Elena Laura Calogero's book offers an exploration of allusions to music in an impressively wide range of early modern English and Continental emblem books. Indebted to John Hollander's The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700 (1961), this study focuses primarily on the relation between music and both the poetic and pictorial components of emblems. Rather than develop a new argument about the increasingly theorized relationship between poetry and music in early modern English literature or about emblematic hermeneutics, Calogero makes a truly significant contribution to the scholarship by tracing several poetic motifs associated with music through their pictorial Continental sources, allowing us to see these motifs with bolder, more fully articulated outlines. Calogero considers an expansive range of material, from the more familiar emblem books, such as Alciato's Emblemata (1550), Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (1586), Wither's A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635), and Quarles's Emblemes (1635), to perhaps less-well-known Continental emblems by artists such as Jacob Cats, Jean Baudoin, and Pieter de Jode. This study is most compelling where it intertwines readings of emblems and their pictorial sources with analyses of other literary forms, such as Tudor pageants, court masques, and the poetry of Shakespeare.

Calogero carves out three quite specific interpretive contexts for her examination of emblematic images: the book's first section is devoted to the political resonances of music, the second engages music as a figure for love, and the last addresses music and spirituality. The first section's concentration on politics recalls the identification of music with rhetorical eloquence in classical and humanist sources, tracing this specifically political motif in England to figurations of Orpheus. Horace's Ars poetica functions as the locus classicus for the interpretation of Orpheus's ability to tame the animals through his musical skill as metaphor for the rhetorical eloquence that could enable effective governance and the establishment of civic peace. In a pageant devised by Thomas Middleton and commissioned for the celebration of Mayor Sir William Cockayn in 1619, the character of Orpheus speaks of London's “rude multitude, the beasts o’ the wood, / That know no laws, but onely will and blood” (28). Orpheus explains that the Mayor in this pageant, depicted as “pruning” the “wilderness” of the Commonwealth, provides “faire example, musicall grace,” and adds, “May well be cal'd a powerfull Orpheus.” Calogero identifies a double audience for such emblematic depictions of Orpheus as civilizer as well as in the parallel myths of Amphion, Arion, and even Apollo, all of whom are figured in various ways that link musical skill with poetic eloquence; Middleton, Heywood, and Jonson, this study claims, were explicating the myths for the public in the street while simultaneously articulating the public's expectations of the new governor.

Coexisting with this interpretation of the political dimension of musical eloquence was the more widespread sense of music as a figure for human love and passion, the broad thematic of section 2. Through a series of readings of Cupid in English and Continental emblem books, Calogero finds a “double attitude towards the link between music and love” (89). The figure of music refers on the one hand to harmony in love, as we see in a specifically conjugal image of concord in Shakespeare's sonnet 8 where “sier, and child, and happy mother, / Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing” (95). On the other hand, there is the more heavily Protestant or Puritan sense of music as taunting and tempting listeners with the sensual through attractive sounds and euphonious words that might “distract its hearers from virile activities and lead to perdition” (89). In a section on the myth of the Sirens and their alluring songs, this study mentions contemporary ideas about women musicians that supported this link between music and sensuality. Calogero also explores the significance of Sirens as, in Ovid's depiction, “deceitfull Sophistrie,” though the link between rhetoric and eros remains surprisingly implicit here.

The book's final section, which treats music and spirituality, similarly addresses the double valence of this link. Calogero first develops a suggestive set of associations between music and various emblems of vanitas. She couples this analysis with a more extensive reading of music as a figure of prayer, praise of God, and divine song. Calogero finds in numerous figures of David the prototype of the poet-musician and attributes the centrality of the Psalms during the Reformation to their connection with music and performance. This study ends by considering the allusions to music and musical instruments made by a set of religious poets: Herbert, Crashaw, Donne, and Vaughan. These readings allow Calogero to articulate the ideology of the human heart as itself a musical instrument and site of divine concert, where the tuning of the self serves as an act of preparation for contact with God, as Hollander has also described. In the context of current critical debates about Protestant and Catholic perspectives in the early modern period, Calogero seems to suggest that while the divide between a Catholic and Protestant reading of music may not always be sharply distinguished given the relatedness of English emblems to their Continental sources, in the poetry of the period, “the difference in the possible treatment of the musical image remains, confirming a more or less marked difference in the underlying poetics” (166).