Francesca Caccini

Francesca Caccini was born in mid-September 1587, the first-born child of two singers then on salary to produce chamber and theatre music for the Medici court–Lucia Gagnolandi, and Giulio Caccini (who was himself the second son of an ambitious wood dealer from Pisa). By 1587 Giulio was already one of the best-known singers and singing teachers of his generation, and the one professional singer known to have regularly participated in the conversations at courtier Giovanni de’Bardi’s Fiesole villa (known as La Camerata) that are supposed to have led to the two most stunning musical innovations of the 17th-century–the invention of a new kind of solo song, and the closely-related invention of new ways of setting plays to music that led directly to the emergence of opera as a genre.

At 13 Francesca sang in the first more-or-less publicly performed opera, L’Euridice, joining her sister Settimia, her step-mother Margerita, and various other pupils of her father to sing the female and the choral parts of the show that had been assigned to Giulio’s composition. At 17, she so impressed the King of France, Henri IV, with the literary sensitivity of her singing in French that the King asked to have her as a musical servant to his household. In the winter before she turned 20 she composed her first theatrical work for the Medici court–a kind of mock sword fight preceded by musico-dramatic dialogue called a barriera. The show’s success seems to have led directly to her hiring by the Medici court as a musica (an all-round musical servant) two months after her 20th birthday; in keeping with local custom, she was married to another musical servant the same week she appeared on the court’s payroll (although, contrary to the prevailing custom, her dowry was paid by her father, not by the court).

According to a biographical sketch penned between 1627 and 1630 by a man who had then known her as a court colleague for 15 years, Cristoforo Bronzini, the adult Francesca was an industrious, talkative woman who compensated by talent, charm, cheerfulness and gracious manners for the fact that, in his words, “she had not been well endowed by nature”.  Francesca had been alone among her father Giulio’s 10 children in receiving something close to a humanist education. This “girl of the sharpest intelligence”, as Bronzini called her, was taught Latin, some Greek, rhetoric, grammar, and languages well enough that she was remembered for writing, as a 12-year-old, a commentary on books 3 and 4 of the Aeneid, and for her adult ability to improvise songs to poetry in Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and several Italian dialects. Constantly eager to learn new things, Francesca seems to have been especially interested in mathematics–arithmetic, geometry and astrology–in the occult sciences, and in philosophy, which, Bronzini says, “she would have studied further had she been able, like Astenia and some others, to wear boy’s clothing to attend the public schools”. Her musical studies, he tells us, were at first a minor part of her education, pursued as a pastime, and “to please her father”.

By the time she impressed the King of France, she was known as much for her skills on the harp, harpsichord, lute, theorbo and guitar as for her singing, and she was said to be able to play any stringed instrument well. Sometime before she was 20, Tuscan Granduchess Christine de Lorraine noticed her talent, and arranged for her to study counterpoint, to marry a handsome, impoverished, respectable tenor on the court’s staff, Giovanni Battista Signorini, and to be hired as a musician of the Granducal court.

In the 20 years that followed, Francesca Caccini performed regularly for the private pleasure of the Medici family–that is, for two Grand Dukes, and for their wives, children, cousins, nephews, nieces, and guests. Annually, during the last three days of Holy Week, Florentine melophiles could be sure of hearing her publicly, when she participated in the poly-choral performances of “the Offices”, singing from the balcony, and behind the grate where the ruling family themselves sat–as if her voice, mixing with those of her own family and pupils, sang in the place of the rulers’. Witnesses to her performances reported that:

“…whenever it suited her, this same woman …could by her singing and playing kindle astonishment and boldness in the breasts of her listeners, so that they would agree to any undertaking, no matter how burdensome…with the soft sound of her playing and the sweetness of her song she invited every breast (even if opposed to chaste intentions) to pure self-containment and integrity…as matched her own…”

