Reviews: The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics

Abstract

The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics , by Gretchen Peters. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. x, 288 pp. In its title and approach, this book bears a family resemblance to Keith Polk's German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons, and Performance Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics , Gretchen Peters asks what we can know about urban musicians and the work they did, based solely on the traces they have left in the local archives of some twenty important communities. These select late medieval “French” cities are mostly large episcopal and/or independent princely capitals (Toulouse, Avignon, Dijon, Reims) but they also include smaller but highly significant mercantile towns like Saint-Omer. While many of them were not “French” in any geopolitical sense during the time-frame of this book—that is, they were not part of the shape-shifting kingdom centered in the Ile-de-France between 1300 and 1500—grouping them together under this rubric allows Peters to trace certain commonalities among them, as well as to highlight significant regional differences. And by not including Paris, which has been the object of so much attention by scholars of late medieval musical culture, she provides a relief map that puts Paris in perspective. In one sense, this book is meticulously organized. Its six chapters fall into two equal parts: the first three survey archival evidence derived from the three major territories into which Peters divides her study (southern, central, and northern France); the second three are topical studies of the varieties of work performed by musicians, their professional relationships, and, as the title of Chapter 6 puts it, the “conflicting images of the medieval minstrel” that emerge from the records. Each of the first three chapters unfolds in a similar way. As in a travel guide, the reader is given a brief history of …