In 1575 Thomas Tallis and William Byrd published a jointly created music collection of Latin-texted Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur to which they each contributed seventeen numbered works for five to eight parts. Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth with appropriately laudatory and self-aggrandizing fanfare, but also introducing musical works of unprecedented magnificence to the nation's print culture, at the time it must have seemed that they had both created and surmounted the era's highest bar of achievement in their mutually chosen field. Fittingly, its influence, both as a set and when treated as emblematic of the contributions of these two composers overall, has been admirably traced well into the Victorian era; and modern recordings abound. Notably memorialized in modern scholarly editions, Byrd's contribution was edited for the inaugural volume of the revised Byrd Edition just over thirty years ago and, at the present time, an edition of the complete set, along with a number of prior versions, contrafacta, and other adaptations, stands as one of the most recent, and heftiest, volumes of the Early English Church Music series. The present work, while drawing on the prior findings of key musical, textual, biographical, and bibliographical studies, is the first to treat the set as a coherent religious argument directed towards Elizabeth.

Research on the original treatment of the Cantiones volume at the press revealed that the printing of the collection presented novel challenges to those who first produced it. Since it was designed to inaugurate a new form of nationalized, monopoly- controlled, and royally sanctioned music trade, its publishing history has also been evaluated in several studies, where its arguably last remaining stain of commercial failure has now been called into question. As far as its texts are concerned, important recent discoveries have nearly concluded a scholarly quest to determine where Tallis and Byrd got hold of the words they set to music, showing a special reliance on liturgical sources as well as an intriguing reach back to some well-admired texts by and associated with patristic authors.

Biographically, there are now Tallis and Byrd titles in the Master Musician series expertly authored by Kerry McCarthy.