279 Reviews Labalme’s impressive familiarity with archival sources and her per- sistence in following wherever documentary evidence led her make her writing informative about social practice, humanistic values, and govern- mental process in Venice on such varied subjects as marriage customs, sodomy laws, and women’s education. Throughout the volume runs a consistent theme of family identity and its importance for Venetian polity. Additionally, the essays demonstrate the generosity of spirit that Patricia Labalme brought to her engagement in scholarly research; without dimin- ishing her own achievement, she credits the help she received, perhaps in recognition of the enduring friendships she made along the varied paths her life took. These essays are a tribute, in part, to her mentors, especially Felix Gilbert and Myron P. Gilmore. This volume provides, moreover, lasting testimony to Patricia Labalme’s scholarly sensitivity and accom- plishment. Through the publication of her collected essays she remains a quietly inspiring example of what a woman can accomplish, using her wit, patience, and resolve, to widen our intellectual horizon about the lives of women and men in Renaissance Venice, spurring us, in response, to take the measure of our own civic and social lives. Patricia Lyn Richards Kenyon College Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power. Suzanne G. Cusick. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 445 pp. $60.00. ISBN 13–978–0–226–13212–9 This book has been much anticipated for those who love early modern women’s relationships to music. Suzanne Cusick has an extraordinarily keen eye for those relationships in spaces often not found in traditional musicology. It has been a volume long in the making and reads with the richness of storytelling and the wisdom of a seasoned scholar adept at coaxing from primary documents a detailed rendering of what it meant to be a woman in early modern Italy fully experiencing her world. The pro- visional title of the book was “a romanesca of one’s own,” which for Cusick implies not the solitude hoped for in Virginia Woolf ’s seminal essay, but