1 R. de Fournival, Li bestiaires d’Amours di Maistre Richart de Fornival e Li response du Bestiaire, ed. C. Segre (Milan and Naples, 1957), pp. 7–8; my translation. Alternative translation in J. Beer, Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour and a Woman’s Response (Toronto, 2003), pp. 3–4: ‘That it describes in words is obvious, because all writing is performed to reveal the word and to be read. When it is read, the writing then reverts to word-form. … Wherefore, it behooves me, when I find in you no mercy, to put greater effort than ever before not into loud song, but into loud and penetrating speech. I am bound to have lost my singing, and I shall tell you why.’ For an elaborated discussion of the presence of voice in the text of Richard’s Bestiaire, see E. E. Leach and J. Morton, ‘Intertextual and Intersonic Resonances in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour: Combining Perspectives from Literary Studies and Musicology’, Romania, 135 (2017), pp. 311–51, esp. p. 322.

2 This phrase in Beer, Beasts of Love, p. 7. On the importance of the written and drawn image as an extension of human memory in the Bestiaire, see ibid., pp. 11, 18; Leach and Morton, ‘Intertextual and Intersonic Resonances’, pp. 323–5.

3 For example, see Hugue de Bergi’s complaint of his lost songs in Encor ferai une chançon perdue, no. 2071 in G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes, ed. H. Spanke, Musicologica, 1 (Leiden, 1955; hereafter RS); no. 117-3 in R. W. Linker, A Bibliography of Old French Lyrics, Romance Monographs, 31 (University, MS, 1979; hereafter L), and Thibaut de Champagne’s complaint that his lady would not hear his dying, nightingale-like cries in Li rossignos chante tant, RS 360 / L 240-36.

4 Leach and Morton, ‘Intertextual and Intersonic Resonances’, p. 316.

5 G. Gröber, ‘Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours’ (in table of contents ‘Ueber die Liedersammlungen …’), in Romanische Studien, ed. E. Boehmer, 6 vols. (Berlin, 1871–95), ii (Heft 9, 1877), pp. 337–670, at p. 342.

6 The earliest major attempt is that of E. Schwan, Die altfranzösischen Liederhandschriften: Ihr Verhältniss, ihre Entstehung und ihre Bestimmung (Berlin, 1886). For Schwan’s view of the relationship of composition and transmission, see p. 267.

7 By the 1960s, Theodore Karp still adhered to the view that the comparison of variants could reveal errors and aid in approaching an original version but also admitted the existence of ‘intentional alteration’ by scribes and performers and the validity of variants: T. Karp, ‘The Trouvère MS Traditions’, in The Department of Music, Queens College of the City University of New York: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Festschrift (1937–1962), ed. A. Mell (New York, 1964), pp. 25–52, at pp. 49–50. Hendrik van der Werf’s editorial work, despite his status as champion of the oral view of transmission, still evaluated melodic variants by asking how close they could have been to performances and on how close the scribes themselves were to being jongleurs; see H. van der Werf, ‘The Trouvère Chansons as Creations of a Notationless Musical Culture,’ Current Musicology, 1 (1965), pp. 61–8, at pp. 65–6.

8 See for example the view espoused by editors such as A. Bahat and G. Le Vot in their L’œuvre lyrique de Blondel de Nesle (Paris, 1996), pp. 26–8. Even when scribal alterations are acknowledged as valid, that validity is justified through a connection with performance, as in Van der Werf, ‘The Trouvère Chansons’, p. 65: ‘the scribe must have sung to himself’. For the locus classicus, most often cited as the authority for the embrace of variance, see B. Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante (Paris, 1989), passim.

9 E. E. Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources for Two Early Fourteenth-Century Metz Chansonniers?’ in Leach, J. W. Mason and M. P. Thomson (eds.), A Medieval Songbook: Trouvère MS C (Woodbridge, 2022), pp. 121–45; R. Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’, in ibid., pp. 82–120; J. Haines, ‘Erasures in Thirteenth-Century Music’, in R. Rosenfeld and Haines (eds.), Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance: Essays dedicated to Andrew Hughes (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 60–88; J. Haines, ‘Aristocratic Patronage and the Cosmopolitan Vernacular Songbook: The Chansonnier du Roi (M-trouv) and the French Mediterranean’, in J. Saltzstein (ed.), Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle (Leiden, 2019), pp. 95–120. Outside of trouvère studies, this approach to musical sources has a longer history. For work incorporating the study of lost sources in other repertoires of French song, see L. Earp, ‘Machaut’s Role in the Production of Manuscripts of His Works’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), pp. 461–503, esp. pp. 490–92; S. Curran, ‘A Palaeographical Analysis of the Verbal Text in Montpellier 8: Problems, Implications, Opportunities’, in C. Bradley (ed.), The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle: Contents, Contexts, Chronologies (Woodbridge, 2018), ch. 2, pp. 32–65

10 Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources’, p. 123.

