Tenors Lost and Found: The Reconstruction of Motets in Two Medieval Chansonniers*

The chansonniers of the Bibliothèque Nationale, f. fr. 844 and 12615, known as R and N, respectively, ¹ preserve one of the major collections of French motets for two voices. ² Dating from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, ³ these manuscripts are also important sources of the monophonie chanson and are among the few anthologies of thirteenth-century music that preserve both chansons and motets side by side. Other collections include the chansonnier Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, f. fr. 845 with its monophonie motets entés; ⁴ the chansonnier V; ⁵ the manuscript Ha, which preserves the chansons and polyphony of Adam de la Halle; ⁶ and Gautier de Coinci’s Les Miracles de Nostre-Dame, which is a lengthy narrative poem with musical interpolations of polyphony, chant, and chansons. ⁷