ABSTRACT
Among accounts of the festivities celebrating the 1594 Ferrarese wedding of Carlo Gesualdo and Leonora d'Este are descriptions of a performance by Duchess Margherita Gonzaga's balletto delle donne, her all-female dance group. According to one account the performance was “a thing of great delight, not only to the whole theater, but even to the bridegroom [Gesualdo] who had never seen such a battle done by women.”1 The “battle” to which this commentator refers is the guiding theme of the balletto's performance: it governed choices regarding the costumes and accouterments of the performers, the choreography, and the music (and probably sung text) chosen to accompany the dancers. Not only does this account provide firm evidence of the continued practice of Margherita's balletto at the Ferrarese court during the 1590s,2 but it may also help shed light on the content of some earlier balletto performances initiated by Margherita not long after her wedding to Duke Alfonso d'Este in 1579. Moreover, the specificity of surviving accounts of the performance given for Gesualdo's 1594 wedding suggest that Margherita and her group were drawing on a tradition of women's creative endeavor, particularly in the realm of theatrical performance, that had special links to the knightly epics produced at the court of Ferrara.
