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By the 1580s Madalena is referred to as “Signora Maddalena Casualana de Mezarii or
Maddalena Mezarii detta Casulana.” 34 This has led some scholars to assume that she married, a
scenario that might explain the relative lack of published compositions and the reduction of
written records of her activities. Both Pescerelli, Pendle, and Lerner report that Casulana likely
married “sometime after 1570 and made her home in Vicenza,” a fact suggested by a change of
surname on the title page of her Il primo libro à cinque voci to “Madalena Mezarii detta
Casulana Vicentina.” 35 However, Thomasin LaMay finds no evidence of marriage documents
and insists that, “her high profile would have made it likely that such information might have
been mentioned.” 36 LaMay posits instead that, upon achieving success as a “full-fledged
composer, wealthy dedicatee and established professional,” Madalena was able to use her
surname instead of her “pet name” denoting her place of birth. 37 Either way, Madalena
apparently withdrew from “professional musical life” sometime after the early 1580s. 38
Madalena was unique not only in her desire to publish and her self-proclaimed desire to
prove the “conceited error of men,” but in her lifestyle and evident freedom within society.
Unlike other women composers, she was not tied to a particular patron or academy, she did not,
34 Ibid, 86.
35 Ibid, 99.
36 Thomasin LaMay, “Composing from the Throat: Madalena Casulana’s Primo libro de
madrigali, 1568,” in Musical Voices of Early Modern Women, ed. Thomasin LaMay (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2005), 376.
37 Ibid, 377.
38 Ellen D. Lerner, “Madalena Casulana,” in Women Composers: Music through the Ages, ed.
Martha Furman Schleifer and Sylvia Glickman (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), 1:100-101.
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