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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2024
The convent in Early Modern Italy functioned as a uniquely queer space, denying women heteronormative lives while producing homosocial, virginal communities. As nuns wove together the dual acts of listening and vocalizing, they built queer sonic environments that were the site of massive power struggles between male church officials, the bodies of women religious, and the wealthy families of Italy. Connecting voice studies, feminist and queer musicology, sound studies, and nun studies to explore new ways of approaching convent musicking, the author examines Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’ to illuminate the possibilities of women’s agency and queerly inflected performance.
1 Quoted in Kendrick, Robert L., Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Clarendon Press, 1996), 427 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kendrick includes the original Italian in Appendix A, Doc. 38a (p. 452): ‘Poi mi meto a far il liuto cosi con la voce, hora una cosa e hor un altra. E poi cosi cantando e sonando alla mia fogia mi escono a tratto per tratto sospiri grandissimi. O che mi piace tanto questo sentimento di Amore […] E una di queste domeniche dopo cena, molte di compagnia cosi per ricreatione andauano in camina per dir alla mia fogia, e per la strada incontrando in me, mi pregavano andar con esse loro. E cosi per compiacerle andai ancor io, e come fui la, cominciai a cantare, e cantai un motetto cosi a mente, mentre che loro dauano un pocco di sufragio alla loro fatica, e mentre io cantaua, mi sentivo ad accender il mio Core, tanto che pareua all’esteriore che fosse una pazarella.’ (Here and in other original language quotations italics denote where the author added in letters that were not in the manuscript.)
2 Ibid., 428. Appendix A, Doc. 38b and c (p. 452): ‘quello che alle uolte mi par di udir in spirito quella bella compagnia di Angeli, tanto belli, tanto dolci’; ‘pariua che io uolsi intendere e sapere, come si ne staua quelli giorni auante che il Signore piglia carne umana’.
3 Lindsay Johnson, ‘Performed Embodiment, Sacred Eroticism, and Voice in Devotions by Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Nuns’ (PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2013).
4 Lindsay Johnson, ‘Experiencing Alba Tressina’s Anima mea liquefacta est through Bodily Humors and the Sacred Erotic’, Current Musicology, 96 (2013), pp. 37–69.
5 Kate Bartel, ‘Portal of the Skies: Music as Devotional Act in Early Modern Europe’ (PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2006).
6 Although in this article my case study focuses on Vizzana, whose convent underwent decades-long trauma at the hands of church officials, the frenzied lobbying and arguments over appropriate restrictions for convent music leading up to the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century (and then the practice in the subsequent decades of withholding allowance of musical activities as punishment) demonstrate this friction. See Monson, Craig, ‘The Council of Trent Revisited’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 55.1 (2002), pp. 1–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kendrick, Celestial Sirens.
7 While monasteries were also outwardly virginal, homosocial communities, monks were not married to Jesus in elaborate profession ceremonies that rivalled secular weddings, as many nuns from the richest Italian families experienced.
8 While examining nuns’ performances within convent spaces, it is important to note that the performance of music within convent walls was a multi-sensory experience for singers and listeners alike, and that the physical spaces augmented the significance of the sound. Indeed, nuns were afforded a more complete musicking experience than lay listeners, as the sisters could watch the performances – an opportunity denied to lay listeners, who had to listen to the music wafting through grating, windows, or screens (if they were allowed to listen at all). In some cases, women from the laity could experience this visual component as well. Laurie Stras demonstrates the extent to which certain privileged lay women of the nobility (in Ferrara, the highest-ranking women of the Este family and their female entourages) gained access to the interior spaces of convents for spiritual visits and retreats, up to days at a time. For example, Duchess Margherita gained special licence from the Pope himself to ongoing interior access to any of the myriad Ferrarese convents and monasteries, and could take married female attendants with her. See Stras, Laurie, Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 229–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Furthermore, the configuration of nuns’ bodies in the architectural spaces of the convent also created opportunities for nuns’ listening and performing bodies to more fully interact with one another on an intimate level.
9 Peraino, Judith, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (University of California Press, 2006), p. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrew’s Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1879).
11 Diana Fuss, ‘Inside/Out’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. by Diana Fuss (Routledge, 1991), pp. 1–10 (p. 2).
