This chapter analyzes what constitutes the core of Casulana’s plea for female intellectual excellence: her music. It shows that the stylistic elements that have sometimes been perceived as unusual are fully coherent when placed in the context of the mid-century madrigal. While adhering to a miniature aesthetic, her four-part madrigals of 1568 and 1570 encompass the full range of the arioso style, from the most modest poetic recitations to the most advanced chromatic, modal, and harmonic experiments, including highly theatrical forms of declamation. These stylistic features place her fully within the “nuova maniera,” the “new music” developed not only by Vicentino but also by Monte, Rossetti, Lasso, Rore, Wert, and others during the same period. With her 1583 Primo libro a5, Casulana fully embraces the new hybrid style. She softens the roughness of her earlier manner to develop more radiant and euphonious textures, while also displaying greater contrapuntal inventiveness.

The poetic mode most often associated with the marvellous is epic: an inherently hybrid form of poetry that combines narration with enactment. In his Discorsi del poema eroico (1587; pub. 1594), Torquato Tasso (1544–95) conveyed his own understanding of meraviglia, which in epic poetry is essential as long as it is tempered, in his view, by verisimile (verisimilitude). This chapter explores the transformation of epic from poem to madrigal to reveal how musical setting recalibrated the representational balance achieved in epic poetry. Following the lead of Giaches de Wert (1535–96) and Luca Marenzio (1553–99), Monteverdi would bring epic poetry in ottava rima – particularly musical settings of Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata (1581) – into the lyric-dominated world of the madrigal book.