Conference Agenda

While early medieval music theory is usually understood as a land barren of women, a canoness named Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (c. 935–973) chose to begin her drama 'The Conversion of the Meretrix Thais' with a lengthy dialogue about this very topic. The conversation about music theory between Pafnutius, an early church desert father, and his very confused students touches on definitions of music, the mathematical dimensions of intervals, and speculative music theory, ostensibly to explain his desire to convert the titular Thais. This text is all but unknown to musicologists, and literary historians have read the music dialogue as either an irrelevant digression or a straightforward synthesis of early music theory. But the truth is far more interesting: Hrotsvit does draw on established theoretical ideas, but she also incorporates explanations for aspects of speculative music, such as the inaudibility of musica mundana and the relationship between musica humana and the human body, not found in any other contemporary source.

In this paper, I will show how incorporating Hrotsvit’s dramas into our corpus of early medieval music theoretical writings changes what we know about elite women’s music education and music as part of Classical reception in the tenth century. As a canoness at Gandersheim, a prestigious royal monastery under the leadership of abbess Gerberga II (949 to 1001), Hrotsvit worked at the heart of Ottonian intellectual culture. Her six dramas, explicitly modeled on the comedies of Terence, demonstrate deep knowledge of Classical, hagiographical, and contemporary literature. But her music theory dialogue goes beyond mere imitation—its sophisticated and frequently comical treatment of complex theoretical concepts suggests an audience well-versed in the content and conventions of Late Antique and Early Medieval music theory, beyond just Boethius’s ubiquitous writings. Hrotsvit's sophisticated engagement with music theory reveals not only the depth of women’s musical education in elite monasteries, but also how theoretical knowledge could be repurposed as a powerful tool for religious and dramatic expression.

Proof of a female scriptorium in Poland has eluded scholars for generations, a situation aggravated by the destruction of medieval sources. However, three Graduals belonging to the Poor Clares convent in Stary Sącz (Poland) imply that the nunnery hosted a high-level female scriptorium, one of the first such institutions to emerge in Poland. The dating of the manuscripts has been established as three different periods—around 1260 (PL-SS, Muz 2 [medium-sized]), 1280-1300 (Muz 1 [large]), and 1320-1330 (Muz 3 [small]). Since the graduals include many Roman saints and exclude Polish saints, current scholarship posits that the manuscripts originated at a Franciscan house outside of Poland. This supposition is strengthened by the sheer lack of information about Franciscan scriptoria in medieval Poland.

The interdependence of the graduals has gone unnoticed, however. They all share the exact same content, except for some rubrics omitted from the smallest manuscript, and they share scribes as well. These commonalities strongly suggest that they were copied from a common exemplar in one place. My paleographical analysis indicates that between 1280 and 1330, no less than twelve scribes worked on the large and small graduals. Furthermore, the careful addition in the smallest and latest manuscript of cross-references to saints’ offices, which facilitated the process of accessing and singing the chants, reveals the faithful celebration of roughly thirty early Roman martyr saints’ feasts that some scholars considered “token” devotions, not performed but written to affirm belonging to the Roman Church. It also reveals the faithful adherence to Franciscan rules of copying liturgical manuscripts by reproducing the exemplar exactly, with no alterations. I propose that the nuns’ scriptorium must have been established shortly after the foundation of the Stary Sącz convent, where the older medium-sized book served as an exemplar for the other two, large and small, graduals. The female scriptorium at Stary Sącz corroborates the legendary fame of the nunnery as a medieval educational center while the significant presence of Roman martyr saints reveals an unexpected devotional profile. Both revelations provide a deeper context for studies of the cultural practices among Clarist nuns in Poland.

The iconographic trope of personifying Musica along with all the other liberal arts as female, in everything from crude woodcuts for educational treatises to gilded frescos for elite princely chambers, might seem so generic as to be without special significance for female musicality in the decades around 1500. Painted in 1493 by Pinturicchio for the Borgia Apartments at the Vatican, one of the most iconic of these shows a demure, deified woman presiding over a gathering of diminutive male practitioners who noisily pound, strum, and sing, thus reinforcing their contrast with her decorous silence. However, there are several representations of Musica on specifically feminine artifacts of material culture, and in each the Lady is actively engaged in making music. What does it mean that Matrona Musica made appearances in the chambers of new brides and how do these objects fit within the lives and activities of the noble women who both viewed and used them daily?

Cassona is the term art historians usually use for the beautifully decorated chests that were carried in procession to a bride’s new home as part of elite wedding celebrations in fifteenth-century Tuscany. Commissioned by either family, they could include didactic iconography relevant to the role of a woman in a successful marriage. Three such extant cassone feature the seven liberal arts and share similar visual schemes—each female discipline is paired with a male practitioner, Musica is actively performing, and somewhere in the image there is a pair of children, seemingly ready to be instructed. These cassone have caused some confusion for scholars, since the female identity of the liberal arts is generally interpreted metaphorically. In fact, art historian Anabel Thomas has proposed that rather than being created for a noble bedroom, these chests would be more appropriate in a confraternity. However, a strikingly similar representation of Musica alone on a desco da parto, a decorative tray used specifically in childbirth rituals, reinforces the likelihood that these female personifications of music had implications for real women in their domestic roles as mothers and supervisors of the education of their offspring, both male and female.