ABSTRACT
Thus far, I have argued that any musical associations song texts may carry is ancillary to the meaning these poems assume within the pages of literary sources, even in manuscripts like Ashburnham 574 that are visibly aware of musical traditions. But might there be unnotated manuscripts in which such associations are central to a poem’s significance even in the absence of notation? This chapter proposes that scribes of one mid fifteenthcentury miscellany-Genoa, Biblioteca Universitaria, A.IX.28-employ four ballate attributed to Francesco degli Organi in good part to conjure up their composer’s famed musical talents and status as a leading intellectual in late medieval Florence. Through Genoa 28 we can thus address one fundamental question raised by Franco Sacchetti’s tangible interest in the musical lives of his song texts, illustrated in the previous chapter: how might we clearly identify and meaningfully articulate musical influence in non-musical manuscripts? Sacchetti’s song texts in Ashburnham 574, we have seen, are first and foremost literary objects, their meaning bound up with the narrative and organizational arch that shapes his entire output. Despite Ashburnham 574’s numerous musical marginalia, then, the answer to the question posed above lies not in Sacchetti’s autograph but rather in Genoa 28.
