Bologna, 2004. I am compiling the musical corpus for my doctoral dissertation. My eyes scan a long list of madrigals. Each one hints at hours of work: locating scattered ancient sources throughout Italy and beyond, transcribing, analyzing. Choices have to be made. My attention is caught by the name Maddalena Casulana. A woman? Curious. I am surprised to find her there, my musicological education in France having left me virtually ignorant about the history of women composers. I dismiss Casulana, perhaps feeling that no one would hold it against me. Later, I came to realize that this decision had left me with a lingering sense of unease.

If experience is the epistemological starting point of all research, then the moment I decided to exclude Casulana from my doctoral corpus is surely the foundation of this book. Feminist theory, women’s history, and critical musicology later helped me to understand the reasons behind this thoughtless decision, which I had believed to be purely pragmatic but was in fact deeply situated, as all scholarly practices are.Footnote ¹ The idea for this research then took shape when I discovered an intersection between music and proto-feminist thought in early modern Italy, with Casulana as its most outstanding representative.

Maddalena Casulana: Music Advocating for Women in Early Modern Italy delves into the groundbreaking life and work of the sixteenth-century Italian madrigalist Maddalena Casulana (ca 1535–ca 1590), the first woman to publish music under her own name. The book aims to show how such a pioneering figure could have emerged in mid-sixteenth-century Italy by contextualizing Casulana within her intellectual, artistic, and political milieu, one in which a number of individuals struggled to uphold the value of women against a pervasive and enduring misogyny. It argues that this pro-women environment created a propitious terrain in which Casulana could flourish, and that she, in turn, contributed to the defense of women by becoming an example of female worth and creativity. This book, therefore, considers Casulana as a nexus of the history of women composers, the history of feminism, and the history of the madrigal.

By signing her name to her first pieces in Venetian anthologies in 1566–1567, and even more so by publishing her Primo libro a4 in 1568, Casulana put an end to long-standing invisibility of women in musical sources, which dated back to the late thirteenth century. A brief survey of early music sources preserving pieces signed by women reveals how the publication of Casulana’s Primo libro a4 broke into a realm that had been male-dominated for centuries. While we possess a substantial corpus of medieval monophonic pieces by female composers – Kassia of Constantinople, Hildegard of Bingen, Beatritz de Dia – the presence of women in musical sources dwindles at the end of the thirteenth century with the spread of contrapuntal writing. This technique was taught primarily in ecclesiastical institutions and universities, and thus largely restricted to men. Women continued to compose, as evidenced by sporadic mentions in documentation, but their music either was not preserved or remained anonymous.Footnote ² Between the late thirteenth century and 1566, when Casulana published her very first madrigals, Gracia Baptista is the only known female composer whose music has survived with a secure attribution – a Spanish nun, Gracia Baptista published a hymn in a tablature collection by Luis Venegas de Henestrosa in 1557, but nothing else is known about her.Footnote ³

Casulana is not only the first woman to publish a book of music. She can legitimately be considered “our” (even if not “the”) first modern female composer, or at least the first whose substantial body of work has come down to us: two books of four-part madrigals (Scotto, 1568 and 1570), one book of five-part madrigals (Gardano, 1583), to which must be added two phantom books of spiritual madrigals, possibly published in the late 1580s by Giacomo Vincenti and now lost.Footnote ⁴ Casulana also made a name for herself by articulating a sharp critique of the misogyny that pervaded the intellectual circles of her time, using language that still resonates deeply in our contemporary feminist consciousness. In the dedication of her first book to Isabella de’ Medici, the daughter of the Duke of Tuscany, she bluntly denounced the presumption of men who considered themselves the sole “masters of the high gifts of intellect,” implicitly inviting women to follow her example. Casulana was a pioneer in this regard, as she was one of the few female voices that rose to publicly defend women against misogynistic attacks in sixteenth-century Italy. In doing so, she anticipated by several decades the moment when Italian women writers would enter the arena of what is now called the “Querelle des femmes,” the long-running debate between women’s detractors and their defenders in early modern Europe.Footnote ⁵