In addition, Francesca composed hundreds of songs and duets in the new style her father claimed to have invented, all but 36 of them lost; she taught the daughters of Medici servants or of Florentine professionals who aspired to musical positions at court, paid for her work either by the court or by the girls’ parents, and she taught music to the Medici children, to the daughters of their favorite government ministers, and perhaps to the daughter of Galileo (in whose home conversazione she is known to have participated); and, often collaborating with colleagues Marco da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri,  she composed some of the music for at least 17 court-based entertainments–balli, comedies for Carnival, mascherate, sacred operas–many of them shows authored by  and little shows put on by and for the households of the two Medici Grand Duchesses (that is, their dame and donne, their children, and such professionals as were needed to serve as ‘ringers’ or onstage coaches–these last were usually Caccini herself, along with some of her artisan-class pupils).

The show that Magnificat will present October 16-18, La liberazione di Ruggiero, is the only one of these  to survive nearly intact (excerpts from several others exist). When she got the gig to compose it (probably working from a barely-sketched libretto and scenic plan), Francesca was the highest paid musician at the Medici court, an intimate of the royal’s domestic spaces (though always a servant in their eyes), and a person whose special gifts to the court were her ability as a composer to make her patrons “laugh from the heart” and her ability, as both a singer and musician, “to make her listeners do whatever she wanted…”

By the time Caccini’s first husband died in late December 1626, she had borne him only one child, Margerita, born 14 years after her parents married. Left only with the property her own dowry had bought, the household goods her husband’s will specified had all been purchased with her salary, and a nice collection of jewels given to her by those who admired her performances, she arranged immediately to remarry.

Two weeks after her 40th birthday, she married a minor nobleman from Lucca, Tomaso Raffaelli, a man about whom others noted his intense melophilia, the richness of his instrument collection, and his Ganymede-like manner. When Raffaelli died three years later, Francesca had borne him a son. As Raffaelli’s widow and the guardian of his noble son, Francesca enjoyed the lifelong usufruct of his estate and something even more precious–a tenuous but plausible hold on the noble status for which her education but *not* her 20 years of hard work had prepared her. She returned to Florence in 1634, where she again served the Medici women (never singing again in public, but apparently making music and teaching the princesses in their convent home) until her daughter Margherita was settled in life–life as a virtuosa musician in a convent that adjoined the principal Medici palace–in 1640.

In May, 1641, Francesca left Medici service forever, and disappeared from the public record.

One could hear these scenes as representing the truth of women’s experience, and of woman-to-woman exchanges; moreover, one could hear them as purging the stage not of effeminacy but of an idea of femininity constructed by male fantasy.

La liberazione di Ruggiero fits into the Tuscan court’s long-term pattern of representing powerful women. Its setting at Villa Imperiale, its nearly all-female cast, and its plot focus on the contest between two women over the sexual and political destiny of a young man all invited its first audience to imagine they were being given a glimpse of the gynecentric, feminizing world they feared. It invited them to confront and resolve their anxieties about local women’s sexual and political power in an entertaining way, by inviting them to suspend temporarily the boundary separating representation and reality, in the very space most associated with that power. It invited them, too, to a resolution in which they could imagine themselves liberated from effeminacy (or from unreasonable gynephobia) through the agency of an unnaturally powerful but benevolent female, the sorceress Melissa.

The show is quintessentially Baroque–full of doublings; scenes that mirror each other formally; scenes that entangle listening spectators in momentarily perplexing forms so as simultaneously to give pleasure and provoke surprise (but that go by so fast we cannot quite think about them); and scenes that look and sound like parodies of contemporary chamber or theatrical performances. Shows within shows within shows, and reminiscent of the very kinds of entertainments Caccini and her troupe performed all the time at the women’s court, these scenes are all performed for Ruggiero, and they are all aimed at controlling his behavior (whether toward entrapment on Alcina’s island or liberation from it).

