Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara by Laurie Stras (review)

The musical ladies of Alfonso II d’Este’s illustrious concerto delle donne have long held a place of fascination in Western music history discourses. Lesser known, however, are the musical activities of Ferrara’s sixteenth-century women religious, including their interactions with the city’s secular court. While the musicological awareness of early modern convents is certainly increasing—thanks initially to foundational works by Craig Monson and Robert Kendrick, followed shortly by Colleen Reardon and more recently Janet Page—the majority of studies have focused on women religious from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth century in Bologna, Milan, Siena, and Vienna, leaving the musical women of Ferrara more or less untouched since Anthony Newcomb’s The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–1597.¹ Adding to this growing body of research and expanding upon Newcomb’s work is Laurie Stras’s much-anticipated monograph, in which the musical practices of Ferrara’s early modern convents are brought into dialogue with those of the secular noblewomen of the Este court. Stras organizes her text chronologically in nine chapters that follow the lives of the Este noblewomen and their dealings with the city’s convents. After a brief introduction to Ercole I’s and Eleonora d’Este’s fifteenth-century cultivation of Ferrara’s monastic spaces, Stras continues with Lucrezia Borgia (wife of Alfonso I d’Este) in the early sixteenth century through to the dissolution of the concerto delle donne and the devolution of Ferrara at the end of the 1590s. Throughout the narrative, Stras skillfully marries the sacred and profane while providing a musical backdrop to the complex political and social lives of the Este noblewomen who moved fluidly between Ferrara’s secular and sacred spaces.

The first chapter provides a general overview of convent life in early modern Ferrara, emphasizing the relationship of the Clarissan convent of Corpus Domini and the Augustinian convent San Vito with the Este court. Stras’s discussion of Suor Leonora d’Este (daughter of Alfonso I d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia) and her life at the convent of Corpus Domini is rife with documentation suggesting musical activities, including records of instruments, the presence of a pietra da contrapunto (a slate for counterpoint), and references to Leonora’s friendships with Gioseffo Zarlino, Nicola Vicentino, and Francesco Dalla Viola (30–35). Readers familiar with Stras’s fall 2017 article for the Journal of the American Musicological Society will recognize a similarity with this chapter.² Here, as in the article, Stras highlights the motets’ notated and implied ornamentation and advocates for Suor Leonora as one of their composers. Her reiteration and reuse of these arguments and evidence continue efforts to draw attention to this repertoire, for, as she rightly notes, the musical practices of early modern Ferrarese convents have been “heretofore all but silent to modern ears” (55). Also included in this chapter is Stras’s observation that the ornamentation styles present in the motets resemble those found in Luzzasco Luzzaschi’s later compositions for the concerto (Madrigali per cantare e sonare a uno, doi e tre soprani, 1601). This serves as a possible link between the musical activities of Ferrara’s sacred and secular spaces, a theme to which Stras continually refers.

In chapters 2 through 7, Stras alternates neatly between the secular Este court and Ferrara’s sacred institutions primarily by examining the ongoing rapport between Este Duchess Renée de Valois of France and her daughters Anna, Lucrezia, and Leonora d’Este with the convent of Corpus Domini and that of Duchess Margherita Gonzaga, third wife of Alfonso II d’Este, with the convent of San Vito. Always central to the discussion are noblewomen who, while marginalized in modern historiographies, played an integral role in the city’s musical life. Stras loosely groups these women into two generations of musica segreta performers: those belonging to the court of Lucrezia d’Este (Tarquinia Molza Porrina, Lucrezia and Isabella Bendidio, Leonora Sanvitale, and Barbara Sanseverina) and those associated with the...