Colleen Reardon. Holy Concord within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575-1700.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xiv + 289 pp. illus, append, gloss. bibl. index. $65. [SBN: 0-19-513295-5.

Colleen Reardon's book is an important contribution to the study of early modern Italian culture. Dealing with music in Siena in the period after the loss of its independence to Florence, the work follows Frank D'Accone's The Civic Muse (1997), which covers the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and complements Reardon's own Agostino Agazzari and Music at the Siena Cathedral, 1597-1641 (1993). In Holy Concord, Reardon focuses on female convents, institutions traditionally neglected in musicology. Only in the last decade, studies by Robert Kendrick, Craig Monson, and Kimberlyn Montford--dealing respectively with nunneries in Milan, Bologna, and Rome--have opened up a fertile field of inquiry, contributing to a greater understanding of the role of women as musicians during the Catholic Reform. Reardon's volume is a welcome addition to this emerging area of research.

The study consists of a thorough and fascinating investigation of the lives and activities of Siena's nun musicians, of the context in which they operated, the cultural products related to them, and their important role in the civic, religious, and economic life of the city. Unfortunately, no music by these nuns survives, but only a few pieces created for them, so the book deals mostly with the context, meaning, and reception of the performances. The author's narrative relies upon a substantial number of newly-discovered archival documents, such as those detailing the administrative life of the convents (there were twenty-one of them at the turn of the seventeenth century) and the decrees issued by local archbishops concerning the musical activities of the nuns. Reardon shows that, in the Tuscan city, the church hierarchy was much more tolerant of these activities than it was in Milan, Bologna, and Rome, where many disputes between archbishops and nuns arose over the role of music-making in the convents, deemed a sinful distraction. To explain this tolerance--towards, for example, the significant role that music had in ceremonies of clothing, profession, and consecration (examined in chapter 3)--the author points out that most archbishops, such as Ascanio II Piccolomini, came from the same Sienese aristocratic families that placed their daughters in the local convents. Reardon's analysis of the relationships between these clans and the nunneries provides not only a unique view on the economic and social aspects of the "business" of forcing daughters into these institutions (as their only alternative to marriage), but it also illuminates the ways in which their musical abilities and performances symbolized cultural and family values, wealth and status, providing a tie between the convents and the lay community, well beyond the sacred walls.

Among the links between the convents and the outside world, theater productions (thoroughly discussed in chapter 4) provided the nuns with a rare opportunity to showcase their musical talents. These talents emerge most dramatically in the surviving vite of the holy women, such as the fascinating autobiography of Maria Francesca Piccolomini (examined, with other similarly captivating documents, in chapter 5). Reardon's subtle reading of the narratives of miracles witnessed by these musicians--in which, for example, the Virgin Mary appears and gives their performances her seal of approval--shows that all those "liberal" episcopal decrees must have been insufficient to validate the nuns' musical activities, if they needed the aid of such powerfully imaginative constructs.

In the final chapters the author undertakes an in-depth analysis of two musical works created for the nuns: a sacred opera written for the clothing rite of a Chigi family member (1686), and a collection of lamentations and motets by the nobleman Alessandro Della Ciaia (1650). Through Reardon's multifaceted discussion the reader gradually realizes that the meaning of these pieces can be fully understood only by considering the appropriate historical and cultural contexts; for example, the role of patronage (especially that of the Chigi family, which placed thirteen women into Sienese nunneries during the seventeenth century) and the use of symbolism common to post-Tridentine spiritual literature (particularly, the image of Jerusalem as a trope for the female convent). In this fruitful interaction between textual and contextual elements--reciprocally illuminating each other--resides one of the most useful methodological lessons of the book.

MAURO CALCAGNO

Harvard University