The subtitle, the Eglantine Table, supplies the focus of this stimulating book; the main title, Music and Instruments of the Elizabethan Age, its principal theme. The table, at Hardwick Hall, was made in about 1568, probably in London. Its inlaid heraldry, commemorating marriages in 1567 and 1568 between the Hardwick, Talbot and Cavendish families, is centred on a verse that mentions ‘Aeglentyne’ and ‘Stagges’, both elements of the Hardwick arms, suggesting that it was commissioned by or for the then Countess of Shrewsbury, better known as Bess of Hardwick. Its only parallel is a table in Glasgow dated 1569, for which the heraldry remains obscure and which lacks the unique feature of the Eglantine Table: two friezes enclosing its heraldic centre and inlaid with representations of musical instruments, manuscript music, game boards, penners and playing cards, the upper frieze sprinkled with flowers.

Although musicological and organological contributions dominate, they have no monopoly. An appendix by John Hartley and the late Paul Merrifield, supported by a marked-up diagram, supplies a clear and useful account of conservation executed by Tankerdale Ltd in 1996, which so clarified the table’s design that, for the first time, legible photographs – a crucial ingredient of this book – became possible. Another, by Christopher Rowell, enriches the Hardwick context while stressing that the table pre-dates Hardwick and was probably made for Chatsworth (Anthony Wells-Cole usefully floats Shrewsbury House in Chelsea as another possibility). Indeed, while Horace Walpole mentioned ‘an inlaid table’ at Hardwick in 1760, the first unequivocal description pinning its presence there was by John Byng in 1789 (Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 ‘a carpeted table’ is relatively imprecise).

Wells-Cole’s own contribution tackles design. He underlines his earlier identification of a 1566 print after Jakob Floris as the model for a strapwork cartouche in the heraldic frieze, and adds one, depicting Hearing, after Frans Floris, published in 1561, as a probable source for the table’s selection and depiction of musical scores and instruments. Indeed, his principal design context for the table is the dissemination of Flemish prints, notably those published in Antwerp by Hieronymus Cock, who in 1570 left his widow 1,400 copper plates. Moresques are prominent in the table’s ornamental repertoire. Wells-Cole instances Balthasar Sylvius, Maurusias, Antwerp, 1554, as a possible inspiration, while Patrick Ball, in his chapter on playing cards and game boards, mentions Thomas Geminus, Morysse and Damashin, London, 1548, without noting that this is copied from Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s suite of small moresques, published in Orléans. The many moresques published in Nuremberg by Virgil Solis before his death in 1562 might also have been cited.

Ball makes sense of one group of inlaid cards as depicting the game of Triumph (hence ‘trump’) while another eludes identification. An inlaid chess-board and a pair of ‘tables’ for backgammon emerge as straightforward representations, whereas what may be a shove ha’penny or shovegroat board, supporting three dice, has an illogical perspective. These games prompt accounts of their origins and of the relevant social and moral conventions prevailing in late sixteenth-century England. Ball speculates, not too whole-heartedly, on Indian prototypes for the design of the chess squares or the recurrence of quincunx formations in the unidentifiable card game. Much emerges as possible, but little or nothing as certain. The table’s inlay also includes two penners (pen-cases) with their attached ink pots, analysed by Jason Scott-Warren. Their function and design are anatomised (perhaps Hollyband, who translated or converted Vives, might have deserved mention), and Bess of Hardwick’s engagement in penmanship is chronicled, but, again, whether their presence is a nod to the music manuscripts or to gaming or to other concerns remains unknowable.

For the non-musicologist chapters by John Milsom on the music in staff notation and by Matthew Spring on lute tablature are particularly daunting. The song ‘O lord in the[e] is all My truste’ is securely attributed to Thomas Tallis, versions having been published in 1562, 1563 and 1565, none precisely matching. Three of four wordless rounds are identified for the first time, with the suggestion, partly based on later sources (1580, 1609 and 1612), that they were probably jolly drinking songs. No such identification emerges from Spring’s detailed discussion of the lute tablature, which pre-dates the golden age of Elizabethan lute music and probably follows a French model.

