One little book sitting in a convent: Laurie Stras introduces the background to Musica Secreta's new recording of music from the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript

The Siege of Florence (1558) by Giorgio Vasari, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
San Matteo in Arcetri is the reddish building in the bottom left of the picture

Musica Secreta is the UK’s only all-female Renaissance ensemble. Their latest album, Ricordanze: a record of love, is released on the Lucky Music label on 1 October. This explores music from the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript, the only surviving manuscript of polyphony from a Renaissance convent. The manuscript has been the subject of research by Laurie Stras, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Southampton and director of Musica Secreta. The new album acts as a companion to Laurie’s online publication in the series Elements in Women in Music from Cambridge University Press, titled Music at a Florentine Convent: The Biffoli-Sostegni Manuscript and Suor Maria Celeste Galilei, due for release in October 2025. I met with Laurie, rather appropriately at the British Library, to find out more about her work on the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript and its significance.

First of all, Laurie explains that the manuscript is the only known Renaissance manuscript of polyphony with a secure provenance from an Italian convent, though she points out that there are a dozen or more such manuscripts from the Medieval period. The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript is the nuns’ choirbook from the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, a modest community in the hills outside Florence. It was copied in 1560 for two nuns at San Matteo, Suor Agnoleta Biffoli and Suor Clemenzia Sostegni. Hence the manuscript's modern name - The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript

Musica Secreta & Laurie Stras recording Ricordanze (Photo: Rosie Taylor)

Laurie started looking at the manuscript around ten years ago. It was apparent that it came from a convent, but which one was not clear. Laurie started looking and narrowed the manuscript's possible home to two places. One, a rich convent in the middle of Florence and the other, a small impoverished convent a mile or so outside the city. Her attempts to find traces of the manuscript in the richer convent's surviving archives proved fruitless. At the last minute, just pre-COVID in February 2020, she turned to the smaller convent, San Matteo in Arcetri. Here, in their relatively meagre archive, she found not only the names of the two nuns who gave the manuscript its name, but the names of their fathers and the sizes of their dowries. One of the fascinating things that came out of my chat with Laurie was the way that researching a single manuscript moved from musical history into a far more complex web of social and political history.  Thanks to a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, Laurie was able to return and finish studying the manuscript, finding out a great deal more about the women and their history. But she found no more music.
In 1612, Galileo Galilei’s daughter, Virginia, entered the convent and became Suor Maria Celeste Galilei. San Matteo was chosen because Galileo was concerned to place both his daughters in the same convent. This was technically against the rules, but convents would wink at the procedure, provided sufficient dowry was provided. In the case of San Matteo, its being small and impoverished meant that it was affordable for Galileo.

The convent had strict controls over numbers, and Virginia was only able to enter  because another nun died. That nun was Suor Clemenzia Sostegni, who died in 1612, having entered in 1541 and been abbess twice. Which means that she was almost certainly aged over 80 when she died. Suor Maria Celeste Galilei became responsible for the Office in 1630, and as such she would almost certainly have used the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript. In another fascinating link, Suor Maria Celeste Galilei's organist colleague was Suor Maria Archilei, who was the daughter of Vittoria Archilei (La Romanina) (fl. 1582 – 1620), the star soprano at the Medici court.

Laurie is fairly confident that when Suor Maria Celeste Galilei took over as choirmistress, the manuscript would have still been in use because it was so specific to the convent and the order. Nuns were not able to have property, and when a nun died, her belongings were reabsorbed into the convent. The manuscript's specificity would almost certainly have prevented it from being sold.

The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript

This isn't the first time that Laurie's research has bumped up against popular history. Her attribution of a book of anonymous motets, Musica quinque vocum motteta materna lingua vocata (1543), to Suor Eleanora d'Este, the daughter of Lucrezia Borgia, caused something of a stir, not so much because of the music (which is very fine) but because of Suor Eleanora d'Este's mother!

The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript was copied in 1560, a time when the convent was relatively comfortable financially. They ate meat and made wine, receiving income from selling the wine as well as the fruits of their spinning. So, they were prosperous enough that the nuns could aspire to have such a manuscript and perhaps the families of the two nuns mentioned paid for it to be copied and bound. The music is mainly older, much of it anonymous, though there are some contemporary names, including the Maestro di Capella of Pisa Cathedral. Some pieces are specific to that convent or their order, so were probably composed for the nuns, but other pieces are older, including a piece by the Franco-Flemish composer Loyset Compère (c. 1445 – 1518).

One mass, Messa sopra Je le lerray, is described by Laurie as being quite unlike anything she has seen in early 16th-century music. It is linked to the Siege of Florence, when in 1539 to 1530 Imperial forces surrounded the city. The nuns were evacuated because their convent was too close to the besieging army's lines. During the siege, the whole city suffered from plague as well. The mass is for three voices, a fully polyphonic elaboration of a French chanson that appears in Florentine manuscripts. The chanson is a scurrilous one, about a woman who leaves her husband because he beats her, yet he does not know about the gate where her lover can get in and out. Laurie sees the subject as possibly linking it to the siege. The Gloria even recalls the sound of trumpets and quotes a defiant motet by the city’s maestro Philippe Verdelot (1480 to 1485–1530 to 1540), Recordare, Domine, pleading for an end to war and pestilence. 

