The direction of research into historical singing is inevitably determined by the nature and geographical distribution of the surviving evidence. This may result in an unbalanced view, especially where survival or loss is due to chance, but the survival of a body of evidence may equally well be an indication of the importance that it had at the time of writing. The texts which have come down to us from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in ‘medieval’ Germany and England are relatively few compared to those from ‘Renaissance’ Italy during the same period. From the seventeenth century onwards there is useful evidence from a much broader range of sources and it confirms the seminal nature of Italian ideas on singing throughout Europe. The ideological continuity from the classical world through to the medieval period underwent a radical change of emphasis when, as Anderson (1987, p. 148) put it, ‘the Renaissance discovered itself with a new, intense consciousness of rupture and loss’. In musical historiography the period from the mid fourteenth century to the mid sixteenth is conventionally thought of as representing a late flowering of the Middle Ages, a period during which polyphony evolved towards its ultimate, ‘Renaissance’ form. Music is thought to catch up with the Renaissance around 1600 with the appearance of monody and the attempts to recreate the music of ancient Greece. Paradoxically this period is seen as the beginning of the baroque era.