The flowering of large-scale polyphony under Mary Tudor remains an underappreciated accomplishment in English music. Self-proclaimed as Truth, the daughter of Time, the queen presided over a new, Counter-Reformation dispensation of Catholic order, one embodied nowhere more plainly than the sound-world of the Chapel Royal. Here Thomas Tallis and John Sheppard responded to the reign's iconographic, pastoral, and political priorities with an extravagant cycle of Matins responsories and office hymns built around their proper chant melodies. In each of these works, the equal-note cantus firmus contrasts markedly with the other voices' dense imitative polyphony and stands as a sign of a renewed liturgical orthopraxis. As an aural emblem of confessional and civil order, these Gregorian melodies determine each work's length, harmonic shape, and motivic content. As a visual emblem, the black 'plainsong' notation (cleansed from Tallis's works in the 1575 Cantiones) differs dramatically from the white 'pricksong' notation in the other partbooks and thus represents an orthodox state of church and commonwealth.


Similarly, in Tallis's mass Puer natus est, we can see how polyphonic temporal structures contributed to the measuring of traditional ritual time in the Marian Chapel. Recent attempts to establish a narrative for the mass's first performance have remained speculative. However, its appearance at Christmas 1553--likely because its scoring matches the surfeit of men's voices and lack of high trebles early in Mary's reign--would place it in company with Nicholas Udall's play Respublica, in which the queen as Nemesis restores right order after mischief and misrule. Moreover, the parallel of Nemesis with the Virgin Mary, who brings forth the incarnation as a new dispensation harmonizing mercy and justice, allows Tallis and Udall to emphasize a virgin queen giving birth to a new ceremonial regime, just as Tallis's cantus firmus treatment depicts rebirth. And as widely seen in contemporary visual and literary artefacts, the figure Time reveals his daughter Truth from her previously hidden state (as did Mary's near-miraculous accession) just as Tallis would have revealed his cantus firmus treatment to his most qualified audience, the new queen herself.

The term "trope" usually summons associations with Gregorian chant and the Middle Ages, particularly since the practice of adding text and occasionally melodies to existing Catholic liturgical music declined by the later sixteenth century. Although some beloved tropes such as the Marian _Spiritus et alme_ text found in Gloria IX prevailed in post-Tridentine Catholicism, the tradition survived to a greater extent within a newer branch of Christianity: the Lutheran church. In this paper, I demonstrate how Lutherans preserved and expanded the medieval practice of tropes within the polyphonic Mass Ordinary genre, thereby building upon an earlier liturgical music tradition that their early modern Catholic counterparts eschewed. 
Extant sources of polyphonic masses reveal that Lutherans engaged with troped settings of the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. In some cases, there is a clear connection to the medieval Catholic past: polyphonic Kyrie settings containing centuries-old trope texts such as _Fons bonitatis_ and _Magne Deus_ survive in dozens of Lutheran manuscripts from across Central Europe, and the popularity of the _Spritus et alme_ trope extended to Lutherans as well, although they sometimes omitted or altered lines of this trope that conflicted with their beliefs about the Virgin Mary. Lutherans also created their own versions of troped Mass Ordinaries; for instance, German translations of Kyrie tropes are prevalent in Lutheran hymnals. In another case, Lutheran composer Johannes Galliculus inserted a section from the German Leise _Christ ist erstanden_ into a Latin Agnus Dei setting, resulting in a poignant and bilingual Easter piece that was published by Georg Rhau in Wittenberg. In addition to engaging with more extensive tropes, Lutherans consistently included brief textual insertions-sometimes just one word-into the lengthy Gloria and Credo movements to enhance or reinforce the theology expressed in the original text. The Lutherans' treatment of tropes and other textual alterations in Mass Ordinary settings aligns with recent Reformation scholarship that recognizes how Lutherans remained relatively close to Catholicism in terms of theology and liturgy while simultaneously creating a distinct confessional identity. 

The Spanish royal court of Philip II has been characterized as a bastion of conservatism by historians since the earliest chronicles following the death of the King. The music produced in and for the royal chapel during his reign has likewise been characterized as conservative (insofar as it upholds the style of the "Franco-Flemish school" of polyphony). Recent scholarship by Michael Noone, Begoña Lolo, Louise Stein, and others has shaken the deeply rooted image of Philip II as a meddling and influential musical patron, talented in music himself and responsible for cultivating an "old-fashioned" musical taste. These scholars have also identified early twentieth-century nationalist tendencies in scholarship as a main source of such mischaracterizations. In light of these correctives, how can we rethink the musical repertories produced within Philip II's royal chapel? This paper approaches the task with a two-pronged reassessment. First, by further investigating the historiographic reasons for this characterization with a particular focus on nineteenth-century Anglosphere representations of the Spanish Empire, we find the image of a conservative, even regressive Spanish royal court cultivated long before the twentieth century; and second, by reassessing the music composed by the five Northern-born chapel masters who served the royal chapel throughout Philip II's reign, we see that these composers not only led professional musical lives of international stature, but also that their music both reflected and influenced contemporary stylistic developments.