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....