This chapter argues for the Italian Renaissance as a pivotal moment in women’s history. This was the first Western age in which secular women emerged in significant numbers as producers, as well as consumers, of high culture. It also witnessed the development of new ways of thinking about sex and gender, framed to counter traditional arguments for women’s inferiority to men. Like many Renaissance cultural innovations, the emergence of culturally active women was initially an elite phenomenon mainly limited to the princely courts, but practices like women’s writing later migrated down to lower strata of urban society. By the late sixteenth century, women writers were being joined by other species of virtuose such as singers, composers, actresses, painters, and other visual artists. The chapter argues that traditional periodizations of the Renaissance, which see the movement as ending in the mid sixteenth century, have led to a major underestimation of the degree to which women may be considered stakeholders in the movement alongside men.

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.

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.

This essay addresses three fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century women writers who composed erotic and satiric verse: the Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain, and the Scottish Gaelic poets, Iseabal Campbell, Countess of Argyll, and her daughter, Iseabal Ní Mheic Cailéan. Adopting an archipelagic feminist approach, Charnell-White locates these figures within the broader context of late medieval bardic culture in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, emphasising their high social status and family connections. While the poetry of Gwerful Mechain was highly regarded in her own time and a significant body of her work remains, far fewer poems by Iseabal Campbell and Iseabal Ni Mheic Cailéan survive; like Mechainߣs, however, they were written to be performed before specific audiences. The essay reads the poetry of all three as playfully reappropriating and subverting the formulaic misogynism typical of the male-authored verse in their bardic or coterie groups. In responding to the kind of anti-feminist motifs characteristic of the European tradition of the querelle des femmes, these poets challenge courtly ideals of women as chaste, silent, and obedient and present female sexuality in empowering terms.