The Chansonnier of Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 308

A uniquely ordered early fourteenth-century chansonnier containing over 500 chanson texts would seem certain to attract the attention of both text scholars and musicologists, yet there have been relatively few studies of this important source and none which views the lyric anthology as a whole. This volume fills this gap by presenting a complete edition of the Chansonnier of Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 308 together with a series of essays which explore the organizational principles of the...
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A uniquely ordered early fourteenth-century chansonnier containing over 500 chanson texts would seem certain to attract the attention of both text scholars and musicologists, yet there have been relatively few studies of this important source and none which views the lyric anthology as a whole. This volume fills this gap by presenting a complete edition of the Chansonnier of Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 308 together with a series of essays which explore the organizational principles of the manuscript. Taking into account the literary context of the complete MS Douce 308, its codicological structures, the scribal hands and the decorative elements of miniatures and capitalization of letters, Mary Atchison argues that the executors of the Chansonnier followed a detailed plan in the process of the manuscript's compilation. The book aims to alter the perception that MS Douce 308 is in any way deficient because of the lack of musical notation and to demonstrate that the Chansonnier is, and was intended to be, a text manuscript.