The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is a primary source of keyboard music from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods in England, i.e., the late Renaissance and very early Baroque. It takes its name from Viscount Fitzwilliam who bequeathed this manuscript collection to Cambridge University in 1816. It is now deposited in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. The virginals or virginal (the plural form does not necessarily denote more than one instrument) is a keyboard instrument of the harpsichord family.
Famous quotes containing the words virginal and/or book:
“Will lovely, lively, virginal today
Shatter for us with a wing’s drunken blow
This hard, forgotten lake haunted in snow
By the sheer ice of flocks not flown away!”
—Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)
“It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. I know of no book that has so few readers. There is none so truly strange, and heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than Greeks and Jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)