Musical Voices of Early Modern Women

Many-Headed Melodies

Thomasin LaMay, Thomasin LaMay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351916271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Recent scholarship has offered a veritable landslide of studies about early modern women, illuminating them as writers, thinkers, midwives, mothers, in convents, at home, and as rulers. Musical Voices of Early Modern Women adds to the mix of early modern studies a volume that correlates women's musical endeavors to their lives, addressing early modern women's musical activities across a broad spectrum of cultural events and settings. The volume takes as its premise the notion that while women may have been squeezed to participate in music through narrower doors than their male peers, they nevertheless did so with enthusiasm, diligence, and success. They were there in many ways, but as women's lives were fundamentally different and more private than men's were, their strategies, tools, and appearances were sometimes also different and thus often unstudied in an historical discipline that primarily evaluated men's productivity. Given that, many of these stories will not necessarily embrace a standard musical repertoire, even as they seek to expand canonical borders. The contributors to this collection explore the possibility of a larger musical culture which included women as well as men, by examining early modern women in "many-headed ways" through the lens of musical production. They look at how women composed, assuming that compositional gender strategies may have been used differently when applied through her vision; how women were composed, or represented and interpreted through music in a larger cultural context, and how her presence in that dialog situated her in social space. Contributors also trace how women found music as a means for communicating, for establishing intellectual power, for generating musical tastes, and for enhancing the quality of their lives. Some women performed publicly, and thus some articles examine how this impacted on their lives and families. Other contributors inquire about the economics of music and women, and how in different situations some women may have been financially empowered or even in control of their own money-making. This collection offers a glimpse at women from home, stage, work, and convent, from many classes and from culturally diverse countries - including France, Spain, Italy, England, Austria, Russia, and Mexico - and imagines a musical history centered in the realities of those lives.

WOMEN, COLLECTIONS, AND PUBLISHING

Chapter 14

Patronage and Personal Narrative in a Music Manuscript: Marguerite of Austria, Katherine of Aragon, and London Royal 8 G.vii

Jennifer Thomas

During the years Marguerite of Austria served as regent of the Netherlands and as the patron of the Netherlands court chapel (1507–15; 1519–30), the Alamire scriptorium of the Netherlands court complex created a sumptuous presentation manuscript destined for the Tudor court of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. (Appendix 1 contains an inventory of the manuscript’s contents and full translations of key texts.) Virtually every aspect ofthat manuscript, London, British Library, Manuscript Royal 8 G.vii (hereafter LonBLR 8 G.vii),¹ has engaged the perplexed scrutiny of scholars with the following questions:²

Who was the first recipient of the manuscript?³

What was the date of its creation and presentation?⁴

What was the occasion that prompted the gift?⁵

Why the recycling of motets originally dedicated to Anne of Brittany and Louis XII of France?⁶

Why the errors and corrections made in one of these recycled motets, A diutorium nostrum?⁷

Why the irregularities in the Tudor coat of arms displayed in the illumination accompanying the opening motet, Celeste beneficium?⁸

Why the complete absence of composer attributions?⁹

What about the authorship and notational irregularities of Absalom fili mi?¹⁰ Why the unusual inclusion of five consecutive settings of Dulces exuviae, a passage from Virgil'sAeneid?¹¹

Explanations for some of the mysteries involving the book and its contents fail to satisfy other concerns; none of the interpretations of the manuscript to this point resolves all of the questions. However, a new understanding of the five settings of Dulces exuviae and the motet that immediately follows them, Absalon fili mi, in the seventh of the manuscript’s eight fascicles, may point to the purpose, donor, recipient, and dates of the manuscript as well as the meaning of its contents. This new interpretation, which plausibly reconciles many puzzling questions, takes into account the meanings the text brings from its original literary context, the meanings it acquires among the texts in the new context, and the significance these meanings may have had for the donor under this reading, Marguerite of Austria, and the recipient, Katherine of Aragon.

The text of the Dulces exuviae motets presents the principle and most striking challenge in decoding the manuscript. Most motet texts derive from scripture or liturgy; this one comes from classical epic poetry. At the end of Book IV of the Aeneid, Aeneas has abandoned Dido to establish his city on the Tiber. As his ship sails from Carthage, Dido climbs onto a funeral pyre, and, surrounded by mementos of her love affair with Aeneas, speaks the words set in these motets before killing herself with his sword:

Dulces exuviae, dum fata deusques inebat,	Relics once dear, while fate and heaven allowed,
accipite hanc animam meque his exsolvite curis.	Take this my spirit, and loose me from these woes.
Vixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi, et	My life is lived; I have fulfilled the course by fortune given, and now my shade
nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.	Passes majestic to the world below.

