Musical composition in the Middle Ages involved many processes far removed from what is understood to constitute the subject in the twenty-first century. Whether one considers men or women in the medieval period, it makes the greatest sense to speak about musical production across a broad spectrum of activities including: singing within communities; teaching and learning music (most often through singing); copying and/or commissioning musical, theoretical, and liturgical texts; setting preexisting pieces with new texts (the most common compositional process in Western Europe); recombining older musical materials in new ways; adapting new music or texts (or both) to preexisting circumstances; and lastly introducing completely new pieces or bits of pieces, usually within the context of preexisting materials.1 Scholars have known for decades that women had agency in all these categories; each of them required musical knowledge and creativity.2 All these activities took place within cultural and historical frameworks that conditioned the way music made by, for and about women was received and interpreted.3
Much of this chapter focuses on Europe in the Latin Middle Ages (c. 800–1500), the area of my expertise, wherein at least some of what survives was produced by or under the auspices of women themselves. There are many difficulties in writing about women’s production of musical materials even in this comparatively well-documented period and region. Much of the evidence was prepared by, for, or with men, even though women and their actions are the subjects or otherwise connected to the evidence.4 Consequently, men’s views of women and their music-making inevitably form part of the larger picture outlined in what follows. Gender is at stake, however one defines this category of study.5 Recent developments in medieval musicology also complicate this undertaking: sound studies and investigations of voice, vocality, and even of noise stand ready to challenge traditional views at every turn.6 In addition much new evidence has been recently uncovered concerning women’s musical agency in many spheres.
Musical Stereotypes and Polarities
Medieval views of women’s voices and their production of music fall generally into two camps: women and their music-making may relate on the one hand to sirens and sinners or on the other hand to holiness and saints. There is often not much in between, at least in the medieval West. That siren studies is now a recognized area demonstrates how important the topic has become in recent decades.7 On the other side of the spectrum, hagiography, especially Mariology, has become another favoured area of work for medieval musicologists.8 So to compare these polarized views of women and their associations with music within both spheres is foundational, yet scholars are especially interested in breaking down the binary whenever possible (see Magdalene studies, mentioned later).
Sirens and Sinners
Siren studies traditionally begin with the core text found in Book 12 of the Odyssey. Warned by Circe against the sirens who will ‘beguile with clear-voiced song’, Odysseus warms wax, kneads it, stuffs his comrades’ ears with it, then bids them tie him fast to the mast of the ship, not to loosen him no matter how he pleads. And indeed, the sirens then sing to him to come hither. Their powerful, seductive song would have drawn the sailors to their deaths, as many renderings in medieval art depict.9 The nature, gender, and number of the mythical creatures changed over time, settling to women who were either half fish or half bird, and were three in number. In addition to singing, there were musical instruments involved, and these, too, depended on the culture receiving the story.10
The music made by the mythical sirens, and its meanings, were reinterpreted constantly by both pagan and Christian authorities in the Middle Ages; usually women, and the sounds they made were linked to luxury and deceit, and to a need to protect men against the evil female influences. This was true even when the music was praised for its skill and beauty; for some theologians, the sirens’ song stood in for heretical ideas that could lead to error and death. Ulysses lashed to the mast became an allegory for Christ on the Cross, who suffered and whose actions saved others.11 The highly influential tract by the Physiologus, translated from Greek into Latin before 600, was eventually adapted to constitute the basic text of the bestiary, with additions (primarily from Isidore).12 Within the widespread tradition of the bestiary, which came to be used for moral instruction in the later Middle Ages, the sirens and their song were allegories for the wanton, lascivious, and lethal behaviour that could be inspired by women.13 Although there are numerous depictions of sirens in the visual arts and in literature of the Middle Ages, many holding instruments and singing, and their song was much referenced, actual representations of the sirens’ song in music are rare. This beguiling women’s music thus stands for an imagined sound, too frightening to be mimicked or recreated, but ever present in its potential to destroy.
