In this exquisite and comprehensive monograph, John A. Rice provides a feast for the eyes and ears as he traces the history of music's patron saint from the Middle Ages up through the Baroque era. However, Rice makes no claims for Cecilia having been anything but a legend: “We know nothing for sure about Cecilia's life—or even if she existed at all” (3). The Roman monk Arnobius the Younger (c. 450) wrote a Passio sanctae Caeciliae about Cecilia, a young Roman woman who married on the condition that her husband, Valerian, would allow her to preserve her chastity. Not only did she succeed, but she also converted Valerian and several others to Christianity. She was martyred for her faith. Eight centuries later, Jacobus de Voragine retold her story in his Golden Legend, “one of the most widely read books in the late Middle Ages” (27), which gave “special importance for the emergence of Cecilia as a musical icon” because, at her wedding, “instruments played and she sang in her heart to God alone” (28). That phrase – “cantantibus organis Cecilia domino decantabat dicens” (18) – would associate her not only with the organ (“organis”), her nearly ubiquitous iconographical attribute, but also with singing (“decantabat”). The beginning of the phrase, “cantantibus organis,” appears frequently in musical settings and in pictorial representations (see plates 2–5, 9–11, 15, 20, 24, 27, 48, and 49).

One of the most remarkable parts of this book is its iconography: 73 color plates – chosen from museums, archives, libraries, books, abbeys, and churches – are beautifully reproduced on glossy paper. Although they are a pleasure to peruse as a set, almost like a visit to a virtual gallery, Rice fully accounts for each image in his narrative. With a distinctly interdisciplinary approach, he also includes musical examples to introduce readers to composers whose music in honor of Saint Cecilia has not been previously assembled. These compositions are mostly Netherlandish (Rice prefers to call them “Flemish”) and French, but a secondary group consists of Italian artists and composers, such as Palestrina and Marenzio, as well as the more obscure musicians Stabile, Dragoni, and Santini. Rice took the trouble to identify all of the pieces of music painted into the art: such as Clemens non-Papa's “Cecilia virgo gloriosa” in Michel Coxcie's Saint Cecilia at the Virginal from the Prado (plates 44–46), beautifully described as “visual echoes of the music” (87).

In chapters 1–3, Rice examines the legend of Saint Cecilia from a variety of sources and provides a didactically clear explanation for how music intersected with the liturgy of the Office chants. Next he turns to depictions and references to “the organ as [Cecilia's] emblem” (39). Rice cleverly brings his readers along with him, never expecting technical terms to be general knowledge. For example, when he discusses confraternities and guilds, he defines their endowments in a knowledgeable tone that is never condescending.

It is always a shame when a publisher insists on endnotes instead of footnotes, with the result being that one is less inclined to consult them; they are, in any case, of high quality. Rice takes pains to provide exacting translations from several languages. For example, on p. 57, he translates the name of the “Connestablie des Joueurs d'Instruments” as a guild of players of musical instruments. An asset to the book is the interpretation of old terms in comparison to their modern counterparts, such as when explaining that the measurement of “two stoopen” is equivalent to five liters of wine (65). Likewise, Rice helps the reader appreciate the distances between geographical locations, such as that Gouda lies 35 kilometers to the east of Delft (66).

Chapter 4 examines the quantities of polyphonic music that followed the chants for Saint Cecilia in the medieval and early Renaissance periods, along with a comprehensive Appendix of Music for Cecilia Published or Copied before 1620 (217). Rice's focus is on Franco-Flemish motets in this chapter. One notable collection of motets, by Jean Maillard and printed by the firm of Le Roy and Ballard, was dedicated to the lofty Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici, and included three motets for Saint Cecilia (81).

Rice does not overlook secular invocations of Saint Cecilia, particularly those at banquets. Nicolas Gombert, for instance, set a non-liturgical text for performance by singers and instrumentalists (95). Rice uses the phrase “picture-motets” (104) to refer to short motets composed expressly for inclusion in pieces of visual art, such as in Jan Sadeler I's engraving after a drawing of Martin de Vos's Fiat cor meum, with its central emphasis on Daniel Raymundi's eponymous motet (plates 51 and 52). It is amusing to witness here that artists sometimes reversed the image of the organ: in Sadeler's engraving, the longest pipes are on the right-hand side, where the shortest pipes should have been in order to play the high notes (105, plate 51). Raphael also reversed the position of the pipes, having famously and intentionally depicted Cecilia with the portative organ's pipes falling out of their case (plate 62).

The last chapters, 5–7, feature a bounty of musical examples, whose texts are familiar from the foregoing portions of the book. Rice provides excerpted scores of music otherwise found only in partbooks and, in Table 5.1, he enumerates a century's worth of motets from the Netherlands and France, ranging from well-known composers – such as Cipriano de Rore – to those known in name only, like “Carette.”

John A. Rice's book surpasses all previous efforts at gathering a historical, musical, and iconographical summation of the visual and aural representations of Saint Cecilia, and it yields the fruit of much his labor over some four decades (216). Saint Cecilia in the Renaissance is sure to be the authoritative source on the saint for many years to come.