ABSTRACT
During the Renaissance, the ideal woman was a silent woman. As Anton Woensam's c. 1525 print of “ein weyse frauen” suggests, women were supposed to act as if they had a padlock on their mouth (Figure 6.1).1 Treatises warned “loquacity cannot be sufficiently reproached in a woman, & nor can silence be sufficiently applauded. ”2 Yet women's words elicited fascination as well as repulsion. As recent studies have stressed, female loquacity occupied a much more prevalent, contested space in Renaissance discourse than such narrow condemnations would suggest.3 Alessandro Striggio's 1567 madrigal comedy Il Cicalamento delle donne al Bucato [The Chattering of Women at the Well] offers an intriguing musical reflection of these pervasive portrayals of women's talk.4 Writers from the seventeenth century to the present have singled out Il Cicalamento as one of Striggio's best-known works. Yet since the abandonment of the piece's most striking claim on researchers' interest, the now-discredited view of madrigal comedies as predecessors of opera, Il Cicalamento has received little critical attention.5 Revisiting the piece in light of recent studies on popular culture and sexuality in the Renaissance reveals that the chattering women of Il Cicalamento still have much to impart to modern scholars. The anonymous text's amusing portrayal of gossip contains previously unremarked connections to Renaissance preoccupations with the simultaneous threat and fascination of women's speech and sexuality.
