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.
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“Will lovely, lively, virginal today
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By the sheer ice of flocks not flown away!”
—Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)
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—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)