The sacred villancico was a prominent element of devotional and musical life within the Iberian world during the early modern period, but has until recently attracted rather little scholarly attention given the vast surviving repertories, the longevity of the genre and the light which it can shed on ecclesiastical, devotional and wider aspects of the cultures concerned. Tess Knighton and Álvaro Torrente have here assembled a collection of essays which illuminate many aspects of the villancico, and which will certainly do much to stimulate further work. Pepe Rey considers traditions of Christmas celebrations belonging to ‘comic popular culture’, surveying how such thoroughly profane and popular elements had long occurred simultaneously with Christmas services in quire. He shows how the villancico repertory preserved in early polyphonic songbooks reveals traces of such traditions, and posits their assimilation by professional church musicians as important for the emergence of the ensalada. Tess Knighton considers the early development of the devotional villancico and its multi-functional nature, through a case study of Adorámoste, Señor: she focuses on the variety of contexts for the performance of versions of this song, including the elevation at mass, Christmas celebrations, a Passion play and a civic procession. Alberto del Río surveys the incorporation of songs within plays of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, exploring how play texts provide indications regarding performance. Jumping forward chronologically, Álvaro Torrente uses a manuscript Ceremonial from Salamanca Cathedral of c. 1700 to reconstruct the use of villancicos in ceremonial context during the Christmas season, Corpus Christi and the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, making comparisons with traditions in other cathedrals. Andrea Bombi demonstrates how widespread was the cultivation of villancicos and related genres in various institutional and other contexts in Valencia. Pablo-L. Rodríguez argues for the villancico's role at the Spanish court as ‘an integral part of music of state’, while Rui Cabral considers its place in the Portuguese royal chapel. Alain Bègue provides a typology of villancico texts and their themes in the later seventeenth century, including parallels with theatrical characters. Pilar Ramos López outlines characteristics of the eighteenth-century pastorela, an independent pastoral piece performed within a villancico, and reflecting international fashions for the pastoral. Benoît Michel explores similarities between the sacred villancico and the repertory of noëls à grand chœur composed in Toulouse in the eighteenth century. María Gembero Ustárroz's chapter is concerned with the convent of Santa Ana in Ávila, and specifically with the villancicos composed by Francisco de la Huerta y Romanos, maestro de capilla in the 1760s and 1770s. The final three chapters turn to Spanish colonial contexts, and include particularly stimulating contributions by Geoffrey Baker and Bernardo Illari. Baker's argument is that ‘ethnic’ villancicos, common in both the Peninsula and the colonies, are best viewed not merely as comic reflections of racial stereotypes, but more seriously as ‘cultural propaganda’, by means of which the élite hispanic minority in the colonies, as part of their ‘compulsion towards hierarchical differentiation’, promoted an exaggerated view of the ‘otherness’ of negroes in particular. Illari exposes the degree to which – for the cathedral repertory – what we may too readily suppose to be characteristics of Latin-American villancicos, reflecting those territories and representing their cultures, were in fact characteristics of the Peninsula villancico, and that their identification by modern scholarship as distinctively American reveals much about the paucity of work until recently on the Peninsular villancico repertory, and the desire to discover ‘otherness’ in New-World musical culture. He shows where we may indeed be able to identify – by applying more precise and subtly contextualized analysis of style and text – idioms that represent in some fashion creole or mestizo identity.