Music and Merchants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence.

Blake Wilson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 12 pls. + xv + 298 pp. $79.

The field of confraternity studies has experienced a period of rapid growth in recent year, expanding beyond the areas of religious and art-historical research to include investigations of the economic and cultural aspects of these lay companies. Blake Wilson's book is one of the first full-length studies to explore the musical practices of Renalssance confraternities, an aspect often overlooked by non-specialists. Music played a major role in the activities of many confraternities, and, as Wilson clearly demonstrates, was the raison d'etre for one group of them, the laudesi companies of Florence.

The laudesi companies were founded in the thirteenth century at several Florentine monastic churches to serve as focal points for lay devotion, much like the better known disciplinati companies. But unlike the disciplinati, whose activities centered around self-flagellation to atone for the sins of the world, the laudesi gathered together to sing laude spirituali, vernacular praises to God, the Virgin, and the Saints. In the earliest years, the brothers themselves sang monophonic laude, with skilled members performing the solo strophes while the congregation sang the refrains. In the fourteenth century, in a move with implications for Florentine music in general, the companies began to hire professional lauda singers. One of Wilson's important points is that the musical practices at the laudesi companies at this time were much closer to the secular world of Trecento song than to the sacred realm of the church.

By the end of the fourteenth century, some of the companies had begun to use polyphonic laude, performed exclusively by professionals. These singers and instrumentalists formed a clearly recognized group of men who often served more than one confraternity. While many had regular jobs as guild members, several were apparently full-time laudesi. The laudesi companies and their music flourished into the fifteenth century, but the political turmoil at the end of the century caused lasting damage, and even those that survived the repeated suppressions never fully recovered.

Wilson's excellent book not only traces the fascinating histories of the musical practices of the laudesi companies and the development of the profession of lauda singer, but also places these confraternities and their music in the broader picture of social, economic, and devotional life in republican Florence. Not surprisingly, the many changes in Florentine society between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries had their parallels in the confraternities. Perhaps more interesting, however, are the reflections of local character between confraternities in different quarters of the city. Wilson also discusses the close relationship between Florentine art, in particular the painting of devotional images, and the poetry and performance of the lauda, and makes an attempt to explore the idea of "ritual space," the interrelationship between the devotional activities of the confraternities and the physical spaces of the churches that housed them. This latter area is the only one of the many covered in this fine study that Wilson does not quite pull off, not because his work here is of any lesser quality, but because the kind of underlying principle or consistency he had used to tie together other sections of the book does not seem present here.

Wilson's writing is clear and interesting, and the book is beautifully produced and well edited. This study is not only for musicologists, but for historians and art historians of the Florentine Renaissance as well: there are insightful discussions of the music, of interest to musicologists, but they are brief and to the point, and can be passed over by non-specialists. The bulk of the book is simply good, solid history, providing valuable insights into an important and often neglected aspect of the society of republican Florence.