Moreover, the show’s scene rhythm is disquietingly asymmetrical. A good 2/3 of the La liberazione, including much of the post-liberation material, takes place in a single setting, Alcina’s island, where the concatenation of shows within shows within shows easily seduces any spectator to complacency. Once Alcina’s rage (figured as verbal and musical excess) sets her world on fire, the scene changes rapidly, first to a dry, landlocked space whence first the women and then the men imprisoned in the bodies of plants emerged to dance, and then to a piazza whence the entire audience was exhorted to move, with the cast, to a courtyard for the shows’ final number, a ballet for 24 horses and riders, led by the triumphant Melissa who circles the field in a centaur-drawn cart.

The overall experience of the show for its audience, then, is of a prolonged, if entertaining stasis, concocted of shows within the show that suddenly unfurls toward uncontained, rapid change that eventually engulfs everyone present. Brilliantly (given the trope of liberation), it is a show that evades closure–even in its published score, as much a product of the court’s propaganda campaign as the show itself, which lacks music for the final dance numbers. Whatever might be understood to go on emotionally in the stage area never quite receives closure–at least not there.

Caccini’s sound design for La liberazione complements and complicates the effect of the scene rhythm, communicating the process of ‘liberation’ through changing the relationships of sounds to each other, and of individual characters’ relationships to music-making. Before the liberation, we hear a world that is tonally static (the music of everything and everyone centers on one of two closely related ‘keys’, some kind of G and some kind of D). During and after the liberation, the tonal world widens, at first gradually and then as if exploding in Alcina’s long scene of complaint against Ruggiero for abandoning her. In that scene, Alcina and her ‘back up singer’ damigelle fill the entire tonal world known to 17th century music theory with the sounds of female complaint.

Before the liberation, two distinct vocal styles–sharply metrical, strophic, rounded songs then called canzonettas, and through-composed, speechlike singing then (and now) called recitative–articulate a class-based social hierarchy. The principal characters, Melissa, Ruggiero and Alcina, sing the “rational” recitative, while the watery spirits of the prologue and Alcina’s underlings–the damigelle, the shepherd and the siren–sing the tuneful, aurally appealing but not verbally significant canzonettas. At and after the liberation, these vocal styles are re-organized, gradually articulating a new hierarchy based partly on class and partly on normativity. For a brief time after the liberation, everyone sings recitative; but as Alcina grows increasingly irate in her complaint scene, she, her damigelle and the monsters, on whom they call to avenge her betrayal revert to rounded forms, just before they are all driven from a recitative-filled stage. [The one exception, and to me an important one, is the brief interjection of the Dama disincantata, pleading for the liberation of the male plants. She sings her first speech in rounded form, and her second as through-composed recitative, her vocality literally enacting her own liberation.]

Before the liberation, only Ruggiero sings in the harmonic style then associated with the term second practice. The dissonances and surprising harmonies that seem like ‘expressiveness’, would also have seemed, then, like sonic disorder, and sonic marks of the feminine. After the liberation, only female characters–the Nunzia who tells Alcina about Ruggiero’s liberation, Alcina’s companions, and Alcina herself sing in this ‘feminine’ style. Thus their singing marks the liberation as a restoration of gender order.

Before the liberation, everyone on stage has a voice, but only the damigelle dance. After the liberation, everyone on stage is gradually silenced, except Melissa. Or, a bit more precisely, Ruggiero, Alcina, and the individual voices, who supported her reality are systematically silenced and driven from the stage, leaving the final word to the sorceress who had the first word, Melissa. Her magic liberates the plants to sing and dance in heterosexual consort, before the men withdraw to join their bodies to horses for the final, outdoor horse ballet.

Interestingly, the fulcrum of this design is not the scene in which Melissa, dressed as the aged African general Atlante, awakens Ruggiero from the spell Alcina’s world of rounded, strophic canzonettas has cast on him. Rather, the exact center of the show is the scene immediately after. Just at the moment when Ruggiero’s mind is set free, we hear first one voice, than many voices, that seem to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Seeking the source of the voices, adjusting our expectations of who or what in the world can sing, we eventually realize that the voices come from entities we (like Ruggiero) have assumed had neither ears, subjectivity nor voice–the trees, flowers and potted plants of Alcina’s garden– begin to sing.