Laurie Stras & Musica Secreta (Photo: Nick Rutter)

Laurie describes the mass as a sonic evocation of the siege, which leads her to wonder what it was doing in a manuscript copied in the 1560s. Quite clearly, this was something that they kept in the convent that meant something to them. Laurie points out that when writing polyphony for three voices all in the same vocal range, the normal rules do not apply - there are examples of dissonance, imitation at the unison and periods of harmonic stasis. This latter would be one of the few occasions when you could easily have consonance.

In 1540, lightning struck the bell tower of the convent; it collapsed, but everyone survived, and an annual votive mass was instituted. The four-voice Messa sopra Recordare Virgo Mater from the manuscript was probably used for this mass of thanksgiving. Rather remarkably, the convent was still giving the annual votive mass in 1694. Laurie describes the music from the mass as being rather wild, especially the use of unresolved sevenths in the Agnus Dei!

Laurie has recorded music from the manuscript three times with Musica Secreta. On their disc From Darkness to Light (Obsidian Records, 2019), Musica Secreta recorded Marian motets from the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript. Alongside these, they included the Lamentations by Antoine Brumel (1460-1513), partly because they were copied by the same scribe. In 2022, on Mother Sister Daughter, they recorded the polyphonic vespers of St Clare from the manuscript. These are for four voices with big ranges, the upper voices going punishingly high, and the results are very virtuosic. 

Yet other music in the manuscript is so simple that it could be extemporised. This rather confused Laurie until, in the archives of Florence Cathedral, she came across a manuscript created for the boys of the Cathedral choir in the 1540s. These were similar, simple psalms written out in strings of semi-breves, probably for the boys who were starting out learning. The music simple enough for them to extemporise and harmonise. 

The convent had a tradition of what they called Visitations, when the nuns would stand in front of the Crucifix, the Blessed Virgin and at the crib of the baby Jesus. The whole convent was there, not just the choir, and Laurie wonders whether the simple short pieces were created for these occasions. Not strictly liturgical, but part of the whole community's religious events and easily learned by everyone. After all, the novices had to learn all the psalms and modes by memory.



What sets the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript apart is the sheer variety of music. In cathedral and other larger establishments, volumes tended to be thematic - all the vespers music, all the office music and so on. This manuscript is a mix, a jumble of motets, vespers, masses, songs and more. It is a gathering together of the resources the convent had, and Laurie imagines this jumble being given to the copyist to create the manuscript. It gives a comprehensive idea of music sung in a not particularly prestigious convent. The nuns were not poor; they were largely from the merchant class, yet they were not from the rich families. You cannot, however, extrapolate from this to elsewhere, as we have so few documents surviving that tell us what the nuns were specifically doing.

By the 1580s, music had moved on outside of the convent, so the manuscript would have looked distinctly old-fashioned. In 1597, the Archbishop of Florence forbade the use of instruments (violins or plucked instruments) in convents or the performance of music with one solo voice. It was acceptable to sing polyphony and to accompany it with organ or viols. If there were solo voices, then they must sing in Latin; these rather specific instructions related to the contemporary performances of virtuoso secular music in Italian. Convents were instructed to read these orders out in chapter, so that everyone knew. All this was part of the Archbishop's campaign to bring nuns more under his control and to force the convents to be enclosed. Suor Clemenzia Sostegni, a formidable woman, had a two-year standoff with the Archbishop related to his wish for them to be enclosed. He stopped all new professions to the convent till they submitted.

The tenor, Francesco Rasi, who created the role of Orfeo in Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo in 1607, was in 1610 exiled for the murder of his step-mother's steward and the attempted murder of his step-mother. This step-mother was the sister of Suor Agnoleta Biffoli (from the manuscript). Eventually, the families are reconciled, and Rasi marries his stepmother's granddaughter but dies two months later. The granddaughter would become a close companion of Galileo's, and the two families intermarried.

Thus, the manuscript is surrounded by a tight web of relations between Florentine families. Laurie comments that the more you sit with documents, the more what appear to be totally separate strands of history come together. We have a tendency to think of music history as something other, but it is all related. The music makes its way in the world interlinked with other strands of history. When Musica Secreta perform this music, it stops simply being music and occupies a place in the imagination of the ensemble.

The manuscript is in the library of the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, though Laurie has never seen the manuscript itself; she has worked from scans. During the whole time she has been working on it, the physical manuscript has been in restoration as it is gradually dissolving into dust. The manuscript was acquired by the conservatory in the late 19th century, and there are other manuscripts in Brussels by the same copyist. The convent of San Matteo in Arcetri was suppressed by Napoleon in 1808, and it is possible that the convent's library was passed to another convent of the same community, perhaps in Belgium.

Musica Secreta will be performing the music from the manuscript at the Brighton Early Music Festival on 19 October

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