Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice. Jane D. Hatter. Music in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xviii + 282 pp. $99.99.
the polemics stimulated by the public letters of Descartes’s friend Guez de Balzac, together with brief mention of Descartes’s own intervention in the quarrel on his friend’s behalf. Similarly, in a discussion of Descartes’s correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia, Gilby considers whether Descartes’s moral and metaphysical views prevented him from seeing what contemporaries would have regarded as the genuine philosophical significance of tragic theater. Gilby counters the argument by showing how Pierre Corneille’s tragedies of the 1640s end (more or less) happily, thereby supporting Descartes’s counsels to Elisabeth on how to turn the tragic happenings in her own life to profitable moral use. Gilby’s commendable desire to anchor Descartes’s fictional procedures in period context seems, then, to have eclipsed sustained engagement with Descartes’s fictions themselves. One result is a good deal of learned and at times illuminating discussion of issues that are nonetheless tangential to Descartes’s enterprise taken on its own terms. Another is a tendency to force matters. Thus, in the introduction and chapter 1, Gilby tries to align Descartes’s strictures on the need for steely eyed attention in philosophical thought with Jean Chapelain’s views on the role verisimilitude plays in holding readers’ and spectators’ attention to the often credulity-straining events portrayed in prose romance and tragicomic drama. It is true that attention is involved in both cases. However, where Descartes points to the intense mental self-discipline demanded by the philosophical search for truth, Chapelain worries about the risk of losing an audience intent on worldly entertainment. Nor is the kind of verisimilitude required to sustain belief in, say, the Cartesian theory of vortices or the ontological proof of the existence of God the same as the kind the willing suspension of disbelief demanded of theatergoers.