Princes and Princely Culture 1450-1650 (review)
interpreted English court festival. Part 5, “The Performance of Festival Music: Theatre and Event,” attempts to recreate the acoustic world of the festival in the frequent absence of printed scores and other documentary evidence. Ian Fenlon investigates the 1574 funeral of Cosimo I, demonstrating how the Florentines created a new tradition and mounted obsequies of unprecedented magnificence. Nicoletta Guidobaldi continues the reconstruction of the rich acoustic dimension of Italian festivals and interprets two well-known paintings by Domenico Morone against the backdrop of Milanese festivals ca. 1490. While Dinko Fabris focuses on urban sacred and secular festivals in Spanish Naples 1555–1702, Flora Dennis’s study examines musical aspects of five tournaments from Ferrara. Roger Savage presents an overview of spectacles within Shakespeare’s plays and of treatises on acting and stagecraft ca. 1600. With the emphasis on music and Italian festivals in this section, the absence of any mention of the readily available University of Illinois dissertation, “Ducal Patronage of Music in Mantua, 1587–1627: An Archival Study” (1989), by Susan Parisi is striking. Part 6, “Festival and Architecture,” a recurring theme throughout the volume, receives special attention in Peter Davidson’s essay recreating the physical world of the entry of Federigo Ubaldo della Rovere and Claudia de’ Medici into Urbino in 1621. Maximilian Tondro’s essay focuses on the triumphal arches erected for the entry of the dogaressa into Venice in 1557. Marina Dmitrieva-Einhorn concludes the volume with an overview of ephemeral architecture in Prague, Vienna, and Cracow. Her article, unfortunately, does not reflect the considerable Danish research, much of it in English, on Melchior Lorch (Lorck). While the volume of essays functions well as a cohesive unit offering much useful information on Italian, French, and English festivals, it is unfortunate that the editors did not exploit the rich opportunities of the EURESCO conference and include essays on understudied areas of festival in Scandinavia (Allen Ellenius), Germany and Austria (Claudia Schnitzer, Veronika Sandbichler), and Eastern Europe (Aaron Petneki, Almut Bues, Karin Friedrich), for example. By failing to present new areas of research, the volume reinforces the outdated notion that Northern and Central Europe are peripheral and therefore unimportant to the Renaissance enterprise and that Renaissance festivals flourished only in Italy, France, and England. MARA WADE University of Illinois, Urbana