11 Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’; Haines, ‘Aristocratic Patronage’.

This article makes use of the commonly recognised sigla for trouvère manuscripts as established in Schwan, Die altfranzösischen Liederhandschriften, pp. 2–6. The same sigla are used in RS, pp. 1–20. Unfortunately, troubadour manuscripts have a completely independent system of sigla, laid out in K. Bartsch, Grundriss zur Geschichte der provenzalischen Literatur (Elberfeld, 1872), p. 27, and adopted by A. Pillet and H. Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (Halle, 1933) (henceforth PC), pp. vii–xliv. A list of major trouvère collections and troubadour collections with notated music appears below.

Trouvère manuscripts:

1. A:

   A: Arras, Médiathèque de l’Abbaye Saint-Vaast, fonds principal 657 (CGM 139), fols. 129–60; ‘Chansonnier d’Arras’

2. B:

   B: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 231

3. C:

   C: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 389

4. D:

   D: Frankfurt am Main, Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Abteilung Mittelalterliche Handschriften, Lat. fol. 7

5. E:

   E: Den Haag, Fragment

6. F:

   F: London, British Library, Egerton MS 274

7. G:

   G: London, Lambeth Palace, 1681 (Misc. Rolls 1435)

8. H:

   H: Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, alfa r.04.04 (Estero 45) = Troubadour D

9. I:

   I: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308

10. K:

    K: Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 5198; ‘Chansonnier de l’Arsenal’

11. L:

    L: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français (F-Pnm fr.) 765

12. M:

    M: F-Pnm fr. 844 = Troubadour W = Motet siglum R; ‘Chansonnier du roi’

13. N:

    N: F-Pnm fr. 845

14. O:

    O: F-Pnm fr. 846; ‘Chansonnier cangé’

15. P:

    P: F-Pnm fr. 847

16. Q:

    Q: F-Pnm fr. 1109

17. R:

    R: F-Pnm fr. 1591

18. S:

    S: F-Pnm fr. 12581

19. T:

    T: F-Pnm fr. 12615 = Motet siglum N; ‘Chansonnier de Noailles’

20. U:

    U: F-Pnm fr. 20050 = Troubadour X; ‘Chansonnier Saint-Germain de Pres’

21. V:

    V: F-Pnm fr. 24406; ‘Chansonnier La Vallière’

22. W:

    W: F-Pnm fr. 25566; ‘Adam de la Halle manuscript’

23. X:

    X: F-Pnm nouvelles acquisitions françaises 1050

24. Z:

    Z: Siena, Biblioteca comunale degli Intronati, H.X.36

25. a:

    a: Vatican, Biblioteca apostolica vaticana (V-CVbav), Reg. lat. 1490

26. b:

    b: V-CVbav Reg. lat. 1522

27. k:

    k: F-Pnm fr. 12786

Troubadour manuscripts with music notation or staves:

1. G:

   G: Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, R 71 sup.

2. R:

   R: F-Pnm fr. 22543

3. V:

   V: Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Stranieri Appendice 11 (MS 278)

4. W:

   W: F-Pnm fr. 844 = Trouvère M

5. X:

   X: F-Pnm fr. 20050 = Trouvère U

12 E. Dillon, ‘Unwriting Medieval Song’, New Literary History, 46 (2015), pp. 595–622, esp. pp. 600–4.

13 See P. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, 1972), pp. 251–64. See J. Peraino, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (New York, 2011), passim, esp. pp. 7–8, 17, for a response to Zumthor, which incorporates melodic and formal analysis of songs.

14 Leach, ‘Do Trouvère Melodies Mean Anything?’, Music Analysis, 38 (2019), pp. 3–46, at p. 5. For the ‘hermeneutic circle’ (hermeneutische Zirkel) in music editing, see also J. Grier, The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice (Cambridge and New York, 1996), p. 30; G. Feder, Musikphilologie: Eine Einführung in die musikalische Textkritik, Hermeneutik und Editionstechnik (Darmstadt, 1987), pp. 67, 90–1.

15 Leach, ‘Do Trouvère Melodies Mean Anything?’, pp. 4–5, 35–7.

16 S. Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY, 1986), was a major development toward focus on the history of the chansonnier. The work closest to my approach here is found in Leach, Mason and Thomson (eds.), Medieval Songbook, but see also precedents such as E. E. Leach and H. Deeming (eds.), Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context (Cambridge, 2015), where each chapter focuses on a music collection in the context of the material culture of medieval manuscript production and use. S. Curran, ‘Writing, Performance, and Devotion in the Thirteenth-Century Motet: The “La Clayette” Manuscript’, in ibid., pp. 193–220, has served as a particularly useful model. A similar shift in focus, mainly towards the study of scribal behaviours, may be observed in J. Stoessel, ‘Scribes at Work, Scribes at Play: Challenges for Editors of the Ars Subtilior’, in T. Dumitrescu, K. Kügle and M. van Berchum (eds.), Early Music Editing: Principle, Historiography, Future Directions (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 49–75, at p. 58; L. Earp, ‘Interpreting the Deluxe Manuscript: Exigencies of Scribal Practice and Manuscript Production in Machaut’, in J. Haines (ed.), The Calligraphy of Medieval Music (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 223–40.

