Anne D. Hedeman’s Of Counselors and Kings offers a comprehensive investigation of the Dialogues of Pierre Salmon. Salmon was an advisor to the ill-starred French king Charles VI (r. 1380-1422), whose debilitating mental illness contributed to a series of profound crises during his reign. The manuscripts consist of a set of questions purportedly posed by the king to Salmon—first concerning political issues and then theological matters—followed by a collection of transcribed letters relating to Salmon’s attempts to discover a remedy for the king’s illness. A second, slightly later version of the text also includes a lengthy treatise on virtues and vices. Hedeman’s concise study will undoubtedly prompt a reappraisal of the Dialogues, which scholars previously investigated using a flawed nineteenth-century edition. By directly examining the original manuscripts, Hedeman provides a subtle analysis of the shifting meanings that the text conveyed to its earliest audiences. On its own, this would be enough to mark her work as a major addition to scholarship on the Dialogues.

But Of Counselors and Kings accomplishes much more. It significantly expands our understanding of late-medieval court patronage. An earlier generation of art historians tended to present kings and dukes as the driving forces behind commissions (e.g. Millard Meiss’s study on Jean de Berry). Within the last two decades, however, scholars have recognized that other members of the court community, including counselors like Salmon, were actively involved in the production of some of the period’s most elaborate visual projects.

In addition to a preface, introduction, and conclusion, Hedeman’s book contains three chapters, each of which addresses one of the three surviving manuscripts of the Dialogues. The preface summarizes Hedeman’s methodology, providing her readers with a model of judicious manuscript scholarship. Borrowing a term from the historian Gabrielle Spiegel, Hedeman explains that she focuses on the “moment of inscription” of Salmon’s text, exploring how each individual manuscript crystallizes the historical circumstances and textual influences that obtained at the moment of its creation. To this, Hedeman adds her own rigorous attention to the significance of codicological features, such as the page layout and miniatures, that the text acquires in manuscript form. A brief introduction sketches Salmon’s biography and summarizes the political circumstances of the period.

Chapter 1 discusses Salmon’s initial version of the Dialogues, contained in a manuscript (Paris BNF MS fr. 23279) presented to Charles VI in 1409. Hedeman’s basic hypothesis is that Salmon was intimately involved in the production of this text, especially its illustrative program. He would not have been the only royal counselor to devote considerable attention to devising a series of miniatures; his contemporary, Jean Lebègue, left us with a well-known list of instructions describing “les histoires que l’on peut raisonablement faire sur les livres de Salluste.” But lacking such convenient written evidence for Salmon’s role, Hedeman must intuit it from the manuscript itself. Her close analysis of its physical structure and visual program confirms that Salmon did indeed closely control its design. Moreover, her interpretation of these features is made more comprehensible by a set of appendices tabulating them.

Hedeman establishes that Charles himself was the primary audience for this first version of the text. Salmon conceived of the manuscript as an active instrument for the king’s cure, an object that could vigorously propel him toward health and sanity. The images were finely calibrated with Salmon’s words, allowing him to add further dimensions to his text, often redirecting its sense in significant ways. They permitted Salmon to present his ideas forcefully but diplomatically, anticipating the hair-trigger political sensibilities of his readers. The miniatures delicately treat Charles’s mental illness (for example, the images in which the king, in a strikingly nonregal manner, despondently reclines on his bed with Salmon kneeling by his side) and they distill the moral choices facing Charles into memorable individual exempla, such as members of Charles’s own family: his son-in-law, King Richard II of England, and his brother, Duke Louis of Orléans. The miniautures characterize powerful historical figures encountered by Salmon, like the depiction of schismatic Benedict XIII as a false pope, and enable Salmon to present himself as a source of valuable counsel to nations’ rulers. Drawing upon recent scholarship on medieval memory theory, Hedeman demonstrates that Salmon intended the miniatures to function as a potent means of fixing an image of proper royal behavior within Charles’s unstable mind.

