Portraits around Marc-Antoine Charpentier

Pendragon Press is proud to assume distribution of this very special book by Patricia Ranum who opens her preface with these words: “Marc-Antoine Charpentier knew or knew about all the sitters in this imaginary portrait gallery. During my long pursuit of the composer in European archives and libraries, these same individuals have become my friends although I confess to feeling less sympathy for some than for others. I never succeeded in unveiling Charpentier the Man whom I consider my very closest seventeenth-century friend. Yet I could not leave my research papers to yellow in file drawers and force other scholars to retrace my steps and go down the blind alleys along which I made my frustrated way. For close to two decades, I have been making categorical statements about Charpentier and the Guises; but although I backed up these assertions with elaborate footnotes, no coherent picture the Guises; but although I backed up these assertions with elaborate footnotes, no coherent picture emer