The San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex: A New Source of Secular and Liturgical Polyphony (the Pavia Fragment)

Federico Saviotti

In 2019 two largely intact parchment bifolios containing late fourteenth-century polyphony, reused as book covers, were found independently in Milanarea libraries: one at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia (I-PAVu, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8) and the other at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan (binding of I-Mt, 1759). This is the first of two articles demonstrating that the two bifolios belonged to the same original manuscript, a compilation of Mass Ordinary movements and secular songs copied in northern Italy (ca. 1400). This first essay presents the fragment Pv, a bifolio containing five polyphonic anonymous unica. The pieces are written in fourteenth-century black notation using dragmae, including an unknown form of ‘dragma brevis’ and a case of half-coloration. The four secular works, two virelais and two rondeaux, are all for two voices with untexted tenor. The fifth piece is a fragmentary Credo of which only two texted voices remain. The essay contains a codicological and palaeographic description of the bifolio, a musicological study of the works, a linguistic and stylistic analysis of the French poems, and a critical edition of both texts and music. In the final paragraph, we offer a hypothesis on the origin of the fragment based on the data collected.

. . . . . . studi musicali . . . . nuova serie anno 14 2023 numero 01 Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia Fondazione Studi musicali. Nuova serie Rivista semestrale di studi musicologici Direttore Teresa M. Gialdroni Redattore Giacomo Sciommeri Comitato consultivo/Advisory Board Luca Aversano (Università di Roma Tre), Paola Besutti (Università di Teramo), Annalisa Bini (Accademia Nazionale di S. Cecilia, Roma), Stefano Campagnolo (Ministero dei Beni e Attività Culturali e del Turismo), Michele dall’Ongaro (Accademia Nazionale di S. Cecilia, Roma), Frederick Hammond (Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY), Margaret Murata (University of California, Irvine), Guido Olivieri (University of Texas, Austin), Klaus Pietschmann (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz), Guido Salvetti (Conservatorio “G. Verdi”, Milano), Álvaro Torrente (Universidad Complutense, Madrid), Lucio Tufano (Università di Palermo), Philippe Vendrix (Université François Rabelais, Tours), Agostino Ziino (Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”) Studi musicali nuova serie, anno 14, 2023, n. 1 Questo volume è stato pubblicato grazie al contributo concesso dalla Direzione generale Educazione, ricerca e istituti culturali del Ministero della cultura Progetto grafico Silvana Amato Composizione grafica e impaginazione Giacomo Sciommeri «Studi musicali» pubblica articoli riguardanti tutti i campi della ricerca musicologica in italiano, inglese, francese, tedesco e spagnolo. Gli articoli proposti per una eventuale pubblicazione possono essere inviati in allegato a studimusicali@santacecilia.it oppure a tmgialdroni@fastwebnet.it o gialdroni@lettere.uniroma2.it La pubblicazione è subordinata al parere di due studiosi specializzati cui l’articolo sarà sottoposto in forma anonima. 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Nessuna parte di questo periodico può essere riprodotta o trasmessa in qualsiasi forma o con qualsiasi mezzo elettronico, meccanico o altro senza l’autorizzazione scritta dei proprietari dei diritti e dell’editore ISSN: 0391-7789 ISBN: 978-88-32079-166 © 2023 Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia – Fondazione, Roma Tutti i diritti riservati www.santacecilia.it studimusicali.santacecilia.it studimusicali@santacecilia.it Sommario 7 Agostino Ziino Polifonia nella Cattedrale di Amalfi agli inizi del Trecento: un primo tassello, forse 15 Elena Abramov-van Rijk Hidden names in Trecento musical compositions 51 Antonio Calvia, Federico Saviotti The San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex: A New Source of Secular and Liturgical Polyphony (the Pavia Fragment) 139 Lorenzo Mattei «La mia cara Cecchina è…» un castrato. Gli evirati cantori e l’opera buffa 161 Renato Meucci Piero Maroncelli, patriota e musicista 175 Biographical Notes 177 Abstracts The San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex: A New Source of Secular and Liturgical Polyphony (the Pavia Fragment)* Antonio Calvia, Federico Saviotti In 2019 two largely intact parchment bifolios containing late fourteenth-century polyphony, reused as book covers, were found independently in Milan-area libraries: one at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia (I-PAVu, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8), by Giuseppe Mascherpa and Federico Saviotti and the other at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan (binding of I-Mt, 1759) by Anne Stone.1 This is the first of two ar* This paper is the result of a tight collaboration between the two authors; §1, and §6-7 are contributed by Federico Saviotti; §3-5 and §8 by Antonio Calvia; the introduction, §2, and the conclusions (§9) are by both authors. The research presented here is an integral part of the Advanced Grant project European Ars Nova. Multilingual Poetry and Polyphonic Song in the Late Middle Ages. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 786379). The authors would like to thank: Cecilia Angeletti, Claudia Bussolino and Elettra De Lorenzo for their help in retracing the history of the Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia; Francesca Toscani for sharing information obtained during the restoration process; Marco D’Agostino for his palaeographic expertise; Marco Malagodi and his team for the laboratory analyses on the fragment and the interdisciplinary exchange; Giuseppe Mascherpa for all his suggestions, especially regarding the linguistic analysis. We would also like to thank a number of people for reading and commenting upon the first draft of this paper: Margaret Bent, Stefano Campagnolo, Maria Caraci Vela, Michael Cuthbert, Michele Epifani, Andreas Janke, Maria Sofia Lannutti, John Nádas, Courtney Quaintance, Yolanda Plumley, and Anne Stone. Very special thanks go to Michele Pasotti and the ensemble La Fonte Musica for performing the ‘world premiere’ in modern times of most of the pieces of the San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex (Cremona, Aula Magna of the Dipartimento di Musicologia e Beni Culturali of the University of Pavia, May 26, 2022). 1 We learned of the bifolio brought to light by Anne Stone at a late stage in the writing of this essay. The two fragments were presented together at the conference Tesori di riuso. Nuove scoperte e ricerche intorno ai frammenti del Codice San Fedele-Belgioioso, Pavia-Cremona, 24-26 May 2022). The research on the relationship between the two fragments and on the original anthology (‘Codice San 51  ,   ticles demonstrating that the two bifolios belonged to the same original manuscript, a compilation of Mass Ordinary movements and secular songs copied in northern Italy (ca. 1400), which we have named the ‘San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex’. We are currently unable to determine whether the codex ever existed as a book or remained an unfinished project, as the incompleteness of the Pavia fragment might suggest. What is certain is that the two bifolios are larger than any other extant contemporary manuscripts of polyphony, and the quality of the parchment and the elegance of the hand make it clear that they were professionally copied for an institution that had considerable resources. These finds have the potential to expand significantly our knowledge of cultivated polyphony in late medieval Lombardy. This first essay presents the fragment held at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia (Pv), a bifolio ruled with fourteen red five-line staves per page, containing five polyphonic anonymous unica. The four secular works, two virelais and two rondeaux, are all for two voices with untexted tenor. The pieces are written in fourteenth-century black notation using dragmae, including an unknown form of ‘dragma brevis’ and a case of half-coloration. The first rondeau, provided with an alius tenor, has a rubric which allowed us to decipher an unusual treatment of coloration used to indicate an alternative cadence. The fifth piece is a fragmentary Credo of which only two texted voices remain. Analysis of the counterpoint and the remaining voices’ ranges show that the extant voices are likely the remains of a four-part setting. In §1, we present the discovery of the bifolio, its restoration, and the history of the host volume; in §2, we offer a codicological and palaeographic description of the fragment; §3 contains the inventory and a discussion of the characteristics of the new source in the context of the anthologies of liturgical and secular polyphony of the first decades of the 15th century; in §4 we provide an overview of the notational peculiarities of the bifolio and in §5 we discuss the stylistic aspects of the repertory. The text of the four monostrophic French poems has been linguistically and stylistically analysed (§6 and §7). We include in the body of the essay (§7 and Fedele-Belgioioso’) is currently taking its first steps and will be carried out by a team consisting of Antonio Calvia, Federico Saviotti and Anne Stone. In the present article we have not taken into consideration the very first data that are emerging from the comparison between the two fragments: they will be the subject of a further publication. Anticipations of the findings were announced at various international conferences and seminars: 49th Medieval and Renaissance International Music Conference (Lisbon, 5-9 July 2021); Poesia e musica in Italia dal Duecento alla fine del Quattrocento (Certaldo, 3-4 December 2021); All Souls Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music (Oxford, 17 February 2022); 50th Medieval and Renaissance International Music Conference (Uppsala, 4-7 July 2022). 52   -  §8) annotated critical editions of the four French songs and the Credo. The conclusion of this paper (§9) proposes a hypothesis about the milieus of the Pv fragment’s composition and reception, based on our analysis of musical and textual features.2 1. Discovery, restoration, and history of the host volume The bifolio I-PAVu, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8 (Pv) was discovered in October 2019 by Giuseppe Mascherpa and Federico Saviotti.3 The fragment was the cover for the canon law essay Tractatus de irregularitatibus by Bartolomeo Ugolini, printed in Venice in 1601.4 On the title page, an ex libris, apparent- 2 The following abbreviations are used: BdT: Alfred Pillet, Bibliographie der Troubadours, hrsg. von Henry Carstens, Halle (Saale), Niemeyer, 1933 (anastatic repr. a c. di Paolo Borsa e Roberto Tagliani, Milano, Ledizioni, 2013); cant: Catalogue of Ars Nova Manuscripts, Authors and Texts (under construction but available to the team as a working tool: www.europeanarsnova.eu); cmm: Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae; csm: Corpus Scriptorum de Musica; diamm: Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, https://www.diamm.ac.uk (last accessed September 9, 2022); emmsap = Electronic Medieval Music Score Archive Project, ed. by Michael Scott Cuthbert (last consulted by courtesy of the author in May 2021); jcuc: Je chante ung chant. An Archive of Late-Medieval French Lyrics, ed. by Yolanda Plumley, University of Exeter, http://jechante.exeter.ac.uk/archive/search.html (last accessed January 15, 2020); lml: Lexicon musicum Latinum medii aevi, digitalisierte Fassung im Wörterbuchnetz des Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Version 01/21, https://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/LmL (last accessed April 27, 2021); pmfc: Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century; rialfri: Repertorio informatizzato dell’antica letteratura franco-italiana, https://www.rialfri.eu/ (last accessed October 20, 2022); rs: G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzosischen Liedes, hrsg. von Hans Spanke, Leiden, Brill, 1955; tl: Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, hrsg. von Adolf Tobler und Erhard Lommatzsch, 12 vols., Berlin, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung (then: Wiesbaden, F. Steiner), 1925-2008; tml: Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/ (last accessed May 4, 2021). Further abbreviations: afr.: ancien français; mfr.: moyen français; C: Cantus; C i: Cantus primus; C ii: Cantus secundus; Ct: Contratenor; T: Tenor. For manuscript sigla, see Appendix A. 3 See the account of the discovery in Federico Saviotti, Antonio Calvia, Virelais, rondeaux e un Credo: cinque composizioni polifoniche inedite in un frammento di codice della Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia, «Textus & Musica», iv, 2021 (https://textus-et-musica.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/textus-etmusica/index.php?id=2194, last accessed October 20, 2022). 4 Tractatus de irregularitatibus Bartholomaeo Vgolino iurisconsulto, ex Monte Scutulo diocesis Ariminensis, ac Barbiani archipresbytero autore. Ad forum conscientiae, pontificium, ac ciuile perutilis, Venetiis, apud haeredem Hieronymi Scoti, 1601 (shelf mark: 43 D 3). Open-access images of the volume before the restoration are available on: http://www.internetculturale.it/jmms/iccuviewer/iccu. jsp?id=oai%3Awww.internetculturale.sbn.it%2FTeca%3A20%3ANT0000%3AN%3AUBOE010076 (last accessed October 20, 2022). 53  ,   ly from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, attests that the book was ‘recorded in the catalogue of the professed house of the Society of Jesus in Milan’ (Domus Professae societatis Iesu Mediolani Inscriptus Cathalogo). The society was suppressed in 1773 and its house, located at the church of San Fedele, was abandoned. Its book collection then joined those of other Jesuit institutions (namely, the Collegio Braidense and the novitiate house at the church of San Girolamo) at the Palazzo Brera.5 There the Braidense Library was established by the empress Marie-Therese in 1774, opening to the public only in 1786. During the twelveyear wait, collections of various provenance were arranged and catalogued, and duplicate books sent to other libraries.6 This was the fate of the Tractatus de irregularitatibus, which bears a black ink stamp from the Braidense. Because the Braidense already owned a copy of the work, it was transferred to Pavia before 1780, when it is mentioned in the first official catalogue. While the history of the host volume is easily retraced,7 it is virtually impossible to determine when and where the fragment became a part of it. When the fragment was discovered in 2019, only the hair side of the bifolio (fols. 1r-2v)8 was partially visible, displaying on both folios fourteen red five-line staves: folio 2v was blank-ruled, while folio 1r contained four Middle French lyric poems (two monostrophic virelais and two rondeaux), with polyphonic settings. All four works (text and music) are anonymous unica. The volume’s spine was covered by an additional parchment strip, which concealed part of the contents. The restoration of the parchment and of the volume was carried out in the winter of 2020 by Francesca Toscani and financed by the European Ars Nova project (ERC Advanced Grant 2019), headed by Maria Sofia Lannutti. After detaching the fragment from the binding, we discovered a fragmentary polyphonic setting of a Credo on the first folio’s hidden side (1v). The fourth folio (2r), like folio 2v, was blank-ruled. Marco Malagodi (Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, University of Pavia) and his team at the Arvedi laboratory for non-invasive diagnostics in Cremona, in collaboration with Marco Gargano (Department of Physics, University of Milan), completed a 5 See Giuseppe Baretta, Tra i fondi della Biblioteca Braidense, Milano, F. Sciardelli, 1993, pp. 16-18. 6 The early history of the Braidense is summarized in La Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense di Milano, a c. di Letizia Pecorella Vergnano, Milano, [s.n.], 1976, pp. 5-6. 7 For more details, see Saviotti, Calvia, Virelais, rondeaux e un Credo, §1. 8 Flesh (fols. 2v-1r) and hair (fols. 1v-2r) sides are easily discernible, as the follicles are well visible on the latter. 54   -  multi-analytic investigation9 on the fragment in the summer of 2021.10 Its results led to the recovery of vanished traces of writings and provided precious information about the bifolio’s materiality (inks and vellum), thus contributing to the reconstruction of its textual and musical contents and of its history. 2. Codicological and palaeographic description The case in which the fragment is preserved today contains, in addition to the bifolio (see Figures 1-4), fifteen other items derived from the restoration (see Figure 5): three small strips of parchment (about 50 x 95 mm); a large parchment strip used to cover the spine (about 365-370 x 169-175 mm); nine strips of paper which include one shelf mark label (70-74 x 128 mm), four blank strips with ‘1p’, ‘2p’, ‘3p’, and ‘4p’ written in pencil (20-30 x 70 mm), four reused strips from a printed volume11 (27-36 x 65-70 mm); two pieces of binding thread. The restored bifolio measures 512-518 mm in width and 375-379 mm (fol. 1) to 379383 mm (fol. 2) in height. On the lower edge, the parchment was trimmed along the fifth line of the fourteenth and last stave. The trimming of the longitudinal external margins removed a few letters and notes from the extreme final portion of folio 1r, and all the guide letters and clefs from the beginning of fol. 1v. Luckily, some of this material was recovered during the restoration, which revealed three rectangular parchment strips (‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’, approximately 49-50 x 91-96 mm) that had been cut from the original bifolio’s margins and reused as band covers for the host volume’s spine. 9 Including: professional high-resolution photography (gigapixels images) in visible light; ultravioletinduced fluorescence (UV-light) photography; high-resolution digital X-ray radiography; highresolution stereoscopic study; X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy (elemental analysis); reflection infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy (molecular vibrational analysis); hyperspectral and multispectral (NIR, VIS, UV) analysis. 10 Laboratorio Arvedi is part of the CISRiC, Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi e Ricerche per la Conservazione del Patrimonio Culturale, University of Pavia (http://cisric.unipv.it/index.php/ laboratori-afferenti, last accessed October 20, 2022). 11 Consiliorum sive responsorum D. Petri Philippi Cornei Patricii Perusini, Pontificii, ac Caesareique Iuris Consultissimi, vol. 4. There are five editions known to date (Perugia 1501, Venezia 1534-1535, Lyon 1553, Venezia 1572, and Venezia 1582); see Pier Luigi Falaschi, Pier Filippo della Cornia, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 36, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1988, pp. 772-777. At present, it has not been identified to which of these editions the fragments belong. 55  ,   Fig. 1. Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8, fols. 2v-1r (by courtesy of Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia – MiC) 56   -  Fig. 2. Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8, fols. 1v-2r (by courtesy of Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia – MiC) 57  ,   Fig. 3. Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8, fols. 2v-1r (UV-induced fluorescence; photography by M. Gargano) 58   -  Fig. 4. Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8, fols. 1v-2r (UV-induced fluorescence; photography by M. Gargano) 59  ,   Fig. 5. Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8, items derived from the restoration (by courtesy of Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia – MiC) 60   -  The original position of one of them (strip ‘A’) is confirmed by the presence of the guide letter ‘f ’ for ‘Factorem’, the first word of the top voice of the Credo. Strip ‘B’ was originally immediately below strip ‘A’, as confirmed by the C-clef of the fourth staff, a portion of the clef of the fifth staff, and small pieces of the beginnings of staves 4-7 (see Figure 6). Thanks to the reconstruction of the exact positions of two of the strips at the margins of the bifolio, we now know that the right margin measured approximately 50 mm. It is likely that the left margin was about the same size. The upper margin measured about 28 mm and shows no trace of longitudinal trimming. We can thus assume that the lower margin, which is (as mentioned above) completely lost, measured at least 28 mm, although it may have measured more than 50 mm, since lower margins can be up to twice as large as upper ones. Thus, with its margins, the new fragment must have measured, at a minimum, about [403] x [612-618] mm. That is to say, the original gathering or manuscript to which it belonged was comparable in size to expensive, deluxe illuminated manuscripts such as Sq (each folio about 400 x 285 mm) and Cyp (each parchment folio 380 x 260 mm). Strikingly, the Pavia fragment is larger than Sq, making it one of the largest known polyphonic sources dating between the end of the fourteenth century and the first three decades of the fifteenth century,12 even considering the extant fragments of large codices already known to scholars such as Berg589,13 BU596,14 and 12 Of the polyphonic sources copied in the first half of the fifteenth century, only Ca6 and Ca11 – which, however, transmit only sacred repertory – exceed the original size of the San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex. See Margaret Bent, Polyphonic Sources, ca. 1400-1450, in The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. by Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 617-640: 631, table 33.1. 13 Berg589 – containing secular and sacred polyphony, not as large as the Pavia bifolio but of significant size – has thirteen five-line staves per page and, according to Stefano Campagnolo’s estimates, could be ca. 328/332 mm high; private conversation and Un nuovo frammento di polifonia conservato alla Biblioteca Angelo Mai di Bergamo (unpublished paper presented at the conference The Nature of the End of the Ars Nova in Early Quattrocento Italy. Research Surrounding the San Lorenzo Palimpsest and Related Repertories, Firenze and Certaldo, December 16, 2017); first notice of the fragment was given by Dominique Gatté (March 8, 2017) in his blog Musicologie médiévale. 14 The fragment BU596 – considered of Italian origins and containing four French-texted pieces, three of them unica – must have been part of an item similar in size but slightly smaller. The page layout of the extant single folio (measuring 362 x 261 mm with nine six-liDne staves per side), however, is different from Pv; see Lodovico Frati, Frammento di un antico canzoniere musicale francese, «Il libro e la stampa: Bullettino ufficiale della Società Bibliografica Italiana», iv, 1910, pp. 15-17; Id., Codici musicali della R. Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, «Rivista Musicale Italiana», xxiii, 1916, pp. 219-242. 61  ,   Fig. 6. Reconstruction of the original position of the strips ‘A’ and ‘B’ Gr224-D.15 In light of this data, it is likely that the bifolio was part of a large-format codex commissioned by an important institution or patron.16 The vellum is in an overall decent state of preservation, despite some humidity spots on the external side and glue-damaged areas on the internal one, damage that only rarely makes the text partially or completely illegible. Material losses are limited to holes due to woodworms in the central part of the bifolio; some minor rips along the line where the parchment was folded inwards to better adhere to the 15 The size of the original folios of Gr224-D was ca. 450 x 280; see M. Cuthbert in diamm (https:// www.diamm.ac.uk/sources/137/#/, last accessed October 20, 2022). 16 For a rough distinction between «institutional manuscripts» and «personal compilations», which takes into account size-related considerations, see Bent, Polyphonic Sources, pp. 630sg. 62   -  binding board of the volume; and the external sections removed when the parchment was repurposed. This last is the case of the four trapezoidal mutilations to the four corners, intended to facilitate the folding-up, which caused loss of the text and musical notation on folio 1 (particularly, the residuum of the virelai iv and the incipit of the Credo’s top voice). The centuries-old adherence of two vellum strips also produced mirror image offsets17 of staves, notes, and letters in two different places of folio 1r: near the upper and near the lower external corners. In the former case, the reverse image clearly shows the segment of a stave and some notes and letters (Actor from FActorem) of the Credo, from the beginning of the first line and second stave of fol. 1v.18 The writing area must have been at least 350 mm high and 230 mm wide. Ruling lines are clearly visible throughout the page. The line spacing is 3.625 mm, slightly decreasing towards the lower edge, probably because of some deformation of the parchment (the last lines are also not properly orthogonal). Given the ninety-six extant lines, the overall number of lines, including the trimmed ones, must not have exceeded one hundred. The lines meant for musical notation were traced over in red (cinnabar, according to the chemical analysis) ink, alternating one stave – two lines – one stave – two lines, and so on. In a single case, the stave is not a pentagram, but a hexagram: this suggests that no rastrum was used. As the hexagram is the eighth staff on fols. 1v and 2r, the two halves of each bifolio must have been ruled together. Only folio 1 was filled in with transcription of text and music. The four secular pieces are on fol. 1r, while the two extant voices of the first part of a polyphonic Credo are copied on the verso of the same folio. Since both sides of fol. 2 are blank ruled, and the Credo is incomplete, it is very likely that our surviving fragment was not the central bifolio of a gathering. No foliation numbers are visible. However, given the excision of the upper right corners of the two rectos, we cannot exclude that the bifolio was originally foliated. On the other hand, since the upper margin appears intact except for its trimmed right-hand corners, it is unlikely that the folios ever contained composer attributions. 17 This is a common phenomenon in re-used medieval fragments. See, for example, Ca1328, a portfolio of detached parchment of different origins (cfr. diamm: https://www.diamm.ac.uk/ sources/271/#/, last accessed October 20, 2022). 18 See Saviotti, Calvia, Virelais, Rondeaux e un Credo, Fig. 10A and 10B. 63  ,   The chemical-physical analyses prove that the same iron-gall ink was used for all the writing, for the notation, and even the ruling. All texts and paratexts on fol. 1r were transcribed by a single hand. As confirmed by palaeographer Marco D’Agostino, the copyist used an Italian littera textualis and had a graphic education dating back to the second half of the fourteenth century.19 A single hand with similar features transcribed the Credo on fol. 1v. While the verso has many more abbreviations than the recto, this is normal for a Latin text, and it is likely that the same scribe was responsible for both sides. The size of the letters depends on their position. The letters are larger (long-line characters are about 4.5 mm high, while short-line characters are about 2.5 mm high) when the text is placed on a single line below the staves; they are smaller elsewhere. The music of all the compositions was probably copied by a single hand. The notator uses the parallelogram-shaped sign for the sharp with four dots also found in northern Italian sources such as ModA, R, PadA and Q15, which contain various kinds of dotted sharps. R has two different shapes, characteristic of the hands John Nádas calls ‘S’ and ‘V’.20 The first, with four dots in the corners, is also found in PadA. The second, with four dots in the middle of the sides of the parallelogram – found, for example, in R’s hand ‘V’ – is the one found in Pv, where it is sometimes used to embellish the finis punctorum double bar (a use found also in ModA). In the Credo, two kinds of signs for the sharp are found: in addition to the dotted sharp, there is also a smaller and far less visible shape without dots. The latter is used for b in the Ct’s signature and a few times elsewhere; the former predominates but is never used in a signature. There are also two forms of the flat: a rounded b shape and a double lozenge-shape (see Table 1).21 In both cases, there is no difference in meaning and occasionally the two shapes are used simultaneously in the two extant voices. The custodes, only visible on the side where the Credo is copied, are drawn obliquely to the staves with upwards and downward stems (see Table 1). 19 Marco D’Agostino, private communication. 20 John Nádas, The Reina Codex Revisited, in Essays in Paper Analysis, ed. by Stephen Spector, Washington, The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1987, pp. 69-114; repr. in Arte Psallentes. Studies in Music of the Tre- and Quattrocento, Collected in Honor of his 70th Birthday, Lucca, LIM-Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2017, pp. 17-54: 46. 21 See the critical apparatus below. 64   -  Tab. 1. Pv, fol. 1v, custos, sharp and flat signs a) custos b) dotted sharp c) sharp without dots d) round flat e) lozenge-shaped flat Several corrections inserted by the notator in the form of thin oblique slashes – mostly in order to cancel minim stems – have not been scraped off but left visible.22 But there is at least one trace of scraping in the text, connected to the misplacement of one syllable in relation to the music.23 It is impossible to determine whether the notator and scribe were one and the same, but the use of the same batch of ink suggests that the text and music were copied around the same time, and not too long after the ruling. The bifolio shows no trace of decoration, suggesting that the preparation of the manuscript was interrupted just after the transcription of text and music before the artists’ intervention. The French texts on fol. 1r lack any medium- or large-size capital letters.24 These were probably destined to be decorated, as suggested by the guide letters on the internal margin.25 22 Credo, C, bb. 48, 70, 80. 23 See virelai i, syllable -re of the word figure (shifted from b. 17 to b. 18). 24 We assume the same for fol. 1v, where the beginning of each line was cut away by the trimming. 25 A guide letter is visible on fol. 1v; see (above) the description of the three parchment strips, belonging to the external margin, recovered during the restoration. Where the guide letters are not visible with the naked eye, high resolution and multispectral imaging have revealed them. 65  ,   3. A new source of secular and liturgical polyphony The newly discovered fragment held at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia can be added to the list of manuscripts containing both secular and liturgical polyphony of the long fourteenth century. Table 2 contains list of its contents, indicating, for each composition: folio, number of the piece, incipit, genre, layout of the voices, clefs, and Textierung. The four French-texted compositions are for texted cantus and textless tenor. Both the extant voices of the Credo are provided with text. Tab. 2. Contents of the bifolio FOL. N. INCIPIT GENRE LAYOUT OF THE VOICES (CLEFS) TEXTIERUNG NOTES 1r i La nuit que est tant obscure Virelai C 1-2 (c2) T 3 (f2) 21 Anon. ii Se la playsant chiera veoyr povoye Rondeau C 4-5 (c2) T 6 (f2/c4) alius T 7 (f3) 21 + alius T Anon. alius T: the scribe corrects the clef from f2 to f3 iii Aves moy Rondeau C 8-9 (c2) passoyt un flour T 10 (f2/c4) 21 iv Tant yolis et gay Virelai sans melenconie C 11-13 (c1) T 14 (f1/c3) 21 Anon. v Factorem / [O] mnipotentem C 1-7 ([c1] and c1) Ct? 8-14 (f2/c4 and [f2/c4]) 22 [44?] Anon. Fragm. 1v Credo 2r – blank ruled 2v – blank ruled Secular and liturgical polyphonic works appear together in many manuscripts and fragments from the second half of the fourteenth century and the first three decades of the fifteenth century, originating mainly in northern Italy or brought to Italy as early as the fourteenth century. French-texted formes fixes 66   -  were copied along with polyphonic repertory of the Ordinarium Missae in anthologies such as Iv26, Lo27, Pit28, Stras29, ModA30, T.iii.231, Cyp32, Q1533, Ox21334, 26 Iv (brought from France to Ivrea as early as the fourteenth century) contains a repertory that most likely does not date later than ca. 1360; see Karl Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare 115: Studies in the Transmission and Composition of Ars Nova Polyphony, Ottawa, Canada, Institute of Mediæval Music, 1997, especially pp. 75-79. 27 On ms. Lo, see Giuliano Di Bacco, Alcune nuove osservazioni sul codice di Londra (British Library, MS Additional 29987), «Studi musicali», xx, 1991, pp. 181-234. 28 Especially fols. 131-138. On the manuscript, see John Nádas, The Transmission of Trecento Secular Polyphony: Manuscript Production and Scribal Practices in Italy at the End of the Middle Ages, Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1985, pp. 216-290. 29 See Charles Edmond Henri de Coussemaker, Le Manuscrit musical M 222 C 22 de la Bibliothèque de Strasbourg (XV siècle), Bruxelles, [1970] (“Thesaurus musicus” 2). 30 See, for example, the sequence of compositions, partly attributed or attributable to Matteo da Perugia, included on ModA, fols. 5v-11r: Credo; Ct for a rondeau by Guillaume de Machaut; ballade; Credo; virelai; Gloria; rondeau; virelai. See the inventory in Anne Stone, The Manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5.24: Commentary, Lucca, LIM-Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2005, pp. 112-113. 31 The liturgical compositions form more or less compact blocks in what remains of the original anthology that constitutes T.iii.2; the same copyist (‘A’) inserts, on fols. 7v-12r, two pieces in French (Ou est amor? and Je suj si las venus), the multilingual ballata Deus deorum Pluto or te rengratio by Antonio Zacara da Teramo, followed by a series of five polyphonic Credos. On T.iii.2, see Il Codice T.III.2 / The Codex T.III.2. Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, a c. di Agostino Ziino, Lucca, LIM-Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1994; Lucia Marchi, Intorno all’origine del codice T.III.2 della Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino, «Recercare», xv, 2003, pp. 7-37, especially pp. 9-13. 32 The repertory of anonymous unica of the main corpus of Cyp is strictly divided into gatherings: Gathering ii contains liturgical polyphony; Gathering iv and v contain French fixed forms ordered by genre. According to Kügle, the ms. was copied by Italian scribes, perhaps around the middle of the fourth decade of the fifteenth century under the guidance of Jean Hanelle, for the Avogadro family of Brescia, whose coat of arms it would bear; see most recently Karl Kügle, Glorious Sounds for a Holy Warrior: New Light on Codex Turin J.II.9, «Journal of the American Musicological Society», lxv, 2012, pp. 637-690 and bibliographical references found therein. 33 On Q15, copied in Padua (1420-1425) and Vicenza (ca. 1430-1435), see Margaret Bent, Bologna Q15. The Making and Remaking of a Musical Manuscript. Introductory Study and Facsimile Edition, 2 vols., Lucca, LIM-Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2008. Compared to Mass movements and motets, the songs of Q15 are relatively small in number. The extant nineteen French-texted pieces were inserted as page-fillers in the final part of stage i (before 1425), in blank spaces of folios that contained Mass movements or motets. Among the pieces identified from the detached and pasted capitals, the only Italian-texted song, Ciconia’s Con lagreme (capital n. 20, pasted to fol. R114r/A117r), was originally entered at the top of a page and then eliminated from the manuscript. See Bent, Bologna Q15, vol. 1, pp. 159-160 and 256. 34 On Ox213, copied in the Veneto between the third and fourth decade of the fifteenth century, see Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Canon. Misc. 213, ed. by David Fallows, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1995. 67  ,   BU221635 and Trém36 – to mention a few. In addition, the existence of numerous fragments with comparable characteristics – such as PadA, Ravi3, Gr224-D, and Cor2 – shows that this type of musical anthology, in which the two repertories are copied in close proximity, was extremely widespread.37 In some sources including the two repertories, the French-texted pieces are probably page-fillers, while in 35 On BU2216, see Heinrich Besseler, The Manuscript Bologna Biblioteca Universitaria 2216, «Musica Disciplina», vi, 1952, pp. 39-65; Il Codice Musicale 2216 della Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, a c. di F. Alberto Gallo, Bologna, Forni, 1968-1970, 2 vols. (“Monumenta Lyrica Medii Aevi Italica” 3, Mensurabilia), and more recently Ralph P. Corrigan, The Creation of a Fifteenth-Century Music Book: The Scribe as Producer, Owner and User, in Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners, and Users of Music Sources Before 1600, ed. by Lisa Colton and Tim Sheppard, Turnhout, Brepols, 2017, pp. 97-132. 36 From the index of Trém, dated 1376, we know that the collection, now lost with the exception of one bifolio, must have featured French pieces and polyphonic pieces for the Mass in close proximity. See, for example, the Credos indexed as Patrem omnipotentem at numbers xxxvii and xlv; under the same index numbers (relating to the folios or page openings), we also find French-texted songs. See Margaret Bent, Indexes in Late Medieval Polyphonic Music Manuscripts: A Brief Tour, in The Medieval Book: Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, ed. by James H. Marrow, Richard A. Linenthal, and William Noel, Houten, Hes & DeGraaf, 2010, pp. 196-207: 199. See also Ead., A Note on the Dating of the Trémoille Manuscript, in Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer, ed. by Bryan R. Gillingham, Paul A. Merkley, Ottawa, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1990, pp. 217242; repr. with updates in Ead., The Motet in the Late Middle Ages, New York, forthcoming, chap. 31 (we thank the author for allowing us to read a prepublication version of this essay). The transcription of the 114 pieces in the index of the ms., prepared by Jason Stoessel, can be read in diamm (https:// www.diamm.ac.uk/sources/98/#/, last accessed April 27, 2021). 37 According to the survey published by Cuthbert, nineteen Italian fragments and manuscripts (excluding the main anthology collections) with these characteristics were known up to 2016; see Michael Scott Cuthbert, Trecento Fragments and Polyphony beyond the Codex, Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2006, table 1.6, p. 28. Some of these contain polyphonic settings of Mass chants and French-texted compositions: Ravi3 and PadA (especially Ox229 and Pad684). In addition to six sacred pieces, including the cantus of a polyphonic Gloria, Ravi3 contains the fragmentary virelai C’est le doulz iour en qui doit estriner; see Enzo Mecacci, Agostino Ziino, Un altro frammento musicale del primo Quattrocento nell’Archivio di Stato di Siena, «Rivista Italiana di Musicologia», xxxvii, 2, 2003, pp. 199-225; on the identification of the Gloria, see Michael Scott Cuthbert, Elizabeth Nyikos, Style, Locality, and the Trecento Gloria: New Sources and a Reexamination, «Acta Musicologica», lxxxii, 2, 2010, pp. 185-212, passim and pp. 194-195. Finally, mention should also be made of the manuscript V-CVbav, Urb. Lat. 1419, in which appears, alongside various settings of liturgical polyphony, the virelai Je port aimablemant composed by Donato da Firenze (of which, however, the musical witnesses preserve only the text’s incipit); the text of the virelai can be read in Gianfranco Contini, Poesie francesi dalla Pavia viscontea, in Studi in onore di Carlo Pellegrini, Torino, S.E.I., 1963, pp. 61-80; new edition in Id., Frammenti di filologia romanza. Scritti di ecdotica e linguistica (1932-1989), a c. di Giancarlo Breschi, Firenze, SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, vol. ii, pp. 1061-1085: 1074-1075. 68   -  others, they are part of the first or only layer of copy: Pv seems to fall into this second category, but caution is necessary since we are dealing with a fragmentary source. In the following pages, we analyse the five newly discovered unica,38 which should be read with the help of the edition provided in §§7 and 8. Since the musical notation of the four secular compositions is essentially identical, the account of their notational characteristics is grouped together. 4. Notation The notation of the four French-texted pieces shows remarkable uniformity (see Table 3): all are written in tempus imperfectum with prolatio maior and make use of the dragma. The first piece is the only one to feature the use of semi-coloration, found only once at the beginning of the cantus in the form of a brevis semivacua. The Credo is written in tempus imperfectum with prolatio minor. The figure of the dragma (or fusiel), introduced during the first half of the fourteenth century, is firstly mentioned by Jacobus in his Speculum musicae.39 38 We have searched for possible further attestations for the four French-texted unica using the tools currently available; in addition to editions and catalogues, the following databases are worth mentioning: cant, diamm, jcuc. Finally, the numerous unidentified French-texted songs (including rondeaux and virelais) in SL – reported by Janke and Nádas – were also checked without any results; see The San Lorenzo Palimpsest. Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo Ms. 2211, ed. by Andreas Janke and John Nádas, vol. i: Introductory Study, vol. ii: Multispectral Images, Lucca, LIM-Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2016; namely, for the unidentified compositions, see vol. i, Appendix C, and the inventory, pp. 49-89. 39 See Speculum musicae, book vii, chap. xxiv, 4-9; Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae, ed. by Roger Bragard, American Institute of Musicology, 1973 (“CSM” 3,7); tml: https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/JACSP7 (last accessed May 4, 2021). The dragma is discussed by Apel in the chapters on ‘mixed’ and ‘mannered’ notation of his handbook; see Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900-1600, Cambridge (Ma), The Medieval Academy of America, 1953, pp. 392-393 and the table at p. 405. A list of French and Italian theoretical writings (from the late fourteenth to the early fifteenth century) which mention the figure of the dragma can be found in Jason Stoessel, Symbolic Innovation: The Notation of Jacob de Senleches, «Acta Musicologica», lxxi, 2, 1999, pp. 136-164, table at p. 149. The figure is not alien to the fourteenth-century Florentine repertory; Gehring has suggested that the use of hollow notes, in the tradition of Francesco Landini’s works, is indicative of a later trend than the use of the dragma; see Julia Gehring, Die Überlieferung der Kompositionen Francesco Landinis in Musikhandschriften des späten 14. und frühen 15. Jahrhunderts, Hildesheim, Olms, 2012 (“Musica Mensurabilis” 5), pp. 35-45. On its use in SL, and in particular in the works of Piero Mazzuoli and Giovanni Mazzuoli, see Andreas Janke, Die Kompositionen von Giovanni Mazzuoli, Piero Mazzuoli und Ugolino da Orvieto im San-Lorenzo-Palimpsest (ASL 2211), Hildesheim, Olms, 2016 (“Musica Mensurabilis” 7), pp. 33-44. 69  ,   Tab. 3. The notation of the French-texted pieces of Pv Meaning (with respect to the breve of the tempus imperfectum with prolatio maior) Notes semicolor 5/6 of breve Virelai i, C 1. The value of 5/6 of breve can also be obtained by imperfectio ad partem; but in this case it is necessary to use the color because the figure adjacent to the initial breve is a semibreve. dragma 2/6 of breve ‘dragma brevis’ 4/6 of breve FIGURAE flag to the right semiminima 70   -  syncopation within the breve The third minim is affected by alteratio; the first one makes imperfecta the final semibreve. Virelai i: C 27 (and 27*: clos). The copyist here prefers not to use the sequence M M D D employed elsewhere. Although he does not explain its value, Jacobus includes the dragma in his discussion of the considerable differences of opinion (magna dissentio) among the ‘moderns’ regarding the different ways of graphically representing the semibreve. The mensural meaning of the dragma was not stable during the fourteenth century.40 In the Pavia fragment it is unequivocally used as a semibreve made of two minims.41 Virelai i and rondeau iii not only use the simple dragma, bearing the value of two minims (D), but also a particular form of brevis with upward and downward stems (B). As far as we know, the brevis-shaped dragma – used in the precise sense 40 See lml, s.v. ‘Dragma’. 