Studies in fhe History of Italian Music and Music Theory. by Claude PaliscaReview by: Richard SherrThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 429-430Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2542824 .

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Book Reviews 429

Church, which was divided into presbyteries that attracted qualified ministers by offering a minimum income and in-house training, seems to have compared favorably with other Cal- vinist congregations.

Andrew Spicer looks at the French and Walloon communities in England, 1560-1620, where at least 15,000 refugees lived. Only a few of the ministers, who were conspicuous among the refugees, had studied at Geneva. By the early seventeeth century, the churches were an anachronism because the ministers had responded to appeals of reformed commu- nities abroad for their return and because many who remained were integrated into the Church of England.

Rona Johnston's essay, like Edington's, directs its attention to a Catholic land: the Triden- tine reform in Lower Austria, 1563-1637. Here reform was difficult and went hand in hand with Habsburg abolutism. Lower Austria formed part of the bishopric of Passua, an indepen- dent province of the Empire which feuded with the emperors over prerogative matters. Co-

operation was possible only with the accession in 1619 of Ferdinand II, who used victories in the Thirty Years'War, in which Protestantism became associated with sedition, to expel re- formed clergy.The new Passau Official also finally accepted Habsburg involvement for the sake of reform. Demands for the inadequate secular clergy to perform new pastoral roles led

interestingly to the incorporation of the regular clergy in pastoral roles outside the monas- teries.

This volume will be of interest to a wide range of Reformation scholars. It challenges tra- ditional historiography and offers new evidence as well as new ways of looking at old and familiar documents. Because of the focus on the clergy, the essays, drawn from a long chro-

nological period and based upon diverse local studies, hang together quite well and make for informative and interesting reading. Retha M.Warnecke ........................................ Arizona State University

Studies in fhe History of Italian Music and Music Theory. Claude Palisca. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 522 pages.

Claude Palisca, as an editor and translator of seminal texts, and as the author of numerous

important books, has added much to our knowledge of Ancient Greek theory and the way it was interpreted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and has illuminated the nature of the change in musical style from the Renaissance to the Baroque.The present collection of

essays concerns what the author defines as "several of my central and abiding interests: the transition from strict counterpoint in the mid-sixteenth century to the experimentation with the new, freer idioms of the seventeenth; the search for verifiable scientific truth as a basis for music theory; the ascendancy of the power of the verbal text in musical settings; and the recovery and imitation of the musical culture of antiquity."The essays were written over

many years (1956-86) and originally appeared in a variety of publications (Festschriften, Congress Reports, and other collections of essays, musicological journals, etc); two appear here in English for the first time. Each essay is prefaced by an introduction in which the author candidly assesses the context of his work and the impact the essay had on further

scholarship; sometimes this turns out to have been considerable. This is on the whole a fascinating volume, testimony to the wide-ranging interests and

deep understanding that Palisca brings to the subjects of inquiry. However, some of the essays can be very hard slogging even for specialists. No. 5 looks at times like a geometry textbook. No. 2 is quite technical with regard to counterpoint. No. 6 offers a detailed assessment of Italian translations of Boethius. I particularly liked the broader synthesizing essays: no. 3,

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430 Sixteenth Century Journal XXVI / 2 (1995)

"The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy"; no. 8, "Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought"; no. 15,"The Alterati of Florence, Pioneers in the Theory of Dramatic Music." A special treat is no. 18 "G. B. Doni, Musicological Activist and His Lyra Barbarina," with its iconographical study of the Greek lyre.

When articles published at different times and in different places but dealing with the same subjects are brought together in one volume, a slight. impression of redundancy is un- avoidable.This is particularly evident in essays 9 through 11 concerning "mannerism" in late

sixteenth-century music. Mannerism is, as Palisca admits, not quite as hot a topic now as it was when he wrote these articles.The attempt to define a style in music which corresponded with what the art historians were saying about mannerism generally produced mixed results

(although I remember being very grateful for Palisca's clarification of the meaning of"musica reservata" when essay no. 9 was first pulished). Palisca opts for the association of the maniere with literary rhetorical figures, but in order to do this he has to invoke a source of the seven- teenth century (Burmeister), which is indeed among the first to produce anything like what we call "analysis" of music by assigning figures in the manner of books on rhetoric to musical

procedures that can (as Palisca shows) be perfectly well described using simpler language. Anybody who wants to know what "hypallage,""syncopa,""anadiplosis," and a host of other inscrutable terms mean in relation to actual music should consult Palisca's masterful elucida-

tion, presented in essay no. 10 ("LUt oraoria musica:The Theoretical Basis of Musical Manner-

ism"), of Burmeister's analysis of a Lasso motet. Whether it is actually useful to call music in which these "figures" can be discerned "manneristic" is not clear, however, especially since this very same type of rhetorical analysis is now being applied with some success to the "clas- sical" polyphonistJosquin. In fact, the most musicologists seem to have been able to do with

"mannerism" is to equate it with word painting in madrigals and motets of the late sixteenth

century. In this regard, Palisca seems to share the disapproving view ofVincenzo Galilei, a

musician/theorist for whom he clearly has much admiration (three of the nineteen essays are

devoted to Galilei alone) and to conclude, perhaps with a certain Baroque bias, that whatever

mannerism was, it was basically empty, a dead end, the future path of true text expression

being provided by the new style of the emerging seventeenth century (see his conclusions to

essays 10 and 11).

Richard Sherr ............................................................ Smith College

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin's Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives. Susan E. Schreiner. Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1994. ix + 264 pp. n.p.

Schreiner, professor of church history and theology at the University of Chicago, has al-

ready published one work on Calvin's understanding of nature (The Theater of His Glory, Durham: Labyrinth Press, 1991), and this study enlarges the scope of her work and authen- ticates early predictions that she would make major contributions to Calvin scholarship. In a

pattern begun by Heiko Oberman and honed by his student David Steinmetz, the latter's student compares Calvin as biblical exegete with earlier commentators on the Book ofJob. She devotes one chapter to the sixth century Moralia in Iob by Gregory the Great, and divides a second chapter between Maimonides and Aquinas.Against the background of Gregory's al-

legorical treatment ofJob and the more literal studies of the medieval scholars, she portrays in two chapters Calvin's even more literal interpretation, before she concludes with some modern studies, in which she ties remarks on current writers (e.g. MacLeish,Wiesel, Kafka) to problems of literary interpretation bei Gadamer, Foucault, and others.This reviewer is am-

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