It used to be accepted by everybody that Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521) was the greatest composer of his generation, an innovator who inspired and directed the course of music history. No more. A Josquin debunking campaign has been actively going on for a while arguing that he was not as famous or as influential in his own time as we have thought and that his great reputation was created posthumously by people in German-speaking areas, particularly, but not exclusively, by Lutherans who idolized him, transmitted his music long after his death, and wrote about him in detail, their point of view taken up uncritically by modern musicologists. In other words, Josquin’s reputation is the result of media hype. This was actually acknowledged at the time in the quip of a German music publisher in 1540 that it seemed that Josquin had composed more music after his death than he had during his life (quoted on p. 82 of the book under review), a reference to the many so-called forgeries (works attributed to Josquin but not really by him) that proliferated in German music publications in the middle sixteenth century. Obviously, his name sold. What has been lacking until now was a detailed demonstration of how this phenomenon happened and how it fits into the context of the times. We now have this in Meyer’s book.

The organization is basically chronological, beginning in the second decade of the sixteenth century and ending at the beginning of the seventeenth. After an introduction come five major sections. In Aneignung und Kanonisierung, Josquin’s music appears in early sixteenth-century German manuscript sources and in the Liber selectarum cantionum (1520) edited by Ludwig Senfl, then assumes canonic status through German music publications of the 1530s, particularly in the Novum et insigne opus musicum edited by Hans Ott. The next section, Heroisierung, is related to canonization. Josquin is literally called a hero, with all the implications of that idea in the minds of humanists like the Swiss theorist Glarean, while Luther and Melanchthon also adopt the concept of Josquin as hero in a Protestant context. In Literarisierung und Rhetorisierung, Josquin appears in German music treatises as a model to be followed while anecdotes about his life also appear. His music is held up as an example of the new idea that music is part of the rhetorical trivium not the mathematical quadrivium. In Historisierung, Josquin’s music gradually loses its canonic status and he is more and more regarded as a historical figure. In the conclusion, Schluss: Vom “Erinnernden” zum “Erinnerten,” is the rise of Josquin to canonic composer and his fall to historical footnote. The book ends with indexes of names and of Josquin’s works, and finally a bibliography.

Each major section is divided into subsections. Sections and subsections begin with a statement of what the main thesis will be, followed by the evidence and ending with a summary. The final section recapitulates the entire book. It is all very orderly and quite useful. There are interesting observations and new material on the historical and intellectual contexts of Josquin reception in Germany. Most people know about Luther’s admiration for Josquin; less well known perhaps are the views of Melanchthon which were just as influential. Meyer further shows how their use of Josquin’s music had a theological component. He also points out that the Catholic Glarean’s criticisms of his hero Josquin might have been a reaction to Lutheran hero worship. He asks and tries to answer the question of what exactly it was in Josquin’s music that brought forth these reactions. Meyer is aware of recent Anglo-American scholarship and of the critical notes for individual works so laboriously created by the editors of the New Josquin Edition. The book is printed on art paper so the facsimiles of pages from prints and manuscripts (one in color) are very clear. Music examples are used sparingly and to good purpose including an analysis of a motet by Johannes Reusch that is clearly modeled on Josquin but is not a forgery. The book is a worthy addition to modern Josquin scholarship. But it would have been nice if the many Latin quotations in the body of the text had been translated (translations do appear in the texts presented in the appendix).