The present Anthology dedicated to music in Portugal in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, comprising two volumes and two CDs, puts for the first time an updated historical introduction about the first centuries of musical activity in the Portuguese territory, illustrated with color and black and white photographs, with sound examples and musical transcriptions.

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The introduction, the musical direction and the coordination of the musicological collaborations belonged to Manuel Pedro Ferreira, specialist of Universidade Nova of Lisbon with a long international curriculum.

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The records were recorded by Vozes Alfonsinas group, which since 1995 is dedicated, with remarkable success, to the recreation and dissemination of the oldest Iberian music.

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The anthology of music gathers 56 pieces, a variety of repertoire known or composed in the territory that today is Portugal between the 7th century and the end of the reign of D. Sebastião.

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The section "Monodia sacra" includes two unpublished pieces, an unknown version and new readings of three other pieces.

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In the sections "Medieval profane Monody" and "Medieval religious monody in vulgar language" include new musical readings of three "cantigas" and three unpublished proposals of adaptation of medieval melodies to texts sung that arrived us without music; four compositions also receive a new textual edition.

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The inclusion under the title "Primeiras polifonias e polifonias simples" of medieval pieces until recently unknown or subject to misinterpretations and later pieces that are difficult to fit into the learned canons is in itself a historiographical novelty, which comes in the line of recent appreciation, in international musicology, of ways of making music something archaic or informal. This section includes three absolutely unpublished pieces and three others that are only found in restricted circulation publications.

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In the section «Canção profana (16th century)» readings are sometimes different from those offered in the available editions, always taking care to arrange the complete texts under each of the voices, in cases in which the texture is polyphonic.

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In the section "Polifonia Sacra (sixteenth century)" there are nine unpublished pieces and one that was only partially published.

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In the "Instrumental music" section there are five unpublished versions or pieces from Arte again invented to learn the tanger of Gonçalo de Baena (Lisbon, German Galharde, 1540), among them an intabulation of the most celebrated moteto of Pero do Porto Escobar) and a rare composition by Cristóbal de Morales, as well as new readings of two key costumes attributed to António Carreira, the Old Man.

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The edition, from the original printed pieces of Milan and Fuenllana took into account the possibility of playing the modern guitar the music there published in tablature for vihuela.