Like many scholars who are not directly involved with Spanish music, I have dealt with the Segovia manuscript as a concordant source on several occasions. And like everyone else, I have wondered about the presence of Dutch texts in a Spanish source and the sprinkling of wrong attributions in the French and Italian pieces. Years ago, when I studied Lupus Hellinck's Missa Intemerata Virgo, based on the third and fourth partes of Josquin's motet cycle Vultum tuum deprecabuntur, I noticed that the Segovia manuscript had the much more plausible textual reading ‘O intemerata Virgo’, and this made me wonder whether the Segovia recension was closer to the composer's original than Petrucci's Intemerata Virgo. When I investigated Obrecht's use of a distinctive mensuration sign for sesquialtera, I was pleased to see that the Segovia manuscript not only transmitted the Dutch texts of his songs but also followed Obrecht's propensity to use this sign. The Flemish hypothesis for a good part of this repertory is a very attractive one, and Rob Wegman's contribution to this volume (Ch. 7) is a welcome confirmation of it.

The present study is more in the nature of random notes on Segovia's notation and texts. Having now looked through every page of the manuscript, my impression is that Segovia was copied by a Flemish cleric who had been in Spain for some time, and that it was intended as a private collection of music, not primarily for performance, and least of all for presentation: there seems to be no reason to connect it with a court unless the owner happened to be a singer at a court. I see only one music hand except for the last piece (Ave rex noster, by Alonso de Mondejar) and the fragment at the end (the superius of an anonymous Ne recorderis ascribed to Francisco de la Torre in three other sources); the slight change of text hand in the Spanish section may represent the main scribe's ‘Spanish’ hand rather than a different scribe.