Veiling the Voice of Architecture* Helen HILLS University of York ‘My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words of thy tongues’ uttering And yet I know the sound’. (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Sc 2) How might baroque convent churches and choirs be thought in relation to nuns’ song if, in- stead of supposing that architecture, the voice and gender are given and known, they are opened to question as a possibility—and, indeed, more than that, if architecture be thought as a pos- sibility through which the interrelationships are opened? his essay investigates Italian baroque architecture, veil and voice in relation to embodiment and gender, while steadfastly refusing to treat any of those ields or their interrelationships in terms of representation, which has been the familiar paradigm for far too long.1 Rather than interpreting conventual architecture and nuns’ music in terms of representation—that is, as representing something that precedes them— I seek here to examine their interrelationship in terms of embodiment, gender, materiality as one of potentiality. he essay is ofered in a spirit of genuine inquiry and also, in truth, in some perplexity at the gulfs that continue to divide—even to drive apart—the ields of architectural history and historical musicology in this regard. Architectural history has tended to focus on convent buildings, including their oten magni icent churches in extensive terms (Figure 6.1). hus it has treated nuns’ choirs in terms * I am grateful to the British Academy for a Small Research Grant which made possible research for this essay. I would like to thank also Richard Wistreich and Andrew Benjamin for stimulating dis- cussion and Mary Pardo for her brilliant interpretations of testing seventeenth-century Italian texts. 1 To treat architecture and gender in terms of representation remains a dominant paradigm in historical scholarship, particularly pre-1800. See, for example, Medioli 2000: 136-52; Evangelisti, 2007; McIver 2012. he reasons for this are complex and lie beyond the scope of this essay, but see useful discussion in Hollier 1998: 190-97.