– Claudia Sessa (active in Milan, late sixteenth century): two solo motets preserved in manuscript sources, featuring agile melodic lines and clear declamation, with texts imbued with sensuous piety.

– Maria Xaveria Perucona (Moncalvo, 1652): author of Sacri concerti de motetti a 1 e 2 voci (Milan, 1675), examples of simple yet intense writing, with refined use of Gregorian modes.

– Isabella Leonarda (Novara, 1620–1704): perhaps the most prolific, with over 200 published works, but active mainly in the later seventeenth century, during the fully affirmed seconda pratica. Her music marks the transition from a reclusive to an institutionalized female voice.

These women did not found schools in the traditional sense: they had no famous pupils nor recognized followings. But their works, now recovered through specific philological and musicological projects, constitute an essential chapter in the history of Western sacred music—not merely as testimony of exception, but as evidence of a plurality of voices, long left unheard.

4. Esthetics and Transgression: Form as Resistance

To analyze the music of seventeenth-century nun-composers is to cross a threshold zone, where art overlaps with spirituality, and form becomes charged with symbolic, ethical, even political meaning. The structure of a motet, the choice of a dissonance, the use of a particular poetic lexicon or the treatment of an interval are not, in this context, mere technical elements: they are traces of embodied thought, signs of an identity taking shape through sound and manifesting itself within a controlled—yet not passive—space.

At the heart of convent musical writing lies the relationship between word and voice, between sacred text and vocal utterance. Unlike many male-composed liturgical works of the same period, which often treat the text with formal abstraction, motets by nuns reveal an internal tension, an affective urgency that drives the music toward liminal zones: the word is inhabited, excavated, at times nearly wounded by the music. It is here that Monteverdi’s seconda pratica—with its principle of music “in the service of speech”—takes on a specific dimension: the female voice, already censored in its public existence, becomes sublimated as a vehicle of total meaning.

Poetic Lexicon and Mystical Ambiguity

One of the most striking features in the musical production of nuns is their choice of texts. Beyond the canonical repertoire (psalms, antiphons, Marian invocations), we find frequent and intense use of the Song of Songs, a biblical text widely adopted in post-Tridentine mysticism, but which—when voiced by women—takes on an unprecedented resonance.

Titles like Vulnerasti cor meum, Osculetur me, Surge amica mea, Quae est ista quae ascendit are not mere quotations: they are poetic declarations of desire. The body of the beloved (who is God, but also an image of the nun’s own desiring body) is evoked, sought, repeatedly named. This is not metaphor in a weak sense, but a poetic codification of sacred eros, drawing on the grand tradition of female mysticism.

Interpretation of these texts in musical composition is never neutral. Vocal lines become sinuous in the most intense passages; melodies break on words of wound, abandonment, attraction. The verb amare is stretched; terms like cor, vulnerasti, desiderium, lectulus are set with extraordinary prosodic care, as though sound itself could convey an otherwise unspeakable depth.

In Vizzana’s Vulnerasti cor meum, for example, the repetition of the verb vulnerare is accompanied by an ascending progression broken by unexpected pauses: the pierced heart is not simply named, but musically struck. In Perucona’s Osculetur me, the sweetness of divine kisses is rendered through a chain of echoing sixteenth notes between two voices, a kind of timid, devout pursuit.

Dissonance, Breath, Corporeality

On the technical level, the nuns’ writing reveals a deliberate use of expressive dissonance. The rules of traditional counterpoint (as transmitted by the Gradus ad Parnassum) are respected, but often pushed to the limit to convey the text’s affect. Delayed suspensions, chromatic progressions, interrupted descending lines: all signal a “breathing” musicality, in which the body—breath itself—becomes the measure of time.

These techniques were not new: Monteverdi used them; late-sixteenth-century madrigalists developed them. But in the female voice—and particularly in the religious female voice—they take on a different value. Every suspension is also a hesitation, every diminution a sigh, every ascending phrase an invocation.

