This chapter considers how Casulana was perceived by her contemporaries. On the one hand, the epithalamiums she and Caterina Willaert composed for the wedding of William V of Bavaria and Renée of Lorraine (Munich, February 1568) may have been perceived as “feminine,” in that they were likely intended to lend a philogynist and philo-matrimonial ethos to the festivities, and, more generally, to construct an image of the Bavarian court as a refuge of the Muses. On the other hand, the numerous imitations of Casulana’s music show that she was by no means ghettoized by her male peers and that they did not erect a rigid barrier between her music and theirs. Finally, the chapter traces how Casulana’s example came to serve philogynist discourses by being incorporated into the corpus of women exempla in the first decades of the seventeenth century.

This chapter delves into Casulana’s family and marital history. It presents evidence that strongly supports the claim that Casulana was originally from Vicenza, and was born in the mid-1530s. She constructed her authorial name from the patronymic of her first Sienese husband, from whom she was separated in 1568, he living in Rome, she in the Veneto region. The name “Mezari” that appears in the sources at the end of her career was that of her second husband from Brescia, whom she likely married in Vicenza in 1579. Casulana probably married for the first time in the early 1550s and was in Siena with two small children during the violent siege that led to the fall of the Sienese Republic. Finally, this chapter places Casulana’s stay in Siena in the context of the currents of philogyny, female literary creativity, and exaltation of women’s heroism that characterized mid-sixteenth-century Sienese society.

This chapter analyzes what constitutes the core of Casulana’s plea for female intellectual excellence: her music. It shows that the stylistic elements that have sometimes been perceived as unusual are fully coherent when placed in the context of the mid-century madrigal. While adhering to a miniature aesthetic, her four-part madrigals of 1568 and 1570 encompass the full range of the arioso style, from the most modest poetic recitations to the most advanced chromatic, modal, and harmonic experiments, including highly theatrical forms of declamation. These stylistic features place her fully within the “nuova maniera,” the “new music” developed not only by Vicentino but also by Monte, Rossetti, Lasso, Rore, Wert, and others during the same period. With her 1583 Primo libro a5, Casulana fully embraces the new hybrid style. She softens the roughness of her earlier manner to develop more radiant and euphonious textures, while also displaying greater contrapuntal inventiveness.

This chapter examines the construction of Casulana’s persona in the late 1560s. It draws on three sources that simultaneously conveyed antagonistic images of Casulana in the public arena: the Dilettevoli madrigali by her student Antonio Molino (1568); “L’Ava di Magagnò,” a poem in Vicenza dialect by Giovanni Battista Maganza (1569); and “A caso un giorno,” a madrigal that Casulana published in her Primo libro a4 (1568). While Molino constructs a poetic and musical image of a morally and intellectually exemplary woman, borrowing his rhetorical strategies from philogynist discourses, Maganza presents Casulana as a hypersexualized body freely available to male desire, implicitly equating her to a courtesan. Casulana, for her part, seizes the semiotic opacity of the music, and perhaps also the sexual freedom that she may have experienced at the time, to offer us one of the rarest representations of female carnal jouissance conceived by a woman in sixteenth-century Italy.