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formal musical instruction of the daughters of London’s merchants who comprised the city’s middling classes. Of special interest are the musical theater productions of a Chelsea boarding school staged between 1676 and 1688 (most famously Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas), wherein Page considers the dramatic impact of the guitar—an instrument whose popular image teemed with eroticism—in the moralistic depictions of seduction explicit in these educational works. Issues of gender and sexuality recur throughout the book, most visibly in chapter 4, a brief yet substantive investigation of the figure of the guitar-playing subject in Restoration elite portraiture. On the face of it, these images tell the story of the guitar favored by young, attractive, and socially available women; totally absent are men (rarely depicted with musical instruments of any kind in oil portraiture) and older, distinguished women. Yet Page is keen to point out the discrepancy between the exclusive feminine domain of the guitar as documented in Restoration visual culture and the inclusive gendered reality of guitar playing in elite circles. Many men played the guitar, including Charles II. This contradiction leads Page to focus on the latent sensuality emanating from the guitar-playing ladies of the Stuart portraits, which he aligns with Caravaggio’s sumptuous musician portraits. Page is justified in paying significant attention in his book to Samuel Pepys and Nicola Matteis: Pepys commissioned Cesare Morelli to compile the largest manuscript collection of guitar songs from seventeenth-century Europe, and Matteis (a Neapolitanborn violinist and guitarist) published in 1682 the only extant guitar treatise from seventeenth-century England. But there is a slight tendency in these pages to overwork hypothetical scenarios not considered by previous scholars, as in the conjectural social contact between Pepys and Matteis toward the end of chapter 6. This is an isolated and insignificant critique, however, of a book that delivers a thoroughly compelling social history of the guitar grounded in solid archival research and erudite attentiveness to the cultural, political, and musical events that shaped seventeenth-century England.