12 Ibid., p. 5.
13 Erlmann, Veit, ‘But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses’, in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. by Erlmann, Veit (Berg, 2004), pp. 1–20 (p. 3).Google Scholar
14 Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, p. 162. The popular belief of nuns as ‘terrestrial angels’ gave rise to a ‘remarkable uniformity of outsiders’ reports on nuns’ polyphony’ that describe convent music as ‘ravishing’, ‘heavenly’, or ‘angelic’. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 162–63. One sixteenth-century author, P. Morigia, explicitly designates nuns and their music as being angelic. See his La nobilità di Milano (Ponzio, 1595), pp. 306–07. The paragraph in question is reproduced in Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, p. 441. See also Monson, Craig, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (University of California Press, 1995), p. 89 Google Scholar; Reardon, Colleen, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 158 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and even the dedication in Leone Leoni’s Sacri fiori, libro quarto (Vincenti, 1622), a volume that contains four pieces by nun composer Alba Tressina.
15 For an exploration of this idea from a theoretical perspective, see Jean-Luc Nancy’s foreword ‘Ascoltando’ in Paul Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears (Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. ix–xiii (p. x).
16 See Anahid Kassabian’s discussion of touch and haptics in relation to listening in Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (University of California Press, 2013), pp. xvi–xvii.
17 Kant posited music as necessarily penetrative, stating that it ‘obtrudes itself and does violence to the freedom of others’ as the sound waves enter our ears forcibly, bidden or not, saturating all within earshot like a perfume. In this way Kant asserts the ambivalent nature of our perception of sound. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. by Bernard, J. H. (Hafner Press, a division of Macmillan Publishing, 1951), p. 174 Google Scholar.
18 Szendy, Listen, p. xiii. See also Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, trans. by Mandell, Charlotte (Fordham University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, p. 5. Originally published as À l’écoute (Éditions Galilée, 2002).
19 Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening, p. xxi.
20 Ibid., p. xxi (emphasis in original).
21 Jarman-Ivens, Freya, Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Ibid., p. 13.
23 One need only look to Christian patriarchs’ writings about music’s role in the Church to see the all-encompassing importance of words in sacred music. See St Augustine, Confessions, Book X.
24 Wood, Elizabeth, ‘Sapphonics’, in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology , ed. by Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth and Thomas, Gary C., 2nd edn (Routledge, 2006), pp. 27–66 (p. 27).Google Scholar
25 1 Corinthians 14: 34–36.
26 Carson, Anne, Glass, Irony and God (New Directions Books, 1995), p. 127.Google Scholar
27 Ibid., p. 121.
28 A total of 75 per cent is the highest of the estimates, but still falls within the realm of possibility. Statistics on the percentages of Italian women in convents can be found in Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 6; Kendrick, Robert, ‘The Traditions of Milanese Convent Music and the Sacred Dialogues of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani’, in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Monson, Craig A. (University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 211–34Google Scholar (p. 212); and Reardon, Colleen, ‘The Good Mother, the Reluctant Daughter, and the Convent: A Case of Musical Persuasion’, in Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, ed. by Thomasin Lamay, (Ashgate Publishing, 2005), pp. 271–86 (p. 273)Google Scholar.
29 Montford, Kimberlyn, ‘Holy Restraint: Religious Reform and Nuns’ Music in Early Modern Rome’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 37.4 (2006), pp. 1007–26 (p. 1012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 See Federigo Borromeo’s writings on female mystics, passages of which are printed in Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, and translated in Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls.
31 See St Augustine, Confessions, Book X.
32 Jagose, Annamarie, Queer Theory: An Introduction (Melbourne University Press, 1996), p. 3Google Scholar, and Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, p. 21.
33 Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, p. 11.
34 For sound phenomenologist Steven Connor, an ‘umbilical continuity’ is the link between the source of sound and the ear that hears it, though early seventeenth-century listeners might have attributed such a linkage to pneuma flying through the ether. See Steven Connor, ‘Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing’, in Erlmann, Hearing Cultures, pp. 153–72; and Johnson, ‘Experiencing Alba Tressina’s Anima mea liquefacta est’.
35 Wood, ‘Sapphonics’, p. 28.
36 Quoted in Stras, Women and Music, p. 27.
37 Quoted in ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 27.
39 Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, p. 41.
40 I have not been able to find a translation of this word. Given its similarity to ‘ginocchio’ (‘knee’) and ‘genuflettersi’ (‘to genuflect; kneel down’), I take it to mean someone who is on her knees a great deal, as in prayer. Furthermore, Confaloniera here is talking about herself. When nuns ventured to write letters or treatises, they tended to portray themselves using overly humble language (see the writings of Hildegard of Bingen or St Teresa of Ávila); as Confaloniera was writing to her archbishop, an imprecise gloss such as ‘penitent’ seems to fit.
