The Court Musicians in Florence During the Principate of the Medici, with a Reconstruction of the Artistic Establishment.

The result of thirty years of research in Florentine state archives, this book is testimony to its author's industry, patience, and single-minded integrity of purpose. It is not a narrative history but rather an encyclopedic dictionary of 364 salaried court musicians, "men of letters, court gentlemen, etc.," and artists serving the Medici dukes from Cosimo I to Gian Gastone, a two-hundred-year period. For musicians, Kirkendale gives all the information he could find (dates and nature of activities, salaries) in the books of salariati and ruoli in the Archivio di Stato, supplementing this archival data with excerpts from contemporary accounts, correspondence, and in the case of composers, worklists; data for the courtiers and artists is understandably of summary nature.

In his preface, Kirkendale calls his work an "anti-lexicon" (15), free of restrictions as to length and the need to write entries in a style of connected narrative. The entries are reportage of "fresh original documents," in place of "stale paraphrase and unreliable compilations" (16). The adjectives warn us that Kirkendale takes a dim view of earlier and current research in the field; almost every scholar who has worked in any depth on the subject is criticized, sometimes harshly, for lack of rigor, with contributors to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) hit particularly hard.

The book is not designed to be read straight through but to serve as a reference work. It is not quite as severe as it might have been; some explanatory and connective prose is supplied, though the author admits (19) that his method "has led, in some instances, to juxtaposition of more or less unrelated facts in a single paragraph." But the documents are given untranslated and with a minimum of editorial modernizing; readers are told that those who cannot read Italian and Latin "would/should not be occupying themselves with this subject matter" (20). Caveat lector/emptor illiteratus! English summaries of the more important and more difficult documents would be useful to most of us, and the space they would occupy could have been provided by cutting out the almost absurdly detailed information on every source, every performance of operas by court composers (that for G. M. Orlandini, for example, takes up 69 pages).

Most of the entries are brief, though few if any are perfunctory. Some are quite extensive, providing materials for new biographical treatments of major composers and celebrated performers, including Alessandro Striggio, Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini and his daughters Francesca and Settimia, Muzio Effrem, Orlandini, and the castrato Francisco (Checco) de Castris. Here one wishes that Kirkendale had used his material to write connected narrative. In one instance, that of the singer-composer Francesco Rasi, he did so (perhaps because he had already published an article on the subject), and the result is fascinating.

Kirkendale set very high standards for himself in this book, and I am prepared to believe that the work lives up to them. I did not read the book looking for errors, but I did find a few: p. 60 (Filippo Strozzi, d. 1538, is said to have written some poems in 1554); p. 193 ("Madama Margherita" in a letter of 1588 is identified as Margaret of Austria, d. 1586); p. 245 (Marenzio is said to have been admitted to the papal chapel upon his return from Poland, probably not true); p. 312 (a letter of 1610 is said to refer to the death of Cosimo II, d. 1621). No one's work is error-free; I cite these only because Kirkendaie is so harshly critical of the errors of others.

This said, I have otherwise nothing but praise for the achievement this book represents. It will certainly be of use to scholars for years to come, and its author deserves our sincere congratulations.

James Haar UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA