Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many Headed Melodies.

Thomasin LaMay, ed. Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many Headed Melodies.

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2004. xv + 454 pp. index. illus. tbls. $89.95. ISBN: 0-7546-3742-5.

Bonnie Gordon. Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy.

New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism 14. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. x + 234 pp. index. illus. bibl. $80. ISBN: 0-521-84529-7.

I read Thomasin LaMay's excellent collection of essays from start to finish, or rather from finish to start, led by my curiosity to jump around to each of the different sections. Happily, I found my methodology validated in the editor's introductory essay. This addition to Ashgate's Women and Gender in the Early Modern World series fills in important gaps in our knowledge. The book, subtitled Many Headed Melodies, is divided into five sections: "Introduction to the Many Headed Ones," "Women En-voiced," "Women on Stage," "Women from the Convents," and "Women, Collections and Publishing." Many of the authors display a wonderful sense of humor in their essays, making their prose a delight to read. These essays show how individually and collectively early modern women made their voices heard despite strictures that actively sought to silence them. It shows that the tension between silence and sound that is fundamental to music's power is amply displayed by women's work.

Suzanne Cusick's closing essay, "Epilogue: Francesca Among Women, a 600 Gynecentric View" is a continuation of Cusick's previous works which take the requirements of women's lives as their departure, using Cristoforo Bronzini's publication Della dignita e nobilita delle donne. Bronzoni's publication was commissioned by the Florentine regents Archduchess Maria Maddalena d' Austria and her mother-in-law Granduchess Christine de Lorraine. It put forth a worldview in which women ruled through piety and thereby created a more peaceful world. Rather than valorizing professional over amateur music-making as do so many androcentric music histories, Bronzoni's work--and therefore Cusick's essay--shows a continuum of musical ability and experience that helps us understand Francesca Caccini as seen by her contemporaries.

Too often composers and historical figures are seen in isolation, but it is the connections among people that make a culture. The role of connector has often been assigned to women throughout history, especially where dynasty was concerned. "Patronage and Personal Narrative in a Music Manuscript: Marguerite of Austria, Katherine of Aragon, and London Royal 8 G. vii" by Jennifer Thomas convincingly ties this manuscript to the ceremonies, rites of passage, and other events in the lives of these two powerful Renaissance women, thereby providing satisfying answers to questions that have puzzled other researchers.

Linda Phyllis Austern's "Portrait of the Artist as (Female) Musician" discusses how music-making by women was portrayed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As anyone who has done research on historical personages knows, "Portraits ultimately served as political propaganda, and means of linking individuals across time and space. They helped to solidify or advance the social status of artists, sitters and owners alike." (31). Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentilleschi are here, along with others who showed women musicians to be as honorable and worthy of respect as their male counterparts.

Italian music is further represented by Shawn Marie Keener's "Virtue, Illusion, Venezianita" which reveals, so to speak, the figure of the courtesan as she was seen and heard toward the beginning of the early modern period. Beth Glixon's portrait of the seventeenth-century prima donna Caterina Porri reveals a strikingly modern singing entrepreneur whose story could inspire today's artists. LaMay's "Composing from the Throat: Madalena Casulana's Primo Libro de madrigali, 1568" gives us a portrait of a feminist composer. She was determined to be seen and heard as a virtuosa, and as a serious professional singer on a par with her male colleagues. Casulana "was ... well aware of how that virtuosity was heard and watched" and sought to break the association between virtuosic female singing and its connection to courtesans.

Two essays focus on women in France. Jeanince Brooks analyzes the influence of women on portrayals of music and eroticism in the early French novel in "Chivalric Romance, Courtly Love and Courtly Song: Female Vocality and Feminine Desire in the World of Amadis de Gaule." Her essay's cogent analysis collapses the distance between its Renaissance readers--who included the circle around Claude-Catherine de Clermont, (comtesse de Retz)--and today's. Catherine Gordon-Seifert's "Strong Men--Weak Women: Gender Representation and the Influence of Lully's 'Operatic Style' on French Airs Serieux" is a satisfying exploration of the strong gender dynamics (and sexual double-standard) within French Baroque vocal music.

Colleen Reardon, Colleen Baade, and Enrique Alberto Arias provide excellent additions to research which seeks to restore to us the nearly forgotten voices of nuns and their musical world. Reardon explores the process of how a girl became cloistered in "The Good Mother, the Reluctant Daughter, and the Convent: A Case of Musical Persuasion." Baade gently informs us that what we think we know about nuns' lives is still not the entire story in "'Hired' Nun Musicians in Early Modern Castile." Arias's essay focuses on the music of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and is the only essay in the collection to focus on music in the New World.

Filling in our woeful lack of knowledge of women and music in Spain on the secular side is Pilar Ramos Lopez, who deftly uncovers "Some Discrepancies between Educational Theory and Musical Practice in Early Modern Spain." She uncovers an overlooked female theatrical performance tradition, and reveals, as do so many of these essays, the subversive power of women's musicality.

England is represented by three articles: on Princess Elisabeth Stuart's influence on the harpsichord collection Parthenia (Janet Pollack), Moll Cutpurse (Raphael Seligmann), and changing uses of the goddess Venus (Amanda Eurbanks Winkler). Inna Naroditskaya's groundbreaking essay on Russian music, "Serf Actresses in the Tsarinas' Russia: Social Class Cross-Dressing in Russian Serf Theaters of the Eighteenth Century" is as disturbing as it is enlightening. This is a collection accessible to scholars, performers, students, and enthusiasts alike. Indeed, it should be mandatory reading in every music history survey class.

Monteverdi's Unruly Women is not designed for nonlinear reading. Each chapter follows logically from the preceding, and the reader will want to take time to savor the enormous amount of information and analysis packed into its 234 single-spaced pages. The focus of Gordon's excellent monograph is not primarily the female singers of Monteverdi's music, though Anna Renzi and others do appear. Rather, it is what the virtuosity of these female singers and characters represented to their listeners, including the theorists and composers of the day. At times the text is reminiscent of the dissertation from whence it came, but there are fascinating bits of history within this volume as well as some careful insight and analysis, and Gordon succeeds in her objective to "diverge from scholars of social and literary history who often depict early modem culture as a world of silenced women and creative men." (2) Using treatises on medicine, philosophy, singing, and sixteenth-century erotica, she portrays a Renaissance world as sex-obsessed and as conflicted about women's power as our own.

Both LaMay's collection and Gordon's monograph show the continuity of human needs, desires, and behavior which is at the heart of humanistic inquiry. They are valuable contributions to scholarship of the early modern period.

APRIL LYNN JAMES

Queens College, The City University of New York