'actes notariés relatifs à l'histoire de Paris et de ses environs au xvle siècle, i (1498–1545) (Paris, 1905), no. 568Google Scholar. Significantly, Ockeghem held a chaplaincy in this little-studied church which was also the parish of François Villon's youth. See Higgins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, pp. 187–8.

38 See Piolin, P., ed., Gallia christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas …, 16 vols. (Paris, 1870–1899), viiGoogle Scholar, cols. 154 and 836; Maugis, , Histoire du Parlement, iii, pp. 114 and 131Google Scholar; Renaudet, A., Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d'Italie (1494–1517), Bibliothèque de l'Institut Français de Florence (Université de Grenoble), 1st series, 6 (Paris, 1916), pp. 182–3Google Scholar and infra. His affiliations with Notre-Dame of Paris and St–Martin of Tours raise the question of his acquaintance with Busnoys and especially with Johannes Ockeghem, who, as we know, held important positions at both institutions. Given his age, through, any contact with either composer probably came about after the Hacqueville songs had been written.

39 ‘De eo vulgo ferebatur, quod more regis David negotia peragebat in die, nocte vero in psalterio et cythara coelestia secreta ruminabat’; Gallia Christiana, vii, col. 836, and Renaudet, , Préréforme et humanisme, p. 182Google Scholar.

40 ‘Elementa musicalia ad clarissimum virum Nicholaum de Haqueville presidentem Parisiensem’. See ‘Febvre (Jacques Faber ou Le) surnommé Stapulensis’, Biographie universelle, ed. Fétis, F.-J., 8 vols., 2nd edn (Paris, 1860–1870), iii, pp. 196–7Google Scholar, and Thibault, G., ‘Busnois’, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Blume, F., 14 vols. (Kassel and Basle, 1948–1961), ii, col. 517Google Scholar. Perkins's statement of the reverse (‘Antoine Busnois’, p.59), that is, that Hacqueville was the author of the treatise and dedicated it to d'Estaples, is incorrect. For more on Lefevre d'Estaples see Ruhnke, M., ‘Faber Stapulensis, Jacobus [Le Febre, Jacques]’, The New Grove Dictionary, vi, p. 345Google Scholar, and Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme, infra.

41 The names and occupations of her eight children are as follows: (1) Antoine Bochart, seigneur de Farinvilliers, counsellor in the Parlement of Paris, then maître des requêtes de l'hôtel, married to Françoise Gayand (daughter of Louis Gayand, lieutenant general of Clermont in Beauvaisis, and of Jeanne de Feuquiere), with whom he had one daughter; (2) Jean Bochart (ii), seigneur de Noroy and Champigny, avocat in the Parlement of Paris under François i, married to Jeanne Simon, daughter of Philippe Simon, counsellor in the Parlement, and niece [recte sister] of Jean Simon, Bishop of Paris, who gave him the territory of Champigny in honour of his marriage; (3) Pierre Bochart, seigneur de Onzen-Bray, official of Beauvais; (4) Henry Bochart, abbot of Sully, near Fontevrault, where he is buried; (5) Nicolas Bochart, canon and chantre of the cathedral of Beauvais; (6) Magdeleine Bochart, wife of Nicolas le Coq, counsellor to the king and president of the Cour des Aides in Paris; (7) Louise Bochart, wife of Louis Rouillart, sieur de Gandin, counsellor in the court of Parlement; (8) Guillemette Bochart, wife of Antoine de Badouvillers, seigneur de La Varenne, near Montereau-saut-Yonne. (F-Pn DB 104 (Bochart), fols. 1–4v). For further bibliographical information on the Bochart children see Higgins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, pp. 181–9.

42 Although not explicitly stated, his designation as ‘chanoine et chantre’ would seem to refer to the office of chantre at the cathedral and not to his being a ‘singer’ there. The chantre was responsible for all singers, choirboys and masters of the choirboys, an administrative position that would have required considerable expertise in music.

43 Francesca Caccini (1587-c. 1640) and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (c. 1666–1729) are perhaps the best-known examples. For examples of sixteenth-century Italian women from musical families see Newcomb, A., ‘Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. Bowers, J. and Tick, J. (London, Urbana and Chicago, 1986), pp. 99–101Google Scholar.

44 Apparently the eldest son, Antoine Bochart is the most mysterious of the Bochart children. His title of Seigneur de Farinvilliers, evidently inherited from his father, removes virtually any doubt that he was one of Jacqueline's sons. Although contemporary documents indicate that he was a member of the Parisian Parlement, his name does not turn up in any of the published histories of the institution (F-Pn DB 104 (Bochart), fol. 2). His daughter Claude married François de La Porte, an avocat in the Parisian Parlement. For financial details concerning their marriage contract see, ‘Antoine Busnois’, p. 182, n. 352. Claude Bochart later gave birth to Suzanne de La Porte, mother of Armand-François du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu. See de La Chesnaye Desbois, , Dictionnaire de la noblesse, xvGoogle Scholar, col. 948, and Marvick, E. W., The Young Richelieu: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Leadership (Chicago and London, 1980), pp. 45–62Google Scholar. Antoine Bochart's Christian name seems to have had no antecedent within the Hacqueville or Bochart families as was customary. It would be frivolous at this point to imagine that this could signal some further connection with Antoine Busnoys, but the coincidence is intriguing.

45 du Fresne de Beaucourt, G. L. E., Histoire de Charles VII, 6 vols. (Paris, 1881–1891), iv, p. 89, n. 3Google Scholar, lists one ‘Jacqueline de Hacqueville’, aged twenty-four years, together with a ‘Marguerite de Hacqueville’ among the damoiselles d'honneur of the dauphine. Unfortunately, he failed to cite his source or its date, indicating only that the list had been compiled ‘after contemporary documents’, of which he had amassed a formidable number for his still unsurpassed six-volume study of Charles vii. From subsequent references it is clear that Beaucourt had used Duclos's, C. P.Histoire de Louis xi, 3 vols. (The Hague, 1745–1746)Google Scholar, for much of the section relating to Marguerite d'Écosse. Duclos does mention a ‘Marguerite de Hacqueville’, but Jacqueline is here given the surname ‘de Bacqueville’ and is listed as twenty-five years of age. See Duclos, , Histoire de Louis xi, iii (The Hague, 1746), p. 37Google Scholar. If Duclos was Beaucourt's source it is difficult to explain the discrepancies of both orthography and age. Moreover, several of the women Beaucourt cites are not mentioned by Duclos.

For these reasons it seems probable that Beaucourt and Duclos used different original documents. Inasmuch as the minuscules ‘b’ and ‘h’ are commonly confused in fifteenth-century palaeography, Beaucourt probably read the name as Hacqueville, and Duclos as Bacqueville. Thibault, M., La jeunesse de Louis xi, 1423–1445 (Paris, 1907), p. 510, n. 4Google Scholar, observed the discrepancy between Beaucourt's orthography and that of Duclos and says that Beaucourt undoubtedly thought Marguerite de Hacqueville and Jacqueline were sisters. In Menu, H., ‘Charles VII et la dauphine Marguerite d'Ecosse à Châlons-sur-Marne (4 mai–18 août 1445)’, Annuaire administratif, statistique, historique et commercial de la Marne (1895), p. 555Google Scholar, they become ‘les deux soeurs Marguerite et Jacqueline de Hacqueville’. Sisters do seem to have been frequently placed at court together, judging from the pairs of women with identical family names who turn up among the attendants of princesses. For example, other ladies-in-waiting of the dauphine and the queen included Annette and Jeanne de Cuise, Marguerite, Jeannette and Antoinette de Villequier, Jeanne and Marguerite Bradefer; the ladies-in-waiting to the wife of Philippe, King of Navarre, in 1339 and 1340 included Jehanne and Margot de Helnet (F-Pn n.a.f. 9175, fols. 640 and 642v); ladies-in-waiting to Jehanne de Laval, second wife of René d'Anjou, in − included Marguerite and Lyonne Cossu (ibid., fol. 675).

On the basis of these examples, to which dozens more could be added, the likelihood seems strong that Jacqueline and Marguerite de Hacqueville were sisters, and that Duclos's reference to Jacqueline de Bacqueville is probably a misreading or a typographical error. In any case, since the Parisian noblewoman's parents were married in 1444, and since the dauphine's lady-in-waiting was about twenty-four years old in that year, she cannot possibly be the Parisian woman at an earlier stage in her life.

46 King James i of Scotland (1394–1437), poet and author of The Kingis Quair (ed. Norton-Smith, J., Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, evidently enjoyed a considerable posthumous reputation as a performer and composer of music, according to the testimony of John Fordun, John Major and Alessandro Tassoni, discussed at length by the anonymous author of a curious late eighteenth-century monograph (also containing an edition of The Kingis Quair) entitled Poetical Remains of James the First, King of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1783), pp. 5–7 and 195ffGoogle Scholar.

Much has been written about Louis's reluctance to marry Marguerite d'Écosse, who had been chosen for him by his father Charles VII as part of a politically strategic alliance with James i of Scotland. Scholars disagree as to the reasons for his evidently intense dislike of her, but there seems to be no basis whatever for the often repeated and profoundly misogynous testimony of the sixteenth-century English chronicler Richard Grafton that her poor hygiene and bad breath drove him away: ‘the lady Margaret, maryed to the Dolphin, was of such nasty complexion and evill savored breath, that he abhorred her company as a cleane creature doth a caryon’. See Beaucourt, , Histoire de Charles VII, iv, p. 90, n. 1Google Scholar.

