ABSTRACT
The contrast in Montecassino 871 between the haphazard texting of the French songs and the provision of Latin texts for the sacred material is even more pronounced. All but three of the 58 sacred items carry text throughout at least one voice, even where that text must have been well-known to any singer and where the music is so chordal that underlay is hardly an issue. The pieces chosen for Latinization are all the most familiar chansons from the Italian textless sources, and indeed the scribal procedure was probably less one of replacing French words with Latin, than adding them to already textless music. Chanson-type music is consistently untexted, particularly if the incipit is French; there are only a tiny handful of complete French texts among all the sources, though they contain much chanson music.
