Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650-1750

Drawing upon an array of sources from archives in Leipzig, Dresden and Halle, this work illuminates culture in Leipzig before and during J S Bach's time spent in the city. It shows that high Baroque culture emerged through a combination of traditional frameworks and practices, and an infusion of change that set in from around 1680.

Prize: Winner of the 2008 William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society Shortlisted for the AMS Lewis Lockwood Award 2008. Through personal accounts, Kevorkian paints a detailed and intimate picture of religious activity across the strata of civic society. The story of Leipzig's public religious culture to 1750 emerges as one of great diversity and flux in a period of relative peace and economic prosperity.... Readers from social, political, and religious history should not be put off by the prominence of music in the title, and indeed, this review. ...a valuable social history. Music, in Kevorkian's book, as it was in Leipzig society, is but one thread in the rich fabric of public pious culture. H-German In sum, Kevorkian has done important research in specific areas such as pewholding, consistory and city council records, and Pietist correspondence that enrich our understanding of religious affairs in Leipzig in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries... it is a significant addition to the scholarly literature in the field. Journal of the American Musicological Society ... this book provides a highly stimulating historical resource that will undoubtedly inflect many musical studies of Bach and his predecessors over the coming years. Early Music A valuable contribution to Ashgate's growing catalogue of interdisciplinary studies... Baroque Piety provides new insight into how we consider the religious arena in early modern Europe. Renaissance Quarterly Music forms only one strand of Kevorkian‘s interdisciplinary study, yet by considering Bach‘s work within the religious life of Leipzig, she offers a model of how music can be integrated within social history. ... [Kevorkian's] book is not only a sure-footed account of the religious sphere in which Bach worked, it should also stimulate new directions in research on eighteenth-century German music. Eighteenth-Century Music Having a broad sweep of Kevorkian

Tanya Kevorkian is Associate Professor of History at Millersville University, USA.