Authority and Materiality in the Italian Songbook: From the Medieval Lyric to the Early-Modern Madrigal

Abstract

The essays in this volume arose initially from presentations given at an interdisciplinary conference on Italian songbooks, sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University on May 1–2, 2015. They advance several contemporary scholarly trends, including an increased academic focus on cross-disciplinarity and the current critical imperative to view premodern books not just as transparent representations of an original text, but as complex material and social artifacts in their own right. In recent decades, scholars of medieval literature and music have increasingly rejected as object of study the artificially coherent, corrected text of the modern critical edition in favor of the instability and singularity of individual manuscripts, while scholarship on the printed book has also begun to take the distinctive features of particular editions and exemplars into its interpretive embrace, and the field of book history has emerged as a recognizably hermeneutic discipline. Critical interest has turned to how, starting with the compilation of the great troubadour chansonniers in the midthirteenth century, vernacular lyric anthologies were constructed and author-inflected. Research on medieval and early-modern lyric compilations has paid particular attention to the relations between the macroand the microtext, or larger works and their component parts, as evidenced by the format and order in which individual songs and poems come down to us, as well as to the way in which manuscripts and prints convey the authority of poets and musicians by constructing the maker as both responsible for and represented in—in a sense, embodied by—the physical objects. This “material