41 Quoted in Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 78–79. ‘Padre carissimo, non posso finir di ringraziar V.S. Ill.ma del dono che mi à fatto e molto più per eser stato a tempo di poterlo adoperar la prima uolta a si bel misterio poi che per l’alegrezza che io vidi che ebero tutte le monache mi risolsi di uoler far sentir à tutte il suo sono. E cosi secretamente feci inuito a una che sona il uilone e un altra il uiolino e cosi la notte del Santo Natale andavimo a far li matinati a tutte le moniche cantando[:] Gloria in eccelsis et altri uerseti simili a questi che io dirò cioe[:] Il dolce sposo uostro sorelle mie Hoggi è nato dalla Vergine Maria. E nato il Bon Giesu per nostro Saluatore. Venite sorelle a donargli il core […] il dono che ha fato a la pouera genocha ha tirato li lacrimi de gli ochi per diuotione a molte persone per sentir a sonar a si bel misterio: poi si ricordauano poi [underlining in original] della melodia deli Angeli’. Translation by Robert Kendrick until the ellipses, then translation mine, with help from Nina Treadwell. Reproduced in Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, Appendix A, Doc. 35 (p. 451).
42 This rhetorical positioning is also a main strategy of Hildegard in her letter to the Prelates of Mainz.
43 Untexted vocalizing removes masculine coding from the queer melding of (feminine) body and (masculine) words. While Jarman-Ivens distinguishes this mixture of masculine and feminine signifiers in spoken or sung language as a queer component of voice, removing the masculine component to leave an untexted vocalization is in itself a queer and sometimes unsettling event. While instrumental music is by definition untexted, many convents shied away from (or were forbidden from performing) such musical offerings; indeed, the first nun composer to write extensively for instruments was Isabella Leonarda (1620–1704), whose sonatas appeared in publication at the end of the seventeenth century, in 1693.
44 Gabriele Paleotti, ‘Ordine da servarsi dale suore nel loro cantare e musica’, 1580, Archivio Generale Arcivescovile, Bologna, Misc. vecchie 808, fasc. 6. Quoted and translated in Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 37; Italian provided in n. 6, p. 260.
45 Ibid.
46 Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls, p. 4.
47 Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, p. 22.
48 Ibid., p. 15.
49 Ibid., p. 59.
50 Glixon, Jonathan E., Mirrors of Heaven or Worldly Theaters? Venetian Nunneries and Their Music (Oxford University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
51 Quoted in Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 39.
52 Ibid., p. 36. The convent specifically banned from using organ to accompany singers was Santi Vitale et Agricola.
53 Paleotti, ‘Ordine da servarsi dale suore nel loro cantare e musica’, 1580, quoted and translated in Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 38.
54 Ibid.
55 Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 38.
56 ‘Suor Angela Serafina stia per tre mesi senza il uelo. Sia priua dell’ufficio di organista, nè si possa rimettere a questo officio per sei anni. L’arpicordo grande non stia in camera sua, ma altroue in conuento, nè lei possa sonar su quello, o altro instromento, nè cantar per tre anni canto figurato. Et per sei mesi ogni Mercordì mangi in refettorio in terra, et domandi perdono del disturbo, che ha hauuto per causa sua, et del scandolo de haver dato da mangiare in conuento all’organista. Nè uada per tre mesi al parlatorio.’ Translation by Robert Kendrick. See Celestial Sirens, Appendix A, Doc. 7d (pp. 437–38). English translation on p. 64.
57 Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, p. 64.
58 Ibid., p. 65. Arese was Carlo Borromeo’s vicar of nuns. Borromeo, archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584 and uncle to Federigo Borromeo, was such a well-loved leader in the reformation of the Catholic Church that he was canonized just twenty-six years after his death.
59 ‘Suor Prospera Vittoria Cauenaga, e Suor Prospera Corona Basgapera e Suor Paula Iustina Carpana stiano priuate di voce attiua, e passiua, di porta, torno, e parlatorio, di [original draft version: poter] non cantar canto figurato per il tempo [original: sara poi arbitrario a Mess.r Ill.mo Aricuescovo] di sei anni, dicano ogni venerdi per vn’anno sua colpa in reffittorio et il salmo, Miserere mei Deus, [next four words not in original] in genocchi in mezzo il refittorio […] Lasciando le loro celle, nelle quali andauano a star altre come se dira alla Madre ministra. – Et di poi detta Suor Paola Iustina stia priuata di scriuer ne far sciuere lettere ne altro ad alcuna persona’. Translation by Robert Kendrick until the ellipses, then translation mine. See Celestial Sirens, Appendix A, Doc. 8k (p. 439). English translation on p. 65. (Note: Suor Paola Giustina’s surname appears with different spellings in the original.)
