Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music (review)

Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music is a collection of ten essays with an introduction by the editor, Todd M. Borgerding (who also contributes an essay), and a postscript by Suzanne Cusick. The book includes contributions by younger writers as well as more established scholars, most of whom are musicologists by training. As its title indicates, the collection brings perspectives on gender and sexuality to bear on European musical life from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. The essays seem to be organized according to the linguistic or regional tradition of music they consider, with seven essays on Italian music followed by three studies of French and Netherlandish music.

At the heart of many of the essays in this collection is a sustained attention to the presence or deferral of violence in European music and musicians' lives before the modern period. As the collection's title suggests, much of this violence is gender based, as in the still-startling murder by strangulation of the singer and musical patron Isabella de'Medici in 1576. As its opening gambit, Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music gives us Donna G. Cardomone's vivid chronicle ("Isabella Medici-Orsini: A Portrait of Self-Affirmation") of the violence committed against Isabella by her estranged husband, Paolo Giordano Orsino, and the artistic strategies by which she sought and provisionally gained power. While the dramatic nature of this chapter's central event sets it apart from the rest of the collection, Cardomone's inaugural piece does establish the tone of urgency that marks many of these essays. One senses that the stakes are high for some of the authors whose work is collected here, and while this strategy can make for compelling, even discipline-changing scholarship, it also bears some serious challenges that the collection does not universally overcome.

Among the essays organized around gender matters, three are biographical studies. The essays by Cardamone, Thomasin LaMay, and Liane Curtis approach the artistic lives of Isabella de'Medici, Madalena Casulana, and Christine de Pizan, respectively, from an assumption that the three women negotiated the gender identities available to them with the aim of obtaining greater personal freedom. As this might indicate, each of the essays tends (to different extents) to assume an essentially modern subject that is potentially accessible to us through her life traces and through the authors' own understandings of women's struggles against gender-based oppression. Curtis's essay, "Christine de Pizan and 'Dueil Angoisseux,'" is the most successful of the three, and this is due in part to her evident concern that we adjust our questions to the contours of past cultures, rather than the other way around. Medievalists, particularly those hardy few who engage in biography, are in general forced to be more aware of historiography because of the acute challenges presented by their often limited historical information and the strikingly different cultural conditions of their subjects' lives. Medievalists who study women or who approach the period from a feminist perspective have an even more difficult task, since medieval historiography has been so thoroughly organized around masculine social and political structures and male life patterns. As Curtis notes, medieval "music, with its systems of court and church patronage, and with its need for specialized training, often seems to exclude women," yet she argues that we nevertheless "need to imagine that they contributed directly as well as indirectly, that music surviving anonymously may indeed be the product of women composers, and that music, whether by known or unknown composers, was influenced by an abstracted feminine ideal" (276). Curtis's approach is far from rigidly historicist, and this is all to the good. Instead, she balances an awareness of the distinctive performance cultures, genres, and power structures of the period with a healthy distrust of its received historiography and a willingness to carefully enlist "imagination" in order to reintroduce women into medieval music history. Her resulting suggestions for future scholarship, while not entirely new, are nonetheless quite promising.

The "deferral of violence" that I alluded to above is at...