That the Low Countries were an important site of musical practice in the early modern period is well known, and the Leiden choirbooks are a crucial legacy of that practice, presenting at least some of the working repertory of an institution that formed part of the rich tapestry of liturgical life in a major non-collegiate church.Footnote ¹ There is plenty of evidence – surveyed in Eric Jas's Piety and Polyphony in Sixteenth-Century Holland (p. 85 and elsewhere) – that similar books existed prior to the Reformation in other parish churches in the region. But the survival of those at Leiden is exceptional, and thereby hangs a tale. Following the takeover of St Peter's by Protestants in 1572, the books became the property of the city authorities, whose treasurer prepared an inventory of them in 1578. After a period during which they were loaned to a group of singers, the books were placed in 1597 in a locked chest in the city hall, where they remained until the nineteenth century.

The meaningful interpretation of a group of sources such as this requires, of course, much more than musicological expertise, and Jas's remarkable achievement is to have navigated his way through a huge array of ‘archival, codicological and scribal clues’ (p. 135) to arrive at a complex yet convincing account of the manuscripts' origins, functions and significance, as well as an analysis of their contents. His volume in the Boydell Press's series Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music has behind it his Ph.D. dissertation of 1997Footnote ² and a series of six two-CD recordings by the Egidius Kwartet of selected items from the choirbooks, for which Jas provided valuable commentary,Footnote ³ but this new monograph represents an important advance on his previous work and makes it available for the first time in English.

Eight choirbooks were present when the inventory was prepared in 1578. Two have been lost since then: one consisting (according to the inventory) of a book of Masses of 329 folios from 1550, the other a book in a soft cover containing four Masses and a Passion setting. The remaining six date, Jas shows, from between c.1545 and c.1565 (with some later additions from 1565 to 1567), and contain a total of 328 different compositions. The music itself forms the subject of Jas's Chapter 4, and is inventoried in his Appendix 2. The core repertory – reflecting the time and place at which it was copied, as well as the liturgical needs of the institution – highlights the works of Clemens non Papa and Crecquillon, and includes other composers who worked in northern France and the southern Netherlands (Appenzeller, Canis, Gombert, Hellinck, Hollander, Lupi, Manchicourt, Mouton, Richafort, etc.), including some whose reputation was purely regional: Eustacius Barbion, Joachimus de Monte, Claudin Patoulet, Michiel Smeekers and Franciscus Ysenbaert among them. The later additions consist of sixty-two pieces copied (and probably all composed) by Johannes Flamingus, zangmeester at St Peter's itself. The grouping of the compositions within the manuscripts seems in general to have been dictated more by genre (Mass, motet, hymn, etc.) and by number of voices than by their relationship to the liturgical year.

Jas begins his study, however, with the Piety of his title rather than the Polyphony, and presents in Chapter 1 the devotional background to the creation of these manuscripts in the context of the zeven-getijdencolleges (‘colleges of the seven canonical hours’ – seven, rather than eight, because Matins and Lauds formed a single service) founded at many non-collegiate churches in the region. Emulating older traditions of, on the one hand, privately (and usually handsomely) endowed altars at which Masses were celebrated for the salvation of the provider's soul and, on the other, more modest types of memoriediensten (memorial services), the zeven-getijdencolleges aimed to fill a gap in the activities of non-collegiate churches by funding the performance of the liturgical hours. Other services were also sometimes involved, including Mass and Lof (votive) services (the latter defined by Jas (p. 184) as ‘free services … bound more by convention than by rules’), partly for the spiritual benefit of those (dead or alive) who had contributed towards the college's funds. The college at St Peter's, Leiden (founded by April 1440) seems to have been the earliest in the northern Low Countries, followed relatively quickly by others at Rotterdam, Delft, Gouda and Alkmaar, and elsewhere as late as 1578. Foundation letters from St John's, Gouda, and the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft supply what were probably typical terms and conditions. The colleges were under the jurisdiction of the city, which appointed a number of procurators to administer the income and pay the priests and singers involved. Schoolmasters and their pupils were to sing at First and Second Vespers, Matins and Mass on holy days in place of the singers of the college. Polyphony seems to have been regularly sung, especially at Vespers, Mass and Lof services, as an alternative to chant. The Reformation inevitably marked the demise of the zeven-getijdencolleges, whose income and assets were diverted to other uses.

Chapter 2 focuses more specifically on the getijdencollege at St Peter's, exploring relevant archival sources (of which the most significant are transcribed and translated in Appendix 1). By the early sixteenth century, Leiden was the largest city in the county of Holland, and St Peter's was the largest and oldest of its three parish churches. More than thirty fraternities were active at the church, and in addition to the high altar, some forty or so other side altars or chapels had been endowed. The zeven-getijdencollege benefited substantially in its early years from the patronage of one Boudijn van Zwieten, a ‘sprig of nobility’ (p. 51) and counsellor to Philip the Good. Further generous benefactions from parishioners followed between 1460 and 1520, and the list of endowed daily, weekly and annual services documented in the accounts of the zeven-getijdencollege (and in Jas's Tables 2 and 3 on pp. 63–4) presents a dizzying display of activity.