41 As regards the meaning of the dragma in the Pv fragment, the value of two minims is first attested in Coussemaker’s Anonymous iii (post 1320): «Item nota quod quaedam sunt semibreves quae caudantur a parte superiori et inferiori, ut patet hic. D D D D D D. Et tales notulae sic caudatae dragmae vocantur, gallice fuises, et non possunt aliquo modo valere nisi duas minimas». Other occurrences datable to the first half of the fourteenth century are listed in lml (ad vocem). The exact meaning is found in the second half of the century in the Tractatus figurarum: «Item minima caudata superius et inferius valet tantum quantum semibrevis imperfecta, id est duas minimas, et hoc satis commune ut hic D D D ». For the Anonymous iii (F-Pnm, lat. 15128), see Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, ed. by Gilbert Reaney, André Gilles, and Jean Maillard, American Institute of Musicology, 1964 (“cms” 8), pp. 84-93: 88; for the Tractatus figurarum, see Tractatus figurarum, ed. and trans. by Philip E. Schreur, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p. 84. The treatise is transmitted in a total of fourteenth witnesses, the oldest of which (Us-Cn, Case MS 54.1), copied in Pavia, is dated 2 October 1391; for the sake of brevity, see the bibliography mentioned in Anne Stone, Lombard Patronage at the End of the Ars Nova: A Preliminary Panorama, in The End of the Ars Nova in Italy: The San Lorenzo Palimpsest and Related Repertories, ed. by Antonio Calvia, Stefano Campagnolo, Andreas Janke, Maria Sofia Lannutti, John Nádas, Firenze, Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2020 (“La Tradizione Musicale” 21; “Studi e testi” 12), pp. 217-252: 250. Other possible meanings of the dragma are also discussed in Karl Kügle, The Notation of Codex Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare 115, in Le notazioni della polifonia vocale dei secoli IXXVII, a c. di Maria Caraci Vela, Daniele Sabaino, Stefano Aresi, Pisa, ETS, 2007, pp. 233-240: 238-239. 71  ,   explained below – was never mentioned by theorists nor found in any musical source. It is thus a unique occurrence in the history of medieval notation – in linguistics, it would be called a hapax.42 We have given this new figure the name of ‘dragma brevis’, which alludes to the fact that it must be understood as double in value in relation to the simple dragma. Although not supported by a theoretical background, the meaning of the dragma brevis can be easily inferred from its context. The simple dragma is used in groups of three figures (sometimes non-contiguous) to be read in proportio sesquialtera at the level of the semibreve (D D D in place of S S), as perhaps happened in the rondeau D’Amours, d’ame et d’amant, described by the anonymous De musica mensurabili of the ms. V-CVbav, Barb. lat. 307 (from ca. 1360 or ca. 1380 according to lml).43 42 The notational system proposed by Giorgio Anselmi in his De musica – never adopted in the repertory – includes a graphic form identical to the new figure of the Pavia fragment (we thank Anne Stone for bringing this occurrence to our attention) but used with a different meaning. Anselmi’s treatise was written in 1434 and uniquely transmitted in the ms. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, H 233 inf., fols. 5r-48r, a codex that belonged to Franchino Gaffurio and was glossed by him. The figure, called ‘semibrevis media’, appears on fol. 46v; see Georgii Anselmi Parmensis, De musica, a c. di Giuseppe Massera, Firenze, Olschki, 1961. Even if we are not dealing with the same system, the possible connection with Anselmi – who is thought to have studied in Pavia at the turn of the fifteenth century – is another clue to be taken into great consideration in our future research; see the entry by Liliana Pannella, Giorgio Anselmi senior, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 3, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1961, pp. 377-378. 43 In the anonymous treatise De musica mensurabili (Coussemaker’s pseudo-Theodoricus de Campo, incipit «Omnis ars sive doctrina») a lost rondellus is mentioned, in which dragmae appear («dragmae vocantur, gallice fusiel»): «Alii quidam praedictas signaverunt deorsum et desursum dantes talibus notulis valorem semibrevis imperfectae, prout in rondello: D’Amours, d’ame et d’amant. Hae parum fuerunt in usu; et adhuc a quibusdam ponuntur, quae ab ipsis dragmae vocantur, gallice fusiel: D ». Reference edition: De musica mensurabili, ed. by Cecily Sweeney; De semibrevibus caudatis, ed. by André Gilles and Cecily Sweeney, American Institute of Musicology, 1971 (“CSM” 13); Coussemaker’s reading was Douce dame d’amour, but in the most recent transcription from the single witness Barb. Lat. 307 (see fol. 24r), prepared for the tml by Oliver B. Ellsworth, the diplomatic transcription of the incipit has been correctly given as Damours damnne et damant. The three editions mentioned can be read in the tml at the following URLs: https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/CAMDEM (Coussemaker); https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/ANODEM (Sweeney); https://chmtl.indiana. edu/tml/14th/ANOMUSI (Ellsworth). Vivarelli has argued that the De musica mensurabili can be associated with a late fourteenth-century Neapolitan tradition of music theory; see Carla Vivarelli, «Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris» un trattato napoletano di ars subtilior?, in L’Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento VII, «Dolci e nuove note». Atti del quinto convegno internazionale in ricordo di Federico Ghisi (1901-1975) (Certaldo, 17-18 dicembre 2005), a c. di Francesco Zimei, Lucca, LIM-Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2005, pp. 103-142: 134-142. The ms. Barb. Lat. 307 has been recently redated to ca. 1360; see Francesca Manzari, Jason Stoessel, The intersection of Anglo-French cul- 72   -  At T 26 of virelai i (D B), the dragma bears the value of one third of a breve, and the following dragma brevis completes the breve unit, taking on the value of the remaining two thirds of a breve. The graphic shape of the new figure directly recalls that of the dragma, and its mensural meaning is further clarified by the fact that the succession dragma–dragma brevis is found sounding simultaneously with three dragmae of the cantus. The same rhythm would have been representable through coloration, with void or red notes (s b);44 and occasionally a mix of the two principles (coloration, and addition of stems) can be found (D b), for example in works by Paolo da Firenze and Francesco Landini.45 However, as will be seen here in the analysis of the rondeau Se la playsant chiera veoyr povoye, the scribe reserves coloration for another function altogether. The invention of the new figure provides homogeneity to the notation, applying the same expedient – the addition of upward and downward stems – to both the breve and the semibreve, to obtain the same result (diminution by one third). This invention is conceptually consonant with Prosdocimo’s claim that «possumus etiam per appositionem caudarum extraneas figuras fabricare» (‘we can also create new/unusual figurae through the addition of stems’).46 ture and Angevin illumination in a fourteenth-century Ars nova miscellany: a new dating for Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 307 and Sankt Paul im Lavanttal, Archiv des Benediktinerstiftes, Ms. 135/6, «Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae», xxv, 2019, pp. 283-331: esp. 295-296 and 298. Consequently, this dating would also retrodate the De musica mensurabili, which was considered datable to ca. 1380 (see lml). 44 The evidence of the Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris clearly shows how, in tempus imperfectum with prolatio maior, the use of color (with hollow or red notes) is considered analogous to that of dragmae («Quod inveniuntur quandoque semibreves vacue vel rubee, quarum tres ponuntur pro tempore imperfecto maioris prolationis, ut hic: s s s vel sic D D D [...]»); see Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris, ed. and trans. by Matthew Balensuela, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1994, p. 224. The anonymous author does not use the term dragma, but speaks of full figurae (black semibreves) with stems on both sides: «plene habeant caudas ex utraque parte»; Ivi, p. 226. 45 See Paolo’s ballata Benché partito da te ’l corpo sia (Pit, fol. 84r), Ct 5: D b. In another place in the same ballata, the dragma prevents the application of the rule known as similis ante similem perfecta est: D S MPM (     ). See also: D SPM (    ). Other examples can be found in Landini’s Nessun ponga speranza (Fp, fol. 40r; Sq, fol. 162v; Pit, fols. 116v-117r; Lo, fol. 75v; SL, fol. cxxviv/Ar) and Per la mia dolze piaga (Sq, fol. 143r). 46 See Prosdocimo de Beldemandis, Expositiones tractatus pratice cantus mensurabilis magistri Johannis de Muris, lxi, 52: «Possumus etiam per appositionem caudarum extraneas figuras fabricare, hoc est extraneorum valorum, et hoc bene et cum rationibus satis evidentibus, sed tales caudationes non erunt ita signa comunia sicut signa superius posita, propter quod dico, quod si tales figuras fabricare volumus, plura habemus presupponere». Shortly afterwards, having considered a number 73  ,   However, the use of the dragma brevis to notate a passage that lacks both mensural complexity and subtilitas is also an indicator of a certain notational experimentalism. It is impossible to say whether this was the work of the copyist or the author, but it is of considerable interest as an indicator of the context in which Pv and the repertory it contains may have originated. Since we find the figure also in the fragment Tr, we seem to be dealing with a notational habit of some diffusion rather than an ad hoc solution to a particular problem. While the contrivance may appear inconsistent with the use of the initial half-coloration, it is consistent and immediately understandable with the use of the simple dragma, from which it is derived by addition: D + D = B. Further explanation is needed regarding the use of semicolor (half-coloration or bi-coloration), a device hardly mentioned in theory,47 and quite rare in the actual repertory.48 The beginning of virelai i is characterised by the syncopation produced by a brevis semivacua, whose value is five-sixths of a tempus. That is to say, its overall value consists of the sum of one black half breve (one semibreve worth three minims) and one hollow half breve (one hollow semibreve worth two minims). of essential prerequisites, Prosdocimo adds: «Istis igitur suppositionibus sic premissis, potest quilibet studiosus infinitas, ut sic loquar, per se varias fabricare figuras, si supradicta bene examinare et calculare voluerit». See Prosdocimo de Beldemandis, Expositiones tractatus pratice cantus mensurabilis magistri Johannis de Muris, a c. di F. Alberto Gallo, Bologna, Università degli studi, 1966; online on TML: https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/15th/PROEXP (last accessed May 4, 2021). 47 The figura semivacua is mentioned in the Tractatus de cantu mensurali seu figurativo musice artis as one of the particular species of figurae used by the moderns («semiminima, fusiel, semifusiel, brevis plicata, cardinalis seu voluntaria, oblonga, vacua, semivacua»), in addition to the five already in use. In spite of the intention to explain all the figurae, in the continuation of the treatise there is no further mention of the semi-hollow notes; see Tractatulus de cantu mensurali seu figurativo musice artis (MS. Melk, Stiftsbibliothek 950), ed. by F. Alberto Gallo, American Institute of Musicology, 1971 (“CSM” 16); the text of Gallo’s edition is available on the tml: https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/ANOTRA (last accessed April 28, 2021). The only extant manuscript, datable to the fifteenth century, is believed to have originated in Melk; according to Gallo, the treatise dates from around 1350-1370. The Tractatus figurarum mentions the application of the principle (but vertically) to a very particular form of minim: «superius semiplena et inferius semivacua»); see Tractatus figurarum, p. 88; and Karen M. Cook, Theoretical Treatments of the Semiminim in a Changing Notational World c. 1315-c. 1440, Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2012, p. 240. 48 A systematic study of semicolor in black notation is lacking. A few mentions can be found in Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, pp. 432-435 (its use in white notation, is discussed at pp. 142-144). See also Margaret Bent, Principles of Mensuration and Coloration: Virtuosity and Anomalies in the Old Hall Manuscript, in La notazione della polifonia vocale dei secoli IX–XVII. Antologia, Parte seconda: secoli XIV–XVII, a c. di Antonio Delfino e Francesco Saggio, Pisa, ETS, pp. 73-96. 74   -  One of the best known examples of the use of semicolor in the repertory of the last quarter of the fourteenth century is found in the three-voice ballade by Senleches, Je me merveil / J’ay pluseurs fois, copied in Ch, fol. 44v.49 In the section in tempus imperfectum with prolatio maior (cantus i and tenor),50 the semicolor is used extensively: it is applied to the imperfect long, the breve and the semibreve, where it always fulfils the same function: namely 5/6 of the long, 5/6 of the breve, 5/6 of the semibreve (see Table 4). Tab. 4. The use of semicolor in Senleches, Je me merveil / J’ay pluseurs fois (cantus and tenor) c Longa semivacua H B+b MMMMMM+MMMM   c Brevis semivacua E S+s MMM+MM   c Semibrevis semivacua M+m FFF+FF   In Pv’s fol. 1r, the use of the semicolor also has a visual function. The brevis semivacua is not only the opening note of the cantus of the first song but also the very first figure on the folio, and it does not occur elsewhere. In this ‘simple’ composition, the opening syncopation, realised through semicolor, stands out like an (unfulfilled) promise of subtilitas. 49 See French Secular Music. Manuscript Chantilly, Musée Condé 564, Second Part: Nos. 51-100, ed. by Gordon Greene, texts ed. by Terence Scully, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1982 (“pmfc” 19); and French Secular Compositions of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Willi Apel, ed. of the literary texts by Samuel N. Rosenberg, vol. i, Ascribed Compositions, American Institute of Musicology, 1970 (“cmm” 53), pp. 172-173. 50 Cantus ii is differently notated; see Willi Apel, French Secular Music of the Late Fourteenth Century, Cambridge, ma, 1950, p. 9; Anne Stone, The Composer’s Voice in the Late-Medieval Song: Four Case Studies, in Johannes Ciconia. Musicien de la transition, ed. by Philippe Vendrix, Turnhout, Brepols, 2003, pp. 169-194: 179-187; Yolanda Plumley, Citation and Allusion in the Late Ars Nova: The Case of Esperance and En attendant Songs, «Early Music History», xviii, 1999, pp. 287-363: 321-326; Jehoash Hirshberg, Criticism of Music and Music as Criticism in the Chantilly Codex, in A Late Medieval Songbook and its Context: New Perspectives on the Chantilly Codex (Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, Ms. 564), ed. by Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone, Turnhout, Brepols, 2009, pp. 133-159: 153ss. 75  ,   5. Repertory The virelai La nuit que est tant obscure appears on the first three staves of fol. 1r. Apart from a small material lacuna in the cantus, the piece can be transcribed in its entirety. As already pointed out above, the beginning of the piece is characterised by syncopation triggered by the semicolor. Regarding the lacuna affecting the cantus at bb. 13-14, it can be argued that the opening of v. 4 (C 14) was likely preceded by a rest. Indeed, all the lines end with rests of the cantus: C 8 (end of v. 1), C 11 (end of v. 2), C 24 (end of v. 5). In the cantus, the first figure of b. 13, at the syllable que, is a minim a, not clearly visible to the naked eye (see Table 5). Since all verse endings are marked by octaves, we can assume that first note of b. 14 of the cantus was g or, less probably, G in unison (see Example 1). Since the lacuna prevents a clear view of the beginning of a possible syncopation, bb. 14-17 are problematic. Two types of reconstruction are possible (see Examples 2 and 3), although the second is more satisfactory. The line probably began similarly to vv. 2 and 3, with an upbeat minim preceded by two minim rests (like the repetition of the first syllable of v. 1 at b. 5). In the second hypothetical transcription, at bb. 15-16, we find the usual dissonance of seventh followed by sixth (a 7–6–5–F 7–6)51 caused by syncopation. The pre-cadential ascending third leap, a rare and distinctive feature, is found in exactly the same contrapuntal configuration (i.e. fourth-sixth closing on the octave) in the other virelai of the fragment, Tant yolis et gay sans melenconie, at bb. 25-26 and bb. 32-33.52 We have not found other occurrences of similar cadences within the corpus of the virelai,53 but it appears at least twice in the rondeau repertory: the anonymous En esperant que de vous amés soye copied in BU596, where this kind of progression – even if not exactly identical in terms of rhythm – appears in the final cadence (see Example 4);54 the same happens in the anonymous Hors sui ye bien de trestoute ma ioye copied in ModA and SL (see below, Example 11). 51 Throughout the essay, dyadic intervallic progressions are represented using the alphabetical system (A–G, a–g, aa–dd...) for the tenor, with superscript numbers for pitch intervals above the tenor. 52 Tant yolis et gay sans mele[n]conie, bb. 25-26: E 4–6–D 8; bb. 32-33: D 4–6–C 8. 53 The only comparable example – due to the jump of the third preceding the ending semitone movement in the cantus – is found in the anonymous virelai Mon tres douls coer, bb. 19-20, in a different contrapuntal context; ed. in French Secular Music. Rondeaux and Miscellaneous Pieces, ed. by Gordon Greene, texts ed. by Terence Scully, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1989 (“pmfc” 22), p. 157. However, this latter evidence is problematic because only two of the three possible voices remain; see Ivi, p. 185. 54 We are grateful to Michele Epifani for bringing this occurrence to our attention. 76   -  Tab. 5. Detail of the upper right-hand corner of fol. 1; a) and c) natural light photography; b) and d) ultraviolet induced fluorescence (UVIF) (photographies by CISRIC, Laboratorio Arvedi, Cremona) a) b) c) d) 77  ,   Ex. 1. Virelai i, La nuit que est tant obscure, bb. 8-15 Ex. 2. Virelai i. La nuit que est tant obscure, bb. 14-18, hypothesis 1 78   -  Ex. 3. Virelai i. La nuit que est tant obscure, bb. 14-18, hypothesis 2 Ex. 4. Rondeau En esperant que de vous amés soye, bb. 15-22 (transcription by Antonio Calvia) 79  ,   Virelai i has some stylistic features in common with other two-voice examples written in tempus imperfectum with prolatio maior.55 See for example the anonymous virelais E Dieus, commant j’ay grant desir transmitted in R (fol. 83v),56 where we find some stylistic traits of La nuit que est tant obscure: a tenor that proceeds predominantly in semibreves associated with a slightly florid cantus, frequent pre-cadential passages written in mutatio qualitatis, lines clearly separated by rests, melisma on the first syllable of the first line closed by a cadence on d, which anticipates the final cadence of the piece. The second composition on fol. 1r, the two-voice rondeau Se la playsant chiera veoyr povoye, is provided with an alius tenor. The piece, stylistically similar to virelai i,57 presents a formal peculiarity in the version with the proper tenor. Two paratexts, one for the tenor part and the other for the alius tenor, explain how the two voices should be sung in relation to the cantus: 1) Tenor Se la playsant. Vacue dicantur pro aperto, loco precedentium tam supra quam inferius; 2) Alius tenor de Se la playsant et non dicantur vacue. The first can be translated as: ‘Tenor of Se la playsant: for the ouvert,58 the hollow 55 See especially the anonymous virelais published in French Secular Music. Virelais, ed. by Gordon Greene, texts ed. by Terence Scully, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1987 (“pmfc” 21), nos. 17 and 28 (from R); nos. 19 and 58 (from Pit); nos. 20 and 62 (from Iv); nos. 31 and 45 (from BU596); no. 49 (from Ca1328); no. 59 (from ModA). See Mors sui, se je ne vous voy by Guillaume de Machaut and Donato da Firenze’s Je port amiablement; ed. in The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, First Part, ed. by Leo Schrade, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1956 (“pmfc” 2), no. 26, p. 185, and Italian Secular Music. Vincenzo da Rimini, Rosso de Chollegrana, Donato da Firenze, Gherardello de Firenze, Lorenzo da Firenze, ed. by W. Thomas Marrocco, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1971 (“pmfc” 7), nos. 9a, 9b, and 9c. 56 Ed. French Secular Music. Virelais (“pmfc” 21), no. 28. In tempus imperfectum with prolatio maior, the tempora written using mutatio qualitatis (T 7, T 18, T 21, T 37 and 37*; C 13, C 23, C 36) are achieved through coloration (s s s in place of S S). 57 Compare for example the first line’s final cadences of the following pieces: Se la playsant chiera veoyr povoye, bb. 8-10; La nuit que est tant obscure, bb. 6-7. Another similarity (though very common) is found in the concluding sonorities: final sonority D-d; ouvert E-e; clos D-d. 58 Pro aperto: ‘for the apertum’; the use of apertum as a substantive term is common (the same applies to clausum); e.g. Aegidius de Murino, Tractatus cantus mensurabilis: «Isto modo debet fieri Ballada simplex: in primo fac apertum et clausum, et ultimo fac clausum solummodo. Item Ballada duplex habet apertum et clausum ante et retro. Item Vironellus simplex habet ante apertum et clausum retro. Item Vironellus duplex habet dimidium apertum et clausum ante, et apertum et clausum retro. Item Rondellus habet apertum ante, quando finitur in ut, et debet esse decima; et quando finitur in la, debet este quinta, et retro clausum»; see Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series a Gerbertina altera, 4 vols., ed. by Edmond de Coussemaker, Paris, Durand, 1864-1876 (repr. Hildesheim, 1963), vol. 3, pp. 124-128, online on tml, https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/AEGTRA (last accessed April 29, 2021). 80   -  [figures] should be sung in place of the previous ones,59 above as well as below’.60 This means that in the sequence consisting of full and hollow figures, to perform the apertum (in vernacular ouvert or verto) it is necessary to sing the hollow figures in place of the full ones immediately preceding them. The specification «tam supra quam inferius» makes it clear that this rule applies to both voices. The second rule translates: ‘Alius tenor of Se la playsant, and the hollow [figures] should not be sung’. Since there are no hollow figures in the alius tenor, the second paratext is referring to the cantus part only, stipulating that when singing the rondeau with the alius tenor, one must skip the hollow figures of the cantus part. As a result, the version with alius tenor will follow the usual rondeau form, while the version with tenor will be an extraordinary form of rondeau with ouvert/clos endings in the first musical section. Example 5 shows how the two versions of the medial cadence work. The copyist has inserted hollow notes that must be sung simultaneously by cantus and tenor. In the first case, at the cantus, we have a succession of four minims and two dotted semibreves (see Table 6-a), alternating full and hollow figures (M m M m SP sP). Since the rule expressed through the paratext requires that the hollow notes be sung ‘in place of the preceding ones’, it will be necessary to perform e d e (m m sP) in place of d c d (M M SP) to obtain the ‘open cadence’. Similarly, to perform the apertum at the tenor (see Table 6-b), the hollow ligature (G F E) is sung instead of the immediately preceding full ligature (F E D). In so doing, one obtains a cadence for the apertum in both voices (see Example 5). The same cadence is not supposed to be sung when the alius tenor is used. The alternative tenor is in fact written without hollow notes and its canon also specifies «et non dicantur vacue», to reiterate that the hollow notes (of the cantus) are not to be sung. The version with alius tenor thus takes the form of a traditional rondeau without apertum and clausum. The version with the ‘normal’ tenor, on the other hand, requires, as we have seen, the use of an alternative ouvert/clos ending for the first section. 