Maddalena Casulana was the first woman to publish music under her own name. She was probably born in Vicenza around 1535. She married a Sienese man from the Casolani family, likely in the early 1550s, and was very probably in the city during the siege of 1554–55, with two young children. After living in Rome with her husband—an alchemist whom she accused of squandering the household funds—she separated from him and moved to the Veneto. In Venice, she forged a close relationship with the actor and musician Antonio Molino, to whom she taught counterpoint. In 1568, Casulana sought Medici support in bringing a lawsuit against her husband, hoping to recover her dowry.

It was in Venice that Casulana published her first works: first a handful of madrigals in anthologies in 1566 and 1567, then her Primo libro de’ madrigali a quattro voci in 1568. In the dedication to Isabella de’ Medici, she declares that she wishes to expose to the world “show the world . . . the vain error of men, who so believe themselves to be the masters of the high gifts of intellect that it seems to them that these cannot be equally shared with women.” With this book, Casulana achieved a double feat: she was not only the first woman to publish music under her own name, but also among the earliest Italian women writers to defend women publicly. In the sixteenth century, the pro-woman cause was articulated almost entirely by men. It was not until 1600, with the publication of two treatises by the Venetian authors Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinelli, that women entered the debate in earnest. Before then, women’s public interventions were rare in Italy, and Casulana stands among the earliest. Criticising men’s shortcomings was deemed unseemly for women; for decades, those who wished to defend women could do so only through male intermediaries, commissioning them to write in women’s favour. Perhaps because music lay somewhat at the margins of learned circles, Casulana enjoyed enough latitude to attach her name to such claims. Despite her peripheral position, she was thoroughly familiar with the rhetorical strategies of pro-woman discourse, particularly the central role accorded to exemplarity. Even if her dedication adopts the conventional humility of the genre, it nonetheless challenges long-standing masculine prejudices about female genius and, more subtly, presents herself as an example—inviting other, “higher intellects” (implicitly, female) to add their voices to the argument.

In 1570, Casulana published her Secondo libro de’ madrigali a quattro voci, dedicated to Antonio Londonio, a major figure in Milanese musical patronage. At the same time her career took on a European dimension: her music was performed in Munich in 1568; in 1571–72 she spent a few months in Vienna at the court of Emperor Maximilian II, before travelling to the French court around August 1572. When Casulana reappears in the early 1580s, she does so under the name Maddalena Mezari, the surname of her second husband—apparently a man from Brescia whom she married in Vicenza in 1579. In 1583, the printer Vincenzo Sabbio reissued Casulana’s Primo libro de’ madrigali a quattro voci in Brescia at the initiative of the Tini brothers, two booksellers also from Brescia who were active in Milan. As a singer and lutenist, Casulana performed in various places—Perugia, the Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza, and Verona, where she stayed for some time in 1583 with Leonardo Montanaro. She then frequented the Veronese count Mario Bevilacqua, to whom she dedicated her Primo libro de’ madrigali a cinque voci. Casulana published two collections of sacred madrigals between 1586 and 1591, which have not survived. These are the last known traces of her life. A portrait of Casulana once formed part of Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol’s collection at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck, but it is now lost.