This book aims to enrich our understanding of the French secular music of Orlando di Lasso, using those songs as a means of understanding a particular community of Renaissance readers and the music books they created. Lasso's secular songs figured quite prominently in a number of collections of devotional songs issued by Protestant printers in the late sixteenth century. Lasso's profane lyrics were changed to convey spiritual meanings. This study uses the example of such reworkings as a means of discovering how such a repertory was heard and understood by a particular community of listeners, and in so doing, it explores the history of these chansons in print, and the history of the spiritual attitudes that shaped their reception among the Huguenots.

Richard Freedman is Associate Professor of Music, Haverford College