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.

William Byrd was known even in his own day as a rather conservative composer. It was a persona he cultivated in print: committed to tradition, wary of Italianate innovations, fascinated well into middle age by homorhythmic cantus-firmus settings and archaic musical forms. His collection of Gradualia (1605/07) is all the more surprising in light of this. It is a radical break, in almost every way, from the established Renaissance tradition of polyphonic mass propers. For Byrd, the ideal of modal and affective unity almost immediately took precedence over the authority of the chant. Exploring the various layers of the Gradualia, we can retrace some of his steps as he began setting the proper to music. There are signs of early experimentation with real cantus-firmus material and with a modified technique of pseudo-cantus-firmus composition–both of which he eventually rejected in favor of a different style and ethos. The uniqueness (indeed eccentricity) of his project also raises some larger questions about the relationship between educated Elizabethan Catholics and the musical culture of the European Counter-Reformation.

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