ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the varied function and meaning the song texts might assume in unquestionably learned literary environments. It begins with a manuscripts that is of the sources featuring poesia aulica. Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, Parmense 1081, places song texts in the midst of the most illustrious and influential collection of lyric poetry composed in fourteenth-century Italy, Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. The chapter considers the way in which Franco Sacchetti incorporates song texts into his Libro delle rime, it bears emphasizing that he chooses not to organize Ashburnham 574 by genre. It describes the equally exceptional phenomenon of song texts copied in a unified and discrete paleographic section. While Ashburnham 574 thus has much to tell us about Florentine musical life and about Sacchetti's own musical activities, what interests me here are its 34 song texts and the way in which Sacchetti incorporates them into his collection as a whole.
