Thus reads the imperial privilege from King Ferdinand2 for this anthology of motets, published in Strasbourg in August 1539 by Peter Schöffer the Younger. The Cantiones quinque vocum selectissima were Schöffer's first motet anthology; they would also be his last ever musical publication. The five in-quarto partbooks, as the title suggests, comprise a collection of 28 motets, overwhelmingly by French or Flemish composers including Arcadelt, Cadéac, Gombert, Jacquet of Mantua, Maistre Jhan, Verdelot, and Willaert, a number of whom worked exclusively in Italy. The texts are all in Latin, of sacred subject matter, and with frequent Marian references. On the face of it, the pieces seem well suited to sixteenth-century Catholic devotional music-making.

However, it is as much the collection's content as its context which makes it a remarkable publication. The music may not be considered particularly unusual for the mid sixteenth century until one realises that Strasbourg was a Protestant city that precisely one decade earlier had abolished the Roman Mass and effectively eradicated choral singing – and choirs – in the process. Strasbourg had, in musical terms, undergone one of the harshest reformations on the continent, more akin to the Swiss reforms than anything which Martin Luther had been advocating. The new liturgy had no place for Latin choral singing, and no formal adult choirs are known to have survived into the 1530s. Yet, in the midst of this Reformation, Schöffer, one of the foremost Protestant printers in the region, published a set of partbooks containing music which was suited to exactly the sort of ritual that the reformers had sought to abolish. Schöffer is understood to have had unabashed Protestant leanings, and had spent much of his career publishing anti-Catholic material. Yet in his own preface to the Cantiones he also states his connection with Hermann Matthias Werrecore, the Flemish choirmaster of the Duomo of Milan. Furthermore, neither the title page, contents page, nor any of the Cantiones’ other paratexts mention religion, let alone Reformation: instead, the whole issue of faith and reform is entirely absent from this anthology.