MARCOS DE TRABAJO QUE APOYAN ESTRATEGIAS DE GOBIERNO DE

4.

A Presumptive Timeline of Assembly and Ownership

The evidence from codicology and palaeography offers much information, but no concrete basis for establishing dates of copying, assembly, annotation, rebinding, or reordering. From the physical evidence of the manuscript alone, it is possible only to concur with previous scholars that the manuscript was compiled in the late 13th _or

early 14th century and was probably prepared for owners on the border of Artois along the Somme. The evidence does at least suggest a relative dating for its construction, compilation and the various marks of use and annotations. The relationship between different periods of repurposing and reordering provides enough of a basis to show how conceptions of V changed through time. A presentation of the inferences and conjectures made in the course of this chapter so far translated into narrative form would run as follows.

V2’s preparation probably began before V1’s, perhaps with the Bestiaire

copied first, and the Traitié some time after 1266. The Traitié and Marian chansons in

V2_{were copied continuously through irregularly organized gatherings (at first without} music). The collection was copied in gatherings or groups of smaller gatherings, as the catchwords attest. V1’s compilation began around this time, copied gathering by gathering and not always in sequence. The music was probably entered into the first gatherings before the text was finished in the later gatherings (perhaps Gatherings 1–2 were completed as a unit). Proof-readers were at work contemporaneously with the copying or soon after. V1 was then furnished withillumination, including the coats of arms, indicating a Picard destination and probably that the manuscript was expected to be bound beginning with Thibaut.

At this point or shortly after, V2 began to receive notation as well, before the annexation of V1 following it. By the time of their combination, V2 was misordered and all or part of a gathering from the Traité went missing. The roman numeral foliation must be added after the combination. V2 was reordered again before the addition of gathering signatures.

The traces of page-turning through the manuscript could plausibly relate to its early history. For a considerable period of time, the manuscript was used for what was then its central portion, extending from the beginning of the Bestiaire d’amour

through the chansons in V2and into the first section of V1. Readers took an interest in many of the unica and the religious chansons, but not in the Adam de la Halle pieces. When V reached the Fougeray family in Tours, the manuscript was probably imagined as a codex containing the Bestiaire and miscellaneous songs, the most interesting clustered near the beginning. It probably remained in the V2-first ordering and the earlier binding when it received Raoulet Berthelot’s inscription.

The travels of fr. 24406 between this point and the 1540s are untraceable. Claude d’Urfé purchased the manuscript late in that decade, rebound it in green vellum, probably in its current ordering and inserted a guard page with his coat of arms at the beginning. A number of annotations appearing in the manuscript probably date to the following two centuries when bibliophiles were comparing texts and attributions between chansonniers. Unlike the smudges at page corners, these annotations reveal an interest in the entirety of V1 but none in V2. The interest was exclusive to attributable songs, thus excluding the unica and the prose works. The manuscript remained in the Urfé family until the Duc de la Vallière purchased it between 1766 and 1783. It received its current binding, the arabic gathering numbers and perhaps the attempt at pagination at the end of that century. The published

description in 1783 marked the manuscript’s sale to the Bibliothèque nationale and an increase in attention in the 19th century. The binding was restored again in 1971, and paper guards were added around the stitching. In 1974, most of V1’s music and texts were edited by Fiona McAlpine and V’s music appeared (piecemeal) in its entirety in Hans Tischler’s 1997 synoptic edition of trouvère melodies. The manuscript was digitized early in the new millennium and appeared online in colour in 2011.

The story told here is one of changing value. V1 and V2 underwent parallel processes of downgrading. V1 is a compromise between thoroughness and the cost of paying numerous craftsmen on the one hand, and speed and cheapened materials on the other. The inconsistencies within the copying of individual pages are nothing unusual for vernacular manuscripts; what are more interesting and surprising are the moments where V1’s compilers employ more care and deliberate neatness than was probably necessary for the manuscript to be in acceptable condition. V2 had been designed from the first to be flexible: its irregular gathering structure suggests a lax attitude to planning; the possible repurposing of an outer parchment guard (fol. 140) as an integral page of the manuscript would indicate the contents were not definite before copying began. The music and decorated initials were clearly expected by the text scribe, but we need not imagine they would have been of the same level as those in V1. The manuscript is able to fulfill its function as a conveyor of text without them. For V1, being added to V2 must have been a further downgrade of status. The latter can only be assumed to have acted as filler, but the fact remains that V1 was inserted second; its status as the heir to the carefully-designed trouvère anthology is lost.

Who read the manuscript and why over the centuries remains a subject for speculation, though it is intriguing to imagine it passing from courtly to clerical to

possession of individuals self-consciously focused on literary history. In a sense, the history of the manuscript continues in the scholarly works written about it: there is little fundamental difference between the antiquarian interest displayed in the attributive annotations in the manuscript and that which prompted later published bibliographies of trouvère song, other than that one is within the manuscript itself and the other is printed for circulation. Perhaps the most significant development falls when V left private ownership and became part of the patrimoine nationale of the manuscript department of the Bibliothèque nationale.Guillaume de Bure’s flattering description, half-promotion, half-codicology, marks the most visible moment in V’s transition toward an object of scholarship. It is here that V’s history begins to be written outside the confines of its binding. From the manuscript’s entry into the Bibliothèque nationale, its value as a basis for historical and literary investigation, a window into the past, eclipsed its material worth as an artistic object.165 That has not prevented V2’s eccentric appearance from predisposing scholars against the reliability of the codex as a music-historical document. With more recent synoptic editions and vindications of V, and most of all with its digitization, the production and editing of the manuscript continues even now.

165_{Consider, for example, the conservateur responsible for the seizures of incunabula and other rare}

books, Joseph Van Praët’s directive to book collectors in Italy during the seizures of the 1790’s: ‘Prendre généralement tous les manuscrits d’histoire, d’auteurs classiques grecs et latins, de poètes en quelque langue qu’ils soient. Négliger les manuscrits des Pères de l’Église et des théologiens, à moins qu’ils ne soient assez anciens pour servir à l’histoire de la diplomatique. …’, F-Pn AM CCLXIX,cited in Marie-Pierre Laffitte, ‘La Bibliothèque Nationale et les “conquêtes artistiques” de la Révolution et de l’Empire: les manuscrits d’Italie (1796-1815)’, Bulletin du Bibliophile, revue fondé en 1834 [issue 125](1989), pp. 273–322 at p. 276. See also Dominique Varry, ‘Les confiscations révolutionnaires’, in André Vernet, Dominique Varry, Claude Jolly, and Martine Poulain, eds., Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, 4 vols. (Promodis: Cercle de la Librairie, 1989–1992), vol. IV, pp. 9–27 at p. 26.

Part II