Books of medieval polyphony were relatively short-lived by comparison with other forms of book. Once their contents had become outdated, they were often broken up and used as scrap parchment. The debris from a few of these books survives in bindings and as wrappers for documents. The evidence for the existence of others must be sought in medieval administrative records: wills drawn up by individuals, documents emanating from royal and noble households and, above all, the financial and administrative acta of the greater churches. From these materials it is possible to hint at the scale of past losses and to recover, from titles quoted in full or in part, information about small sections of vanished repertories. It is possible also to trace patterns in the ownership and dissemination of written polyphony and to identify something of the structure and dynamics of its production.

Much has been written about the Italian madrigal and its effect upon the musical life of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. That the Italian vogue was indeed strong can be observed most dramatically in English printed and manuscript sources of the period; yet the obvious and dazzling effect this foreign idiom had upon many aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean music is balanced by the equally important and more deeply-rooted connection that England enjoyed with her nearer Continental neighbours, France and the Low Countries. The following index documents this musical connection by presenting a list of the Franco-Netherlandish chansons that appeared in English manuscript sources dating from c. 1530 to c. 1640.

The treatise entitled The Airt of Musick Collecit out of all Ancient Doctoris of Musick, British Library Additional MS 4911, known as 'Scottish Anonymous’, has long been of interest to scholars of faburden and related subjects. The importance of its evidence has been difficult to assess, however, since key questions remain unanswered, such as of what establishment this manuscript represents the musical practices and over what time-period. The matter is further clouded by the circulation of obviously erroneous dates, the background to which is discussed by Judson Maynard in his dissertation on this manuscript.

When Thomas Tallis died in 1585 he left his wife Joan his heir. Joan Tallis's will (12 June 1587) bequeathed ‘to Anthony Roper esquier one guilte bowl with the cover thereunto belonging in respect of his good favours showed to my late husband and me'—her first bequest, and the only one of hers or Thomas's to a person of rank. Who was Anthony Roper, what was the connection, and can it throw any light on the composer? The point does not seem to have been picked up hitherto in Tallis literature.

Musical settings of lyrics from Latin plays written by Englishmen during the Caroline period are extremely rare. Only two such songs survive: ‘Dulcis somne’ from William Johnson's university play Valetudinarium, and ‘Astrorum iubar’ from Joseph Simons's school play Zeno sive Ambitio Infelix. Unusually, both songs are known only from copies bound into the play-texts themselves rather than from exclusively musical sources. This article sets out to evaluate both the songs themselves and their dramatic functions.

Although Johann Christian Bach is best known today as a composer of operas and symphonies, his earliest large-scale works were keyboard concertos. In fact, the only incontestably authentic works that date from before his move to Italy in 1754 are the five concertos in autograph score that are now bound together as Bach Mus. MS P 390 in the Staaatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin (D-brd-B). Since these manuscripts were included in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's estate list at his death in 1788, it is assumed that the works were composed before Christian left for Italy, and most probably after he came to live in Berlin with his older half-brother following their father's death in 1750. These five works have recently appeared, in an edition by Richard Maunder, in the Complete Works of Christian Bach now being published by the Garland Press. Those with some knowledge of the youngest Bach's keyboard concertos may be somewhat surprised to find, however, that the volume of the earliest concertos contains not only the five works that make up the autograph manuscript P 390 but a sixth concerto as well. This work, in f minor, has a relatively extensive and confused manuscript tradition, and has not always been accepted as authentic. Since the editor offers only a brief statement supporting its inclusion in the critical edition, further comment is perhaps in order.

This list of theses supplements the lists previously published in Research Chronicle 15 (1979, 38–116), 16 (1980, 110–34), 17 (1981, 117–33), 18 (1982, 85–118) and 20 (1986–7, 59–89). It is based on information collected in the summer of 1987. For some account of the general principles on which the list is compiled, readers should refer to Research Chronicle 15 (1979, 38–9).

With the proliferation of comprehensive commercial microfilming of major music collections, careful consideration needs to be given to the production of hard-cover books of facsimiles that traverse the same ground. Of course, a book is still a convenient way of storing and handling certain kinds of material. In compensation for its bulk it is tangible, accessible and portable, not to mention the fact that it can be annotated. And certain kinds of facsimile volume are obviously still going to be desirable: those reproducing single sources of great importance; those containing the contents of smaller libraries and obscure or less accessible collections; and those that comprise within a single volume an important cross-section of some scattered repertory or corpus of sources. In the light of those considerations, the publication of these two volumes of facsimiles of late-medieval English polyphony is most welcome. They make widely available at reasonable quality and price a vast amount of buried treasure found up to now only in the file drawers of a few specialists. The hoard consists of a large proportion of the surviving English polyphony from the era between the Worcester fragments and the Old Hall manuscript. This is an important and little-known repertory, spanning the entire fourteenth century but dispersed among numerous fragmentary sources. Both volumes will be necessary and welcome additions to public collections as well as to the private libraries of specialists in medieval music. They are also an essential complement to the four-volume edition of this same repertory recently published by Editions de L'Oiseau Lyre in the series Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, and they will surely prove invaluable for the teaching of surveys and seminars on early English polyphony.