Renewed interest among scholars in all manners of Baroque culture has resulted in the emergence of a veritable subgenre of early modern studies. It usually goes without saying that entrants into this field focus on a common medium through which a Baroque style is made manifest and on a rigidly defined period in which it is produced. But what sets this volume apart is its multidisciplinary approach to a variety of subjects spanning a surprisingly wide chronological range. Instead, they are all steeped in the character of a particular place—the richly prolific city of Naples, whose Baroque contributions in so many media have never, as far as I am aware, been brought together into a single book.

In the first essay, Giordano Bruno's Candelaio (1582) and its rejection of humanist and Petrarchan values allow for an enlightening glimpse into subversive models of gender, sexuality, and the body through a cast of characters seemingly plucked from the human menagerie spilling into the city's coarse streets and alleys. What follows is Alessandro Giardino's antidote to recent scholarship that favors a distancing of Caravaggio's own biography and psychology from the subjects he paints. In an essay sure to elicit a range of reactions, Giardino argues instead that the painter took an empathetic position toward marginalized and debased women, giving them a new centrality in paintings during his two sojourns in Naples, “when [Caravaggio's own] violent death seemed a concrete prospect” (35). Marino Forlino's essay delights in the lewd metaphorical transcription of the sexualized female body onto the city's topography in Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone (1632), entangling the reader in an evocative web of Baroque literary devices.

The fourth chapter, by Marcella Salvi, carries on this theme of corporeality in a study of Silvio Fiorillo's La Lucilla costante (1632) as a cipher for the political context of Naples's subjugation to Spanish rule in the seventeenth century. The fifth essay, by Clorinda Donato, presents a truly fascinating overview of Raimondo di Sangro's “esoteric baroque” (94) strategies for the cadaverous anatomical and sculptural displays at the eighteenth-century Cappella di San Severo; however, it must be mentioned that the force of the arguments advanced is diminished by a curious lack of illustrations portraying these truly bizarre sculptural forms. Finally, Carmela Benedetta Scala's fascinating exploration of Matteo Garrone's film The Tale of Tales (2015) provides a fitting conclusion to the volume. Not only does it analyze Garrone's cinematic adaptation of Basile's Pentamerone and the underexplored interchanges with the painting style of Caravaggio (perhaps even begging for further investigation), but in so doing it contributes yet another indication of the revival of Baroque aesthetics in our contemporary culture.

Readers of this collection of essays will undoubtedly delight in the rich immersion it offers into the cultural productivity of the Neapolitan Baroque through its literary, artistic, medical, and cinematic manifestations spanning the late sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. Each essay is uniformly sensitive to how their subjects of study are shaped by the city in which they are produced. That said, the coherence of the essays contained therein is perhaps not as much of a given as the title might indicate. While the city of Naples unquestionably links them together, readers who encounter this volume from certain fields of study might have benefited from a discussion in the introduction of what makes them all Baroque—at least to the extent that such a label can adequately be defined and expected to present cognate stylistic features across media. What one infers, certainly, is that the literary production follows characteristics that many might recognize in the art (and even biography) of Caravaggio—an eye toward the gritty, ribald, and carnal, at times laced with a tawdry sexuality that borders on the burlesque. However, only to a lesser extent is “corporeality” or the metaphor of the body evenly applied. More curious still is the near total absence of “performativity,” so prominent in the book's title, in many of the essays or the introduction. Nevertheless, both as a contribution to scholarship on Baroque art and literature, and to scholarship on Naples itself, there is much to recommend about a volume that will attract the interest of anyone who has come into even superficial contact with this truly distinct place.