17 Estimating the rate of survival for any given genre of manuscript, especially the trouvère chansonniers, is a difficult problem. One technique, borrowed from ecology, has recently been proposed; M. Kestemont etal., ‘Forgotten Books: The Application of Unseen Species Models to the Survival of Culture’, Science, 375/6582 (2022), pp. 765–9. Adapting this model to vernacular chansonniers might offer a reasonable guess at the number of sources that have been lost. However, it fails to take into consideration differences between manuscript types. Two different song collections are more equivalent to entirely different ecosystems than to individual observations of a camera trap. The use of a non-parametric model avoids assumptions about how common or uncommon unica are in any given repertoire and assumes instead that rates of survival should be the same across manuscript witnesses of a given text. Determining how such a model could best be applied to manuscript cultures would likely require close collaboration between statisticians and historians.

18 Other lost trouvère manuscripts are known to have existed but may have lacked notation. For example, the anthology of Philippe de Navarre’s works described in the author’s own narrative memoirs, Des quatre tenz d’aage d’ome, contained lyrics and potentially musical notation for their melodies. See P. de Novare, Mémoires, 1218–1243, ed. C. Kohler (Paris, 1913); J. Haines, ‘The Manuscrit du Roi (M-Trouv.) and the French Mediterranean’, in Saltzstein (ed.), Musical Culture, pp. 95–120, at p. 110.

19 T. Karp, ‘A Lost Medieval Chansonnier’, The Musical Quarterly, 48 (1962), pp. 50–67, at pp. 51–2, 61. Smith’s transcriptions were published as part of the miscellany J. S. Smith, Musica antiqua (London, 1812).

20 For example, the chansonnier has a description in RS, p. 7; for the melodic comparison, see Karp, ‘A Lost Medieval Chansonnier’, pp. 53–61.

21 Two major discussions of lost music sources from Latin repertories also inform this article. One is that regarding the possible lost archetypes of 8th-c. plainchant: see K. Levy, ‘Charlemagne’s Archetype of Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the Musicological Society, 40 (1987), pp. 1–30, esp. pp. 5–11; J. McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later-Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000), pp. 101–24; D. G. Hughes, ‘From the Advent Project to the Late Middle Ages: Some Issues of Transmission’, in S. Gallagher etal. (eds.), Western Plainchant in the First Millenium (Routledge, 2003), pp. 181–98; L. Treitler, With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How it was Made (Oxford, 2007), pp. 131–3, 144–5; C. Atkinson, The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in Early Medieval Music (Oxford, 2009), pp. 50, 137; S. Rankin, Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe: The Invention of Musical Notation (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 8–12, 45. The other surrounds the Magnus liber organi of the 12th and 13th cc., germane to this discussion since such books would have been copied in scriptoria from around the same time and place as the earliest trouvère sources: see e.g. E. Roesner, ‘Who “Made” the Magnus “Liber”?’, Early Music History, 20 (2001), pp. 227–66, at pp. 264–6; L. Treitler, ‘The Vatican Organum Treatise and the Organum of Notre Dame of Paris: Perspectives on the Development of a Literate Music Culture in Europe’, in Treitler, With Voice and Pen, pp. 39–67.

22 That is, before the current decade. For the most stimulating discussions of the various exemplars thought to have informed the copying of trouvère C, see Leach, ‘Introduction’, in Leach, Mason and Thomson (eds.), A Medieval Songbook, pp. 1–12, at p. 8; Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’, esp. fig. 6.6, p. 97; Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources’; M. P. Thomson, ‘C and Polyphonic Motets: Exemplars, Adaptations, and Scribal Priorities’, in Leach, Mason and Thomson (eds.), A Medieval Songbook, pp. 192–209.

23 E. Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington, 1996), p. 28. See also A. Ziino, ‘Caratteri e significato della tradizione musicale trobadorica’, in Lyrique romane médiévale: La tradition des chansonniers: Actes du Colloque de Liège, 1989, ed. M. Tyssens (Liège, 1991), pp. 85–218, at pp. 92–8.

24 Namely, ‘Messine’ neumes: see Lug, ‘Das “vormodale” Zeichensystem des Chansonnier de Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 52 (1995), pp. 19–65.

