A Choirbook for the Seven Sorrows. Royal Library of Belgium Ms. 215-216: Facsimile

Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium Ms. 215-16 is a choirbook belonging to the Alamire corpus, a group of richly illuminated manuscripts preserving sixteenth-century sacred and secular music from the Low Countries. This manuscript is unique among the collection because all of its music celebrates a central theme: the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin. Devotion to the Virgin’s Sorrows was immensely popular in the early sixteenth century among all levels of society – from labourer to nobility. As an artifact of this widespread movement, this exceptional choirbook not only commemorates the devotion through both polyphony and plainchant but also reveals its importance for the Burgundian- Habsburg court.

The present facsimile with commentary is the second volume of the Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile, under the general editorship of David J. Burn and Bart Demuyt. The series presents high-quality reproductions of primary music sources of outstanding aesthetic, historical, and cultural value. Each facsimile is in full colour, at original size, and accompanied by an extended commentary, written by a leading expert. Emily Thelen is a musicologist specialising in music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the Low Countries.