59 Loco precedentium: ‘in place of the previous (figurae)’. 60 Tam supra quam inferius: ‘as much above as below’. The specification indicates that the rule must be applied to both voices (cantus and tenor). The hollow notes are located in the first and third staves of the rondeau (fourth and sixth staves). Supra and inferius seem to refer to the arrangement of the hollow notes in the folio (and thus to the position of the respective voices), rather than synthetically to ‘upper voice’ (cantus) and ‘lower voice’ (tenor). In any case, the result would be the same. 81  ,   Tab. 6. Hollow figurae in the rondeau ii. Se la playsant chiera veoyr povoye b, tenor a, cantus Ex. 5. Rondeau ii. Se la playsant chiera veoyr povoye, bb. 11-13*, with tenor and alius tenor Since the rondeau form does not normally use alternative cadences, the question remains of how to establish the alternation between the e (ouvert) and d (clos) cadences. The normal function of the ouvert/clos alternation in the other formes fixes is to diversify the ending of a recently performed musical section when a new text is applied to it. Based on this criterion, the most plausible option seems that of performing the clos ending only when the A section is directly followed by the B section: that is, at the end of the second line and at the end of the tenth line (see Table 7). 82   -  Tab. 7. Rondeau ii. Se la playsant chiera veoyr povoye, version with tenor, possible succession of ouvert/clos endings Line Text Musical sections (version with tenor) 1 Se la plaisant chiera veoyr povoye A (bb. 1-13*)a 2 de cella chi serf m’amour 3 delivré seroy de dolour 4 et de Fortune che ansi me gravoye. 5 Certes ma complainte a li feroye 6 de liesse tornee en plour 7 [se la plaisant chiera veoyr povoye 8 de cella chi serf m’amour]. 9 Quant me sovient de vous, ma douce yoye, 10 y’en ay ansi tres grand douchour, 11 puis que y[e] avis voutre dolour: 12 se ce ne fust, bien croy que ye moroye. 13-16 Se la plaisant chiera etc. OUVERT/CLOS Clos (d) i (AB) Ouvert (e) ii (A’A) B (bb. 14-26) A’ (bb. 1-13) A (bb. 1-13*) Ouvert (e) A’ (bb. 1-13*) Clos (d) B’ (bb. 14-26) AB (bb. 1-13*, 14-26) iii (A’B’) iv (AB) a. Clos endings are numbered with *. The rondeau Aves moy passoyt un flour is stylistically compatible with the first two pieces of the fragment. The tenor moves mainly by semibreves and makes use of the proportio sesquialtera delivered by three dragmae (D D D), here always used in a pre-cadential function (see bb. 3 and 18). The dragmae are also used, again with the total value of two minims, in a precadential figuration to the cantus: b. 7 (M M D D). The cantus is written mainly in minims and semibreves, with semiminims in ornamentation. A textless musical segment begins section B (bb. 15-16, including the two upbeat semiminims at the cantus). 83       ,       At bb. 9-10, the tenor has a syncopation achieved using the dragma brevis ), in which the figura has the value of four minims. ( S ¸ M SPM    c S¸ M SPM Finally, in the cadence at b. 24, the e of the cantus should be emended to g: a7–6–G[8]. This is most likely a copying error due to the (common) third transposition. In the rest of the virelai the cadences in which the cantus is followed by a two-minim rest always lead to the octave.61 Moreover, the presence of an f # at b. 23 helps to clarify the cadential context. A certain propensity to repeat short melodic-rhythmic modules (see C 17 with upbeat; and its repetition a fourth below, at C 20 with upbeat) – sometimes in sequence (C 9 with upbeat, and C 9-10) – should also be noted (see Examples 6 and 7). In the second case (Example 7), the sequential repetition is grafted onto the tenor’s syncopation, making it an even more interesting rhythmic combination. In fact, the basic rhythmic-melodic segment covers the duration of four minims (M F F M M). Therefore, it is not repeated in the same position in relation to the mensural unit, but with a shift of one minim forward. The repetition thus simulates, at the cantus, a shift to prolatio minor of tempus imperfectum, with minim equivalence. The last virelai, Tant yolis et gay sans melenconie, is heavily damaged by a lacuna in the poetic text. The ambitus of the two voices and the final sonorities (G-g, with A-a for the ouvert) are a fourth higher than in virelai i. The b-flat in the signature of the tenor and the Phrygian cadences at bb. 5-6 and 38-39 reflect the characteristics of the ambitus. Although considerably longer (39 tempora), stylistically this last piece of fol. 1r is very close to the other three pieces. Except for a few notes in the tenor, the final measures of section A (bb. 19-21) are comparable to bb. 17-19 of rondeau iii and bb. 9-11 of virelai i, but they are written – not surprisingly (considering the ambitus) – a fourth higher (see Examples 8, 9 and 10).62 61 See bb. 4, 8, 11, 14, 19 and 22. 62 Compare also virelai iv, bb. 27-28 with rondeau iii, bb. 18-19. 84    -  Ex. 6. Rondeau iii. Aves moy passoyt un flour, bb. 16-20 Ex. 7. Rondeau iii. Aves moy passoyt un flour, bb. 8-12 Ex. 8. Virelai iv. Tant yolis et gay sans melenconie bb. 18-21 85  ,   Ex. 9. Rondeau iii. Aves moy passoyt un flour, bb. 16-19 Ex. 10. Virelai i. La nuit que est tant obscure, bb. 8-11 The central segment of the same melodic-rhythmic module, repeated in the three pieces in the cantus, is consistently retained (descending second – descending third – descending second – ascending third – ascending third – descending second),63 while the liminal portions are slightly modified. Since it seems unlikely that this similarity in melodic-rhythmic material is purely coincidental, we are inclined to consider it as a characteristic of a single composer’s style. The first six notes of this melodic segment are associated with the same rhythmic contour in Hors sui ye bien de trestoute ma ioye – a two-voice anonymous rondeau copied in ModA and SL – 63 The linear intervallic succession appears characteristic when considering that the exact same rhythm has been used. A research using emmsap has been done – coding the sequence as ‘-2-3-233-2’ (further specifiable as ‘3-2-3-233-2’ including the initial ascending third of Examples 8 and 10) – with no relevant occurrences matching the same rhythmic pattern. Numbers in succession indicate ascending melodic intervals; numbers preceded by ‘-’ descending intervals. On the possibilities opened up by melodic-interval research in emmsap, see Michael S. Cuthbert, Melodic Searching and the Anonymous Unica of San Lorenzo 2211, in The End of the Ars Nova in Italy, pp. 151-161, esp. 153-155. 86   -  both in the version with the first-pitch repetition found in the rondeau Aves moy passoyt un flour (bb. 16-17) and in the one with an initial third leap (see Example 11, bb. 5-6, “a” and bb. 24-25, “a’ ”).64 The cadence at bb. 25-26 (Example 11, “b”) closely resembles the rather distinctive cadence at the end of the first section of virelai i, bb. 18-19, mentioned above. On fol. 1v, two voices of a polyphonic Credo are entered. The upper voice begins with the text «[f ]Actorem» (first staff)65 and the lower voice with «[o]Mnipotentem» (eighth staff). The music ends, in both voices, with a syntactically and musically separate section which closes with the words «cuius regni non erit finis», although in the second voice six tempora of music (bb. 194-199) and the text underlaid to the entire last staff have been lost (bb. 194-220). The copying of the two voices is not abruptly interrupted, as would be the case if there were a material lacuna. Instead, their insertion was carefully planned and both were copied on the same folio up to the section that finishes with the cadence on «non erit finis», according to a well-studied mise en page found elsewhere in the polyphonic Credo repertory.66 It is highly likely that the final part of the setting, almost a third of the entire liturgical text,67 was in the following folios. Considering the remaining portion of music, in its entirety the piece probably amounted to about 300 tempora, not including the final Amen.68 64 ModA, fols. 13v-14r (page-filler on folios containing works by Antonello da Caserta). The rondeau is entered without text in Gathering xvi of SL (fol. clvir/87r, staves 5-7, incipit Hors suy bien de tres) – here again as a page-filler – where a large portion of the cantus appears to be erroneously transposed upward by a third. At b. 21, where ModA has coloration, SL employs dragmae with the value of two minims each. Until just recently the rondeau was considered to be a unicum; the identification of the song was reported by Epifani in 2016 (published in 2017). See Michele Epifani, Una caccia inedita dal Codice di S. Lorenzo, «Il Saggiatore musicale», xxiv, 2, 2017, pp. 155-188; and The San Lorenzo Palimpsest, vol. i, pp. 82-82 and vol. ii, n. 179. The edition based on ModA is published in French Secular Compositions of the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Willi Apel, ed. of the literary texts by Samuel N. Rosenberg, vol. iii: Anonymous Virelais, Rondeaux, Chansons, Canons. Appendix: Compositions with Latin Texts, American Institute of Musicology, 1972 (“cmm” 53), p. 94. 65 The guide-letter ‘f ’ can be read in strip ‘A’ mentioned above. 66 A similar structural subdivision of the music after the cadence on «cuius regni non erit finis» occurs, for example, in Zacara’s Credo ‘Cursor’ (b. 146); see Italian Sacred and Ceremonial Music, ed. by Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1987 (“pmfc” 13), n. 4. The subdivision is mirrored in the mise en page of the four voices in Q15, where the pairs C i/ T and C ii / Ct, entered in a page opening, are interrupted after the cadence on «finis» and resume at the next page opening with the last section of the Credo (incipit «Et in Spiritum Sanctum»). 67 From «Et in Spiritum Sanctum» to «Et vitam venturi saeculi», plus the final Amen. 68 To mention an example of similar length, see the Credo by Bartholus copied in Pit; see Italian Sacred Music, ed. by Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1976 (“pmfc” 12), n. 12. 87  ,   Ex. 11. Rondeau Hors sui ye bien de trestoute ma ioye , ModA, fols. 122v-13r (transcribed by Antonio Calvia) 88   -  The two extant voices of the Credo share equally the fourteen staves of fol. 1v. This is not surprising, since their style appears to be compatible with the socalled ‘simultaneous style’, a broad classification including settings whose three or four voices, often all texted, are not (or only very slightly) rhythmically different from each other.69 That the Credo was not a two-voice composition is immediately evident from the presence of cadences with parallel fourths of the type c4–d4 (see Example 12, fourth), which should be reconstructed, specifically, at least as three-voice g cadences, in which the ‘tenorizans’ movement a–G is missing (see Example 12, fourth, a). Example 12 shows all the ending progressions grouped by the interval reached; by ‘ending progression’ we mean all the successions at the end of a textual section, followed by a finis punctorum or closed by a longa (or maxima). From this first observation, we deduce that at least the tenor is missing. From the ranges of the two extant voices – and even more from the relationship between the two ambitus – we deduce that we are dealing with a cantus and a voice usually referred to as contratenor.70 The two remaining voices sometimes move in long series of parallel octaves (see bb. 30-32 on «Jesum Christum»), a feature rarely found in three-voice counterpoint, and above all, they produce parallel octaves (of the type F 8–G 8) in numerous major cadential articulations. In the four-voice writing of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, similar octave movements are common between Ct and C ii or between Ct and C i, but they are rare, if not very rare, in three-voice textures (see Example 12: Octave). An example of a four-voice Credo with parallel octaves in succession is the wellknown Credo Bonbarde.71 C and Ct proceed with a long series of parallel octaves on the words «crucifixus etiam pro nobis» (see Example 13, b. 62). 69 Objections to the rigidities of the categories adopted by Stäblein-Harder have been raised by Gallo and Facchin, but we retain it here for the sake of convenience, taking into account the cautions discussed by Strohm; see Fourteenth-Century Mass Music in France, ed. by Hanna Stäblein-Harder, Edition, American Institute of Musicology, 1962 (“cmm” 29); Critical text, American Institute of Musicology, 1962 (“Musicological studies and documents” 7); French Sacred Music, ed. by Giulio Cattin and Francesco Facchin, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1989 (“pmfc” 23a), p. xv; Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European Music 1380-1500, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 23-30. 70 This voice has a range of about an octave below the cantus; although it is not labelled ‘contratenor’ in the source, we choose this designation to distinguish it from a second cantus. By cantus ii, on the other hand, we mean, in a four-voice composition with this type of writing, a voice that has approximately the same ambitus as cantus i. 71 French Sacred Music, ed. by Giulio Cattin and Francesco Facchin, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1991 (“pmfc” 23b), pp. 224-237. See Strohm, The Rise of European Music 1380-1500, pp. 26-35. 89  ,   Ex. 12. Cadential movements of the Credo, ordered by ending interval in the two extant voices The cadences shown in Example 12 are at the following bars: • Octave: a) 8-10; b) 17-19, 55-57, 80-81, 92-94, 125-128, 174-175, 209-210; c) 50-52, 132-133, 172-173; d) 27-28; e) 52-53 (preceding the progression ‘b’ at 55-57); f ) 97-99; g) 135-136. • Fourth: a) 22-24, 158-159; b) 41-42, 102-103, 116-118, 185-186, 218-220; c) 84-86, 191-192; d) 138-139. • Fifth: a) 106-107; b) 111-113; c) 165-167. • Sixth: a) 32-33; b) 36-38; c) 45-47; d) 70-71; e) 143-145. • Third: a) 13-14; b) 65-67, 180-183; c) 75-77, 148-150; d) 119-122. 90   -  Ex. 13. Credo Bonbarde (Perrinet?), French Sacred Music, ed. by Giulio Cattin and Francesco Facchin, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1991 (“pmfc” 23b), pp. 224-237, bb. 62-63 Strohm has highlighted how the contratenor – in this type of four-voice writing composed in relation to the tenor – produces, with respect to the two upper voices, not only octave parallelisms but also passages written in a kind of ‘heterophony’ caused by the ornamentation of melodic segments doubled at the octave. Passages of this last type are very frequent in the Pv fragment’s Credo.72 Remarkably, the Pv Credo is similar in style to the Sanctus ‘Mediolano’, a wellknown fully texted four-voice setting of the chant, whose C ii / Ct couple behave in a manner strikingly close to our Credo’s two extant voices. If the texture of the Pv Credo was in some way similar to that of this northern Italian Sanctus,73 it may have also had multiple passages in which the C i carried extended syncopations on top of a solid base of the other three voices, which rigidly marked the beginning of each tempus 74 (segments where the cantus ii is syncopated across tempora in the 72 See (but the list is not exhaustive): bb. 21, 49-61, 83-84, 165, 168-171, 173-178, 207, 208-210; the same principle is applied to a lesser extent to bb. 15-19 as well. 73 The rubric «Mediolano» can only be found in PadA and the piece is transmitted in other witnesses without it; see, most recently, Michael Scott Cuthbert, Elizabeth Nyikos, Style, Locality, and the Trecento Gloria: New Sources and a Reexamination, «Acta Musicologica», lxxxii, 2, 2010, pp. 185-212: 208-210. 74 See Italian Sacred Music, ed. by Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1976 (“pmfc” 12), pp. 83-87, especially bb. 87-100 for an example of syncompation. 91  ,   Pv Credo are in fact rare and of limited duration).75 Although it is tempting, at the moment we cannot directly associate these stylistic connections with a Lombard local style, since the source is fragmentary and such an association would require more detailed evidence. Nevertheless, what can be cautiously stated is that our Credo’s style is quite similar to – and indeed is entirely compatible with – that of a Sanctus bearing the telling denomination ‘Mediolano’. Given these initial observations, we believe that the Pv fragment contains two extant voices of an original four-voice Credo. It is not possible to specify whether the first one is a C i or a C ii, although the C ii / Ct pair is perhaps slightly more attested from the point of view of the mise en page. If it is indeed a C ii / Ct pair (for the sake of clarity, these are the labels used in the present edition), the lost recto of the following folio must have contained the pair C i / T up to the cadence on «cuius regni non erit finis» (see Table 8). Although the Credo is fragmentary, in terms of its form, some structural partitions can be identified. The musical setting follows the syntactic units of the text, finishing each with a cadence marked by longa or brevis and visually articulating the break with a double bar. The underlaid text marks these syntactic units with a punctus followed by a capital letter (see Table 9). There are thus 11 sections, most of them around 20 breves in length. Exceptions are sections 1 (fragmentary: «Patrem» is missing, probably sung by at least one of the lost voices), 4, 7 and 9. Section 7, on the text «Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine: et homo factus est», is clearly differentiated from all the others, both by its length and by the use of longa rests (here transcribed as suspiria) and maximae in order to amplify the final portion of the text, in which each word is declaimed in long notes («et – homo – factus – est»).76 Tab. 8. Possible mise en page of the Credo’s first part (up to «non erit finis», with four voices fol. 1v next folio recto (lost) C ii ? (i-vii) [C i ?] Ct (viii-xiv) [T] 75 See bb. 31-32, 53-54, 68-70, 90-92, 100-101, 110-111, 157-158, 184-185 and 201-202. 76 See again the Credo Bonbarde, where this portion of the text is highlighted using hoquetus (bb. 55-61). 92   -  Tab. 9. Sections of the Credo Section bb. duration in tempora Text (from C with UVIF photography, except Final for section 1, from Ct) sonorities 0 – – [Patrem] 1 1-5 5 (lacuna) [o]Mnipotentem. [only Ct] a 2 6-24 19 [f ]Actorem celi et terre uisibilium om(n)ium et inuisibilium. d 4 [G] 3 25-42 18 (final brevis) Et in unum dominum yh(esu)m xρ(istu)m filium dei unigenitum. a 4 [D] 4 43-72 30 Et ex patre natu(m) ante o(mn)ia se(cu) la. deum de deo lum(en) de lumi(n)e deum uerum de deo uero. c 4 [F] 5 73-94 22 Genitu(m) no(n) factu(m) c(on)substantialem a 8 [a?] patri p(er) que(m) o(mn)ia facta su(n)t. 6 95-113 19 Q(u)i propter nos homi(n)es et p(ro)pt(er) nostram salutem descendit de celis. a5 7 114-139 26 (not including longa rests and maximae) Et incarnatus e[st] de sp(irit)u s(an)c(t)o. ex maria uirgine et homo factus est. e 4 [a] 8 140-160 21 Crucifixus etia(m) p(ro) nobis s(u)b pontio pillato (sic) passus (et) sepultus est. d 4 [G] 9 161-175 15 (final brevis) Et resurrexit tertia die s(e)c(un)d(u)m sc(ri) pturas. a 8 [D] – 10 176-198 23 Et ascendit in celum sedet ad dexteram patris. g (C only) 11 199-220 22 Et iter(um) ue(n)turus est cu(m) gloiria (sic) iudicare uiuos (et) mo(r)tuos cui(us) regni non erit finis. […] a 4 [D] […] Almost all cadences at the end of a section can be reconstructed without particular problems as cadences ending on a 5-8-12 sonority.77 It can be inferred that the main cadences are built firstly on D, secondly on G, and finally (only once) on a and 77 This is especially true for those cadences of which only the interval of fourth between C and Ct remains. 93  ,   F (see the fifth column of Table 9).78 For some of these cadences, the manuscript offers indications concerning the accidental inflections (see in particular bb. 138139). Although the fragmentary nature of the source calls for caution, based on the occurrence of the ficta at b. 138, the ‘double-leading-note’ cadence may well have appeared in other places. Through analysis of the extant voices, it is possible to provide plausible (if hypothetical) reconstructions of the main cadences. Example 14 shows a reconstruction of the final cadence (bb. 218-220), in which the two missing voices are indicated with smaller notes. First, the cadence is missing the descending tone movement of the tenor: E–D. The fourth missing voice can be reconstructed on the basis of the many cadences in which the two remaining voices close with the movement of parallel octaves G 8–a 8, here given without any embellishment in the reconstructed voice (a hypothetical C i doubling the Ct octave), but ornamented in various ways throughout the piece.79 Ex. 14. Credo. Possible reconstruction of the final cadence of section 11, bb. 216-220 78 Some doubt remains about the cadence at bb. 89-91 (end of section 5), probably a ‘Phrygian’ cadence to a; cfr. a very similar four-voice example in Zacara’s Credo Cursor, bb. 32-34; see Italian Sacred Music, (“pmfc” 13), no. 4. 