On Hearing the Courtesan in a Gift of Song: The Venetian Case of Gaspara Stampa

Abstract We have seen that the repertories performed by Italian courtesans to such acclaim are highly problematic for the modern scholar. Indeed there is hardly a single collection or even piece that can be said with absolute certainty to have been sung by a woman, courtesan or otherwise. In what follows I offer a case study designed to interrogate the much larger problem of the courtesan’s lost music by looking at a set of polyphonic partbooks and proposing new possibilities for how female performance of solo song might be buried in written sources. My evidence is a fourvoice collection of madrigals written by Perissone Cambio in Venice (fl. 1540–50) and dedicated in 1547 to the famous female poet, singer, and lute player Gaspara Stampa (1523–54).1 Working backwards from a polyphonic madrigal book in order to uncover solo repertory is a relatively novel endeavor, as studies of women’s solo repertories generally look directly at song-type genres like frottole and lute songbooks. My own study ostensibly addresses only the practice of a single female musician, but from it I extrapolate to a hypothetical cross-section of the repertories of Italian courtesans all told, raising various questions about how courtesans made their repertories and how their singing was regarded as cultural currency.