ABSTRACT
We turn now from the close study of individual manuscripts to the broader context of copying and reading vernacular poetry and song in late medieval Italy. The preceding chapters have already alluded to a number of ways in which the literary sources differ physically from the notated canzonieri transmitting Trecento song. This chapter addresses these differences specifically through a thorough comparison of the two material worlds this repertoire inhabited, taking into account not only the most famous musical manuscripts, but all of the known sources with Italian origins that contain Italian-texted secular song commonly considered to be part of the Italian ars nova tradition.1 Many of the sources surveyed here are absent from textbook narratives of Trecento music-making. Our awareness of some-those that contain sacred as well as secular works-has been raised recently by Michael Cuthbert’s work on fragments and the transmission of sacred polyphony by Italian composers.2 Others, however, continue to hide in the margins of Trecento scholarship, their existence acknowledged and their contents known but their individual characteristics unexplored. Considering fragments, even scraps of parchment as small as those used to reinforce the binding in Perugia 15755 and the snippets of song copied in non-musical sources like Bologna 23 or Assisi 187 leads to a richer understanding of song’s material transmission than does analysis of the intact, or nearly intact, codices alone.3
