Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2012, vol . 7

Marie de Medici’s 1605 ballet de la reine and the Virtuosic Female Voice Melinda J . Gough

his essay focuses on the Baroque phenomenon of solo female song Tin royal women’s ballets of the early seventeenth century, primarily at the court of Marie de Medici (1575–1642), queen consort to Henri IV of France.1 Most English masque scholars know that Marie’s young- est daughter Henrietta Maria, as queen consort of England, featured two female singers in her 1632 masque Tempe Restored, one of whom has been presumed to be a foreign musician and perhaps a professional.2 French

1 I deploy the term “Baroque” in reference to musical developments of late six- teenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe as helpfully defined by Georgie Durosoir, La musique vocale profane au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 2009), 10–15. 2 Suzanne Gossett, “’Man-maid be gone’: Women in Masques,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 96–113; Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6; Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1605–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 4; R. Booth, “The First Female Professional Singers: Madame Coniack,” Notes and Queries 44 (1997), 533; James Knowles, “Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?: Apes and Others on the Early Modern Stage,” in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 138–63; Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52–58; Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 90–110; Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 156–57.

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precedents for this casting innovation, however, are less well understood.3 This article seeks to expand what we have known about vocal monody in French court ballet, particularly the ballets for which Marie de Medici was chief patron-performer, by focusing on her unnamed ballet de la reine for Carnival 1605.4 Scholars have speculated about the impact of Marie’s patronage on sung music in court ballet, but lacking concrete evidence they have only been able to hazard a diffuse and indirect influence.5 Drawing

3 This essay builds on my earlier assertion of connections both material and the- matic between Henrietta Maria’s patronage of female singers in Tempe Restored and the 1609 Ballet of Beauty sponsored and danced in Paris by Henrietta’s mother. See Melinda J. Gough, “‘Not as myself ’: The Queen’s Voice in Tempe Restored,” Modern Philology 101, no. 1 (August 2003): 48–67. 4 Published work on Marie de Medici’s spectacles is largely silent regarding those productions for which Marie was both premier dancer and patron. Sara Mamone, for example, whose work traces the celebrations surrounding Marie de Medici’s wedding in 1600 and her later production of French court entertainments, discusses no instances in which Marie herself performed. See her Paris et Florence: deux capitales du spectacle pour une reine, Marie de Médicis, trans. Sophie Bajard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990); Mamone, ed., Firenze e Parigi: due capitali dello spettacolo per una regina, Maria de’ Medici (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 1988); Mamone, “Feste e spettacoli a Firenze e in Francia per le nozze di Maria de’ Medici con Enrico IV,” Quaderni di teatro 2 (1980): 206–28; Mamone, “Slittamenti progressivi della festa da Firenze a Lione per le nozze di Maria de’ Medici con Enrico IV di Francia,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 1 (1987): 309–22; and Mamone, Dèi, semidei, uomini: lo spettacolo a Firenze tra neoplatonismo e realtà borghese (XV-XVII secolo) (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003), esp. 169–92. Ballet de cour scholars, too, have largely ignored Marie’s contributions: even Margaret McGowan, whose work briefly considers Marie’s influence in the genre, treats almost exclusively the productions she sponsored after Henri IV’s death in 1610 in none of which the widowed Marie herself danced; see McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1963), esp. 63–67 and 85–99. Henri Prunières briefly discusses Marie’s 1609 ballet in Le ballet de cour en France avant Benserade et Lully (1914; Paris: Editions Lanore, 1982), 108–9. More recently, Maria Adelaide Bartoli Bacherini has devoted four pages to Marie’s Florentine training in music and dancing and its impact in France, but the ballets de cour in which Marie performed are given but a two-sentence mention; see Bartoli Bacherini, “Musiche e danze per una regina,” in Maria de’ Medici (1573–1642): una principessa Fiorentina sul trono di Francia, ed. Caterina Caneva e Francesco Solinas (Florence: Sillabe, 2005), 141–44. 5 The most important discussion of this topic to date is Prunières, Le ballet de cour en France, 105–9.

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on a previously neglected eye-witness description of this particular queen’s ballet for winter 1605 together with better-known records of the famous Caccini consort’s sojourn at the French court during the carnival season that same year, this essay traces how Marie as queen of France used her Medici heritage and the privileged networks of artistic patronage to which it gave her access not only to bring the Caccini family to Paris, as oth- ers have noted, but also to integrate into French ballet de cour one of the period’s most avant-garde performance trends: the virtuosic solo female voice. Mapping this musical moment against its structural juxtaposition with elite women’s dance during the 1605 ballet, and reading both female dance and female song in light of Renaissance civility discourse, I also suggest what this new queen stood to gain socially and politically through active participation in and patronage of such aesthetic innovations within this most prestigious genre of French court spectacle.6

I

Scholars have known almost nothing about this second of three royal bal- lets for which Marie de Medici was both patron and highest ranking danc- er.7 Brief references in contemporary sources establish that a queen’s ballet

6 On the status of royal court ballet as the most socially prestigious of the French court’s cultural festivities, see page 145 and also note 42, both below. 7 Scholarly consensus has attributed to Marie de Medici three major ballets in 1601, 1605, and 1609. For example see, most recently, Ilaria Ciseri, “Ballets et carrousels: immagini simboliche nello spettacolo di corte,” in Le ‘siècle’ de Marie de Médicis . Actes du séminaire de la chaire rhétorique et société en Europe (XVIe–XVIIe siècles), ed. Françoise Graziani et Francesco Solinas (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2003), 137–44, esp. 138. Ciseri, like Marcel Paquot in Les étrangers dans les divertissements de la cour de Beaujoyeulx à Molière, 1581–1673 [n.p.: La Renaissance du Livre, n.d.], 55 note 1, fol- lows the eighteenth-century scholar Pierre Godard de Beauchamps, who in turn based his conclusions on contemporary references found in Michel Henry’s table (Beauchamps, Recherches sur les théâtres de France, 3 vols. [Paris, 1735], 3: 48–49; see also ms.fr. 24357 fol. 132r). Undoubtedly other productions took place under Marie’s sponsorship, but concerning these ballets information is even less coherent and sustained. For example, although Françoise Kermina (Marie de Médicis: reine, régente et rebelle [n.p.: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1979], 103) makes reference to Marie’s involvement in a 1610 ballet entitled Felicités de l’Age d’Or, and Karen Britland cites Kermina on this ballet in “Marie

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took place in January 1605, but offer scant description; moreover, since no extant récits or verses have been identified, we have had no information concerning this ballet’s dramatic frame or plot.8 An unsigned manuscript letter authored by a spectator at the Louvre performance, however, pro- vides a detailed outline of the onstage action. This letter, found among the registres or collected papers of the famous seventeenth-century antiquarian Nicholas-Fabri de Peiresc, has remained unknown to ballet de cour schol- ars despite having been roughly paraphrased by Louis Battifol in 1930.9 Usefully for my purposes, however, this document describes the ballet’s women performers, including one particular musician: an “Italienne” or Italian woman. Arriving on stage among the royal “Music”(the consort of chamber singers regularly employed by the monarchs) and dressed like them and like the ballet’s women dancers in “incarnat” (i.e., carnation or light pink) and white, the colors of the royal livery, this Italian woman was also specially costumed: the letter’s author states that she was “so remark- ably dressed that it would be impossible for me to depict her” (“si bien atifée qu’il me seroit impossible de la depeindre”). She performed with the Music when it sang the king’s praises after the queen and eleven princesses marched in a grave passage to the center of the room and just before they ceremonially greeted Henri IV, and again when the Music accompanied the figured dances performed by Marie and her female companions. The ballet’s most notable musical feature, however, was a solo performance by this “Italienne” during an intermission in the queen’s dancing. The queen, eventually tiring, seated herself on a specially constructed chair of

de Médicis and the Last Caroline Court Masque,” Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, ed. Clare McManus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 204–23, esp. 206–7, to my knowledge neither Henry nor Beauchamps cites a Ballet des felicités de l’Age d’Or in connection with Marie de Medici. 8 For detailed discussion of contemporary references to this ballet production and existing scholarship, see Melinda J. Gough, “Marie de Medici’s 1605 ballet de la reine: New Evidence and Analysis,” Early Theatre 15.1 (June 2012): 109–44. 9 Louis Battifol, Le Louvre sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1930), 112–15. For a scholarly edition of this letter comprising a discussion of the manuscript and its provenance, a transcription of the original French text, and an English translation with commentary, see Gough, “Marie de Medici’s 1605 ballet de la reine: New Evidence and Analysis.”