More than any other scene in La liberazione, I think, this comically improbable–and therefore delightful– moment shifts the axis along which power flows in the performance space. As spectators, we are as jolted out of our complacent delight in the show staged for our benefit as Ruggiero was (and, like him perhaps, we experience the jolt itself with delight). We are jolted into questioning, who, besides, Ruggiero, has been seduced by the show’s concatenating entertainments; who, besides Ruggiero, might need to be liberated; who of the beings around us we might have failed to acknowledge as sentient, reasoning, desiring creatures because we have imagined them to be of a different, lesser order.

Spectators in 1625 would have experienced this jolt, and this chain of questions, while simultaneously reckoning with a cascade of associations the presence of singing plants would have unleashed in their minds: plants were among the entities most often claimed to have been moved by the musical magic of Orpheus; some plants–notably the laurel tree and the sunflower–had once been women (Daphne who became a tree to escape Apollo’s rape, Clizia who became a flower as punishment for loving Apollo too much); given Giulio Caccini’s equal fame as a teacher of women singers and a cultivator of citruses and roses, they might be a joke on the probable casting of the show from among his daughter’s pupils; given the Medici family’s creation of the gardens at Castello–the traditional women’s villa–as an allegory of the Tuscan state, and given the meaning of “Fiorenza”–flowering place–they might be the Florentines themselves.

Part of the brilliance of the scene lies in the fact that by the time spectators would have identified the source of the voices and experienced a brainstorm of evoked images, its first half could be almost over. Spectators would have heard, in the vulnerable moment of their confusion and their brainstorm, a stunning, miniaturized lament, its tiny (30-seconds long) solo and choral sections entwined around each other and a (30 second) ritornello of ‘infernal’ instruments to produce a 2-stanza strophic form (interrupted by Ruggiero). By the time they heard the chorus’s second stanza, they might have recovered enough to both feel its piteous affect and notice that its texture of narrow-ranged parts restlessly shifting their entangled contrapuntal relation to each other made the singers’ words impossible to hear.

Cognoscenti would have smiled to think that the plants’ piteous, miniaturized imprisonment produced the kinds of sounds against which Bardi’s Camerata had complained–and had been so well aligned with a moment of theatrical magic as to communicate affect all but irresistibly (thus realizing the Bardian injunction that all elements of a musical communication should be focused on producing a single effect, and producing sympathy for the plight of the “plants”). Everyone in the 1625 audience was likely to have got the reference to Bardi’s aesthetic in the second half of the scene, however, when the chorus of plants respond to Melissa’s promise to liberate them as well by singing homophonically, intelligibly, as if with one voice–the choral sound of a united, not a contentious community (who, not so coincidentally, predict with their shared rhythms their eventual liberation into human, cosmologically orderly, dance).

If the first audience were to have heard the plants as representations of themselves, they might well have heard in the difference between the cramped, contrapuntal chorus and the freer homophonic one the trajectory–and “Melissa’s” promise– of their own liberation not just from the thrall of shows staged endlessly to seduce them, but from internal political struggle, from the parochial constraints of Tuscany’s traditional foreign policy, and, indeed, from their very seats in Villa Imperiale’s temporary theatre into the courtyard and the stylized military display that was the show’s end. They could hear in the plants’ second, homophonic chorus the sound of an ideal social order (as locally construed). And because they could hear all these liberations as having been wrought through the ‘magic’ of *some* unusually talented woman (was it Melissa? Caccini? Maria Maddalena?), they might have heard a way to be liberated from their fear of women’s political (or sexual, or musical) command.

I think it is equally possible that the scene might have provoked a second level of liberation from men’s fear of women’s command (and women-centered culture) that I have called gynephobia, by prompting a sudden, sympathetic understanding of the plight of women who struggled to be heard–to be free–through the gynephobic assumptions that underlay the social, spatial and psychic) segregation of women in courtly life. I, at least, hear it that way–though it has taken me the longest time to remember why my experience of a live performance prompted me to do so. (In our time, when a little plastic box can be made to sing, the effect (or, in 17th-century terms, the “marvel” of voices coming from nowhere and everywhere is too easily shrugged off as commonplace; the sound clips of the chorus I have played were no different, as phenomena, from the sound clips I played earlier) In 1625, however, the effect of hearing voices that came from nowhere and everywhere would have been most commonly experienced in the concerts performed from behind the grates in those Florentine churches that were attached to communities of cloistered women.

