Jean Charité

Jean Carité, also called Jacques Charité, was a French composer active between 1401 and 1433, a figure reconstructed almost exclusively from archival documents. His only surviving work is a rondeau for three texts, Jusques à tant / Puisqu'ency / Certes m'amour, transmitted in the Oxford manuscript GB-Ob Canon.misc.213.

His identification is not certain. He has been associated with a canon of Laon who was a member of the Cour d'Amour, founded in Paris in 1401, with a canon of St Donatian's in Bruges between 1406 and 1411, and with a Jacques Carité, both chaplains to the Duke of Berry. It seems they were the same person, since Jean and Jacques appear interchangeably in the records.

In the chapel of Duke John of Berry he served as sommelier and later as chaplain, and he received valuable gifts from the duke, including a ruby and three diamonds. Between 1418 and 1422 he was a canon of the Sainte-Chapelle in Bourges. By around 1433 he was already a canon of Cambrai, where he died in 1461, and Guillaume Du Fay was among the executors of his will.

His musical legacy is slight, but his career illustrates how musicians of the Burgundian and French courts moved between noble households and ecclesiastical chapters.