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“incarnat” satin all covered with “clinquant” (tinsel, in the sense of thread of gold, silver, or other rich metal).10 Then the musicians exited their places to come before the king, where this Italian woman began to “charm the ears of the company by her voice more divine than human” (“cette femme Italienne commenc[. . .] de charmer les oreilles de la compagnie par sa voix plutot divine que humains”).11 Following this song, the queen and her compan- ions resumed their dancing until they had completed their choreographed ballet. This unnamed singer must have been a member of the famous Caccini consort. As is well known, in 1604 Henri IV and Marie de Medici wrote letters to the Tuscan grand duke and grand duchess Ferdinando I de Medici and Christine of Lorraine respectively, requesting that this consort headed by famous composer and singing teacher Giulio Caccini be allowed to visit France “for two or three months.” In late December 1604 Giulio, his second wife Margherita, son Pompeo, and daughters Francesca and Settimia arrived in Paris, where they remained until May 1605. The Caccini were thus present in Paris in late January 1605, when Marie’s ballet was performed. On 16 January, Giulio noted that his eldest daughter Francesca (known as “la Cecchina”) had sung two French airs which so pleased the French king that he made her repeat them twice. Then, in a letter dated 1 March, Giulio wrote that “throughout carnival after the ballet made by the queen in the first days” the king and queen had constantly called on them to perform and had shown them great courtesy. Giulio does not explicitly state that one of “his” women sang in the ballet, but the royal couple’s attentiveness to the Caccini in general and the king’s

10 When used for ballet costumes, “clinquant” reflected the lights in the hall, adding to the production’s other stunning visual effects. Clinquant: “s. m. Lame d’or ou d’argent qu’on met dans les broderies, les dentelles &c.” Dictionnaire de l’académie française, 1st edi- tion (1694). “On appelle aussi Clinquant, Des lames ou feuilles de cuivre qui brillent beau- coup. Les habits de masques, de ballets, sont ordinairement chargés de clinquant.” Dictionnaire de l’académie française, 4th edition (1762). Accessed 20 April, 2006, Dictionnaires d’autrefois, http://colet.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dico1look.pl?strippedhw=clinquant. 11 Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, ms. 1794, fol. 429v; see also the full transcription and translation of this letter in Gough, “Marie de Medici’s 1605 ballet de la reine: New Evidence and Analysis,” 122–36.

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response to Francesca’s singing in particular suggest that the “Italienne” whose voice so charmed the Louvre audience during the queen’s ballet that season was Francesca herself, although she may also have been Settimia or Margherita, both of whom seem to have been greatly admired.12 Giulio’s

12 Cf. Jean-François Dubost, Marie de Médicis. La reine dévoilée (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2009), 239, who asserts as fact that Francesca Caccini sang in Marie’s 1605 ballet, with no explanation of his basis for this claim save a citation to Battifol’s para- phrase. Battifol’s paraphrase uses the phrase “une célèbre cantatrice italienne” (Battifol, Le Louvre, 113), and it is presumably this wording on which Dubost bases his claim. But neither of the two extant manuscript sources mentions this Italian singer’s “fame” nor identifies her by name; on these sources, see Gough, “Marie de Medici’s 1605 ballet de la reine: New Evidence and Analysis.” I have not been able to discern for certain whether it was Francesca, her younger sister Settimia, or their stepmother Margherita whose song so delighted the Louvre audience during the ballet performance. The letter from Giulio Caccini to Virginio Orsini dated 1 March, previously mentioned, suggests that it was early in the carnival festivities that the court both listened a second time to the consort with the royal Music and “heard, compared, and marveled at the facility with which Francesca sang in French.” Marie’s ballet inaugurated carnival that year, so it may very well have been Francesca who entertained the entire court so successfully during that produc- tion. This suggestion fits well with the special attention paid to “la Cecchina” during her time in France, including Henri IV and Marie de Medici’s offer of a salaried position to Francesca. On Francesca’s patronage by the French monarchs see, for example, Angelo Solerti, “Un viaggio in Francia di Giulio Caccini 1604–1605,” Rivista musicale Italiana 10 (1903), 707–11; Henry Prunières, L’Opéra Italien en France avant Lully (Paris: Champion, 1913), xxxi; Ferdinand Boyer, “Giulio Caccini à la cour d’Henri IV (1604–1605) d’après des lettres inédites,” Revue musicale 7 (1926): 241–50, esp. 246–47; Maria Giovanna Masera, “La famiglia Caccini alla corte di Maria de’ Medici,” Rassegna musicale 13 (1940): 481–84; Doris Silbert, “Francesca Caccini, Called La Cecchina,” Musical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1946): 50–62, esp. 52–53; H. Wiley Hitchcock and Suzanne G. Cusick, “Francesca Caccini,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, accessed 2 May 2006, http://www.grovemusic.com. libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca; Suzanne G. Cusick, “Franesca Caccini,” New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhien Samuel (London: Macmillan, 1994), 94–98, here 94; Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 59; Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 20–23. Margherita Caccini, too, was greatly admired: in another letter, Giulio boasts how his wife’s voice was so pleasing to all that the king and queen, marveling at her trills each time she sang, desired to retain the entire consort; see Giulio Caccini to Virginio Orsini,

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word choice — “after the ballet made by the queen” — fails to clarify the pre- cise link between this ballet and the subsequent frequency with which the king and queen called on the visiting singers. Was this relationship merely temporal, i.e., first the ballet happened, then the king and queen called on the singers? Or was the connection causal, in which case something about the queen’s ballet production contributed to the situation in which these visiting singers found themselves constantly in demand? This solo vocal performance by a woman is the only element of the ballet’s music singled out for laudatory commentary by our letter writer: he mentions entrances by a number of musicians, including the lutes and violins, for example, and briefly describes their costumes, but the nature of their music and its impact on the audience are not discussed. This Italian woman’s “divine” voice, by contrast, was powerful and novel enough to warrant description; so was the “charmed” reaction of the audience. Putting this letter together with Giulio’s previously glossed-over statement about the queen’s ballet at the start of Carnival, I hypothesize that this Caccini woman’s participation in the ballet may well have contributed to the considerable fame that would accrue to the entire Caccini consort as a result of their high-profile patron- age by the French crown.13 Recent important work by Jean-François Dubost on Marie de Medici and Suzanne Cusick on Francesca Caccini challenges long-standing assumptions that in France the Caccini and the Italianate innovations in vocal monody for which they were renowned received unqualified

Paris, 1 March 1605, as quoted and translated in Boyer, “Giulio Caccini,” 247–49; see also Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, 21. Settimia Caccini, Francesca’s thirteen year old sister, was also much sought out. Madame de Guise, for example, seems to have approached Giulio with the request that Settimia remain with her in France; see Giulio Caccini to Virginio Orsini, Paris, 1 March 1605, in Boyer, “Giulio Caccini,” 248–49. Giulio in a separate letter to his friend Piero Strozzi dated 25 February 1605 states that the French king and queen wished to retain not only Francesca but also Settimia, offering the latter a dowry of 1000 scudi; see Maria Adelaide Bartoli Bacherini, “Giulio Caccini. Nuove fonti biografiche e lettere inedite,” Studi musicali 9, no. 1 (1980): 59–71, esp. 63, and Suzanne G. Cusick, “Settimia Caccini,” New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Saide and Rhian Samuel (London: Macmillan, 1994), 98–99. 13 Cf. Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 241, who asserts that during their Paris visit the Caccini were “constrained” to perform in ballets.