79 See the places listed in Example 12, octave, b. 94   -  6. The French poems: linguistic analysis and literary notes The secular poems in Pv are two virelais (texts i and iv) and two rondeaux (ii and iii). The scripta of all four poems is a highly Italianized French. This is no surprise, as such linguistic blending is quite common in medieval vernacular manuscripts, particularly for the French formes fixes in the Italian Ars Nova sources (such as Man, ModA and R). A «stratigraphic» analysis80 is necessary, then, to distinguish between the French and Italian elements in the manuscript «diasystem» (the result of complex and unpredictable interaction between the linguistic systems of the author and those of the different copyists who successively transcribed the text)81 and to identify the regional features of each as precisely as possible. Of course, some of these may be a result of linguistic interference, due to contact. In order to detect such phenomena, a useful comparison is provided by other contemporary Italian musical sources containing French poems and by fourteenth-century manuscripts of so-called ‘Franco-Italian’ production – this includes not only linguistically-hybridized Italian copies of French works, but also works that were composed in a professedly hybrid language.82As for the author (or authors, since the poems may be the work of different poets), it is impossible to determine in advance whether he was a Frenchman or a more or less French-cultivated Italian. Still, for at least one of the texts, the analysis of the rhymes offers some significant clues. Only very few characteristics of the scripta can be interpreted as markers of a regional variety of French, and these point towards the northern (Picard) area. They include the forms of the noun do(u)chour (ii, 9 and iii, 4) with voiceless 80 The geological concept of ‘stratigraphy’ is commonly used in recent research in the field of linguistic philology (see for instance the workshop devoted in 2017 to La stratigrafia linguistica dei manoscritti medievali, whose proceedings were published in «Medioevo Romanzo», xlii, 2018). It refers to the different linguistic layers which overlapped throughout the manuscript tradition of vernacular texts and must be distinguished while analyzing the latest copyist’s scripta. 81 Cfr. Cesare Segre, Critica testuale, teoria degli insiemi e diasistema, in Id., Semiotica filologica, Torino, Einaudi, 1979, pp. 53-70. 82 For a recent discussion (and the main bibliographic references) about ‘Franco-Italian’ as a language and as definition of a literary tradition, see the articles by Marcello Barbato, Carlo Beretta and Giovanni Palumbo published in «Medioevo Romanzo», xxxix, 2015, and Fabio Zinelli, Inside/ Outside Grammar: The French of Italy between Structuralism and Trends of Exoticism, in Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France: Studies in the Moving Word, ed. by Nicola Morato and Dirk Schoenaers, Turnhout, Brepols, 2019, pp. 31-72. The RIALFRI database directed by Francesca Gambino, provides a useful tool for the research of linguistic forms within the Franco-Italian corpus. 95  ,   postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ expressed by ⟨ch⟩, as opposed to the Francien and standard French douceur83 (the reading douceur is actually found in ii, 9, but the rhyme -our speaks for the northern form).84 The complete lack of final ⟨z⟩, particularly where it would express the nexus T + S, or an s following a nasal, lateral, or vibrant consonant – in all of these cases the scribe uses ⟨s⟩ – might also be considered a northern feature.85 Ultimately, it seems likely that the Pv poems – particularly ii, iii, and perhaps iv – were influenced by or derived from Picard sources, in keeping with what has been observed for the main Italian manuscripts of the Ars Nova.86 If the author was from France, such ‘sources’ can be considered proper exemplars,87 whereas if he was from Italy, they must instead be generically understood as linguistic and literary models. The list of Italianisms in the poems is quite long, and these often correspond to those found in the French scripta of other contemporary Italian manuscripts. As for the spelling: - frequent occurrences (i, ii, iii, not iv) of che/chi instead of que (which is also present) or qui.88 83 See Charles Théodore Gossen, Grammaire de l’ancien picard, Paris, Klincksieck, 1970, §38, pp. 91-94. For the vocalism of do(u)chour, see Ivi, §26, pp. 80-82. 84 For the editorial correction, see below, note to ii, 9. 85 For a comparative description of this phenomenon in Francien and Picard scriptae, see Ivi, §40, pp. 94-95. 86 See Maria Sofia Lannutti, I testi in francese nelle antologie dell’Ars Nova, in Innovazione linguistica e storia della tradizione. Casi di studio romanzi medievali, a c. di Stefano Resconi, Davide Battagliola, Silvia De Santis, Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2020, pp. 197-223: 202-ff. However, we do not consider as a significant northern feature open e + implied l > iau, like in biauté (i, 10), given the frequency of this form (which is topical in the lyrical vocabulary) even in authors and scribes from other French regions (as remarked by Gossen, Grammaire de l’ancien picard, §12, p. 61). 87 Though, some scholars caution against too-facile conclusions regarding the geographic origins of seemingly-specific regional traits: «Non sempre i tratti francesi, anche i più tipici, si diffondono lungo i rami della tradizione; […] talvolta essi vengono introdotti dagli scribi italiani, ai quali suonano familiari perché li hanno trovati in altre copie eseguite, adottandoli come propri» (Carlo Beretta, Giovanni Palumbo, Il franco-italiano in area padana: questioni, problemi e appunti di metodo, «Medioevo Romanzo», xxxix, 2015, pp. 52-81, at 67; see also Fabio Zinelli, De la France-Italie à l’Italo-France (ou de l’histoire littéraire comme délocalisation), in Transferts culturels franco-italiens au Moyen Âge – Trasferimenti culturali italo-francesi, ed. by Roberto Antonelli et al., Turnhout, Brepols, 2020, pp. 169-199: 180). Of course, this argument should not be considered conclusive per se. 88 Same phenomenon in Man. 96   -  Phonetics is affected in the following phenomena: - final -a instead of -e (< lat. -A), in such forms as chiera, cella (ii), poysansa, bruneta, gratioseta (iv); - dissimilation of l towards n in meleconie89 (vs. melencolie/merencolie < MELANCHOLIA; iv, 1). Finally, morphosyntax is involved in: - the use of relative pronoun que/che with any logical value (whereas qui would be the norm for the nominative: e.g. i, 1; ii, 6; iii, 3 and 6); - the masculine treatment of some feminine nouns with ending in -our (from lat. -ORE), for instance un flour (iii, 1), bo colour (iii, 5), son […] amour (iii, 12), in opposition to m’amour (i, 2) and odour moult souv[e]rayne (iii, 2). All of the above phenomena can be considered generic Italianisms, commonly found in Italian varieties and scriptae from different regions. Another feature that often occurs alongside the above is a graphic habit characteristic of Italian scribes of various origins when transcribing French texts, namely: - the use of ⟨y⟩ instead of ⟨i⟩/⟨j⟩ to express the voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/,90 as in yoye (vs. joie; ii, 7; iv, 12), ye (vs. je; ii, 8 e 10; iii, 9), yoiens (sic, per yoieus, vs. joieus; iv, 2), yolis/yolie (vs. jolis/jolie; iv, 1 e 4); all these forms are exclusive in Pv (but cfr. jour iv, 9).91 As it does not occur in proper French scriptae, this phenomenon should be identified as linguistic interference due to contact – based on the arbitrary extension to ⟨y⟩ of the triple use of ⟨i⟩ for the vowel /i/, the approximant /j/ and the fricative /ʒ/ by a non-French scribe92 – and listed along with other features which are limited to 89 Meleconie is the erroneous ms. reading for melenconie (see below, note to iv, 1). 90 The same grapheme is normally used in all Middle French scriptae as an alternative for ⟨i⟩ to express both the vowel /i/ and the lateral approximant (see below). 91 This use is well attested in Man, ModA and R and in the fresco captions (form yoye) at the Frugarolo castle (Piedmont), which date to 1391-1402. 92 For a description of this kind of interference in Franco-Italian scriptae, see for instance Zinelli, Inside/Outside Grammar, pp. 46-48. 97  ,   northern Italian Franco-Italian sources, such as: - the use of the digraph ⟨ou⟩ (possibly without any phonetic relevance) where unexpected, like in the possessive adjective voutre (i, 10 e ii, 11),93 the noun our (< AURU; iii, 7),94 the adverb troup (unattested elsewhere, vs. trop) or the noun vous (vs. vois < VOCE; iii, 9);95 - the verbal form oyt (vs. out/ot < HABUIT; iii, 5).96 The monophthong e (< Ĕ, vs. fr. ie) in the adjective gref (i, 7) might also be assigned to a northern Italian scribe, since the form reflects the development of lat. Ĕ in most of the autochthone varieties and it occurs frequently in Franco-Italian production.97 In addition, some unusual apocopes may suggest the intervention of a Lombard copyist, although they may also be the result of the copyist’s inaccurate transcription of the word endings: - the dropping of nasal consonant -n – a phenomenon which is found, even if in different proportions, both in eastern98 and in western Lombard varieties99 – as 93 Voutre, a rare form, is found six times in a very limited portion of the Entrée d’Espagne, between vv. 13286 and 13574; see L’Entrée d’Espagne. Chanson de geste franco-italienne publiée d’après le manuscrit unique de Venise, éd. par Antoine Thomas, 2 vols., Paris, Didot, 1913. 94 The form our can represent both lat. AURU and HORA in Franco-Italian texts; see La Prise de Pampelune. Ein altfranzösisches Gedicht, hrsg. von Adolfo Mussafia, Wien, Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1864, p. ix: «Ou statt o (eu) : ... our (AURUM, HORA)»; for ‘gold’, see, for example, Niccolò da Verona, Opere. Pharsale, Continuazione dell’Entrée d’Espagne, Passion, a c. di Franca Di Ninni, Venezia, Marsilio, 1992, p. 343, v. 4785. 95 At least four occurrences in the works by Niccolò da Verona (Ivi, Glossario, p. 501). 96 Frequently spelled oit, as in the Entree d’Espagne (ed. Thomas, p. cxvi; see also Roman d’Alexandre B, vv. 1363, 3636, 3654, and Bataille d’Aliscans, ms. Marc. Fr. 8, for instance vv. 768, 1650, 1886). 97 With a particular concentration in Niccolò da Càsola’s Guerra d’Attila. 98 Where it is systematic, as in the dialect of Bergamo (see Glauco Sanga, Fonetica storica del dialetto di Bergamo, in Lingua e dialetti di Bergamo e delle valli, a c. di Glauco Sanga, 3 vols., Bergamo, Lubrina, 1987, vol. 1, pp. 37-63: 56), since the first attestations: cfr. Altbergamaskische Sprachdenkmaler: (9.-15. Jahrhundert), hrsg. von J. Etienne Lorck, Halle a. S., Max Niemeyer, 1893, pp. 32-33. 99 In Milanese the phenomenon presents itself rather as a nasalization of the preceding vowel; see Carlo Salvioni, Fonetica del dialetto moderno della città di Milano, Torino, Arnaldo Forni, 1884, §245, p. 203, and, for the Middle Ages, Id., Osservazioni sull’antico vocalismo milanese desunte dal metro e dalla rima del cod. berlinese di Bonvesin da Riva, in Studi letterari e linguistici dedicati a Pio Rajna nel quarantesimo anno del suo insegnamento, Milano, Hoepli, 1911, pp. 367-388: 387-388. Forms without nasal are sometimes found in the manuscript tradition of Bonvesin de la Riva (I volgari di Bonvesin da 98   -  in bo (vs. bon; iii, 5, unless it is a phonetic spelling for beau, ‘beautiful’, but cfr. the noun biauté, i, 10) and autrema (vs. autremant; i, 9), where the apocope of the entire nexus nasal + dental would be an extreme development unheard of in the autochthone varieties;100 - the fall of lateral consonant -l – attested in the western part of Lombardy (west of the river Adda)101 – as in genti (i, 4, vs. gentil).102 A possible Lombard scribe may also be responsible for the numeral do (< DUAE, iii, 5)103 – but this form often appears as a product of linguistic interference in Franco-Italian texts – and for the conservation of the voiced dental in mond (vs. mont < MUNDU, iv, 8), an apocopic form sometimes found in Middle French scriptae.104 As stated above, based on ink analysis and palaeographic expertise it is likely that one scribe was responsible for the copying of both the recto and verso of fol. 1. The Latin text of the Credo is obviously no place to seek linguistic elements to help pin down the copyist’s origin. However, two aberrant readings may be noteworthy. In the first form, pillato (two occurrences) for the proper name Pilato, which is found elsewhere in regional Latin scriptae (e.g. from France), ⟨ll⟩ may be interpreted as a la Riva. Testi del ms. Berlinese, ed. by Adnan M. Gökcen, New York, Peter Lang, 1996, p. liii) and in the fourteenth or early fifteenth-century Passione Trivulziana (see Passione trivulziana: armonia evangelica volgarizzata in milanese antico, a c. di Michele Colombo, Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 2016, p. 147). 100 The hypothesized development would be autremant > autreman > autrema; adverbal forms without -t are not rare in medieval Lombard scriptae (see, for example, Antichi testi pavesi, a c. di Maria Antonietta Grignani e Angelo Stella, Pavia, Tipografia del libro, 1977, p. 130, and Il manoscritto Saibante-Hamilton 390, a c. di Maria Luisa Meneghetti et al., Roma, Salerno, 2019, p. cl). The form fortu (ii, 4) instead of fortune (both linguistically and prosodically correct) with apocope of the entire syllable, is unattested and even more aberrant: rather than the result of a phonetic trend, the absence of -ne seems to be due to the copyist’s inattention. 101 See, for instance, Salvioni, Fonetica del dialetto moderno, §188, pp. 173-174, according to whom this phenomenon is attested in medieval authors even more largely than in the modern language (see also Gökcen, I volgari di Bonvesin, p. 1, and Colombo, Passione trivulziana, p. 146). On the contrary, in medieval eastern Lombard, the final -l is generally conserved; see for instance Lorck, Altbergamaskische Sprachdenkmaler, p. 29. 102 While genti meets the genuine French phonetic realization, Middle French scriptae normally use the etymologic form gentil. We have found genti (or the equivalent genty) only rarely and always in rhyme position: see, for example, Baudouin de Sebourc, éd. par Larry S. Crist [et Robert F. Cook], Paris, Société des Anciens Textes Français, 2002, v. 547 (genti) and passim; Le Chevalier au cygne. A Critical Edition, ed. by Gisela Christa Pukatzki, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1990, v. 99 (genty). 103 See, for example, Colombo, Passione trivulziana, p. 238. 104 This form, quite rare in mfr., is very common in afr.; see tl, vi, 200. 99  ,   common western Romance (and therefore also northern Italian) hypercorrection. The second form, gloiria for gloria, contains the diphthong oi, which characterises the French form gloire. Unless it is an oversight, this erroneous reading may well reveal that the copyist was using a French source, which he faithfully respected – and which may also be the source for pillato – perhaps in accordance with the language of the secular texts he was transcribing at the same time. This is the extent of what we know about the copyist’s scripta and its sources, but some of these clues may also shed light on the author’s language: in particular, the Italian form mercé (instead of fr. merci < MERCEDE) rhyming with nobleté105 in virelai iv and the masculine treatment of some of the nouns ending in -our, which occurs in rondeau iii. As for the latter, the scribe’s uncertainties are evidenced in v. 12, where amour – probably not referring to the feeling typically sung in lyric poems: this is the only poem amongst the four that is not a traditional love song; instead, through the commonplace description of a locus amoenus, it may convey an encomiastic message, as we will discuss below – is preceded by the masculine possessive son, the epicene adjective form grand and the feminine douce. If one tried to restore the correct French feminine genre for, say, flour in verse 1, the modification of the article (disyllabic une instead of monosyllabic un) would produce a hypermetric verse (in iii, 5, bone instead of bo would intensify the hypermetria). This would suggest that the masculine forms are original. In addition, the noun our (< AURU, ‘gold’) rhymes with flour : dochour : colour : amour.106 This would not be acceptable in French versification. Thus, it is almost certain that not only the Pavia fragment’s copyist, but also the authors of rondeau iii and virelai iv were Italian. For the two other poems, in the absence of such evident clues, the question still stands. However, the hypothesis that the other texts were also by a non-French author does not seem unrealistic: the prosody is not always congruent (with often irregular caesuras), the rhymes and syntax are ordinary, the figures of speech quite basic. Moreover, all the poems tend to avoid any abstraction or subtlety, and all – except iii – have predictable themes such as the lover’s lament (i and ii) or declaration of love (iv). All these features set the Pv poems apart from 105 The equivalent form noblece is much more common both in afr. and mfr.: nobleté is possibly an Italianism (cfr. it. nobiltà) too. 106 The same anomalous rhyme is in Prise de Pampelune, laisse cxliii (Niccolò da Verona, ed. by Di Ninni, pp. 342-343). As for the rhyme flour : dochour : colour with amour, which is widespread in afr. and mfr. poetry despite being in manifest contradiction with the phonetic development of spoken language, see Gossen, Grammaire de l’ancien picard, §26, pp. 81-82. 100   -  the refinement typical of Machaut and his disciples. Hence, we are inclined to think that our author(s) intended to translate lyrical contents in French forms and language (the choice of vocabulary is plainly traditional: nouns like amour, ardure, biauté, chiere, dochour/douceur, dolour, figure, flour, pité, plour, tormant, adjectives such as dure, joli/e, plaisant, souverain and compounds with tres-, verbs like languir, servir, syntagms such as sans fauseté, dame jolie), relying more on the evocativeness of the poetic materials they reused than on the formal perfection of the outcome.107 All that is not uncommon in this kind of production: similar Franco-Italian lyrics are found in several manuscripts,108 sometimes amongst original French poems, and sparked interest and perplexity in the first scholars who dealt with them.109 Furthermore, our hypothesis is corroborated by the sporadic but consistent occurrence in the Pv poems of elements usually absent from – or very rare in – French lyric poetry. Instead, these elements seem to belong to the Italian poetic idiolect (e.g. the syntagm plaisant chiera, ii, 1, and the epithet douce yoya for the beloved, ii, 9). As for their relationship with Italian poetry, the Pv poems are quite distant from the refinement of the grand lyric tradition that was inaugurated by Giacomo da Lentini and continued by Dante, Petrarch, and his epigones. Instead, their simplicity of style and straightforwardness of expression relate them to the repertory of madrigals and ballatas that was widespread in both northern Italy and Tuscany in the fourteenth century.110 However, despite their formal flaws, the Pv rondeaux and virelais are more interesting from a literary point of view than most similar compositions, given that they use innovative motives, metaphors, and imagery rarely if ever found in the French or Italian lyric corpora (the beloved described as darker than the night in i, 1-3; a passing-by or fading111 flower, then two roses in iii, 1 and 5). 107 This would also account for some unexpected lyrical iuncturae: bo colour, supplier doucemant, etc. (for a commentary, see the notes to the poetic texts below). 108 See, for instance, Trentatré liriche franco-italiane trascritte nel codice Strozzi-Magliabecchiano Cl. VII (1040) della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, a c. di Francesca Gambino, new edition for rialfri, 2015 (https://www.rialfri.eu/texts/canzoniFrancesi|001, last accessed October 20, 2022). 109 See, for example, Paul Meyer, Extraits du ms. Addit. 15224 du Musée britannique, «Bulletin de la Société des anciens textes français», viii, 1882, p. 69-72; Francesco Novati, Poesie musicali francesi de’ sec. XIV e XV, tratte da mss. italiani, «Romania», xxvii, 1898, pp. 138-144. 110 See below, the commentary notes to the vv. for the details on these and other elements. 111 The translation depends on the interpretation of the verb passer: ‘to pass by’ or ‘to wither’ (see below, note to iii, 1). 101  ,   7. The French poems: critical edition and commentary In our critical edition of the four French poems we have adopted the following criteria.112 Where the author’s intention is not clearly recognizable, at times due to the linguistic reasons explained above, we have stayed as close as possible to the manuscript readings, whose incongruences are discussed in the commentary notes. Missing letters due to material damage have been reconstructed in square brackets; obviously erroneous forms have been corrected where possible and appear in italics.113 Irreparably corrupted parts are between daggers and hypothetical emendations are proposed in the commentary notes. As for the quite frequent faulty syllable count, we intervene only where the correction is evident and univocal. In all other cases, we report the anomaly in curly brackets. Capitalization and punctuation have been modernised; we observe the norms established for the edition of medieval French texts for diacritics and the distinction between u and v.114 In the rondeaux, the verses of the refrain when this is intercalated (two for both ii and iii) are inserted into square brackets following the music. In all four poems, the final repetition of the refrain is indicated by the incipit, as found in the manuscript (or, for iv, reconstructed in brackets). The rejected readings, in diplomatic transcription, are placed in the critical apparatus beneath the text and each editorial choice is discussed in the commentary notes to the verses, which also contain remarks on significant linguistic, stylistic and literary features, along with short discussions of loci paralleli. i. Virelai Metric scheme: A7’ B7 B7 A7’ | c7 d7 c7 d7 a7’ b7 b7 a7’ Rhymes: a -ure, b -é, c -ant, d -is La nuit que est tant obscure donne a moy de clarité 112 A diplomatic edition of these texts was provided in Saviotti, Calvia, Virelais, rondeaux e un Credo, Appendix A. 113 Following the habits of classical philologists: see, for instance, Conseils pour l’édition des textes médiévaux. Fascicule III. Textes littéraires, éd. par Pascale Bourgain et Françoise Vielliard, Paris, École Nationale des Chartes, 2018, p. 71. 114 See Ivi, pp. 60-67. 102   -  plus che vous, que sans p[ité] m’a tués genti figure. 5 10 Heu, suppli vous doucemant, dame, che, pour Dieu mercis, delivrés du gref tormant mon cuer che en vous ay tout mis. Autremant, s’il est troup dure enver moy voutre biauté, a cuy serf [sa]ns fauseté, languiray de grand ardu[r]e. La nuit etc. ____________________________ 3: vous] uo(us)s. 7: delivrés] delimes. 9: Autremant] autrema. Translation. ‘The night, which is so dark, gives me more light than you, since [your] gentle look killed me mercilessly. | Alas, lady, I sweetly beg you, by God’s grace, to free my heart, that I wholly entrusted to you, from this excruciating torment. Otherwise, if your beauty, which I loyally serve, is too cruel to me, I will pine with great passion’. Notes. 