47 The most celebrated, if apocryphal, tale about her involves the poet Alain Chartier. As the story goes, the dauphine came upon Chartier sleeping on a bench, and bent over and kissed him on the mouth. When her stupefied companion exclaimed, ‘My Lady, I am astonished that you have kissed such an ugly man!’ she replied, ‘I have not kissed the man, but rather the precious mouth which has been the source of so many good and virtuous words.’ Champion, P., Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, Bibliothèque du xve Siècle 27, 2 vols. (Paris, 1923), i, pp. 131–2Google Scholar, citing J. Bouchet, Annales d'Aquitaine. The story is summarily dismissed by all modern scholars as being totally without foundation, since Alain Chartier was dead by the time Marguerite came to France in 1436. And since she was only four years old when Chartier visited the Scottish court in 1428, it is further presumed that she would have been too young to appreciate his talents. It should be pointed out, however, that we know very little about the education of medieval children and therefore have no basis upon which to form assumptions of any kind about the literary capacity of a privileged noble child reared in the sophisticated literary, artistic, and musical climate that the court of James I evidently provided. Moreover, whether apocryphal or not, the story, which seems to have originated in the mid-sixteenth century, illustrates the extent to which folklore about the dauphine's literary interests must have survived in the popular memory at least a century beyond her own lifetime. For more information on Marguerite d'Écosse see Champion, La dauphine; Barbé, L. A., Margaret of Scotland and the Dauphin Louis (London, 1917), pp. 114–49Google Scholar; Rait, R. S., Five Stuart Princesses (Westminster, 1902), pp. 3–46Google Scholar; Beaucourt, , Histoire de Charles vii, iv, pp. 89–111Google Scholar; Duclos, , Histoire de Louis xi (1745–1746)Google Scholar; Vallet de Viriville, A., Histoire de Charles VII, 3 vols. (1863–1865), iii, pp. 81–90Google Scholar; de Lincy, Le Roux, Les femmes célèbres de l'ancienne France (Paris, 1848)Google Scholar; Thibault, , La jeunesse de Louis xi, pp. 503–51Google Scholar.

48 ‘M. de Charny dit qu'il avoit entendu qu'elle n'étoit point habile à porter enfans, et siainsi étoit qu'elle allât de vie à trespassement, il faudra marier monseigneur le Dauphin à une autre qui fût encline à porter enfans; et lors il qui parle [Jamet de Tillay] dit qu'ilavoit ouy dire à madame Dubois Menart qu'elle mangeoit trop de pommes aigres et de vinaigre et se ceignoit aucunefois trop serrée aucunefois trop lâche, qui étoit chose qui empêchoit bien à avoir enfans’. Duclos, , Histoire, iii, p. 47Google Scholar. Especially valuable for its nugget of medieval popular wisdom concerning female infertility, this commentary bears a striking similarity to the nineteenth-century ‘cult of female invalidism’, whereby ‘tightlacing, fasting, vinegar-drinking, and similar cosmetic or dietary excesses were all parts of a physical regimen that helped women either to feign morbid weakness or actually to “decline” into real illness’. See Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S., The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979), p. 25Google Scholar. For a compelling discussion of infirmity and sickness as ‘physical evidence of mental and physical purity’ as well as a provocative analysis of the ‘cultural apotheosis of the sublime consumptive’ in fun-de-siècle art see Dijkstra, B., Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford, 1988), pp. 25–36Google Scholar. The striking and even more bizarre medieval analogue for this behaviour is the subject of a brilliant and compelling study by Bynum, C. W., Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987)Google Scholar. Taking as her point of departure the centrality of food and food imagery to women's lives Bynum argues that the various food practices of medieval women ‘frequently enabled them to determine the shape of their lives – to reject unwanted marriages, to substitute religious activities for more menial duties within the family, to redirect the use of fathers’ or husbands' resources, to change or convert family members, to criticize powerful secular or religious authorities, and to claim for themselves teaching, counseling, and reforming roles for which the religious tradition provided, at best, ambivalent support' (p. 220). Bynum's conclusions would ambivalent support' (p. 220). Bynum's conclusions would seem to take on a certain relevance to Marguerite d'Écosse in the light of Louis's alleged animosity towards her.

49 (First deposition of Jamet de Tillay, 1 June 1446) ‘dit qu'environ Noel, I'an 1444, un soir environ neuf heures de nuit, autrement du jour ne du temps ne se recorde, le roi étant à Nancy en Lorraine, lui qui parle [Jamet de Tillay] et Messire Regnault de Dresnay, chevalier, allèrent en la chambre de ladite dame, laquelle ètoit lors couchee sur sacouche, et plusieurs de ses femmes étoient autour d'elle; aussi y étoit Messire Jean d'Estouteville, seigneur de Blainville, appuyé sur la couche de ladite dame, et un autre qu'il ne connoît; et pour ce que ladite dame étoit en sadite chambre sans ce que les torches fussent allumées, il qui parle dit audit messire Regnault, maître d'hôtel de ladite Dame, que c'étoit grande paillardie à lui et autres officiers de ladite dame, de ce que lesdites torches étoient encore à allumer, et dit qu'il dit lesdites paroles pour le bien et honneur de ladite dame et de sa maison’; Duclos, , Histoire, iii, p. 42Google Scholar.

50 Tillay's suspicions were perhaps excessively heightened by the highly charged sexual climate of the French royal court, where Charles vii was alleged to have routinely availed himself of the ladies-in-waiting of both the dauphine and the queen, who included his most celebrated mistress Agnes Sorel. See Steenackers, F. F., Agnès Sorel et Charles vii: Essai sur l'état politique et moral de la France au XVe siècle (Paris, 1868), pp. 250–9Google Scholar.

51 Including Duclos's ‘Jacqueline de Bacqueville’, who testified about comments the dauphine made on her deathbed: ‘Jacqueline de Bacqueville, âgée de vingt-cinq ans ou environ, jurée, ouïe et examinée sur ce que dessus est dit par nous commissaires dessusdits, le vingt-cinquième jour d'octobre audit an [1445]: Dit et dépose par son serment qu'environ la mi-août, dernièrement passée, elle qui parle étant à Chaalons [sic] en la chambre de madame la Dauphine, le jour que madite Dame tréspassa, elle ouït que maistre Robert Poitevin disoit à madite dame qu'elle avoit pardonné à tout le monde, et madite dame répondit audit maître Robert: Non ai vraiment; et par trois fois lui dit lesdites paroles. Et adonc madame de Saint Michel, et autres Demoiselles étant illec, dirent à madite dame qu'il falloit qu'elle pardonnât à tout le monde, si elle vouloit que Dieu lui pardonnât; et adonc madite dame dit tout haut qu'elle pardonnoit à tout le monde de bon coeur et requéroit à Dieu qu'il lui voulsist pardonner. Interrogée si à cette heure que madite dame répondit audit maître Robert les paroles: Non ai vraiment, si elle nomma personne: Dit que non. Interrogée si paravant la maladie de madite dame, ne durant icelle, elle n'ouït point madite dame parler d'aucunes personnes à qui elle eût malveillance: Dit que non, et plus n'en sçait, sur tout diligemment enquise et examinée. Ainsi signé G. le Boursier et Bigot.’ Duclos, , Histoire, iii, pp. 36–7Google Scholar.

52 (Second deposition of Jamet de Tillay, 23 August 1446) ‘ledit Nicole lui demanda ce qu'elle avoit, et d'où procédoit cette maladie, et il qui parle [Jamet de Tillay] lui répondit que les médecins disoient qu'elle avoit un courroux sur le coeur, qui lui faisoit grand dommage, et aussi que faute de repos lui nuisoit beaucoup; et lors ledit Nicole dit que lesdits médecins lui en avoient autant dit, et aussi dit: Plût à Dieu qu'elle n'eût jamais eu telle femme á elle! Et quelle, dit il qui parle? Et lors ledit Nicole lui répondit: Marguerite de Salignac. Et il qui parle lui dit: Plût à Dieu, ne aussi Prégente, ne Jeanne Filloque [recte Filleul]! Requis pourquoi il dit lesdites paroles, dit pour ce qu'il avoit ouï dire que c'étoient celles qui la faisoient trop veiller á faire rondeaux et balades.’ Duclos, , Histoire, iii, pp. 47–8Google Scholar.

53 ‘Et lors le roi lui demanda si elle étoit impédumée; et il qui parle répondit que non, comme disoient les médecins. Et le roi lui demanda, d'où procède cette maladie, et il qui parle lui dit qu'il venoit de faute de repos, comme disoient les médecins, et qu'elle veilloit tant, aucunefois plus, aucunefois moins, que aucunefois il étoit presque soleil levant avant qu'elle s'allât coucher, et que aucunefois monseigneur le Dauphin avoit dormi un somme ou deux avant qu'elle s'allât coucher, et aucunefois s'occupoit à faire rondeaux, tellement qu'elle en faisoit aucunefois douze pour un jour, qui lui étoit chose bien contraire. Et lors le roi demanda si cela faisoit mal à la tête, et monsieur le trésorier maître Jean Bureau, là présent, dit: Oui, qui s'y abuse trop; mais ce sont choses de plaisance.’ Duclos, , Histoire, iii, p. 54Google Scholar.