Hedeman notes, however, that shortly after the creation of this initial manuscript, it became apparent that the hopes for the king’s cure were illusory. Anticipated help from a papal physician never materialized. The religious schism and its resulting spiritual trauma continued, and the political situation in France deteriorated in tandem with the mental state of the king. Between 1412 and 1415, Salmon produced a revised version of the work (Geneva MS 165) to address this situation. Hedeman shows that he drastically edited the earlier text, added a new section, and altered the illustrative program, thereby radically transforming the meaning of the Dialogues. Although this manuscript was also presented to Charles, Salmon now was concerned primarily with addressing the Dauphin and other members of the royal family. The miniatures clarify the text’s meaning, underlining its themes of morality and virtue without augmenting it as the images in the first version had. In despair over the prospects for a near-term solution to the nation’s problems, Salmon’s new manuscript sought to provide moral guidance for the future rulers of France.

The last chapter discusses the third and final version (Paris BNF MS fr. 9610), a close copy of the second. It was produced ca. 1500 for François de Rochechouart, an official at the court of Louis XII. The miniatures carefully replicate most of those in the previous text—although not with the same style—while subtly amending some of the scenes to elevate the status of Salmon, who Rochechouart wished to emulate. Here, Hedeman explores how Salmon’s text was understood by a subsequent generation of readers, providing a fascinating glimpse into a case of cultural revival.

The rigor of Hedeman’s scholarship leaves little to criticize. Of Counselors and Kings offers a significant contribution to the emerging picture of late-medieval patronage, complementing studies by Richard and Mary Rouse (of the goldsmith Simon de Lille), Claire Richter Sherman (of the royal advisor Nicole Oresme), Sandra Hindman (of the author Christine de Pizan), Donal Byrne (of Lebègue), and Brigitte Buettner (of the merchant Jacques Raponde). Hedeman also helps move us beyond earlier studies of the Dialogues’ celebrated miniatures, which are often discussed as important steps towards Renaissance naturalism. She convincingly suggests that Salmon consciously chose particular artists (the shops of the Cité des Dames Master and the Boucicaut Master) for the naturalistic qualities of their images in an effort to make the text vividly and personally relevant to his audiences. Hedeman thus provides further proof, if any is needed, that the naturalism of fifteenth-century art emerged as a response to particular social and political aims; it was not simply favored as a self-evidently desirable style.

Of course, Hedeman’s account is principally concerned with ascertaining the role of Salmon in the production of his manuscripts; it is not a study of the oeuvres of particular illuminators. It ascribes agency to Salmon for all of the visual strategies contained in the miniatures. He chose the artists for their style, he designed the program, and he ensured that text and image worked in lockstep to reinforce one another. Hedeman provides ample evidence to support this description of the process by which the illustrative program was devised; studies of other courtly patrons confirm its validity. But this leaves little purchase on the project for the artisans themselves. Would not the miniatures have resulted, at least in some small part, from a negotiation between Salmon and the illuminators? Even when we can unequivocally show that a patron exerted a great deal of control over a commission, can we write the creators of the images out of the equation entirely? Did their creative input, however minimal, constitute their own performative act of self-fashioning? We know that the Limbourg brothers were active players in the culture of gift-giving and reciprocal obligation that Salmon was immersed in—a culture investigated by Buettner in a forthcoming Art Bulletin article entitled “Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Courts, ca. 1400”—witness the “livre contrefait” that they offered to Jean de Berry in 1410 as a clever testament of their virtuosity. Is it conceivable that the illuminators responsible for Salmon’s Dialogues also keyed their work in some way to correspond to that culture, independent of their patron’s instructions? And if so, how can we recover their role? But whatever the answers to these questions, they cannot alter the conclusions or the value of Hedeman’s outstanding study. She set out to refine our understanding of Salmon’s Dialogues and of the author’s role in guiding the reception of the text and has done so with resounding success.