Music is an integral part of convent life, yet in sixteenth-century Italy music-making sometimes clashed with gender roles for women, challenging the space between fleshy and spiritual. Sixteenth-century gender was often understood in a binary between body and spirit with women restricted to the flesh, thus sinful and lacking intellect. Music interacted with this binary in unique ways, as a bodily art that could heighten prayer. Women’s music-making was therefore often sexualised by male onlookers, even within convents. Women, of course, understood these ideologies and reappropriated the connection between femininity and the flesh, establishing a mode of spirituality that placed the “feminine body” at its core. Daniela's research lies at this intersection within the music of sixteenth-century Florentine Catholic sisters (both lay sisters and nuns) in the Dominican order.
Contextualised within traditions which depicted Christ as feminine, whether as mother of the Church or as a lover to “brides of Christ” (most centrally including nuns), this talk examines sixteenth-century women’s experiences with music, religion, and the diversity of gendered bodies. Based in her archival research, Daniela explores music-making and gendered resistance amongst a group of women who understood the voice as a bodily and material manifestation of love unable to be silenced, even with likeness to Christ’s blood and the Virgin Mary’s breast milk. Finally, she will discuss the intersections between the performance of gender and the performance of music in sixteenth-century Italy with the participants.
Daniela Graca is a historian of gender and music studying for a PhD in Music at the University of Cambridge.
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