Dow Partbooks

The Dow Partbooks (Christ Church, Mus. MSS 984–988) are a collection of five partbooks compiled by Robert Dow in Oxford around 1581–88. The collection includes mostly choral but also some instrumental pieces. At the end is an instrumental La gamba and a canon, both a 3 and apparently copied from Vincenzo Ruffo's book printed in Milan in 1564.

The partbooks are an important source for Tudor music, and the sole known source for some of the pieces. Robert Dow was a trained calligrapher and the books are unusually easy to read among manuscripts of the Tudor period.