Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:12:20.883Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Talking back: the female voice in Il ballo delle ingrate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Bonnie Gordon
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Suzanne Cusick has recently argued that the musical processes of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna purge Ariadne of passion and desire in order symbolically to make her a good wife. Written for the 1608 marriage of Francesco Gonzaga to Margherita de Savoy, the lament, according to Cusick, reflects Renaissance marriage and gender ideologies that were determined to silence women and put them in their place. Ariadne has dared to choose her own mate and therefore must suffer. Her fate is dramatised by her uncharacteristically long lament, which enacts the transformation women experienced as they gave up their own desires to the constraining institution of marriage. Cusick's argument is in line with recent critical tendencies to read early modern culture in terms of the opposition between passive female silence and active male desire.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 1 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Earlier versions of this essay were read at the 1996 meeting of the American Musicological Society and the 1997 meeting of the International Musicological Society. I want to thank Elyse Carter, Eric Chafe, Jeff Kallberg, Nathan Macbrien, Roger Parker, Gabriella Safran, Julie Schutzman and Gary Tomlinson for patient and astute readings of many drafts. Also many thanks to die Folger Library's Subjectivity and Sexuality Colloquium for their comments.Google Scholar

2 Cusick, Suzanne, ‘ “There Was Not One Lady Who Failed to Shed a Tear”: Arianna's Lament and the Construction of Modern Womanhood,’ Early Music, 22/1 (02 1994), 21–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Lipking, Lawrence argues that abandoned women also abandon convention, decorum, and control, subverting authority and propriety. See his Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar

4 The primary and secondary source literature on marriage manuals and conduct books is vast. One oft-quoted source is Barbaro's, Francesco ‘On Wifely Duties,’ in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. Witt, R. E., Welles, E. B. and Kohl, B. G. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 211–254.Google Scholar For critical studies of this literature, see Kelso, Ruth, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956),Google Scholar and Benson, Pamela Joseph, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park: Penn. State Press, 1992).Google Scholar For a discussion of the relationship between conduct books and Venetian opera see Heller, Wendy, ‘Chastity, Heroism, and Allure: Women in the Opera of Seventeenth-Century Venice,’ Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University (1995).Google Scholar

5 Fenlon, Iain, ‘The Origins of the Staged Ballo,’ in Con che soavità: Studies in Italian Opera, Song and Dance, 1580–1740, ed. Carter, Tim and Fenlon, Iain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 24.Google Scholar

6 Eric Chafe calls attention to the G-minor tonality of Venus's plea in which the goddess of love reminds Pluto of her role in his conquest of Proserpina. This emphasis on G minor also recalls Proserpina's sympathy for Orpheus in Act IV of L'Orfeo. See Chafe, , Monteverdi's Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 163.Google Scholar

7 Pamela Jones argues that Cesare Negri, in his early seventeenth-century treatises on dancing the ‘entrata,’ separates social dance from that of the dramatic balli. See ‘Spectacle in Milan: Cesare Negri's Torch Dances,’ Early Music 14 (1986), 182–98. Iain Fenlon has suggested that Il ballo delle ingrate's ballet music, six distinct sections with contrasting rhythms, is based on a model for seventeenth-century large-scale dance spectacles first developed by Cavalieri. See ‘The Origins of the Staged Ballo’ (see n.5), 17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Gagliano's Dafne, also commissioned for this wedding, was staged a few months earlier in order to entertain the guests during the complicated negotiations leading up to this political marriage. My Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Singing the Female Body: Monteverdi, Subjectivity, Sensuality,’ (University of Pennsylvania, 1998), argues that in keeping with the goals of marriage, the 1608 festivities overflow with exemplary tales designed to circumscribe female behaviour. Like other discourses that managed women, the Mantuan productions inscribed rules governing female bodies and behaviours. They staged unruly women only to transform them into chaste figures, a staging that through identification disciplined the women in the audience.Google Scholar

9 Fabbri, Paolo, Monteverdi, trans. Carter, Tim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Monteverdi, Claudio, Madrigali guerierri e amorosi, ed. Malipiero, Gian Francesco, trans. Appelbaum, Stanley (New York: Dover, 1990), xiv.Google Scholar

11 Ovid, , Metamorphoses Books IX–XV, ed. and trans. Goold, G. P. and Miller, Frank Justus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 335.Google Scholar

12 For the classic discussion of Boccaccio's reception in die Renaissance and in particular for Dolce's biographical sketch introducing his edition of Boccaccio, see Solerti, Angelo, Le Vite; di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio Scritto Fino al Secola Decimosesto (Milan: Vallardi, 1904), 720–22.Google Scholar