25 See Table 1, col. ‘Type D’.

26 See Table 1, col. ‘Type D’, and Table 2, col. ‘Type 2’.

27 Haines, ‘Erasures in Thirteenth-Century Music’, esp. p. 70.

28 Possible exceptions are Thibaut de Champagne, Gace Brulé and Adam de la Halle, though few would argue their examples hold for the majority of trouvères. See F. Gennrich, ‘Die Repertoire-Theorie’, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 66 (1956), pp. 81–108, at p. 88; J. Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Song (Cambridge, 2009), p. 18.

29 Here Gröber, ‘Die Liedersammlung der Troubadours’, p. 342, assumed that the lack of music in the majority of troubadour collections reflected the moment of copying and a lack of notational expertise among recipients of the earliest sources. Gennrich’s response, ‘Die Repertoire-Theorie’, p. 83, tends to elide knowledge of writing with knowledge of musical notation.

30 While Van der Werf’s starker claims around the invention of chansons may seem to suggest a complete denial of written transmission, he moderated his position in his role as editor, where he accepted the importance of scribes and even the possibility of errors. See the running commentary on (and occasional emendation of) missing or superfluous notes in his anthology, for example when editing Gace Brulé’s RS 111 / L 65-18: H. van der Werf (ed.), Trouvères-Melodien, 2 vols., Monumenta monodica medii aevi, 11–12 (Kassel, 1977–9), i, p. 579. Hans Tischler acknowledged (albeit grudgingly, and only for the early period) the influence of ‘improvisation’ on melodic variants in the Introduction to S. N. Rosenberg and H. Tischler with M.-G. Grossel (eds.), Chansons des trouvères: Chanter m’estuet (Paris, 1995), p. 18. His correction of transpositions by a third does show a difference of opinion regarding the reliability of scribes; see H. Tischler (ed.), Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies, 15 vols. (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1997), ix, no. 813-3, where Tischler corrects RS 1440 / L 240-28, in contrast to the same melody in Van der Werf (ed.), Trouvères-Melodien, i, p. 195, without correction or comment.

31 Some have argued that surviving rolls and single sheets were performance copies, made to aid memory and presumably based on oral transmission: e.g. A. Roncaglia, ‘Rétrospectives et perspectives dans l’étude des chansonniers d’Oc’, in Lyrique romane médiévale, ed. Tyssens, pp. 19–41, at pp. 20–1. These rare survivals are late, however, with the latest case dated to 1272. See also Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’, p. 90.

32 For example, H. van der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the Melodies and their Relation to the Poems (Utrecht, 1972), pp. 28, 33, has been read as an indirect attack on Gröberians, although what Van der Werf argues against is an extreme position in denial of oral transmission, something Gröber himself never proposed. Where Van der Werf’s criticisms are clearest is in his stated philosophy of critical editing, ‘The Trouvère Chansons’, pp. 62–3.

33 Gröber, ‘Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours’, p. 342. Gröber’s work on the troubadours is the locus classicus for this hypothesis, and the terms ‘Liederblätter’ and ‘Gelegenheitssammlungen’ refer to his theory of transmission stages. For a description of rolls containing medieval lyric, usually included under the term ‘Liederblätter’, see W. D. Paden, ‘Lyrics on Rolls’, in ‘Li premerains vers’: Essays in Honor of Keith Busby, ed. C. M. Jones (Leiden, 2011), pp. 325–40. Most of these rolls date from the 14th c. or later. For a recent rehabilitation of Gröber’s work, see Haines, ‘Aristocratic Patronage’, pp. 97–100, and his discussion of rolls, p. 104.

34 Gröber, ‘Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours’, pp. 345–55.

35 E. Schwan, Die altfranzösischen Liederhandschriften. See also the discussion of stemmata in Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’, pp. 86–90.

36 Gröber, ‘Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours’, p. 342.

37 Ibid. , p. 344.

38 The proposal in Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources’, p. 123, and Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’, p. 86, implies that collected materials would be kept for a considerable length of time. Specificially, the smaller sources collected by the copyists of U were kept for several decades before being used for the late sources C and I.

39 On the pecia system, see R. Rouse and M. Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500, 2 vols., Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History, 25 (Turnhout, 2000), i, pp. 85–99. The maintenance of large, constantly-growing collections of exemplars may also bring to mind the theories surrounding the work of Guillaume de Machaut; it seems the extant Machaut manuscripts reflect the existence of both large and small exemplars starting during Machaut’s life: see M. Bent, ‘The Machaut Manuscripts Vg, B, and E’, Musica disciplina, 37 (1983), pp. 53–82, at pp. 61–82; L. Earp, ‘Machaut’s Role in the Production of Manuscripts of His Works’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), pp. 461–503, at pp. 472, 489–90.

40 For an incisive discussion of similar questions that arise in studies of the polyphonic repertoire around the same period, see Curran, ‘A Palaeographical Analysis’, pp. 48–9.

41 Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources’, pp. 123, 145.

