John Dowland used the Latin word ‘Lachrimae’ (‘Tears’) to mean three distinct but related things. First, it is the title of his famous pavan, best known as a solo lute piece but also surviving in many contemporary adaptations for other solo instruments or groups of instruments. Second, it is the title appended to Dowland's adaptation of the pavan as a song for two voices and lute, ‘Flow my teares’, published in The Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (1600). Third, the pavan, now entitled ‘Lachrimae Antiquae’, is the first item of the subject of this book, the collection Dowland published in London in the spring of 1604 as Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans, with Divers other Pavans, Galiards, and Almands, Set Forth for the Lute, Viols, or Violons, in Five Parts. In what follows I use ‘Lachrimae’ generally to mean the pavan in its various settings, ‘Antiquae’ specifically to mean its five-part setting as printed in the 1604 collection, and Lachrimae to mean the collection as a whole.

Lachrimae is a typeset folio volume in table layout, with the parts of each piece laid out around a single opening. It contains twenty-one pieces, ten pavans followed by nine galliards and two almands, each with staff-notation parts for five viols or violin-family instruments and a part in tablature for the lute.