Uncovering the Musical Life of San Donato in Polverosa: Sister Maria Diacinta Paulsanti's Processional

Abstract

This study reveals an episode in the little-known musical life of the Florentine Cistercian convent of San Donato in Polverosa. It shows that one of the convent’s mid seventeenth-century nuns, Maria Diacinta Paulsanti, owned a sixteenth-century processional, now Additional MS 412 in the Fisher Library, University of Sydney, Australia. This handed-down chant book also witnesses the cultivation of mensural music and choral polyphony at San Donato. Supporting archival evidence for a range of musical practices at San Donato during Maria Diacinta’s time there is outlined. The chapter concludes by examining whether post-Tridentine reforms at Florence in 1661 had any effect on the subsequent use of the processional.