When sirens’ singing is evoked, then, the reader is directed to an area of the imagination that has no clear overlap with perception or memory, but is instead made up of fantasies, fears, and desires. Such a call to imagine operates like hyperbole in rhetoric, knowing no limit: we are supposed to imagine something more beautiful, more appealing, or more dangerous than we could have expected to imagine.14
A parallel to the sound of the sirens is found in the speech of Eve. The nature of humankind and all women was dramatically made manifest in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as found in the legend of the Fall in Genesis 3, especially at the moment when Eve took fruit from the forbidden tree in the midst of Paradise, and gave it to her companion Adam: ‘And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband who did eat.’ Condemnation of the daughters of disobedient Eve runs like an ever-flowing stream from this action, accruing rich and plentiful sediment. The early Christian theologian Tertullian (c. 155–after 220) began his treatise on women’s clothing by emphasizing the destructive power and longevity of Eve’s sin, passed on from one woman to another: ‘Do you not believe that you are [each] an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times and so it is necessary that the guilt should live on, also.’ Other writers related Eve’s sin to sexuality and seduction, making her a kind of siren who drew Adam and all his race to death. In Christian theology, Eve and her voice of seduction, sexuality, and death are countered by the Virgin Mary, who is obedient to God, chaste even as she conceives, and offers redemption through the birth of her son.
Mary and Women Saints
The contrast between Eve and Mary played out in the arts, including music, throughout the Middle Ages, and in all Christian cultures, and is perhaps the most common of all medieval topoi regarding women. A dramatic example in song is found in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, no. 320, a loor in praise of Mary with the refrain: ‘Holy Mary restores the good which Eve lost.’15
The thirteenth-century Cantigas, their poetry, music, and detailed illuminations in two of the four major manuscripts, provide a rich vein of visual information concerning medieval ideas of women, sin, and redemption.16 The partially completed illumination accompanying Cantiga 320 in the Florence manuscript contrasts Eve, being seduced by a black, woman-faced snake with grotesque features, on the left, with a white Virgin Mary, who listens obediently to the angel Gabriel on the right.17
In Christian theology, both East and West, the theme of reversal of Eve’s sin through the actions of the Virgin Mary predominates. One of the greatest medieval defenders of women to do so in song, the meistersinger Frauenlob (Henry Meissen, d. 1319), wrote from a male perspective, concentrating his best-known work on the Virgin Mary.18 In Mariological thought, women could be ‘un-Eved’, and the nearer they came to mirroring Mary’s humility and chaste ways of life, the nearer they came to their own redemption.19
The much-described but rarely recreated songs of the sirens are quite different from religious chants either of or about women saints. These latter figures echoed throughout the Christian liturgy in many genres, most prominently in two forms: in the singing of biblical canticles, especially the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise from Luke 2, which was chanted every day in the monastic and cathedral hours of prayer at Vespers; and in the many offices and masses that were composed in honour of women, mostly in honour of the Virgin Mary, but for hundreds of other saintly women as well. Through antiphons, for example (short chants that enframe canticles and psalms), biblical texts were exegeted and expanded upon with new meanings that defined and gave voice to women’s sanctity. The antiphon ‘Paradisi porta per Evam cunctis clausa est et per Mariam virginem iterum patefacta est alleluia’ (The door of Paradise, closed through Eva to all, is opened again through the Virgin Mary, Alleluia) is an example of how the idea of reversal was adapted on multiple liturgical occasions, in combination with a variety of texts from the Bible.20 In addition to specific chants for women saints, the plainchant repertoire also includes common chants for virgins and for virgin martyrs. These collections of chants covered the entire liturgical year and were reused multiple times. It is fascinating to compare the liturgical calendars, chant repertoires, and liturgical practices of women’s monasteries to those of men and notice the subtle differences sometimes found within them.21 Quantities of polyphonic music were written in honour of the Virgin Mary throughout the later centuries of the Latin Middle Ages, in religious establishments of several kinds and in courtly circles.22
The Virgin Mary and many virgin saints and martyred women created a powerful foil for the misogynistic views of the sirens and of the cursed Eve. One of the most interesting groups of such chants was written by Hildegard of Bingen in honour of Ursula and the 11,000 martyred virgins of Cologne, whose cult began to have a major impact in the twelfth century. Hildegard described their rape and murder, and their redemption as just and chaste women.23 A different case is that of Mary Magdalene, traditionally known in the Latin West as a reformed prostitute.24 Increasingly popular from the late eleventh century forward, she was praised in the Mass and several offices composed for her feast day (July 22) and also through her role in Easter plays and other paschal ceremonies, musical endeavours often prominent in women’s houses. Understood as the first to encounter the risen Christ and to comprehend the meaning of the Resurrection, she proclaimed this message, becoming the Apostle to the Apostles.25
Women and Music in Western European Religious Communities
The musical work of women in the Latin Middle Ages can be studied in greatest detail within their religious communities; here scholars can most readily find diverse evidence produced by and for women themselves. The women who left written evidence of their musical activities were educated, many coming from noble or well-to-do families. Books produced by nuns possessed special authority: there are many examples of nun scribes commissioned to copy books for other establishments. There is also evidence of women composers in Byzantine realms and some of their music survives.26 As in the Latin West, these women wrote liturgical chants.