60 Examples of convent punishments, in rough order of severity, included excommunication; imprisonment in one’s cell (in extreme cases for the rest of a nun’s life); denial of Communion or other sacraments; restrictions on behaviour, such as movement within the convent, singing, communicating; forced humility, such as requiring the nun to lie prone on the floor while others walk over or around her, making her eat apart from the others, making her kiss the feet of her sisters and ask their forgiveness for her transgression; and for minor offences, extra prayers or other convent duties. Often, the severity of the punishment was reflected in the duration of time that it lasted: days or weeks vs. months vs. years. The severity of Suor Serafina’s punishment demonstrates the degree to which her actions threatened the Church’s beliefs regarding proper nun behaviour. This type of punishment was not new following the Council of Trent. Hildegard of Bingen and her convent were on the brink of excommunication when she wrote her letter to the Prelates of Mainz to argue that being forbidden from singing the offices should not be a punishment.
61 The parlour was typically constructed as a double room divided by a grate or iron bars, and for the church hierarchy it often became the site of scandal. Numerous edicts survive banning nuns from performing secular songs or Carnival plays en travesti for select audiences of family members, local aristocrats, friars, and honoured guests in the parlour. The regularity of such decrees throughout the seventeenth century demonstrates their ineffectiveness. The parlour was also the space where an outside music teacher would meet with his pupil(s), though this practice was heavily regulated and often forbidden from the early 1600s onwards. This is the one space in the convent where a nun’s voice was not ‘disembodied’, from the perspective of a lay listener. See Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 62–64 and 116.
62 Ibid., p. 417.
63 Vizzana’s compositions are no exception in exhibiting these various outcomes. See Johnson, ‘Performed Embodiment’.
64 Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 121.
65 Much of the excellent research on convent music published in the last decades has focused on the musical cultures of specific cities, describing in detail the logistics and spiritual import of outward facing performances and ceremonies, biographic scholarship on nun composers and familial relationships, and how convents used music towards social and political ends. Colleen Reardon traces the lineage of scholarship on convent music in detail in ‘Musical Dispatches from the Heavenly Jerusalem’, in Listening to Early Modern Catholicism: Perspectives from Musicology, ed. by Daniele Filippi and Michael J. Noone (Brill, 2017), pp. 79–93.
66 Cusick, Suzanne, ‘On a Lesbian Relationship with Music’, in Brett and others, Queering the Pitch, pp. 67–83 Google Scholar (p. 78).
67 Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 192.
68 Ibid., 201. In contrast, convents in Ferrara during this same time offered spectacular musical performances, encouraged by Bishop Paolo Leoni. See Stras, Women and Music, pp. 224–29.
69 Of the twenty pieces in Vizzana’s sole publication, Componimenti musicali (1623), ten are for a single soprano. Eight more feature two sopranos and continuo. The final two are for three and four voices and continuo, respectively.
70 As Monson says, ‘From 1580 onward, then, Bolognese church fathers thus unwittingly directed the musical nuns in their charge to participate indirectly in what constituted the “new music” of the early seicento.’ See Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 202.
71 Only a few of the pieces in Componimenti musicali use popular religious texts suitable for a variety of liturgical applications. Many pieces contain unique texts. The text of ‘O magnum mysterium’ is unusual and may have been composed within the convent. I would like to suggest that Vizzana or her famed aunt, Flaminia Bombacci, both of whom were considered gifted rhetoricians in both Italian and Latin, may have written one or more of the texts in this compendium, though I have no proof of this. Monson, too, stops short of suggesting that Vizzana herself wrote the text. See Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 73. However, it is not unheard of for nun composers to write their own texts; Sulpitia Cesis (fl. 1619) of Modena wrote several of her own texts, noting della medesima in the manuscript. See Johnson, ‘Performed Embodiment’.
72 Monson names ‘O magnum mysterium’ as one of ‘Vizzana’s two most overt love songs to the heavenly spouse, both in terms of their verbal and musical language’, Disembodied Voices, p. 99. He specifically places this piece within the nuns’ ‘private realm’ on p. 104.
73 Monson, Disembodied Voices, pp. 28, 194.
74 Monson, Disembodied Voices, pp. 76–77, 103.
75 In the Germanic lands, nun and poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–94) wrote an extended, erotic meditation on the physicality of Christ’s wounds on the cross, called Die Abendmahls-Andachten, which includes a poem entitled ‘Uber das Blut JESU/aus seiner rechten Hand’ (‘On the Blood of JESUS from his Right Hand’). See Foley-Beining, Kathleen, The Body and Eucharistic Devotion in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s “Meditations” (Camden House, 1997).Google Scholar
76 Monson, Disembodied Voices, pp. 65–68.
77 In Early Modern Europe, death was a common metaphor for orgasm. It’s unsurprising, then, that those with a fervent desire to be close to the divine might celebrate Jesus’s dying body.