1-2. The opening comparison between the night and the beloved seems to be an original choice by the author. We could not find anything similar in medieval Gallo-Romance or Italian poetry, where, on the contrary, the beloved is often identified with light and brightness in general (the Italian equivalent of clarité is often used, as it is here, in comparative or superlative expressions; see, for example, the sonnet by Guittone d’Arezzo, Gentile ed amorosa criatura, v. 5: lume che sovra ogn’altro ha claritate; ed. Le rime di Guittone d’Arezzo, a c. di Francesco Egidi, Bari, Laterza, 1940, p. 202, n. 127). Moreover, the image of the night occurs very infrequently in fourteenth-century French115 and Italian116 lyric, where nuit/notte is almost always part of the syntagm nuit et jour/notte e giorno, meaning ‘always, in every 115 Besides the available editions of the texts, we have usefully exploited the following databases: Concordance de l’Occitan medieval. COM2: les troubadours, les textes narratifs en vers, ed. by Peter T. Ricketts, Turnhout, Brepols, 2005; Trouveors. Database della lirica dei trovieri, a c. di Paolo Canettieri e Rocco Distilo, Roma, Università di Roma La Sapienza, 2010 (http://trouveors.lieuweb.eu/, last accessed February 15, 2022); jcuc. Troubadour and trouvère poems are referred to by – respectively – their BdT or rs number. 116 For the Italian lyric, the fundamental research tool is provided by the Corpus LirIO. Corpus della poesia lirica italiana delle origini, dagli inizi al 1400, a c. di Lino Leonardi et al., Fondazione Ezio Franceschini-Università degli Studi di Siena (http://lirioweb.ovi.cnr.it, last accessed October 20, 2022). 103  ,   moment’. For the contrast between the adjective obscure and the noun clar(i)té, see the anonymous ballade (Ch, fol. 13r) Toute clarté m’est obscure (the example in the incipit is the first of a series of opposita); the two variants, with or without syncope, are widespread: see Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, version 2020, ATILF – CNRS & Université de Lorraine (henceforth dmf; http://zeus.atilf.fr/dmf/, last accessed October 20, 2022), Clarité. Here the relative pronoun que replaces the expected nominative form qui; the latter would regularize the prosodically necessary dialepha, which, on the contrary, is uncommon after que, particularly with a vowel of the same timbre. The postposition of the pronominal indirect object – donne a moy instead of the unmarked me donne – is rare in French (and apparently absent in the lyric corpus), where it seems to belong to a sub-standard register. See, for example, the popular song by Philippot le Savoyard Chanson des frères camarades (ante 1665; ed. Recueil des chansons du Savoyard: réimpression textuelle faite sur l’édition de 1665 et augmentée d’un avant-propos, par Achille Percheron, Paris, Gay, 1862, p. 58), vv. 1-4: «Dans cette authentique débauche / a toy frere de ce vin bon, / moy boit de ma main gauche / si toy donne à moy du iambon». If the author of the virelai i were an Italian, this anomaly could of course be justified by his linguistic background. 3. The scribe uses both the Italian form che and the French form que, the latter having here a causal value (‘since, because’). For the personal pronoun vous, the scribe abbreviates us with the usual upper mark after vo, but he erroneously adds s at the end of the word. Our decision to complete the mutilated manuscript reading pit as pité, rather than pitié (cfr. dmf, Pitié), is based on several factors: the traditional distinction of the endings -é and -ié in rhyme; the almost systematic preference for the monophthong form by the most representative authors of the fourteenth century (namely Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps); and its proximity to the Italian form pietà. 4. The widespread lyric motif of death by love (see also ii, 12, where death is evoked only as an extreme eventuality) is sometimes represented as a murder perpetrated by the beloved (as it is here): see, for example, Machaut, Louange des dames (ed. Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies lyriques, par Vladimir Chichmaref, 2 vols., Paris, [s.n.], 1909, i, pp. 15-237), ballade lxxiii, vv. 1-2: «Douce dame, vous ociés a tort / vostre humble serf et vo loial ami». The past participle tués appears to be a relic of a sigmatic cas sujet form (same for pleins iii, 2) – here misused as cas régime; it should agree with the object pronoun m’ – in a time when bi-casual declension had already been abandoned: see Robert Martin, Marc Wilmet, 2. Syntaxe du moyen français, in Manuel du français du Moyen Âge, sous la dir. d’Yves Lefèvre, Bordeaux, SOBODI, 1980 (henceforth mw), §291, pp. 174-175 («la survivance de formes déclinées n’en trahit pas moins l’évanescence de la déclinaison. […] le système casuel n’a plus aucune pertinence linguistique»), and, for a historical analysis of reasons and modalities, the Grande grammaire historique du français, éd. par Christiane Marchello-Nizia et al., 2 vols., Berlin, De Gruyter, 2020 (henceforth gghf ), i, §30.1.2.4, pp. 649-653. Figure is a very common term for the beloved’s appearance: see, for example, Machaut, Louange des dames, ballade xciv, vv. 12-13: «Tous ces biens ha en sa figure / celle qui si me vint ferir». The ms. reading genti is not attested in French scriptae and clearly descends from one of the two possible correct forms, gentil (epicene) or gente. If the latter seems preferable due to the presence of the syntagm gente figure in the French corpus (at least two occurrences, while gentil figure does not appear at all), the poem’s Italian transmission (and perhaps composition) suggests a possible passage through the former (genti might be a western Lombard deformation of gentil: see above), since gentil(e) figura appears frequently in early Italian poetry. Significant occurrences are found in two ballatas: Antonello da Caserta’s Deh, vogliateme oldire, v. 6 (ed. Nino Pirrotta, Ettore Li Gotti, Il Codice di Lucca: II. Testi letterari, «Musica Disciplina», iv, 1950, pp. 111-152, at 130), where figura rhymes with both dura and ardura (as it does here); and 104   -  Francesco Landini’s In somma altezza t’ha posta natura (Poesie musicali del Trecento, a c. di Giuseppe Corsi, Bologna, Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1970, p. 183, n. 67), where figura rhymes with the syntagm troppo dura (as it does here). 5. The initial exclamation Heu may account for the pronominal object postposition in suppli vous (as in the cases described as «verb second» + «effacement du sujet»: cfr. mw, §472-474, p. 279-282, where «adverbes ‘thématiques’» are involved rather than interjections). A similar postposition in a very different construction (je suppli a vous par grant benivolance; the verb works with both direct and indirect object: see dmf, Supplier), is found in the virelai set to music by Matteo da Perugia (ModA, 10v), Dame que j’aym sour toutes de ma enfance, v. 13. We have found no other French or Italian attestations of the syntagm supplier doucement (generally in the corpus: s. humblement); the adverb seems to mean ‘sincerely, fervently’, as suggested for the occurrences with the verb priier by tl, iii, 2053-2054. 7. In mfr. supplier que can take an indicative, even though the conjunctive construction is far more common. In this sense, it is at least theoretically possible that the corrupted ms. reading de limes might stand for de liuies (a common palaeographic confusion), coming from deliv[r]iés (conjunctive) by loss of the titulus for r. Nonetheless, given that delivré is deformed in delune (or delime) in ii, 3, the emendation delivrés seems to be more likely. The syntagm gr(i)ef (see above for the northern-Italian localization of the monophthong form) torment is recurrent in courtly literature referring to lovesickness (see, for example, Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, vv. 4488-4489: l’ame me fust del cors partie / a grief tormant et a martire; ed. [by Peter F. Dembowski] Chrétien de Troyes, Œuvres complètes, sous la dir. de Daniel Poirion, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 110), privileged by Machaut (thrice in the Louange des dames alone: ballade xxxvii, v. 4; chanson royal cxvii, v. 14; ballade cxxxvi, v. 20), and also attested in Italian lyric poetry (e.g. Guittone d’Arezzo, Lasso!, en che mal punto ed en che fella, v. 6: «lo doloroso meo grave tormento»; ed. Guittone d’Arezzo, Canzoniere. I sonetti d’amore del codice laurenziano, a c. di Lino Leonardi, Torino, Einaudi, 1994, n. 56). 8. The declaration that the ‘entire heart’ has been put into the beloved is a commonplace of love poetry: see, for example, the refrain vdb (= Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe, éd. par Nico van den Boogaard, Paris, Klincksieck, 1969) 683, En simple plaisant brunete ai tout mon cuer mis, and the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (vv. 2772-2773: «le bouton où j’avoie / tot mon cuer mis e ma beance»; ed. Le roman de la rose par Guillame de Lorris et Jean de Meun, éd. par Ernest Langlois, 5 vols., Paris, Didot [then: Champion], 1914-1924, ii, p. 141). Cfr. also Francesco Landini, ballata Donna, se ’l cor t’ho dato (ed. Poesie musicali del Trecento, p. 164, n. 43, vv. 1-2: «Donna, se ’l cor t’ho dato / ed ha’ lo in tua balia»). 9. For the ms. reading autrema, which we have supplemented with -nt based on doucemant (i, 5), see above, note 100. The apparently inappropriate impersonal subject il may perhaps be explained by the replacement of ce with il in some impersonal tournures, as noted by mw, §325, p. 198, but it is worth emphasizing that this sentence could be considered as impersonal only if the verse that follows it is ignored, since the anacoluthon presumably depends on the need to avoid putting the verb est in the first position, as shown in ibid., §470, p. 277. As for the unattested form troup (unless it is a scribal lapsus), the digraph ⟨ou⟩ instead of ⟨o⟩ is a common interference phenomenon of Franco-Italian scriptae. 10. The absence of -s in enver (< IN + VERSU) is common in Italian copies of French texts: see, for example, the virelai (R, fol. 81v) Adeu mon cuer, v. 10, and the rondeau attributed to Matteo da Perugia (ModA, Zr) Dame d’honour, v. 5. The rare Franco-Italian form of the possessive voutre (also in ii, 11), which rialfri detects only in the Entrée d’Espagne, has at least three occurrences in ModA (fols. 25v, 27v, 33v). 105  ,   11. The construction of servir with indirect object (see dmf, Servir) is less attested than the construction with direct object and apparently absent in the French lyric corpus (always que serf), whereas (a) cui servo is well represented in Italian lyric poems (about twenty thirteenth and fourteenth-century occurrences). For servir sans fauseté, see, for example, Machaut, Louange des dames, ballade viii, vv. 17-18: «je l’aim tant qu’onques mes cuers ne fine / de li servir sans nulle fausseté». 12. For languir de (the preposition de expressing the cause: mw, §303, p. 185), see, for example, the rondeau Ay las! quant ie pans le biauté de m’amour (Man, lvii), v. 5: «languiray de d[ueil] et de tristour». The syntagm grant ardure depends on the commonplace metaphor of the ‘fire of love’, which recurs frequently in the lyrical repertory: «li maus qui m’art et destruit nuit et jour» or «l’ardure dou grant desir / qui me fait a la mort traire» are two of the many loci which can be cited (respectively Machaut, Louange des dames, ballades ii, v. 20 and xxxii, vv. 4-5). In the Italian corpus, the only occurrence of the equivalent syntagm grand’ardura appears in the ballata set to music by Andrea da Firenze, Non isperi merzede (ed. Poesie musicali del Trecento, p. 301, n. 18, v. 8), where it rhymes with the adjective dura (as it does here). The feminine adjective grant is an epicene form still common in mfr. for the Latin second class adjectives (and the synthetic comparatives and the present participles): see mw, §256, p. 144, and gghf, §30.1.3.2, p. 654. ii. Rondeau Metric scheme: A10’ B8 B8 A10’ | a10’ b8 A10’ B8 a10’ b8 b8 a10’ Three verses display metric anomalies. We have corrected only v. 6, where the expected octosyllable is replaced by a decasyllable with lyric cesura that is clearly inadmissible (only nine musical figures are notated for the ten syllables), by eliminating the probable poetic filler que m’est. Rhymes: a -oye, b -our Se la plaisant chiera veoyr povoye de cella chi serf m’amour delivré seroy de dolour et de Fortune che ansi me gravoye. 5 10 {-1} Certes ma complainte a li feroye {-1} de liesse tornee en plour [se la plaisant chiera veoyr povoye de cella chi serf m’amour]. Quant me sovient de vous, ma douce yoye, y’en ay ansi tres grand douchour, 106   -  puis que y[e] avis voutre dolour: se ce ne fust, bien croy que ye m[o]roye. Se la plaisant chiera etc. ____________________________ 1: povoye] poroye. 3: delivré] delime. 4: Fortune] fortu. 5: feroye] feroy. 6: liesse tornee] l. que mest t. 10: douchour] douceur. Translation. ‘If I could see the beautiful face of the one my love serves, I would be freed from the pain and the Fate that distressed me so much. | I would certainly address to her my lament about my happiness turned into tears [if I could see the beautiful face of the one my love serves]. When I harken back to you, my sweet joy, I feel such a great sweetness, after I recognised (?) your pain: if it were not so, I really think I would die of it’. Notes. 1. Though made up of two frequently recurring terms of lyrical vocabulary (for chiere, ‘visage, mine, air’, see ed. Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies lyriques, vol. ii, p. 660), the syntagm plaisant chiera is not found elsewhere in the French corpus (in Machaut, for example, the predominant formula is douce chiere, as shown by the series of ballades, Louange des dames, cxxxv, cxxxviii-cxxxix), whereas it is sporadically attested in thirteenth-century Italian lyrics: see, above all, the incipit of Giacomino Pugliese, La dolce cera piasente (ed. [by Giuseppina Brunetti] I poeti della Scuola siciliana, vol. ii: Poeti della corte di Federico II, dir. da Costanzo Di Girolamo, Milano, Mondadori, 2008, pp. 617-618). In the ms. reading poroye, the use of the conditional in the dependent clause of the hypothetical period is grammatically erroneous and, as such, unattested in mfr. literature (very rare occurrences in afr., particularly in Anglo-Norman texts: see Claude Buridant, Grammaire du français médiéval: 11-14. siècles, Strasbourg, EliPhi, 2019, §578, p. 936). It is possible that this reading stems from faulty knowledge of French grammar (by the author or by a copyist), but a lapsus, or, better still, a palaeographic confusion from the correct imperfect form povoye seems a more likely explanation. 2. The relative pronoun chi must be intended as cui (commonly confused with qui in afr. and mfr. scriptae: see mw, §413, pp. 247-248) or che (que). For the double rection of servir (direct and indirect object), see above, note to i, 11. 3. The conditional seroy (cfr. ms. feroy v. 5, vs. imperf. povoye v. 1 and gravoye v. 4, cond. moroye v. 12) has one less syllable than the allotropic form seroye: both are acceptable, based on afr. and more and more frequent mfr. attestations (different descriptions and explanations are in Pierre Fouché, Le verbe français: étude morphologique, Paris, Klincksieck, 1967, §123bis, p. 240, and gghf, §31.6.2.3.b, p. 786); the choice is based on prosodical factors. The forms without -e are recurrent in Franco-Italian scriptae: see, for example, ed. Trentatré liriche franco-italiane, xx, vv. 13, 17, «Un ciapelet en feroy», and vv. 19, 21: «A mon ami le daroy». 4. For the ms. reading fortu – the necessary integration -ne regularizes both the form and the meter – see above, note 100. The same noun, which we interpret here as a personification (Fortune), is subject of the verb grever in Machaut, Louange des dames, ballade cxiii, v. 2, Fortune me grieve nuit et jour. 5. We could locate other occurrences of complainte meaning ‘love lament’, usually expressed by the masculine form complaint, in the French lyric corpus. Nonetheless, according to dmf, the two 107  ,   forms were equivalent in both the common and the literary (‘poem expressing the love lament’) sense. A li is the older, but still well attested in mfr. construction for a elle (see mw, §265, p. 151-152). 6. The juxtaposition of liesse and plour occurs, for example, in Machaut, Louange des dames, ballade clv, vv. 15-17: «Car Amours se Diex me gart / qui me destraint pour vous et maine et art / me tient souvent en leesce et en plour». 9. The beloved is never named douce yoye in French lyric poetry. The use of joie as an epithet was uncommon in medieval French: the first attestations can be dated to the first decades of the fifteenth century (according to the dmf, Joie, A.1 a, which only cites three occurrences). On the contrary, the use of gioi(a) to address the beloved – the origin of this metaphorisation probably lies in a poetic pseudonym used by some troubadours such as Bernart de Ventadorn (Fis-Jois in BdT 70.19, v. 52) and Giraut de Borneil (Mos-Jois in BdT 242.4, v. 53, and 242.65, v. 15) – was (and still is) common in Italian, at least since the works of Guittone d’Arezzo (see Tuttor ch’eo dirò «Gioi», gioiva cosa; ed. Leonardi, Guittone d’Arezzo, n. 31, pp. 92-94): see Federico Saviotti, «Tuttor ch’eo dirò “gioi”». La «joie» appellatif de la dame dans la lyrique romane médiévale (avec quelques remarques sur les pseudonymes poétiques des troubadours), «Revue des langues romanes», cxxvi, 2022, pp. 293-313. This element may speak to the Italian origin of the author, which is, however, impossible to confirm. 10. The rhyme -our compels us interpret the ms. reading as douceur, representing the standard French form, with the northern vocalism (/u/ vs. /œ/) for the stressed syllable. Thus, based on dochour (iii, 4), we spell this northern form as douchour, although douçour would also be possible (but the Pv scribe never uses the grapheme ç). 11. The exact meaning of this verse is difficult to establish, for none of its components can be unambiguously interpreted. The conjunction puis que often has a temporal value (‘after, afterward’), but it can also express cause (see dmf, Puis). The verb aviser has a wide range of senses in mfr. (e.g. ‘to notice’, ‘to recognise’, ‘to realise’: see dmf, Aviser) and the form avis may be either a present or, more likely, a simple past indicative. Furthermore, the literal translation above evades the problem posed by the adjective voutre: subjective (‘your own pain’) or objective (‘the pain you cause’) possessive? Both interpretations are possible, but puzzling. If the former, the beloved’s dolour would counterbalance the lover’s pain mentioned in the refrain (v. 3), though this would introduce an unexpected attitude of revenge towards the beloved that does not seem very consistent with the rest of the poem. If the latter, the dolour would be, as in v. 3, the same lover’s pain, whose relationship to the douchour (v. 11) would not be clear. 12. For the topic of death by love, see above note to i, 4. iii. Rondeau Metric scheme: A7 B7’ B7’ A7 | a7 b7’ A7 B7’ a7 b7’ b7’ a7 At least three verses display metric anomalies. Only v. 6 can easily be corrected, by modifying the perfect form luit into the imperfect luisoit, which seems more appropriate from the point of view of the verbal aspect. Rhymes: a -our, b -aine/ayne 108   -  Aves moy passoyt un flour pleins de odour moult souverayne che me traist au cler fontaine a coillir pour grant dochour. 5 10 Do roses oyt de bo colour que plus luisoit che l’araine. [Aves moy passoyt un flour pleins de odour moult souverayne] Le rai s’es de fin our, sus l’eve fet tint a graine, donc ye chant a vous hautaine pour son grand e douce amour. {+1} {-1} Aves moy etc. ____________________________ 2: moult souverayne] moulte sourayne. 6: luisoit] luit; l’araine] ladame. 10: a graine] acraine. Translation. ‘A flower full of very noble scent passed/wilted before me: this attracted me to the limpid fountain to pick it for great sweetness. | There were two roses whose beautiful colour glittered more than bronze [A flower full of very noble scent passed/wilted before me]. The ray is pure gold, it dyes the water surface scarlet, therefore I sing aloud for her/his great and sweet love’. Notes. It is possible that in this poem the love declaration (which is openly stated only in the final v. 12, if one understands son, ‘her’, as referring to an unknown and not aforementioned lady, although it seems more likely that it refers to the rai) is no more than a pretext for encomiastic homage: the images of the fountain (v. 3), of the two roses (v. 5) and maybe of the golden ray (v. 9) might be interpreted as a consistent system of metaphorical or even heraldic – though not transparent – references. 1. We interpret the aberrant hapax aves as envers, ‘towards, in front of’ (< VERSUS), which is sometimes spelled anvers in Franco-Italian sources (see, for example, Le roman d’Hector et Hercule, éd. par Joseph Palermo, Genève, Droz, 1972, vv. 1057, 1383, 1642). As for the two subsequent consonant cluster reductions involved, nv > v and rs > s, it is difficult to find attestations of the former, whereas the latter is sporadically found in Italian varieties (e.g. AD DORSUM > it. addosso, milan. adòss: see Salvioni, Fonetica del dialetto moderno, §210; cfr. also the correspondent Occitan form enves). In any case, since aves is used twice by the scribe (v. 1 and the incipit of the refrain at the end of the poem), we prefer not to correct it. The noun flour, which (based on vv. 11-12) could metaphorically refer to the beloved (see, for example, Machaut, Louange des dames, ballade cc, vv. 9-10: «Seur toute fleur l’avoit mes cuers eslite / com la plus douce et la plus debonaire») if this is indeed a love poem like the other three, is treated as masculine (as in the Italo-Romance varieties: see above), since it is accompanied by the article un and 109  ,   the adjective pleins (v. 2), both guaranteed by the metre. Here the verb passer may mean either ‘to pass by’ or ‘to wither’ (dmf, Passer, B.1.c: «“Être affecté par le temps qui s’écoule” – [D’une fleur] “Se faner, se flétrir”»): if the latter, the subject’s reaction (to go and pick it, vv. 3-4) would be explicable only if the flower were not already completely withered, so as to capture its final moment of liveliness. 2. The aberrant ms. reading moulte souurayne likely is a corruption of moult souverayne (‘very noble’). Odour is, contrarily to flour (v. 1), regularly treated as feminine. Although the syntagm souverainne/souvereinne flour is frequent in Machaut (e.g., Louange des dames, ballades vii, v. 4, ccxviii, v. 21, cclxx, v. 4) and in Deschamps (e.g., in the virelay dlxi, ed. Œuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps publiées d’après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, éd. par le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, vol. iv: Rondeaulx et virelays, Paris, Didot, 1884, p. 17), here the adjective can only refer to odour, as it is a feminine form: the same rare iunctura is found in the ballade set to music by Egidius Augustinus (Ch, fol. 22r), Roses et lis ay veu en une flour, v. 9: «Moult est noble et souverayne oudour» (with which our rondeau seems to have no other correspondence, except for the mention of plural roses, here in v. 5). A plein(e) de odour flower is quite common in the corpus: see, for example, the ballades (Cyp, 135v) Je ne desirs fors, vv. 4-5: «rose plaisant et tres odorant flour, / plainne de bien et de trestoute odour», and (Ivi, fol. 119v) Fleur gracieuse, vv. 15-17: «Je vous puis bien appeller gente flour, / et puis qu’estes fort entre toutes loée; / dire vous puis plaine de toute oudour». 