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The vernacular oratorio

for instance, alludes several times in his Declaración de instrumentos musicales (Osuna, 1555) to the technical difficulty of Franco-Flemish polyphony. The third chapter focuses on individual pieces of music, in order to determine as far as possible the exemplars for some of the more important manuscripts. Rather surprisingly at first, Urchueguía concentrates on works from the earlier end of her timeframe. The decision is justified (p.159) on the grounds that later copyists progressively lost interest in international repertory other than the music of Palestrina, whereas the author can show the dependence of the earlier Toledo sources on editions by Petrucci and his contemporaries, as well as constructing stemmas for several of the northern Masses on which she concentrates. The chapter therefore deals largely with famous works by 15th-century northerners such as Busnoys, Ockeghem, Isaac, Obrecht, and of course Josquin, rather than those of local or less celebrated figures. Only in the last 20 pages do we reach the music of a Spanish composer, Juan de Anchieta. Clearly the dissemination of the international repertory is more varied than that of later imports or domestic works, and the material presented here is of great interest. One result of this approach, however, is that the book does not entirely bridge the divide between national schools of study that I mentioned earlier. No author has addressed the history of sacred music in Spain and Portugal with detailed reference to both native and foreign elements since Robert Stevenson in the early 1960s, and it is much to be desired that this gap be filled. Such an undertaking, however, would require a far larger volume than a doctoral project such as the present one; and by including so many sources, Urchueguía prepares the ground for future research to proceed in a more inclusive manner. As already noted, a full understanding of the argument developed in this study is heavily dependent on the forthcoming catalogue: in using this volume on its own, I have often wished that it included a list of contents for the manuscripts discussed in detail, particularly given the limited accessibility of some previous work on Iberian sources (and, in certain cases, its inaccuracy). Even the sigla used will be fully explained only in the accompanying RISM volume: this is a significant handicap with regard to those sources not included in the Census-catalogue of manuscript sources of polyphonic music, 1400–1550. This book, then, is immediately recommended to those who either have some knowledge already of the manuscripts in question or have access to a research library to fill in the gaps. Once the RISM catalogue is available, the two together will undoubtedly prove of immense value both to professional scholars and to those with a more general interest in exploring the immense and still little-cultivated field of Iberian polyphony.