| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Anthony M. Cummings. The Maecenas and the Madrigalist: Patrons, Patronage, and the Origins of the Italian Madrigal. (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, number 253.) Philadelphia, Penn.: American Philosophical Society. 2004. Pp. xxi, 274. $50.00.

Anthony M. Cummings has written an important book that contributes not only to the history of music but also to the history of Florence and to Renaissance cultural history. The origins of the Italian madrigal, a major musical genre of the sixteenth century, are the focus of his interest. Yet Cummings describes his work not as a study of genre per se—though in fact this book does follow the developing musical style—but as a study of patronage. It is not a conventional patronage study, for most of the patrons in question operated as participants in one or more of the societies both formal and informal, serious and convivial, that flourished in the city. The work's setting is Florence in the first decades of the sixteenth century, its future uncertain, its politics shifting from unsteady republic to Medici governance from Rome, and eventually to a republic once again before the final installation of a Medici duke in 1530. Only then did the city acquire the central aristocratic court that one might assume would foster new styles and genres; by that time, madrigals were already appearing in print and were already associated with Florence.

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