Quill and Pixel: Chansonniers and their Modern Readers

143

QUILL AND PIXEL: CHANSONNIERS AND THEIR MODERN READERS

JANE ALDEN WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the phenomenon of luxury manuscript facsimiles that include music. It traces their relationship to the original sources and the factors that determine publishers’ choices regarding which manuscripts to reproduce as well as the manner of representation. The market for facsimiles of notated books reaches beyond those who are musically literate, which was also the case in the Middle Ages. Indeed, new research shows that the patrons of fifteenth-century songbooks were not primarily monarchs and noblemen, as was once thought, but notaries, secretaries, and other professionals—people directly analogous to modern buyers of facsimiles. But publishers continue to favor a remote view of the medieval world, inadvertently distancing readers from the historical and social context of the objects themselves.

In 1901 a young doctor in Philadelphia named Alfred Reginald Allen (1876–1918) formed the Savoy Company to

144 CANTUS SCRIPTUS: TECHNOLOGIES OF MEDIEVAL SONG

perform Gilbert and Sullivan operas in the authentic D’Oyle Carte style.1 Following the doctor’s untimely death at the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, the company established the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Fund at the University of Pennsylvania Library. It was thanks to this fund that the University’s Music Library was able, in 2008, to acquire a deluxe facsimile of the justly famous Chansonnier Cordiforme (Plate 1).2

One can see why the distinguished Valencian publisher Vicent García Editores S.A. might have been interested in reproducing this exquisite heart-shaped manuscript, now housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BnF), even though music books have not featured thus far in their publications. Heart-shaped books are difficult to produce and rare even today.3 The Cordiforme facsimile is an extraordinary achievement in which significant production

1 Ian C. Bradley, Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!: The Enduring

Phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York, 2005), p. 119. 2 Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (Valencia: Vicent García

Editores, 2007), and David Fallows, ed., Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (ca. 1475): Commentary to the Facsimile of the Manuscript Rothschild 2973 (I.5.13) in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Valencia: Vicent García Editores, 2008).

3 Eric Jager discusses the history and significance of cordate (heart-shaped) books and manuscripts in The Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2000). Among the surviving books from the fifteenth century, only the Chansonnier Cordiforme is in the shape of a heart when closed, opening up to form a butterfly of two conjoined hearts; other cordate books, such as Paris, BnF, MS lat. 10536, are almond-shaped in closed form, forming a heart only when they are opened. One of the most remarkable objects to survive from the Auschwitz concentration camp is a tiny heart-shaped booklet that was made for Fania Fainer (née Landau), at considerable personal risk, by fellow female prisoners. It is the subject of a 2010 documentary by Carl Leblan, Le coeur d’Auschwitz (The Heart of Auschwitz), produced by Luc Cyr for Ad Hoc Films. The booklet itself is covered in purple fabric and embroidered with the initial “F;” its pages are folded origami-style and unfold like petals.

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challenges were overcome to arrive at a publication that replicates the original manuscript with astonishing verisimilitude. Buyers of the facsimile also receive a substantial commentary volume by the leading scholar of fifteenth-century songs, David Fallows; a newly-recorded compact disc by the Spanish Ensemble Fontegara, performing a selection of songs; a replica leather case identical to that used in the BnF to store the original; and a methacrylate display case (as shown in Plate 1). The publication has generated renewed interest in this source, which in turn prompted Decca to re-release the landmark 1979 recording of the complete chansonnier by the Consort of Musicke, directed by Anthony Rooley.4 The Chansonnier Cordiforme is still the only fifteenth-century songbook to have been recorded in its entirety (including all the repetitions demanded by the poetic forms) and in manuscript order.5

This exceptionally beautiful manuscript came into public ownership in 1933, following a bequest by its last private owner Baron Henri de Rothschild, to the BnF.6 It immediately attracted scholarly attention. Jean Porcher, historian of French illuminated manuscripts and librarian at the BnF, co-authored an article on the chansonnier with Eugénie Droz, a Swiss philologist resident in Paris.7 In a remarkably wide-ranging study, the authors consider the

4 Decca, 480 1819, 3 CDs (2010). The original LPs were issued

in 1980, L’Oiseau-Lyre Florilegium, Decca, D186D 4. 5 The recent recording by Ensemble Fontegara features only

nine of the manuscript’s forty-three works—L’aultre jour par ung matin, Zentil madona, Faites moy sçavoir de la belle, Est-il mercy de quoy l’on peust, De tous bien plaine, Perla mya cara, Ben lo sa Dio, Chiara Fontana, and Hora cridar “oyme.”