At a time when many are seeking to demasculinize the canon by rediscovering women’s musical heritage, it is not surprising that Casulana’s music and figure are of growing interest to scholars and musicians alike. However, the musicological literature focused on Casulana is still limited to a handful of articles, the historical foundations of which are largely based on the pioneering edition and historical work that Beatrice Pescerelli published in 1979.Footnote ⁶ In particular, Ellen D. Lerner, Thomasin LaMay, Joseph Willimann, and Peter Schubert, although they did not provide any additional archival or biographical data, did undertake an analytical work on Casulana’s music that Pescerelli had not yet begun to outline.Footnote ⁷ Casulana also made her way to less specialized audiences via encyclopedias in the 1980s,Footnote ⁸ then in widely distributed English textbooks from the late 1990s onward,Footnote ⁹ before tardily (and very discreetly) reaching other musicological territories, notably Germany and France.

Now a key figure in the history of women composers, and indeed in the history of music as a whole, Casulana was virtually unknown in the 1970s. A glance at the older literature reveals that her exclusion from musical knowledge is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, more akin to a passing eclipse. Casulana appears in the earliest eighteenth-century encyclopedias of music, in Johann Gottfried Walther’s Musicalisches Lexicon (1732) and Johann Andrea Fabricius’s Abriß einer allgemeinen Historie der Gelehrsamkeit (1754).Footnote ¹⁰ In the nineteenth century, this initial corpus of German encyclopedic work was augmented by contributions from French- and English-speaking scholars, such as John Sainsbury’s Dictionary of Musicians (1827) and François-Joseph Fétis’s Biographie universelle des musiciens (1835), both of which contain a few lines on Casulana.Footnote ¹¹ Casulana is also mentioned in the first historical synthesis on women composers, published by Arthur Elson in 1880. In his Woman’s Work in Music, Elson rightly identifies Casulana as the “first great name” in the history of women composers after the Middle Ages.Footnote ¹² Not surprisingly, Otto Ebel also devoted a short entry to Casulana in Women Composers: A Biographical Handbook of Woman’s Work in Music, published in London in 1902 and translated into French in 1910.Footnote ¹³ Following these early works by music writers, another encyclopedic tradition emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century that led to Casulana’s lasting disappearance from musicological knowledge. The key dates of this erasure can be identified by the publication of the major twentieth-century encyclopedias, all of which omitted mention of Casulana: George Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1900; Albert Lavignac’s Encyclopédie de la musique in 1913; Carlo Schmidl’s Dizionario universale dei musicisti in 1937; and the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (the volume devoted to entries beginning with the letter C was published in 1952). Like many women composers, Casulana was thus buried under what we now consider the cornerstones of professional musicology, whose emergence was accompanied by the drastic masculinization of the canon.Footnote ¹⁴ Her gradual rediscovery coincided with the significant wave of women’s studies that began in the 1970s and reached the shores of musicology from the 1980s onward.

Since the seminal research of Pescerelli, the history of early modern women musicians, the history of women, gender, and feminism, and the social history of sixteenth-century Italian music have made great strides. Access to literary, archival, and musical sources is now considerably facilitated, and advanced research tools and databases have made it possible to reel in fresh pieces of evidence. All this allows for a new reassessment of Casulana, which will hopefully fill a significant gap. Still, writing a monograph on Casulana remains exceptionally challenging due to the scarcity of historical documentation about her. It requires navigating through an archipelago of scattered sources that must be reconnected to gain a comprehensive understanding. Musically speaking, only two of her five books of madrigals have come down to us in their entirety, one of them only recently.Footnote ¹⁵ Until 2023, only Pescerelli’s edition was available, representing about a third of Casulana’s music: the complete Secondo libro a4 of 1570, and five pieces published in anthologies in 1566–1567, four of which were republished in the Primo libro a4 in 1568.Footnote ¹⁶ With Stras’s providential rediscovery of the missing Alto voice from the Primo libro a5, the publication of her edition in 2023, and the 2024 recording by the Fieri Consort, another third of Casulana’s madrigals has become accessible.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, the Primo libro a4 of 1568 still suffers from an important lacuna, since its Alto and Bass parts are lost. Four-fifths of the pieces were not included in better-preserved anthologies and remain incomplete. I have reconstructed the missing voices in collaboration with Marc Busnel, and the music was premiered in April 2025 by the ensemble Doulce Mémoire at the French festival Présence Compositrices. I am currently completing an open-access digital edition of the fully reconstructed Primo libro a4.Footnote ¹⁸ Of her two books of spiritual madrigals, not a single note has survived. Although our understanding of Casulana’s music is more complete than ever before, many shadows still remain.

