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Gender, sexuality, and early music.

Article Excerpt
Edited by Todd M. Borgerding. (Criticism and Analysis of Early Music.) New York: Routledge, 2002. [xiii, 297 p. ISBN 0-8153-3394-3. $95.] Index.

This volume of collected essays reflects the growing emphasis on and importance of feminism, gender, and queer studies in musicology. After more than two decades of research in the so-called "new musicology," often by some of the brightest and most imaginative musicologists in the field, these tendencies can no longer be ignored of considered foreign to the mainstream of musico-historical studies. Indeed, to the readers of this important collection, the point should seem obvious.

Donna G. Cardamone's "Isabella Medici-Orsini: A Portrait of Self-Affirmation" explores the brilliant life and tragic murder of Isabella de' Medici through the lens of her role as an artistic Florentine woman. In a clever twist on the extensive research on musicmaking in Ferrara over the last few decades (by Anthony Newcomb, Elio Durante, and Arma Martellotti, among others), Nina Treadwell shifts the emphasis away from Duke Alfonso II d'Este to his third wife, the Duchess Margherita Gonzaga, and her contributions to entertainment at the Ferrarese court. Thomasin LaMay, in "Madalena [sic] Casulana"--an essay that dovetails nicely with the subject of the Cardamone contribution (Isabella de' Medici as patron of the composer treated here)--delves into the contemporary and current perception and changing status of the madrigalist Maddalena Casulana. (Some readers may find that the interpolated...

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