Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara

Laurie Stras is Research Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield, where she teaches and researches sixteenth-century music, popular music, and music and disability. She is co-director of the ensemble Musica Secreta, with whom she has made four acclaimed recordings, including Lucrezia Borgia's Daughter, winner of the 2016 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society.

• Introduction: Musica secreta; 1. Ferrarese convents and the Este in the first half of the sixteenth century; 2. Courtly women and secular music in Ferrara in the first half of the sixteenth century; 3. Princesses and politics: the Este women and music in the 1550s; 4. Actresses and Ariosto: spectacle and song in the 1560s; 5. 'Un modo di cantare molto diverso': Ferrara and the new singing of the 1570s; 6. Margherita's arrival and the convents in the first half of the 1580s; 7. Musical practices of the 1580s concerto; 8. Ferrara's final chapter: court and convents in the 1590s; 9. Afterlife in Mantua.

'In Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara, Laurie Stras has produced a highly accessible and important volume - thoroughly researched and elegantly written - that throws open the clouded window that has, until now, obscured our understanding of this chapter in music history … Stras offers a second life to the musical women of sixteenth-century Ferrara.' Rebecca Cypess, Music and Letters