Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan by Robert L. Kendrick (review)

book reviews343 to Byrd and TaUis of a monopoly for twenty-one years of printing music, for which they dedicated to her a book of Latin motets (pp. 55, 216-217). In 1592 Byrd limited his attendance at the chapel, for he wished to compose a major Catholic liturgical series. This began Ui 1595 with the private printing of a new Ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.) for three, four, and five voices (pp. 306-316) which he intended for CathoUc households where Mass was secretly celebrated. TheU considerable popularity led to new printings. To complete this unique updating of English Catholic worship Byrd pubUshed in 1606 and 1608 his two-volume Graduada ac cantiones sacrae, in which official prayers, hymns, and antiphons for the feasts such as Christmas,Annunciation, or Corpus Christi were arranged for the voice and could be selected by each household for their private Masses. Dedicated to two close friends,Baron Petre and the earl ofNorthampton and with the Ucence ofa notorious persecutor, Bishop Richard Bancroft (pp. 317-340) the appearance of these books was a milestone in English CathoUc music occasioned by the fortunate immunity from persecution of one of that century's greatest composers. John Harley has shed considerable light on a rarely appreciated aspect of the English Reformation. Albert J. Loomie Fordham University Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan. By Robert L. Kendrick. (NewYork: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. xxi, 556. $95.00.) Current scholarship has produced a wealth of learned writings on an old, but only recently explored, source of modern history—the lives and activities of nuns within the cloister. This phenomenon may in part be due to the current interest in women's studies in general; in musicology, in particular, it is evidence of pushing the boundaries of archival research. Celestial Sirens, along with Craig Monson's Disembodied Voices, EUssa Weaver's works on the theatrical performances of nuns in Florentine convents, and Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast, are impressive evidence of the richness of these sources. Since the nuns studied in these works were subject to both civU and ecclesiastical authority, their very lives and activities are among the most thoroughly documented in early modern history. In Celestial Sirens Robert Kendrick constructs a conceptual framework of the reUgious, economic, and political circumstances of the period in which the subjects ofhis study lived. He traces the musical activities offive generations of nuns in Milanese convents (from ca. 1570 to well into the eighteenth century), through the tenure of eight dUferent archbishops—ranging from the restrictive Carlo Borromeo to his more permissive nephew Federico Borromeo. Examination of the nuns' musical activities during this period reveals not only conflicts between clergy and secular authority, but also power struggles among the 344book reviews clergy themselves, and at times factionaUsm inside the cloister. This very class distinction within the convents had its practical consequences for the musical IUe of the nuns. The converse (sisters without final vows who had brought a smaller dowry to the order) did the menial work in the cloister, thus allowing the professed nuns greater leisure to pursue musical studies. Despite the Church's attempts to Umit family control ofthe patrician nuns by enforcing strict clausura, the occasional infiltration of secular music and the need for male tutors sometimes placed the nuns at the center of suspicion and even controversy. Their situation is more or less symboUzed by the very space in which they functioned musically: the dichotomy between the Ulterior church in which they performed and the exterior church to which travelers came and visiting dignitaries were brought to hear them. There is much to be learned from the proscriptions of the various archbishops just as there is from the music performed in the cloister. WhUe Kendrick's study is essentially a musicological investigation, his exploration of non-musical documentation is sensitive to the dilemma in which the nuns sometimes found themselves; the very musical achievements for which they were recognized sometimes resulted in their being subject to extreme discipUnary measures. Despite these dUficulties, it is clear from the music performed that many of these women—perhaps the...