Anne Boleyn's Songbook

The manuscript known as the Anne Boleyn Songbook tantalizingly has Anne’s name (a signature?) and her father’s motto penned on one of the pages. It would appear, from its contents, to be almost all church music, and so to be sung by a choir made up of men and boys, but its layout and the attractive decorations of initial letters show it is clearly not for a workaday chapel choir. The songbook’s association with Anne and the French princess Marguerite of Alençon and indeed the book’s contents seem to suggest it was tailored for the spiritual education of a young lady, perhaps given by Marguerite to Anne when she was engaged as the princess’s lady in waiting, a common placement for courtly training for a well placed young woman at the time. We investigate the history of the manuscript, its contents and its theological context in a series of interviews with experts, and hear music from the manuscript and lute dances from a contemporary source.