13 Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron, trans. McWilliam, G. H. (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1972), 419.Google Scholar

14 Decameron, 424.Google Scholar

15 Boccaccio's gory rendition of Nastagio degli Onesti appears on Botticelli's wedding panels from the mid-1480s depicting the knight chasing a naked lady. They were commissioned in 1483 for the marriage of Lucrezia di Piero Bini and Gianonozzo Pucci, a cousin of the Medici. For a discussion of these panels see WofFord, Susan L., ‘The Social Aesthetics of Rape: Closural Violence in Boccaccio and Botticelli,’ in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. Ferguson, Margaret W., Pigman, G. W., Rebborn, Wayne A. and Quint, David III (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Text Studies, 1992), 191–229.Google Scholar

16 Positioning Ariadne's plight as a cautionary tale for other similarly tempted women, Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara's Italian version of the Metamorphoses includes a telling introduction by Gioseppe Orologgi: ‘Let the story of Arianna be a document to incautious women that they should not wish to believe the promises of those who appear to love them, because they run the risk of throwing themselves into the arms of faithless and ungrateful young men, by whom they are, with greatest infamy, often ruined.’ Cusick suggests that the ladies would have known Ariadne's story through Orologgi. I have quoted Orologgi from Cusick (see n. 2), 24. In addition, Fabbri suggests that Rinuccini probably drew most heavily on the same source, since it includes a long extension of Ariadne's abandonment. Anguilara's 1561 edition, entitled Il Metamorfose di Ovidio, was reprinted sixteen times between 1561 and 1607.Google Scholar

17 Cusick, , (see n. 2), 23.Google Scholar

18 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century musical productions tend to make musico-rhetorical distinctions between genders and between chaste and lascivious women. For an informative discussion of the kinds of the musico-rhetorical distinctions between genders in Monteverdi's music, see McClary, Susan, ‘Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi's Dramatic Music,’ this journal, 1 (1989), 203–23.Google Scholar For a discussion of the ways that song was deployed by female characters in Venetian opera, see Carter, Tim, ‘In Love's Harmonious Consort? Penelope and the Interpretation of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria,’ this journal, 5 (1993), 1–16.Google ScholarSee also Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminace: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,’ Music and Letters 14 (1993), 343–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Cusick, (see n. 2 ), 30. Cusick argues that Ariadne's passionate self and her disciplined self are represented in the internal conflicts of the lament's opening phrase. For her, the musical processes of that phrase represent the purging of Ariadne's passion.Google Scholar

20 I want to thank Suzanne Cusick for pointing out in her response to the version of this paper delivered at the fall 1996 meeting of the American Musicological Society that all the women in these productions sin against patriarchy.Google Scholar

21 For a discussion of the mythological rhetoric of the 1608 festivities see Gordon, Bonnie, ‘Burning Fire, Gaping Mouths, and Weeping Women: Spectacles for a 1608 Mantuan Wedding’ in ‘Singing the Female Body’ (see n. 8). For the classic discussion of Renaissance readings of mythology,Google Scholar see Seznec, Jean, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Arts, ed. Sessions, Barbara F. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 229–62.Google Scholar

22 According to Fabbri, the lines, ‘O Barbara fierezza,/ una io ne vidi (e potrei dirme il nome)’ [O Barbarous pride,/ I saw one (and I could say her name)], allude to Barbara Sanseverino, Countess of Sala. Il ballo delle ingrate was printed in Monteverdi's eighth book of madrigals, published in 1638. The published version refers to the kingdom on the Danube, not Mantua. Monteverdi's notes to the 1638 edition instruct Pluto to ‘stop in mid-course and address the Princesses and ladies present in the fashion described in the text.’ Notations in the score read, ‘They dance the ballet up to the halfway point. Pluto assumes a noble stance and, turning to the Princesses and ladies, says…’ Fabbri, Monteverdi (see n. 9), 99.Google Scholar

23 Ovid, , Metamorphoses Books I–VIII, rev. edn. ed. Goold, G. P., trans. Miller, Frank Justus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 419.Google Scholar

24 Ovid, , Heroides and Amores, trans. Showerman, Grant, ed. Warmington, E. H. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), 123.Google Scholar

25 In a devious version of this paradigm, Jove turns his illicit love object into a glorious white heifer when his wife approaches the site of their liaison. Unlike the other women, she is ultimately returned to her human form.Google Scholar

