In this groundbreaking book Jacomien Prins vigorously argues that the customary linear narrative of the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth century has had the effect of masking the breadth and complexity of philosophical and musical thought of the period. Her claim is based on a deep reading of the philosophy of two Italian Neoplatonists, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597), whose contrasting writings on the harmony of the spheres are examined here against a backdrop of the changing nature of music and science in Renaissance Italy. However, although she highlights the fundamental divergence of their thinking about cosmic harmony, which Ficino believed was real and Patrizi thought was metaphorical, Prins resists narrowing this transformation down to become merely part of the backstory to the rise of science. As Paolo Gozza has shown in particular in From Number to Sound: The Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution (2000), it is certainly true that between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries there was a shift from numerological to physical explanations for the causes of harmony, but again Prins does not think that the story of a one-way development adequately captures ‘the actual process of transformation of the doctrine of the harmony of the spheres’ (p. 56). So instead of just identifying the aspects of their thought that in hindsight are seen to have contributed to the Scientific Revolution, Prins also critically examines the ways in which Ficino's and Patrizi's views of cosmic harmony interacted with the magical, religious and philosophical ideas of the period more generally.

Prins is adamant that Ficino was not one of the founders of modern science, even though his concept of cosmic sympathetic vibration did come to play a part in matter theories of the seventeenth century. Rather, Ficino's ultimate goal was nothing less than to make the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres alive again, and to give advice on how to make and listen to music in a way that leads to purification of the soul and transcendental union with the divine, which for him was the purpose of philosophy. As part of this overall goal, Ficino aimed to re-create ancient Greek music and song – which he knew from Plato could imitate moral character and generate ethical states – and in so doing identify himself with the ancient theologians and musical magi Orpheus and Pythagoras. The power of music to draw down astrological influences and even to communicate with demons, which Ficino believed existed, rested on the central tenet that the same simple numerical ratios were constitutive of both music and the cosmos.

As Prins explains in the second half of the book, which is devoted to Patrizi's engagement with the harmony of the spheres, Patrizi effectively severed the link between earthly music and the proportions of the heavens by showing how the tuning of actual instruments did not follow the Pythagorean ratios that were supposedly immanent in the cosmos. Indeed, although he, like Ficino, was convinced that the Earth had a soul, Patrizi criticized the latter's astrological, magical and musical ideas that had supposedly ‘contaminated’ the ancient doctrine of the harmony of the spheres. For Patrizi, whose chief intellectual goal was to establish a natural philosophy and cosmology without Aristotle, the solution was to hark back to a more perfect philosophy that was originally developed by the ancient theologians Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus and Pythagoras before being perfected by the Neoplatonists and lately recovered by Ficino. Ironically, although one of Patrizi's central cosmological beliefs was in Ficino's concept of cosmic sympathetic vibration, he had no desire to obtain beneficial heavenly influences through music and therefore effectively deconstructed Ficino's major contribution to the tradition of the harmony of the spheres. Yet given that Patrizi pleaded for a revival of the Pythagorean conception of world harmony, Prins's conclusion is that instead of portraying him as an innovative natural philosopher, as historians of science such as Paolo Rossi and Edward Rosen have done, we should rather see him as a conservative thinker who was responding to a variety of controversial theories offered by contemporary astronomy and cosmology.

Despite Prins's reluctance to situate Ficino and Patrizi within the paradigm of the Scientific Revolution, she nevertheless accepts that her protagonists had differing understandings of magic from each other, and that they also carved up the field of knowledge in quite different ways, with Patrizi in each case adopting a stance that seems quite ‘modern’ in character compared to that of Ficino. The latter, for example, believed that music was an instrument for healing body, spirit and soul, its chief purpose being purification of the soul, which for him was also the goal of philosophy. By contrast, Patrizi severed the link between earthly music and the cosmos, and divided musical knowledge into the realm of acoustical facts and a realm of the subjective experience of music. One of the most significant contributions that Prins has made here to the history of sixteenth-century science and philosophy is a demonstration of the importance of musical thought to its development, even while she argues that music theory was ‘emancipating itself’ from cosmological and philosophical speculation at the same time as philosophy similarly ‘emancipated itself’ from musical metaphors (p. 277). Readers of this journal who focus on Renaissance and early modern science will hopefully recognize Prins's major contribution to this field, and take up the challenge of fitting music into their mental map of the disciplines they consider relevant and important.