To study Josquin des Prez is to stand at the edge of an epistemological precipice. One of the greatest impediments to accessing the historical Josquin is the extraordinary reception he enjoyed after his death. The early decades of the sixteenth century witnessed an explosion in the circulation of Josquin's music, and a concomitant increase in references to Josquin's stature. More than a quarter-century ago, Joshua Rifkin challenged scholars to consider works by Josquin guilty until proven innocent. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music historians were forced to rely heavily on Glareanus and late printed sources, their accounts are littered with dubious claims about Josquin's personality and oriented toward works of questionable attribution. The biographical details can serve as a starting point, as can the most fundamental sorts of information about the institutions in which Josquin worked, the musicians with whom he associated, and the broader social, cultural, and political developments of his age.

Among the Pannonians, three brothers, namely Lech, Rus and Czech, were born to Pan, prince of the Pannonians. These three held the three kingdoms of the Lechites, Russians and Czechs. The kingdom of Bohemia was girt by the Erzebirge mountains to the northwest and the Bohemian Forest in the south-west, while in the south-east the White Carpathians separated the dependent mark of Moravia from Slovakia. The thirteenth century brought a second and consolidatory round of 'westernisation' to central Europe. The greatest impact on Hungary and on central Europe as a whole was made by the Tatar invasions. While the western and southern Polish dukes concentrated their attentions primarily on relations with Bohemia and Hungary, the Mazovian Piasts stood further aloof from western alliances. Political developments in central Europe were attended by religious and economic changes which transformed the central kingdoms from passive recipients of alien culture into active members of Latin Christendom and propagators of her values.

The concepts of the 'Heptarchy' and of the 'Bretwalda' are so deeply engrained in the historiography of early Anglo-Saxon England that they could never be removed from any discussion of the subject. It is questionable whether either concept would have had much meaning in the eighth or the ninth century, and it must be said that there are other ways of approaching the complexities of political history in the period, which proceed from different assumptions and which promise to explain developments in somewhat different terms. It seems clear that the Tribal Hidage is in some sense a 'Mercian' document, if only because the survey proceeds from Mercia itself. The course of events in the ninth century could be understood in its simplest terms as a story of the 'rise of Wessex' from foundations laid by King Egbert in the first quarter of the century to the achievements of King Alfred the Great in its closing decades.