La place du prince: Perspective et pouvoir dans le théâtre de cour des Médicis, Florence (1539-1600) (review)
Case of Musical Persuasion.” Baade gently informs us that what we think we know about nuns’ lives is still not the entire story in “‘Hired’ Nun Musicians in Early Modern Castile.” Arias’s essay focuses on the music of Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz, and is the only essay in the collection to focus on music in the New World. Filling in our woeful lack of knowledge of women and music in Spain on the secular side is Pilar Ramos López, who deftly uncovers “Some Discrepancies between Educational Theory and Musical Practice in Early Modern Spain.” She uncovers an overlooked female theatrical performance tradition, and reveals, as do so many of these essays, the subversive power of women’s musicality. England is represented by three articles: on Princess Elisabeth Stuart’s influence on the harpsichord collection Parthenia (Janet Pollack), Moll Cutpurse (Raphael Seligmann), and changing uses of the goddess Venus (Amanda Eurbanks Winkler). Inna Naroditskaya’s groundbreaking essay on Russian music, “Serf Actresses in the Tsarinas’ Russia: Social Class Cross-Dressing in Russian Serf Theaters of the Eighteenth Century” is as disturbing as it is enlightening. This is a collection accessible to scholars, performers, students, and enthusiasts alike. Indeed, it should be mandatory reading in every music history survey class. Monteverdi’s Unruly Women is not designed for nonlinear reading. Each chapter follows logically from the preceding, and the reader will want to take time to savor the enormous amount of information and analysis packed into its 234 single-spaced pages. The focus of Gordon’s excellent monograph is not primarily the female singers of Monteverdi’s music, though Anna Renzi and others do appear. Rather, it is what the virtuosity of these female singers and characters represented to their listeners, including the theorists and composers of the day. At times the text is reminiscent of the dissertation from whence it came, but there are fascinating bits of history within this volume as well as some careful insight and analysis, and Gordon succeeds in her objective to “diverge from scholars of social and literary history who often depict early modem culture as a world of silenced women and creative men.” (2) Using treatises on medicine, philosophy, singing, and sixteenth–century erotica, she portrays a Renaissance world as sex-obsessed and as conflicted about women’s power as our own. Both LaMay’s collection and Gordon’s monograph show the continuity of human needs, desires, and behavior which is at the heart of humanistic inquiry. They are valuable contributions to scholarship of the early modern period. APRIL LYNN JAMES Queens College, The City University of New York