Often the Italian Madrigal is associated with print and the public marketplace. Yet it originated in handwritten anthologies restrictively circulated by Florentine patricians. In recent years, print scholarship broadened Renaissance musical studies from composer and institutional analyses to those focusing on material form, usage, and meaning. Manuscript studies of the Italian Madrigal, however, are yet to receive similar methodological expansions. This dissertation explores the social world of four manuscript anthologies of madrigals crafted in 1530s Florence. I argue that they participated in a culture whose practices aligned with and projected the elite identities of their owners, remaining in use despite the advent of printed collections intended for the broad consumption and general tastes that dominated the genre’s dissemination from the 1540s onward. Through the four manuscript anthologies, I present a needed cultural history of manuscript usage and meaning in an understudied era of the genre, examining processes of self-fashioning, communal and diplomatic circulation, notational difference, and political identity. I uncover this information through paleographic, primary-source analysis of musical and epistolary documents as well as historical survey. This dissertation reveals, firstly, patrician use of manuscripts as markers of hierarchical distinction in Florentine society. Second, it concludes that manuscript madrigals should be understood alongside other Florentine manuscript practices of epistolary exchange and personal record keeping, as documents intended to accumulate new works and preserve family history and legacy. Third, this dissertation provides a comparative analysis of the music-notational and paleographic differences between contemporaneous print and manuscript versions of Florentine madrigals in the 1530s. This dissertation then concludes with an analysis of the political decorations within one of the manuscript partbook sets that offers insight into Florence’s governmental transition from a longstanding republic to Medici rule in 1530. Altogether, my project reveals particular ways in which the manuscript madrigal projected the individual and communal identity of patrician Florentines to garner distinction among other social classes, to solidify diplomatic bonds and preserve family history, to encode performance through subtle notation, and to engage with cataclysmic governmental shifts as reflected through the political views of individuals and the scribal hand.