6 The recent history of the Chansonnier Cordiforme is briefly discussed in Jane Alden, Songs, Scribes, and Society: The History and Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers (New York, 2010), pp. 60–61.

7 Jean Porcher and Eugénie Droz, “Le chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu,” Trésors des bibliothèques de France 18 (1933), 100–110.


iconographic, literary, and historical aspects of the manuscript and identify the ecclesiastic Jean de Montchenu as the Chansonnier Cordiforme’s original owner. Notwithstanding the fact that this irreverent bishop was described by a contemporary chronicler as “shameful of conduct, unchaste, detestable, dissolute, and full of vices,” the identification of this chansonnier patron was an exceptionally important discovery.8

The title given to the chansonnier by Droz and Porcher—the “Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu”—was adopted by Geneviève Thibault, comtesse de Chambure (1902–1975), a musicologist and later owner of the related Chansonnier Nivelle de la Chaussée (BnF, Rés. Vmc. MS 57), who completed a musical edition of the heart-shaped manuscript in the 1950s. Due to various other commitments, her edition remained unpublished. Following Thibault’s death, David Fallows assumed the task of finally bringing it to publication.9 Full-color digital photographs of the Chansonnier Cordiforme have been available on the BnF’s website Mandragore for some years.10 The clarity of the photographs is admirable, and certainly sufficient for the purposes of musical transcription. Each photo has a rainbow spectrum and ruler appended to the side, which is helpful for gauging color

8 The translation of the contemporary chronicle is taken from Fallows, Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (ca. 1475), p. 25. For a list of contemporary manuscripts with known dedicatees and owners, see Alden, Songs, Scribes, and Society, p. 61, n. 197.

9 Geneviève Thibault and David Fallows, eds., Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (Bibliothèque nationale, Rothschild 2973 [1.5.13]) (Paris, 1991). Fallows revised one of the chapters he wrote for this edition, “Placement des paroles,” and published it in English as “Texting in the Chansonnier of Jean de Montchenu,” in Songs and Musicians in the Fifteenth Century, Variorum Collected Studies 519 (Aldershot, 1996), essay X.

10 It is not possible to give a direct web address, but the images can be accessed by going to http://mandragore.bnf.fr/html/accueil.html and entering the manuscript call number, “Rothschild 2973”. The next screen has links to “Images” (102 single fol. images) and “Légendes” (keyword information on each leaf).

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accuracy as well as indicating the manuscript’s diminutive proportions. But what these disembodied single leaves fail to give is any sense of the chansonnier as an entity. This is where the facsimile comes into its own.

Inevitably, facsimiles will come to replace some originals, when conservation becomes impossible, and it would be our dream always to be as well served as we are with this reproduction of the Chansonnier Cordiforme. But while this facsimile asserts its fidelity to the original, certain editorial initiatives were nonetheless taken. For instance, none of the gilding at the edges of the leaves remains visible on the original, but it is brought back to life on the facsimile (Plate 2).

Publicity brochures need make no great claims to scholarship, but when promoting a true-to-life facsimile, we might hope to take what we see on good faith. But one would search the facsimile, and indeed the manuscript, in vain for an opening that resembles the image shown in the promotion materials (Plates 1 and 3). The “opening” shown in this promotional image comprises, on the recto, the leaf that includes the coat of arms identifying Jean de Montchenu as the manuscript’s owner, along with double-faced Fortune on her wheel, Cupid, and a lady in contemporary dress.11 The facing verso has the discantus (top voice) and beginning of the contratenor of the popular song J’ay pris amours. But in the manuscript, the Allegory of Fortune leaf follows immediately after the index (Plate 4). Perhaps the bleed-though of a later owner’s monogram, “GLP,” on the previous leaf was deemed too unsightly, or the final page of the index dull. The image selectors could have used all of J’ay pris amours (Plate 5), but interest in painterly expertise seems to have taken precedence over musical content and factual representation.

