In 1531, at the end of his career as a world-class music scribe and supplier of music manuscripts, Petrus Alamire travelled to ’s-Hertogenbosch to deliver three large choirbooks containing polyphonic music to the Brotherhood of Our Illustrious Lady. Two of these had been commissioned the previous year, with the repertoire chosen by the brotherhood’s singers; the third was a finished manuscript that was offered to the brotherhood. With their twenty-three masses and a number of motets, these choirbooks are today still kept in the brotherhood’s house in the centre of ’s-Hertogenbosch.

A study devoted to these “Bossche Choirbooks” (Archive of the Brotherhood of our Illustrious Lady, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Mss. 153, 154, and 155) by Eric Jas, assistant professor in musicology at the University of Utrecht, is now available in the Alamire Foundation series Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile.

The study is now available in our webshop.