54 The morals of creative women in music, literature and art have historically tended to be viewed with suspicion. For examples of the notion that music-making, and especially music composition, was dangerous to a woman's chastity see Bowers, J., ‘The Emergence of Women Composers in Italy, 1566–1700’, Women Making Music, pp. 139–41Google Scholar. In later centuries, women composers like Corona Schröter feared that publication of their music would be perceived almost as an act of promiscuity. See Citron, M., ‘Women and the Lied, 1775–1850’, Women Making Music, p. 230Google Scholar. Many creative women were the targets of innuendo. The sixteenth-century poet Louise Labé, for example, was accused of granting sexual favours to the men of Lyons (Jones, A. R., ‘City Women and their Audiences: Louise Labé and Veronica Franco’, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ferguson, M. W., Quilligan, M. and Vickers, N. J. (Chicago, 1986), pp. 302–3)Google Scholar. The seventeenth-century English writer and playwright Aphra Behn was considered a ‘shady lady’ (Gilbert, and Gubar, , The Madwoman, p. 63)Google Scholar, and the composer and singer Barbara Strozzi (1619–1664?) is reputed to have been a Venetian courtesan (Rosand, E., ‘The Voice of Barbara Strozzi’, Women Making Music, p. 172)Google Scholar. Since many creative women clearly did have libertine attitudes towards sexuality, such suspicions were not always without foundation. Indeed, given the stigma of impropriety associated with any public acknowledgement by a woman of her creative activities, it is probably no coincidence that women who did publish their work were those who seem to have been least concerned about notions of respectability, or whose respectability was presumably beyond question (e.g. nuns). As Newcomb (‘Courtesans, Muses’, p. 102), Rosand (‘The Voice’, p. 172) and others have pointed out, a long tradition of serious music-making by courtesans existed in Venice. Curiously, though, the subject has never been pursued in a scholarly study. The degree of literary cultivation among certain Venetian courtesans must have been high, to judge from Pietro Aretino, who said of one: ‘She knows by heart all Petrarch and Boccaccio and many beautiful verses of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and a thousand other authors.’ Quoted in Burckhardt, J., The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York, 1958), p. 394, n. 2Google Scholar. With regard to women writers in the nineteenth century, morality and respectability became so closely linked to economic success that they could no longer risk the kind of sexual innuendo surrounding a woman like Aphra Behn. See Gilbert, and Gubar, , The Madwoman, pp. 63–4Google Scholar.

55 ‘Il luy semble que ladicte maladie principalement luy est venue pour ce que ladicte dame vieilloit trop, parquoy se corrompoit son sang et les humeurs de son corps; son cervel s'en affoiblissoit et nature envoye toujours au plus foible du corps et iceluy qu'elle trouve plus brecié les superfluitez ou humeurs corrompues. Dont en son cervel s'est engendré un rume, lequel a esté cause de engendrer un appostume en son dit cervel. Et peult estre que de son dit cervel peult estre tombé par manière de une gouture partye de ces humeurs corrompues sur les parties de son poulmon, qui a esté cause de ulcerer son dit poulmon, comme a esté trouvé par effet.’ Deposition of Guillaume Léotier, in F-Pn Dupuy 762, fol. 51v, quoted in Beaucourt, , Histoire de Charles vii, iv, pp. 106–7, n. 3Google Scholar. My interpretation of Léotier's report as implicitly associating the dauphine's literary endeavours with the cerebral origin of her lung disease receives striking corroboration in Erasmus's colloquy ‘The Abbot and the Learned Woman’, where the ignorant Abbot Antronius, parroting popular wisdom, warns his erudite interlocutor Magdalia that ‘Books destroy women's brains’; see The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Bailey, N., i (London, 1878), p. 380Google Scholar. For similar examples of women whose creative activities were thought to have had pathological consequences see Gilbert, and Gubar, , The Madwoman, pp. 55–6Google Scholar.

56 Jehanne Filleul and Marguerite de Salignac were damoiselles d'honneur to Marguerite d'Écosse, and Prégente de Melun, damoiselle d'honneur to Marie d'Anjou, Charles vii'S queen. See Beaucourt, , Histoire de Charles vii, iv, p. 90, n. 4Google Scholar.

57 Droz, E. and Piaget, A., eds., Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhétorique, ii (Paris, 1925), p. 205Google Scholar. Steenackers, (Agnès Sorel, p. 257, n. 2)Google Scholar records a gift from the king of 192 livres 10 sous in the year 1454 to Marguerite de Salignac ‘to have a room for her lying-in.’ Steenackers, who never mentions the literary interests of Marguerite d'Écosse's ladies and assumes, often with little justification, that they were all mistresses of Charles vii, attributes this rather generous gift to Marguerite de Salignac to a probable ‘accouchement clandestin’. Among the most frequently recorded payments to women in the accounts of both male and female magnates, gifts for a gésine (lying-in) are usually accorded to attendants of his consort at her behest, or to the wives of loyal male servants.

58 Clériadus undoubtedly refers to the courtly narrative Clériadus el Méliadice discussed by Christopher Page as a rich source of information concerning late medieval performance practices. See ‘The Performance of Songs in Late Medieval France: A New Source’, Early Music, 10 (1982), pp. 441–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Evidence that Marie of Cleves owned a copy of the narrative which she in turn lent to the female attendants at the French royal court is interesting in light of Page's observations concerning its ‘evidence of a French aristocratic and possibly royal provenance’ (p. 442) since ‘the author speaks of the chivalry, the court and the king of France in the most flattering terms’ (p. 450). An edition of Clériadus et Méliadice has appeared since the publication of Page's article: Zink, G., ed. Clériadus et Méliadice: Roman en prose du XVe siècle (Paris and Geneva, 1984)Google Scholar.

59 According to Vallet de Viriville, A. (Histoire de Charles vii, 3 vols. (Paris, 1863), iii, pp. 85–6, n. 1)Google Scholar: ‘Le 18 août 1450, Marie de Clèves, duchesse d'Orléans, envoie un messager d'Yèvre-le-Châtel à Corbeil, où était la reine, pour recouvrer des mains de Prégente de Melun, dame de la reine, un roman de chevalerie intitulé Clériadus, que la duchesse avait prêté à Prégente.’ The now lost document in question, one of ten items included under no. 852 in the Catalogue des archives de M. Le Baron de Joursanvault, contenant une précieuse collection de manuscrits, chartes et documents originaux (Paris, 1838), p. 145Google Scholar, was subsequently acquired by the Bibliothèque du Louvre, which was destroyed by fire in 1871. Included under the same catalogue number was a document of 1470 referring to Regnault le Queux and Robert du Herlin who had given the duchess ‘certains livres par eulx fais de ballades et rondeaulx’. The latter document was published by [Léon-Emmanuel] de Laborde, le comte, Les ducs de Bourgogne, 3 vols., iii (Paris, 1852), p. 403Google Scholar, no. 7060, who listed as its call number Bibliothèque du Louvre, F1453.

60 The concept of a separate tradition of women's literary culture is central to the pioneering work of Gilbert and Gubar (see note 48) as well as to that of the literary critic Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, 1977)Google Scholar.

61 Hélas mon amy sur mon ame, fol. 46, ed. Raynaud, , Rondeaux, p. 76Google Scholar. See below, p. 182, for the complete text.

62 F-Pn fr. 9223 transmits thirty-four poems by three male courtiers in the dauphine's circle: Blosseville (29), Tanneguy du Chastel (3), and Jean d'Estouteville, seigneur de Torcy et Blainville (2). Torcy's rondeau N'ai ge pas esté bien party follows that of Jehanne Filleul in the same manuscript. For the most recent biographical information on these poets see Inglis, B. L. S., ed., Le manuscnt B. N. nouv. acq. fr. 15771 (Paris, 1985), pp. 19–24Google Scholar (Blosseville), pp. 35–6 (Tanneguy du Chastel) and pp. 58–60 (Seigneur de Torcy).

63 Les douleurs dont me sens tel somme, fol. 8v, text by Anthoine de Cuise, set to music by Dufay; Nul ne me doibt de ce blasmer, fol. 14v, text by Monsieur d'Orvilier, anonymous musical setting in Dij, fols. 142v–143r; C'est par vous que tant fort soupire, fol. 18, text by Meschinot, anonymous musical setting in Dij, fols. 50v–51r; J'en ay le dueil et vous la joye, fol. 59, text by Blosseville, anonymous musical setting in Dij, fols. 144v–145; Malleureux cueur que veulx tu faire?, fol. 62v, text by Le Roussellet, musical setting by Dufay in Lab, fols. 26v–28, and Wolf, fols. 25v–27; Qu'elle n'y a je le maintien, fol. 104, text by Anthoine de Cuise, anonymous musical setting in Dij, fols. 109v–110; En tous les lieux ou j'ay esté, fol. 101, text by Monsieur Jacques, musical setting by Busnois in Dij, fols. 83v–85, and Niv, fols. 44v–46; A ceste foiz je me voy, fol. 56, text by C. Blosset, anonymous musical setting in Dij, fols. 64v–65; Quant jamms aultre, fol. 60v, text by Le Roussellet, anonymous musical setting in IPu 362, fols. 56v–58.

