Abstract
Two sets of manuscript parts reveal the priorities and practices of musicians from Breslau (Wrocław) when transforming Italian madrigals into Lutheran spiritual madrigals in the waning years of the Thirty Years War (ca. 1640s). One is a previously unrecognized contrafactum of Monteverdi's Hor che'l ciel et la terra (Eighth Book of Madrigals) by cantor Michael Büttner, the other a set of contrafacta of Marco Scacchi's Madrigali a cinque by Ambrosius Profe. Both sets likely served as preliminary stages for selections published in Profe's anthologies. Many of the retexted madrigals vividly evoke the political and religious conflicts then plaguing war-torn Silesia.