42 Ibid .

43 Ibid ., p. 139.

44 Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours, p. 49; E. Aubrey, ‘The Transmission of Troubadour Melodies: The Testimony of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, f. fr. 22543’, Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, 3 (1987), pp. 211–50, at pp. 214–21. See also John Stevens’s assessment of trouvère R in‘The Manuscript Presentation and Notation of Adam de la Halle’s Courtly Chansons’, in Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: A Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. I. Bent (London, 1981), pp. 29–64, at p. 46: ‘The real puzzle is to decide how a copyist could have got so out of touch with the essential tradition musically whilst presumably having access to a number of poetically reliable chansonniers. Admittedly not all his sources may have had music’.

45 An edition of the songs of Philippe de Remi and a discussion of their attribution appears in P. de Rémi, Jehan et Blonde, Poems, and Songs, ed. and trans. B. N. Sargent-Baur (Amsterdam, 2001); see pp. 515–17 for discussion. I am indebted to Daniel O’Sullivan for assistance with the translation of this poem.

46 Ibid., p. 516.

47 I strictly differentiate what I call ‘poetic lines’, units of versification indicated by rhyme sound and occasional punctuation, from written lines of text matching the width of the writing block. Poetic lines frequently spill over the writing block into the next written line.

48 S. N. Rosenberg, ‘The Lyric Poetry of Philippe de Remy’, Romance Philology, 49 (1995), pp. 13–24, at pp. 14–16; Remi, Jehan et Blonde, p. 516.

49 See Aubrey’s interpretation of blank staves in troubadour R in The Music of the Troubadours, p. 49.

50 For Lug’s dating of the earliest layer of U, see his ‘Katharer und Waldenser in Metz: Zur Herkunft der ältesten Sammlung von Troubadour-Liedern (1231)’, in Okzitanistik, Altokzitanistik und Provenzalistik: Geschichte und Auftrag einer europäischen Philologie, ed. A. Rieger (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 249–74. For a dating closer to mid-century, see M. Tyssens, Introduction to Le chansonnier français U, ed. Tyssens (Paris, 2015), pp. i–li, at p. x.

51 Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’, pp. 90–9.

52 Tyssens, Introduction to Le chansonnier U, p. x.

53 J. Haines, ‘Songbook for William of Villehardouin, Prince of Morea (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 844): A Crucial Case in the History of Vernacular Song Collections’, in Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese, ed. S. E. J. Gerstel (Washington, DC, 2013), pp. 57–109, at pp. 91–5; J. Longnon, ‘Le Prince de Morée chansonnier’, Romania, 65 (1939), pp. 95–100, at pp. 96–9; V. Agrigoroaei, ‘Le Manuscrit du Roi, un chansonnier que le prince de Morée Guillaume de Villehardouin n’a sans doute jamais connu’, Textus & musica, 6 (2022), https://textus-et-musica.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/index.php?id=2350, passim.

54 A. Stones, ‘Some Northern French Chansonniers and Their Cultural Context’, in Ars musica septentrionalis: De l’historiographie à l’interpretation, Colloque Cantus 21, Douai, 2005, ed. B. Haagh and F. Billiet (Paris, 2011), pp. 169–87, at p. 172.

55 E. Aubrey, ‘Sources, MS, §III, 4: Secular Monophony: French’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell, 29 vols. (London, 2001), xxiii, pp. 851–60, at pp. 852–3 (K), 853–5 (N), 855 (P), 859 (X).

56 C. Symes, ‘The School of Arras and the Career of Adam’, in Saltzstein (ed.), Musical Culture, pp. 21–50, at p. 31, considers a date for Adam’s birth roughly around 1250 to be reasonable, based on the autobiographical events of Adam’s Jeu de la feuillée of 1276 or 1277 and on the attested untimeliness of Adam’s death between 1284 and 1288.

57 M. J. O’Neill, Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France: Transmission and Style in the Trouvère Repertoire (Oxford, 2006), pp. 27–52.

58 N. Bleisch, ‘The Copying and Collection of Music in the Trouvère Chansonnier F-Pn fr. 24406’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019), pp. 98–101.

59 Lug, ‘Katharer und Waldenser in Metz’, pp. 257–8.

60 This is at fol. 170^v.

61 A complete table of notation by gathering appears in C. Callahan, ‘Copying Trouvère Lyric at the Peripheries: The Lessons of MSS Paris, BnF fr. 20050 and Bern, Burgerbibliothek 389’, Textual Cultures, 8/2 (Fall 2013), pp. 15–30, at p. 17. Callahan’s table also provides folio numbers for each gathering. Tyssens, Introduction to Le chansonnier U, pp. ix–xii, also provides a gathering structure and description of the blank staves.

62 Callahan, ‘Copying Trouvère Lyric’, p. 18; Tyssens, Introduction to Le chansonnier U, p. x.

63 Callahan, ‘Copying Trouvère Lyric’, p. 17.

64 Tyssens, Introduction to Le chansonnier U, p. x: ‘au sommet des ff. 37v, 38v, 89v les deux dernières portées d’une chanson sont restées vides’.