64 Lequel vous plairoit mieulx trouver, fol. 98, ed. Raynaud, , Rondeaux, p. 153Google Scholar.

65 Deposition of Annette de Cuise, F-Pn Dupuy 762, fol. 53: ‘Interrogée sy elle a aucune chose en garde de madicte dame, dict que non, fors un livre qui parle d'amours, et de chansons et ballades, et aucunes lettres d'estat qui sont en son coffre lequel elle auroye avec le bagaige de la Roine’.

66 For the most recent biographical information on Anthoine, Jeanne and Annette de Cuise, see Inglis, , Le manuscrit B.N. nouv. acq.fr. 15771, pp. 29–33Google Scholar.

67 Garey noted that the incipit Ja que lui ne si actende could be read either as ‘Let Jacqueline wait’ or ‘Although he doesn't expect it’. See his discussion of the text of this poem in Perkins, and Garey, , Mellon Chansonnier, ii, pp. 242–3Google Scholar.

68 Perkins, and Garey, , Mellon Chansonnier, ii, p. 74Google Scholar.

69 Since ‘her poems are of the same high quality as his’, and the style of her lyrics ‘indistinguishable’ from Machaut's, employing ‘identical rhyme, meter, imagery, and diction’, they cannot possibly have been written by her. ‘… the brilliant young poetess existed only in Guillaume de Machaut's imagination. A fictional character, she is not to be identified with Péronne d'Armentières or anyone else who actually lived in the fourteenth century.’ (Calin, p. 170, upholding the arguments of G. Hanf). Especially noteworthy is the assumption that Péronne's poems would necessarily have been inferior in quality to those of Machaut. The alleged indistinguishability of Toute Belle's lyrics from Machaut's notwithstanding, when the late Machaut scholar Sarah Jane Williams examined the poems she found striking divergences from Machaut's standard procedure at every turn: ‘Whereas ballades far outnumber rondeaux elsewhere in Machaut's literary and musical repertory, the proportion is reversed in the Voir Dit, where rondeaux outnumber ballades thirty to nineteen.’ As Williams points out, this may well be due to the fact that Toute Belle initiated the lyric exchange with a rondeau, and that the form was an easy one for her to grasp. Moreover, the first few rondeaux attributed to Toute Belle ‘are written in forms of the rondeau rarely if ever found in Machaut's work elsewhere’. The third rondeau sent by Toute Belle is unique among all Machaut's others in alternating long with short lines; two of the virelais have only a single stanza, instead of three; and her ballade Regrete la compaignie and the virelai Cent mille fois esbahie both have only two instead of three stanzas, an irregularity commented upon by Machaut in the text. See ‘The Lady, the Lyrics and the Letters’, Early Music, 5 (1977), pp. 462–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another study, using a computer-aided linguistic analysis of the poems, demonstrated that there are in fact striking qualitative differences in the vocabularies of the poems attributed to Machaut and Péronne respectively. See Musso, N., ‘Comparaison statistique des lettres de Guillaume de Machaut et de Péronne d'Armentière dans le Voir-dit’, Guillaume de Machaut: Colloque, Table Ronde, Reims, – avril 1978 (Paris, 1982), pp. 175–93Google Scholar. Musso's evidence was challenged by literary critics on the grounds that the apparent linguistic differences might have been deliberately created by Machaut. This, however, seems to me the strongest evidence in favour of the existence of Péronne or a woman like her. Even if Machaut wrote the poems himself, attempting to emulate the written prose of a young woman, this presupposes (a) that he probably knew of women writers and (b) that he perceived qualitative ‘differences’ in their writing to the point of having concrete notions about how they would manifest themselves in a literary text. Whether or not gender difference can be discerned in literary texts is a controversial topic being heatedly debated in late twentieth-century literary critical circles. Machaut was indeed remarkably ahead of his time if he perceived such subtle distinctions some six centuries ago. My thanks to Professor Lawrence Earp for drawing my attention to Musso's article.

70 For the most recent study of medieval women writers see Dronke, P., Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar. In the book's preface, Dronke comments on the extent to which these works have been unjustly undervalued in the past and gives a few notable examples of the paradoxical attempts even until recent times either to accept their authenticity and trivialise them, or to reject their authenticity on the basis of their high quality and therefore attribute them to men.

71 Hélas mon amy stir mon ame, F-Pn fr. 9223, fol. 46, ‘Jehanne Filleul’, ed. Raynaud, , Rondeaux, pp. 76–7Google Scholar; F-Pn n.a.f. 15771, fol. 38r, ‘Jehanne Fillieul’, ed. Inglis, , Le manuscrit, p. 146Google Scholar. The poem also survives anonymously in Roh, fol. 178r (ed. Löpelmann, M., Die Liederhandschrift des Cardinals de Rohan (xv.Jahrh.), Gesellschaft für romanische Literatur 44 (Göttingen, 1923), p. 343)Google Scholar, F-Pn fr. 1719, fol. 121r, and Jard, fol. 81 (ed. Droz and Piaget, Le jardin, no. 212).

72 En la forest de Longue Actente, ‘Madame d'Orléans’, F-Pn fr. 9223, fol. 26v, ed. Raynaud, , Rondeaux, p. 43Google Scholar; F-Pn n.a.f. 15771, fol. 2r, ‘Madame d'Orléans’, ed. Inglis, , Le manuscrit, p. 73Google Scholar; F-Pn fr. 1104, fol. 87v, ‘Madame d'Orléans’; F-Pn fr. 25458, fol. 415r, ‘Madame d'Orléans’. The poem survives anonymously in F-Pn fr. 1719, fols. 4v, 64v, 129r; Roh, fol. 64v; Carpentras, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS fr. 375, fol. 50v; London, British Library, MS Harley 6916, fol. 171v; F-Pn fr. 1722, fol. 76v.

73 En ce monde n'a saint ne saincte, ‘Madamoiselle de Beau Chastel’, F-Pn fr. 9223, fol. 69, ed. Raynaud, , Rondeaux, p. 113Google Scholar. The poem survives anonymously in Roh, fol. 204r, ed. Löpelmann, , Die Liederhandschrift, pp. 408–9Google Scholar.

74 C'est pour me receller les biens, F-Pn fr. 9223, fol. 36v, ‘Jammette de Nesson’, ed. Raynaud, , Rondeaux, p. 59Google Scholar; F-Pn n.a.f. 15771, fol. 39r, ‘Denesson a ja’, ed. Inglis, , Le manuscrit, p. 148Google Scholar. The poem survives anonymously in F-Pn fr. 1719, fol. 44r.

75 Pour tous les maulx d'amours guerir, F-Pn n.a.f. 15771, fol. 34, ‘Recepte de la Raine’, ed. Inglis, , Le manuscrit, p. 137Google Scholar. The poem survives anonymously in F-Pn fr. 1719, fol. 75r; Roh, fol. 202v; Carpentras, Bibl. mun. MS 375, fols. 55r, 65r; F-Pn fr. 25458, fol. 441r; F-Pn fr. 1104, fol. 92v; London, British Library, MS Harley 6916, fol. 181v; and F-Pn n.a.f. 7559, fol. 68r. The attribution ‘Recepte de la Raine’ in all likelihood refers to Queen Marie d'Anjou. See Angremy, A., ‘Un nouveau recueil de poésies françaises: Le MS B. N. nouv. acq. fr. 15771’, Romania, 95 (1974), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The dauphine's household was incorporated with that of Queen Marie d'Anjou, with whom she travelled constantly. Marie d'Anjou was the sister of Duke René d'Anjou, another of the noble literary amateurs of his day. Champion published the poem as a work of Charles d'Orléans because it appears in his autograph manuscript without an attribution. The existence of several other poetic ‘recipes’ ‘for curing the ills of love’ by other poets suggests that it was among those themes developed at the Orléans court such as ‘je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine’. Inglis, B. (Le manuscrit, p. 206)Google Scholar has suggested the possibility that ‘la Raine’ could also refer to Jeanne de Laval, ‘reine de Sicile’, second wife of René d'Anjou. Inglis cited the existence of another ‘recepte’ similar to this one attributed to Jean de Lorraine (son of René, and stepson of Jeanne de Laval) in support of this hypothesis. In light of the evidence presented here concerning the close interaction among the women of the French court and the Orléans court, as well as the numerous pieces by French court poets surviving in the manuscript, it would seem more likely that a non-specific reference to ‘the queen’ would be to the Queen of France, Marie d'Anjou.

76 See Thomas, A., ‘Jammette de Nesson et Merlin de Cordebeuf’, Romania, 35 (1909), pp. 82–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raynaud, , Rondeaux, p. xxviiiGoogle Scholar; and Inglis, , Le manuscrit, pp. 48–50Google Scholar. The very context in which Le Franc chose to mention her is telling: L'Adversaire, one of the interlocutors in the poem, admonishes Franc-Vouloir, Christine de Pizan's enthusiastic panegyrist, for neglecting to mention Jammette de Nesson (Thomas, p. 82). This seems to betray the author's awareness of how the work of noteworthy women can be overlooked. In any case one might well ask what motivated Le Franc to write a 24,000-verse poem drawing attention to the unsung accomplishments of women, the full text of which has never been edited.