In Cozzolani’s Ego flos campi, for instance, the contrast between flos campi and lilium convallium is expressed through the opposition of two melodic gestures: one descending, gentle, blossoming on flos, the other swift, broken, more spasmodic on lilium, with an evident pictorial intent. The voice does not describe—it embodies.

The use of breath as an affective articulation is one of the most modern features of this writing. Breath is not merely physiological necessity, but semantic caesura, meditative pause. Silence between phrases is not absence, but part of the discourse. In this sense, nuns’ musical writing becomes a poetics of the body, reaffirming the female presence even where the body is officially denied, hidden, removed.

Spirituality and Corporeality: Teresa, Cecilia, Mary

This interweaving of music and desire, of form and emotional tension, finds precedent and justification in the female mysticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Saint Teresa of Ávila, central figure of Carmelite reform, had already expressed the profound link between divine love and bodily sensation. Her ecstasies—often described in quasi-erotic terms—were long viewed with suspicion, discussed, even ridiculed by male theologians.

In the nuns’ music, the same ambivalence becomes sound. Voices seek each other, touch without meeting. The choir becomes a space of choral mysticism, where a plurality of female voices constructs a spiritual space that is collective, non-hierarchical, and pulsing. In some works, such as Assandra’s O dulcissima Maria, the invocation to the Virgin ends with a suspended cadence that does not close, but returns the listener to inner contemplation. It is a “non-ending,” an open conclusion, more akin to prayer than musical rhetoric.

Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music and frequent symbolic reference, is never portrayed as a distant muse, but as an interior sister: music as an act of the heart, not of prestige. Likewise, Mary—central figure of monastic devotion—is not an abstract model of purity, but a companion in suffering, a body to embrace, a voice to imitate.

Form as Hidden Freedom

In light of all this, it becomes clear that the very form of these compositions—the motet, the sonata, the concertato—acts as resistance. Not ideological resistance, not open rebellion, but resistance through the work. Composing within the rules to expand the margins of the sayable, to bring into liturgical space a voice that is other, irreducible.

When Cozzolani writes for eight voices, she does not do so for polychoral showmanship, but to create an interior theater where each part has a voice, an identity, an affective function. When Vizzana employs sudden pauses and melodic leaps, it is not to impress, but to translate spiritual tremor. When Assandra harmonizes sacred texts with boldness, she does so to draw the sacred text closer to her own human, feminine, devout experience.

In this sense, composition is not merely technical skill or liturgical adornment: it is a form of active feminine memory, a way of inscribing, on the staff, an experience of enclosure that is not only isolation but also awareness.

To compose music, for these nuns, meant to give voice to what could not be spoken.
And sound, passing through the grilles, became the secret witness of an inner freedom.

5. Surveillance and Punishment: The Voice Under Control

Within the disciplinary system of the post-Tridentine Church, the sung female voice was regarded as an object of regulation, not only spiritual but juridical. It was not enough that religious women observed silence outside of liturgical functions, or refrained from appearing in public: even what could be heard—and thus desired, interpreted, remembered—had to be monitored, moderated, contained.

Repression was not episodic, but systemic. It manifested through apostolic visitations, synodal decrees, pastoral letters, and internal monastic regulations, all driven by a persistent fear: that the beauty of the female voice might disrupt devotional order and, even unintentionally, awaken a principle of sensual disturbance in the hearts of men. The voice, especially if invisible, became dangerous: because not seen, it was imagined. And in that void, desire found a threshold.

Surveillance as Ecclesiastical Praxis

Apostolic visitations were the primary tool by which bishops (or their delegates) verified compliance with monastic rules. Music was always an object of scrutiny. In the records preserved in many diocesan archives (Milan, Bologna, Venice, Rome), recurring phrases include: “the nuns sing with excessive zeal”, “concerts are performed during feast days”, “music is heard from multiple choirs at high volume”, “certain motets are suspected to have been composed without the confessor’s approval.”