In most Christian convents, women were required to sing the daily office and Mass liturgies; these activities occupied hours of every day. The more educated among the women of any religious community served as choir nuns, and understanding enough of music and Latin to do their work was prerequisite. In perhaps her most famous passage concerning music, Hildegard of Bingen spoke of the fundamental importance of liturgical song, something that no person should be able to forbid. In this passionate defence, Hildegard referred to the act of excommunication imposed on her community because the nuns had been accused (wrongly) of allowing an illegal burial on their property. When a medieval community was so condemned, its members could no longer sing the liturgy; they could only speak the texts. Hildegard explained the central importance of music and praise: ‘The body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God.’ Indeed, she continued, prelates who took from her community their right to praise through song provoked their own condemnation.27
Books do not in and of themselves have genders, so scholars look for evidence of other types, including institutional history. In several monastic situations, women scribes prepared the books necessary for the liturgy, which included music, and for their libraries; sometimes they signed the books they made for others. As was the case with Hildegard’s monastery on the Rupertsberg, copying was clearly a part of the monastic discipline.28 This work indicated learning, together with women’s musical literacy and the ability to compose. Each group has its own story to tell over time, depending on the nature of the liturgy, of customs, of regionality, and, of course, what survives. An example from the early Middle Ages is Giesela, sister of Charlemagne, who was a lively correspondent and presided over the monastery of Chelles, with its important group of women scribes.29 McKitterick points out that the quality of the copying was excellent, and the works theologically important and sophisticated, implying that the women knew what the texts said, were intellectually competent, and had excellent Latin. Scriptoria in what McKitterick calls ‘the Seine constellation of convents’ during the Carolingian period also copied liturgical books, and these activities attest to musical competence, although none of these early codices are notated. In later periods, the copying, commissioning, and ownership of music books related greatly to the nature of the rule and customs by which the women lived.30 There is much evidence concerning musical composition and the copying of music books by women religious across Europe in the central and later Middle Ages, and discussion must be selective here; I have chosen to focus on two regions, England and German-speaking territories.
Women’s Monastic Institutions in Medieval England
In England, the best-known communities for books were Benedictines.31 Katie Bugyis has identified some of the English women scribes in the early and central Middle Ages, and their liturgical work (even when their work is lost). Bugyis found that women served a great variety of liturgical ministries, including those of singing and copying books.32 Several cantor/sacristans sang, led choirs, and copied musical materials in the earlier periods of English history; the evidence of these activities appears often in the writings of men, and although the accounts are idealized depictions, still they provide testimony to constant participation in and with music.
