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The medieval songbook known variously as trouvère manuscript
C or the "Bern Chansonnier" (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 389) is one of the most important witnesses to musical life in thirteenth-century France. Almost certainly copied in Metz, it provides the texts to over five hundred Old French songs, and is a unique insight into cultures of song-making and copying on the linguistic and political borders between French and German-speaking lands in the Middle Ages. Notably, the names of trouvères, including several female poet-musicians, are found in its margins, names which would be unknown today without this evidence. However, the manuscript has received relatively little scholarly attention, partly because the songs' musical staves remained empty for reasons now unknown, and partly because of where it was copied.
This collection of essays is the first to consider
C on its own terms and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philology, art history, literary studies, and musicology. The contributors explore the process of creating the complex object that is a music manuscript, examining the work of scribes and artists who worked on
C, and questioning how scribes acquired and organised exemplars for copying. The peculiarly Messine flavour of the repertoire and authors is also discussed, with contributors showing that
C frames the tradition of Old French song from a unique perspective. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how in this eastern hub of music and poetry, poet-composers, readers, and scribes interacted with the courtly song tradition in fascinating and unusual ways.
List of contents
Introduction
Elizabeth Eva Leach, Joseph W. Mason, and Matthew P. Thomson1. The Trouvère Manuscripts of the Bern Burgerbibliothek
Florian Mittenhuber, translated by Henry Hope2. The Lorraine Repertoire of
CMélanie Lévêque-Fougre3. Chansonnier
C: Contents, Stemmatic Position, Particularities
Paola Moreno4. A Note on the Decoration of
C and its Artistic Context
Alison Stones5. Author Ascriptions and Genre Labels in
CLuca Gatti6. Common Exemplars of
U and
CRobert Lug7. Shared Small Sources for Two Early Fourteenth-Century Metz Chansonniers?
Elizabeth Eva Leach8. The Legacy of Thibaut de Champagne in
CDaniel E. O'Sullivan9. Strategies of Appropriation in Jacques de Cambrai's Devotional Contrafacts
Christopher Callahan10. Jeux-Partis and their Contrafacts in
CJoseph W. Mason11.
C and Polyphonic Motets: Exemplars, Adaptations, and Scribal Priorities
Matthew P. ThomsonAppendix: List of Songs in
CBibliography of Works Cited
General Index
