Fragmentary Motets in Coimbra Sources from the 1570s

The majority of the motets known to have been composed in the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra around the dates of acceptance of the Breviary and Missal of Pius V survive in incomplete sets of part-books. The extant volumes from these sets (P-Cug MM 70 and MM 231, 231 A, and 231 B, olim MM 230, 231, and 161, respectively) share a significant number of pieces— twenty out of a total of 114, of which eighty-five are motets. Owen Rees studied the materiality of these manuscripts and spotted most of the concordances between the extant part-books, drawing attention to the specificities of many of their texts and the considerable homogeneity of style of their settings, suggesting the authorship of Francisco de Santa Maria for most of them. This paper aims at furthering and, to some extent, give additional support to Rees’s analysis by showing the mutual connections of the part-books and their links with other manuscripts from Santa Cruz, particularly choirbook P-Cug MM 3, which proved to be almost entirely an autograph of Francisco de Santa Maria from around 1575. The hypothesis that P-Cug MM 70 and the second layer of the MM 231 set are likewise autographs of this composer is also explored.