This stimulating and ambitious collection of essays issues a challenge to all scholars to break down interdisciplinary boundaries in their work on early modern Catholic history and culture. The book originated in a conference held at Boston College in July 2014, which in turn grew out of a research project by Daniele Filippi, “The Soundscape of Early Modern Catholicism.” Embracing the term “Early Modern Catholicism,” coined by John O'Malley in the 1990s as an umbrella concept incorporating such historical labels as Counter-Reformation and confessionalization, the book seeks to bring the term into the musicological discourse, collapsing the traditional distinction between Renaissance and Baroque. The book also seeks to highlight the ways in which musicology can contribute to scholarship on early modern Catholicism, aiming for a readership of nonmusical and musical scholars. According to the editors, despite the recent “sonic turn” in historical disciplines and an increasing emphasis on sound studies in musicology, “no wide-ranging reflection on the sonic cultures of Early Modern Catholicism has thus far appeared” (3), a gap this book seeks to fill by embracing a longue durée perspective covering the period 1450–1750.

The editors have enlisted an impressive international roster of senior scholars (mostly musicologists). As explained in the introduction, the contributors were given a specific charge: each was assigned “a subject or keyword referring to an aspect of culture, society, and/or religious life (for example, ‘catechism,’ ‘popular piety,’ ‘confraternities,’ and ‘spirituality’) and that invited wider terms of reference than the strictly and narrowly ‘musical.’ Each contributor was thus challenged to tackle such underlying questions as the sonic/musical echoes of the keyword and to concentrate on those unique insights on each problem that could be distilled from the study of the musics and sounds related to it” (4–5). The results are mixed. Many essays provide surveys or case studies in which existing research is reframed by the book's questions. Because the authors understandably stuck to their areas of expertise, the assigned concept tends to be restricted to a narrow geographic or chronological scope (e.g., Colleen Reardon's chapter on convents focuses on seventeenth-century Siena, Alexander Fisher's on processions focuses on German cities, Margaret Murata's on spirituality focuses on the Roman cantata, Tess Knighton's on death focuses on sixteenth-century Barcelona), sometimes preceded by a historiographic overview of existing research on the topic. (Two opening chapters, comprising part 1, provide broad historiographic surveys, one from a historical perspective, by O'Malley, and one from a musicological perspective, by Robert Kendrick.) The editors chose not to explicitly identify each author's keyword, probably because most essays expanded beyond the initial assignment. The resulting overlap between chapters is a strength of the book, as many chapters complement each other by providing multiple perspectives on concepts. It is thus disappointing that the book's index contains only names, depriving the reader of the opportunity to easily identify all chapters that touch on a given keyword.

The thirteen chapters in part 2 embrace a wide range of approaches, with some focusing on institutions (Reardon on convents, Noel O'Regan on confraternities, Andrew Cichy on the English seminary in Valladolid), some on genres (Murata on the cantata, Anne Piéjus on the lauda, Marco Gozzi on cantus fractus), and the majority on musical practices. Many chapters rely on narrative description, while others provide close readings and analyses of sources (musical or otherwise) or question long-standing assumptions. The latter are among the most successful; two particularly fascinating examples are chapter 3, by Gozzi, in which he draws upon a wide array of sources to reconstruct the experience of hearing plainchant in the liturgy, and chapter 14, by historical ethnomusicologist Ignazio Macchiarella, who uses the contemporary singing practices of Southern Italian confraternities to read between the lines of early modern sources on falsobordone. Both chapters include audio examples accessible on the internet.

With an overwhelming focus on musical practice and supposedly minor musical genres and styles, this book sheds important light on scholarly methods that go beyond the traditional emphasis on great composers and works. Because it contains little original research, it sits somewhere between a secondary and tertiary source. As its primary purpose is to encourage new research, its main value will be to graduate students and others just embarking on early modern Catholic studies (it is ideal for seminars), though scholars of all ranks and disciplines will find much to consider in this wide-ranging and authoritative resource.