Gender and Print Culture

Among the tens of thousands of attributed articles in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, all, famously, are signed by men. The most prominent contributions by a woman author-and, indeed, the only pieces of confirmed, extended writing-are the illustrations and technical explanations that accompany an extract in the fifth volume of plates, entitled "Gravure en lettres, en géographie et en musique" ("The engraving of words, maps, and music"). This description of the tools and practices of music production is by a certain "Madame de Lusse"-an engraver who left scant trace in the biographical record, but whose imprint survives in several key musical texts of the French Enlightenment. (In addition to her illustrations for Diderot and d'Alembert's compendium, de Lusse prepared the examples for Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique, as well notable scores from the repertory of early opéra comique.) 


If Madame de Lusse represented an exceptional case within the frame of the Encyclopédie, her example is far from unique in the wider domains of music printing and commerce in eighteenth-century Paris. Surveys suggest that during this period roughly half of French music engravers were women, as were the heads of several important publishing houses. This paper draws on new archival evidence to reconstruct this network of entrepreneurs–and to unpack the logistical conditions and critical assumptions that enabled them to occupy this niche in the male-dominated musical landscape of the French capital. Practically speaking, women were accepted as graveuses because of legislative loopholes that allowed them to take over family-run enterprises; they succeeded, more generally, by exploiting the ambiguous status of engraving-as an activity poised between "feminine" craft and "masculine" creative art. In recuperating these tangible aspects of  musical production, my paper situates both women and music as agents in France's "artisanal" Enlightenment (Bertucci 2017), adding to a growing body of literature addressing the material underpinnings of this century's modernizing mentalités. 

Between 1607 and 1621, no fewer than seven atlas-sized luxury choirbooks emerged from the print shop in Salamanca owned by the Fleming Artus Tavernier (the son or nephew of Plantin's punchcutter Ameet), his wife Susana Muñoz, and their successors, in printruns of up to 130 copies. Three of these magnificent polyphonic choirbooks were devoted to music by Sebastián Vivanco (ca. 1550-1622); three were devoted to music by Juan Esquivel (c. 1563-after 1612), and one - whose unique surviving exemplar was recently discovered - to music composed by Diego Bruceña (1567-1623). As a corpus, the seven books contain about 288 Latin liturgical works scored for between four and twelve voices printed on a total exceeding 2,370 pages. One of these books, Esquivel's Tomus secundus, is the largest choirbook ever printed in Spain.


Today, a mere 24 exemplars, only half of which are recorded in RISM and almost all of which have suffered mistreatment, are known. They are preserved in 14 locations in 5 countries. The findings presented here are the result of in situ research in 12 of these locations. When notarial records and other archival documents are correlated with the extant exemplars, the figure of Susana Muñoz emerges as the driving force behind this unexamined explosion of printed Latin polyphony. Through her marriages to Artus Tavernier, Francisco de Cea Tesa, and Antonio Vásquez, all of whom she survived, she built the most prodigious press for the printing of polyphonic choirbooks in Early Modern Spain. And while only once is she referred to in colophons - and then merely as the 'widow of Cea Tesa' - it is clear from the number of printing contracts, bills of sale, and other legal documents that she signed that she was much more than an appendage to the men whose names are found in contracts, on title pages, and in colophons.


In addition to offering a picture of the woman behind the printing press, this paper offers revised printing dates, newly-verified physical and repertorial descriptions, and further information on the seven polyphonic choirbooks and their distribution in the 17th-century and their survival into the 21st.

In eighteenth-century Britain, composers and others in the music trade increasingly turned to the subscription method to cover production costs, alleviate financial risk, improve sales and profit, and provide a reliable network of distribution. The subscription method generally involved a buyer's payment (or promise of payment) in advance of publication.  In return, subscribers were often rewarded with a discount on the retail price and their names inscribed in the work's first edition on a list of subscribers.  Although the subscription method accounted for a fraction of total music sales in eighteenth-century Britain, the transactions recorded by subscription lists provide useful demographic information about buyers in the marketplace.


This paper assesses the effectiveness of the subscription method using a first-hand examination of lists of subscribers from roughly 550 musical works, representing 350 individual composers and nearly 100,000 subscribers.  With a relative absence of business records from the music trade of that era, subscription lists provide modern historians with valuable (though imperfect) data on social trends and the economics of music publishing.  Detailed examination of subscription lists may be used, for example, to sharpen our knowledge of women's achievements in the musical life of eighteenth-century Britain - as composers, consumers, performers, and publishers.  In addition to examining gender as a basis of analysis, subscription list data allow for market comparisons based on factors such as locale of publishing, genre, the nationality of composers, prices for music, and the 'social quality' of subscribers.


Despite the burden of recruiting subscribers and the risk to one's bank account and reputation, the subscription method seems to have been a successful approach for those who wished to bring large, expensive, and specialized music books into print.  The subscription method held promise of substantial profits for well-established composers, and also served as a useful entrance into music publishing for relatively unknown musicians.  In addition, the subscription method provided opportunities for producing high-quality music books, and served as a check against violations of an artist's intellectual property.