Laurie Stras is Research Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield, where she teaches and researches sixteenth-century music, popular music, and music and disability. She is co-director of the ensemble Musica Secreta, with whom she has made four acclaimed recordings, including Lucrezia Borgia's Daughter, winner of the 2016 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society.

'In Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara, Laurie Stras has produced a highly accessible and important volume - thoroughly researched and elegantly written - that throws open the clouded window that has, until now, obscured our understanding of this chapter in music history … Stras offers a second life to the musical women of sixteenth-century Ferrara.' Rebecca Cypess, Music and Letters

• Introduction: Musica secreta; 1. Ferrarese convents and the Este in the first half of the sixteenth century; 2. Courtly women and secular music in Ferrara in the first half of the sixteenth century; 3. Princesses and politics: the Este women and music in the 1550s; 4. Actresses and Ariosto: spectacle and song in the 1560s; 5. 'Un modo di cantare molto diverso': Ferrara and the new singing of the 1570s; 6. Margherita's arrival and the convents in the first half of the 1580s; 7. Musical practices of the 1580s concerto; 8. Ferrara's final chapter: court and convents in the 1590s; 9. Afterlife in Mantua.

Laurie Stras is Research Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield, where she teaches and researches sixteenth-century music, popular music, and music and disability. She is co-director of the ensemble Musica Secreta, with whom she has made four acclaimed recordings, including Lucrezia Borgia's Daughter, winner of the 2016 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society.

'In Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara, Laurie Stras has produced a highly accessible and important volume - thoroughly researched and elegantly written - that throws open the clouded window that has, until now, obscured our understanding of this chapter in music history … Stras offers a second life to the musical women of sixteenth-century Ferrara.' Rebecca Cypess, Music and Letters

• Introduction: Musica secreta; 1. Ferrarese convents and the Este in the first half of the sixteenth century; 2. Courtly women and secular music in Ferrara in the first half of the sixteenth century; 3. Princesses and politics: the Este women and music in the 1550s; 4. Actresses and Ariosto: spectacle and song in the 1560s; 5. 'Un modo di cantare molto diverso': Ferrara and the new singing of the 1570s; 6. Margherita's arrival and the convents in the first half of the 1580s; 7. Musical practices of the 1580s concerto; 8. Ferrara's final chapter: court and convents in the 1590s; 9. Afterlife in Mantua.