Review of 'Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics', D. Howard and L. Moretti more

850 JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY Gemeinschaften ’ served as a model for the sort of semi-autonomous church governance that, as further developed by Calvin, was to have a long history in Reformed Protestantism. Greschat provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of Bucer’s career, accessible to the general reader as well as to specialists. Despite failing to leave behind a distinct theological ‘ school’ associated with his name, Bucer is shown to have influenced key aspects of Reformed teaching, especially in relation to the eucharist and church discipline. Greschat also highlights the international reach of Bucer’s activity, which extended beyond Germany to the emerging evangelical communities of France and Italy and, in the final months of his life, the England of Edward VI. Without seeking to gloss over Bucer’s weaknesses – his notorious verbosity, his hostility towards the Jews and his Puritanism, which so antagonised the Strasbourg authorities – Greschat overturns the traditional view of Bucer as ‘einem glatten Taktierer und wortreichen Opportunisten ’ ( p. 119), characterising him instead as a ‘Theologe des Dialogs ’ ( p. 284). As Greschat demonstrates, the very features of Bucer’s personality that made him controversial in his own time – his recognition of difference and willingness to go the extra mile for the sake of religious unity – are those that make him appear so ‘ modern ’ and sympathetic today. EDINBURGH MARK TAPLIN Sound and space in Renaissance Venice. Architecture, music, acoustics. By Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti. Pp. xvi+368 incl. 75 black-and-white and 75 colour ills, and numerous plans and graphs. New Haven–London : Yale University Press, 2009. £30. 978 0 300 14874 9 JEH (61) 2010 ; doi :10.1017/S0022046910001521 The focus of this original and informative study is the relation between sacred music and architecture in sixteenth-century Venice. The book results from meticulous archival and library work, but the authors’ principal and most revealing method is empirical : during April 2007 the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, was employed to test the acoustic properties of eleven Venetian churches. These were also measured by acousticians, and subjective responses were elicited from audiences and singers. The acoustic data is analysed in a series of appendices, while select musical tracks are available to download online. But the internet is ephemeral, and since the choral experiments inform the book’s conclusions these recordings should probably have been supplied to readers on an accompanying CD. I should also have liked to see more examples of musical notation among the text : only the opening bars of Giovanni Gabrieli’s Timor et tremor are reproduced and further excerpts would have been welcome. The centre of musical innovation in Renaissance Venice was of course San Marco, whose maestro di cappella, Adrian Willaert, regularly ‘ rubbed shoulders ’ with the architect Jacopo Sansovino. This book proves beyond reasonable doubt that Sansovino’s alterations to the chancel in the 1540s responded in part to the needs of musical performance, providing spatial separation for Willaert’s complex double-choir psalm settings. But textual and visual evidence also indicates that singers occupied the bigonzo, a large polygonal nave-pulpit, and the choral experiments confirmed that this, too, was an effective position for certain aspects of the repertoire. The issue is not as black-and-white as some scholars have REVIEWS 851 assumed : as with any choral foundation, protocol at San Marco was evidently labile, constantly evolving in response to liturgical and musical demands. San Marco aside, this book examines all of Sansovino’s surviving Venetian churches, each of which has, or was intended to have, a flat ceiling. While such compact spaces as these promote clarity in choral polyphony, experiments also revealed the extent to which they drain sacred music of its mysticism ; whether Sansovino designed churches to reflect advances in musical composition is, for this reason among others, moot. Circumstantial evidence suggests that this might have been so at San Giuliano but the authors adduce no specific proof that the architect placed acoustics ‘ high on the design agenda ’ elsewhere. Ingeniously, the project also made use of computer simulation and anechoic recording to reconstruct the soundscape of Sansovino’s lost church of the Incurabili. This hospital church, demolished in 1831, was revered for its exemplary acoustic yet this appears to have been attained ‘ almost accidentally’ rather than by design. Moreover, St John’s College choir found the interiors of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore, Andrea Palladio’s great Venetian churches, excessively resonant and ill-suited to the performance of polyphony – a defect observed too by Vincenzo Scamozzi in 1615. This book’s central question – did architects intentionally seek acoustic effects in the churches that they designed ? – therefore remains insoluble. None the less, Howard and Moretti have covered substantial new ground, deftly uniting three disciplines that have rarely been considered together. OXFORD SIMON P. OAKES Die Magdeburger Centurien, I : Die Kirchengeschichtsschreibung des Flacius Illyricus. Edited by Eckhart W. Peters. Pp. 280 incl. numerous black-and-white and colour plates. ¨ Dossel (Saalkreis) : Verlag Janos Stekovics, 2007. E 48 (2 vols.). 978 3 89923 146 5 Die Magdeburger Centurien, II : Universalgeschichte Betrachtungen im Sinne einer Weltchronik. By ¨nther Korbel. Pp. 752 incl. numerous black-and-white and colour plates. Gu ¨ Dossel (Saalkreis) : Verlag Janos Stekovics, 2007. E 48 (2 vols.). 978 3 89923 146 5 Catalogus und Centurien. Interdisziplinare Studien zu Matthias Flacius und den Magdeburger ¨ Centurien. Edited by Arno Mentzel-Reuters and Martina Hartmann. ¨ ¨ (Spatmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation, 45.) Pp. x+253. Tubingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2008. E 84. 978 3 16 149609 7 ; 1865 2840 JEH (61) 2010 ; doi :10.1017/S0022046910001739 The year 2005 marked the 1200th anniversary of the founding of the city of Magdeburg1 on the Elbe River by Charlemagne. The two-volume Die Magdeburger Centurien was published as a result of a conference held at the historic city hall of Magdeburg on 10 and 11 November 2005, where historians, librarians, pastors and professors read papers. The Magdeburg centuries were an account of church history from a sixteenth-century Lutheran viewpoint, arranged by centuries from the time of Christ onward. The project was initiated by the Croatian-born gnesio-Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus and was carried out by Johannes Wigand and a group of co-workers. Centuries I-XIII were published between 1559 and 1572. 1 See the commemorative volume, of close to 1,000 pages, on the history of the city : Matthias Puhle ¨ and Peter Petsch (eds), Magdeburg : die Geschichte der Stadt, 805-2005, Dossel (Saalkreis) 2005.