In 1628, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, papal legate for the Emilia region, visited the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Cristina in Bologna. Among the accusations directed at the nuns: “concerted music is sung which seems more theatrical than ecclesiastical.” This was a direct allusion, evidently, to Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana, author of the Componimenti musicali published just five years earlier. The monastery’s response was weak, and Vizzana—already worn down by internal tensions—disappeared from the musical scene.

In Milan, Archbishop Alfonso Litta wrote in 1663 to the convent of Santa Radegonda, criticizing the use of alternating choirs and instruments during solemn feasts: “concerts are heard that attract the people more for musical delight than for piety.” Again, the target was the musical excellence of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani’s choir, which was actively publishing its Motetti a voce sola at the time.

Internal confessors—often Jesuits or Barnabites—also played a controlling role: it was they who decided whether a composition could be performed, whether a publication could be authorized, whether the use of instruments was licit. Spiritual discernment became a tool of prior censorship. In some private letters, admonitions appear against “composing without humility” or the “vanity of wishing to innovate sacred music with worldly affections.”

Recurring Accusations

The main categories used to justify censorship were always the same:

1. Implicit sensuality of the singing: there was concern that melodic inflections, melismas, expressive dynamics might evoke desire. The female voice, especially when alone or in duet, was viewed as an ambiguous sonic body, and thus as an erotic presence—even without intent.

2. Spiritual exhibitionism: excessive musical care was accused of distracting the nuns from prayer. Some inquisitors employed phrases such as “harmonic pride” or “carnal polish of sound” to describe a beauty deemed suspicious, too refined, too worldly.

3. Ritual disobedience: choosing non-liturgical texts, such as passages from the Song of Songs, or using instruments outside prescribed times, was seen as a sign of indiscipline. Even autonomous composition, if not overseen by a confessor, could be interpreted as disobedience.

4. Influence on laywomen: the beauty of monastic music often attracted secular women to the edges of the choir or church. Some visitors recorded: “during feast days, many women of the world crowd near the grilles to hear the nuns sing, as if it were a performance.” Enclosure, from spiritual enclosure, risked becoming an unauthorized stage.

(Implicit) Responses from the Nuns

Faced with these pressures, the nuns could not respond with manifestos or public letters. But their responses lie within the music itself. In the way they chose texts, orchestrated voices, shaped form, they articulated a position. The compositional form became a site of oblique freedom, of indirect reply.

Some works show explicit signs of awareness. In Cozzolani’s Concerti sacri, the interweaving of choirs creates a density such that the individual voice dissolves into the whole: a way of saying we are one without needing to declare it. In Vizzana, by contrast, each voice feels individual, affective, almost solitary: resistance as signature, not as collectivity. This too is discourse.

Then there are the pauses, the empty spaces, the suspensions—signs of a music that knows risk, and transforms it into language. The nuns could not openly defy authority, but they could construct a sonic world that eluded full institutional control, that revealed itself in details, in melodic curves, in unexpected harmonic returns.

Silence as Erasure

Censorship did not only contain; it removed from memory. Many works were lost, never performed again, never copied. Some composers—like Claudia Sessa—are known only through one or two pieces. Others, like Vizzana, were discredited, isolated, silenced.

Punishment was never theatrical. There were no burnings, no excommunications. But the archive itself became a tool of discipline: not to publish, not to copy, not to name. For centuries, the names of these nun-composers remained locked within convent walls, as though their voices—so widely heard, so utterly unseen—could not be granted a place in history.

Today, reopening those scores also means facing that erasure. Recognizing that sacred Italian music was not solely male, and that the voices of women, just when they were most repressed, resounded with unheard power.

6. The Historiographical Erasure

The silence that enveloped the seventeenth-century nun-composers for centuries is not merely an archival accident. It is the product of a deliberate cultural construction, shaped by well-defined selection criteria: male centrality, public visibility, institutional authority, editorial presence. Everything that existed outside these coordinates—or worse, against them—was slowly pushed to the margins of historical discourse until it all but disappeared.

