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Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the di (1600). By Fabritio Caroso. Translated and edited by Julia Sutton. Music transcribed and edited by F. Marian Walker. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. [vi, 408 p. ISBN 0-486-28619-3. $14.95.] Because the richest body of sources on the art of dancing in the sixteenth century is from Italy, it was an important scholarly event when major Italian treatise became available in an English translation for the first time. That treatise--Fabritio Caroso's Nobilta di Dame (Venice: II Muschio, 1600)--was published by Oxford University Press in 1986. The importance of Nobilta, Caroso's second treatise, to the fields of musicology and dance history, among others, cannot be overstated. It contains forty-nine choreographies, each with its own music. Each is also dedicated either to member of royalty or to nobility of France, Italy, or Spain, making it clear to which audience the dances were directed. Each is also accompanied by poetry that places dance in the wider artistic context of the sixteenth-century. Dover's current edition of Nobilta is described in the flyleaf as a revised, corrected and expanded republication of Oxford's original edition. Close comparison of the two editions shows, however, that this annotation is misleading, since few substantive changes have been made. The bibliography has been somewhat expanded and updated. An appendix of Nobilta's steps transcribed into the dance notation system called Labanotation has been added, about which I have reservations, for it places another layer between the reader and the source that could effectively freeze an interpretation in place, regardless of the editor's clear caveat. But even these additions certainly do not amount to the major revisions, corrections, and emendations that second edition of this monumental work required. While much of the work that Julia Sutton and others have done on this complex source has been to good purpose, like the transcription of the music From mensural notation and lute tablature into practical melody line with piano score formal and the cogent discussion of the state of Renaissance dance research and the direction future research should take, the second edition, like the first, is riddled with problems. They fall into three major categories: 1) errors of commission, 2) errors of omission, and 3) issues of interpretation. Most of the smaller problems are factual errors in the first category; for instance, some typographical errors in the first edition were not corrected (see wooden, p. 141). More important are misstatements such as the statement that there is no music in the English Inns of Court sources. A seventeenth-century source known to be concordant with sixteenth-century sources (London, Royal College of Music MS 1119) has tunes for four of the eight dances it contains (p. 1). The most serious errors in this category are represented by two examples: one generic, the other specific. The generic errors frequently revolve around the dance names, with some dance genres like Alta translated while others, like Gagliarda are not. …
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