Vicent García and the American distributor OMI (Old Manuscripts and Incunabula - Specialists in Facsimile

11 For further details, see Jean Porcher, “Historical Notice,” in

Fallows, Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (ca. 1475), pp. 23–33.


Editions) both describe the Chansonnier Cordiforme as having elaborate borders throughout.12 In fact, this manuscript, like other contemporary songbooks, was decorated in several different artistic styles, and the decoration is incomplete. Evidence of protracted completion provides important information regarding the original circumstances of production and the manuscript’s later usage. But while such matters are of great social, historical and codicological interest, they are perhaps of less concern to potential buyers of facsimiles.

One of the characteristics of high-quality facsimiles is that no detail of the original book’s material form is omitted in the replica volume. To this end, manufacturers engage in a laborious process of production that in many ways echoes the painstaking work undertaken by medieval book makers. It took ten years for the Swiss publisher Faksimile Verlag to produce its replica edition of the Book of Kells.13 Teams of specialists undertook numerous trips to Dublin, with proofs in hand. The resulting facsimile is faithful even to the extent of reproducing inkblots, wax stains, scratches, sewing repairs, and holes in the original parchment.

As with the other publishers in this market, Faksimile Verlag’s reproductions are all issued with commentary volumes, designed to instruct readers on “how to view the pictures and read the original text in the proper way.”14 The model here, both of scholarship and reproduction, is one of fixity. There is a finite goal: a full understanding of the codex in question. Such commentary volumes are not offered as part of an ongoing scholarly dialogue concerned with historical documents. The purpose of facsimiles seems, on the contrary, to imbue the original manuscripts with eternal life. By their

12 http://www.vgesa.com/vgeman118.htm and

http://www.omifacsimiles.com/brochures/montchen.html. 13 The Book of Kells: MS 58 Trinity College Dublin, commentary

edited by Peter Fox (Luzern: Faksimile Verlag, 1990). 14 See Faksimile Verlag,

http://www.faksimile.ch/frame_kommentar_e.html.

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very nature, facsimiles take manuscripts outside of historical time. The aging of the original is replicated up to the point at which the photographs were taken, but the clock stops there.

Even if the verisimilitude of facsimile to original is near to exact at the time of issue, a true likeness would need to be rephotographed at regular intervals to reflect the likely faster rate of deterioration in the original. Of course this is highly impractical, not the least because photographing a manuscript itself takes a toll. But side-stepping the actual passage of time may not pose an obstacle for purchasers of luxury facsimiles. The appeal seems to be in simply owning a representation of a rare object from the past. The facsimile offers escape from the present world to a place that is safely timeless. The ongoing state of the original manuscript is therefore of less concern; its function has been served.

In choosing to title the facsimile of the heart-shaped songbook “Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu” rather than “Chansonnier Cordiforme” and to promote it with an image of the cover emblazoned with manuscript’s call number, “Rothschild 2973,” the facsimile keeps the emphasis firmly on the owners of this extraordinary book (Plate 6).15 This emphasis probably reflects the market reality of producing a facsimile of topmost quality: publishers are naturally interested in fostering thoughts about ownership. Lacking any subvention to offset manufacturing costs, Vicent García Editores relies on consultation with distributers to assess the right balance between beauty, size, production challenges, and costs. The publishing house’s Director General, Fernando Grau Orellano stresses the need to be successful in their choices “because any mistake could be catastrophic.”16 According to Señor Orellano, facsimile customers are mostly

15 The title and call number appear only in publicity materials,

not on the actual cover of the facsimile itself. It is a curious case of digital editing.