65 E. Aubrey, ‘Literacy, Orality, and the Preservation of French and Occitan Medieval Courtly Songs’, Revista de musicología, 16 (1993), pp. 2355–66, at p. 2364. For an example demonstrating that entering melodies on the basis of knowledge was a real possibility in the Middle Ages, albeit in an earlier repertoire, see J. Grier, The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-Century Aquitaine (Cambridge, 2006), p. 44.

66 Callahan, ‘Copying Trouvère Lyric’, pp. 18–19, has commented on this peculiarity of U’s organisation or seeming lack thereof.

67 Lug, ‘Katharer und Waldenser in Metz’, p. 257: ‘Ersttranskriptionen nach mündlichem Vortrag’. See also Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’, p. 90.

68 Lug, ‘Katharer und Waldenser in Metz’, p. 258.

69 Van der Werf, ‘The Trouvère Chansons’.

70 Karp, ‘The Trouvère MS Traditions’, p. 45; J. Schubert, Die Liederhandschrift Paris, Bibl. nat. fr. 1591: Kritische Untersuchung der Trouvèrehandschrift R (Frankfurt am Main, 1963), p. 33.

71 Gröber, ‘Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours’, pp. 342–3.

72 Karp, ‘The Trouvère MS Traditions’, pp. 33–5. See also T. Karp, ‘Troubadours, Trouvères, §III, 1: Music: Manuscript Sources’, in New Grove, xxv, pp. 807–10, at p. 808.

73 Gennrich, ‘Die Repertoire-Theorie’, pp. 101–6. Schubert, Die Liederhandschrift Paris, Bibl. nat. fr. 1591, p. 32, already admits the existence of multiple generations of written source between performer and chansonnier. Van der Werf later developed a more sophisticated model of transmission, reformulated multiple times. See Van der Werf, ‘The Trouvère Chansons’, passim; Van der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères, pp. 33–4; and his commentaries on musical editions, e.g. his ‘Musical Introduction’ to The Songs Attributed to Andrieu Contredit d’Arras, with a Translation into English and the Extant Melodies, lyrics ed. and trans. D. Nelson, melodies ed. H. van der Werf, Faux titre, 59 (Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 23–50, at pp. 23–9.

74 Gennrich, ‘Die Repertoire-Theorie’, pp. 86, 98–9.

75 Ibid., pp. 105–6.

76 Ibid., pp. 81–2.

77 Van der Werf, ‘The Trouvère Chansons’, p. 68.

78 See nn. 8, 30 above. It is probably significant that the consensus in other fields coincides with this view; see e.g. R. F. Person jr, Scribal Memory and Word Selection: Text Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Atlanta, 2023), p. 26.

79 Van der Werf, ‘The Trouvère Chansons’, passim.

80 This suspicion remained implicit for Van der Werf. See e.g. what I read as his sarcasm in H. van der Werf, ‘Music’, in F. R. P. Akehurst and J. M. Davis (eds.), A Handbook of the Troubadours (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 121–66, at p. 124; Van der Werf, Trouvères-Melodien, i, p. ix. More vocal is G. Le Vot, ‘Pour une épistémologie de l’édition du texte lyrique français médiéval’, in M. Huglo (ed.), Musicologie médiévale, notations et séquences: Actes de la table ronde du C.N.R.S. à l’Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, 6–7 septembre 1982 (Paris, 1987), pp. 187–207, at pp. 190–1.

81 Schubert, Die Liederhandschrift Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 1591, p. 30.

82 Ibid., pp. 35–6.

83 Lug, ‘Katharer und Waldenser in Metz’, p. 257.

84 Schubert, Die Liederhandschrift Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 1591, p. 127.

85 Ibid., pp. 179, 184–6.

86 Ibid., p. 179.

87 H. Spanke, ‘Studien zur Geschichte des altfranzösischen Liedes: I.’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 156 (1929), pp. 66–79, at p. 70.

88 Schubert, Die Liederhandschrift Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 1591, p. 178.

89 H.-H. Räkel, Die musikalische Erscheinungsform der Trouvèrepoesie (Bern, 1977).

90 See also Van der Werf’s denigrating comments in his ‘Musical Introduction’, p. 28.

91 Räkel, Die musikalische Erscheinungsform, p. 339: ‘repräsentatives Werkstück eines Bewunderers der Trouvèrelyrik’. Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours, p. 56, also considers the possibility that divergent melodies for the same text resulted when ‘a scribe provided a new melody for a poem for which he could not find music’.

