Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages

Anna Kathryn Grau is lecturer and Music & Performing Art Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her published work includes research on gendered voices within Old French motets, it has appeared in Gender & Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song (ed. Katherine Kong and Rachel Golden, University Press of Florida, 2021). Lisa Colton is Professor of Musicology at the University of Huddersfield. Her publications include Angel Song: Medieval English Music in History (Routledge, 2017) and the co-edited book Music and Liturgy in Medieval Britain and Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Acknowledgements

List of Figures, Tables and Music Examples

Notes on Contributors



Introduction: Female Authorship, Female Voice, and Female-Voice Song

 Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton



PART 1: Ritual Discourse



1 The Feminine Voice in the Early Islamicate Courts (661–1000)

 Lisa Nielson

2 Music, Liturgy, and the Discursive Construction of Gender in a Thirteenth-Century Double Monastery

 Lauren Purcell-Joiner

3 A Female-Voice Ceremonial from Medieval Castile

 David Catalunya

4 Religious Reform and Liturgical Change in the Fifteenth Century: Chant as Women’s Protest Music

 Claire Taylor Jones



PART 2: Materiality



5 Beyond this Mist: Uncovering Material Multiplicities in Amis, amis

 Rachel May Golden

6 Transmission of Female-Voice Motets in Late Thirteenth-Century Manuscripts

 Anna Kathryn Grau

7 Chants for the Holy Trinity of Barking Abbey: Ethelburg, Hildelith, and Wulfhild

 Anne Bagnall Yardley



PART 3: Subjectivity and Emotion



8 Handmade Women: The Manufacture of Femininity in the Chansons de femme

 Helen Dell

9 The Voice of Emotion: Constructing an Identity for the Comtessa de Dia in Performance

 Leah Stuttard

10 “Going all the Way with Marot”: Empowerment in the Pastourelle Motet L’autrier m’esbatoie/Demenant grant joie/MANERE

 Lisa Colton

11 Sexuality, Pedagogy, and Women’s Emotions in Middle English Songs

 Carissa M. Harris

12 “Who cannot wepe come lerne at me”: Voicing Refrains in Late Medieval Passion Lyric

 Melissa Tu



PART 4: Representation



13 A Song from the Mound: The Female Voice as a Repository for Genealogical Knowledge in Hyndluljóð

 Annemari Ferreira

14 Eye, Mouth, and Heart: The Female-Voiced Contrafacta of Can vei la lauzeta mover

 Meghan Quinlan

15 A Musical Letter from Eleanor of Provence to Margaret of Scotland: Patronage as Authorship in the Sequence Ex te lux oritur

 Gillian L. Gower

16 Female Voice in the Trecento Song

 Angelica Vomera

17 Saints and Sinners: The Representation of Women in Late-Medieval English Carols

 Louise McInnes



Index