Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music: Music, musicians, and community at the Florentine convent of San Matteo in Arcetri (1540-1630)
Laurie Stras (University of Southampton)
Discussants: Bonnie Blackburn and Marica Tacconi
The Clarissan convent of San Matteo in Arcetri is well known in both scholarly and non-specialist histories as the home of Suor Maria Celeste Galilei, daughter of Galileo Galilei and granddaughter of the musician Vincenzo Galilei. Brought to modern imagination by the 1999 non-fiction work Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel, the convent has been portrayed as a rather dour, unsophisticated, and impoverished house. And yet, evidence of San Matteo’s rich musical life in the mid-sixteenth century has recently emerged, in one of the most complete music manuscripts that can securely be associated with an Italian convent of the Renaissance.
Copied in 1560, Brussels MS 27766, the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript - so called because of the names of the nuns embossed on its binding – preserves polyphony for the entire year, and reveals intriguing local detail regarding liturgical practice and chant in its destination community. Its most impressive contribution is a set of twelve polyphonic Vespers antiphons for the Feast of St Clare, unique form and function in the sixteenth-century repertoire. Its provenance is confirmed by the only surviving ledger from the sixteenth century in the Florentine Archivio di Stato pertaining to San Matteo. Names, faces, and traces of relationships are found entwined in the music’s elaborate cadellae, and the feasts to which the polyphony pertains are given depth and context in the ledger, which records the convent’s expenses.
Triangulating information from the manuscript, the ledger, and from Suor Maria Celeste’s letters - and experiencing chant and polyphony performed by Musica Secreta - we can start to piece together a better picture of why this convent might have felt an appropriate choice for the Galilei family. We may also understand better how family connections that weave in and out of the convent space are used to forge relationships over generations.