Wrapped, as it was in La liberazione’s performance, in the trappings of Granducal patronage, it was an effect the 1625 audience might very easily have associated with the only times the astoundingly virtuosic performances of La liberazione’s composer could be heard by the general public–singing, playing, and leading the music of other unseen singers from behind a grate at the annual ‘concerts’ of the Offices in the ruling family’s parish church of S.a Felicita. To me, and I think probably to many listeners in 1625, the singing of the enchanted plants would have evoked memories of music from behind the grate. It would, thereby, have prompted a sudden awareness of the whole system for the containment of women for which the grate of a cloister stood.–a system predicated on fear of entanglement by sirens, or by sorceresses like Alcina.

Indeed, it is only after the plants (the world “behind the grate”) come to sonic life that we in the audience hear (and therefore understand) how the events of the show’s fictive world might seem from a world beyond the gaze of men. It is as if the first half of the show were unfolding in reverse (or as if the two halves, pre- and post-plants, were the two parts of a palindrome. Alcina’s messenger narrates to an all-female audience a different version of the liberation scene from the one we in the audience think we have just witnessed; her version, both more complete and closer to Ariosto’s tale, is, she says, ‘what I heard from behind the branches’. The sexually and emotionally dangerous Alcina fills the stage with mounting outrage at Ruggiero’s betrayal, her anger far more frightening than the Siren’s anodyne little song–for Alcina’s song ignites the stage, purging it of apparent effeminacy. One could hear these scenes as representing the truth of women’s experience, and of woman-to-woman exchanges; moreover, one could hear them as purging the stage not of effeminacy but of an idea of femininity constructed by male fantasy. Or by male fears of what women liberated from social constraint and from the obligation to perform femininity in front of men might actually say, and do. But it is all under the narrative control of Melissa, who ends the show as she began it, with a recitative soliloquy that seems to draw the moral point. Her speech is followed, then, by a scene that formally mirrors the prologue’s double-strophic exchange between Neptune and his tributary–except that Melissa’s interlocutor is a woman “liberated” from her life as a plant who persuades Melissa to liberate the still-captive men, in a scene that explicitly banishes both lament and strophic, rounded (containing) forms–replacing them with the Medicean voice of reason, recitative, that Melissa and the former plant share.

Villa Poggio Imperiale in the 17th Century

On February 3, 1625, sometime in daylight, 160 gentildonne and their husbands, and an unknown number of foreign guests rode in carriages out the southeastern gate of Florence, and half a mile up a tree-lined avenue to a villa atop the nearest hill that had very recently been renovated as the personal palace of Tuscany’s regent, Archduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Leaving their carriages in a grassy courtyard guarded by two squadrons of armed cavalry, the Archduchess’ guests were welcomed into the palace by a military commander, and led to bench seats in a temporary theatre built in the villa’s loggia, to hear a new commedia in musica based on a well-known plot (two sorceresses struggling over the sexual and military future of a hapless young man). The commedia was to be followed, seamlessly, by two balletti danced by members of the court, by a ballet for horses and riders in the paved courtyard, and by a reception at which the gentildonne were served by the men who rode in the final horse ballet (while their husbands watched from above). It was the first performance of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero.

So what could La Liberazione possibly have seemed to be about in 1625? First, a bit about the plot, since the story on which it’s based is not nearly as well known now as it was then.