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admiration.14 But resistance to the Caccini among French elites was less significant and of shorter duration than these scholars allow. Cusick cites several reports from the period immediately following the consort’s arrival in Paris indicating that Giulio’s arrogance caused irritation rather than admiration and that the French king and queen initially quarreled about who would pay the visitors’ expenses. She then argues that it was not until 19 February that the Caccini’s fortunes changed thanks to a solo performance by Francesca, when her rendition of French songs in French caused “everyone to marvel” and made “the king declare her the best singer in France”; the next day, Francesca was offered a permanent position; indeed, the queen was so eager to keep her that she reportedly offered a handsome dowry for her younger sister Settimia as well.15 These elements of the story certainly support the assertion, proffered by Cusick and Dubost, that Francesca’s ability to sing in French was essential to her success in Paris. It is also true that during the family’s first weeks in Paris they were favored most immediately by French courtiers of Italian origin and foreign ambassadors.16 By early January, however, the family seems to

14 Jean-François Dubost, “Goûts et entourages musicaux auprès de Marie de Médicis (v. 1600–1620),” in Poésie, musique et société: l’air de cour en France au XVIIe siècle, ed. Georgie Durosoir (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2006), 19–27, esp. 25–27; Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 237–39; Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, esp. 20–23. 15 Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, 21; see also note 12 above. 16 For example, the Florentine nobleman Concino Concini (later Marie de Medici’s most notorious favorite) took the Caccini under his wing during the first days of their stay (thanks to a note of recommendation from Christine of Lorraine); they were lodged at the residence of Baron Gondi (another Florentine); and the consort performed at the home of Sébastien Zamet (the king’s financier, also of Italian origins). Later, as Giulio reports, the duc de Nemours (a prince étranger from a cadet branch of the Savoy dynasty) boldly declared to Henri IV that in his opinion, their music compared favorably to that of France, while the ambassadors of Spain and Venice and the Archduke said similar things to Caccini himself. Regarding Concini’s efforts on behalf of the Caccini consort, see the letter from Baccio Giovanni to Belisario Vinta, Paris, 20 February 1605, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, filza 4860, fol. 398r-399v, esp. 398r; see also Giulio Caccini’s letter to Belisario Vinta, Paris, 19 February 1605, in Solerti, “Un viag- gio in Francia,” 710. On their reception by Gondi, Zamet, Nemours, and the lords and ladies of the court, see Giulio Caccini to Virginio Orsini, Paris, 16 January 1605, in Boyer, “Giulio Caccini,” 245–46.

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have been well received by those French grandees to whom Giulio had delivered letters of introduction from Virginio Orsini,17and as early as mid- January, as we have seen, “la Cecchina” had already won the king’s professed admiration. Finally, as Giulio’s 1 March letter asserts, it was after the ballet made by the queen in the first days of Carnival that the king and queen began frequently to honor the visitors. Even taking into account the boast- ful tone for which Giulio’s missives are notorious, it appears that not only foreigners and Italians naturalized to France but also the native French, including Henri IV, championed these visiting singers within six weeks of their arrival. Thus, although Cusick posits late February as the moment at which the Caccini’s fortunes changed for the better, if there was any key turning point in their reception at the French royal court, Giulio’s writings themselves locate that moment earlier, as coinciding with the queen’s ballet on 23 January. If this reading is sound, we may now reassess Marie de Medici’s influ- ence on court ballet music. Henri Prunières has hypothesized that the queen’s patronage had an impact on sung music in ballet de cour, but lacking concrete evidence he and others have only been able to hazard an indirect influence.18 But by introducing to French court ballet the innovative perfor- mance values and virtuosic techniques for which the Caccini women were so famous, Marie’s patronage would have contributed quite directly to an important shift in French court ballet music that begins during the first decade of the seventeenth century. According to Prunières, this decade wit- nessed a change in the récits for court ballet productions that prior to 1605 were designed to be spoken rather than sung. This shift toward sung récits, Prunières posits, in turn moved the genre away from the ballet-mascarade and ballet à entrées (forms of court ballet with loose, episodic structures) toward the more plot-driven and dramatic form of ballet mélodramatique and eventually opera, in which music assumes for itself the dramatic task that it previously had shared with poetry.19 Prunières suggests that the initial shift toward expressive, dramatic song within ballet de cour reflects

17 See Boyer, “Giulio Caccini,” 244–45. 18 See note 5 above. 19 Prunières, Le ballet de cour en France, 105–9.

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the influence of Giulio Caccini and the poet Ottavio Rinuccini. Present in France between the years 1601 and 1605 thanks to Marie de Medici’s patronage, Caccini and Rinuccini at this time stood as the two cultural figures most strongly associated with dramatic expression in Italian song.20 Caccini in particular was famous for his published theories regarding the superiority of Italian vocal monody — songs for solo voice, largely secular, accompanied most often by the lute, chitarrone, or theorbo or performed as recitative in opera — and for his compositional contributions to this genre, often performed by virtuosic women singers he had trained and especially his own female family members.21 If the “Italienne” who sang for the queen’s 1605 ballet was Francesca, Settimia, or Margherita Caccini, though, this means that Marie de Medici’s patronage had more than an indirect impact on the music of French court ballet. Rather, the queen’s own production featured as its chief musical highlight one of the very diva-singers from Florence most famously associated with the new stile rappresentativo. This “Italienne” was not the first woman singer, or even the first Italian professional woman singer, to appear on the French court ballet stage. In 1581, the famous Ballet comique de la reine sponsored and danced by Louise de Lorraine-Vaudemont, wife of Henri III, had featured two female lute players and two women singers, all unnamed, personating the Cardinal Virtues, as well as a duet for Tethys and Glaucus sung by Violante Doria, the Genoese soprano, and her husband, the bass singer and composer Girard de Beaulieu. As early as 1572, Jeanice Brooks notes,

20 Ibid., 106–8; see also Prunières, L’opéra Italien en France avant Lully, xxvi. 21 Giulio Caccini’s compositions and theory in connection with vocal monody arguably ushered in a new musical epoch focused on dramatic expression in musical spectacle, including opera, first in Italy and eventually other European countries. In 1602 he published his Le nuove musiche, a theorization of sung monody’s excellence along with a collection of Caccini’s own vocal compositions which included madrigals, airs, and an operatic chorus performed during the Florentine celebrations of Marie de Medici’s wed- ding to Henri IV. For a succinct but useful definition of early seventeenth-century vocal monody ca. 1600–40, see Nigel Fortune and Tim Carter, “Monody,” in Grove Music Online, accessed 30 March, 2012 through Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusi- conline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/18977.

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Doria and Beaulieu had received remuneration as servants to Elisabeth d’Autriche, wife of Charles IX, and during the 1580s they garnered salaries and pensions from Louise de Lorraine and, to a lesser extent, Henri III.22 Their duet for the Ballet comique, composed perhaps by Beaulieu himself, concluded with a “highly ornamented final strophe” which in its execu- tion would have required from Doria a “vocal agility” that was “equal to or surpassing that displayed by Beaulieu, one of the most celebrated singers of the period.”23 Brooks contrasts this vocal part written for Doria with the “strictures against ornamentation” by elite women singers outlined in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: according to Brooks, the inclusion of (professional) female singers in “woman-sponsored court spectacles” at the late Valois court, such as this performance by Doria in the Ballet comique, marked an increasingly “propitious environment for women’s song,” one that “encourage[d] women’s musical activity to stretch beyond the decora- tive, modest, and largely private uses envisioned in civility literature.”24 Two decades later, Marie de Medici extended such late Valois prec- edents by featuring in her own ballet another professional Italian woman

22 According to Jeanice Brooks, in 1572 Doria and Beaulieu received the kind of end-of-year financial gift paid from the royal treasury usually reserved for specially favored musicians, particularly those “attached to the [royal] chamber,” as well as a “joint royal pension of 200 livres and their wages as members of the maison de la reine.” See Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 100, 105. Later that decade the couple received extensive sums as pensioners of the queen and a lesser sum from the king, and during the 1580s these kinds of subven- tions continued, for example in the form of regular salaries from the household of the new queen Louise de Lorraine-Vaudemont and special payments to Beaulieu and their daughter, Claude (ibid., 105, 201). 23 Ibid., 201. According to Brooks, Doria accompanied herself on the lute. Brooks also offers a helpful transcription of this duet’s final stanza in musical example 4.1 (245). 24 Ibid., 200. If elite women’s music-making at court was tolerated during the medieval period, Brooks argues, by the second half of the sixteenth century it had become encouraged thanks in part to the new emphasis in Renaissance civility literature on wom- en’s cultural interventions, including female song that “was most appropriately deployed in informal performance, for private enjoyment, or in the context of small gatherings,” such as took places in the chambers of queens regnant and queen mothers (ibid., 198–200, quote from 200).