For example, Osbert of Clare wrote the life of the tenth-century Eadburh of Nunnaminster, but Bugyis suggests that one copy contains passages influenced by a tradition established by the nuns themselves.33 In this hagiographical account, the precentrix Eadburh emerges as a woman who is devoted to singing the office, in possession of a skilled and beautiful voice for chant, and known for her ministry of the altar. In the eleventh century, Goselin of St Bertin, an itinerant composer and hagiographer, seems to have been commissioned by the Benedictine nuns of Barking to compose the lives of some of their foremothers, together with related offices (not presently known to survive).34 Among the women described in these writings is the eleventh-century sacristan Wulfruna-Judith, known as a scribe and musician.35 The ordinal of the nuns of Barking, which survives in an early fifteenth-century copy, offers a close view of the musical and liturgical life of this community of well-born women. The book was commissioned by Abbess Sibille Fenton (1359–1419, abbess 1394–1419); although the date is late, several layers of liturgical practice can be fathomed from it, thus it complements the writings of Goselin.36 Ann Bagnall Yardley, who has studied communities of nuns in late medieval England,37 has uncovered a book of hours that belonged to Barking, and is relating the practice reflected in this prayer book to the ordinal and other materials from Barking. Among the writings authored by Barking women are those of Clemence of Barking, and the anonymous life of Edward the Confessor.38
It is clear that women used their liturgical music, especially those works they themselves wrote or commissioned, to create identity and a sense of history, and sometimes to outline boundaries and protect their property.39 Women in Wilton Abbey, a Benedictine Abbey in Wiltshire, had a lively liturgical and musical life, one that proclaimed their history and prominence in the area. The use of music and ceremony for dramatic purposes was frequent in these English houses, as can be seen at Wilton in the ceremonies of Easter week, as well as at Barking.40 The spectacular use of dramatic ceremony and music suggested by the surviving evidence, together with the vast numbers of sequences we know were sung at Barking Abbey, testify to the rich musical life of at least some English Benedictines throughout the Middle Ages. They hold out strong possibilities that the women not only fashioned their ceremonies but also composed some of the music they sang.41
Music and Art Produced by Women in German-Speaking Lands
Many of the themes mentioned hold across the entire Latin West, regarding singing in the monastic office and the control that women exerted over their musical practices, especially as regards the office, plays, processions, special ceremonies, and their sequence repertoires. As most works are anonymous, it is impossible to tell how much of these kinds of music was composed or adapted by women; the best estimate is probably a good deal of it. Twelfth-century reformed Benedictines, especially the Cistercians, were not especially open to women’s communities, and were generally liturgical minimalists.42 Alison Beach identified several nuns who copied and produced books in southern Germanic regions.43 Diemut of Wessobrunn in the diocese of Augsburg was a tireless scribe who copied an entire library, including notated liturgical books.44 Anne Winston-Allen has outlined the work of nuns as part of a broad reformed movement in German-speaking lands and the low countries.45 And, as Judith Oliver has shown, Cistercian nuns also commissioned deluxe notated volumes.46
The reformed Benedictines of Hirsau were fairly open to women monastics, and there is strong evidence concerning liturgical and musical practices among women’s houses and double monasteries in this sphere of influence. One early twelfth-century treatise, the Speculum Virginum, now ascribed to Conrad of Hirsau, is a handbook for the education of nuns, a dialogue on virtues and vices. Copies from the twelfth century had both paintings and music, suggesting that women wanted to pray with both images and song simultaneously.47 In an essay on some books intended for and possibly prepared by the nuns of Admont, Stefanie Seeburg argues against the idea that illuminations in these women’s books were to make up for a lack of learning.48
A historiated initial for the Feast of Mary’s Nativity found in the twelfth-century sermon collection belonging to the nuns of Admont shows the Virgin Mary seated between her parents, Anna and Joachim.49 The words that the parents are ‘speaking’ to her as they seek to teach her about the meanings of her birth are both liturgical texts associated with the feast. Joachim says ‘audi filia et vide et inclina aurem tuam’ (from Psalm 44), intoned on Marian feasts and for other women saints; Anna’s scroll quotes from the verse of a Marian hymn, ‘O sancta mundi domina’:
The relationship between art and music exemplified in the work of the Admont nuns is found in other guises in the work of Hildegard of Bingen, who also worked under the sway of Hirsau. Her first treatise, Scivias, written between 1141 and 1151, is the only one of her works that was both illuminated and copied on the Rupertsberg under her auspices.50 The paintings are closely interwoven with the texts of the treatise, and must have been designed by her, although not painted by either Hildegard or her nuns. Incorporated within the treatise are the texts of fourteen of her compositions, the music of which can be supplied from the two copies of her songs that were also produced in her scriptorium, together with a truncated version of her play, the Ordo Virtutum. The music of the play also survives in the collected edition of her works made on the Rupertsberg in the last years of Hildegard’s life.51 Another woman working in the interdisciplinary tradition was the Augustinian Herrad of Hohenbourg (d. after 1196), whose magnum opus, the Hortus deliciarum or Garden of Delights, also included copious illuminations and some music. The codex, which was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, has been partially reconstructed from various notes and drawings.52 It was a compendium with more than 1,100 textual extracts, these being the ‘delights’, and included several poems with musical settings.53
The most visually intricate surviving liturgical books with music produced in the later Middle Ages were those created by German-speaking Dominican nuns in the fourteenth century. Some of these volumes have recently been examined in some detail for the ways in which art, music, and theology were studied and entwined within them. For example, Düsseldorf, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek MS 11, a gradual produced by the nuns of Paradies bei Soest in around 1380, contains hundreds of brief quotations woven into initials and paintings, all exegeting the liturgical meanings of the chant texts.54 Several sequences in the book were probably commissioned or composed by the nuns. German Franciscan nuns from Freiburg and their ideals of music and the visual arts are represented in a liturgical miscellany, with some unica that may have been composed by them or by the Dominican nuns with whom they were associated; several are contrafacta, new texts set to preexisting melodies.55 The prolific artist Sibilla von Bondorf, a Franciscan, is one of the painters represented in this deluxe collection, a fragment of what was once a larger work.
Women and Music in Two Contrasting Courtly Spheres, East and West
Regarding music at court, women had major roles to play in many medieval cultures. This is one of the few areas where it is possible to learn a fair amount about particular classes of medieval women, the qiyan (singular qayna), or singing slaves, who were present in the Middle East and in Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian peninsula, and there is apparently nothing comparable in Western European courts to the influences of these women on the production of song. The early Islamic courts were centred in Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries, the so-called golden age of the Abbasid. The primary sources reveal complex layers of interactions between the singers and the men who often owned them as slaves and made them a part of life at court.56 It is nearly impossible to generalize as the period of time is long and the ways men treated their slaves varied greatly. It seems that the most beautiful and musically gifted had the most chances to gain material rewards, fame, and success, and that many of the musicians had been trained in various musical skills to increase their prices on the market. In a culture where the women of the home were restricted in their movements, enslaved singing women were of special prominence at court, and one special category, the houris, could achieve an aura of purity.57 Women were not only capable performers but also composers of both texts and music, the latter of which does not survive.58 Being able to set new texts they composed to earlier melodies or to write entire new pieces were expectations of the most skilled. The contrasting views of the jaded and seductive trickster on the one hand, and the faithful and beloved servant on the other are ever present in this literature and point to the dichotomy that so often surrounds women and their music-making, whatever the context.