3. The relative pronoun che stands for qui (nominative). The noun fontaine is treated as a masculine (see the adjective cler and the preposition au), as it is in Johannes Ciconia’s famous virelai Sus un fontaine (for this incipit the manuscript tradition also offers the reading une fontaine, which creates a hypermetric verse). This irregularity, linguistically unjustified (in the Italian varieties the corresponding noun fontana is always feminine) must have prosodical motivations. Another feature linking Ciconia’s virelai to Aves moi passoyt un flour is the compresence of flour and fontaine, which is very rare in the corpus. The poetic image of a fountain, quite recurrent in poems written in the Visconti’s milieu between the end of the fourteenth and the first decades of the fifteenth century, might metaphorically allude to the (hopefully) inextinguishable munificence of the Signori: see Reinhard Strohm, Filippotto da Caserta ovvero i Francesi in Lombardia, in In cantu et in sermone: for Nino Pirrotta on his 80th birthday, ed. by Fabrizio Della Seta and Franco Piperno, Firenze, Olschki, 1989, pp. 65-74. The cler(e) fontaine clearly depicts a locus amoenus characterised by the presence of flowers (see also v. 5) and water (v. 10), a common setting for the love affairs reported in Trecento ballatas and madrigals. It is noteworthy that in Italian poetry the same syntagm can refer (but only rarely) to the poet’s beloved, as it does in an anonymous fragmentary sonnet transcribed in 1294: see Rime due e trecentesche tratte dall’Archivio di Stato di Bologna, a c. di Sandro Orlando, Bologna, Commissione per i testi di lingua, 2005, n. 57, v. 5: «Clara fontana che sorge alo nictore»). This is probably based on the secular appropriation of a sacred formula (Psalm. xxxv 10; Ier ii. 13) attested since the origins of Italian literature: see, for example, Chiaro Davanzati, Rime, a c. di Aldo Menichetti, Bologna, Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1965, p. 93). The verb traire was commonly used by the trouvères to express the beloved’s power to attract the lover (e.g., Jacques d’Amiens, rs 737, vv. 50-51: «di ma dame, chançon, hardiemant / c’ a soi servir me traist an esgardant»; ed. Jacques d’Amiens, hrsg. von Philipp Simon, Berlin, Vogts Verlag, 1895, vi, p. 61); in the formes fixes traire is usually replaced by the synonym compound at(t)raire. 4. The verb coillir traditionally refers at least since the Roman de la Rose (where it expresses the accomplishment of the allegoric action) to sexual intercourse, based on the topical floral metaphor: see, for example, the incipit of the anonymous ballades En un vergier cols par mesure (ModA, fol. 18v) and especially En un vergier ou avoit mainte flour (Cyp, fol. 115r, vv. 1-5): «En un vergier ou avoit mainte 110   -  flour, / sur un rosier vi une fresce rose. / Tres doulce estoit sa fasson et s’oudour, / si qu’en mon ceur s’est ardamment enclose / la volenté de celle flour ceuillir». The same topos is frequently exploited in the Italian Trecento lyric repertory: see for instance the ballatas set to music by Jacopo da Bologna, In su’ be’ fiori, in su la verde fronda (ed. Poesie musicali del Trecento, p. 34, n. 7, vv. 7-8) and by Andrea da Firenze, Fili paion di fin or lavorati (Ivi, p. 297, n. 13, vv. 5-8). Moreover, in the anonymous madrigal Cogliendo per un prat’ ogni fior bianco set to music by Nicolò del Preposto (Nicolò del Preposto, Opera Completa. Edizione critica commentata dei testi intonati e delle musiche, a c. di Antonio Calvia, Firenze, Edizioni del Galluzzo per la Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, 2017, pp. 88-89), the action of picking flowers also occurs in the presence of a fonte (v. 4) and the metaphorical use of the noun oro (v. 6, referring to the maidens’ hair; cfr. here our, v. 9), to bolster the conventional description of a coup de foudre setting. The preposition pour (unless it does not stand for par, ‘by means of ’) can express purpose (as in modern French) or cause (see mw, §304, p. 186). Here both meanings are theoretically possible, but the former seems preferable, ‘in order to (scil. feel) a great sweetness’, as a complement of cause should involve a possessive (see the numerous occurrences of mourir + pour sa [grant] biauté/douçour). 5. The ms. reading bo – we have not corrected this form, since the Italian author himself might have used it – can express either bon (for the fall of -n see above), ‘good’, or, with a less likely phonetic spelling (no such occurrences in the rialfri corpus), beau, ‘beautiful’. In both cases, the adjective shows that colour is treated as masculine, like flour and unlike odour (the feminine forms bone/bele would increase the hypermetria, in a verse already one syllable too long). No other literary occurrences of bo(ne) coulour referring to flowers (or to the beloved’s appearance) have been found either in French or in Italian. In the samples found in the Corpus OVI, ‘good colour’ usually describes a healthy human face (the syntagm is recurrent in medical texts) or, more rarely, is the external expression of a moral attitude (e.g., in the capitolo ternario of fourteenth-century poet Sinibaldo da Perugia, Lo stato in che Fortuna aspra e ria, v. 15; ed. Daniele Piccini, Sinibaldo da Perugia. Un poeta del Trecento e la sua opera, Perugia, Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria, vi, 2008, pp. 318-345). As for the syntagm bele coulour, it is used (albeit rarely) in lyric poems, particularly by the trouvères. Given the rare literary appearances of the syntagm ‘two roses’ (for the numeral do, which can be either a Lombardism or an interference phenomenon, see above), which seem to be unattested in the French lyric corpus, it is worth reporting the sole Petrarchan occurrence (Due rose fresche, et colte in paradiso, incipit of the sonnet RVF 245, «uno dei testi più “misteriosi” della raccolta» according to Marco Santagata: Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, a c. di Marco Santagata, Milano, Mondadori, 2004, p. 992), and the one in Nicolò de Rossi’s sonnet 406, vv. 9-10: «Tu mi mostri tra due vermiglie rose / menute perle uguale e blanche molto» (ed. Il canzoniere di Nicolò de Rossi, a c. di Furio Brugnolo, 2 vols., Padova, Antenore, 1974-1977), where the roses are clearly a metaphor for the beloved’s lips (as in Le rime di Cino da Pistoia, a c. di Guido Zaccagnini, Genève, Leo S. Olschki, 1925, canzone clxxix, vv. 9-11: «Oimé lo dolce riso / per lo qual si vedea la bianca neve / fra le rose vermiglie d’ogne tempo», where the numeral is missing). In our rondeau it is difficult to decide whether the roses have a literal (as in Petrarch) or metaphorical meaning. If the latter, the roses refer to the beloved’s eyes, based on the next verse (elsewhere roses can describe female cheeks: see Simone Serdini da Siena detto il Saviozzo, Rime, a c. di Emilio Pasquini, Bologna, Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1965, canzone 65, v. 23: «veggio le guance sue piene di rose»). Another possibility is that the image is heraldic, although emblems with two roses are quite rare. We located one for the Casati, a Milanese aristocratic family linked to the Visconti especially in the time of Gian Galeazzo, but it is not clear if such an emblem was already in use in the fourteenth century. The verbal form oyt for the third person perfect indicative of avoir (here meaning ‘to be there’) is recurrent in northern Italian Franco-Italian scriptae. 111  ,   6. In the ms. this verse lacks a syllable. The correction of luit (minoritarian form, for present and perfect indicative, compared to the more common luist: see dmf, Luire) in luisoit, based on metrical and aspectual reasons, is also supported by the double occurrence of the same syntagm que plus luisoit (v. 6-7) and of an active ray bearing a figurative (purely metaphoric? allegoric? heraldic?) meaning (v. 1, here v. 9) in the anonymous virelai Un noble ray en mon songe veoie, a unicum of the ms. Lo15224 (fol. 33r), a codex containing «a lyric collection which seems to have originated at the Visconti court in Milan-Pavia», whose compilation can be dated, based on many references to Giangaleazzo, before his death in 1402 (Yolanda Plumley, Crossing Borderlines: Points of Contact between the Late-Fourteenth Century French Lyric and Chanson Repertories, «Acta Musicologica», lxxvi, 2004, pp. 3-23: 13; for a non-critical edition of the poems see Norbert H. Wallis, Anonymous French Verse. An Anthology of Fifteenth Century Poems Collected from Manuscripts from the British Museum, London, University of London Press, 1929). The affinities between this poem – brought to our attention by Anne Stone – and Aves moy passoyt un flour do not seem to be fortuitous. The grammatical subject of the singular verbal form can only be (by hypallage?) the bo colour of the two roses. According to the rhyme (-aine) the ms. reading la dame (which is clearly a lectio facilior for a copyist acquainted with lyric poetry) must be intended as *ladaine, probably a deformation of l’araine, ‘the bronze’ (tl, i, 488-489; in this context, la daine, ‘the female deer’, is obviously not acceptable), a shiny material par excellence, but less precious than gold (following v.). 9. In love poetry, the ray (rai) generally originates from the beloved’s shining eyes: see, for example, the ballade Corps femenin (Ch, fol. 23v), v. 6: «l’amoureux ray de vostre oeil riant», or the ballata by Giovanni Quirini, Io chiudo gli ochi quando a me si voglie (ed. Rimatori del Trecento, a c. di Giuseppe Corsi, Torino, UTET, 1969, p. 56, n. xii), vv. 1-3: «Io chiudo gli ochi quando a me si voglie / la gioven dona, perché sofferire / non posson del suo ragio il bel fedire». That said, as already mentioned, it is by no means certain that this rondeau is to be read as a love song. For the interpretation of the enigmatic rai, it is worth noticing that in the related virelai Un noble ray en mon songe veoie (see above, note to iii, 6), the ray would be the emblem of the Milanese duke Giangaleazzo Visconti, whose dynasty might be also evoked by the fontaine (here v. 3). We interpret the ms. reading ses as s’(< SIC) es (< EST), the meaning being ‘is really, truly’ (‘…pure gold’, so much more precious than the araine, v. 6). This hypothesis is supported by an identical occurrence, albeit in a completely different work (a thirteenth-century encyclopaedic prose compilation): in the ms. K version of Brunetto Latini’s Trésor we find La tierce et la quarte partie dou liure, c’est dou trésor, si est de fin or (the fact that this passage is apocryphal is obviously irrelevant; see Pietro G. Beltrami, Tre schede sul Trésor: 1. Il sistema delle scienze e la struttura del Trésor 2. Trésor e Tresoretto 3. Aspetti della ricezione del Trésor, «Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia», s. iii, xxiii, 1993, pp. 115-190: 161). Despite est in i, 1 and 9, which proves that the copyist was familiar with the correct French form, here we do not restore est, since the author is presumably Italian and es occurs very frequently in Franco-Italian texts (same for è in iv, 10: see below). As for the syntagm de fin our, never found elsewhere in reference to a ray, the Italian equivalent is recurrent in the ballatas and madrigals repertory, usually referring to the beloved’s hair: e.g., Andrea da Firenze, Fili paion di fin or lavorati (ed. Poesie musicali del Trecento, p. 297, n. 13, vv. 1-2), and Francesco Landini, La bionda treccia di fin or colore (ibid., p. 185, n. 71, v. 1). 10. The ms. reading eue (‘water’), conspicuously represented in Franco-Italian and almost unattested in contemporary French sources (which usually prefer conservative forms with diphthong ai- and consonant g: see dmf, Aigue), the grapheme u can express either the labio-velar approximant /w/ or the labio-dental fricative /v/. In choosing the latter (form eve in the critical text), we follow the majority of the philologists (24 interpret it as eve vs. only 4 as eue according to the editions used by the rialfri). The most likely interpretation for the second part of this v., in the ms. tint acraine, is tint a graine, 112   -  ‘dyed scarlet’ which would fit perfectly with the semantic field of visual perception on which the entire strophe is based. Tint seems to be an Italianised form of the fr. teint (< TINCTU, either as the past participle of teindre, ‘to dye’, or as a noun, ‘colour, shade’). For graine, ‘scarlet’, see dmf, Graine, ii. As for the logical value of the preposition a, it could be a deformation of an (instead of en: see above aves, iii, 1). Occurrences of the Italian equivalent syntagm tinto in grana are common in Lombard works, such as the fourteenth-century anonymous «contrasto in forma di ballata» Confesando la mia defeta (ed. Lorck, Altbergamaskische Sprachdenkmaler, pp. 90-91, v. 58) or Matazone da Caligano’s Detto dei villani (ed. Poeti del Duecento, a c. di Gianfranco Contini, 2 vols., Milano-Napoli, Ricciardi, 1960, i, pp. 791-801, v. 246), but also in poems composed by authors from Central Italy: see, for example, Jacopone da Todi’s lauda Sorella, tu che plangni (ed. Rosanna Bettarini, Jacopone e il Laudario Urbinate, Firenze, Sansoni, 1969, iv, pp. 495-504, v. 118) and Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo (Fazio degli Uberti, Il Dittamondo e le Rime, a c. di Giuseppe Corsi, 2 vols., Bari, Laterza, 1952, i, L.3, cap. 18, v. 69). 11. In afr. and mfr. dont (‘from where’) «se confond […] plus ou moins avec donc (“alors, en consequence”)» (dmf, Dont): here, the correct meaning is the latter. The syntagm a vois (< VOCE, here vous, a Lombard or Franco-Italian interferential form) hautaine is recurrent in the French lyric corpus, referring to the lover’s stentorian singing. 12. Singing for love is one of the most widespread lyric commonplaces, at least since Bernart de Ventadorn’s manifesto, BdT 70.15, vv. 1-2: «Chantars no pot gaire valer / si d’ins dal cor no mou lo chans» (Bernart von Ventadorn, Seine Lieder mit Einletung und Glossar, hrsg. von Carl Appel, Halle a. S., Niemeyer, 1915, p. 247). For amour accompanied by an ‘objective’ possessive referring to the beloved (and not, as is usual, a ‘subjective’ one referring to the lover), see the ballade Je ne desir fors que vo douce amour (Cyp, 135v), vv. 1-5: «Je ne desir fors que vo douce amour, / dame en qui maint toute vraie doussour, / vers qui doit on tous les tans retourner, / rose plaisant et tres odorant flour, / plainne de bien et de trestoute odour» (this long quotation is justified by the contemporary presence of specific elements, like the rose and the odour). Yet, like the other lyric topoi and vocabulary exploited by the author, this seems to require here a second-order interpretation, since there is no explicit reference to a beloved. Subsequently, the possessive adjective son – incongruous as a masculine form, as douce amour is usually treated as a feminine (grand is the epicene form already discussed: see above, note to i, 12) – should logically refer to the rai (v. 9), rather than to an any other unmentioned subject (see the introductory note above). iv. Virelai The text of the strophe is in very bad condition, due not only to material lacunae (mostly in the tierce) and parchment deterioration, but presumably also to errors of transcription and linguistic interferences that make some verses barely comprehensible and the syntax difficult to reconstruct. Therefore, for vv. 5-12 we have decided not to attempt a critical edition of the text as a whole and no commentary is given. Instead, for each verse we offer the most plausible (needing only very limited or no editorial intervention at all and providing a satisfactory meaning) reading accompanied by an English translation of the intelligible parts of the text. As for the punctuation, we have only marked with a period the end of the ouvert-clos section. 113  ,   Metric scheme: A10’ B10 B10 A10’ | c8’ d8 c8’ c8’ d8 c8 a10’ b10 b10 a10’ At least two verses are metrically irregular. The hypermetric v. 3 could be easily normalized by eliminating either the initial et (so as to obtain a regular decasyllable with 4+6 structure), or – given v. 1, whose structure is the quite rare 5+5’ – the adverb tres in the second hemistich. Since it is impossible to decide between these two solutions and metrical anomalies are frequent in the Pv poems, we have not intervened. On the contrary, in the second hemistich of the hypermetric v. 12, we have eliminated a semantically incongruous tout (so to obtain 4+6), which is clearly a repetition of the previous v. 11. Rhymes: a -ie, b -ans, c -eta, d -é Tant yolis et gay sans melenconie vivray liés et yoieus en tout mon tans et sans nul dangier feray tres dous semblans pour le playsir de vous, dame yolie. 5 10 15 {+1} Car poynt ne † maet † mes dousceta amoureus de sa nobleté moy a doné s’amour bruneta ens les autres plus yolieta et deservi tres bien mercé flour n’è u mond tant gratioseta. A ma poysansa a tout jour de ma vie pour [de]f[i]nir mon cuer en des[iran]s ma[…] grand […] ple[…] […]yans unques[…] si yoye comp[lie]. [Tant yolis et gay sans melenconie…] ____________________________ 1: Tant] the capital T was not traced, but the guide-letter is visible with UV-induced-fluorescence scan; melenconie] meleconie. 2: yoieus] yoiens; tans] tamps. 4: playsir] playr. 9: deservi tres] de tres serui. 12: mon] tout mon; en] e en. Translation. ‘So happy and joyful, without sadness, I will live glad and cheerful all my time and without any hesitation I will put on a very sweet face for your pleasure, nice lady. | Because not at all 114   -  […] sweeter, in love with her nobleness, a brunette more beautiful than the others gave me her love and I deserved very well (her) mercy, no flower in the world is so lovely. As far as I can, every day of my life, in order to wear out my heart with desire […] never […] accomplished joy’. Notes. 1. The adjectives yoli et gay form, as in the virelai A qui fortune est toutdis ennemie (ModA, fol. 19v, vv. 5-6: «Si ne se doit nulz homs meravellier / se je sui bien de cuer gay et jolis»), a synonymic pair (it. ‘dittologia sinonimica’), which is doubled in the following verse (see note). Yoli (‘happy, joyful’; see dmf, Joli) only rarely describes the lover’s condition; see, for example, the refrain of the «ballette» rs 1051: «Cilz qui me tient por jolit / ne seit pais les malz que je trai» (ed. The Old French Ballette. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, ed. by Eglal Doss-Quinby, Samuel Rosenberg and Elizabeth Aubrey, Genève, Droz, 2006, 122, p. 348). In meleconie – an Italianism: in French the word is spelled with l or r (-colie/-corie) – a titulus for n is presumably missing: the very few Italian occurrences of melaconia/malaconia (4 cases, all found in Tuscan sources) are not enough to justify the ms. reading. For melenconie, ‘état de profonde tristesse, humeur sombre, abattement, dépression, inquiétude’, see dmf, Mélancolie, B.2 (another primary meaning of the same word – which would be inappropriate here – is ‘colère, dépit, ressentiment’, ibid., B.1). Equally, the Italian equivalent malinconia can signify ‘triste e doloroso pensiero’ (TLIO. Tesoro della lingua italiana delle Origini, a c. di Paolo Squillacioti et al. [http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/, last accessed October 20, 2022], malinconìa [by Elena Artale, 31/12/2005], 2.4), but for the lyric idiolect a more specific meaning is suggested: ‘doloroso e stizzoso tormento (spesso associato ad ira) determinato dall’impossibilità di appagare il proprio desiderio’ (Ivi, 3). The absence of this specific kind of melenconie is clearly the ideal status for a lover. 2. The same four adjectival synonyms, here split in the first two verses, appear, though in a single verse and in a partially different order, in the incipit of Machaut’s Louange des dames, ballade xxxix, vv. 1-2: «Gais et jolis, liés, chantans et joieus / Sui, ce m’est vis, en gracieus retour». For the frequently recurring synonymic pair liés et joieus, see also a ballade (Leiden, fol. 3v) by Martinus Fabri, v. 1: «[N]’ai je cause d’estre liés et joyeux»; see Two Chansonniers from the Low Countries: French and Dutch Polyphonic Songs from the Leiden and Utrecht Fragments (Early 15th Century), ed. by Jan van Biezen and Johan Peter Gumbert, Amsterdam, Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1985, pp. 41-43. We have found only very few occurrences of the syntagm (which seems to be completely unattested in Italian literature) en tout mon temps in afr. (for instance in the Roman de Carité by the Renclus de Moilliens, cxviii, v. 11; ed. Li Romans de Carité et Miserere du Renclus de Moilliens, poèmes de la fin du XIIe siècle, éd. par Anton Gerard van Hamel, 2 vols., Paris, F. Viewig, 1885, i, p. 63) and in mfr. (for example, in the Dits de Watriquet de Couvin, éd. par August Scheler, Bruxelles, Devaux, 1868, p. 247, v. 505, or in the Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin par Cuvelier, éd. par Ernest Charrière, 2 vols., Paris, Didot, 1839, i, p. 451, v. 12924): the expression tout mon temps, without the preposition en, is used much more frequently. 3. Dangier is a polysemic term. For sans dangier, ‘without hesitation’, see dmf, Danger, B.1.d. Another lyric occurrence of the syntagm sans nul dangier is found in the ballade Amor me fait desirer loyalment (R, fol. 57v), vv. 5-6: «C’est que merchi puisse avoir pour amer / en nom d’ami sans nul dangier porter». The expression faire (tres) dous semblans does not seem to be otherwise attested (in courtly literature dous semblant usually refers to the beloved’s rather than to the lover’s appearance). Based on «Faire beau / bon / grand semblant à qqn, ‘Faire bonne mine, bon accueil’ à qqn» (dmf, Semblant, i.A.1b), we interpret it here as ‘to put on a (very) sweet face’. 4. The ms. reading playr is a scribal lapsus for playsir (a sort of haplography). For de vous instead of the possessive, see mw, §272.1 («De + pron. prédicatif tient très fréquemment la place du possessif»). 115  ,   In dame yolie, a common epithet in the corpus, the adjective clearly has a different meaning (‘nice’: dmf, Joli, ii.A) from yolis (v. 1). 