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singer of arguably greater, and indisputably more famous, virtuosic capac- ity. The song performed by this “Italienne,” assuming that it followed the guidelines outlined in Giulio Caccini’s musical theory, would have been directed (more strictly than that of Doria in the Ballet comique) toward expressive, mimetic ends.25 The exact musical qualities of female song for the 1605 ballet remain opaque. Since no extant evidence identifies this ballet’s vocal music or its verse texts, we cannot say for certain whether the celebrated “Italienne” sang in French, Italian, or even Spanish (we do know, however, that during their sojourn in France the Caccini women sang at the Louvre in all three languages before a royal audience).26 Nor do we yet know whether this woman performed an air de cour, as would have been standard in court ballets up to this period, or a sung récit, the largely Italian innovation that French court ballet would start to adopt by the end of the decade.27 Sung by Francesca, Settimia, or Margherita Caccini, how- ever, this 1605 ballet’s most prominent musical interlude likely brought to ballet de cour, for the first time, some of those aesthetic qualities for which the Caccini women were so renowned throughout Europe. According to Cusick, these included a new, more nuanced relationship between music and text enabled by the singer’s “constantly flexible dynamics and impro- visation of manner”; an emotional intensity and rhetorical power enabled by the female body’s ability to produce its high voice naturally (as opposed to through falsetto); and last but not least a remarkable responsiveness to “the conceits that informed the song’s words” enabled by the singer’s vir- tuosic technique, most notably her “distinctive expressive use of . . . breath control and gorheggiando (literally warbling)” designed to offer “extremely clear declamation of a song’s words” and to imitate “the dynamic shape of speech.”28

25 On Caccini’s musical theory, see note 21 above. 26 Giulio Caccini to Belisario Vinta, Paris, 19 February 1605, quoted in Solerti, “Un viaggio in Francia,” 709. 27 Battifol does not support his assertion that this Italian singer performed an “air” during the 23 January ballet (Le Louvre, 114). 28 As Cusick explains, at this period high voices were thought to best express high emotion and intensity; according to Giulio Caccini the female singer produced this effect the most naturally (as opposed to through the steady, high-speed forcing of air through

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II

What was at stake for the queen as patron of such innovations within the court ballet genre, we might ask, beyond the merely personal pleasure of indulging nostalgia for music enjoyed in Florence during her youth?29 According to Dubost, one of the principal lessons Marie had learned at the Tuscan court concerned how secondary dynasties might gain prestige internationally via concerted policies and practices of artistic patronage, and, once in France, the new queen applied this lesson on a grand scale.30 Marie’s second ballet production in Paris for winter 1605, I argue, formed an important early moment in this lesson’s application, one which made the queen notable, internationally, as patron to some of the most admired musicians in Europe. It was primarily Marie de Medici’s Italian and specifically her Florentine heritage that had enabled incorporation into French court ballet those musical developments for which the Caccini were so well known. This was not Marie’s first effort to champion professional female musicians, including the Caccini women. In 1589 and 1590 Marie, along with Eleonora Orsini, had taken up patronage of an unofficial concerto di donne immediately after her uncle Ferdinando I had dissolved the first one, instituted in Florence by Marie’s father Francesco I in part to rival the Este dynasty’s female consort. Lucia Caccini, Giulio’s first wife, had been a member of the original Florentine group of women singers and was also

the vocal cords required in falsetto registers produced by uncastrated male singers) — and hence the most powerfully. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, 11–16, esp. 9, 11, 12. 29 Solerti, “Un viaggio in Francia,” 708. During the initial weeks of the Caccini’s stay in Paris, Marie did convey her desire to have them perform Dafne when Ottavio Rinuccini arrived, and though this idea seems to have gone by the wayside, eventually they performed music from the Euridice (Boyer, “Giulio Caccini,” 249). Similarly, Giulio Caccini reports back to the grand duke’s secretary that it was easy to speak with the French queen because of her love of all things Florentine, especially the feasts held there at court (Ibid., 247 n. 1, French translation 248), and that she boasted of Florentine musical preeminence to several French courtiers, including the duc de Mayenne. 30 Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 73.

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patronized by Marie and Eleonora.31 In 1590, Lucia sang in Rinuccini’s Maschere di bergiere, dedicated to Christine of Lorraine, in the role of a shepherdess who, fleeing civil war in France, sought the aid of Florence and of Marie’s future husband Henri de Bourbon. Marie would no doubt have been present at this performance (she may even have danced in it). That same year, moreover, she commissioned madrigals by a female composer, Laura Giuddicioni, for a production of Tasso’s Aminta in which Marie herself acted.32 Then, in 1600, Lucia’s eldest daughter Francesca made her professional debut during the Florentine festivities for Marie de Medici’s wedding. Five years later, as queen of France, Marie’s role in bringing the Caccini to her new court was paramount. Both she and the king had writ- ten to the Tuscan court requesting that the consort and its women be allowed to visit France, as we have seen, but the queen’s request arguably held equal if not greater weight than that of her husband: the Florentine court’s majordomo Giovanni del Maestro, for example, reports that the Caccini were called by (“chiamata dalla”) the queen while mentioning

31 On these women and the concerto di donne see Tim Carter, Jacopo Peri, 1561– 1633: His Life and Works, 2 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 1: 24 and note 71, and Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–1597, 2 vols. (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 2: 200. With her brother Don Virginio, Eleonora Orsini was raised at the Medici court from 1576 on, and records from 1581–91 show her close association with the young Marie de Medici. See Miles Chappell, “The Artistic Education of Maria dei Medici,” in Graziani and Solinas, ed., Le ‘siècle’ de Marie de Médicis, 13–25, esp. 18–19. On Ferdinando I’s dismissal of the initial female consort “as part of the policy of the new grand duke . . . of purging Francesco I’s luxuries from the court,” particularly those associated with Francesco’s mistress Bianca Cappello, see Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, 3. 32 Angelo Solerti, Gli albori del melodramma, 3 vols. (Milan: Libraio della Real Casa, n.d.), 1: 51. See also Bartoli Bacherini, “Musiche e danze per una regina,” 141–44. Both Solerti (I: 51) and Bartoli Bacherini (143) cite a letter dated 3 February 1590 in which Caterini Guidiccioni, mother of the composer Laura Guidiccioni, states that “Le principesse con le dame di palazzo fan loro stesse la pastoral del Tassino questo carnevale, e voglion madrigali per musiche”; Bartoli Bacherini suggests that the princesses men- tioned here must have been Marie de Medici and Christine of Lorraine because Marie’s sister Eleonara and her cousin Virginia were both married and thus had left Florence by this date (143); however, I believe that Eleonara Orsini is a more likely candidate than Christine of Lorraine.