From a historical and biographical point of view, it is extremely difficult to trace an individual trajectory in sixteenth-century sources when it comes to little-known people, as musicians almost always were. The difficulties are even greater when it comes to female musicians, who rarely appear with the rest of the musici in sixteenth-century Italian court registers, but are listed under other functions or hidden behind a husband, a father, a brother. Anyone writing about Casulana thus faces accumulating difficulties. She seems never to have been employed on a permanent basis by a court; her surname was subject to many variations and changes; and, at a time when mothers almost never appeared in filiations, she had no chance of featuring in the baptismal records of her children. Yet Casulana was far from being a woman “without history.” On the contrary, her life seems to have been tumultuous, and she was involved many times in episodes of “Great History” (such as wars, epidemics, and massacres). Moreover, Casulana’s vivid personality left traces in the extant documentation. Her life thus provides ample material for the reconstruction of a historical narrative, even if what we know necessarily remains fragmentary, incomplete, and at times conjectural.

This book builds on the research that has analyzed Casulana from a critical feminist standpoint (especially that of LaMay), but it historicizes this theoretical perspective by situating it within a broader historical arc.Footnote ¹⁹ To achieve this, it considers “feminism” in early modern terms, alongside contemporary medical discourses, classical rhetorical techniques, and cohorts of exemplary ancient matrons and allegorical figures. By historicizing the analytical tools of feminist criticism, this book aims to reaffirm their relevance for the study of ancient periods and to refute the “charges of anachronism and skepticism about the possibilities of political resistance” that Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez have rightly highlighted when it comes to gender history.Footnote ²⁰ My approach also resonates with that of Emily Wilbourne, who has rooted her critical analysis of race and slavery in seventeenth-century Medici music within the ancient concept of “razza” (lineage), unraveling “the ways in which anachronistic scholarly assumptions about race have concealed the workings of the early modern racial imaginary.”Footnote ²¹ However, I do not claim that my analytical framework is entirely historicist. Rather, I subscribe to what Nicole Loraux has termed a “controlled practice of anachronism.”Footnote ²² Regarding ancient Greek societies, Loraux, despite her aversion to universalist historical theories, asserts: “we had to share, in one way or another, something of their feelings and thoughts.”Footnote ²³ My analyses also entertain the hypothesis of a continuity between early modern writings in defense of women and contemporary feminist theories, and affirm the heuristic value of their hybridization.

Casulana is perhaps the figure who best embodies the convergence of the musical sphere and proto-feminist thought in early modern Italy, and it is from this perspective that I analyze her trajectory and her music. I argue that female exemplarity and discourses in defense of women were instrumental for Casulana’s empowerment. They created the necessary social, cultural, intellectual, and political conditions that allowed such a trailblazing figure to emerge. I examine her accomplishments as the outcome of a synergy between her extraordinary personality and talent and a milieu that was eager to support women’s creativity and value against the prevailing misogynistic ideology. This book therefore draws on two central and closely related notions: philogyny and exemplarity. By “philogyny,” I refer to the corpus of texts in defense of women that flourished in Italy between the end of the fifteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, the most intense period of the Italian Querelle des femmes. The word “philogyny” and its more common antonym “misogyny” have the primary advantage of their philological propriety, as both terms, which already existed in ancient Greek, were known in early modern Italy.Footnote ²⁴ Although scholars such as Joan Kelly, Constance Jordan, and Sarah Ross have not hesitated to speak of “Renaissance feminism,” philogynistic writings cannot always be described accurately with this term, as Virginia Cox has rightly pointed out.Footnote ²⁵ Even accepting a very broad view of feminism entirely disconnected from social struggles and assertive political claims, philogynistic thought, like the love of women, remains too protean to be equated with feminism, or even proto-feminism. It can range from a genuine critique of women’s condition, involving the deconstruction of the difference between men and women, to an encomiastic philogyny or a gallant gesture, or even a mere literary exercise. Moreover, Italian philogynistic writings were almost exclusively authored by men until the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the two foundational works of modern misogynistic and philogynistic thought were penned by one and the same author, Boccaccio. While Boccaccio’s Corbaccio fueled misogynistic invectives well into the seventeenth century, his De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women) was extensively plundered by defenders of women throughout the early modern period, as it formed the core of the corpus of exemplary illustrious women.Footnote ²⁶