77 To put this remark in perspective, a dozen poems a day would have exceeded the ‘100 verses’ Machaut claimed to be capable of writing when he was having a good day. Even accounting for the possibility of Tillay's exaggeration, this is still a considerable output. Marguerite d'Écosse might well have been a female analogue of Charles d'Orléans. Yet, surprisingly, of the dozens of scholars who have mentioned her activities as a poet none seems to have considered this possibility; all have contented themselves with presuming the mediocrity of her poetic gifts, even though her poetry seems not to have survived. See for example Kendall, P. M., Louis XI: The Universal Spider (New York, 1971), p. 63Google Scholar: ‘Like her father, James i of Scotland, Margaret was enamoured of poetry, though it is doubtful – none of her compositions has survived – that she possessed her father's genius’; and Cleugh, J., Chant royal: The Life of King Louis xi of France (New York, 1970), p. 60Google Scholar: ‘No examples of Margaret Stuart's verses survive … she fervently admired Alain Chartier and Charles of Orléans … it is improbable, however, that she attained the heights of lyrical imagination and delicacy of statement which they achieved.’ Such statements, of which there are many more examples, are emblematic of the ways in which the literary and musical creations of women, even when they have survived, have historically tended to be dismissed without a reading or hearing. The subject with regard to women writers has been treated in a witty, polemical and powerfully sobering work by Spender, D., The Writing or the Sex? Or, why you don't have to read women's writing to know it's no good (New York, 1989)Google Scholar. I raised similar questions with regard to musical creativity and women composers from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth in my paper ‘In her Brother's Shadow: The Musical Legacy of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’, Proceedings of ‘The Changing Patterns of Our Lives: Women's Education and Women's Studies’, A Sesquicentennial Symposium at Duke University, – March 1989 (Durham, NC, 1989), pp. 37–49Google Scholar.

78 Both Coldwell, M. V. (‘Jougleresses and Trobairitz: Secular Musicians in Medieval France’, Women Making Music, pp. 55–6)Google Scholar and Brown, H. M. (‘Women Singers and Women's Songs in Fifteenth-Century Italy’, Women Making Musk, pp. 64–5)Google Scholar try to explain the absence of polyphonic compositions attributed to women from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Coldwell attributes this to political considerations and Brown to the exclusion of women from cathedral schools. Curiously though, precisely the same obstacles existed for women composers from the mid-sixteenth century on, and they somehow managed to circumvent them. Brown is much closer to the mark, in my view, when he suggests that perhaps women were composing music but could not admit to doing so (p. 64). Given the vast number of pieces surviving anonymously in musical manuscripts from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, it would not be at all surprising if works by women were among them. The more fundamental question that needs to be raised is this: since there is abundant evidence that women in convents and monasteries, as well as aristocratic women, did compose monophonic music up to c. 1300 and polyphonic music from 1566 on, often against considerable odds, what would have stopped them from doing so during the intervening 250 years?

79 Brown, ‘Women Singers and Women's Songs’, pp. 67 and 83–4, n. 28.

80 Champion, P., ‘Un “Liber amicorum” du xve siècle: Notice d'un manuscrit d'Alain Chartier ayant appartenu à Marie de Clèves, femme de Charles d'Orléans’, Revue des Bibliothèques, 20 (1910), pp. 320–36Google Scholar.

81 On the poetry albums of Marguerite d'Autriche see Gachet, E., Albums poétiques dt Marguerite d'Autriche (Brussels, 1849)Google Scholar, and Françon, M., Albums poétiques de Marguerite d'Autriche (Cambridge, MA, and Paris, 1934)Google Scholar. The parallel of Marguerite d'Autriche's court with that of the dauphine Marguerite d'Écosse is striking in light of the fact that Marguerite d'Autriche was raised at the French court and imbued with its literary traditions. Hers may represent yet another circle of courtly women who emulated and participated in the literary interests of their lady. In any case, the names appearing in BBr 10572, whether or not they are those of the authors, include those of at least four of her ladies: Madamoiselle de Planci, Madamoiselle de Huclam, Madamoiselle de Vère, and Madamoiselle de Baude. The music-historical importance of Marguerite d'Autriche's court was brought to scholars' attention by Picker, M., ed., The Chanson Albums of Marguerite of Austria: MSS 228 and 11239 of the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels (Berkeley, 1965)Google Scholar.

82 For eye-opening accounts of women's education and erudition in the Middle Ages and Renaissance see Ferrante, J. M., ‘The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact, and Fantasy’, Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Labalme, P. H. (New York and London, 1980), pp. 9–42Google Scholar; Kristeller, P. O., ‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars’, Beyond their Sex, pp. 91–116Google Scholar; and the classic article by Jourdain, C., ‘Mémoire sur l'éducation des femmes au moyen âge’, Mémoires de l'Institut National de France: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 28 (1874), pp. 79–133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 See note 47 for the bibliography concerning Marguerite d'Écosse.

84 Vale, M. G. A., Charles VII (Berkeley, 1974), p. 96Google Scholar. Vale's account provides a useful example of how a historian's ideological perspective inevitably shapes the resulting historical construct.

85 Beaucourt, , Histoire de Charles vii, iv, p. 189Google Scholar.

86 See notes 71–5 above for the sources in which these poems survive anonymously.

87 Rigolot, F., ‘Gender vs. Sex Difference in Louise Labé's Grammar of Love’, Rewriting the Renaissance, p. 298Google Scholar.

88 Habit le moine ne fait pas, ‘Madame d'Orléans’, F-Pn fr. 1104, fol. 94.

89 Poems in a woman's voice make up only 2% of F-Pn fr. 9223, but about 10% of Roh.

90 Munrow, D., ‘On the Performance of Late Medieval Music’, Early Music, 1 (1973), pp. 197–8Google Scholar. This notion, which seems to be based on an unfounded assumption about the non-existence of women in medieval musical culture, is contradicted by the significant numbers of women musicians known to have performed publicly, at least in the secular sphere, before medieval and renaissance princes and princesses. See especially the documents and literary references cited in Wright, C., Music at the Court of Burgundy, 1364–1419: A Documentary History, Musicological Studies 28 (Henryville, Ottawa and Binningen, 1979), pp. 183–6Google Scholar; Rokseth, Y., ‘Les femmes musiciennes du xiie au xive siècle’, Romania, 61 (1935), pp. 464–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coldwell, ‘Jougleresses and Trobairitz’, pp. 39–61; Brown, ‘Women Singers and Women's Songs’, pp. 62–89; and Page, C., Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), pp. 156–9Google Scholar. Evidence of active participation by women in the vocal performance of secular music of the Middle Ages has important implications for the late twentieth-century medieval performance practice industry, which, with notable exceptions, still tends to be dominated by all-male vocal groups.

91 ‘Ungrammatically’, as defined by Riffaterre, M., ‘ranges from utter nonsense to obscurity to what are perceived as metaphors, but metaphors in which the semantic transfer seems somehow deviant’ (‘Intertextual Scrambling’, Romanic Review, 68 (1977), p. 197)Google Scholar. For a good example of the ‘ungrammaticality’ of a fifteenth-century incipit see the last item in Example 7.

92 An anagram, which involves scrambling and rearranging letters in words or phrases, is read horizontally and should not be confused with an acrostic, which is a name or phrase formed vertically from the first letters of each line of a poem.

93 On the history of anagrams see especially Kuhs, E., Buchstabendichtung: Zur gattungskonstituierenden Funktion von Buchstabenformationen in der französischen Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1982)Google Scholar which, despite its rather limited coverage of the Middle Ages, gives some idea of the vast number of publications on the subject, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Canel, A., ‘Histoire de l'anagramme, principalement en France’, Revue de Rouen, 9 (1841), pp. 162–71 and 193–204Google Scholar; and Lebègue, R., ‘Les anagrammes de Villon à Malherbe’, Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, Institut de France: Comptes rendus des séances de l'année (1969), pp. 243–50Google Scholar. The anagram in Example 1 leaves the letters ‘P’ and ‘o’ unused.

94 Despite his assertion to the contrary (p. xxiii), Paris adds two Es and one T, and leaves one A unused, to arrive at this solution of the anagram, at odds with the one he gives on p. 370 n. 1: ‘Perone d'Armantiere [et] Guillaume de Machau’. Moreover he prints ‘nule’ in verse 9029 instead of ‘nulle’. This was noted by Cerquiglini, J., ‘Un engin si soutil’: Guillaume de Machaut et l'écriture au XIVe siècle, Bibliothèque du xve Siècle 48 (Paris, 1985), pp. 233–4Google Scholar. See her lengthy critique of Paris's methodology on pp. 223–43.

