Robert Shay and Robert Thompson's Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Musical Sources, is perhaps one of the more illuminating and important bibliographical studies of recent years. Purcell's 1995 tri-centenary, allied to recent discoveries of yet more previously unknown manuscripts, has led to plethora investigations and re-evaluations of his autograph scores. Such investigations are important for several reasons; primarily, since little is known of Purcell's life, any investigation of evidence closely associated with his career is of utmost value, and such research can shed new light on both compositional processes and chronology, as well as help to reassess the place of existing autographs in his musical development.

Although the intention of Shay and Thompson's book is to provide a comprehensive account of Purcell's principal musical sources, the introductory chapter presents a survey of Purcell's career from the viewpoint of the principal manuscripts cited in the book, and is followed with detailed codicological information. Of this, little of this is new, since much of it occurs elsewhere, but that these points are collated into a single source makes the prefatory chapter a useful and illuminating resource.

The main body of the book details the more important manuscript sources, clearly organised into three main sections that focus on individual scorebooks, (namely Fitzwilliam Museum, Mus. MS. 88, British Library, Add. MS. 30930 and British Library, RM 20.h.8), performing materials of sacred music from various London sources and music for the theatre, and the large corpus of miscellaneous vocal, keyboard and instrumental music. For each, the commentary is defined clearly, and forensically examines codicology, content and handwriting: individual manuscripts are discussed in detailed prose, backed up with numerous tables that provide other pertinent information such as content, folio size and rastrological features.

The Fitzwilliam Museum's Mus. 88 is one manuscript that requires such extensive treatment. Containing what appears to be a number of hands, the opening 26 folios were thought to contain the earliest examples of Purcell's calligraphy, copied at Westminster Abbey. However, the formation of musical and textual characters excludes Purcell, as reported in Katherine Roher in 1980 thesis, "The Energy of English Words": a Linguistic Approach to Henry Purcell's Method of Setting Texts (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1980, 112). She suggests instead John Blow as a more plausible candidate, a fact borne out by Shay and Thompson's careful observations of concordant material. Of the 39 Purcell entries, Shay and Thompson have constructed a chronology that is argued convincingly, thus leaving room to doubt, for example, the previously speculative date of 1680 for the anthem Hear my prayer, O Lord, instead suggesting 1685 as a more likely possibility.

The final chapter, which deals with aspects of vocal, keyboard and instrumental music, includes the recently discovered keyboard autograph, British Library MS Mus.1, which contains a much-debated C major prelude. It has three concordances, one in British Library Add. MS 39569 of 1702 (Babell MS, p. 38), and two undated non-mesuré versions in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Rés. Vmd. MS 18 (La Pierre MS, fos. 3r and 9-10r, hereafter referred to as P1 and P2). Shay and Thompson rightly suggest that these cast doubt on the likelihood of Purcell's authorship (277, fn. 24), but this needs to established beyond doubt; finding what is, to all intents and purposes, a French unmeasured prelude in a book that was copied evidently for pedagogical reasons, is significant for reasons that will become clear.

Both French sources are different: P1 has much in common with the version in the Purcell manuscript, but P2 is sufficiently different from P1 to suggest that both came from separate sources. Although Babell, also written in non-mesuré notation, is closely allied to P1 (and thus the Purcell manuscript in terms of some variant readings), the overall shape of Purcell is so discrete as to suggest that he was expanding on an already extant composition. It is likely that the Babell version was copied from P1, or a very similar source. Given the other contents of the Babell manuscript, we can be certain that it was copied in England and since it is highly unusual for English manuscripts to be circulated on the Continent at this time, it is more feasible that both Purcell and Babell were copied from an imported French source.

The implications of this are evident: that Purcell is probably not the author of the C major prelude casts doubt on the authenticity of the A minor prelude (MS Mus.1 no. 14), which was published by Purcell's widow in 1696 (A Choice Collection of Lessons…). Written in a similarly free style, it remains remarkably different from Purcell's other preludes which, when displaying free figuration tend more towards a style brisé homophony.

Overall, this relatively detailed treatment of the chosen manuscripts is highly successful. That manuscripts other than autograph sources are referred to is also significant since the relationships between sources, copyists and various versions demonstrates yet another facet of this fascinating bibliographical survey. On the whole, the perception of interesting source relationships, placed in a cultural and historical light, makes Purcell Manuscripts an important and valuable resource not only for scholars of late seventeenth-century English music, but anyone interested in bibliographical research.

John Woodford