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nothing about the French king.33 For the carnival season 1605, then, the world’s most famous women singers, in great demand across Europe, found themselves in France thanks in large part to Marie’s sustained interest in virtuosic female song together with her personal dynastic connections. One of Guilio Caccini’s letters from this period indicates the inter- national prestige that accrued to the queen as a result of this patronage coup. Giulio describes how the English extraordinary ambassador to France, Ludovic Stuart, second duke of Lennox, expressed great admira- tion for Francesca’s singing, even confessing that the English queen Anna of Denmark, wife of James I, would, due to her love of Italian culture, receive no greater pleasure than to have Francesca on loan from Marie for a month.34 Of course, no such sharing occurred: despite her best efforts Marie herself was only able to borrow Francesca’s services from the Tuscan court for a short time.35 Nonetheless, Giulio’s hoped-for scenario is tell- ing. It was Marie’s specifically Medici connections that gave her privileged access to the Caccini women and the form of Italian cultural capital they embodied. It was this very sense of Italian culture as a marker of elite status that Iacopo Castelvetro had appealed to when seeking to cultivate Anna of Denmark and James I as patrons, noting that in “every foreign nation” the

33 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane, filza XXX, c. 6, as cited and quoted in Solerti, “Un viaggio in Francia,” 708–9. 34 “The Duke of Lennox, first prince at the court of England, has heard us and has showed us much honor, and he enjoyed hearing us so much that he would have wanted to bring us to the queen of England, telling us we would receive every honor and anything we might want or require for our use. And it would be very easy for him to act together with his queen, through a letter that would intercede with the queen here [in France] for a month saying that she [Anna of Denmark] would be extremely delighted by this, and by the music and language of Italy, and would receive this favor as extremely good treat- ment” (Giulio Caccini to Belisario Vinta, Paris, 19 February 1605). The original Italian is quoted in Solerti, “Un viaggio in Francia,” 710–11. On Anna of Denmark’s affinity for and knowledge of Italian language and culture, see Hymen’s Triumph by Samuel Daniel, ed. John Pitcher (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1994), x, and Jason Lawrence, “Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?” Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 7–8. Lennox arrived in Paris the very evening of the queen’s ballet and stayed for several weeks. 35 Earlier that spring Marie de Medici did successfully delay their departure from France until May, on the pretense of bad weather.

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Italian language is considered “the most beautiful” and that it is “embraced by all the princes of the world.”36 As the queen of France, Marie de Medici was granted the Caccini women’s presence at her new court as a temporary “gift” from her aunt and uncle in Florence. Had she been able to retain per- manently even one of these female singers, Marie would have moved from the position of indebted recipient to the eminently more powerful position of gift-giver.37 By lending out the very musicians who had previously been loaned to her, Marie might in turn place in her debt queens, such as Anna, from other, rival courts. To patronize these avant-garde women singers from Italy for even a short time was a much sought-after privilege, one for which Marie might be envied and admired. But Francesca Caccini and her family also embodied a certain vir- tuosic cosmopolitanism through which they, with Marie as their patron, might impress both local and international court audiences. On the one hand, as musicologists have noted, Giulio and Francesca Caccini (and I would argue Settimia and Margherita as well) represented Florentine cultural excellence per se, thus functioning as Medici propaganda.38 On the other hand, the Caccini women were greatly admired for their ability

36 As quoted in Lawrence, “Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?” 7. 37 Around this same period, Marie enacted a similar instance of rivalrous inti- macy between ruling women as patrons of celebrated female singers in a letter to Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, archduchess of the Spanish Low Countries. Marie’s letter notes the pleasure that she had received at hearing Isabel de Camere, a Spanish singer who had passed through France on her way back to Flanders, and expressing her regret at not being able to detain this woman longer from her return to the Infanta’s service. In this instance Marie flatters Isabella Clara Eugenia as the more powerful patron of female song while simultaneously fostering connections between them by pointedly noting that she, too, shares the Infanta’s elevated musical sensitivities. On this letter, see Dubost, “Goûts et entourages,” 20, and his Marie de Médicis, 236. One precedent for Marie’s avowed desire to hear and retain this Spanish woman singer was Elisabeth d’Autriche’s 1572 patronage, as French queen, of Maddalena Casulana, a celebrated singer, composer, and lady-in-waiting to Elisabeth’s mother Maria of Spain, wife of Emperor Maximilian II. On Casulana and Elisabeth d’Autriche, see Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France, 201. 38 On the Caccini consort as a symbol of Florentine cultural preeminence and their visits to Paris and Ferrara as vehicles for Medici “cultural propaganda,” see Howard Mayer Brown, “The Geography of Florentine Monody: Caccini at Home and Abroad,” Early Music 9, no. 2 (1981): 147–68, esp. 158; and Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici

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to sing in many languages and national styles; in this sense they paral- leled the period’s diva-actresses of commedia dell’arte. Isabella Andreini, for example, who had recently sojourned in France under Henri IV and Marie de Medici’s patronage, was renowned as a performer skilled in not only dramatic mimesis but also a remarkable linguistic lability, including the ability to sing in French: at the 1589 wedding celebrations for Ferdinando I de Medici and Christine of Lorraine, she had charmed the new grandduch- ess by performing in Christine’s native French.39 Francesca Caccini, too, possessed remarkable linguistic and cultural versatility; indeed, as we have seen, Henri IV himself praised Francesca’s singing in the French language as excelling that of any musician resident in France. Francesca’s associa- tions with Medici Florence clearly resonated with international visitors in Paris such as the English extraordinary ambassador Lennox, who flattered Giulio Caccini by representing his own queen as eager to patronize for herself these female paragons of specifically Italian cultural superiority. At the same time, the Caccini women’s virtuosic cosmopolitanism exceeded affiliation with any one princely court, such that Francesca’s linguistic and

Court, 11. As Cusick eloquently notes, Francesca’s “singing could have been received, in part, as embodying Medicean dynastic power in sound.” 39 On Marie’s sponsorship of Italian acting troupes, particularly the Gelosi with Isabella Andreini as the leading lady, see Deborah Marrow, The Art Patronage of Maria de’ Medici (1978; Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 81 n. 63; Sara Mamone, Paris et Florence, esp. 137–38, 145–61, 247–57; W. L. (David) Wiley, The Early Public Theatre in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), esp. 22–24; Rosamond Gilder, Enter the Actress: The First Women in the Theatre (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 31; I. A. Schwartz, The Commedia dell’Arte and its Influence on French Comedy in the Seventeenth Century (Paris: H. Samuel, 1933), 47–49; Louis Battifol, La vie intime d’une reine de France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1906), 122; Louis Battifol, Marie de Médicis and the French Court, trans. Mary King, ed. H. W. Carless Davis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908), 66–68; Melinda J. Gough, “Courtly comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and Women’s Amateur Stage Plays in France and England,” Women Players in Early Modern England, 1500–1650: Beyond the ‘all-male stage’, ed. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (2005; rpt. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008), 193–215; Anne MacNeil, Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 48, 163, 173; and John S. Powell, Music and Theatre in France, 1600–1800 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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stylistic versatility might be taken up by the French monarchy itself as a pleasing vehicle for promoting excellence in specifically French music. Effecting such multiple strands of appeal, the Caccini women thus embodied a form of cultural capital we might call “supra-national,” designed to mark and distinguish royal patrons across Europe as united in a shared sovereign status that transcended the limits of any one national court. And this insight, in turn, helps us to understand what Marie might have gained by including solo song by one of this consort’s female members in a queen’s ballet per se. Dubost frames the queen’s turn to patronage and performance of ballet de cour during Henri IV’s lifetime as a regrettable defeat follow- ing her initial allegedly failed attempts to acclimatize the French to Italian cultural superiority in theater and music during the Caccini’s visit.40 This assessment, however, disregards the considerable personal pleasure Marie took in courtly dancing as well as her prior participation in Florentine balli and maschere, genres from her home court which featured consider- able affinities with early ballet de cour.41 Most importantly, it sets aside consideration of what Marie had to gain socially and politically through active participation in court ballet — the very genre of court entertainment

40 “Après avoir tenté d’acclimater ce qu’elle perçoit comme des supériorités culturel- les italiennes (le théâtre et la musique), la reine s’insère, grâce au ballet, dans la tradition culturelle du royaume et peut alors apparaître comme un mécène français” (Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 241).This relegation of ballet de cour to a second choice strategy for Marie as patron, one that marks her submission to French cultural norms, is particularly surprising given that Dubost himself notes that “Le ballet de cour est loin d’être inconnu en Italie” and that indeed, Marie avidly participated in French ballets de cour even prior to the events that he interprets as spelling her failure to import Italian cultural preeminence in theatre and music (ibid., 240–41). 41 Court records indicate that at least as early as 1589 Marie’s circle included a dancing master, one ‘Fabbio ballerino delle Sig.re principesse’; see Chappell, “The Artistic Education of Maria de’ Medici,” 18, n. 37. She displayed her training prominently during the Florentine festivities for her wedding in 1600 when Marie and her uncle Grand Duke Ferdinand opened the ball at the Pitti Palace by dancing a stately passimento de Espana. On this latter occasion, following her own dance, Marie asked the duc de Bellegarde (Henri IV’s representative for the wedding) to “lead some of the dances in vogue at the French court, the which her majesty watched with curious attention.” See Martha Walker Freer (Robinson), Henri IV and Marie de Medici, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1861), 2: 220.