78 That is, the physical group consumption of Jesus’s body and blood in ritualistic practice.
79 Out of twenty pieces in the publication, five focus on Jesus, the Passion, or the Sacrament. These are (in order within the publication): ‘O si sciret stultus mundus’, ‘Praebe mihi’, ‘O magnum mysterium’, ‘Veni dulcissime Domine’, ‘Omnes gentes, cantate Domino’.
80 With thanks to Molly Jones-Lewis for the translation.
81 Fascinatingly, convent walls allowed the transfer of these innovative ideas. Vizzana and other nuns at Santa Cristina appear to have had access to up-to-date musical styles. Monson delineates a number of possibilities for how such knowledge might have been allowed inside the convent, including collections of sacred music in the stile moderno published in Bologna in the preceding decade; the loosening of restrictions placed on convents that allowed outside musicians to perform during convent feast days; and the fact that correspondence and in-person visitors were no longer monitored as strictly as they had been previously at Santa Cristina. In some cases, sheet music was bequeathed to the nuns in wills. See Monson, Disembodied Voices, pp. 56–61.
82 Monson suggests that the triple repetitions may allude to the three hours Jesus spent on the cross. See Monson, Disembodied Voices, p. 104.
83 Stras points out a similarly meditative quality in music written for nuns in Ferrara. For example, the anonymous piece ‘Suscipe verbum, virgo Maria’, a piece Stras suggests may have been used by mystic musician Caterina Vigri for meditation, features repetition of pitches so much that the opening D appears nearly constantly in all five voices for the first seventeen bars. Stras calls the piece ‘mesmeric’, noting that ‘the passage of musical time is suspended’. See Stras, Women and Music, p. 44.
84 Indeed, the mystery of the Passion is fundamental to Roman Catholic teachings. The term ‘Paschal mystery’ traces back at least to the second century ce in a homily by Melito of Sardis, who wrote of the ‘mystery of the Pascha’. See Melito of Sardis: On Pascha: With the Fragments of Melito and Other Material Related to the Quartodecimans, translated, introduced, and annotated by Alistair Stewart-Sykes (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), p. 37.
85 Vizzana was not the only nun composer to play with the dual eroticizations of Mary and Jesus. In 1650, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani published her Salmi a otto voci concertati, wherein she included the piece ‘O quam bonus es a due’. The two singers in this piece drive one another into a frenzy as they have trouble deciding which body is more glorious – Mary’s or Jesus’s. The text says, ‘O happy, blessed me. Now I graze from his wound; now I nurse at her breast; I do not know where to turn next’, and gets increasingly detailed as the piece goes on.
86 The upwards motion of pitch in the cantus line might be mirrored and thus reinforced in the continuo line as well with the performance of a ♯6 chord on the penultimate bass note – that is, a G major chord in second inversion, in which the B♮ continues to drive upwards to the C and then is left hanging as a Phrygian half cadence.
87 This type of syncopated, extended dissonance in a full or half cadence is common in Vizzana’s compositions.
88 In convents large enough to support more than one choir, the act of singing with one’s particular group indeed fostered a sense of community and loyalty with that group, often in opposition to the other choir. Robert Kendrick documents multiple instances of these types of internal convent struggles at large convents in Milan. See Kendrick, Celestial Sirens.
89 Jacques Descartes de Ventemille, quoted in Pontus de Tyard, Solitaire second ou prose de la musique [1555], trans. by Joel Newman, in ‘Francesco Canova da Milano’ (Master’s thesis, New York University, 1942), p. 11. Quoted also in Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, ed. by Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin (Schirmer Wadsworth Group/Thompson Learning, 1984), pp. 159–60.
90 A common understanding of performance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whether musical or spoken, held that the performer’s shifting humours, wrought by their changing emotions, created a spark of vitality that flew through the air to then alter the bodily humours and thus the emotions of the audience. See Roach, Joseph R., The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (University of Delaware Press, 1985).Google Scholar
91 As Craig Monson so thoroughly describes in Disembodied Voices, the public musical renown of the convent of Santa Cristina della Fondazza in Bologna as well as internal arguments over musical practice together prompted decades of curial visits, an outright ban on polyphonic singing, and threats of excommunication.