The Greek writings of early Christians and Hellenized Jews have three terms in common to refer to and designate song and singing: humnos, ōdē and psalmos and cognate forms of these. In the literature the terms and their cognates appear frequently, both in isolation and variously together. In the Septuagint (see below), for example, in 3 Maccabees, it is to be found that freed Jewish captives included ōdēn (6: 32), psalmois (6: 35) and humnois (7: 16b) in their celebratory singing. In the Greek New Testament, in Ephesians 5: 19 and Colossians 3: 16, the members of the Christian congregations to whom these letters are addressed are urged to sing psalmois, humnois and ōdais pneumatikais (‘psalms’, ‘hymns’ and ‘spiritual songs‘).

The first part of this study of the ‘Gyffard’ partbooks (Lbl Add. MSS 17802–5) examined in detail the handwriting, watermarks and other aspects of their physical make-up, and concluded that the collection could not have been compiled sequentially, as had hitherto been imagined. Each book was seen to fall into seven fascicles, and arguments were advanced for the existence of three layers, labelled - for the sake of convenience - early, late and latest. A sequel was also promised in which the problems of scribe/ownership, date and provenance would be addressed. Before attempting to identify the person responsible for assembling the anthology, however, one would do well to examine the biographies of the composers there represented, for if it could be demonstrated that the work of certain composers associated with a particular locality was restricted largely to a particular layer of the collection, then such geographical and temporal co-ordinates might be of assistance in confirming the identity of the compiler if they were seen to reflect the pattern of his own associations and movements.

Lambeth Palace Library MS 1040 has received less attention than a companion volume, MS 1041 (inscribed ‘The Lady Ann Blount’ on the first leaf). Although there appears to be no musical connection between the two manuscripts, they have been together for a long time. The Library's old catalogues do not allow the volumes to be identified with certainty, but if ‘Two Musick Books’ refers to them they have been in the collection since at least the mid-eighteenth century.

The masque—a long-established if only loosely defined form which had its origins in the Elizabethan revels—underwent striking changes in the course of the seventeenth century. Having reached a sophisticated and inevitably short-lived unity of all its possible dramatic elements during the first quarter of the century, this unity was first undermined by the departure of Ben Jonson in 1631 from the team at Court, and then all but extinguished by the Commonwealth. Although its performance during the Interregnum and its subsequent regeneration both at Court and in private are more vigorous than is usually believed, there was never the money to revive its earlier splendour, nor the political climate in which to do so. There was, of course, a revival of the pre-Commonwealth habit of inserting masques into spoken plays, and towards the end of the century, masques were also interpolated between the acts of spoken plays. Masques were also included in the ‘dramatick’ operas of the 1670s and 1690s, but although the masques here were more extravagant than those in plays, this use did not give the genre theatrical independence.