The core of this book is arguably to be found in the third chapter, which (together with supporting material in Appendices 2 and 3) provides a codicological study of the choirbooks. Crucial to the story is the professional music scribe Anthonius de Blauwe, who also ran a small private school in Leiden, and is known to have supplied music books to churches in Amsterdam, Gouda, Delft, Dordrecht and even England, as well as to Leiden. All the Leiden manuscripts are of paper, rather than parchment, and MSS 1438–1441 are large-format books in which each folio is a whole sheet of paper, and pairs of sheets are pasted together to form bifolios. The colophons of MSS 1438–1440 describe them as the work of De Blauwe and date them to 1549 (MS 1438) and 1559 (MSS 1439 and 1440). Accounts of the getijdenmeesters at St Peter's record that De Blauwe was paid for two such books in 1550, of which MS 1438 is one, while the other must have been the lost Mass book recorded in the 1578 inventory. All three of these manuscripts (1438–1440) were clearly commissioned from De Blauwe by the getijdenmeesters of St Peter's. (The accounts also record payment to De Blauwe for two further manuscripts in 1551 – both of which must have been lost or disposed of even before the inventory of 1578 was prepared.) MS 1441 is less carefully finished in a number of respects, but Jas nevertheless manages to show that it is also mostly the work of De Blauwe, apparent differences being accounted for by the fact that this manuscript was produced more economically and more hastily; he argues that it was copied between c.1549 and 1560, and most probably in the early 1550s. Additions were made some time later by an unidentified scribe and in 1565 by Flamingus.

MSS 1442 and 1443 present a different appearance again, not least owing to the fact that they are in folio format – half the size of MSS 1438–1441. In MS 1443 Jas distinguishes between three layers: the first contains fourteen masses copied by two scribes in collaboration; the second three further masses copied entirely by one of those scribes; and the third additions by Flamingus. Cautiously, and with much (appropriate) circumspection, Jas convinces us that the scribe who copied the second layer and collaborated on the first was in fact none other than De Blauwe again. MS 1442 is a more heterogeneous compilation of fascicle manuscripts – sections that may potentially be of separate provenance but were subsequently bound together, perhaps primarily for the purpose of safekeeping. Jas again finds De Blauwe's hand among the eight that contributed to this manuscript. Here, though, he discovers another variant of the scribe's hand, characterised by slightly larger noteheads and shorter stems. He plausibly argues that this manuscript functioned as a repository of compositions on which De Blauwe might call when he needed music to copy into a more formal source, and even shows that he apparently did so when preparing MSS 1438–1440.

These six manuscripts from Leiden, then, provide a fascinating glimpse not only into the repertory of a pre-Reformation institution, but also into the working methods of a mid-sixteenth-century music scribe, ranging as they do from top-quality commissioned items for a well-endowed getijdencollege (MSS 1438–1440) through a less formal but still entirely serviceable equivalent (MS 1441) to a pair of smaller-format repertorial repositories that may not necessarily have been intended for use at church services at all (MSS 1442 and 1443). The scribe's music hand varied to suit different contexts and levels of formality: the size and spacing of his diamond-shaped noteheads could be adjusted, or abandoned altogether in favour of more quickly executed teardrop shapes, yet enough remains constant in De Blauwe's work to convince us that his work pervades these sources. De Blauwe must also have been responsible for the calligraphic initials in MSS 1438–1440. Jas does not suggest this, but one of the weapons in De Blauwe's scribal armoury when executing the more elaborate initials (see the cover of Jas's book, and his Plate 16 on p. 103) may have been a broad-nibbed pen with a nick excised towards the right edge of the nib, producing at a single stroke a broad line on the left and a parallel narrow line on the right.

We must be grateful to Dr Jas for presenting his work in such elegant English, and his publisher has served him reasonably well. It is regrettable that a decision was taken to reproduce the watermarks (in Appendix 3) smaller than their actual size, since this makes potential comparison with other examples much more difficult (and this is all the more frustrating when the list of concordant sources – important as it is – is presented on pp. 349–93 in a much larger typesize and a more extravagant layout than necessary). The proofreader might perhaps have spotted twenty or so occurrences of ‘epynomous’ (sic) in the manuscript inventories, not to mention some of the stranger end-of-line hyphenations (‘notehe-ads’, pp. 111, 116; ‘semim-inims’, p. 131). But, of course, none of this detracts from the value of Jas's important and thorough research and his impressive presentation of it in this book.