This chapter addresses the question of Casulana’s development as a composer. Through historical network analysis, it presents evidence suggesting that Casulana was connected to Nicola Vicentino for a significant part of her life, and that it was through him she established her first networks. Their paths led them both to Vicenza, to Siena during the siege of 1554–55, as well as to Rome, Venice, Milan, and more indirectly to Munich and Paris. Moreover, their networks intersected on several occasions. These data provide substantial evidence to argue that Casulana and Vicentino were somehow personally connected. Vicentino, the leading theorist of chromaticism in the mid-sixteenth century, had many students, including several women, and he was clearly not an opponent of female instruction. His implicit musical philogyny lends significant plausibility to the hypothesis that he may have had Casulana as a student.

The introduction of this book articulates its central thesis: that Maddalena Casulana’s achievements are best understood as the product of a synergy between her exceptional talent and character and the intellectual context of the Querelle des femmes, which created an environment eager to support women’s creativity and value against the prevailing misogynistic ideology of the early modern period. It first traces Casulana’s presence in 18th- and 19th-century encyclopedias and then illustrates how she faded from musicological knowledge in the early twentieth century, only to be rediscovered in the late 1970s. It then lays out the analytical framework underpinning the study, which is grounded in a historicized feminist criticism informed by early modern pro-feminine discourses. Finally, the introduction delineates the three fundamental key concepts that inform the approach adopted in this study: philogyny, exemplarity, and imitation.

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.