Josquin's fame in our time is founded upon his renown throughout Christendom in the later sixteenth century. His six-voice motet setting of the Marian sequence Benedicta es, coelorum regina helped to cement that fame. It survives in at least twenty-four early manuscripts and printed collections of music; lutenists and keyboard players (among them Antonio de Cabezon) made numerous arrangements of it. At least four mass settings, by Willaert, Georges de la Helle, Phillipe de Monte, and Palestrina parody the Josquin motet; Jean Mouton composed a motet, on the same text, imitating the music's style and melodic character. Cristobal de Morales wrote a mass quoting both from this motet and Mouton's, possibly initiating a long tradition of Spanish double-parody mass settings.

A well-known piece of Gregorian chant provides the cantus firmus model for Josquin's perennial favorite. Benedicta es was sung during the mass for a number of feasts of the Virgin Mary (though the Council of Trent later removed this sequence from the liturgy). The text falls into three pairs of stanzas, each pair linked by rhyme scheme and syllabification. Its imagery deals jointly with the worship of, and prayers to, God the Father, Mary as Queen of Heaven, and the Son. It contains several felicitous passages which transcend the often stereotyped language of Medieval devotional poetry—for example, a mystical allusion to Mary as both daughter and mother of Jesus, and an elegant pun on "Son" and "sun," which is in turn linked to Mary as the "stella maris," "star of the sea."

Josquin's musical setting respects this poetic structure, marking most of the poetic lines with cadential articulation, and many with a change in voicing and texture. The first stanza itself is rhetorically closed by a threefold repetition of the same cadence in alternate duets, while the fifth is set apart from the fourth by a strong cadence and an extended duo setting. The final strophe looks towards our "coelesti patria" ("heavenly homeland") in a brisk tripla section followed by an extended "Amen." As is the case with quite a number of Josquin's six-voiced chansons, two of the voices are in a canonic relationship: the chant melody is paraphrased throughout in the uppermost voice, while each phrase receives its canonic echo in the tenor an octave down. The temporal distance of this echo varies, however, and Josquin may manipulate the rhetorical force of the entire motet at times by, for instance, speeding up the pace of successive entries.



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