92 This ‘simulated’ or ‘false’ musical notation appears in manuscript o of Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame, F-Pnm fr. 2193: see Räkel, Die musikalische Erscheinungsform, p. 338 (‘den Inhalt gar nicht zu bewaren, sondern zu simulieren’); K. A. Duys, ‘Manuscripts that Preserve the Songs of Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame (Listed by Date and Siglum)’, in Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and Manuscript, ed. K. M. Krause and A. Stones (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 367–8, at p. 368, n. 3.

93 Schubert, Die Liederhandschrift Paris, Bibl. Nat. fr. 1591, p. 178, notes this particularly in the melodies R and V share.

94 I thus translate the phrase ‘fantaisies personnelles’ from A. Henry (ed.), L’œuvre lyrique d’Henri III Duc de Brabant (Bruges, 1948), p. 79. H. Spanke, ‘Studien zur Geschichte des altfranzösischen Liedes’, p. 70, refers to one implausible melody as ‘das Erzeugnis der müßigen Stunde eines Schreibers’ (the result of a scribe’s idle hour).

95 The topic of melodic sameness and difference is a rich one. Because of the variance inherent in trouvère melodic tradition, it can be difficult to assert that two melodies are elaborated versions of the same basic template, modal reworkings of a shared melodic contour, or two different, entirely unrelated compositions. In the case of manuscript V, the contrast between divergent and concordant melodies is extreme. See C. Callahan, ‘À la défense des mélodies “marginales” chez les trouvères’, Cahier de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 26 (2013), pp. 69–90, discussed below. For a detailed analysis of variance in V, see Bleisch, ‘Copying and Collection’, pp. 196–233.

96 For the origin of the term ‘Kontraposition’ see W. Bittinger, ‘Fünfzig Jahre Musikwissenschaft als Hilfswissenschaft der romanischen Philologie’, Zeitschrift für Philologie, 68 (1953), pp. 161–94, at p. 178.

97 N. Bleisch, ‘Between Copyist and Editor: Away from Typologies of Error and Variance in Trouvère Songs’, Music & Letters, 103 (2022), pp. 1–26, at pp. 21–4.

98 Callahan, ‘À la défense des mélodies “marginales”’.

99 Callahan, e.g. ‘Copying Trouvère Lyric’, p. 18, generally accepts the importance of written transmission in the compilation of chansonniers even from the earliest period.

100 Huot, From Song to Book, pp. 64–6; Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères, p. 35; Haines, ‘Aristocratic Patronage’, pp. 104, 111.

101 Callahan, ‘À la défense des mélodies “marginales”’, p. 76. See also Bahat and Le Vot (eds.), L’œuvre lyrique de Blondel de Nesle, p. 30.

102 For a full discussion of the different text and music hands of V, and correlations between changes in layout, notational styles, and melodic concordances, see Bleisch, ‘Copying and Collection’, pp. 65–97, 196–229, 276–302, esp. pp. 69–70, 232.

103 These folios are copied on different parchment, with a different gathering structure, in a different hand and with different decoration. The separate nature of this section, containing an otherwise unknown treatise on Les Sept Sages, a truncated version of the Bestiaire d’Amour of Richard de Fournival and a number of Marian chansons in French (mostly contrafacta of other trouvère songs, some of them found elsewhere in V but with different melodies) has long been recognised: see J. Brakelmann, ‘Die dreiundzwanzig altfränzosischen Chansonniers: in Bibliotheken Frankreichs, Englands, Italiens und der Schweiz’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 23/42 (1868), pp. 43–72, at pp. 46, 49; Aubrey, ‘Sources, MS, §III, 4’, pp. 857–8; Bleisch, ‘Copying and Collection’, pp. 43–53; D. E. O’Sullivan, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric (Toronto, 2005), pp. 83–6; R. Lug, Semi-mensurale Informationen zur Liedrhythmik des 13. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2019), p. 78; Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources’, p. 130. The unusual appearance of the staves and notation has led to the speculation that they were inserted as part of one of the bibliographic projects of the Enlightenment; see E. Aubrey, ‘Medieval Melodies in the Hands of Bibliophiles of the Ancien Régime’, in Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman, ed. B. Haggh (Paris and Tours, 2001), pp. 17–34, at pp. 21–9. However, the singular variants (which cannot have been copied directly from an extant chansonnier), the extensive knowledge of examples for the contrafacta, and the obvious attempt to adhere to square notation would be more in keeping with a medieval collector’s activity, albeit one with limited skill as a notator. Aubrey has noted early gathering signatures beginning on fol. 119 and running through the end of the manuscript and then continuing at its beginning. The two manuscripts must have been united at an early date in the opposite order from how they now appear. The blank staves in this separate section begin with De la mere dieu doit chanter chascuns, fol. 152^v, and continue through the rest of the songs in the manuscript.

104 Selective notation that follows a similar rationale may be found among plainchant hymns at a period when an oral repertoire was transitioning towards notation: see Susan Boynton, ‘Orality, Literacy, and the Early Notation of the Office Hymns’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), pp. 99–168, esp. pp. 124–32.

