February 14 at 3pm in Dodge 622
‘Extraordinary Subtill Queanes’: Musical Diplomacy and Jewish Women in the Early Modern Constantinople Harem
In 1599, the English organ builder Thomas Dallam prepared an instrument for voyage to the Ottoman Empire. The instrument, a 12.5-foot-high clockwork organ with the ability to tell time and play automatically, was to be a gift for Sultan Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603) from Queen Elizabeth I, a diplomatic gesture on behalf of the English crown. Funded by the merchants of the Levant Company, the instrument was carried overseas on the ship Hector, under the personal stewardship of Dallam, himself, along with diplomats, ambassadors, and a host of other travelers, and ultimately installed in Constantinople in the Sultan’s seraglio, or harem—the female-centered space of the Ottoman court. The negotiations for this musical gesture of diplomacy, and the discourse it engendered, were entrusted to two women who navigated the space between the Sultan and the world outside the court: the Sultana, Ṣāfiye Sultan (d. 1619), and her kira, or chief female attendant, a Jewish woman by the name of Esperanza Malchi (d. 1600).
A letter from Malchi containing gifts to Queen Elizabeth I survives, as do three letters to the Queen from Ṣāfiye, all testifying to the fact that the women of the harem—and not the Sultan—negotiated this musical-diplomatic relationship between England and the Ottoman world at a time when England was fiercely pursuing trade with the East. Malchi’s story, however, is absent from the musicological literature. Contemporary scholarship by Ruth Lamdan, Eric Dursteler, and others have examined early modern Constantinople with respect to musical diplomacy and knowledge circulation, yet no one source has directly examined the role of music as a means of navigation within the particularly female-centered space of the harem. This paper will reconsider the harem alongside Dallam’s organ gift as a consequential feature of musical diplomacy, and as a business space in which knowledge sharing begets female agency. By centering an otherwise marginalized individual whose actions were enabled by the trust and knowledge shared between women, I thus complicate the notion that the harem was an environment in which sexual transactions were the only economy of power.
Bio
Elizabeth Weinfield is a musicologist and gambist who teaches in the department of music history at The Juilliard School. Her research explores the relationships among gender, performance, race, and material culture in the early modern period. She holds a PhD in historical musicology from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Master’s in Music from the University of Oxford. As the artistic director of the ensemble, Sonnambula, inaugural ensemble-in-residence at The Frick Collection and formerly at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she has designed site-specific concerts at museums around the country, including the National Gallery of Art, the Hispanic Society of America, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Met Cloisters, and the Museum of Biblical Art. Her recording of the music of the seventeenth-century converso composer, Leonora Duarte (Centaur Records), won the American Musicological Society’s Jewish Studies award in 2019 and her forthcoming recording, Passing Fancy: Beauty in a Moment of Chaos, will be distributed by Avie Records, UK, later this year. Her most recent publication is on Duarte, in the Fall 2024 issue of the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music.