26 The position that I take in this section reflects the influence of Lynn Enterline, ‘ “You speak a language that I understand not”: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), 17–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Reading Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale as a rewriting of the Pygmalion myth, she argues that the play follows Ovid and Petrarch in ascribing to the female voice an unsettling power. She also discusses the Ovidian roots of Petrarchan conventions. For a detailed discussion of Petrarch's complicated relationship to Ovid see Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Metamorphoses, (see n. 23), 41.Google Scholar

28 Metamorphoses, 53.Google Scholar

29 Fabbri, (see n. 9 ), 91.Google Scholar

30 Costumes carried enormous symbolic power in early modern theatre. See Stallybrass, Peter, ‘Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage,’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Quilligan, Maureen, Stallybrass, Peter and de Grazia, Margreta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 289–337.Google Scholar

31 Ariadne also undergoes transformation. Her betrothal to Bacchus moves her to the heavens where she lights up the sky and presumably enters a life of excess as the wife of Bacchus. For an interesting discussion of Renaissance understandings of the process of death and its similarities to orgasm, see Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996).Google Scholar

32 Enterline (see n. 26). Barkan, Leonard, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

33 Follino, , as quoted in Fabbri (see n. 9), 91.Google Scholar

34 See Fenlon, (see n. 5), 15.Google Scholar

35 Fenlon, suggests that Il ballo delle ingrate marks the high-point of seventeenth-century spectacle dance performances, which he says acquired their generic form with the 1589 wedding production of Cavalieri's final ballet, La Pellegrina. For more on the court ballet as a genre and especially on its French influences,Google Scholar see Saslow, James M., The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996);Google Scholar and Fenlon, Iain, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).Google Scholar Anthony Newcomb suggests that the French ballet de cour influenced the development of the Dancing Duchesses of Ferrara. Considering the artistic cross-pollination between Italian courts, it is more than likely that ballets at Mantua also carried traces of French dance. See Newcomb, Anthony, The Madrigal at Ferrara (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).Google Scholar For information on European dance in general, see Little, Meredith Elias, ‘Recent Research in European Dance, 1400–1800,’ Early Music, 14 (1986), 331–40;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFranco, Mark, Dance As Text Ideologies of the Baroque Body (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993);Google Scholar and Neville, Jennifer, ‘The Italian Ballo as Described in Fifteenth Century Dance Treatises,’ Studies in Music, Australia, 18 (1984), 38–51.Google Scholar

36 Ovid also dismembers his women. For example, Apollo's erotic glance at Dafne effectively takes apart his love object, objectifying each part as an individual entity: hair, eyes gleaming like stars, and a sensuous mouth.Google Scholar

37 Vickers, Nancy, ‘Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme,’ Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 265–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Freccero, John, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel,’ in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Parker, Patricia and Quint, David, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 29.Google Scholar

39 Elucidating the Ovidian roots of Petrarch's representational strategies, Vickers examines canzone 23, a poem in which Petrarch takes on Actaeon's voice. She argues that the poet's anxiety about seeing Laura's whole body emerges because he associates himself with Actaeon, whose forbidden encounter with Diana led to dismemberment and immobilisation. Vickers (see n. 37), 273.Google Scholar

40 Belsey, Catherine, ‘Desire's Excess and the English Renaissance Theatre: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello,’ in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Zimmerman, Susan (New York: Routledge, 1992), 66.Google Scholar

41 Enterline, Lynn, ‘Embodied Voices: Petrarch Reading (Himself Reading) Ovid,’ in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Finucci, Valerie and Schwartz, Regina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 124.Google Scholar

42 Vickers (see n. 37). Also see Cropper, Elizabeth, ‘The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture,’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modem Europe. ed. Quilligan, Maureen, Vickers, Nancy J. and Ferguson, Margaret W. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 175–91.Google Scholar

43 The literature exploring the influences on and of Petrarch's representational strategies is vast. For discussions with a similar theoretical stance to this one, see Enterline, Lynn (see n. 41), and Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). Both of these scholars also discuss the influence of Augustine on Petrarch, particularly with respect to the origin of language in desire.Google Scholar

44 Within neoplatonic cosmologies, song and the spirit had a special magnetic affinity for one another, turning song almost into a living thing. See Tomlinson, Gary, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 101–45.Google Scholar

45 The ‘Addio per sempre’ setting recalls in its harmonic progression the opening to ‘Si ch'io vorrei morire’, one of Monteverdi's most explicitly erotic madrigals published in the fourth book. Perhaps by giving the ingrate a musical gesture explicitly associated with orgasm in another piece, Monteverdi imbued her with the erotic desire she refused in life. I have written elsewhere about the erotics of that madrigal. See ‘Singing the Female Body’ (see n. 8), Chapter Three.Google Scholar

