Convent Music and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Vienna.By Janet K. Page

Abstract

Serious and sustained research on nuns and music in the early modern period began in earnest in the mid-1990s with the publication of two ground-breaking books: Craig A. Monson’s Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1995) and Robert L. Kendrick’s Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996). Those monographs set the standard in the field and inspired subsequent investigations of seventeenth-century convent music in other Italian cities as well as in Spain and New Spain. Relatively little scholarship, however, has been directed at the activities of holy women in German-speaking lands, perhaps because the Reformation had such a devastating effect on convents in those regions. Janet Page’s new monograph on the nunneries of Vienna during the period of their revival in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is thus significant because it broadens the geographical sphere and widens the time period of current literature on monastic musical culture.