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that Dubost himself acknowledges was the most prestigious in France at this time.42 By bringing together female monody from Florence and bal- let from France, Marie brought together the two most powerful cultural forms found at the courts to which she had direct experience and access. More specifically, the queen successfully merged musical rarity and novelty, attributes that bespoke expansionist cultural as well as material authority within a larger European court nexus, with ballet, that composite form of courtly entertainment most associated, in the local French audience’s mind, with its own native cultural excellence. To the extent that the French responded positively to this voice “more divine than human,” Marie de Medici as patron also facilitated a useful public occasion through which the court of France might perform its own elevation within the European court nexus as a distinguished locus of noble virtue. During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, royal courts became crucial sites for the production and reproduction of a noble class that increasingly defined itself in terms of excellence in not only warrior values but also civility.43 This period witnessed the development of a new concept of nobility rooted in virtue as much as birth, and in letters as well as arms, and such virtue in turn required enactment, meaning that nobles, to demonstrate their allegedly innate status, sought multiple occasions

42 Kate Van Orden similarly notes that “ballets were the central cultural events of each season’s social calendar” (Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern Europe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], 48). 43 My discussion of civility is indebted throughout to Brooks’s important chapter entitled “The Conjunction of Arms and Letters” in her Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth- Century France. See also her essay, “Les Guises et l’air de cour: Images musicales du prince guerrier,” in Le mécénat et l’influence des Guises: acts du colloque organisé par Centre de Recherche sur la Littérature de la Renaissance de l’Université de Reims, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris: H. Champion, 1997), 187–210. Important historiographic discussions of the “crisis of the aristocracy” in France include Arlette Jouanna, “La noblesse française et les valeurs guerrières au XVIe siècle,” in L’homme de guerre au XVIe siècle, ed. Gabriel-André Perouse, André Thierry, and André Tournon (Saint-Etienne: Universite de Saint-Etienne, 1993), 205–17; Arlette Jouanna, Ordre social: mythes et hiérarchies dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1977), 139–79; and Ellery Schalk, From Valour to Pedigree: Ideas of Nobility in France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3–35.

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through which to practice not only the arts of war but also the courtly arts of rhetoric, music, and dance, as well as to reveal their lettered taste and judgment through appreciation for and patronage of even more skilled pro- fessional artists. If the “highest souls” were made by God “in the image of the harmonious heavens,” then one way to perform one’s own noble perfec- tion was through demonstrable appreciation of excellence in music, which in humanist thought enjoyed “a special place as the worldly manifestation of divine order.”44 Royal women like Marie might themselves perform noble virtue through their own musical appreciation: French court histori- ographer Pierre Matthieu’s praise for the new queen in his description of her 1600 entry at Lyon, for example, deploys just such notions when ref- erencing Marie’s love of music as befitting such a magnanimous and “well born” soul.45 But Marie also facilitated the king’s own performance of noble excellence by sponsoring a ballet through which his own pleasure at virtuo- sic female song and the noble virtue this connoted might be demonstrated in highly public fashion, before his own courtiers as well as numerous foreign ambassadors present in the ballet audience.46 If the unattributed letter describing Marie de Medici’s 1605 ballet is to be believed, moreover, the Italian female singer greatly pleased not only the queen and king but the entire Louvre audience. As this ballet’s patron, Marie de Medici thus provided a useful occasion through which she as queen, together with the king and a larger French court audience, might demonstrate elevated

44 Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France, 127. 45 “Elle se plaît à la musique, aussi l’harmonie comme dit Pindare trouve toujours lieu aux âmes belles & biens nées, rendant les coeurs magnanimes, & les remplissant d’une ravissement d’esprit & d’une ardeur de bien faire.” See Matthieu, L’entrée de la reine a Lyon le III Décembre M .D C. . (no place [Lyon]: Thibaud Ancelin, no date [ca. 1600]), as cited and quoted in Dubost, “Goûts et entourages,” 20. 46 Ronsard’s late sixteenth-century preface to the Livre de meslanges makes associa- tions between royal male virtue and love of music explicit, stating that “all the most worthy persons of past centuries, whether monarchs, kings, philosophers, governors of provinces, or captains of renown, felt themselves especially gripped by the love of music . . . so that music has always been the sign and the mark of those who have shown themselves virtu- ous, magnanimous, and truly born to have nothing of the common herd about them.” Quoted in Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France, 132.

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capacities for musical receptivity rooted in an appreciation for the period’s most avant-garde trends in secular European court song. Further, this ballet’s combination of female monody by a profes- sional singer with dancing by elite women, the queen included, allowed Marie to navigate a tricky double-bind endemic to contemporary civility literature as it applied to women. As noted by feminist scholars such as Jeanice Brooks, working on gender and music, and Clare McManus, writ- ing on women and court masque, civility required participation by courtly women as interlocutors and audiences for lettered noblemen and as enter- tainers for those same elite men, who were said to require respite from the cares of war and of rule.47 We have seen how the English extraordinary ambassador expressed admiration for Marie’s power as a patron of women singers — but not as a singer herself. Had the queen and her women entertained such large numbers of spectators through virtuosic singing, they would have risked association with a lesser class status as well as promiscuity. As Brooks has shown, civility literature following Castiglione registers anxiety that “overt displays of musical proficiency could be consid- ered degrading” insofar as they might fail to differentiate between amateur noble singers and professional chamber musicians. Castiglione in particu- lar takes what Brooks has called an “anti-virtuosic” position whereby music “should never appear as the ‘principal profession’ of the courtier”: instead, the courtier needed to be seen to approach music as if it were simply an agreeable leisure activity, avoiding displays of excessive skill.48 Such “unease” about excessive proficiency in music held for both male and female court- iers, levelling the playing field of gender if you will, but for women such strictures on the basis of class were further compounded by prohibitions against public musicianship tout court. On the one hand, “civility manuals

47 Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France; Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619 (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), esp. 1–59. Other feminist literary scholars who consider women’s contributions to civility include Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 11–20, and Katherine R. Larson, Early Modern Women in Conversation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 48 Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France, 159.