The exemplum, an essential part of ancient and modern rhetoric, stands at the foundation of philogynistic thought.Footnote ²⁷ All treatises in defense of women rely on ancient and/or modern female examples. Beyond their memorial function, these illustrious exemplary women served to challenge misogynistic theses on female inferiority and were held up as precedents in all fields of activity and knowledge and for all moral virtues, as proofs by example. Accordingly, Casulana climbed on the shoulders of her illustrious predecessors before being held up as an example in her own right. Wendy Heller and Kelly Harness have analyzed how the great examples of illustrious women permeated the scenic musical repertoire in the seventeenth century, but the interactions of the female musicians themselves with the corpus of female exempla is a question that remains little explored.Footnote ²⁸ Casulana provides an excellent entry point for conducting such an inquiry, as female exemplarity was one of the major driving forces of her endeavors.

In a broader sense, exemplarity intersects with another central notion in madrigal studies that will also be discussed in these pages: imitation. Musical imitatio during the Renaissance has been studied extensively since the seminal writings of Howard Mayer Brown.Footnote ²⁹ The relevance of the concept of imitatio for analyzing Renaissance music has been widely debated and questioned.Footnote ³⁰ Imitatio, which refers to rhetoric and ancient models, was a term rarely used in this sense in Renaissance music theory. While it may be appropriate to speak of borrowing for the repertoire of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth centuries, imitation remains an extremely useful concept for a later and highly intertextual genre like the madrigal.Footnote ³¹ The term loses its philological incongruity for late sixteenth-century music, as several theorists used it to describe borrowings at the turn of the seventeenth century.Footnote ³² Moreover, imitation possesses a moral dimension that extends beyond strictly musical concerns, a nuance that is missing in the more neutral term “borrowing.”Footnote ³³ To imitate is to take as an example. Studies on musical imitation have rarely addressed the issue of exemplarity in the processes of imitation or borrowing.Footnote ³⁴ Discussing exemplarity involves questioning the status of the model person and the relationship between the imitator and the imitated. This issue is far from trivial in the case of Casulana. In analyzing the imitations of her madrigals, one can discern a resonance with the philogynistic question, revealing significant insights into her authorship and authority. Comparative analysis, a classic tool of madrigal studies, acquires new significance when viewed from the perspective of gender. The madrigalists who imitated Casulana’s music implicitly recognized her legitimacy as a composer and granted her a place within their artistic community. Musical imitation also establishes connections between individuals. When cross-referencing with other sources, intertextuality enables us to reconstruct the networks to which she belonged, the composers she knew, and those who were familiar with her music.