16 I am most grateful to Fernando Grau Orellano for engaging in email communications with me; this information was sent on November 10, 2010.


businessman, professors, doctors, and lawyers, “people who love beauty and/or like to learn about art objects.” This client base has remained stable for buyers of luxury books, but the market for music facsimiles has shifted dramatically in recent decades. Whereas in the mid- to late twentieth century the main buyers were libraries and institutions, the situation is now reversed, with only around 10% of sales going to institutions and 90% to private clients.17

Spain holds a pre-eminent place in the heritage business, partly as a result of the multidisciplinary AR&PA (Heritage Restoration and Management) Biennial, hosted in the Feria de Valladolid exhibition venue. The 2010 meeting, devoted to the “Economics of Cultural Heritage,” attracted more than 30,000 visitors. These visitors would have included professionals working in conservation, protection, restoration, intervention, interpretation, management, and the promotion of “Heritage,” one aspect of which is the trade in facsimiles. In the United States, facsimiles are prominently featured at book fairs such as BookExpo America (BEA) and the Miami Book Fair International.18

A regular exhibitor at such events is the Barcelona-based publisher Manuel Moleiro.19 In 2010 the firm released a “quasi-original” facsimile of the Isabella Breviary (British Library, Add. MS 18851). Press coverage described this reproduction as more “clone” than facsimile.20 Indeed, Moleiro’s own publicity materials assert that the Isabella

17 Thanks to Steven Immel of OMI for communicating this

information to me in a personal email on October 15, 2010. 18 For further details, see, respectively, http://bookexpocast.com/

and http://www.miamibookfair.com/about/. 19 For access to catalog descriptions of books published by M.

Moleiro, see http://www.moleiro.com/en/pdf-catalogues.htm. 20 The term “quasi-original” derives from a short article in Le

Monde, “Des manuscrits ‘presque originaux’ à 10,000 euros,” from September 30, 2010; this description is widely cited in other press releases, such as http://www.efeamerica.com/309_hispanic-world/924557_facsimile-of-isabella-breviary-unveiled-at-miami-book-fair.html.

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Breviary is “integrally and identically reproduced,” with their edition constituting “an exact replica that can be considered as a new original.”21

Alongside “clone,” “quasi-original,” and “replica,” Manuel Moleiro uses “identical reproduction” as a descriptor for the books he produces. He deliberately eschews the term “facsimile” on account of this term’s common application to books of limited verisimilitude. To achieve books of astonishingly faithful replication, his firm combines “the most advanced contemporary graphic and printing technology with the precision of specialists in medieval art and handcraft work.”22 Moleiro employs trained experts to select natural inks, pigments, and hides; the paper used by the firm is made by hand and arranged in the same folio composition as the originals; and images are transmitted through a combination of printing techniques, including offset, silk-screen, embossing, and engraving. Like other specialty publishers, Moleiro seeks to reproduce the feel, odor, thickness, and density of the original paper or parchment, as well as the materials used in the original bindings. The result is “a new original, barely distinguishable from the one that popes, emperors, sultans and monarchs once held in their hands.”23

According to Faksimile Verlag, “it all begins with a book. Not a common book but an original work of art in

21 M. Moleiro produced several promotional flyers for their

reproduction of the Isabella Breviary; the quotations here are from a link in the Moleiro section of the website of the 2011 Maastricht Antiquarian Book & Print Fair; see http://www.maastrichtbookandprintfair.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=39&Itemid=68&lang=en.

22 Michael Knipe, “The Art of Perfection; Books,” Times [London, England] (23 Apr. 2001): 3.

23 This statement is from a link on the website of the Maastricht Antiquarian Book & Print Fair to a document (pdf) entitled “Moleiro Profile”; see http://www.maastrichtbookand printfair.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=39&Itemid=68&lang=en.


book form, which is unique in the world” (my italics).24 In the realm of deluxe facsimiles, a book’s “artistic” merit is primary, with its contents, usage, and relationship to other texts all matters of secondary importance. The target audience is largely made up of investors and “lovers of literary fine art.”25 Moleiro advises, “if you are interested in art, or wish to enhance and increase the value of the assets in your library, or make a deserving person a unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable present, [a facsimile] is the perfect choice.”26 In pronouncing their books as “art” suitable for collectors, these facsimile publishers place their products in the realm of connoisseurship.

