Paying the Piper: Music in Pre-1642 Cheshire by Elizabeth Baldwin; David MillsReview by: Fiona KisbyThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 255-256Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20476891 .

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Book Reviews 255

Owens has made a significant contribution to our understanding of Spenser and his world. My own reservations about this book lie chiefly in the attenuated nature of its argu

ment, which operates in a contextual vacuum-an ironic situation for a work that means to unfold new and manifold contexts.The book is indeed highly specialized, even for a special ist reader, and it is written in an obfuscating language that is all too common in contempo rary criticism. Nevertheless, Owens is careful in her judgments, thorough in her arguments, and current in her research. Her book is scholarly and it is eminently sensible and full of insight; it is also unfortunately written in a cumbersome and graceless style that is at odds

with one of the greatest of English poets. Owens gives a good account of"the sage and seri ous" Spenser, a difficult and complex poet, to be sure, but one of endless wit, charm, and vitality, qualities that this book too easily overlooks.

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Paying the Piper: Music in Pre-1642 Cheshire. Elizabeth Baldwin, with David Mills. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002. xii + 287 pp., ill. $30.00. ISBN 1 58044-040-1.

REVIEWED BY: Fiona Kisby, Queenswood School, Herts, UK

It has long been known that cities and towns played an important role in the economic, political, social, and cultural history of Early Modern Europe. Indeed, a subfield of historical scholarship-urban history-has been developed to promote historical enquiry into the totality of the urban experience during this period. Unfortunately, some of this work has been preoccupied with demography, economics, politics, and government, and urban cul ture in its broadest sense has been bypassed in favor of investigations into infrastructural change.Yet happily a generation of historical musicologists has begun to redress the balance in this respect and has integrated cultural topics into the urban historians' purview. Their scholarship focuses on the contexts as well as the contents of musical works, and, rather than investigate the development of musical style, they have viewed the organization and activities of musicians as responses to social, economic, political, religious, and economic stimuli in specific -largely urban-locations. Among many other things, they have begun to examine how music shaped space and time within urban environments and how it was woven into the fabric of daily life as well as special occasions; they have also begun to observe how music

was a focus for tensions and was a tool of subversion in the face of institutionalized power, with recent work traceable through Urban History (Special Music Issue), 28:2 (2001).

It is in this somewhat newer and more interdisciplinary historiographic tradition that the current work by Baldwin and Mills must be placed, for it attempts to set the performers and performances of music in the city of Chester and the wider county of Cheshire into their "social, economic, legal and possibly political contexts" in the period before 1642. Noting that much of the work done on early music has concentrated on extant music manuscripts and known-usually male-composers associated with the elite sacred sphere, the authors have widened the scope of their enquiry and focused on music and not necessarily profes sionally trained music makers outside the regular control of the church. In order to achieve this, documentary sources were mostly consulted, including judicial and financial records, together with parish material, wills, and inventories. Much of this formed part of the col lection for the ongoing Records of Early English Drama project volumes on which the authors have also worked, and this book will form an excellent companion to these.

In two parts, the book first addresses contextual issues relating to musical culture in its

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256 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXV/1 (2004)

broadest sense in Chester and Cheshire and some of the terminology used to describe them. Most importantly, this section draws attention to the fact that the documentary evidence about music and musicians upon which scholars are forced to rely in the absence of extant

music is often compiled by those whose principal interest lies elsewhere. This is a point which has profound methodological implications and reminds us that such sources must be regarded as texts to be interpreted rather than records of objective information about musical culture.

The work goes on to examine music in the city of Chester in detail. In this chapter music is viewed as a component of the wider social, ceremonial, political, and commercial life of the urban community; the waits, for example, are characterized as audiovisual emblems of civic control.The city is also described as a meeting point for a variety of musical traditions, difficult to reconstruct in the absence of surviving music. In the second part of the book, music in the rest of the county, music associated with the gentry, and musical instruments are discussed.These chapters are complemented by useful appendices containing lists of county musicians and transcripts of seventeenth-century inventories of musicians. In all of this the striking number of occasions when infringements of law and order are a major element of evidence about music stand out. To some extent, this reflects the relatively large quantity of legal sources used; but it also draws attention to the fact that, in urban and other

community contexts, disputes about music and performers were often an expression of

deeper divides between parties of varying kinds contesting a whole variety of social, political, and religious issues. The overlapping boundaries between amateur and professional, popular and elite, and, to some extent, sacred and secular music and musicians are also made prom inent in this book, reflecting the fluidity of categories that have formerly been thought of as

largely distinct. It is a disappointing fact that some might question the relevance of books of this type,

for arguably it does little to solve the perennial "problem" that lies at the heart of musico logical scholarship-that of understanding and writing about music as aesthetic experience rather than simply describing the financial provision for it, the patronage that supported it, the institutions in which it was performed, or the biographies of the personnel who com posed, sang, or played it. However, through extensive and thorough archival research and detailed, perceptive analyses of documentary sources, the authors have admirably illustrated the wealth of information that can be discovered (in the absence of extant music) on the sec ular, sacred, civic, popular, and professional contexts which gave rise to musical activity and shaped the lives of performers and audiences in pre-1642 Cheshire.This alone should ensure

that it makes a significant contribution to the historiography and acts as a model which future

studies could emulate.

Monaca, Moglie, Serva, Cortigiana: Vita e immagine delle donne tra Rinasci mento e Controriforma. Sara F Matthews-GriecoSara F Matthews Grieco, Sabina Brevaglieri, Caroline Murphy, Olwen H Hufton;, Gabriella Zarri, Anna Scattigno, and Bette Talvacchia. Lunaris 1. Florence: Morgana, 2001. 285 pp., ill. port. ?30.00. ISBN 88-85698-75-1.

REVIEWED BY: Julia L. Hairston, University of Rome "La Sapienza"

The six essays in this volume explore the iconography-mostly prints from Florentine institutions-representing a variety of women's roles in early modern Italy. Caroline P Mur

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