Giovanni Battista Doni

Giovanni Battista Doni (c. 1593 – 1647) was an Italian musicologist and humanist who made an extensive study of ancient music. He is known, among other works, for having renamed the note "Ut" to "Do" (in the "Do Re Mi ..." solfège scale).

In his day, he was a well-known lawyer, classical scholar, critic and musical theorist, and from 1640 to 1647 he occupied the Chair of Eloquence at the University of Florence and was a prominent member of the city's Accademia della Crusca, one of the early semi-scientific/academic societies that flourished in Italy at the time. They had published the first Italian-language dictionary in 1612.

Born in Florence, he studied Greek, rhetoric, poetry and philosophy at the Universities of Florence and Bologna and both mathematics and jurisprudence at the University of Rome. Later he studied jurisprudence at Bourges in France and it is claimed that he worked for some time with the famous legal scholar Jacques Cujas who was a prominent member of the legal humanists or mos gallicus school (a French approach to historical law studies). However, since Cujas died a few years before Giovanni Doni's birth, this seems to be unlikely; however he probably did study under the legal humanists as the University of Bourges. (See also Cujas Library)

This approach to legal studies was admired during the early French revolutionary period because it emphasised the importance of early Roman law, rather than the pretensions of French kings.

Doni received the degree of doctor from the University of Pisa and was chosen to accompany Neri Corsini (1614-1678) to Paris in 1621 where he became acquainted with Marin Mersenne and other literary persons. The Florentine Corsini family became important contacts in Doni's life: Neri Corsini became a cardinal in 1664 (Don't confuse with Neri Maria Corsini who became Cardinal in 1730, the year that Lorenzo Corsini became Pope Clement XII.) This was a period where the top religious orders were part of a culture of nepotism, and Doni attached himself to these religious dynasties.

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