Eric Jas, Piety and Polyphony in Sixteenth-Century Holland: The Choirbooks of St Peter's Church, Leiden, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music 18. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018. xvi + 416 pp. £60. ISBN 978 1 78327 326 3.

Abstract

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. 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. Themeaningful 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 themanuscripts’ 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 1997 and a series of six two-CD recordings by the Egidius Kwartet of selected items from the choirbooks, for which Jas provided valuable commentary, but this new monograph represents an important advance on his previous work and makes it available for the first time in English. Eight choirbookswere present when the inventorywas 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. Themusic 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