Colloquium: Dr Alana Mailes (University of Cambridge)

“Such Wine, such Women, such Musick”: Stuart Diplomats and the Siren Song of Italian Courtesans.

In 1611 the English travel writer Thomas Coryat famously warned his countrymen to beware the bewitching musical virtuosity of any courtesan whom they might meet in Venice: “[S]hee will endevour to enchaunt thee partly with her melodious notes that shee warbles out upon her lute, which shee fingers with as laudable a stroake as many men that are excellent professors in the noble science of Musicke; and partly with that heart-tempting harmony of her voice.” Jacobean ambassadors in Venice expressed a similar wariness toward Italian courtesans. English emissaries actively avoided socializing with them, complaining in diplomatic dispatches that the feminine wiles of these seductive songstresses were a hazard to infatuated Englishmen and thus to the moral health of the English state. Later accounts from the Caroline period, however, find embassy agents in the Republic consorting freely with courtesans, even making music alongside them. Restoration theatrical texts then portrayed the musicking of Venetian courtesans as little more than a hackneyed sex-work marketing ploy, to which exiled Stuart cavaliers were ultimately impervious. Why had the diplomatic sources changed their tune?

Examining a wide range of seventeenth-century source materials from travelogues and state papers to printed plays and music, I analyze this apparent cultural shift within the British diplomatic corps over an approximately sixty-year period. I chronicle interactions between Italian courtesans and English politicians in Venice from the 1604-23 residencies of the ambassador and viol player Henry Wotton to the 1650-52 legation of the diplomat, playwright, and theatre impresario Thomas Killigrew. For English travelers abroad, I argue, singing Italian courtesans were a visceral symbol of English anxieties about the corrupting influence of a feminized, licentious, Catholic Italy on England’s nascent global empire. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, English envoys to Venice were demonstrating and claiming immunity from the Italian courtesan’s musical talents. These changing English attitudes can be attributed not only to various musical, political, and religious developments that had transformed Stuart England in the first half of the century, but also to Britain’s rapid ascension to an unprecedented level of artistic, diplomatic, confessional, commercial, and colonial power in the early modern world.

Note: This talk includes references to misogyny and sexual violence.

Alana Mailes is the Thole Research Fellow in Music at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Her work explores the role of early modern musical transculturation within histories of statecraft, espionage, commerce, confessionalism, and empire, with a focus on the musics of Italy, Britain, and Ireland. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Early Music, Early Music History, and Religions, and her current book project investigates musical and diplomatic exchange between Venice and Stuart England. She holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from Harvard University and an MPhil in Music Studies from Clare College, Cambridge. She is also an enthusiastic performer of early music.