‘The Most Beautiful Sound’: The Queer Nexus of Listening and Voice in the Early Modern Italian Convent

Abstract

The convent in Early Modern Italy functioned as a uniquely queer space, denying women heteronormative lives while producing homosocial, virginal communities. As nuns wove together the dual acts of listening and vocalizing, they built queer sonic environments that were the site of massive power struggles between male church officials, the bodies of women religious, and the wealthy families of Italy. Connecting voice studies, feminist and queer musicology, sound studies, and nun studies to explore new ways of approaching convent musicking, the author examines Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’ to illuminate the possibilities of women’s agency and queerly inflected performance.