95 Cerquiglini, pp. 233–43. Cerquiglini's resolution ‘Guillaume de Machaut, Perronne fille a amer’ is based on her disagreement with Paulin Paris's alteration of the rhyme ‘fame’, which appears in all the manuscripts, to ‘dame’ and a variant spelling of the word ‘nule’ and ‘nulle’. Another solution of the anagram, ‘Guillaume de Machaut amera fille Perronne’, was proposed by Suchier, H., ‘Das Anagramm in Machauts Voir dit’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 21 (1897), pp. 541–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other ‘signature’ anagrams appearing in Machaut's works include the one at the end of Le confort d'ami: ‘Guillaume de Machaut, Charles roi de Navarre’ (vv. 3968–70); and at the end of La prise d'Alexandrie: ‘Guillaume de Machaut, Pierre roi de Chipre e de Iherusalem’ (vv. 224–5). See Cerquiglini, pp. 235–6. Cerquiglini's resolution is not without its own problems however, as P.-Y. Badel noted in his review of her book (Romania, 106 (1985), pp. 550–61)Google Scholar. While her argument that the Voir-dit anagram should correspond structurally to those in other of Machaut's works is basically sound, that anagram would be more truly parallel to Machaut's others if it were to say ‘Péronne, x de y' with x being a title and y being a territory, as Badel suggests. Although Badel does not mention this, Paris's resolution is actually closer to Machaut's others in that there is at least a y, and if one assumes the x to be understood: Guillaume de Machaut, Peronelle [dame] d'Armentière’. Moreover, as Badel noted, it is doubtful whether the phrase ‘fille a amer’ would have had any medieval significance.

96 La clef d'amors, ed. Doutrepont, A., Bibliotheca Normannica 5 (Halle, 1890; repr. Geneva, 1975), pp. 125–6, vv. 3377–425Google Scholar. This text is for the most part a virtual French translation of Ovid's Ars amatoria, but the sections on anagrams are unique to it.

97 La clef d'amors, Appendix, pp. 127–35.

98 See Dufournet, J., ‘Tzara et les anagrammes de Villon’, Nouvelles recherches sur Villon, Bibliothèque du xve Siècle 45 (Paris, 1980), pp. 249–73Google Scholar. For an explanation and critique of Tzara's system, which involved the arrangement of letters in symmetrical positions around a movable axis, see Stults, L. D., ‘A Study of Tristan Tzara's Theory concerning the Poetry of Villon’, Romania, 96 (1975), pp. 433–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99 ‘Aujourd'huy ceste invention est si commune, que chacun s'en mesle, voire, y en a qui en font marchandise.’ Canel, ‘Histoire de l'anagramme’, pp. 167–8, quoting Tabourot, Estienne, a sixteenth-century authority on anagrams and author of Les bigarrures el touches du Seigneur des Accords (Paris, 1585)Google Scholar. Tabourot may have been related to Jehan Tabourot (1520–95), who published the well-known dance treatise Orchésographie (1588) under the pseudonym ‘Thoinot Arbeau’, an anagram of his real name.

100 Lebègue, ‘Les anagrammes’, p. 243.

101 Huot, S., Lyric Poetics and the Art of Compilatio in the Fourteenth Century (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1982), p. 233Google Scholar.

102 See Chenu, P., ‘Le livre des offices pontificaux de Jean Coeur, archevêque de Bourges’, Mémories de la Société des Antiquaires du Centre, 48 (1938–1941), p. 27Google Scholar, and Schaefer, C., ‘Nouvelles observations au sujet des heures de Laval’, Arts de l'Ouest (Rennes, 1980), p. 45Google Scholar.

103 Françon, , Albums poétiques de Marguerite d'Autriche, p. 53Google Scholar. Françon believes that the attributions in B-Br 10572, the only album containing poems without music, are ‘dedications’ or ‘allusions’ to the people who ‘inspired’ the poems, rather than to authors' names.

104 The inscriptions explicitly identify the given phrase as being the ‘nom tourné’ (‘turned’ or ‘twisted’ name) of a particular woman. Several of the poems contain acrostics on the same names, leaving no doubt as to the intentionality of the anagrams. Roh also includes the names of other women in acrostics (names formed by reading down the first letter of each line): Jehanne de Cambray, wife of the Parisian Parlement member Henry de Marie; Perrette de Raye; and Jehanne Cenami, wife of the Lucchese banker Giovanni Arnolfini. Roh transmits some 60% of Niv's song texts, including those for 50% of its unique pieces, and for nine of Busnoys's eleven songs. These circumstances enhance the possibility that the text of Pour les biens transmitted therein (no. 78), with a musical setting unique to Niv and possibly by Busnoys, does contain an intentional anagram alluding to Busnoys and Jacqueline.

105 Löpelmann, , Die Liederhandschrift, p. 290Google Scholar.

106 I have so far been unsuccessful in establishing a phrase that would satisfactorily use all of the remaining letters, although perhaps significantly the word ‘MUSE’ is among them.

107 Canel, ‘Histoire de l'anagramme’, p. 169.

108 Lebègue, ‘Les anagrammes’, pp. 243–4.

109 See the examples given in Canel, ‘Histoire de l'anagramme’, pp. 168–71.

110 Perkins noted the symbolic location of Bel Acueil as the first piece in the chansonnier, interpreting it as a song of welcome or greeting for the young princess (Mellon Chansonnier, i, pp. 1, 19–20, 32Google Scholar). van Benthem, Jaap (‘Concerning Johannes Tinctoris and the Preparation of the Princess's Chansonnier’, Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 32 (1982), pp. 24–9)CrossRefGoogle Scholar took Perkins's conclusions several steps further in pointing out the correspondence of the first two initials, B and A, with those of her name and the coincidence that the manuscript consists of three sections, each of nineteen pieces and each ending with a reference to Beatrice. The reason for division by nineteen, according to Benthem, is that it represents the numerical equivalent of ‘T’, the first letter of ‘Tinctoris’, the compiler and arranger of the manuscript. He also showed that the number of notes in the tenors of several pieces corresponds to the cipher of her name. Worth mentioning, too, is the coincidence that Beatrice of Aragon's initials are those of Busnoys's name in retrograde, something Busnoys was unlikely to have missed.

111 David Fallows has informed me that in his opinion Tout a par moy is in the style of neither Binchois nor Frye, and is probably by Busnoys, an attribution that would seem to be corroborated by the iconographical evidence discussed here. There is also the possibility that the artist simply misread or confused the attribution to ‘Binchois’ as ‘Busnois’, which still happens frequently today.

112 Ferguson, G., Signs and Symbols in Christian Art with Illustrations from Paintings of the Renaissance (New York, 1954), p. 18Google Scholar.

113 P.[Le Fèvre, dit] Fabri, Le grand et vrai art de pleine rhétorique, ed. Héron, A., 3 vols. (Rouen, 1890; repr. Geneva, 1969), ii, p. 73Google Scholar.

114 Significantly, Roh transmits Busnoys's text with a slightly altered incipit: instead of ‘Cent mille fois le jour’ the incipit reads ‘Mille fois le jour’, corresponding even more closely with the lines in Pour les biens. See Löpelmann, , Die Liederhandschrift, pp. 152–3Google Scholar. For some thoughts on the intertextuality of fifteenth-century music see Higgins, ‘Antoine Busnois’, pp. 144–60.

115 Celle pour qui je porte l'M, ed. Raynaud, , Rondeaux, p. 72Google Scholar, and Vous qui parlés de la beauté d'Elaine, a complainte on the death of Marguerite d'Écosse, line 6: ‘d'une pour qui bien devons priser l'M’ (ed. Raynaud, , Rondeaux, p. 108)Google Scholar. Significantly, both of these poems employ the same rhymes on ‘ame’ as Hélas mon amy and Pour les biens: ame, dame, fame, blasme, and reclame. These puns were very much in keeping with other rebuses in vogue at the court of Charles vii, such as ‘Rien sur L n'a regard’, a pun on ‘surelle’ or ‘sorel’, the surname of Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles vii. See Steenackers, , Agnès Sorel et Charles VII, pp. 340–1Google Scholar.

116 For the most lucid account of écriture féminine, a concept heavily indebted to the work of the French feminist critic Hélène Cixous, see Moi, T., Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London, 1985), pp. 102–26Google Scholar. For a cogent critique of écriture féminine as a powerful yet problematic literary concept see Jones, A. R., ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'Ecriture féminine’, The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Showalter, E. (New York, 1985), pp. 361–77Google Scholar.

117 A recent study by Ferrante, J. (‘Public Postures and Private Maneuvers: Roles Medieval Women Play’, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Erler, M. and Kowaleski, M. (Athens, GA, 1988), pp. 213–29)Google Scholar discusses the subtle rhetorical strategies by which medieval women writers exploited the subordinate roles men expected of them as devices for facilitating self-empowerment. Hildegard and Hrotsvitha, for example, exaggerate the conventional humility topos by excessive use of diminutives and self-deprecatory allusions to themselves as ‘poor little women’, ‘ignorant little things’, while at the same time levelling devastating critiques at some of the most powerful men of their day.

