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)
“... the wife of an executive would be a better wife had she been a secretary first. As a secretary, you learn to adjust to the boss’s moods. Many marriages would be happier if the wife would do that.”
—Anne Bogan, U.S. executive secretary. As quoted in Working, book 1, by Studs Terkel (1973)