This chapter addresses the question of Casulana’s development as a composer. Through historical network analysis, it presents evidence suggesting that Casulana was connected to Nicola Vicentino for a significant part of her life, and that it was through him she established her first networks. Their paths led them both to Vicenza, to Siena during the siege of 1554–55, as well as to Rome, Venice, Milan, and more indirectly to Munich and Paris. Moreover, their networks intersected on several occasions. These data provide substantial evidence to argue that Casulana and Vicentino were somehow personally connected. Vicentino, the leading theorist of chromaticism in the mid-sixteenth century, had many students, including several women, and he was clearly not an opponent of female instruction. His implicit musical philogyny lends significant plausibility to the hypothesis that he may have had Casulana as a student.

This chapter focuses on the Medicean context of the publication of the 1568 Primo libro a4, dedicated to Isabella de’ Medici. After hypothesizing about the Romano–Florentine networks that brought Casulana into contact with Isabella, it shows that Casulana’s book sits within a broader tradition of Medicean philogyny. The woodcut printed on the frontispiece of the Lamento di Olimpia, published by Stefano Rossetti in 1567 with a dedication to Isabella, contains a Sibylline philogynist message that provides a direct precedent for the much more explicitly pro-women statements that Casulana would make a few months later. The chapter analyzes how Casulana’s dedication draws on philogynist arguments that had been circulating in Italy for several decades, and how she set herself up as a living example of female excellence. Casulana’s dedication also had a more utilitarian purpose, that of gaining the support of the Medici in the lawsuit she was about to file against her husband for squandering their household’s money.

The introduction of this book articulates its central thesis: that Maddalena Casulana’s achievements are best understood as the product of a synergy between her exceptional talent and character and the intellectual context of the Querelle des femmes, which created an environment eager to support women’s creativity and value against the prevailing misogynistic ideology of the early modern period. It first traces Casulana’s presence in 18th- and 19th-century encyclopedias and then illustrates how she faded from musicological knowledge in the early twentieth century, only to be rediscovered in the late 1970s. It then lays out the analytical framework underpinning the study, which is grounded in a historicized feminist criticism informed by early modern pro-feminine discourses. Finally, the introduction delineates the three fundamental key concepts that inform the approach adopted in this study: philogyny, exemplarity, and imitation.