Señor Orellano reports that sales of the Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu “are fine,” even if not as good as anticipated prior to the economic crisis. In his view, facsimiles are like old liquors, increasing in value with age.27 Again, the suggestion is that facsimiles are investments. For this reason, reproductions of rare books are themselves produced in limited numbers, many individually certified by notaries public. Moleiro restricts most publications to 987 copies (numbered) so that they can be “available to only the most fortunate.”28 Each Moleiro publication is described as a “first, unique, and unrepeatable edition.” Vicent García Editores is also eager to emphasize the rarity of their volumes, asserting the belief that even in the modern era “books will remain in the hands of a chosen few.” Their aim

24 http://www.faksimile.ch/frame_herstellung_e.html. 25 Knipe, “The Art of Perfection; Books,” p. 3. 26 This is the opening statement in Moleiro The Art of

Perfection, http://www.moleiro.com/en/pdf-catalogues.htm, see general_catalogue_vi_06.pdf.

27 Orellano is confident sales of the Chansonnier will catch up eventually, citing, as an example, the fact that their edition of Petrarch’s Trionfi (Valencia, 1998) sold out within six years (communicated in a personal email, February 18, 2011).

28 The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry was printed in only 550 copies, perhaps on account of its substantially higher cost price.

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is for each volume to be “a gem prized by collectors and the world’s greatest libraries alike.”29

Limited print runs affirm the exclusive nature of these books. But their celebrated rarity is at odds with the actual numbers: 1,380 copies were printed of the Chansonnier de Jean de Monchenu; the facsimile of the early sixteenth-century Song Book of Joan the Mad had a print-run of 999; the Squarcialupi Codex, 998; and the Las Huelgas Codex, 980.30 Scholarly monographs, by contrast, rarely have print runs exceeding 700 copies. This discrepancy reveals the belief that facsimiles are rare objets d’art to be something of a publisher’s construction.

In his magisterial book Likeness and Presence, Hans Belting argues that in the Middle Ages art for art’s sake did not exist.31 Books were decorated for a purpose: every image functioned in some capacity—to inform, to aid in devotion, to facilitate memorization, or to explain. This is where the primacy of the visual is problematic, most especially for a music book. As musicians know, reading a chansonnier is only one way to experience the book; hearing it or performing from one of these books is an experience of equal or perhaps greater richness. The interaction of the verbal, visual, and musical is the defining feature of these books.32

Chansonniers call for a kind of reading that can be simultaneously narrative, non-linear, pictorial, auditory, or

29 http://www.vgesa.com/vgepreseni.htm. 30 Details of the Song Book of Joan the Mad (Valencia, 2006), Il

codice Squarcialupi. Ms. Mediceo Palatino 87 (Lucca and Florence, 1992), and Códice musical de las Huelgas Reales de Burgos (Madrid, 1997, 2005) are all available on http://www.omifacsimiles.com.

31 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1994), originally published as Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichle des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich, 1990).

32 For further discussion on the interdependence of these elements, see Jane Alden, “Reading the Loire Valley Chansonniers,” Acta Musicologica 79/1 (2007), 1–31.


thematic. Even more than other manuscripts, they embody the ideal of a multifaceted object. When this new kind of diminutive songbook first gained popularity in the 1460s and ’70s, the center of production seems to have been the Loire Valley region of central France. The royal court was based in this region for most of these decades, bringing with it many court affiliates and fonctionnaires.

Makers of facsimiles wish us to believe that their recreated medieval books link modern readers to ancestral royal, noble, and omnipotent individuals. But in fact the later Middle Ages witnessed the development of a new class of bourgeois readers, comprised of recently ennobled professionals. In the Ancien Régime, these individuals were known as noblesse de robe (on account of their professional attire), by way of distinction from the older established nobility of the sword, the noblesse d’épée. In striving to emulate, and even outdo, the established nobility, these “men of the robe” sought to acquire manuscripts, historical writings, poetry collections, and works of art and sculpture. It was these professionals, to a greater extent than royalty or ancestral nobility, who were responsible for commissioning the greatest art works from this period, and it was they who were the chief bibliophiles.

