ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses the 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. It compares the material characteristics of the notated sources to those of the literary sources and shows that the circulation of song texts with music contrasts starkly with their circulation sans notation. The chapter explores the cultural implications behind the material worlds these two groups of sources embody, arguing that they reflect disparate reading practices and consequently point towards different kinds of reception. It focuses on the practices of reading and writing that the literary sources reflect practices tied to vernacular reading among the merchant and artisan classes in Tuscany. Antonelli deserves much credit for discovering this fragment as well as several other traces of Trecento song in Bologna's Archivio di Stato.