During the course of a series of articles relating medieval Italian songs to oral and unwritten traditions, Nino Pirrotta comments on a peculiar anonymous two-voice setting from the fourteenth century whose verses seem to have been broken and shattered by the music. Word repetition ‘does not result in a more effective or more understandable rendition of the text; on the contrary, it so fragments and stutters it that any meaning is lost, except as a pretext for the melody which submerges it’. The song in question, Dolce lo mio drudo, is part of a group of unica with Calabrian associations found in the oldest layer of the Reina manuscript. Pirrotta transcribes the song in full and analyses the text and its cognates in detail. It is a ballata with irregularities. I quote in Example 1 just the refrain, together with an indication of the syllable count, in order to facilitate comparison with what follows.

Michael Morrow was an acute reader of medieval literature, and one who knew that every medieval text is a potential source of information for the modern performer and musicologist. A striking example is provided by the 453 chapters of a fifteenth-century anthology now in the library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. This imposing book appears to be one of the largest collections of Marian miracle-stories in the world. Assembled in the year 1409, perhaps in East Anglia, it contains forty-nine chapters about Marian devotions, liturgies, plainsongs and prayers, among them several texts that were set by English composers: Salve regina (there are ten chapters devoted to this chant alone), Alma redemptoris mater, Gaude flore virginali, Sancta Maria non est tibi similis, Salve sancta parens, Gaude Maria virgo, Ave maris Stella and Gaude virgo mater Christi.

John Dunstaple's reputation as the most famous English composer of the Middle Ages has stood almost unchallenged since his death. Two epitaphs attributed to one of his patrons, John Wheathamstead, Abbot of St Albans between 1420–40 and 1452–64, give him equal credit as a mathematician and astronomer (or rather, astrologer). Dunstaple was evidently proficient in the quadrivial arts of music, astronomy and mathematics (arithmetic and geometry), but only his musical activities have been thoroughly explored. At least two books that were in his library may provide hints about the level of his attainment in mathematics and astronomy. One is a fascicle within another volume that carries the often quoted ‘Iste libellus pertinebat Johanni Dunstaple cum duci Bedfordie musico’. The other and more extensive of the two manuscripts, Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 70, contains treatises on astronomy and astrology by standard authors in various hands. Some of these have what must be a scribal signature (often in the form ‘deo gratias quod Dunstaple’), apparently signalling his own hand for those treatises. If this is indeed the case, we have dozens of folios of closely written Dunstaple autograph and several signatures. His copy of the older astrological treatise by Bartholomew of Parma is copiously illustrated by excellent line-drawings of zodiacal signs and constellations. If these drawings are also in his hand (and they are harmonious with the surrounding script), we must add fine draughtsmanship to his known accomplishments.

Writing in 1882, Edmond Vander Straeten was the first to argue that the name ‘Juschino’ among the singers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza's household chapel referred to the composer Josquin des Prez. Assuming a birthdate in the early 1450s, Vander Straeten found it easy to understand why the young Josquin was at the bottom of the salary scale in 1475, the date of the documents. Soon afterwards, Eugenio Motta provided new evidence to support that identification and stretch Josquin's Milanese career to 1479. Since then the years in Milan have had a fixed and central place in all studies of Josquin's life.

The discovery of a musical source is always something of an event. This volume of keyboard music dated 1540 and printed in Lisbon was discovered – appropriately for an Iberian source – in 1992 by Alejandro Iglesias who announced his find at a conference held at the Institution ‘Fernando el Católico’ in Zaragoza in the autumn of that year. It was heralded in the Castilian rhetorical style as the ‘discovery of the century’, and it provided a moment of high drama, especially when it became clear from Iglesias's brief description of the source that it included works by Franco-Netherlandish composers such as Josquin, Ockeghem, Compère, Agricola, Caron and Obrecht. The volume is indeed of considerable interest, not only because it offers keyboard intabulations of previously unknown works by both Franco-Netherlandish and Spanish composers, but also because it is the earliest surviving source of keyboard music from the Iberian peninsula and a rare example of printed instrumental music from the first half of the sixteenth century. Manuel Carlos de Brito, making an assessment of Renaissance Portuguese music in 1989, was perfectly justified in thinking that new music sources were unlikely to appear, and that lack of musical texts to confirm or refute the historical context suggested by documents would limit the history of Portuguese music to the realms of speculation. This discovery, surprising though it is, rescues something from that shadowy kingdom.