46 Stevens, Denis, The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 117.Google Scholar

47 The ingrate's harmony differs slightly from Ariadne's. The bass C is held for five bars in the ingrate's lament, providing a less directed and more harmonically static feel.Google Scholar

48 Metamorphoses, XI (see n. 11), 121.Google Scholar

49 Metamorphoses, III (see n. 23), 139.Google Scholar

50 See canzone 167 in Petrarch, Francesco, Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime sparse’ and Other Lyrics, trans, and ed. Durling, Robert M. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 312.Google Scholar

51 Petrarch, , canzone 167, Petrarch's Lyric Poems, 312.Google Scholar

52 Petrarch, , canzone, 207, Petrarch's Lyric Poems, 360.Google Scholar

53 Petrarch, , canzone, 78, Petrarch's Lyric Poems, 178.Google Scholar

54 Petrarch, , canzone, 23, Petrarch's Lyric Poems, 64–5.Google Scholar

55 Petrarch, , canzone 23, Petrarch's Lyric Poems. 63–5.Google Scholar

56 Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi (see n. 10), xviii.Google Scholar

57 Follino, , as quoted in Fabbri (see n. 9), 89.Google Scholar

58 Follino, , in Fabbri, 92.Google Scholar

59 Jacques Ferrand, a French medical philosopher writing in the mid-seventeenth century, is here drawing on Aristotle's famous dictum. See Ferrand, , A Treatise On Loveskkness, ed. Beecher, David A. and Ciavolella, Massimo (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 311.Google ScholarAristotle, , Generation of Animals, ed. Peck, A. L. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990), bk. 1, ch. 20, 103.Google Scholar

60 Castiglione, Baldassarre, The Book of The Courtier (1528), trans. Bull, George (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 217.Google Scholar

61 Here I refer to the many conduct books and debates on women that appeared from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Castiglione's famous Il libro del cortegiano is just one representative work among many. Much work has already been done on these discursive battles over women's bodies. For accounts that take these ‘etiquette books’ as mostly didactic, see Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medieval Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For accounts that treat conduct books more as literature and look closely at cultural contexts, see Jordan, Constance, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Text and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar and Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women's Lyrics,’ in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Armstrong, Nancy and Tennenhouse, Leonard (New York: Methuen, 1987), 39–73.Google Scholar

62 Barbaro (see n. 4), 204.Google Scholar

63 Barbarod, 205.Google Scholar

64 Barbaro, 205.Google Scholar

65 Guazzo, Stefano, La Civil Conversation (1575), ed. Quondam, Amadeo (Modena: Panini, 1993), 211–33.Google Scholar

66 Ferrand (see n. 59), 264.Google Scholar

67 Castiglione (see n. 60), 212.Google Scholar

68 Castiglione, 212.Google Scholar

69 Laura Macy suggests that late sixteenth-century madrigals, especially as depicted in Doni's dialogues, imitated good conversation. Macy, Laura, ‘Speaking of Sex: Metaphor and Performance in the Italian Madrigal,’ Journal of Musicology, 14/1 (1996), 1–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70 As translated in Tomlinson, Gary, ed., Strunk's Source Readings in Music History, vol. III (New York: Norton, 1998), 70.Google Scholar

71 Letter to Messer Ambrogio De Gli Eusebi, Venice, 1 June 1537: ‘Take a woman for a mistress but poetry for a wife.’ Selected Letters of Aretino, trans. Bull, George (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1976).Google ScholarAretino, Lettere, ed. Procaceioli, Paolo (Rome: Salerno, 1992), 204.Google Scholar

72 This reliance on humoral medicine is part of the Renaissance humanist immersion in ancient texts of all kinds. The humanist recovery of ancient texts stimulated extensive interest in medical scholars, who made many translations, commentaries and indices of ancient sources, including Galen, Hippocrates, Soranus, Avicenna and Heraphalus. For comprehensive studies of the impact of ancient medical practice on medieval and Renaissance Europe, see Siraisi, Nancy G., Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);CrossRefGoogle ScholarSiraisi, , Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987);CrossRefGoogle ScholarMaclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medieval Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Zanier, Giancarlo, ‘Platonic Trends in Renaissance Medicine,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), 509–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

73 Heraphalus supposedly discovered the ovaries in the third century. Hippocrates, , The Medical Works of Hippocrates, ed. Chadwick, John and Mann, W. N. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 217.Google Scholar

74 Galen, , On The Natural Faculties, trans. Brock, Arthur John (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), 227 and 229.Google Scholar

