Women as dedicatees of "artes de canto" in the early modern Iberian world: imposed knowledge or women’s choice?

Abstract

Only two known 16th-century music books printed in the Iberian world were dedicated to women: El arte Tripharia (1550) by Juan Bermudo (c.1510–after 1559) and Arte de canto llano (1594) by Francisco de Montanos (c.1528–after 1595). The first one, dedicated to Isabel Pacheco, Abbess of the Santa Clara convent in Montilla (Córdoba), was addressed to her nuns. The second, dedicated to the noblewoman Catalina de Zúñiga y Sandoval (1555–1628), was a plainsong handbook consisting of only the first section of a previous work by Montanos, Arte de musica theorica y pratica (1592), which had been dedicated to Catalina’s husband, Fernando Ruiz de Castro, 6th Count of Lemos. El arte Tripharia has usually been taken as evidence to claim that Renaissance Iberian music treatises considered women as intellectually inferior learners, to be taught passively only the practical side of music. This article, in addition to questioning received opinion about El arte Tripharia, focuses on the connections (generally overlooked) between Montanos’s Arte de canto llano and Catalina de Zúñiga. Both the dedication by Montanos and the prefatory material of other books dedicated to Catalina de Zúñiga support the hypothesis that this noblewoman was not a passive receptor or a prospective user of Montanos’s book, but might in fact have commissioned the publication of this work to serve her own agenda as a religious patroness. I will argue that these two music handbooks dedicated to Isabel Pacheco and Catalina de Zúñiga were not conceived nor regarded at that time as books for ‘women’ as a category, relating these two cases to the wider debates about the role of women in the creation and transmission of culture and the representation of women in literature and art.