ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that any musical associations song texts may carry is ancillary to the meaning the poems assume within the pages of literary sources, even in manuscripts like Ashburnham 574 that are visibly aware of musical traditions. It is relatively rare for literary sources to attribute poems with musical settings to their composers, and even rarer for them to do so while acknowledging the text's musicality. The chapter explains that scribes of one mid fifteenth-century miscellany such as 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. Genoa 28 was copied between 1462 and 1485 by two amateur scribes, Giovanni Benci and Filippo Benci, who were born into an affluent Florentine merchant family during the first quarter of the fifteenth century.