118 Rigolot, pp. 287–98. Rigolot focused on ‘the possible misuse of gender forms as a sexually-coded index of self-expression … Since Renaissance love discourse has been shared by male and female writers, it seems that one possible approach is to look for bizarre or incongruous elements in female-authored texts and find out if they can be interpreted as revealing sex differentiation.’ (p. 288)

119 By a ‘feminist revision’ I mean a critical reinterpretation of a woman's role which has traditionally been viewed as negative or subordinate (such as that of Eve) that casts her in a more favourable light or superior position. Perhaps the best example is that which appears in de Pizan's, ChristineL'epistre au dieu d'amour (1399), vv. 245–53Google Scholar, where she claims that woman, and not man, was the superior creation because she was made from better-quality material – a human rib made by God (‘le plus noble des choses terriennes’) - and not from the slime of the earth (‘du lymon de la terre’), as Adam was. Significantly, the same twist to the creation story is echoed in de Romieu's, MarieBrief discours: que l'excellence de la femme surpasse celle de l'homme (1591), vv. 31–6Google Scholar: ‘la matière de chair est-elle pas plus belle … que n'est celle qui fut formée du limon?’ For editions of both poems see The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Stanton, D. C. (New York, 1986), pp. 14–28 and 46–63Google Scholar. Given the overwhelming tendency in medieval and renaissance culture to view Mary and Eve as bipolar opposites of supreme goodness and evil incarnate, the sympathetic portrayals of Eve by Christine de Pizan in w. 258–70 of the poem mentioned above are also striking. I plan to discuss these and other examples in a study currently in progress entitled ‘“From Adam's Rib”: Feminist Exegeses of Genesis i–iii’.

120 Freeman, M. (‘The Power of Sisterhood: Marie de France's “Le Fresne”’, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, pp. 250–64)Google Scholar demonstrates how Marie de France creates a ‘uniquely feminine’ version of a well-known legend by ‘revers[ing] the procedures associated with the Griselda model’ with the result that ‘the domain of women, formerly private, hidden, and inconsequential, has been publicly commemorated’.

121 See Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S., ‘Ceremonies of the Alphabet: Female Grandmatologies and the Female Authorgraph’, The Female Autograph, ed. Stanton, D. C. (Chicago, 1987), pp. 21–48Google Scholar. The fact that many of these textual cryptograms are employed by men addressing a female audience seems to corroborate further the idea that women were particularly fascinated with the alphabet and its various permutations.

122 The argument for the woman's voice in the poem can only be made unequivocally given the context of the other three poems alluding to Jacqueline de Hacqueville and of course presumes a heterosexual relationship. Otherwise the possibility of homosexual interactions would need to be considered seriously.

123 See especially the Countess of Dia's A chantar m'er de so qu'ieu non volria and Estat ai en greu cossirier, as well as Clara d'Anduza's En freu esmai et en greu pessamen in Bogin, M., The Women Troubadours (New York and London, 1980), pp. 84–9 and 130–1Google Scholar. As this article was going to press, I came across the recent study by Ferrante, J., ‘Notes Toward the Study of a Female Rhetoric in the Trobairitz’, The Voice of the Trobairitz, ed. Paden, W. D. (Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 63–72Google Scholar. Her observations about rhetorical strategies in a small group of troubadours and trobairitz whose periods of literary activity seem to have been roughly contemporaneous reveal that women poets ‘rarely use the second person for anyone but the lover’, while male poets ‘are as likely to address their fellow men as their ladies’ (pp. 64–5).

124 Bogin, , The Women Troubadours, p. 68Google Scholar. The view that the women troubadours took over male themes and changed the gendered voice is surprisingly prevalent despite its patent invalidity. In an otherwise pioneering and insightful article, Howard Brown (‘Women Singers and Women's Songs’, p. 77) makes a similar claim about fifteenth-century songs in a woman's voice, which he acknowledges were probably written by women. Moreover, such arguments fail to note the ideas expressed by women that are never expressed by men, or that would be virtually inconceivable coming from men. A study by A. Tavera claims that extremely close readings of texts by the trobairitz, phrase by phrase, word by word, reveal more than a dozen ways in which these poems are completely distinct from those found in pieces by male troubadours. See ‘A la recherche des troubadours maudits’, Exclus et systèmes d'exclusion dans la littérature et la civilisation médiévales, Sénéfiance 5 (Aix-en-Provence, 1978), pp. 137–62Google Scholar. Although the author's perspective is marred by his attribution of these differences to a biologically determined ‘feminine’ nature, some of his remarks about the specific textual differences are perceptive and worthy of closer examination. The observations of Ferrante (see note 123) further corroborate the idea that there are discernible rhetorical differences in the language employed by the troubadours and trobairitz.

125 Jones, A. R., ‘Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence’, Yale French Studies, 62 (1981), pp. 135–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

126 Some examples include Venantius Fortunatus and Queen Radegunde, St Jerome and Paula, Heloise and Abelard, the troubadours and trobairitz, Christine de Pizan and Eustache Deschamps, Pernette du Guillet and Maurice Scève, Louise Labé and Olivier de Magny, among others. See Dronke, , Medieval Women Writers, pp. 84–106Google Scholar, for further examples, especially the extraordinary testimony by the biographer of St Jón, first Bishop of northern Iceland (d. 1121), concerning the existence of a traditional game between women and men that involved the exchange of amorous verses in late eleventhcentury Iceland (p. 105).

127 Although not specifically designated ‘réponse’, the poem of Madame d'Orléans, ‘En la forest de Longue Actente’ immediately follows that of Charles d'Orléans on the same theme, and shares many of the same A-rhyme words. The exchange between Jammette de Nesson and Tanneguy du Chastel is explicit. In the margin of the folio where Nesson's poem appears is the inscription: ‘la response est de l'autre costé par faulte du relieur.’ The relationship between these two poems is even more striking: not only do they share both A and B rhymes, they reproduce every one of the same rhyme words in identical sequence, but in different grammatical context. Especially noteworthy are the incipits of the two poems. Nesson's reads: ‘C'est pour me receller les biens’ and Tanneguy's ‘Puis qu'en moy cuidez tant de biens’, both of which seem to echo the incipit of the anonymous poem ‘Pour les biens qu'en vous je parçoy’ (italics mine). A poem to which Jehanne Filleul's Hélas mon amy sur mon ame seems to be a response immediately precedes it in Le jardin de plaisance, 1, fol. 81v. It too contains an allusion to biens, in line 3. At least one of these exchanges was initiated by the woman, that of Jammette de Nesson. Similarly, in Machaut's Voir-dit it was Toute Belle who launched the exchange of poems by sending Guillaume a rondeau, and significantly, over half the Voir-dit's lyrics are pairs of pieces with related subjects, rhymes and verse forms (see Williams, ‘The Lady’, p. 465).

128 Plus voy mon mignon plus le prise, Niv, fols. 75v–76, shares many rhymes a n d textual similarities with the poem by C. Blosset, Plus vous regarde trop plus fort je vous prise in F-Pn fr. 9223, fol. 53. Compare Chansonnier Nivelle de La Chaussée (Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, Rés. Vmc, ms. 57, ca1460), ed. Higgins, P. (Geneva, 1984), fols. 75v–76Google Scholar, with Raynaud, , Rondeaux, pp. 88–9Google Scholar.

129 This statement is based solely on received opinion about the datings of manuscripts transmitting his secular works which in turn tend to assume a date of composition relatively close to the date of compilation. We have almost no information about the chronology of Busnoys's works with the exception of In hydraulis, which was almost certainly written between 1465 and 1467, and we still have no idea of exactly when he was born.

130 ‘[April 1449] A Jehanne Filleul, damoiselle de la Royne, que le roy lui a donné pour lui aidier à avoir robée et soy mectre en point pour aler acompaigner ma dame Helienor d'Escoce en l'Austeriche.’ F-Pn fr. 23259, pièce 18. Éléleonore d'Écosse was the sister of the dauphine.

131 ‘[February 1447] A Prégente de Meleun, l'une des damoiselles de la Royne, la somme de lxxv L. xvii S. vi D. tournois laquelle somme ledit seigneur lui a donnée ou mois de decembre pour avoir une robe pour elle’. F-Pn fr. 23259, pièce 6. Melun was still in the queen's service in 1461 (F-Pn n.a.f. 9175, fol. 347v).

132 Steenackers, , Agnès Sorel, p. 257, n. 2Google Scholar.

133 I shall address the broader music-historical implications of a redating of Busnoys's musical activities to the 1450s in my forthcoming Antoine Busnoys and Musical Culture. On Busnoys's activity in Tours in 1465 see Higgins, , ‘In hydraulis’, pp. 70–6Google Scholar. Evidence of his activity in the cathedral of that city by 1461 at the latest comes from an unpublished document discovered by Pamela Starr and discussed in her paper ‘Rome as the Center of the Universe’, given at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Baltimore, November 1988. Although the document itself is dated February 1461, the incident to which it alludes might well have occurred a year or two earlier.

134 Jacqueline's father had business connections with the French court (see above, pp. 153–4), her mother's family (the Hennequins) included members of Parlement and royal advisers, and her uncle Jean de Hacqueville was a deputy to Louis xi in Tours in 1463, while Busnoys would have been living there. Given the extraordinary number of lawyers and counsellors in the male line of the Hacqueville-Bochart family, the fact that Jacqueline's great-granddaughter, Suzanne de La Porte (Richelieu's mother), was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Louise of Lorraine in 1580 (de La Chesnaye-Desbois, , Dictionnaire de la noblesse, xv, col. 948Google Scholar) may suggest that a tradition of ladies-in-waiting existed in the female line of the family. Indeed, the Jacqueline and Marguerite de Hacqueville at Marguerite d'Écosse's court in the 1440s may have been related to the Parisian family.