A detailed analysis of the sixteen musical instruments depicted in inlay follows, introduced by Michael Fleming and Christopher Page, who are frank in lining up a series of caveats as to interpretation, which makes their conclusion that the table stands ‘as a monument to the Indian summer of English chivalry’ appear strained. The instruments’ perspectives are often wonky, although rarely brazenly so, and details are often incorrect, although the general impression is convincing to a non-expert. Perhaps the inlayers and their designer intended no more. Only one instrument, a curled horn, is unprecedented, as the late Jeremy Montagu makes clear. Fleming examines the bowed instruments, but whether these are viols, the province of the gentry, or violins, professional instruments, remains uncertain, as was nomenclature at this date. Page gives a full context for the gittern, with fascinating data on import and ownership, and Peter Forrester does the same for the cittern, which emerges as the most accurate representation (he cites Vincenzo Galilei’s 1581 praise of the English cittern). Spring then provides an authoritative survey of the lute.

Broader themes are now pursued. Milsom’s conspectus of music in the 1560s, adducing eight relevant documents, draws distinctions between private and public, and between notated music and that played – or sung – from memory. Christopher Marsh surveys popular music-making, recreating the putative career of a real bagpiper, Edward Hadshed, who died at Chesterfield in 1578. A recurrent contrast is that between courtly stringed instruments and more popular wind instruments, the latter masculine, the former for both sexes. The theme is explicit in a print of about 1565 after Frans Floris showing wind instruments – bagpipes included – blown by men while women play stringed instruments or sing. Its Latin title apposes ‘a kind of Musicke that dooth asswage and appease the affections, and a kinde that doth kindle and provoke the passions’ (as Francis Meres expressed the idea in Palladis Tamia, Reference Meres1598). Engraved by Hieronymus Cock, it features an old woman playing an impractical curvilinear harp, comparable to that on the table, which, as Karen Loomis explains, is also incorrectly strung.

Two chapters stand alone. Claire Preston describes the inlaid flowers in detail, placing them in the Hardwick context where she proposes the table as ‘almost a governing element’. For all the importance of floral imagery, both to Bess of Hardwick and to her Queen, was the table – some thirty years old when Bess moved into her New Hall – really that significant amid so many rich furnishings? Be that as it may, there is another possible angle: in about 1585 a great Roman pietre dure table in Madrid, commenced in the late 1560s and incorporating inlaid flowers, inspired a Latin encomium by Vincenzo Stampa, which highlights the Ancient Roman custom of strewing tables with flowers; the table was presented to Philip ii of Spain by Cardinal Michele Bonelli, known as Alessandrino (1541–98) (Jervis Reference Jervis2020). The other singleton is the final chapter in which Edward Wilson-Lee, invoking Plato, Wittgenstein, Aristotle, Locke and Foucault, performs a set of sparkling variations on the theme of tabulation. What Bess of Hardwick and her contemporaries would have made of this is anyone’s guess.

Is the Eglantine Table tightly or loosely programmed? The heraldry is certainly tight, but that is its essence. As to the rest, this reviewer inclines to detect a loose programme and a degree of improvisation. A unique object is always a difficult subject for exegesis, the more so when there is – as for the 1560s – a paucity of evidence. Music and Instruments is replete with detailed expertise and close observations, as well as many intriguing speculations, but specific conclusions prove elusive. Perhaps there is more to learn from the international context. In 1565 an Augsburg cabinet-maker offered Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tyrol a cabinet ‘mit … allerlei saitenspielen eingelegt’ and the top of a contemporary Augsburg cabinet published by Georg Himmelheber (Reference Himmelheber2010) includes a mass of inlaid instruments and two books lined for scoring, intermingled with leaves and flowers. A search through Liselotte Möller’s Reference Möller1956 classic work on South German inlay reveals further examples, including a later cabinet in Budapest which adds playing cards and a die. Such accomplished if formulaic Augsburg-style products, exported all over Europe, are not very close to the Eglantine Table, but they are more or less contemporary, and should be woven into a story that is much the richer for this learned book.