History shows that women were not as big of participants in music as men until later in the medieval era. This is due to many obstacles that faced women disabling them from singing, playing any instruments, or even composing music. Although barriers were present, many women and nuns were able to surpass them, and make use of their abilities and skills. In this paper, I will present the role of women as they interacted with polyphony, and as they became scribes, performers, composers, and patrons.
Women’s involvement with medieval music took a variety of forms; they served at times as audience, as participant, as sponsor, and as creator. The evidence for their roles, like that for their male contemporaries, is sporadic at best. Many musical sources have been lost, and those sources that do survive only occasionally provide composer attributions. Information on specific performances is virtually non-existent, and the references to musical performances gleaned from literary allusions must be read critically.
Similarly, a work of art portraying a woman musician may be representational or symbolic, or both. Yet despite these handicaps, modern scholarship reveals many ways in which medieval women were engaged with, and enriched by, the music that flourished around them. Women and Polyphony In at least some convents, women performed polyphony (an extensive discussion of this can be found in Yardley, pp. 24-27).
Some of this repertory is preserved in the Las Huelgas codex which stems from the Carthusian monastery for women near Burgos in Northern Spain which housed approximately one hundred nuns and forty choir girls at its prime in the thirteenth century. The manuscript itself contains an extensive collection of polyphony, including three styles of organum: note-against-note, melismatic, and Notre Dame; as well as motets, conductus, tropes, and sequences. Although the manuscript was copied in the fourteenth century, the repertory comes from earlier, especially 1241-1288.
The prevalence of polyphony and the heavy use of tropes suggests that this convent, at least, placed a premium on up-to-date musical styles. Other convents may not have had the resources to keep up with the latest musical fashions, but small clusters of polyphonic pieces survive from sixteen different women’s convents, suggesting that religious women had at least some interest, and perhaps some training, in composed polyphony. Women as Scribes
Women not only read musical books, they also copied them, at least in some instances. While no investigation of women as scribes has been published, evidence for women’s roles in scriptoria has been accumulating. It is not known that women’s monasteries as well as men’s often had active scriptoria. Moreover, an index of colophons from France reveals a significant number of women who signed their scribal works. Though text sources naturally predominate, a few musical sources were signed by women (Colophons, passim).
Similarly, though no musical sources survive in her name, Sister Lukardis of Utrecht from the fifteenth century is known to have copied musical manuscripts, because a Dominican friar writes of her activities: She busied herself with…writing, which she had truly mastered as we may see in the large, beautiful, useful choir books which she wrote and annotated for the convent (Edwards, p. 10) Judging by handwriting, notational styles and repertory, a number of unsigned chant manuscripts also stem from the convents in which they were used.
Indeed, though relatively few women music scribes are known, many of their sisters may have legacies that hide amongst the unsigned manuscripts of the era. Women as Composers Perhaps the most famous of the medieval women composers is Hildegard of Bingen. Her repertory of sequences and antiphons (sacred songs) stand somewhat outside of the musical tradition, as she writes in a loosely formulaic melodic language that works more by motivic allusion than by strict adherence to modal range and standard melodic gestures.
She collected her 77 musical works in a volume called the Symphonia harmoniae caelestium revelationum (Symphony of Harmony of Heavenly Revelations). Her morality play, the Ordo virtutum, is appended to one manuscript copy of the Symphonia. Hildegard’s training is not particularly exceptional; education at convents was focused on the performance of the liturgy, and included literacy, Latin, and music. Thus, other nuns may have composed plainchant — or even polyphony — for new feasts and special celebrations. Since most medieval music is anonymous, however, their contributions are impossible to trace.
Secular composers fared better, probably because secular music is more often copied with composer attributions. Twenty-one trobairitz (or women troubadours) are known by name. Though only one composition survives with both text and music copied together (the canso A chantar written by the Countess of Dia), other works can be reconstructed by supplying a tune to match the poetic structure. Further examples of women’s compositions can be found among the tensos — debate poems — usually with alternating stanzas by the speakers.
A few women trouvres were active in the thirteenth century, but none of their works survive with music. Some scholars have speculated that songs in a women’s voice, that is, songs in which the speaker is identified as a women, may reflect women’s contributions to the lyric repertory. At the very least, these songs reflect sentiments and musical styles that seemed to their contemporaries to be appropriate for a woman. Several articles addressing such songs can be found in Vox Feminae. Women as Performers Women were active performers of secular music.
Many women performed as amateurs, either in the home or in courtly or urban settings. Boccaccio’s Decameron identifies women singing and dancing, along with their male companions, as do many of the courtly romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Page, Owl, pp. 102-106). In the romance Cleriadus et Meliadice (discussed in Page, Performance), for instance, girls as well as boys perform for the assembled company by harping or singing. Adults too participated actively in the festivities, first dancing their fill to the music of minstrels, then singing.
There might you have heard men and women singing well! , says the narrator (Page, Performance, p. 443) In addition to informal musical participation, however, women were also active as menestrelles and jongleuresses. Performers themselves, they traveled as part of small groups of entertainers, and were often wives or daughters to male minstrels. In some instances, however, women had independent roles; they were granted permission to participate in the Guild of Minstrels in Paris from 1321 to the seventeenth century.
Women as Patrons The role of the patron has often been neglected in histories of music, but a strong patron could form a center of musical production by gathering and supporting musicians of all calibers. The lands that Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) brought to her marriages, first to Louis VII of France and then to Henry II of England, made her one of the most politically influential figures of her day, but her cultural endeavors had an equally profound impact on European civilization.
Eleanor’s efforts at the court of Poitiers shaped a culture centered on courtly love and chivalric behavior; her sponsorship contributed to the success of the troubadours and to the spread of the Arthurian legends. Other noblewomen may have had a less dramatic impact on musical culture, but they often had musicians in their personal retinue and so helped to shape the prevailing musical style. Indeed because women often married far from home, they served as a kind of cultural network for importing and mingling new ideas, styles, and tastes with the established norms of their husband’s court.