135 Other of Busnoys's song texts written from a woman's point of view include: Joye me fuit et douleur me court seure, Seule a par may en chambre bien parée, Ung plus que tous est en mon souvenir and Je suis venue vers mon amy (the last carries a conflicting attribution to Hayne van Ghizeghem). See Brown, ‘Women Singers and Women's Songs’, p. 76, for a list of songs from the woman's point of view in I-Fn 229.

136 Williams, ‘The Lady, the Lyrics’, p. 462; citing Paris, Le livre du voir-dit, p. 4.

137 Unable to keep up with Toute Belle's demands for new music, Machaut sent her an old piece for which he had composed a new tenor and contratenor, but she complained that she had already seen it before and demanded something new. Williams, ‘The Lady’, p. 464, citing Paris, pp. 242 and 250. The text of the relevant exchange is as follows: (Machaut): ‘Je vous envoie un rondel noté, dont je fis piega le chant et le dit. Sy y ay fait nouvellement teneure et contreteneure. Si, le vueilliez savoir, car il me semble bon.’ (Paris, p. 242) (Toute Belle): ‘J'ay éu. I. rondel noté que vous m'avez envoié, mais je l'avoie autrefois éu et le scay bien. Si vous prie que vous me vueillez envoier des autres, et se vous avez nuls des virelaiz que vous féistes avant que vous m'éussiez veue, qui soient notez, si m'en vueilliez envoier, car je les ay en grant desir de savoir, et par especial L'ueil qui est le droit archier.’ (Paris, p. 250)Google Scholar

138 By ‘feminist’ I mean a text in which women are portrayed in a positive light as intelligent, strong-willed, gifted and accomplished, as opposed to negative portrayals of them as deceitful, destructive, stupid, weak and incompetent. Positive views of women are especially striking within the context of the ‘viral antifeminism’ and its ‘discourse of misogyny’ which according to one leading critic ‘runs like a rich vein throughout the breadth of medieval literature’. See Bloch, R. H., ‘Medieval Misogyny’, Representations, 20 (1987), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

139 See especially Coldwell, ‘Jougleresses and Trobairitz’, pp. 39–61.

140 See Newcomb, ‘Courtesans, Muses or Musicians?’, pp. 90–115.

141 Newcomb, pp. 93–4.

142 Pollock, G., Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London, 1988), p. 42Google Scholar.

143 Baude Cordier, Hayne van Ghizeghem, Adrien Basin and Antoine de Longueval, among many others.

144 Beatrice of Aragon was the destinee of the Mellon Chansonnier, as well as the dedicatee of no fewer than three theoretical treatises by Tinctoris. Surely this signals a far greater interest in and understanding of polyphonic music than the passive status she is generally accorded, as patron of music and musicians, would suggest.

145 Daughter of Charles the Bold, Marie of Burgundy took over the Burgundian court chapel, which included Busnoys, on her father's death in 1477. The court organist Pietre Beurse gave her daily lessons on the clavichord. See Higgins, , ‘In hydraulis’, p. 68Google Scholar.

146 On Marguerite d'Autriche's musical education and interests see Picker, , The Chanson Albums of Marguerite of Austria, pp. 14–15Google Scholar. I too wonder, as does Picker, if Marguerite might have tried her hand at musical composition ‘as a natural extension of poetic composition and as a result of her evident interest in music’.

147 Isabella d'Este sang and played the lute, viol, lira da braccio and keyboard instruments. She employed several of the foremost frottolists of the day, including Bartolomeo Tromboncino and Marchetto Cara, and maintained a continuous correspondence with native Italian poets whose imitations of Petrarch she encouraged and solicited. See Prizer, W. F., ‘Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia as Patrons of Music: The Frottola at Mantua and Ferrara’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), pp. 1–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially pp. 5, 13, 17, 18, and 30. Prizer's study underscores the major impact Isabella's evidently passionate interests in poetry and music had on the development of the frottola as a genre and on native Italian music in general. Her courtly circle offers a paradigm of how a woman or women operating by necessity in cultural spheres separate from the mainstream (i.e. those cultivated and nurtured by their male consorts) – in this case, secular music, vernacular poetry and bas instruments, as opposed to sacred music, Latin texts and hauts instruments – could give rise to entirely new styles and genres.

148 On Anne of Brittany's patronage and musical establishment see Bonime, S., ‘Anne de Bretagne (1477–1514) and Music: An Archival Study’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1975)Google Scholar. Unfortunately this study gives no information on Anne's own musical education and interests. Some details of her education, as well as her literary, artistic and musical interests, however, are given in de Lincy, Le Roux, ‘Détails sur la vie privée d'Anne de Bretagne, femme de Charles viii et de Louis xii’, Bibliothèque de l'École des Charles, 11 (1849), pp. 148–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

149 For example, the woman named ‘Pacquette’ who sang with the two famous blind vielle players at the Burgundian Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 was a lady from the household of the duchess (Isabel of Portugal): ‘une damoiselle de 1'ostel de ladicte duchesse’. See Fallows, D., ‘Specific Information on the Ensembles for Composed Polyphony, 1400–1474’, Studies in the Performance of Late Mediaeval Music, ed. Boorman, S. (Cambridge, 1983), p. 139Google Scholar. Similarly, among the chansons sung at the wedding festivities for Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in 1468 was Bien venue la belle bergère sung for Margaret by Madame de Beaugrant, the governess of Charles's daughter Mary, riding a lion who sang the tenor. See Strohm, R., Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1985), p. 99Google Scholar.

150 The explanation proposed by Coldwell, (‘Jougleresses and Trobairitz’, p. 55)Google Scholar that ‘when Salic law prohibited the passage of the French crown through women, women were no longer able to compete as composers with men’ clearly begs many questions.

151 On publications by women composers in Italy see Bowers, ‘The Emergence of Women Composers’, pp. 116–67.

152 Fundamental studies include Brenet's, M. pioneering ‘La musique dans les couvents de femmes depuis le moyen âge à nos jours’, La Tribune de Saint-Gervais, 4 (1898), pp. 25–31, 58–61, 73–81Google Scholar; Rokseth, ‘Les femmes musiciennes’; and Yardley, A. B., ‘“Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne”: The Cloistered Musician in the Middle Ages’, Women Making Music, pp. 15–38Google Scholar, which despite the author's unduly modest claim to the contrary (p. 30) shows more than ample cause for a major revision in the common understanding of sacred music in the Middle Ages. Strohm (Music in Late Medieval Bruges, pp. 62, 70, 107 and 160, nn. 8 and 9) drew attention to the musical activities of the Rich Clares and the béguines of Bruges as music teachers, music scribes, performers, and possibly conduits of polyphonic music.

153 Studies of musical manuscripts produced in female monasteries and convents will shed some sorely needed light on the thoroughly unexplored subject of women's musical literacy and creativity in the late Middle Ages. See Yardley, ‘“Ful weel”’, pp. 26–7, for a working list of polyphony surviving in manuscripts from medieval nunneries.

154 A recent study attempting to assess the extent of women's ownership of manuscripts is that of Bell, S. G., ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Erler, and Kowaleski, , pp. 149–87Google Scholar. The number of women destinees of music manuscripts of the fifteenth century speaks strongly in favour of a high level of musical literacy among elite and noble women. The most notable examples include: the Mellon Chansonnier (Beatrice of Aragon); the chansonniers B-Br 228 and 11239 (Marguerite d'Autriche); and F-Pn fr. 1596 (Marguerite d'Orléans). The devotional song-motet, Ave regina by Walter Frye, which opens both the Wolfenbüttel and Laborde chansonniers could signal the destination of both manuscripts for female aristocratic patrons. Significantly, the Pixérécourt chansonnier (F-Pn fr. 15123), the shape of whose Italian shield identifies its owner as a woman, also opens with a song-motet: O pulcherrima mulierum. The textual allusions to the virgin Mary, queen of heaven, in these dedicatory pieces could well signal their destination for terrestrial female magnates.

155 Ferguson, , Quilligan, and Vickers, , eds., Rewriting the Renaissance, p. xGoogle Scholar.

156 See Franc Liszt: Briefe aus ungarischen Sammlungen, 1835–1886, ed. Prahacs, M. (Kassel etc., 1966), Brief 589, pp. 283 and 446Google Scholar. The most recent study of Liszt, Burger's, E.Franz Liszt: A Chronicle of his Life in Pictures and Documents (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar, includes a full-page reproduction of the photograph in question (picture no. 607), together with a quotation from August Stradal's memoirs. Stradal suggested that Senkrah had ‘dragged [Liszt] off to the photographer's studio’ where the photograph was taken and subsequently distributed copies of it autographed by Liszt for publicity purposes, thus accounting for the fact that she always played to full houses throughout Europe. Curiously, Burger fails to mention whether Albert Morris Bagby and Brod Korb, who flank Liszt at the piano in a photograph taken in the same studio (picture no. 606), had also coerced Liszt there. Perhaps Senkrah had dragged them there on the same occasion as well.