There are at least four general reasons why this book is noteworthy. First, for Anglophile readers proud of the continuing tradition of young choristers in cathedral and collegiate choirs in Britain, it is a salutary reminder that this was a phenomenon found throughout the Western Church at least until the sixteenth century. Second, for those who consider the intrusion of girls' and women's voices into the Church to be a modern aberration, it draws attention to the significance of female voices, including young voices, in monastic and religious foundations. Third, it offers additional insights into ecclesiastical institutions and their music – a reminder both that the great-name musicians and their patrons were the icing on a very much more substantial cake and that there is a range of different viewpoints from which to investigate institutions and their personnel. Finally, it brings together work of some of the best institutional music historians of the medieval and early modern periods, and offers a rich sampling of their research and writing. The presentation of both Latin and ‘old’ English texts in modern translation (offering the original texts and explanation of most unfamiliar terms in the notes) makes the book particularly accessible; and two contributions written in another language have been translated into English. There is also a consolidated bibliography. Although the book seems very particular in its subject matter, it offers a valuable introduction to the study of music and musical training in ecclesiastical institutions, and provides models for writing based on a particularly broad range of documentary evidence; while not a primary purpose, it is therefore well suited to the research training of master's students and advanced undergraduates.

The book opens with a helpful essay by the editors which serves as a review of the content of the whole book, synthesising the issues addressed: choristers in medieval and early modern institutions, their education, their liturgical duties, and the wider context. There follow twelve essays by specialists in the field, the majority relating to a particular institution or city. In a more general study, Susan Boynton surveys central medieval practice in monasteries and cathedrals across Europe (with an emphasis on customaries). This essay forms a bridge from the only study of the early medieval period, by Joseph Dyer. The bulk of the contributions deal with late medieval and early modern practice. So, although the historical span of the studies is from around 650 to 1700, evidence from the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries predominates; but geographically this includes Cambrai, St Omer and Aachen in north-west Europe, Seville in Spain, Rome and Siena in Italy, as well as England. Short of writing a summary of each of these essays, it is hard to do full justice to the range and detail of a multi-authored book of this kind. What follows sets out to indicate some of the over-arching topics and themes.

The twelve studies begin and end in Rome, and in some respects Noel O'Regan's study of choirboys in early modern Rome, which concludes the volume, encapsulates the range of issues covered in the whole volume. In spite of the lack of formal, institutional provision for singing boys in most Roman churches and colleges, their musical activities can be traced, as can evidence of their training in singing (including both exercises and training) and wider musical education, including composition. A significant source of boy singers was Santa Maria della Visitazione degli Orfani, from which boys went out to sing at a number of churches and meetings of confraternities. Overall, however, their duties seem to have been far more selective and occasional: they were not the workhorses of daily services that their English counterparts seem to have been by the early seventeenth century.

The three contributions which concern England do not deal with the central tradition of boy choristers. Richard Rastall explores the fascinating world of boys in medieval religious drama, addressing issues of female characterisation, puberty, and the transference of liturgical expertise to drama, questioning the boundaries between choristers in choral foundations and other boy singers, such as those required to fill the twenty-six parts for boys in the York Plays. His final example, from Chester, dates from 1575, a time of Protestant ascendancy and therefore a late date for religious drama. By contrast, Jane Flynn focuses on the ex-chorister as apprentice to an established musician (a matter also discussed by O'Regan, pp. 227 ff.), arguing the case for Thomas Mulliner as apprentice to John Heywood, and on the use of Mulliner's keyboard anthology as a teaching resource of his apprenticeship.

The stages of childhood and its relationship to musical education are outlined in Anne Bagnall Yardley's study of girls in medieval English nunneries. From Barking Abbey, she notes that the girls may be divided into three age groups: infantes to around the age of 7, iuvenculae from 7 to 14, and scolares over 14. There is the question of the relationship of musical learning to literacy, as well as the importance of memory. In comparison with literacy, four levels of musical skill and education are described, leading from early years to the noviciate – and on towards the role of cantrix. Musical training is also the theme of Colleen Reardon's essay on girls in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century convents in Siena, where there was even some provision for male music teachers.

While musical training and education remain as underlying themes, the remaining five essays relate to individual institutions and pay greater attention to the musical and ritual deployment of boy choristers in each foundation: Andrew Kirkman on St Omer, Alejandro Planchart and Sandrine Dumont on Cambrai (with different periods and approach, but some common documents), Eric Rice on Aachen, and Juan Ruiz Jiménez on Seville. It is evident from late medieval customaries that music and ritual were inseparable, and that a musical duty allocated specifically to a chorister generally had ritual significance. Other duties they undertook were primarily ritual (and inevitably do not always receive as much attention in a book on young singers). The relationship of the ritual and the musical is a feature of Planchart's piece on Cambrai, and both this and Dumont's essay indicate the concentration of chorister duties on three services: Mass, Vespers and Lady Mass. Ritual and musical duties extended to the mimetic and the dramatic – as in Kirkman's ceremonial trumpets for the boys as Christmas angels at St Omer, or Jiménez's illustrations of the boys' roles at Seville as the three Marys in the Easter Sepulchre dramatic ritual, angels at the funeral of the first wife of Philip II, and in the famous Corpus Christi dance. The increasingly demanding musical responsibilities undertaken by boys become evident, as does the training required for them to sing composed polyphony. Kirkman and Rice provide significant information – some of it testatory – on the funding allocated (even diverted at St Omer) to support boys, and Kirkman, Dumont and Jiménez indicate the relationship of their position and training to later progression as vicar choral, cantor or even canon.

The emphasis in these studies is principally on the musical and ritual duties of young singers engaged by or associated with the church; there is less on their broader education than in Allan Mould's recent historical survey of The English Chorister (London, 2007). Neither book dwells on the role of choristers outside church and school: there were often domestic duties within the institution (such as serving at table) which continued even when there were no choral duties in church or chapel – as was the case at Magdalen College, Oxford, during the seventeenth-century Commonwealth; furthermore, earlier choristers at Magdalen were required to share the bed of an aged fellow of the college, presumably to prevent the old man from dying in his sleep of hypothermia.

At a time when the present-day Church is struggling with revelations of abuse of children by clergy, no one can assume such an innocent function for sharing a bed. Nevertheless, there is a crucial juxtaposition of child and adult working alongside one another in the liturgy and in musical performance. Children not only took on significant ritual and musical responsibilities on a daily basis and in major ceremonies (not least c.700 in the schola cantorum for the Papal Mass at the station church described in Ordo Romanus I and discussed by Joseph Dyer), but also worked alongside or under the direction of some of the finest singers, maestri and composers of the time. It is no surprise to find that a number of modern choristers (girls and boys) look back in adulthood on their experience as a young singer as the most formative part of their childhood and even the most important part of their education. The evidence in this book underlines the integration of liturgical duties, musical training and general education of young singers – and there may still be lessons to learn from this in considering the pattern of training and education for present-day choristers. In the world of scholarship, there may be scope for socially orientated studies of young singers in the medieval and early-modern Church, taking in the whole of their activities as well as considering implications for their later careers and life-courses.