St Anne, the mother of Mary, although scripturally unattested, was one of the most popular saints of the late Middle Ages. As Martin Anderson – author of the first comprehensive study of her veneration through music – points out, this popularity was based not merely on her family connections, as the grandmother of the Saviour himself, but as much if not more on the multiple interconnected ways in which she could serve as intercessor – her ‘utility’, to use Anderson's term. She was the patron saint of married women, of married life and the family, of women desiring children and of fertility in general – the latter of obvious importance in dynastic contexts where (particularly male) offspring was a matter of enormous political importance.

Anderson's focus is on the period roughly from the early fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century and is decidedly Franco-Burgundian in flavour, simply because the number of demonstrable instances of musical veneration of St Anne in this part of Europe is highest. The author himself points out that the saint's currency in Italy was less widespread than north of the Alps, and that although the veneration of the mother of Mary was very strong in Germany (in the Rhineland in particular), musical traces are here limited to relatively isolated instances. In a welcome departure from numerous similar studies on ‘x and music’, Anderson casts his net more widely, to include plainchant as well as polyphony, albeit with a slightly different focus on the former than the latter. While he does aspire to discuss every single polyphonic witness to the saint in his chosen period, he is much more selective with regard to plainchant, limiting himself to a pair of (admittedly fascinating) case studies rather than a survey of the entire tradition of chants for St Anne – a quick search on the CANTUS online database yielding twenty-one sources containing about 400 chants pertaining to the feast on 26 July, spread all across Europe.

Having said that, the narrative does begin with plainchant: the enigmatic rhymed plainchant office for St Anne found in the ‘French-Cypriot’ codex Turin J.II.9. This source contains a complete rhymed office for St Anne – intriguingly so as the only other office (and body of chant) in the manuscript is the office for St Hilarion specifically written for the Lusignan court. Anderson manages to place this office in a textual tradition ranging from northern France to England to Denmark, while the origins of the music remain obscure, possibly in fact unique to the Turin manuscript. He casts doubt on the previous hypothesis that the office was composed to honour the birth of Anne of Cyprus, the daughter of the Cypriot King Janus, on the basis that her birth (between 1415 and 1419) postdates the earliest time when the two offices could have been composed – the papal bull of 1413 granting permission to establish the office for St Hilarion. But since there is no evidence that the two offices were composed at the same time (the author himself concedes that they are composed in a different melodic style) and since the codex itself, as Karl Kügle has recently argued, was not made until the 1430s for the Avogadro family in Brescia, the presumption that Anne was the intended ‘recipient’ of the Office must remain strong, while later owners and users of the codex might easily have personalised the presence of the saint to their own dynastic purposes.

For the next work, we leap ahead about eighty years, to the Habsburg-Burgundian court of Margaret of Austria, with Pierre de La Rue's Missa de Sancta Anna. Quite ingeniously, Anderson here succeeds in identifying the antiphon Felix Anna quedam matrona as the source of the cantus firmus, by comparing it to La Rue's own very free use of pre-existent melodies elsewhere and by placing the work alongside a number of motets using the same chant. Once again, however, the main focus is on what this work would have meant for the apparent dedicatee, Margaret of Austria – famously twice-widowed yet childless and thus with a biography resonating particularly strongly with St Anne. La Rue's Mass and the codex Jena 7 which opens with it take us to another court – that of Frederick the Wise in Wittenberg whose Castle Church already held several relics to the saint, and a St Anne altar very possibly by Lucas Cranach. A strong focus on St Anne permeates the liturgical practice of this court as well, manifesting itself first and foremost in the Proper cycles of the choirbooks 30 and 34, which attest to a lively polyphonic practice. Anderson could have made his case here even more fully by referring more than in passing to Jürgen Heidrich's groundbreaking study Die Deutschen Chorbücher aus der Hofkapelle Friedrichs des Weisen (1993), which proved that the bulk of the choirbooks for Frederick's court were actually made in southern Germany around 1500 – but that it is precisely the works for St Anne which were added in the later ‘Wittenberg’ phase of production around 1510, perhaps, as Anderson suggests, prefiguring Martin Luther's preoccupation with the mater matris.

The author's gaze then moves westwards once again, with the final three chapters discussing the musical veneration of St Anne in France, focusing on Jean Mouton's motet Celeste beneficium (for Anne of Brittany), its ‘afterlife’ in a group of motets in the set of partbooks BAV Pal. lat. 1976–79 (for Anna of Bohemia and Hungary) and a set of monophonic Mass Propers in a French manuscript from the late 1510s, BnF fr. 1035 (for Marguerite of Angoulême). Mouton's motet is once again interpreted in light of Anne of Brittany's unsuccessful attempts to bear a male heir. The ‘Anna group’ in the Palatini partbooks is analysed as a gift to the queen by the Habsburg court and a general extended comment on her life (with perhaps slightly unfair comments on the ‘bungling’ of the scribe who had the thankless task of repurposing all kinds of existing ‘Anna settings’ for their new destination, regardless of whether they really fit the bill, and probably had to do so quickly). Finally, the French plainsong Mass again refers to infertility (this time of Marguerite of Navarre) and the idea of a pax christiana within the embattled French kingdom.

The undoubted strength of this book is the way in which Anderson embeds his observations on the settings into an immensely rich literary, artistic, historical and dynastic context. This context is researched with reference to a broad range of literature in a wide array of languages, with only a handful of typos in the foreign-language transcriptions and titles (but with references hidden as endnotes in the back, a feature that is especially infuriating for the reader when the notes contain much additional commentary which often substantially aids comprehension of the argument). However, this strength can at times appear seemingly like a weakness, in that it becomes an end in itself, with the music almost an afterthought; even where the settings are discussed, the words often receive more attention than the musical notes. Occasionally, the context takes on a life of its own entirely, perhaps most clearly in the discussion on currents of biblical humanism in France around the time when the Proper cycle for Marguerite of Navarre was written – which turns out to be quite orthodox theologically, thus apparently untouched by this discourse. Given the wide chronological, geographical and stylistic dispersal of his repertoire, Anderson also struggles to establish any kind of musical narrative. There are, with few exceptions, no real links between the pieces, nor does a concrete sense emerge of what, if anything, might make ‘Anna settings’ distinctive. Rather, the (inevitable) impression emerges that every piece as such follows the stylistic norms of its respective genre. This includes the setting of the texts: the highlighting of the name ‘Anna’ through slow-moving homophony could equally plausibly be applied to the name of the subject of the text in other saints’ motets, and the case can hardly be made either that the chant settings depart from the general norms of late medieval plainsong. The ‘special treatment’ that Anderson postulates for Anna is liturgical, ceremonial, dynastic, personal, but as it turns out, not musical. In the end, there are simply not enough ‘Anna settings’, and they are in too many different genres, to make that possible, and it is perhaps not a reasonable expectation that the situation should be otherwise. What we do get are individually enlightening descriptions of the individual settings, invariably providing new insights into repertoire that has received little if any attention by scholars so far. And after all, Anderson never intended to write a history of music. His stated aim was to establish music as one of the ‘areas of cultural production to form a picture of St Anne's unusually strong impact on devotional and political life in the advent of the Reformation’ (p. 249). This he has achieved without a doubt.