Conference Agenda

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” exhorts the nameless bride of perhaps the most controversial text of the entire Bible, the Song of Songs. Despite (or rather because of) its unabashedly erotic content, the Song of Songs was among the most thoroughly glossed texts of the Middle Ages; its vast interpretative literature represents an anthology of diverse spiritual attitudes toward erotic love in Christianity. Within this context, the Song of Songs constitutes what Stephen Moore (2000) calls “a fascinating footnote in the infinitely intricate history of sexuality.”

The Song of Songs played much more than a citational role in the history of music in late-medieval Germany, however. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, an intense musical response to the Song circulated primarily within German-speaking regions north of the Alps (Göllner, 1995). Several manuscripts associated with the monastic reforms of William of Hirsau (c. 1030-1091) contain a rich repertory of Song of Songs antiphons. These antiphons deviate from their older counterparts in Gregorian antiphonaries in many respects: they are longer, far more musically ornate and, perhaps most important, indicate a need for expression beyond adorning feasts for the Virgin Mary (Fulton [Brown], 1998).

My presentation examines this late-medieval antiphon repertory and positions it among other literary responses to the Song of Songs. At the outset, this atypical surge in Song antiphons owes much to the Marian cult that swept Europe in the High Middle Ages (Stenzl, 2008). But a proliferation in Marian devotion does not give the full picture: while the Marian cult was an international phenomenon, this passionate response to the Song is highly regional. I argue that these Song antiphons served as a musical complement to the spiritual education of men and women religious in Hirsau-reformed institutions. The great number of women entering the cloistered life in the twelfth century demanded alternative methods of spiritual guidance. The Song's nameless bride was the ideal role model for pedagogical literature such as the Speculum virginum, and these antiphons functioned as a sonic medium for both women and men to personify the allegorical bride of Christ.

The musical activity of elite, virginal convents in early modern Italy is increasingly well-documented; however, the convents of the Convertite, which flourished in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, have received far less musicological attention. Ideally populated by reformed prostitutes, these institutions also housed the daughters of prostitutes, impoverished nobility, and victims of assault. As they became more established and popular, dowry prices increased, compromising their social function by making it more difficult for underprivileged women to enter; however, this may have increased their capacity for musical development. Convertite musical activity was heavily restricted compared to “regular” convents, owing to the perceived risk that the women had sensual experiences of music, or had acquired musical skills as courtesans. For the Convertite, perhaps more than any other early modern woman, music inhabited the problematic intersection between erotic power and sacred devotion. After the Council of Trent, restrictions on convent musicianship were decided by diocesan bishops and thus varied widely. Extant monastic rulebooks for the Convertite from Pisa (1615), Naples (1569), and Rome (1542/1607), for example, offer glimpses of liturgical practice ranging from a total ban on singing to the teaching of polyphonic improvisation over a cantus firmus. Similarly, evidence for music lessons, the installment of organs, and bans on certain types of instruments suggest that more musical activity took place than meets the eye, and, furthermore, that perhaps the best way to discover what the Convertite were doing is to observe what they were told not to do.

In 1599, the English organ builder Thomas Dallam prepared an instrument for voyage to the Ottoman Empire. The instrument, a 12.5-foot-high clockwork organ with the ability to tell time and play automatically, was to be a gift for Sultan Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603) from Queen Elizabeth I, a diplomatic gesture on behalf of the English crown. Funded by the merchants of the Levant Company, the instrument was carried overseas on the ship Hector, under the personal stewardship of Dallam, himself, along with diplomats, ambassadors, and a host of other travelers, and ultimately installed in Constantinople in the Sultan’s seraglio, or harem—the female-centered space of the Ottoman court. The negotiations for this musical gesture of diplomacy, and the discourse it engendered, were entrusted to two women who navigated the space between the Sultan and the world outside the court: the Sultana, Ṣāfiye Sultan (d. 1619), and her kira, or chief female attendant, a Jewish woman by the name of Esperanza Malchi (d. 1600).

A letter from Malchi containing gifts to Queen Elizabeth I survives, as do three letters to the Queen from Ṣāfiye, all testifying to the fact that the women of the harem—and not the Sultan—negotiated this musical-diplomatic relationship between England and the Ottoman world at a time when England was fiercely pursuing trade with the East. Malchi’s story, however, is absent from the musicological literature. Contemporary scholarship by Ruth Lamdan, Eric Dursteler, and others have examined early modern Constantinople with respect to musical diplomacy and knowledge circulation, yet no one source has directly examined the role of music as a means of navigation within the particularly female-centered space of the harem. This paper will reconsider the harem alongside Dallam’s organ gift as a consequential feature of musical diplomacy, and as a business space in which knowledge sharing begets female agency. By centering an otherwise marginalized individual whose actions were enabled by the trust and knowledge shared between women, I thus complicate the notion that the harem was an environment in which sexual transactions were the only economy of power.