David Fallows identified Étienne Petit, royal notary and secretary, as the dedicatee of the Wolfenbüttel Chansonnier (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, MS Guelferbytanus 287 Extravagantium), one of the earliest Loire Valley songbooks.33 I have elsewhere suggested that an inscription on the front flyleaf of the closely related Laborde Chansonnier (Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Music Division, MS M2.1.L25 “Case”), “par tout passe fume,” links this manuscript to a similar bourgeois family.34 I argue that the devise, perhaps

33 David Fallows, “‘Trained and Immersed in All Musical

Delights’: Towards a New Picture of Busnoys,” in Antoine Busnoys: Method, Meaning, and Context in Late Medieval Music, ed. Paula Higgins (Oxford, 1999), pp. 42–43.

34 Alden, Songs, Scribes, and Society, pp. 206–10.

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to be understood as “Fumée passe partout” (smoke goes everywhere), belonged to an important family by the name of Fumée, who were in royal service from the mid-fifteenth to the late sixteenth century. Adam Fumée (born c. 1416) served as royal doctor to Charles VII, Louis XI, Louis’s widow, Charlotte of Savoy, and Charles VIII. He also held the position of garde des sceaux (Keeper of the Seals or Minister of Justice) and served as Chancellor of France from 1492 until his death two years later.35 The Laborde Chansonnier may have been prepared for him, or acquired by him some years after copying.

The identifications of Petit and Fumée as chansonnier owners confirm that people from the upper middle classes and new nobility, rather than royalty and established nobility, were primary patrons of these manuscripts. Royal notaries and secretaries may have been particularly drawn to chansonniers on account of the active interest these individuals had in collecting and even writing poetry.

Several illuminated initials in these chansonniers represent figures in secretarial dress.36 Whether these were actual portraits matters less than the fact that they suggest a certain kind of readership. The inclusion of a didactic treatise at the beginning of the Dijon Chansonnier (Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 517), the largest of the Loire Valley Chansonniers, provides further information regarding its anticipated users: readers were not expected to be fluent in mensural notation. This treatise provides the contemporary counterpart to the commentary volumes

35 Jean Favier, Louis XI (Paris, 2001), p. 273; see also René

Coursault, La Medecine en Touraine du moyen-âge à nos jours (Paris, 1991), p. 28. His position as garde des sceaux is confirmed in a royal edict of 11 December 1493; see Abraham Tessereau, ed., Histoire Chronologique de la Grande Chancelerie de France (Paris, 1676), p. 65.

36 Three examples are given in Alden, Songs, Scribes, and Society, p. 211, figs. 5.12–5.14, with color images on the companion web site, www.oup.com/us/songsscribessociety, username Music1 and password Book5983.


issued with today’s deluxe facsimiles, intended to enable users to gain some understanding of the book’s contents.

Even if an owner of a chansonnier—contemporary or historical—lacks comprehensive musical literacy, he or she is able to gain entry into a conceptual performance of the pieces contained simply by owning the book or facsimile. The modest length and strophic forms of the songs enables less experienced musicians to follow them relatively easily and recordings are available for many if not all of the songs.

Publishers hope to entice potential customers by suggesting that they too can own a book once held by a duke or prince. But it should not be a disappointment for these readers to learn that the original patrons in many cases belonged to a social milieu rather similar to their own. In the fifteenth century, doctors, royal notaries, secretaries, and priests powered the luxury book market. And there is no doubt that modern facsimiles would not exist without the patronage of bibliophiles from these same professions.

The social, cultural, and intellectual world in which chansonniers were produced determined the meaning and significance of these objects for their first users, and the same is true today. Even as e-books become more widespread, the market for facsimiles seems likely to continue to exist, perhaps even to grow. Digital images serve scholars and libraries, not book collectors. For such readers, the individual and material identity of the book object is essential. As fewer scholars engage in manuscript work, and library and travel budgets are slashed, readership among scholars is actually less certain than the market for facsimiles. But it is my hope that even if the work of musicologists is increasingly underwritten by monied patrons who want to know more about the books they purchase in replica, the work will continue. Facsimiles hold these objects at a fixed point in time, but their existence may just ensure the ongoing development of scholarly discourse on the original manuscripts.

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Plate 1. Promotional photograph of the facsimile of the Chansonnier Cordiforme, published by Vincent García (from http://www.vgesa.com/vgeman118.htm).


Plate 2. Gilded leaves on the facsimile of the Chansonnier Cordiforme (author’s photograph).

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Quill and Pixel: Chansonniers and their Modern Readers

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