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advocate[d] singing instruction for court women” just “as they advise[d] the acquisition of conversational skill, and often specifically locate[d] women’s conversation and music together within the discourse of ‘honest pastime’ for men.”49 Elite women needed to demonstrate verbal and musical accom- plishment as part of the requirement that they entertain men in order to “train” noble warriors in the arts of civility. When exhibiting these apti- tudes, however, these same women had to balance the injunction to entice their male counterparts through a performance and self-display required of their class with the sometimes conflicting requirement, on the basis of gender, to embody a sexual continence or chastity beyond reproach. In navigating such contradictions, elite women specifically contended with the view that public performance and especially verbal proficiency and musical skill connoted female “sexual availability and excess.”50 Marie de Medici’s 1605 ballet, we might argue, manages these contra- dictions in part through a division of women’s aesthetic labor. As we have seen, the structural centre of this queen’s ballet featured song by an Italian woman, immediately preceded and followed by dancing led by Marie de Medici herself, accompanied by eleven women from the kingdom’s high- est ranking families. Richly attired, this troupe, having entered the Grand Salle du Louvre, marched in a grave fashion and made a little passage.51 When they arrived at the center of the room, the musicians sang the king’s praises.52 The queen then approached her husband, the instruments

49 Ibid., 160, 196. 50 Ibid., 197. Cusick eloquently outlines the extensive discursive and material measures put in place to manage such anxieties concerning Francesca Caccini and other professional women singers from Italy (Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, esp. 5–18). On similar contemporary attitudes toward female musicians, particularly singers, in an English context, see the classic study by Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘Sing againe syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Autumn 1989): 420–49. See also Austern, “‘Alluring the auditorie to effeminacie’: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,” Music & Letters 74, no. 3 (August 1993): 343–52. 51 “Marchant d’une façon grave, faisans de petite passage” (Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, ms. 1794, fol. 429v); see also Gough, “Marie de Medici’s 1605 ballet de la reine: New Evidence and Analysis.” 52 “Les musiciens chanterent le loüanges du Roy” (ibid.).

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ceased, and she with her companions saluted him. Marie then continued her ballet, accompanied sometimes by the violins, sometimes the lutes, sometimes the Music. The queen eventually rested, seating herself on a specially constructed chair, at which point the musicians came again before the king and the Italian woman began “to charm the ears of the company by her voice more divine than human.” After the song was completed, the queen and princesses resumed their dancing until they had finished their ballet. Renaissance civility theory and dance literature together provide a useful lens for analyzing these dance movements as described by our unknown letter writer. According to Mark Franko, the primary ideal for the Renaissance courtier was grace, understood as a “systemic form of [social] theatricality.”53 Theories of grace were enacted and elaborated, he argues, through kinesis in general and dance in particular. “Profiling” the Renaissance dancing body as the locus of such theories of grace and nobility, Franko extracts from the period’s dance literature a specific set of codes for noble pose and gesture to argue that grace primarily reveals itself in gestures and postures against which it defines itself.54 Rather than explicitly describing the qualities that define permitted gesture, dance literature primarily outlines movements that civility and grace prohibit: these are “fast, unexpected, brief, repetitive and suggestive or mimetic”; by deduction, Franko argues, the “desiderata” for “permitted gestures” must be “by opposition slow, smooth and separated by pauses and halts.”55 Grace also reveals itself in dance through an upright carriage or posture which indicates prudence, the ability to mediate between extremes. Elite social dance, known as the basse danse, showcases such mediation between extremes through the “reverence” or choreographed bow, followed by sober walking steps with a partner in simples and doubles, steps which Franko notes are indistinguishable, in dance literature descriptions, from everyday

53 Mark Franko, “Renaissance Conduct Literature and the Basse Danse: The Kinesis of Bonne Grace,” in Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard C. Trexler (Binghamton NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), 55–66; here, 55. 54 Ibid., 55. 55 Ibid., 57.

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walking; in these ways, “the steps of the basse danse exhibit the dancer’s probity to all present by circulating two or three times through a room.”56 Such choreographies code what Franko, drawing on seventeenth-century French writer Pierre Charon, calls the “hyperbolically natural gesture,” which like sprezzatura in civility literature marked aristocratic status.57 The courtier’s movement is by definition mimetic — a form of social perfor- mance. In dance, however, obviously mimetic gesture or imitation of what one is not — what we might call extra-mimetic gesture — carries associa- tions of extremity and vice. By contrast, intra-mimetic gesture — gesture designed to heighten or enact hyperbolically one’s true nature — is a form of virtue and prudence available only to elites. Charon, writing in 1601, suggests that this latter type of intra-mimetic kinesis transcends distinc- tions between natural and acquired gesture and is a capacity available only through supra-normal grace; “conceal[ing] coded behavior with a natural appearance,” grace thus understood is both god-given and acquired.58 Such notions, Franko suggests, partly explain why dance treatises remain frustratingly vague regarding the technical qualities of those gestures per- mitted by civility: as inimitable inspirations of a god-given nature, noble movements “cannot be analysed.”59 This framework usefully helps us to parse the movements performed in January 1605 by Marie de Medici and her female companions. On initial glance, our knowledge of the women’s dancing and its historical meanings appears hampered by lack of detailed description. Given the period’s theo- ries of civility and grace, however, this paucity of description proves para- doxically informative, a sign that their kinesis connoted divine ineffability and hence grace. Moreover, we see that the choreographies our letter-writer does mention are precisely those which Renaissance dance literature asso-

56 Ibid., 58. 57 Ibid., 63. 58 “Distinction de la vraie prudhommie, en vertu naturelle et en vertu acquise: il y a encore une troisième composé des deux; ce qui constitue trois degrés de perfection. Pour achever cette perfection, il faut la grace de Dieu.” Pierre Charon, De la Sagesse (1601; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968), vol. 2 and 3: 73, quoted in Franko, “Renaissance Conduct Literature and the Basse Danse,” 63. 59 Ibid., 63.

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ciates with noble status. In elite social dance, grace is most clearly demon­ strated, as we have seen, through the reverence or bow followed by sober walking or marching. The queen’s ballet merely reverses this order: first the women “marched” or walked “gravely,” making a little passage toward the center of the hall, and then the queen along with the other women dancers saluted the king, presumably in a reverence or choreographed curtsey. In their passage, moreover, the women “exhibit[ed] their probity to all present”60 by moving through the Grand Salle du Louvre, their intra- mimetic or hyperbolically natural walking steps, in upright posture, coding that ability to mediate between extremes that according to civility litera- ture constituted noble grace. These women further embodied civility understood in gendered terms insofar as the ballet coded their participation, aurally and visually, as a form of service to the kingdom’s chief patriarch, Henri IV. It marked this relation to the king in part through the music that accompanied their gestures: at the very moment when the queen and princesses literally and figuratively occupied center stage, marching gravely to the center of the room and dancing a “petit passage,” the Music sang the king’s praises. Then, before beginning their figured dances or grand ballet, as we have seen, the queen with her female companions singled out the king as their most honored spectator in a “salute” or ceremonial greeting that further signaled their obeisance. In such moments, the queen led the kingdom’s most social- ly elevated women in a troupe whose movements showcased their own authority as a noble, princely class. Their unity of movement and appear- ance, however, also projected images of a kingdom in which loyalty to the crown was paramount. The ballet further marked such relations of service through their attire. The queen and princesses, as we have seen, wore cos- tumes of “incarnat” and white, the colors of the royal livery; they were pre- ceded in this by the violins, the lutes, the Music, and the pages, who like the women bowed before the king and performed marches followed by figured dancing. In these multiple ways, the women’s costumes and movements, framed by the ballet’s music, deflect accusations of women’s over-reaching

60 Ibid., 58.

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found in anti-court literature by signaling their decorous submission both as political subjects and as women.61 Further deflecting such rhetorical attacks, the ballet differentiates, on a structural level, elite female dance from women’s singing. Notably, the queen sat herself on a specially constructed dais, situating herself among the audience yet simultaneously on display, in preparation for the Italienne’s virtuosic vocal performance. Relying on and, in turn, re-enforcing degrees of class hierarchy within the courtly milieu, the queen’s ballet thus deci- sively keeps for elite women the noble activity of graceful dancing — a form of comportment which signaled noble virtue by allegedly transcending distinctions between acquired and natural skill and by eschewing extra- mimesis or imitation of identities other than the dancers’ own — while setting such nobility against the likes of the ballet’s Italian woman singer, a professional artisan of lesser status who was both of the courtly elite and in some ways outside it.62 Marie thus distances herself from the very real social risks that attended female virtuosity in music — risks that would have been exacerbated by the kind of expressive, dramatic, and therefore mimetic virtuosity that was the Caccini’s calling card. By thus keeping dancing for elite women and expressive virtuosic song for women perform- ers of lesser status, the ballet positions both the queen as patron and also the French court audience entertained through her patronage as exemplars of (cosmopolitan) artistic sensibility, while simultaneously distancing the dancing queen and princesses from the very real risks that attended women’s musical virtuosity.

