Early modern Leipzig is probably most widely remembered as the city where Johann Sebastian Bach served as cantor or director of church music for twenty-seven years, from 1723 to 1750. While much has already been written about the rich musical culture of Leipzig, Tanya Kevorkian argues in this book that Bach is “best understood in the context of the sprawling social, cultural and political system that was the urban public religious arena” (1). To set Bach in context, she undertakes a broader examination of Baroque piety, analyzing the institutional structures that influenced the practice of religion and music in Leipzig and the interactions of various social groups who regularly came together as worshippers in the city's churches. This book looks particularly at Leipzig society during the hundred-year period from 1650, the end of the Thirty Years' War, until 1750, the year of Bach's death.

Kevorkian writes as both a social historian and a musicologist. Modeling her approach on the work of Natalie Zemon Davis and Bob Scribner, she is particularly attentive to social status and gender in the study of Leipzig's religious life. The author shows interest in the confessionalization paradigm and its focus on the use of religious policies by rulers to promote social discipline, but she seeks to uncover the outlooks of ordinary people as well as powerful elites. In her effort to reveal the complexity of social interactions, Kevorkian also draws inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu's approach to the study of cultural production. Using his theory of fields, she looks at competition among civic and territorial officials, musicians and clerics, and wealthy and poor congregants in Leipzig and at the ways in which relations among these groups were “negotiated through concrete practices” (5). Kevorkian links social history to musicology by emphasizing the social function of musical events.

The first two parts of the book provide a broad overview of the structures and practices of religious life in Leipzig. Two chapters analyze the congregants who experienced worship in Leipzig's five churches, and two more study the “producers” of public religious culture, the ecclesiastical and political authorities who were responsible for the spiritual welfare of the city's inhabitants. After describing features of the worship services and presenting evidence of how congregants reacted to preaching and music, Kevorkian comes to the most revealing component of her social analysis of religious life in a chapter about the practice of assigning seating in the churches. Here the importance of gender and status distinctions is most evident. Women were seated in the center of the ground floor and men sat along the sides or in the balconies. Congregants could only sit in pews that had been allocated to their families and had to pay a significant sum for the right to sit in these reserved places. Pews were highly valued assets and “objects of commerce” (71). They were a major source of revenue for the churches and clear indicators of social status. Elite groups monopolized the most desirable seating, and, in fact, the poor generally had to worship at secondary services on Sunday afternoons. Kevorkian convincingly concludes that “people did not see the religious arena as distinct from the material social world” (70).

Chapters 3–5 show the overlapping jurisdictions of the producers of religious culture and the intense competition among those who were in positions of authority. The author first profiles the clergy, describing their status, activities, and relations with the laity and city councilors. Although the city councilors were the primary urban elite group that controlled the appointment and promotion of the clergy, chapter 4 shows that they were subject to the periodic intervention of the Saxon Elector in Dresden and the territorial consistories that were the ultimate determiners of ecclesiastical law. The complexity of these governmental structures may contribute to the diffuse nature of chapter 4, but the author also investigates some tangential matters such as laws related to witchcraft.

Chapter 5 deals most directly with music. It outlines the multiple responsibilities and anomalous status of the cantors who directed music in the churches. Kevorkian compares and contrasts Kuhnau and Bach, who were the cantors between 1701 and 1750. She also examines controversies about musical styles and notes that ambivalence about innovations drawn from secular music was present among the Orthodox and Enlighteners as well as the Pietists. She associates Bach most closely with the Orthodox.

Since Leipzig was important in the development of Pietism, Kevorkian devotes chapters 6 and 7 to the evolution of this movement. She uses official interrogation protocols from 1689 to create an interesting social profile of these critics of the religious establishment. The author notes how the Pietists challenged some status and gender norms but also perpetuated patron-client relations that were characteristic of society in that period. Although conventicle meetings in homes were outlawed in 1690, Kevorkian shows how the Pietists maintained an informal “shadow network” (169) until at least the 1730s.

This book makes an important contribution to Baroque studies by singling out and scrutinizing all of the social groups that had some influence on the production of music and the evolution of church life in Leipzig. The author provides new information about a number of interesting topics, but after dissecting Leipzig society, it would have been helpful to elucidate how competing powers worked together by focusing on some situation at length. To a certain extent this is done in the final chapter, which looks at various controversies that arose as a result of efforts to build new churches in Leipzig after 1699, but an extended focus on a revealing moment of conflict might have facilitated the reassembly of a whole from the carefully analyzed parts.