At the beginning of the 17th century, several collections of rather unusual madrigals appeared in northwestern Italy. The definition of this new musical genre was given by one of its major authors, Aquilino Coppini: music drawn from madrigals and rendered spiritual. What actually happened was that a well-defined circle of writers and musicians ventured upon the feat of transforming some madrigals by replacing their original texts with lines of sacred verse in Latin. It was not a translation, as in some English versions of Italian madrigals, but an actual replacement of the text based on a completely different subject matter.