61 On accusations in anti-aulic literature and conduct books regarding women’s prideful comportment and speech as a sign of moral and sexual looseness, particularly at court, see Jones, Currency of Eros, 18–19; Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France, esp. 191–98. 62 Giulio Caccini was from an ambitious artisan family originally from Rome; as his daughter, Francesca’s social rank was thus “ambiguous” (Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, 2). See Gough, “‘Not as myself ’,” esp. 56–61, for an analysis of such divi- sions between silent dancing by royal and elite women and vocal performance by women of lesser status in the later 1609 Ballet of Beauty sponsored and performed by Marie de Medici as well as a 1632 English masque danced by Henrietta Maria.

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Moreover, by figuring the queen and king as jointly engaged in appre- ciation for this woman singer and her musical innovations, the 1605 ballet de la reine contributed to a larger effort on the French crown’s part during the first decade of the seventeenth century to bolster ideologies of dynastic personal monarchy rooted in images of stable partnership between the king and his female consort. Barely one year after her arrival at the French court, in 1602, Marie de Medici had taken advantage of the political, aesthetic, and economic opportunities available to her as queen in order to perform a Ballet of the Sixteen Virtues designed to celebrate not only the birth of a dauphin but also her own elevated status as his mother and hence “true” queen. Between this earlier performance and her second ballet in 1605, a series of events made evident the crown’s need to reassert force- fully a legitimate and definitive union between king and queen. After the Biron conspiracy of 1602, which had challenged the authority of both king and queen, as well as a period of serious illness on the king’s part the fol- lowing summer, Henri IV undertook concrete steps to promote his wife as a legitimate political actor.63 In 1603, he included her in his council of state not only so that she would be symbolically present during deliberations over Biron’s punishment but also presumably to prepare her for the role of regent should he himself die or leave the kingdom during wartime. The crown even issued a medal to announce and commemorate publicly the queen’s admission to the council; as art historians have noted, this medal visually suggests Marie’s authority in alliance with that of Henri.64 Two

63 In summer 1603 the English ambassador to France Sir Thomas Parry reported that Henri IV’s illness “was grave enough for Henri to be instructing his wife in affairs of state, and emphasized the chaos which would ensue in France if the king should die.” See Maurice Lee Jr., James I and Henri IV: An Essay in English Foreign Policy, 1603–1610 (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1970), 24–25, including n. 21. 64 On Marie’s addition to the council, see Nicola Courtright, “A Garden and a Gallery at Fontainebleau: Imagery of Rule for Medici Queens,” The Court Historian 10, no. 1 (2005): 55–84, esp. 75, including n. 78; Ronald Forsyth Millen and Robert Erich Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens’ Life of Marie de’ Medici (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 101; Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 114; and Jean-François Dubost, “L’Épouse,” in Marie de Médicis et le Palais du Luxembourg, ed. Marie-Noëlle Baudouin-Matuszek (Paris: Délégation à l’Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris [Hachette], 1991),101–10, esp. 104. Cf. Bernard Barbiche, who argues that this

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years later, following the discovery of a second conspiracy against the king, queen, and dauphin by Henri IV’s mistress the marquise de Verneuil along with her brother and father, contemporaries continued to worry about the kingdom’s stability should Henri IV die before the dauphin’s majority.65 As if in direct response to such anxieties, Marie’s 1605 ballet represented (and enacted) a more influential position for its chief performer-patron by representing her role as complementary to that of the king. In this respect, Marie’s second French court ballet engaged a larger shift, specific to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, whereby representations of a consort queen’s status, expressed symbolically in her own literal and ceremonial spaces, helped to bolster an increasingly stable dynastic system of personal monarchy. Nicola Courtright, following the work of Katherine Crawford, makes a convincing argument for this his- torical development in the image and function of queenship.66 In early modern France, thanks in part to Salic law, women were not generally seen as capable of rule. Yet despite these and other legal and ideological checks on women’s authority, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France saw increasing emphasis on the power of queens in part because such queenly authority helped, in Courtright’s words, to “compensat[e] for the structural weakness in a system of personal monarchy posed by

position on the council did not give Marie access to any real political power (“Marie de Médicis, reine régnante, et le Saint-Siège: agent ou otage de la réforme Catholique?” in Graziani and Solinas, eds., Le “Siècle” de Marie de Médicis, 41–56, esp. 42–43). Regarding the 1603 commemorative medal and a second variant produced in 1604, the obverse of which formed the model for Rubens’s “Consignment of the Regency” in Marie de Medici’s cycle, see Millen and Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures, 101–4; Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 197–99. 65 In 1605 the Venetian ambassador to France, Angelo Badoer, expressed concern that should Henri IV die before the dauphin reached majority, “much harm would befall the kingdom.” As quoted in Edmund H. Dickerman and Anita N. Walker, “Monuments of His Own Magnificence: Henrichemont and the Archaeology of Sully’s Mind,” French History 6 (1992): 159–84, esp. 177. 66 Courtright, “A Garden and a Gallery”; Katherine Crawford, Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2004). What follows is a synopsis of Courtright’s explanation as it extends Crawford’s work on regencies.

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the danger of royal minorities.”67 If royal authority were ever eclipsed, it was feared, the king’s functions might be seized by other corporate groups (parliamentarians, princes of the blood). A queen mother acting as regent for her child king, however, could help to mitigate this risk: as an adult royal, she would possess an authority that he, as a minor, lacked, while at the same time her maternal prerogatives, obligations, and affections, it was thought, naturally bound her to her son such that she would protect and guide him until he came of majority, thus making her a safer choice as regent than other more self-interested parties. Even during her hus- band’s life, then, a queen consort would need to appear capable of staving off internal division and attack by foreign powers should her husband be called away to war. As Courtright explains,

During his life her protective authority would remain latent and dormant, but capable of asserting itself instantly the moment the King was removed. Hence the importance of constructing mon- archy as a partnership of king and queen. This in turn required the elaboration of a mystique of queenly power complementary to — although also different from — the glorification of heroic kings. It was a vision of feminine authority that did not directly challenge male supremacy but offered a rationale for allowing women to rule under certain circumstances.68

As an art historian, Courtright’s main focus is to trace the development of this “mystique of queenly power” in those patterns of artistic expression found in the buildings, gardens, and other literal spaces presided over by Catherine de Medici and Marie de Medici, most notably at Fontainebleau. Her general thesis, however, can easily be extended to Marie de Medici’s ceremonials and entertainments, including the court ballets for which she was both chief performer and patron. Together, as we have seen, Henri IV and Marie de Medici projected the image of a royal couple united through shared patronage efforts when

67 Courtright, “A Garden and a Gallery,” 59. 68 Ibid., 60.

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in August 1605 they jointly wrote letters to the Tuscan court requesting the Caccini’s visit to France. If in private the king and queen initially quar- reled about who should pay the visitors’ expenses, as Cusick has shown, in public the king seems to have pronounced an unqualified admiration equal to that of his wife. During the 23 January ballet de la reine specifically, when Marie temporarily joined her husband in a position of prominence among the audience, performing along with him her noble appreciation of the “Italienne”’s virtuosic monody, she further projected before both French subjects and visiting diplomats from foreign courts the image of a French king and queen linked harmoniously through shared aesthetic taste. In these ways, the royal couple’s patronage of the Caccini family and its public display during this ballet represented obliquely, in idealized fashion, those emerging modalities of French royal power outlined by Courtright and Crawford. Rather than marking Marie de Medici’s early cultural defeat, then, this 1605 French court ballet worked to build the queen’s own pres- tige along with that of her husband, merging Florentine and French aes- thetic modes while simultaneously fostering Bourbon dynastic ambitions.

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