An introduction to the major chronological shifts in medieval Iberia is found in Dwight F. Reynolds’s essay for Gordon and Hain’s volume.59 Reynolds provides an eye-witness description of the situation as given by the thirteenth-century writer Ahmad al-Tifashi (this in Seville, but in other periods of time different cities were prominent):
Among the cities of al-Andalus, this music is primarily located in Seville where older professional women singers teach singing to female slaves whom they own, as well as to hired, mixed-race [muwalladat] female servants. These girls are sold from Seville to the various rulers in the Maghrib and Ifriqiya. A singing-girl is sold for a thousand Maghribi dinars, sometimes more, sometimes less, according to her singing, not her face, and she must be sold with a document that lists what she has memorized, and most of these [songs] are among the poems that we have mentioned above. Some of these are ‘light’ songs that are good for the beginning of a performance, and others are ‘heavy’ songs that a skilled performer only sings at the end [of a performance], such as ‘al-Kumayt Complained’ and ‘The Palm Tree and the Palace’, for these songs and others like them are only sung by experts. For that reason they are considered obligatory for the sale, and the lack of such songs would necessarily lower the price. Among the Andalusians a singing slave girl must also be skilled in calligraphy. She must submit the document listing what she has memorized to someone who makes sure that it is all in good Arabic. Her buyer reads what is in her document, indicates what he wishes to hear, and she sings it for him on the instrument specified in her bill of sale. She might also be skilled on all of the different instruments, as well as all forms of dance and shadow-puppetry, and possess her own instrument and her own servant-girls who accompany her with percussion and wind instruments, in which case she is known as ‘complete’ and is sold for several thousand Maghribi dinars.60
Well-born women in western courts were also able to exert measures of control over the tenor and fabric of life. Courtly life and courtliness in Western Europe have long been defined by the De amore, a short treatise ascribed to the late twelfth-century cleric Andreas Cappellanus. The first two books, with their undeniable debt to Ovid’s The Art of Love, are followed by an apparent diatribe against women.61 The treatise is filled with subtle allusions to relationships, including sex and sexuality, and seems to be hosting an ongoing debate about how and why people love, a topic that was raging through Europe in the twelfth century, one of the results of the rise of vernacular languages and a fascination with classical literature, as well as new attitudes towards women and the family emerging in the wake of the religious reform movements of the later eleventh century.62 Albrecht Classen sees the treatise De amore as a debate about the meanings of love that prevailed throughout the later Middle Ages.63
It is true that courtly literature in the later Middle Ages is often deeply ironic and filled with subtle interplay surrounding the meanings of love and lust. Women composers were at work in the repertoire, but it is often not possible to identify them or recover their music.64 The tenso, or debate poem, characterizes the thirty or so poems ascribed to Occitanian women poet/composers (the troubaritz). Daniel O’Sullivan suggests that the yearning idealizations of the male poet are exploded in poems by women authors, who argue from a position of immediate challenge.65
The debates found in the literature of the troubadours and trouvères are continued in new guises in the motet repertoires of the thirteenth and fourteen centuries. The motet with its several voices was a natural genre for such debate and the ironies that rise from juxtapositions of voices and points of view. In these courtly repertoires, women are frequently the subjects treated in the texts, and surely they were involved in the commissioning of collections of motets, as can be seen in the case of the earliest fascicles of the Montpellier codex (Montpellier H 195), the art and music of which reflect life in the Parisian court of the first half of the thirteenth century.66 What became the lower and slower moving voice of the motet, the tenor, was often borrowed from the repertoire of medieval plainsong, whereas the upper voices could be in Latin or in the vernacular, most commonly Old French. In this way the religious context and the secular love lyrics might complement each other or engage in some kind of debate, with the characters suspended in the webs of meaning.67 The great battle that takes place in the expanded and notated copy of the Roman de Fauvel from the early fourteenth century pits a host of virginal virtues struggling against the worst of women, Vainglory. In the treatise both monophonic and polyphonic repertoires are charged with allegorical meanings.68
One motet from the Montpellier codex has been chosen here to represent many. The complex motet Ne m’a pas oublié/In seculum is for two voices, a Latin tenor, and a French motetus, or upper voice.69 Roesner demonstrates that art associated with the piece in the manuscript, the chant, taken from the Easter season, and the pleading nature of the upper text, all work together: ‘its paschal associations ironically link the suffering and triumph of Christ with the ordeal of the lover and his recovery through the love of his lady’.70
With so much more one could say, I have aimed here to give a brief overview of ways in which women as subjects and women’s voices were heard and expressed in medieval music, often through their own agency. I close with reference to the vast web of interconnected music and texts written for St Elizabeth of Hungary. The saint’s character has been commented upon by Barbara Haggh-Huglo in her edition of liturgical offices.71 In her analysis of other interrelated works, Catherine A. Bradley shows that the anonymous composers of thirteenth-century polyphonic works manipulated their materials to allow the saint herself to sing, to give her a means of expression in music.72 Indeed this was a goal advanced by much of the music, and many of the manuscripts, the communities, and the texts described here about, for, and by many women, and over many centuries.
