oa Isolated Jottings? The Compilation, Preparation, and Use of Song Sources from Thirteenth-Century Britain

The sources of song to survive from thirteenth-century Britain are difficult to interpret. None is properly a ‘songbook’; rather, all the manuscripts are of mixed contents, in which music forms only a small part of the total. In some cases, songs were added to these books in spaces left blank after the original contents had been compiled, but in others the songs were present from the earliest stages of copying, jostling incongruously beside a range of texts, including sermons and other preaching materials, and historical and hagiographical items. From the point of view of mise-en-page these sources raise special questions, because their pages were frequently not designed from the outset to incorporate music, and existing layouts and rulings had to be adapted for the songs. Furthermore, a scribe copying only a few songs in a book otherwise devoted to unnotated texts had no opportunity to develop consistent approaches to matters of musical layout or notation, so these sources offer a unique perspective on the scribal decision-making process. Through a case-study of London, British Library, Arundel Ms. 248, this paper explores what we can learn of how such song sources were compiled and prepared, and the implications of this evidence for our understanding of how they were used.