The show opens with a prologue sung by Neptune (a figure for Medici power) and a Polish river, The Vistola, meant to praise the guest of honor in 1625, Maria Maddalena’s visiting nephew, Wladyslaw, the crown prince of Poland. Immediately afterward, the “good witch” Melissa sails up on a dolphin’s back to explain that she has come to rescue Ruggiero from the “bad witch” Alcina’s sexual spells, restoring him both to his military duty on behalf of Christian armies and to his dynastic sexual duty as the fiancée of the woman warrior Bradamante. At Melissa’s exit, Ruggiero arrives with Alcina and her retinue of singing and dancing minions. The lovers exchange perilously mis-communicated vows, and then Alcina leaves to manage government affairs while her retinue lulls Ruggiero to sleep. Dressed as his aged African teacher Atlante, Melissa returns, awakening Ruggiero with an exhortation to return to the battle for Libya. Previous victims of Alcina’s power, turned into plants by her mind-numbing spells, beg the pair to liberate them, too. After promising to return for them, Melissa leads Ruggiero away.

When Alcina and her retinue return to find him gone, a female messenger explains that Melissa has broken Alcina’s spell. Alcina confronts Ruggiero in a long scene mixed of lamentation and ire, to no avail. Enraged at her loss of power, she calls on monsters for aid. The stage is engulfed in fire, as the now monstrous Alcina rides offstage on a dragon’s back, after which creatures who had been trapped in the bodies of the island’s plants emerge to dance. One such creature pleads with Melissa to liberate the men who are plants as well as the women. They dance, and then everyone–the players and the audience–adjourn to the courtyard to watch the horse ballet, over which the triumphant Melissa presides from a centaur-drawn chariot.

My sense is that like the other comedies on which Francesca had worked La liberazione was meant to be both entertaining and serious–to give the audience the impression they were glimpsing into the ‘real’ entertainment life of the women’s court, and at the same time to engage a particular set of anxieties about that court’s relationship to public power during the regency of the 1620s.

Arch Duchess Maria Maddalena

When Grand Duke Cosimo II died in late February, 1621, the intermittent de facto regency of his mother Christine de Lorraine was replaced by a de jure regency she was to share with his widow, Archduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Christine had quietly ruled Tuscany since late in 1606, first during her husband Grand Duke Ferdinando I’s final illness and then during her son’s long, losing struggle with what seems to have been several forms of tuberculosis. According to all diplomatic accounts, Christine had been Tuscany’s absolute ruler in this period, yet the same accounts report that she had shared decision-making with her son when he was up to it, and that she had systematically arranged for her daughter-in-law to be trained for what seemed like the inevitable regency of the 1620s. (One possible interpretation of La liberazione’s plot about the struggle of two women over a man, then, would be to imagine Ruggiero as the ailing Cosimo, his wife and his mother as the sorceress antagonists: but all diplomatic accounts also agree that the three worked well together.)

To be frank, there is not a lot of direct evidence in archival accounts to suggest that Tuscany’s patrician and political classes grumbled about either Christine’s de facto regency or Maddalena’s de jure one. But there is a lot of evidence showing that entertainments at court, from 1607 onward, focused on themes associated with female sovereignty, like

(1) foreign women who turned out to be queens, and who found safety in Tuscany;

(2) women who seemed to exceed the usual boundaries of female power, especially sorceresses like Alcina; and, as the de jure regency began,

3) virgin-martyrs whose choice to die rather than have either body or soul penetrated by heathens always also saved their city or their nation.

Moreover, sometime in late 1617, after one of Cosimo’s worst health crises, a court functionary named Cristoforo Bronzini began work on what would become an encyclopedic, 25-volume manuscript in dialogue form entitled Della dignita e nobilta delle donne, of which 8 volumes were published between 1622 and 1632. Combining proto-feminist arguments justifying women’s right and ability to rule the state with hundreds of biographies of women worthies (including the one of Francesca Caccini in the first part of this essay), Bronzini’s project was clearly intended to normalize the regency, and to normalize some of Maddalena’s peculiar ways–notably her passion for and her excellence at shooting, hunting, and horseback riding. Maddalena meant to distinguish herself from her rather genteel mother-in-law, Christine de Lorraine, in other ways as well. Unlike the Medici-descended Christine, who had centered her court at one of the Medici country villas already associated with the family’s women and children, Maddalena acquired a palace just outside the city walls as the center of her court.