The troubling message of the text is intensified by its five-fold repetition. The reiteration sets it apart not only within this manuscript, in which no other text is repeated, but also because recurrence of a classical text falls outside normal practices. Repeated use of a particular text within a single musical source usually occurs in certain circumstances and normally for reasons clearly connected with the function of the source. For instance, manuscripts of intabulated music often contain multiple settings for individual pieces – presumably, to offer choices.¹² Many manuscripts collect motets on liturgically appropriate texts for practical use, thus the repetition of functional religious texts is not remarkable.¹³ Among these sources are manuscripts that collect texts on a particular subject, most often Marían devotion. Such manuscripts present multiple settings of the most prominent Marían texts, such as Salve regina, Regina caeli, and the other major Marían items.¹⁴ However, neither the text Dulces exuviae nor the manuscript LonBLR 8 G.vii falls into any of these categories. Why would a manuscript given to a royal couple contain multiple settings of this particular text, a text on the suicide of a queen? Might not the recipient interpret emphasis on this particular text as ill will, possibly even treasonous? Though one setting of the text would not call attention to itself, five settings definitely do. The multiple settings of this unusual text dictates that we regard it as an emblem of special significance to both the donor and the recipient of the manuscript.

Its significance lies in the message it conveyed to the donor and recipient. In his introduction to the Garland facsimile edition of LonBLR 8.G.vii, Herbert Kellman mentions the fact that one of the possible donors of the gift, Marguerite of Austria, may have found personal meaning in the Dulces exuvaie texts. Marguerite suffered many personal tragedies, and Martin Picker, in his edition of her chansonnier, Brussels 228, convincingly connects its many sorrowful texts to the specific tragedies of her life.¹⁵ Among those texts are two settings of Dulces exuviae, one of them concordant with the second setting in LonBLR 8.G.vii. In the Brussels manuscript, Dulces exuviae is again the only repeated text, an indication that it had personal meaning for Marguerite – perhaps her response to the deaths of her two young husbands. In fact, though this text is not statistically significant in any other region of Europe, it has an unusually high profile in Netherlands sources generally, surpassed in use only by Salve regina. Its prominence may well be the result of Marguerite’s attention to these verses.¹⁶

If indeed this text had particular meaning for Marguerite of Austria, she may have requested its inclusion in LonBLR 8.G.vii for personal reasons. Just as BrusBR 228 served as a vehicle for expressing Marguerite’s state of mind, LonBLR 8.G.vii may well have served as the vehicle through which she conveyed a deeply personal message to Katherine of Aragon. That Marguerite had reasons and desires for significant communication with Katherine is not surprising: the two women shared a friendship and family ties as well as uncannily similar histories. The London and Brussels manuscripts commemorate many significant biographical events in the lives of the two women. In addition, the themes and ties so dominant in the lives of Marguerite and Katherine echo those of a third royal woman, Anne of Brittany.¹⁷ Our knowledge of Anne’s association with the opening motets of LonBLR 8.G.vii (see note 4) seems to cast her shadow upon the entire book, and, as Tirro has argued (see note 7), she would have been drawn to the Dulces exuviae text for the same reasons as Marguerite and Katherine. Given their own complicated family connections and near-connections, Marguerite was undoubtedly very familiar with Anne’s story, and it is not hard to imagine that Katherine was as well; thus, Anne’s story may have been part of the private communication. (See Appendix 2 for a synopsis of the similarities and connections among the three women’s lives.)

The relationship between Katherine and Marguerite began when they were still in their teens. They became sisters-in-law in 1497 when Marguerite, at the age of seventeen, wed Katherine’s brother, Juan, and came to live at the Spanish court. She and Katherine became good friends there, and Marguerite taught Katherine French.¹⁸ Marguerite had learned French during her childhood spent at the French court, where she was groomed from the age of three to become the wife of Charles VIII. Charles later repudiated the betrothal for political reasons and dismissed her from court when she was eleven years old. In order to protect French territorial interests, he instead married Anne of Brittany, forcing her to renounce her proxy marriage to Marguerite’s father, Maximilian I.¹⁹

Marguerite may have felt a sisterly sympathy for Katherine, whose childhood experiences paralleled her own in many respects. Though reared in her mother’s court, Katherine was educated from the age of two to fulfill her parents’ hope that she would eventually be the Queen of England. After many years of negotiations, her formal betrothal to Prince Arthur took place in 1497, when Katherine was eleven. She left her home for the English court in 1501, and she and Arthur were married when both were fifteen years of age and considered capable of consummating their marriage.²⁰

The parallel continued: both young wives were widowed by their first husbands after very short marriages. Marguerite and Juan were married in April of 1497; he died in October, and their child was stillborn a few months later. Marguerite was seventeen years old. Katherine was married to Arthur, the son of Henry VII, by proxy in May of 1499 and again in May of 1501. They wed in person in November of that year; Arthur died 5 months later, in April of 1502. Katherine was sixteen years old. Both women also lost their young adult brothers to death. Katherine’s brother Juan, who was also Marguerite’s husband, died in 1497. Marguerite’s brother Philip died in 1506.

In 1500, Katherine and Marguerite became the aunts of the future Charles V, whose parents were Katherine’s sister Juana and Marguerite’s brother Philip. This relationship was important to both women. Marguerite became Charles’s guardian after his father’s death. Though Katherine corresponded with Charles, they did not meet until his visit to the Tudor court in 1520. Anticipating this meeting Katherine said: “I thank God I shall see his face; it will be the greatest good that I can have on earth.”²¹ Years later, Katherine depended heavily, though in vain, on Charles’s advocacy in her divorce proceedings.²²

Both women remarried, and in these second marriage...