One of the least studied aspects of the many festivities celebrating the 1622 canonization of Saints Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier throughout the vast Habsburg empire was the role played by extravagantly orchestrated music. When Emperor Ferdinand ii arrived in Regensburg to conduct the routine business of empire, he brought with him no fewer than fifty-nine musicians, most of whom played at the festal Mass for St. Francis Xavier attended by Ferdinand himself, the empress, and an assortment of Catholic princes. In 1653, in the same city, forty trumpeters accompanied the emperor in the Corpus Christi procession. Meetings of the imperial diet were subsequently treated to performances of a sacred opera, Philothea, composed by the Munich Jesuit Johannes Paullin. These represent but a tiny sampling of the House of Austria’s elaborate and sustained involvement with music and musicians in the period 1500–1700.

In his introduction, the Companion’s editor declares an ambitious aim: “to redress the lack of scholarly surveys of Habsburg musical patronage by providing a detailed survey of music at the Habsburg courts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spanning the reigns of Emperor Maximilian i (r.1493–1519) through Emperor Leopold i (r.1658–1705).” Within such broad geographical and chronological limits, Weaver set himself the twin tasks encapsulated in the perilously oxymoronic term “detailed overview.” It is a survey that must account for phenomena that range from Philip ii’s proscription of polyphony at the Escorial (one of many aspects of this monarch’s music patronage to go unmentioned in Pablo L. Rodríguez’s chapter) to the patronage of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) following Ferdinand ii’s marriage to Eleonora Gonzaga in 1621.

While the first chapter offers an overview of the entire volume, the remaining fifteen are grouped into parts under three inclusive subheadings: institutional contexts, cultural contexts, international contexts. The editor’s goal “not to present new research, but to build on the wealth of existing scholarship” places the burden of success on the individual chapters, each conditioned by the concerns of their authors and the current state of knowledge in a specific area. The results are uneven.

Coverage of the Austrian and German Habsburgs is strong, reflecting Weaver’s own expertise; he appears as author or co-author of four chapters. Three chapters take us to Spain and New Spain, two are concerned with Italy (Milan and Rome), and two treat connections between Italy (mainly Venice) and the Austrian Habsburgs. Among the best are two chapters by Honey Meconi: one on the court chapels of the Habsburg-Burgundian line from Maximilian i to Charles v and a tour-de-force on the Habsburg-Burgundian scriptorium and music manuscript culture.

Yet the reader expecting a colloquy that would bring the fifteen disparate chapters into dialogue with one another will be frustrated. This is an opportunity missed considering the constant exchanges between the overlapping and interlocking dynastic, political, national, and clerical networks that make the volume’s subject so compelling. Cross-referencing seems to be limited to editorial footnotes and the decision to equip each of the sixteen chapters with its own bibliography leads to such duplication as, for instance, Weaver’s own Sacred Music as Public Image being cited separately in the bibliographies of the introduction and no fewer than ten chapters. A single bibliography surely would have avoided such duplication while providing a much-needed scholarly resource.

In the first chapter, the notion of “savvy patronage of music” (16) raises such questions as the following: by what precise mechanisms did the Habsburgs deploy music? For what purposes? Precisely how did it serve those purposes? One after another, the authors will breezily mention music’s role in such sweeping statements as: “the musical interests of Philip ii and Philip iv were the deciding factors that shaped the musical landscape of the Habsburg court in Madrid” (103), “the promotion of the King as a composer was part of his image-building” (107), “polychoral music played a decisive role in the portrayal of power and devotion” (114), “music became an instrument of politics” (185), and “the politicization of sacred music took several forms” (191). While some authors concentrate on the what and the how, there is no sustained inquiry into why music was so important to the dynasty. The notable exception is to be found in one of the chapters on the Austrian line that shows how “Ferdinand could shift his public image as the [Thirty Years’] war steadily turned against the Habsburgs during the 1640s, allowing him to transform his image from that of a heroic, victorious warrior to a pious, protective father looking out for his citizens under the care of God” (196). In fact, the treatment in Weaver’s oft-cited Sacred Music as Public Image (see, for example, 100–106) offers precisely the kind of sophisticated discussion that this volume lacks.

And it is a shame that the Jesuit political theorist Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) remains unmentioned. After all, his De rege et regis institutione (Toledo, 1599), ostensibly intended for the young Philip iii, devotes an unusually long section to the reasons why monarchs—in this case a Habsburg king—should engage with music. Other references to the important role played by the Society of Jesus in music are scattered throughout the volume. It was the Habsburgs, after all, who supported the publication of Kircher’s prodigious Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650) dedicated to the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. The Germanicum was a frequent and reliable source of skilled musicians for the Hofkapelle of Ferdinand iii and such rulers as the Archduke Ferdinand Charles (1628–62) were educated by the Jesuits. Yet there is hardly a single paragraph dedicated to the Society’s contribution and even the term “Early Modern Catholicism”—first proposed in the 1990s by John O’Malley, S.J.—is ignored in favor of the traditional and baggage-laden “Counter-Reformation.”

This Companion represents a serious attempt to reveal the astonishing variety of ways in which the Habsburgs employed music and in doing so it reminds us of the pressing need for a sustained and comprehensive study of Jesuit engagement with music in the same period.