The canon of Baroque music, as it formed beginning in the eighteenth century and was consolidated in later centuries, rests on a logic of presence: included are those who were printed, performed, transmitted by recognized schools. But the nuns rarely printed; they had no public students; they lacked patronage networks; and above all, they did not always sign their works. Or, if they did, they used pseudonyms, vague formulas, or the mediation of men.

Here lies a central issue: female authorship in sacred music was not only denied in practice, but also in discourse. For a long time, nuns’ names were absent from treatises, dictionaries, and histories of music. In the great historiographic repertoires of the nineteenth century—from Fétis to Grove—their space is nonexistent or negligible. When they do appear, they are relegated to marginal notes, described with ambiguous adjectives: “devout,” “gifted,” “amateur.”

This erasure is not only quantitative but qualitative. It is not about how many women were ignored, but what kind of musical experience was excluded from the historical narrative. A music born from invisible bodies, from non-public voices, from internal rituals: a music without stage, without spectacle, without protagonism—and therefore suspect.

Canon and Power

As Richard Taruskin has emphasized, the canon is not a collection of excellences, but a narrative of power: what enters the canon responds to a cultural hierarchy that privileges the figure of the genius author, the professional composer, the producer of recognizable and repeatable works. The nuns do not conform to this model. They composed out of inner necessity, for liturgical function, for shared devotion. Their music was rooted in the daily life of the convent, not designed for commercial circulation or theatrical consumption.

For this reason, even when it was published (as in the case of Cozzolani or Vizzana), it rarely entered the professional networks of sacred music. The intended audience was limited; distribution was restricted; reception was ambiguous. Without a market, without patrons, female musical output remained opaque to the dominant system.

Moreover, the absence of a male oral tradition—that is, of teachers, theorists, students who would cite and transmit these names—contributed to their oblivion. No Lully, no Padre Martini, no Burney included these women in their lists. The canon was written elsewhere. And their music, however spiritual, was not considered History, but domestic piety.

Critical Turns and Contemporary Rediscovery

The fracture begins to crack only in the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to the work of the first feminist scholars and musicologists. Figures such as Suzanne G. Cusick, Marian Wilson Kimber, Laurie Stras, Anna Beer, Claire Fontijn—each from different perspectives—helped to question the linear narrative of Western music as the exclusive product of male authority.

Particularly influential was Cusick, who proposed reading nuns’ music not only as a rediscovered repertoire, but as a “political text”: a space where the negated female body is inscribed, and which must be interpreted through new critical categories capable of integrating aesthetics, theology, and gender theory.

In parallel, numerous research and performance projects have brought this repertoire back to life. Among the most important:

– Cappella Artemisia, founded by Candace Smith, a vocal ensemble specializing in Italian convent music, with a targeted and philologically accurate discography.
– Musica Secreta, a British group active since 1990, with recordings dedicated to Cozzolani, Leonarda, and anonymous female composers.
– Modern editions of the works of Assandra, Vizzana, and Cozzolani, published by specialist publishers (A-R Editions, LIM, Suvini Zerboni), which now allow critical access to the scores.

Academically, conferences, dissertations, and scholarly journals (Early Music, Women & Music, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia) have begun to fill the gaps.

Yet the process is far from complete. Many manuscripts remain untranscribed; many convents still guard un-inventoried music collections; and performance of these works often encounters practical and ideological resistance. The work ahead is not only philological—it is critical, cultural, and symbolic.

Beyond Rehabilitation: Toward Full Recognition

It is crucial, finally, to avoid the trap of “rehabilitation.” The goal is not to “save” nun-composers as anomalies to be museumized, nor to celebrate them as women despite all odds. Their value does not lie in their anomaly, but in the depth of their work. They are not victims to be recovered, but cultural subjects to be acknowledged.

To reintroduce their music into circulation is to re-establish a broader idea of musical history, where enclosure is not absence but alternative presence. Where imposed silence is contradicted by song. Where the voice is no longer contained, but finally heard in all its complexity.