105 Bleisch, ‘Copying and Collection’, Table 10.1, pp. 399–400.

106 Henry (ed.), L’œuvre lyrique de Henri III, p. 79; see n. 94 above.

107 R, fols. 52^v–53^r, 83^r–v; a, fol. 75^r.

108 See Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources’, p. 123.

109 Haines, ‘Aristocratic Patronage’, pp. 101–6.

110 See Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante, p. 69, cited in Haines, ‘Aristocratic Patronage’, p. 97, for the phrase ‘les dinosaures’ applied to philologists. On libraries, see Haines, ‘Aristocratic Patronage’, p. 100, and for erasures, see Haines, ‘Erasures in Thirteenth-Century Music’, pp. 66–7. For the description of single-author collections, see Gröber, ‘Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours’, pp. 345–54; Schwan, Die altfranzösischen Liederhandschriften, p. 266.

111 Haines, ‘Aristocratic Patronage’, p. 96.

112 For the phrase ‘immediate ancestors’, see ibid., p. 102, where Haines ascribes their study to Gröber and Schwan.

113 Compare Gröber’s overview of the various hypothetical strands of transmission behind the extant sources (complete with ample caveats) in ‘Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours’, pp. 656–61, and Van der Werf’s view of the stages of oral transmission and the transition to writing in ‘Music’, in Akehurst and Davis (eds.), A Handbook of the Troubadours, pp. 129–30.

114 Gröber, ‘Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours’, pp. 338, 355–7; Van der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères, p. 28.

115 M. Desmond, ‘Translatio in Wax: The Wax Tablet and the Composition of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie’, Viator, 49/1 (2018), pp. 51–76, at p. 57: the largest of the sets of tablets associated with the French royal household contained 26 writing surfaces, enough to hold 781 lines of text. See E. Lalou, ‘Inventaire des tablettes médiévales et présentation générale’, in Lalou (ed.), Les tablettes à écrire, de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne (Turnhout, 1992), pp. 233–88, at p. 268; A. Morgan, ‘Absent Material: Waxed, Wooden, and Ivory Writing Tablets in the Medieval and Modern Periods’, in R. G. Sullivan and M. Pagès (eds.), Imagining the Self, Constructing the Past: Selected Proceedings from the 36th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2016), pp. 166–89. Desmond, ‘Translatio in Wax’, p. 54, also offers evidence for lyrics inscribed in wax, namely a line in the Harley Lyrics, ‘Scripsi hec carmina in tabulis’ (I have written these songs on tablets): The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. and trans. S. Fein with D. Raybin and J. Ziolkowski, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI, 2014), ii, p. 234, song 55, line 17.

116 Van der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères, p. 28, describes something similar for wax, where ‘a “draft”, probably on some inexpensive or reusable material like a wax tablet or a slate [could have] been used for two or more of the preserved manuscripts’.

117 Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources’, pp. 123, 144; Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’, pp. 85–6.

118 On the sometimes haphazard or improvisatory character of V’s notation in particular, see Bleisch, ‘Between Copyist and Editor’, pp. 21–5.

119 Other manuscripts in similar repertoires from around the same time period exhibit the same lack of co-ordination. Aubrey, ‘The Transmission of Troubadour Melodies’, pp. 214–21, observes that the text scribe of troubadour R was ignorant of the music copied in that source.

120 Clef choice was clearly not always easy for chansonnier notators. For a discussion of the irregular use of clefs in V and the impact of pre-drawn staves, see Bleisch, ‘Copying and Collection’, pp. 253–7; also Haines, ‘Erasures in Thirteenth-Century Music’, pp. 73–8, for errors of transposition in monophonic and polyphonic sources.

121 Leach, ‘Shared Small Sources’; Lug, ‘Common Exemplars of U and C’.

122 On the romantic, even erotic, notion of desire to recuperate medieval voices and sonorities from the surviving texts, see P. Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. S. White (Lincoln, NE, 1986), p. 22; P. Zumthor, La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale (Paris, 1984), pp. 11, 37–9; Peraino, Giving Voice to Love, pp. 7–8.

123 Haines, ‘Erasures in Thirteenth-Century Music’, pp. 67–71.

124 The fact that only the repetitive and therefore memorable first four poetic lines of Bien me cuidoie partir, RS 1440 / L 240-28, on fol. 68^r, Rois thibaut sire en chantant respondez, RS 943 / L 19-1, on fol. 72^r and Tant ai amors servies longuement, RS 711 / L 240-51, on fol. 74^r in the Thibaut de Champagne section of M (F-Pnm fr. 844) suggests that the through-composed caudae were either deemed unnecessary or too difficult to supply accurately.

125 Aubrey, ‘The Transmission of Troubadour Melodies’, p. 212; see n. 44 above.