Dedicated publicly in 1624 to her own Habsburg heritage, and to the leisure of future Tuscan princesses, the Villa Imperiale had once been the palace of a 16th-century Medici princess, the only daughter of the dynasty’s founder, who had been murdered there by her husband, for her outspoken political opinions, her unashamed musical and poetic performances, and her open adultery. Maddalena presumably meant to rehabilitate the memory of this gifted and transgressive woman when she ordered her palace rehabilitated, and adorned with two elaborate gardens (of roses and citrus), and 2 sets of frescoes (of historically important queens and of Biblical heroines): the palace reconciled the memory of the most intellectually ambitious and sexually dangerous Medici woman to the unquestionable virtue of the exceptional, excessive women painted on the villa’s ceilings. The site where La liberazione was first performed, Maddalena’s Villa Imperiale was simultaneously the private seat of the Tuscan regency and the newly constituted center of the women’s court.

Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine

Maddalena and her mother-in-law Christine had, in effect, long shared rule over the institution known as the “women’s court”. In the ducal and princely classes of early modern Italy, it was common practice for the wife of a ruler to live principally at a suburban villa rather than in the family’s urban palace, visited by her husband as he pleased. These wives ruled absolutely over extended households that consisted of them, their children, and any nieces/nephews or cousins who might visit, along with the elite young women who served them as dame and donne, servants of all kinds and all sexes, and male secretaries detailed from the central office in Florence. A well-known feature of such courts (one that seems (to me) inexplicably lost in standard histories) is that the women at the top of their hierarchies–the Grand Duchesses and Archduchesses– managed the marriages of their dame, donne, female relatives below princess rank, and servants of both sexes.

When I say they managed these marriages, I mean they superintended the negotiations over dowries, the payment of dowries, and the restitution of dowries if a marriage failed for whatever reason; they advocated for women whose husbands turned either physically or fiscally abusive, sometimes ordering the physical rescue of such women and the imprisonment of the guilty men; they were known to force women and men alike to marry for the sake of preserving a family’s patrimony; and they routinely forced widows under 40 into remarriages that would channel their sexuality and thus preserve their reputations for chastity. Because the women’s court over which Christine and Maddalena presided were communities in which women managed ‘the traffic in women’ to preserve a heteronormative gender order, I have described this situation as female patriarchy. Whatever one might call it, however, it was a situation that, I speculate, encouraged the formation of strong mutual allegiances among elite women, strong loyalty toward the women at the top of the hierarchy, and a shared understanding that heterosexuality was compulsory but heterosociality was not, and it was not at the core of a woman’s loyalties to her ‘tribe’. It was in service to this kind of community that Francesca Caccini passed most of her working life, providing entertainments for the women and children whose communal relations were forged by a ‘traffic in women among women’ and, as a letter by Grand Duchess Christine would eventually argue, providing through her teaching and coaching of women’s and children’s musical performances a model of female authority that was obviously legitimated by competence and mastery.

However commonplace the traffic in women among other women might have been, in a time of multi-generational regency like the one Tuscany knew from 1606 to 1636, the potential for women’s court *ruled by foreigners* to be an alternative source of power seems likely to have been frightening to the patrician class of men. For these men knew that the political (and economic) future of Tuscany depended on decisions made in such an environment, even if they were made by Medici boys being groomed for leadership there, or by ministers (like first and second secretaries Curtio Picchena and Andrea Cioli) whose rise to political power was directly the result of the relationships they had cultivated in this community of women. For men who spent too much time with women–even is as their heterosexual lovers–were understood to become gradually effeminate, to sink to the level of the pleasure-loving, singing-and-dancing, reason-abjuring level of the not-quite-human creatures among whom they lived.

To become, that is, like the plants in Alcina’s garden.

To follow “Part 3: La Liberazione di Ruggiero and the Culture of Women”.