8. Critical edition of the music We have adopted the principles for critical editing of fourteenth-century music shared by the European Ars Nova study group.117 Individual editorial choices due to the specific properties of this manuscript witness are discussed above in §5. The reduction ratio between the original values and those of the transcription is 1:4. Tempus imperfectum with prolatio maior is rendered with the modern 6/8 (B = °.); tempus imperfectum with prolatio minor with the modern 2/4 (B = ° ). The ligaturae are indicated by continuous square ligatures; color by open square ligatures; semicolor by dashed square ligatures. Editorial additions are in square brackets. Numbers of clos measures are followed by an asterisk. In cases where legibility was difficult, and especially for fol. 1v, our transcriptions have been supported by high quality UVIF images. i. La nuit que est tant obscure (virelai 21) Mensura: tempus imperfectum / prolatio maior Ambitus: C a-bb; T D-d 117 See Musica e poesia nel Trecento italiano. Verso una nuova edizione critica dell’«Ars nova», a c. di Antonio Calvia e Maria Sofia Lannutti, Firenze, Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2015; Nicolò del Preposto, Opera completa. Edizione critica commentata dei testi intonati e delle musiche, a c. di Antonio Calvia, Firenze, Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2017; La caccia nell’Ars Nova italiana. Edizione critica commentata dei testi e delle intonazioni, a c. di Michele Epifani, Firenze, Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2019. Some objections to the editorial criteria adopted in Nicolò del Preposto, Opera completa have been raised in a recently published review article (Francesco Zimei, «Verso una nuova edizione critica dell’Ars Nova»: in margine all’“Opera completa” di Nicolò del Preposto, passando per una raccolta di saggi, «Cultura Neolatina», lxxvii, 2018, pp. 277-302), where Zimei accused the editor of omitting a lectio of the manuscript from the apparatus to better support his hypothesis (Ivi, p. 298). In the response article (Antonio Calvia, Davide Checchi, L’edizione dei testi intonati dell’Ars Nova: alcune questioni di metodo, «Cultura Neolatina», lxxx, 3-4, 2020, pp. 245-281), the authors demonstrate that the reviewer was not only unable to find that reading within the critical apparatus of the literary texts but had not taken into account the related musical edition (see Ivi, pp. 269-270). Zimei admits the error in a very concise footnote of his counterresponse (see Francesco Zimei, Se questo è un metodo, «Cultura Neolatina», lxxxi, 1-2, 2021, pp. 157-164). Due to its outrageous title, inexplicably alluding to Primo Levi’s well-known book on the Holocaust, the reviewer’s counterresponse remains unworthy of reply. 116            -          Final sonorities: D-d; ouvert: E-e; clos: D-d   Special figurae: ED¸ ♯ Formal features: ouvert/clos   # : C 17, C 28* ♯  # : C 19      ii. Se  la playsant chiera veoyr povoye (rondeau 2 with alius tenor)    ♯ Mensura: tempus imperfectum / prolatio maior   Ambitus: C a-bb; T D-d (b # signature); alius T D-d ♯   Final sonorities: D-d; D-d (with alius tenor, ouvert: E-e)  Special figurae: D ; vacue for ouvert ending  Formal features: the version with T has ouvert/clos ending in section A ♯  # : T signature; C 12*, C 25   #:C4 ♯    1  iii. Aves moy passoyt un flour (rondeau 21)      Mensura: tempus imperfectum / prolatio maior    Ambitus: C G-bb; T D-d (b # signature)  ♯   Final sonorities: D-d; F-f ♯ Special Figurae: D¸ # : T signature; C 3, C 23    # : C 10 ♯   In two instances (C 19 and C 21), the succession ‘semibrevis perfecta – two minim rests – minim’ is ♯  written using the dot after the semibreve (SP “” M); in all other cases, the same rhythm is written with out the dot (C 4, C 8, C 11, C 24).   13 C the minim e’s stem is clearly visible in the uvif photo   24 C 1, e        iv. Tant yolis et gay sans melenconie (virelai 21)       Mensura: tempus imperfectum / prolatio maior  C d–ee; T G–g (b flat signature) Ambitus: Final sonorities: G-g; ouvert: a-aa; clos: G-g Special Figurae: D Formal features: ouvert/clos # : C 25, C 38* # : C 15  117  ,   v. Credo, incipit Omnipotentem (22 of 44?), fragmentary Mensura: tempus imperfectum / prolatio minor Ambitus: C ii b-dd; Ct C-e (b # signature) Sharp signs: #: C ii at bb. 33, 63, 116, 125, 138, 166; Ct at bb. 37, 116, 125, 138, 208. # : C ii at bb. 55, 205; Ct in signature and at bb. 66, 166, 181. Flat signs: = : C ii 155. @ : Ct 155. The figurae used in the Credo are as follows: X L B S M. Longa rests at bb. 128, 133, 134, 136 and 138, meant to separate single words of the period «ex Maria Virgine / et / homo / factus / est», have been transcribed as suspiria. The same principle has been applied to Ct 4. The maximae have been transcribed as modern breves without adjusting the 2/4 measure (see bb. 4-5 and 133-139). At Ct 161-162, a long is imperfected by a minim, exceptionally applying the imperfectio ad partem to an imperfect pars (the breve). Text underlay. The graphic forms of the manuscript have been maintained; abbreviations have been spelled out. Punctuation and capitalization are based on the Graduale romanum.118 Incomplete words due to material damage have been completed with the missing letters in square brackets. In sections 10-11 (from b. 199 on), the text of the tenor, lost due to material damage, has been supplied in square brackets. Two errors have been emended in italics: gloria] gloiria (cantus, b. 208; text of the tenor missing) and Pilato] pillato (both voices, b. 156). 7-8 22 20-21 23-24 47 70 80 93-94 112-117 189 194-199 219-220 C ii C ii C ii-Ct Ct Ct C ii C ii Ct C ii C ii Ct C ii notes and rests only partially visible in uvif images 1, om. punctum uncertain syllable placement L] B 1, the scribe corrects a semibreve rest into a minim rest 1, the scribe corrects the minim into a semibreve 2, the scribe corrects the minim into a semibreve L] B L L L] B B B om. minim rest (partly visible in uvif images?) material lacuna; the custos indicates c as first note L] B 118 Graduale Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae de Tempore et de Sanctis, Roma, Editio typica, 1908. 118   -  119  ,   120   -  121  ,   122   -  123  ,   124   -  125  ,   126   -  127  ,   128   -  129  ,   130   -  131  ,   132   -  133  ,   9. Conclusions Given the lack of named composers, as well as the absence of any concordances, addressing the fundamental questions regarding the dating and provenance of the Pavia fragment and the repertory it contains requires caution. It is highly plausible that the codex (or the larger project) to which the fragment belonged was compiled in northern Italy. Clues regarding such provenance are present in both the text and the music. In the text, these clues include the Italian palaeographic features and scripta of the textual copyist; in the music, they include the particular shape of the sharp sign and the tendency – characteristic of late fourteenth-century Italian notation – to create new figures, especially through the addition of caudae. The study of the bifolio reveals a new source of polyphony with distinctive characteristics of musical uniqueness and homogeneity: a) the five pieces included are unica, suggesting a restricted circulation; b) the figure of the brevis dragma is a notational hapax; c) the form of the rondeau with ouvert/clos endings is extraordinary; d) the use of coloration to indicate cadential diversification is unique (to our knowledge); e) finally, some elements suggest a strong stylistic homogeneity common to at least three of the four French-texted compositions. Homogeneity and uniqueness both point to local tastes; this seems to be valid for the French texts too, as at least two of them (rondeau iii and virelai iv) must be attributed to (an) Italian author(s) given their rhymes. We have deliberately left aside the Credo because its incompleteness makes it difficult to evaluate. That said, as mentioned above, it is compatible with other northern Italian settings of the Ordinary. The repertory transmitted probably dates to the end of the fourteenth century (a dating that is compatible with the palaeographic features displayed by the texts) or the first quarter of the fifteenth century, but the fragment’s very uniqueness prevents us from offering a more specific date. Indeed, the pieces transmitted by Pv are a repertory in search of a context. Two factors offer important evidence for the reception of this repertory: the possibility that the copyist of the texts was Lombard, and the fact that the bifolio, after being pasted in the host volume, circulated in Milan (from San Fedele to the Braidense). It seems likely that the milieus of the fragment’s reception and of its composi- 134   -  tion correspond to one another, as suggested by the distinctive features of both texts and music discussed above. With this assumption, we must also consider the possibility that the origin of the fragment’s contents could be linked to the most important cultural centre in late medieval west Lombardy: the Visconti court. In support of this hypothesis, we might consider some scattered elements,119 all in the rondeau iii: the mention of a fontaine (v. 3), an image that was often used by poets in service to the Visconti family as an encomiastic metaphor of their patrons’ largesse, and the joint occurrence of a rai (v. 9) and the syntagm que plus luisoit (v. 6) in an anonymous virelai conveyed only by a codex known to be linked to Giangaleazzo Visconti (Lo15224).120 119 More pieces of evidence may come in the near future from the currently ongoing study of Tr (see above, note 1). 120 For more details about Lo15224, see above, note to iii, 6. In a forthcoming contribution about the ‘San Fedele-Belgioioso codex’, Anne Stone will develop this hypothesis by considering all the pieces of information provided by the fragment held at the Biblioteca Trivulziana (Tr). 135  ,   Appendix A – Manuscript Sigla Siglum Rism Full Shelfmark Berg589 I-BGc, MA 589 Bergamo, Biblioteca Angelo Mai, MA 589 BU596 I-BU, 596, busta HH2.1 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, 596, busta HH2.1 BU2216 I-BU, 2216 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, 2216 Ca6 F-CA, D 6 Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’Agglomération; olim Bibliothèque municipale), D 6 Ca11 F-CA, D 11 Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’Agglomération; olim Bibliothèque municipale), D 11 Ca1328 F-CA, B 1328 Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’Agglomération; olim Bibliothèque municipale), B 1328 Ch F-CH, 564 Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, 564 Cor2 I-CTasc, fragment s.n. Cortona, Archivio Storico del Comune, fragment s.n. (‘Cortona 2’) Cyp I-Tn, J.ii.9 Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, J.ii.9 Fp I-Fn, Panc. 26 Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panc. 26 Gr224-D I-GR, Kript. Lat. 224 and US-HArscl, MS 2387 Grottaferrata, Biblioteca del Monumento Nazionale, Kript. Lat. 224 (olim Collocazione provvisoria 197) and Hanover, NH, Dartmouth College Library, Rauner Special Collections, MS 2387 Iv I-IV, 115 Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare, 115 Leiden NL-Lu, Fragment B.P.L. 2720 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Fragment B.P.L. 2720 Lo GB-Lbl, Add. 29987 London, British Library, Add. 29987 Lo15224 GB-Lbl, Add. 15224 London, British Library, Add. 15224 Man I-La, 184 and I-PEc, 3065 Lucca, Archivio di Stato, 184 and Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, 3065 ModA I-MOe, alpha.M.5.24 Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, alpha.M.5.24 Ox213 GB-Ob, Canon. misc. 213 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. misc. 213 Ox229 (part of PadA) GB-Ob, Canon. patr. lat. 229 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. patr. lat. 229 136   -  PadA see Ox229 and Pad684 Pad684 I-Pu, 684 Padova, Biblioteca Universitaria, 684 Pit F-Pnm, it. 568 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, it. 568 Pv I-PAVu, Pergamene Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia – MiC, Pergasparse, scatola 4, n. 8 mene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8 (ex 43 D 3) (part of the ‘San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex’) Q15 I-Bc, Q.15 Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, Q.15 R F-Pnm, n.a.fr. 6771 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.a.fr. 6771 (‘Reina Codex’) Ravi3 I-Sas, Mediceo Lore- Siena, Archivio di Stato, Mediceo Lorenese Gavorrano, nese Gavorrano, 10 10 (olim Vicariati, Ravi, 3) SL I-Fsl, 2211 Firenze, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, 2211 (‘San Lorenzo Palimpsest’) Sq I-Fl, Med. Pal. 87 Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Med. Pal. 87 (‘Squarcialupi Codex’) Stras F-Sm, 222 C 22 Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Municipale, 222 C 22 (destroyed) T.iii.2 I-Tn, T.iii.2 Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, T.iii.2 (‘Boverio Codex’) Tr I-Mt, 1759 Milano, Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, 1759 (binding; part of the ‘San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex’) Trém F-Pnm, n.a.fr. 23190 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.a.fr. 23190 (‘Trémoïlle’) (part of PadA) 137 Biographical Notes Elena Abramov-van Rijk is an independent scholar, whose main interest is in Italian music from the Trecento to the Cinquecento in the context of history and literature. She published two monographs: Parlar cantando: The Practice of Reciting Verses in Italy from 1300 to 1600 (Peter Lang, 2009) and Singing Dante: The Literary Origins of Cinquecento Monody (Ashgate, 2014); several essays in journals («Early music», «Early music history», «Plainsong and medieval music», «Acta musicologica», «Studi musicali», «Cultura neolatina» and other), festschrifts and congress proceedings. Antonio Calvia is Assistant Professor in Musicology at the University of Pavia, campus of Cremona, where he teaches Musical Palaeography and History of Poetry Set to Music in the Middle Ages. He is senior researcher of the ERC-funded project European Ars Nova: Multilingual Poetry and Poly- phonic Song in the Late Middle Ages and co-director of the bibliographical bulletin and database «Medioevo musicale / Music in the Middle Ages». His fields of interest include 14th-century polyphony, musical philology, history of musical notation, relationships between poetry and music, and digital humanities applied to the study of medieval music. Lorenzo Mattei (Florence 1974) graduated in piano (1998) and in modern literature (1999). Ph.D. History and analysis of musical traditions (Rome University La Sapienza) and Research fellow History of modern Music at the University of Bari. Now he is Associate professor at the University of Bari. He’s specialized in Eighteenth-Century Opera. Since 2007 he’s the artistic director of the “Giovanni Paisiello Festival” in Taranto. Among his publications: History of Opera (2023) Critical edition of Jommelli’s Didone abbandonata (2017) and Paisiello’s Giuochi 175   d’Agrigento (2007). His essays have been published on: «Il Saggiatore musicale», «Studi musicali», «Analecta musicologica», «xviii secolo» «Napoli Nobilissima». Renato Meucci, musician and organologist, has studied guitar and horn at the conservatoires of Rome and Milan, and classical philology at the University of Rome. He has been full professor (History of Music) in the Faculty of the Conservatoire of Perugia (19951999) and since 2000 in the faculty of the conservatoire of Novara. He was visiting professor (History of musical instruments) at the University of Perugia (1994-1999) and State University of Milan (2000-20). His main interest were the history and technology of musical instruments, while his contributions published in various languages (Italian, English, German, French, Spanish) dealt with the history of music, iconography, ethnomusicology, orchestration, and performance practice in 18th and 19th centuries. Since 2019 Meucci is also director of the Cultural Heritage department of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Federico Saviotti, chercheur associé at the College de France, is currently Research Associate and Lecturer in Romance Philology at the University of Pavia. The main subjects of his investigations are Romance lyric poetry up to the 14th century, French didactic literature and the Arras literary milieu in the 13th century, tradition and fragmentology of medieval codices. His research, based on textual, material and linguistic philology and privileging an interdisciplinary approach, aims to critical editions, manuscript description and reconstruction, analysis of literary language, study of the relationship between text and music. Agostino Ziino is Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. In 2000 he was awarded the “Premio Feltrinelli per la Musica” (Feltrinelli Prize for Music) by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and in 2003 he (with Teresa M. Gialdroni) was granted the “Richard S. Hill Award” by the Music Library Association (USA). He is a past President of the Italian Musicological Society, Istituto Italiano per la Storia della Musica and of the “Centre for Studies of the Italian Ars Nova of the 14th Century” in Certaldo. He is a member of the editorial board of the New Gesualdo Edition (Bärenreiter), the National Edition of the Works of Pierluigi da Palestrina and Alessandro Stradella. He is a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society and a member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome. He has been the Editor of the journal «Studi Musicali» and has been a member of the Advisory Board of «Acta Musicologica» and «The Journal of Musicology». 176 Abstracts Agostino Ziino Polifonia nella Cattedrale di Amalfi agli inizi del Trecento: un primo tassello, forse Elena Abramov-van Rijk Hidden names in Trecento musical compositions The Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Amalfitanae or Chronica omnium Archiepiscoporum inform us that Andrea de Alanio or d’Alagno Archbishop of Amalfi from 1292 to 1330 «musica quae organa dicuntur fieri fecit» in the cathedral of Amalfi. This piece of information is very important because it shows that at the end of the 13th century polyphony was already practiced in the liturgy of this cathedral of Southern Italy, in the same way as those of Central and Northern Italy (Rome/Papal Chapel where the repertory was imported perhaps from Nôtre Dame in Paris; and Siena, Firenze, Lucca in which many pieces were sung «cum organo»). The focus of the essay is the habit of inserting the names of dedicatees in a poem, sometimes openly but more often disguised. Such names are usually labelled with a word related to Provençal and Occitan troubadour poetry, senhal, namely sign or symbol. Although this term is not used for Italian poetry, in modern research it has been applied by analogy to hidden names in Trecento poetry as well. Although the individual instances of hidden names are frequently treated in musicological studies, the phenomenon by itself has so far not been a topic of specific discussion in more general terms. Here two manners of using a hidden name are examined, both already mentioned in Antonio da Tempo’s treatise Summa artis rhythmici vulgaris dictaminis (1332): 177 abstracts a name given as one word if it has an ambivalent meaning, and an unequivocal female name split into syllables over consecutive words. Several examples illustrate both manners of introducing hidden female names into the verbal texture of poem. Antonio Calvia, Federico Saviotti The San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex: A New Source of Secular and Liturgical Polyphony (the Pavia Fragment) In 2019 two largely intact parchment bifolios containing late fourteenth-century polyphony, reused as book covers, were found independently in Milanarea libraries: one at the Biblioteca Universitaria in Pavia (I-PAVu, Pergamene sparse, scatola 4, n. 8) and the other at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan (binding of I-Mt, 1759). This is the first of two articles demonstrating that the two bifolios belonged to the same original manuscript, a compilation of Mass Ordinary movements and secular songs copied in northern Italy (ca. 1400). This first essay presents the fragment Pv, a bifolio containing five polyphonic anonymous unica. The pieces are written in fourteenth-century black notation using dragmae, including an unknown form of ‘dragma brevis’ and a case of half-coloration. The four secular works, two virelais and two rondeaux, are all for two voices with untexted tenor. The fifth piece is a fragmentary Credo of which only two texted voices remain. The essay contains a codicological and palaeographic description of the bifolio, a musicological study of the works, a linguistic and stylistic analysis of the French poems, and a critical edition of both texts and music. In the final paragraph, we offer a hypothesis on the origin of the fragment based on the data collected. Lorenzo Mattei «La mia cara Cecchina è…» un castrato. Gli evirati cantori e l’opera buffa Castratos have always been related to Opera Seria. However, the emasculated singers played also in Opera Buffa, not only in Rome and in the whole Vatican State, where there was a veto on women singers, but also in other Italian and foreign theaters. The data collected from the analysis of theatrical chronologies, from the Corago database, and the Indice de’ teatrali spettacoli, made it possible to schedule over five hundred castratos active throughout the Eighteenth Century and to observe their relationship with Opera Buffa. The royal theaters of Lisbon, Queluz and Dresden systematically hosted castratos for female roles. Castratos played always lovers, aristocratic and sophisticated characters, able to introduce the heroic spirit of the Opera Seria into the Dramma Giocoso atmosphere, by means of the lexical and stylistic-musical choices used. During 178 abstracts the 70’s castratos in Opera Buffa became rarer until they disappeared completely in the following decade to the delight of those who disliked them. The process of the unstoppable extinction that affected castratos therefore began precisely from the opera buffa in which it was more and more important to adhere to nature and truth. Renato Meucci Piero Maroncelli, patriota e musicista Piero Maroncelli (1795-1846), hitherto known only for being Silvio Pellico’s cellmate of and the co-protagonist of Le mie prigioni, was actually a trained and complete musician and one of the first Italian musicologists, with two essays on Corelli and Manfroce. A recent study of mine is dedicated to the latter activity, while the one presented here sets out in detail the musical biography of the patriot and musician, rehabilitating him from some unsuitable evaluations of a publication dedicated to him on the same topic. 179 STUDI MUSICALI ONLINE Il portale della rivista Studi Musicali digitalizzati e indicizzati della Sono disponibili online per gli abbonati tutti i numeri Rivista insieme a: A 4 anni zione rivista sono ieme a: tutti i numeri lizzati e indicizzati informazioni per gli autori norme editoriali informazioni per gli abbonati www.studimusicali.it per g

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The San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex: A New Source of Secular and Liturgical Polyphony (the Pavia Fragment)

The San Fedele-Belgioioso Codex: A New Source of Secular and Liturgical Polyphony (the Pavia Fragment)

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