St. Anne in Renaissance Music: Devotion and Politics. Michael Alan Anderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xvii + 346 pp. $99.
the context of nonreligious and religious plurality. Toivo’s study consists of five chapters. The first and second chapters discuss historiography and theory, followed by two main empirically based chapters on Catholic and Eastern Orthodox influences. A short chapter 5 sums up her findings and conclusions. A few illustrative maps support the text. The primary sources come from the western, southern, and eastern part of Finland. That the huge area of northern Finland is not mentioned and is left out of her research can be cited as an obvious shortcoming. A chapter on the Finnish part of Lapland, with its multiethnic groups and conflicted border issues with Russia and Denmark-Norway, should have been included to fulfill the aims of the book. Research into the indigenous Sami people and their shamanistic rituals would certainly have broadened the issues. Moreover, the comparative aspect, if not absent, is limited to a few comments on the Baltic region and to what she calls Sweden proper. A comparative view of the northern part of Sweden and Denmark-Norway could have strengthened her study. Otherwise, this is a well-structured work that offers valuable and important contributions to our understanding of the uneven Christianization process in European countries during the seventeenth century—good scholarly work, indeed.