The important contribution of Heinrich Isaac (ca. 1455–1517) to the genre of the proper of the mass has long been recognised. His work in this genre, collected in the monumental posthumously published Choralis Constantinus, was considered a landmark even in the sixteenth century. Yet Isaac’s magnum opus was by no means isolated. The mass proper played a much greater and more significant musical and symbolic role in the landscape of later-medieval and Renaissance music-making than is currently acknowledged. The present collection of fifteen essays offers new insights into both Isaac's mass propers themselves, which are still shrouded by many enigmas, and their context within broader later-fifteenth and sixteenth-century mass proper traditions. The circumstances under which Isaac's mass propers were composed, performed, and transmitted are discussed afresh, as is the striking late-sixteenth-century reception that the Choralis experienced. Studies of previously unknown or little-examined mass proper collections from countries as widely seperated as Portugal and Poland, as well as of the transformation of the genre in Lutheran territories and in the hands of William Byrd, show that Isaac's enterprise, though the largest of its kind, was built on and embedded in a strong and ongoing tradition of proper settings and cycles.

The manuscript UppsU 76f, formerly property of the Jesuit Collegium in Braunsberg (today Braniewo), contains eighty-one liturgical pieces, of which sixty-eight are mass propers: mainly introits, alleluias, and sequences, along with a few graduals and communions. The full liturgical calendar is not used: only the most important feasts from the proprium de tempore are included, such as Palm Sunday, Easter, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and Ascension Day. Christmas is absent. Among the items for the proprium sanctorum there are compositions ascribed to Marian feasts, and pieces dedicated to the following saints: Philip and Jacob, John the Baptist, Margaret, Mary Magdalene, Anne, Lawrence, Archangel Michael, Martin, and Andrew. Propers for All Saints Day, martyrs’ days and the feast of the Dedication of a Church are also included. All works are unattributed. Nonetheless, authors can be identified for some of the compositions: Johannes Mouton, Thomas Stoltzer, Heinrich Finck, Johannes Galliculus and Conrad Rein. The manuscript was presumably prepared in the Braunsberg Jesuits' circle, ca. 1579-89. In two works there are hidden references to Martin Kromer, bishop of Warmia at that time, and his successor Andreas Batory. The Marian repertory contained in the manuscript might have been used by the Marian sodalities active in the Braunsberg Collegium. The scribe probably had connections with Silesia and Royal Prussia. That he was acquainted with the Lutheran repertory is demonstrated by the fact that some of the propers were copied from protestant prints.

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   |texte=   Polyphonic Mass Propers from the Braunsberg Jesuit Collegium and their Local Context
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