This book also undertakes an in-depth stylistic analysis of Casulana’s music, with some pages flirting with a formalism that occasionally deviates from the generally critical approach adopted throughout. Considering the current state of research on Casulana, I deemed it necessary to provide a comprehensive discussion of her output to reveal her compositional skills, which form the very foundation of her advocacy for women. In doing so, I also hope to address the lack of analysis of music by women composers that Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft have highlighted.Footnote ³⁵ However, because the genre of the madrigal is conceived as a signifying system largely subordinated to a poetic text, it is also fair to consider Casulana’s music as conveying a more articulated discourse on women’s issues. I contend that Casulana, who explicitly criticized misogyny through her words, may have also sought to say things with her music. In this respect, this book draws to some extent on the analyses of later music of women composers by Susan McClary and Marcia Citron, and it is sympathetic to their hermeneutic approach.Footnote ³⁶

The six chapters of the book roughly follow a chronological progression, but without sequencing Casulana’s trajectory into discrete episodes. Not only is the source material insufficient for that type of linear biographical narrative, but it is often necessary to move back and forth between different periods of Casulana’s life in order to interpret a source or support a hypothesis. Still, the book does begin with Casulana’s origins and end with her reception in the 1620s, with particular emphasis on the years 1566–1570 and the publication of her first two books.

Chapter 1 examines Casulana’s origins and her marital history. It investigates the way she acquired her various names and had to contend with patriarchal violence throughout her life, particularly in Siena during the siege that led to the fall of the Sienese Republic. It also shows how Casulana likely thrived early on in a Sienese environment that encouraged female literary creativity and celebrated women’s heroism and value. Chapter 2 addresses Casulana’s formation and growth as a musician and a composer. Through historical network analysis, it presents evidence that suggests Casulana was connected to Nicola Vicentino for a significant part of her life. Vicentino, the leading theorist of chromaticism in the mid-sixteenth century, was also a lifelong ally of female musicians. The chapter posits that Casulana established her initial clientelist network through Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, Vicentino’s powerful patron.

Chapter 3 puts forth hypotheses regarding Casulana’s musical networks at the outset of her publishing career and examines the potential motivations behind her decision to dedicate her first book to Isabella de’ Medici. The dedication of the Primo libro a4 demonstrates how Casulana was able to leverage arguments that had been pervading Italian philogynistic treatises for several decades to establish herself as a living example of feminine excellence. Chapter 4 analyzes the contrasting personae of Casulana that circulated at the time of the publication of her Primo libro a4: the morally and intellectually exemplary lady that appears in Antonio Molino’s Dilettevoli madrigali; the lascivious, courtesan-like woman penned by Giovanni Battista Maganza; and finally, the image of an erotically free woman that Casulana reveals through her own music.

Chapter 5 examines what is at the heart of Casulana’s plea for female intellectual excellence: her music. An analysis of her four-part madrigals from 1568 and 1570 reveals that they span the entire spectrum of the arioso style, from the most modest poetic recitations to the most advanced elements of the “new music,” including experimental chromaticism. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Casulana’s Primo libro a5 of 1583, a collection that softens the roughness of her earlier manner and fully embraces the new hybrid style. Chapter 6 focuses on the reception of Casulana and her music. After formulating some hypotheses regarding the philogynistic manner in which her music might have been heard and utilized, it analyzes how Casulana’s madrigals were adopted as models by her peers in the two decades following their publication. Finally, it traces how Casulana was incorporated into the corpus of illustrious women in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and how her example came to serve philogynistic discourses.

This book is as much an ending as it is a beginning. Much remains to be discovered about Casulana’s life, which will require time in the archives, a fresh perspective to ask new questions, and a good deal of luck. New pieces of evidence may fit more or less easily into the puzzle I put together in these pages, solidifying some parts of the picture and perhaps dismantling others. This study also leaves room for future research on Casulana’s music. Open access to a growing corpus of madrigals, the development of computational analysis tools, and the increasing dissemination of Casulana’s music through editions and recordings will likely allow new avenues of research to emerge. Beyond the possible continuation of historical and musicological research, this book invites us to revive the figure of Casulana for the here and now. Far from being limited to documentary value, the political significance of her exemplarity can transcend centuries and continue to resonate in our contemporary societies. In this sense, Casulana’s example not only adds another “first” to women’s history, but it can also serve today as a figure of identification and anchor the existence of female composers in the long term. It tells us of a musician who used the critique of misogyny to gain access to creation, recognition, and memory, to push the boundaries of her agency and that of other women who published music after her. It is my hope that Casulana will, once again, serve as an example.