Bad Latin, Bad Manners: Giovanni Battista Doni, Marin Mersenne, and Literary Style in Seventeenth-Century Music Theory

Abstract

An overlooked copy of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonicorum libri (1636) with extensive annotations by theorist Giovanni Battista Doni offers a glimpse of how early modern music scholars assessed each other’s work behind closed doors. Although Doni treated Mersenne courteously in more public settings, his private marginalia reveal an overwhelmingly negative assessment of Mersenne and his work. Doni bypassed matters of contemporary musical practice and instead criticized Mersenne’s Latin, his prose style, his manners, and his failure to meet (Doni’s) standards for humanistic scholarship. Doni’s preoccupation with literary style and his discretion in not airing his criticisms publicly illuminate the social and professional worlds where musical knowledge was generated. Doni showed good courtly taste in valuing eloquence as much as (or more than) technical precision, even in music-theoretical writing. Moreover, it would have been impolitic for a courtier such as Doni to reveal his full judgement of Mersenne in the greater Republic of Letters, where complex political and institutional networks intersected.