75 Hippocrates (see n. 73), 262.Google Scholar

76 Ferrand, (see n. 59), 294.Google Scholar

77 Ferrand, 263.Google Scholar

78 Bakhtin connects grotesque figures to the social body by suggesting that they are universal representations of all the people. While the parallels between the mouth of hell and Bakhtin's grotesque orifices are clear, it is crucial to move beyond Bakhtin's gender-blind fascination with the mouth. Bakhtin erases the gendered implications of this imagery, and then proceeds categorically to ignore women by positing the grotesque body as implicitly female. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Helene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

79 Paster, Gail Kern, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and The Disciplines of Shame in Early Modem England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 25.Google Scholar

80 Soranus, , Gynecology, trans. Temkin, Owsei (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 17.Google Scholar

81 Soranus, 83.Google Scholar

82 Isidor of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive Originum, trans. Lindsay, W. W. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 102.Google Scholar

83 Pare, Ambroise, Of Monsters and Marvels (1573), trans. Pallister, Janis L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5.Google Scholar

84 Fiertz, Markus, Girolamo Cardano, trans. Niman, Helya (Boston: Burkhauser, 1983), 99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

85 Ficino, Marsilio, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love, trans. Jayne, Sears (Dallas: Spring Publications, Inc., 1985), 161.Google Scholar

86 Ficino, , 160.Google Scholar

87 Soranus, (see n. 80), 19.Google Scholar

88 Soranus, , 133.Google Scholar

89 As quoted from Hippocratic gynaecology in Hanson, Ann and Armstrong, David, ‘The Virgin's Voice and Neck: Aeschylus, Agammemnon 245 and Other Texts,’ British Institute of Classical Studies, 33 (1986), 99. The authors suggest that ancient Greek ideas about the physical signs of virginity stemmed from folk belief and held sway, along with Galenic medicine, well into the seventeenth century.Google Scholar

90 Hanson, and Armstrong, , 97.Google Scholar

91 Hanson, and Armstrong, , 98.Google Scholar

92 Galen, , On Semen, trans. De Lacy, Phillip (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 52.Google Scholar

93 As translated by Tallmadge, Margaret May in her Galen On The Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 650.Google Scholar

94 Shah, Mazhar H., The General Principles of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine (Karachi: Naveed Clinic, 1966), 343.Google Scholar

95 Ferrand, (see n. 59), 263.Google Scholar

96 Furley, David J. and Wilkie, J. S., Galen On Respiration and The Arteries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

97 I began thinking about the importance of the temperate nature of singing as a result of Suzanne Cusick's spring 1995 talk at the University of Pennsylvania, entitled ‘On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex.’ The excess warmth needed to produce a good voice paralleles the excess warmth of erotic desire.Google Scholar

98 Soranus, (see n. 80), 29.Google Scholar

99 Lacqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google ScholarGreenblatt, Stephen, ‘Fiction and Friction,‘ in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66–94.Google Scholar

100 As cited in Lacqueur, 102.Google Scholar

101 Rosand, Ellen, ‘Barbara Strozzi, Virtuosissima Cantatrice: The Composer's Voice‘, Journal of the American Muskological Society, 31 (1978), 241–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

102 Cusick, Suzanne has argued that Artusi uses the singers' overly sexualised bodies to denigrate Monteverdi's music. She suggests that this rhetoric stressed the inherently feminising power of its sounds. See her ‘Gendering Modern Music: Thoughts on the Artusi Controversy,’ Journal of the American Musicological Society, 46 (1993), 10–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

103 Fabbri, (see n. 9), 47.Google Scholar

104 See Macy, (see n. 69) for a discussion of madrigalian uses of this metaphor.Google Scholar

105 The literature on the seconda prattica is large. See, for example, Arnold, Dennis, ‘Seconda Prattica: A Background to Monteverdi's Madrigals,’ Music and Letters, 38 (1957), 341–52; and Fabbri (see n. 9).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

106 Barbara Johnson makes an interesting psychoanalytic argument about an aesthetic of female silence that allows male authors to appropriate female muteness as an aesthetic trophy. She suggests that female silence about pleasure and violation collapses the two into one another. See ‘Muteness Envy,’ in Human, All Too Human, ed. Fuss, Diana (New York: Routledge, 1996), 131–48.Google Scholar

107 Fabbri (see n. 9 ), 86.Google Scholar

108 Fabbri, 92. fabbri, VZ.Google Scholar

109 Ferrand (see n. 59), 278.Google Scholar

110 Cusick (see n. 2 ), 22.Google Scholar