“The religious music of Elizabethan England both refines and complicates our understanding of the English Reformation” (244). So writes Jonathan Willis in the conclusion of his new book on music and religious identity formation in sixteenth-century England. This notion of plurality and diversity is at the heart of Willis’s study, and Willis is careful to repeat this caveat often as he proposes a more multifaceted portrait of religious practices after the English Settlement. His argument builds upon, yet challenges, the seminal works of Nicholas Temperley, Peter Le Huray, Percy A. Scholes, and Edmund H. Fellowes, perhaps some of the most definitive voices on sacred music in post-Reformation England. Willis acknowledges, and rightly so, the rather one-dimensional representations of religiomusical life offered by this nearly forty-year-old scholarship and sets out to refashion the narrative on the sixteenth century’s diverse religious and musical practices. Willis’s book further illustrates the current musicological methodologies that attempt, through a combination of primary source documents and writings about music, to reconstruct how early modern people heard, and ascribed meaning to, music. Uniquely, however, Willis combines this method with careful and exhaustive archival research, delving into parish and cathedral records. Avoiding discipline-specific language and specialized musical analysis, Willis’s book is appropriate for nonmusicians and musicians alike.

Organized in three principal divisions, Willis’s study first explores learned discourses of music and religious thought in sixteenth-century England. His first chapter lays out, as many interdisciplinary-minded books on early modern English music are wont to do, the Greco-Roman foundations for sixteenth-century learned opinions on music, its uses, and its effects. Willis also draws upon recent cultural studies scholarship on music and ephemera as well as acoustic environment studies, including, but not limited to, the works of Bruce Smith. This chapter will be very useful to nonmusicians as an overview of early modern learned philosophies and discourses on the powers and effect of music in general, while musicologists versed in sixteenth-century literature might find this discussion well-worn territory. Chapter 2 likewise positions music in Elizabethan religious thought as the church attempts to reconcile itself with its intellectual heritage and the new rigors of Protestantism. At the heart of this discussion is an analysis of Continental reformers’ theologies on music and its role in Protestant worship, as well as a discussion of English metrical Psalters by Miles Coverdale, Sternhold and Hopkins, and Matthew Parker. Willis here invokes the Lutheran notion of adiaphora, or certain practices not regarded as essential to faith but still permissible for Christians and allowed in the worship service, to explain the musical flexibility of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559. The author asserts that English Protestantism “achieved widespread popularity through church music and the Psalms,” since there seemed to be a lack of “unqualified approval or disapproval of church music” in learned writings of the period (78).

After examining the various discourses on music in general and its role in sacred practices in particular, Willis turns in chapter 3 to the specific sites of religious musical production—that is, the parish church and cathedral. Through a painstaking analysis of expenditures by parish churches across England during the reign of Elizabeth, Willis sheds new light on how the Elizabethan Settlement was realized in the smaller congregations. He conducts a national survey, examining receipts for organ maintenance, musicians’ salaries, pricksong (notated music) purchases, and Psalters in order to gain a more multifaceted picture of the parish church’s musical priorities. These data challenge the views espoused in previous scholarship that depict the parish church as participating in only unaccompanied unison vernacular congregational metrical psalmody. Willis instead posits that there existed a wide range of possibilities for musical activities in these parishes. The author employs a similar methodology when examining the cathedral church, a site that has heretofore been viewed as fiercely preserving traditional musical activities such as choral polyphony and organ music. Like the parish church, the cathedral was able to adapt to the changes brought about by the Elizabethan Settlement, all the while balancing the requirements of the state with the desires of the constituents in its precinct. The author paints a particularly vivid picture of this compromise when he describes the powerful message a “vernacular service punctuated with vernacular choral polyphony” could deliver, while the congregation “listen[s] to an evangelical exegesis of vernacular scripture” and “sing[s] a vernacular metrical Psalm, all within a hallowed cathedral precinct” (158).

Willis’s final section focuses on the formation of religious identities through individuals’ interactions with music. He examines contemporary writings on pedagogy, godly ballads, and religious propaganda to illustrate the role of music in religious devotion. The author analyzes the contents and introductory remarks of Psalters, as well as recent controversial scholarship on literacy rates and book ownership in Elizabethan England, to determine the processes of transmission and reception of religious doctrine through individual devotion. Finally, Willis broadens his scope in chapter 6 to examine how religious music could engender social harmony and likewise discord through the Elizabethan understanding of the relationship between music and community. Harkening back to his discussion of the affective powers of music in chapter 1, the author describes how English Psalter writers conceived of music’s power to bring out social harmony through parochial piety and communal religious identity formation. Likewise, music also had the power to create social discord and exacerbate religious division. Because early moderns endowed music with the ethical powers of concord, they believed it could act as a “medium through and a space within which people and communities could formulate further meaning between and amongst themselves” (236).

Willis’s careful consideration of the multifaceted nature of sixteenth-century Protestantism illustrates how religious music shaped the new identities that emerged by the end of Elizabeth’s reign. His methodologies signal the arrival of musical ephemera and acoustic environment studies to discourses on church music, methods that have heretofore been limited to literary and musicological scholarship on Elizabethan secular music and culture.