Musica scientia: musical scholarship in the Italian Renaissance (review)

Reviews 151 process operating in the north and at Portsmouth in the first part of the century. He would have had a major clue to this, for example, had he found Sir William Fitzwilliam's letter as vice-admiral in 1523 to the Portsmouth authorities. He would, incidentally, have been obliged to revise his estimate of Fitzwilliam's experience as a commander. As it is, the account has littletoadd to what he has derived from Simon Adams and T o m Glasgow. The powers given to the officers and the ways in which they were exploited is not analysed, so that the use of purveyance is not fully appreciated. A satisfactory investigation of the effectiveness of the administration at (liferent periods would require an attempt to analyse the building costs per ton of a ship and the advantages and disadvantages of contracting out such construction, the annual costs and time of fitting out of each ship, the life-expectancy of a warship, the frequency with which such ships underwent routine repair, and the adequacy of the facilities for those repairs. There are incidental references to all of these problems but a systematic treatment would be valuable. Management of the ordinary maintenance costs and budgetting for setting ships to sea could be teased out of the surviving records for different periods. This is a useful starting point for a revived interest in the navy and one hopes that it may inspire further research. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Moyer, Ann E., Musica scientia: musical scholarship in the Italian Renaissance, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992; cloth; pp. 325; R.R.P. US$48.95. This study examines musical scholarship in the Italian Renaissance and presents its major victory as the complete redefinition of music from a subject whose theoretical basis rested among the mathematical disciplines of the Quadrivium to one studied in terms of poetics and taste. Moyer examines the writings of a selection of the humanists, musicians, scholars, and philosophers working on the Italian peninsula and addressing issues pertinent to music and its study from approximately 1480, the years immediately preceding the new translations, to 1600, when the new definitions of the field were established beyond further serious challenge. The study is approached in five main chapters, thefirstof which, 'The discipline of music in antiquity and the Middles Ages', describes the intellectual landscape within which medieval theorists operated. The quadrivial discipline called musica was the branch of mathematics devoted to the proportions that describe the behaviour of sounding bodies with direct connections to arithmetic, astronomy, and geometry. Its central text was Boethius' De institutione musica 152 Reviews and its philosophical orientation was essentially Platonic and specifically Pythagorean. The second chapter, 'Expansion of the medieval tradition', reflects on the initial impact made by the new translations of previously unknown Greek sources and ancient literary works, while the third, 'Humanists, mathematicians and composers', discusses the temporary fragmentation of approaches which the influx of new sources promoted. The fourth chapter, 'Ancients and moderns', reflects on the central conflict, as theorists, grasping the subject as a whole, attempted to interpret an ancient inheritance for the new age. Thefinalchapter, 'The science of sound and the study of culture', discusses the results of that reinterpretation where quadrivial music, musica speculativa, was transformed within the arena of acoustics and the term musica came to refer to a cultural product studied by the humanistic tools of historical analysis and social appropriateness. Moyer examines some theoretical sources in considerable stylistic detail and a great number more at the comparative level with considerable flair. She relates theorists of the Renaissance by similarities in their approach and their location on the ladder of Renaissance scholarship. While the musicologist might read these same theoretical tracts with a view to distinguishing issues of content in order to cite how contemporaneous early theorists differed in their discussion of particular items of theoretical interest, Moyer, a historian by training, takes a much broader view, that of the process of scholarship. While one might expect a hefty dose of pedantry in the theoretical tracts considered, the major impression is one of genuine inquiry and scholarship. Perhaps surprising is the high degree of interaction...