Geronimo Cavaglieri, the Song of Songs and female spirituality in Federigo Borromeo's Milan.

MILAN (Italy); ITALY

The Song of Songs was a central text in the spiritual lives of monastic women of the later cinquecento and early seicento, and this no doubt accounts at least in part for the text’s popularity among composers. Hundreds of motets setting either excerpts or centonizations survive from the period. This article is a close study of one subset of that oeuvre: the centonizations found in Geronimo Cavaglieri’s four books of contrafacta, the Nova metamorphosi (1600–16). These four books, all Latin contrafacts of Italian madrigals, include some 20 texts based on the Song of Songs. They belong to a larger group of eleven books of contrafacta by four editors, with clear ties to Federigo Borromeo’s reform programmes in general and to his relationship with Milanese female monastics in particular. This article examines one of Cavaglieri’s contrafacta texts, Nigra sum from the first book, as a starting point for a consideration of his use of the canticle and the meanings that his particular centonizations may have held for his audience. It becomes clear that Cavaglieri chose a handful of phrases and assembled them in ways that were influenced by a monastic thread in the canticle’s exegetical tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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