Near the end of the third decade of the sixteenth century, a five-volume set of madrigal and motet partbooks was assembled in Florence and sent as a gift or "musical embassy" to the English court of Henry VIII. The manuscript set minus the missing altus part has been owned since 1935 by the Newberry Library in Chicago; but until H. Colin Slim's exhaustive efforts, no thorough study of the history or contents of the partbooks had been undertaken. At first encounter, these partbooks yield no clues concerning their provenance, their composers' names, or the reasons for their dispatch to...
Near the end of the third decade of the sixteenth century, a five-volume set of madrigal and motet partbooks was assembled in Florence and sent as a g...
