Long, Sarah Ann. Music, Liturgy, and Confraternity Devotions in Paris and Tournai, 1300–1500

+ 15 ill., 30 musical examples, 27 tables.ISBN 978-1-58046-996-8 (hardcover) $130 USA; 978-1-7874-4927-5 (EPDF) $40 USA.Whether popular or professional, secular or ecclesiastical, music has always been an active component of confraternal rituals and devotions.One needs only to think of the simple laude sung in procession as early as the fourteenth century (if not even earlier), or the complex oratorios mounted in their halls by confraternities in the seventeenth century, to realize that music not only played an important part in confraternal life, but also received new life and energy in confraternities.The birth of opera, for example, can be traced back not just to the Camerata dei Bardi in early seventeenth-century Florence (as is often claimed), but even earlier to the Florentine youth confraternities that, in the late sixteenth century, were already mounting plays that were sung with musical accompaniment from beginning to end (as I pointed out in my book, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998, chapt.18).The recent growing interest in the soundscapes of urban settings has, once again, brought into focus the important role played by confraternity devotions in this intriguing aspect of early modern towns and cities (see, for example, Iberian Confraternities and Urban Soundscapes, the recent special issue of Confraternitas, 31.2,Fall 2020, guest edited by Tess Knighton).What Sarah Ann Long's recent book contributes to the growing discussion on music and confraternities is the awareness that music served not only to embellish rituals and support devotion, but also, through shared musical repertoires and experiences, to create networks of influence and cooperation both within and between cities. Drawing on fourteen liturgical books produced for, and used by, confraternities in Paris and Tournai, two cities where scant information on confraternity devotional practices survives, Long is able not only to reconstruct their daily devotions, but also to illustrate the way in which such practices were transferred from one sodality to another, and from one city to another, thus creating a variety of webs of interconnectedness that facilitated the spread not only of musical innovations, but also of devotions to particular saints and adherence to certain religious ideas.While much of the analysis of the music will be of interest primarily to historians of music, the rest of the book will certainly attract the attention of a wider audience of confraternity scholars.The book is divided into five chapters.The first, on "Confraternities and Popular Devotions to St. Barbara in Tournai" (pp.14-60), examines three unique liturgical books owned by the Confraternity of the Notaries that met

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