The age of the Catholic monarchs, opening in 1469 with the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand, heirs, respectively, to the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and closing with Ferdinand’s death in 1516, was momentous by any measure. Dynastic and territorial union gave birth to a unified Spanish nation; the Inquisition—established in 1478—helped impose the illusion of unity through its systematic persecution of Jews, Muslims, conversos, and heretics; Columbus’s voyages led to the opening of previously unimaginable cultural, scientific, and geographical horizons; the conquering of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in 1492 signaled a triumphant symbolic completion of the Christian project of reconquest; and in the same year Jews were officially expelled from Spanish territory.

The study of music during the reign of the Catholic monarchs was first seriously undertaken by the Catalan priest Higini Anglés (1888–1969), who, in the period 1947–65, published the results of his extensive archival work in a series of volumes that focused on music manuscripts preserving both sacred and secular music associated with the courts of Ferdinand and Isabella. Anglés was followed in 1960 by Robert Murrell Stevenson (1916–2012), whose Spanish Music in the Age of Columbus, described by the author as a “résumé of Spanish music to 1530,” brought to an anglophone audience a distillation of Anglés’s findings together with the results of his own archival work, especially in Seville. While inevitably conditioned by the concerns of the intellectual milieus from which they arose, these studies laid the pioneering contours that have influenced all subsequent studies of the subject.

When Knighton began work on her PhD at Clare College, Cambridge, in the early 1980s, she sought to amplify the documentary base through her own archival work. In the process, she consciously weighted the balance of treatment in Fernando’s favor, partly because he outlived Isabella. In addition, Knighton embraced a wider geographic and historiographic context for her consideration of the courts of the Catholic monarchs. It was not until 2001, however, that her impressive work saw the light, published in a superb translation by Luis Gago, under the title Música y músicos en la Corte de Fernando el Católico, 1474–1516. If this study, almost two decades in gestation, reflected the broadly accepted concerns of historical musicology in the 1980s, the volume under review presents a much more ambitious agenda. Without eschewing such traditional preoccupations of music research as biographical and archive-based source studies, Knighton’s Companion expands the field to include the myriad consequences of the arrival of the conquistadores in the Americas; the vast terrain of improvisatory and oral musical practices that by their very nature elude historical documentation; the role of women in music making; the musical lives of Hispano-Jewish communities; contacts between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish musicians; the role of music in the propagandistic pageantry of the monarchs’ public-relations program; and the separate traditions of instrumental music, theoretical writings about music, and liturgical chant in an age of reform.

Casting such a broad net demands careful curatorial oversight and a sure editorial hand. Far from the random miscellanies that so often lie barely concealed beneath the label “companion,” the result is a milestone of state-of-the-art research by nearly all of the most active scholars in the field. The scholarship is rigorous and wide ranging, and clearly the product of recent, lively, and ongoing colloquy between the authors and the editor. This generous anthology comprises fifteen substantial essays, three of them translated from the Spanish by the editor herself. The essays are supported by more than thirty figures (many in full color), more than forty examples of music notation, and more than thirty tables, and the bibliography is a tour de force. Unpretentiously signaled with the prosaic heading “works cited,” it offers, in eighty pages, a comprehensive listing broken into the following categories: primary sources, cancioneros and songbooks, early printings, music and music-related sources, printed music books, and modern editions of musical works. And, fortunately, this comprehensive volume is equipped with a well-constructed index that makes navigating its 700 pages a joy. What we have here is a deeply satisfying mosaic of current knowledge that richly serves both specialists and the informed general reader and that will set the research agenda for future decades.