The present volume brings scholarly perspectives from a variety of disciplines to bear on a specific medieval object: a beautifully produced parchment manuscript, now in Bern, Switzerland, containing over 500 songs. The first stanza of each song is carefully copied beneath staves for their melodies, but the planned musical notation was never entered. Despite the intriguing poignancy of the empty staves for musicologists, their muteness has led to the relative neglect of Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 389, known to scholars of trouvère song by Schwan's siglum C. After all, what can a musicologist say about a song when only the text survives?The lack of notation is the first of several factors that has led to the relative scholarly neglect of C, including its provenance on the easternmost border of the Francophone region, its choice not to organise by author corpora, its comparatively high numbers of unica, and the absence of illuminations.

C has thus been perceived as distant from a ‘central’ trouvère tradition embodied by the surviving authorially organised and richly illuminated manuscripts that hail largely from the Artois and Champagne; the supposedly problematic aspects of C have combined in various ways to cause C's neglect not just in musicology, but also in other academic disciplines that study trouvère song. Although literary scholars have considered C more deeply than their musicological colleagues, they have typically done so in conjunction with the creation of editions of the texts of specific authors or edited collections of predominantly anonymous secondary genres, like the pastourelle. C's eastern provenance has meant that the variants that it presents for those songs with concordances in other, more ‘central’ sources have been noted in the apparatus of critical editions, but largely relegated to a secondary status: indeed, some of the authorial songs in C have themselves been treated as of secondary authenticity within their respective author corpora. The high number of unica in C – over 20% of its contents – have all now been edited, but not yet thoroughly integrated into literary scholarship; that so many of C's songs are not also found in other sources has reinforced the impression of C as a peripheral source.

List of Songs in C

Trouvère songbooks are designated in bold type by their sigla as given in Raynaud/Spanke. Troubadour songbooks have sigla, in bold type, according to Pillet/Carstens and are preceded by the prefix ‘troub’, for example, troubD. Motet sources are represented by the sigla in Ludwig's Repertorium and, where it is necessary to distinguish a motet source from a trouvère source, are preceded by the prefix ‘motet’, for example, motetF. A full list of sigla is provided in the list of abbreviations. Where a manuscript has both a trouvère and a troubadour siglum, only the trouvère siglum is used (with the exception of Chapter 6, where the Occitan content is discussed specifically). trouvère songs are identified by an RS number according to Raynaud/Spanke; troubadour songs are similarly identified by a PC number according to Pillet/Carstens, and conducti by the identifier given in Anderson's collected edition. Songs are referred to in italics with the spelling given in Raynaud/Spanke. Quotations from manuscripts (including the incipit of a song in the orthography in which it appears in a specific chansonnier) are given in single quotation marks and Roman type. Where a song has two numbers in Raynaud/Spanke, only the corrected number is given. Where it is necessary to indicate the state of copying of a song's music notation, designates that music notation has been entered, ≡ designates empty staves, and ⬜ designates space left in the manuscript for staves which were never entered. When lines of poetry are quoted within the text, a forward slash (/) is used to separate poetic lines.

In studies of the jeu-parti, a genre of vernacular sung debate composed and copied in northern and eastern France from the 1230s to the 1310s, scholars have tended to focus on the largest material collections of debate songs. These are the deluxe chansonniers whose provenance is assumed to be the Arras puy: chansonniers a (seventy-nine jeux-partis), A (thirty-two) and Z (twenty-four). The small selection of jeux-partis in chansonnier C has not been widely examined, in part because of the lack of musical notation in the source, which has deterred any serious musicological study. The jeux-partis in C have suffered, too, from scholarly neglect because of the source's eastern provenance. Arthur Långfors, for example, groups jeux-partis from chansonniers C, I, O, and U together at the end of his landmark edition of jeu-parti texts, literally presenting jeux-partis from these eastern manuscripts as peripheral to his conception of the genre. In a passage that characterises the contents of I (and by extension, C) as late, over-ripe, epigonist, and parodic, Langfors effectively dismisses the jeux-partis of eastern chansonniers as objects unworthy of scholarly attention, a characterisation that has left its mark on scholarship today.

While the jeux-partis of C have largely been ignored by twentieth-century scholars, the scribes and compilers of C considered jeux-partis to be of great importance to the songbook that they were making. At the start of each letter-section, scribes copied a devotional song, as Paola Moreno explains in her contribution to this volume (Chapter 3). The genre of the next song to be copied varies between letter-sections, but frequently it is a jeu-parti that is then copied. This suggests that scribes considered the genre of the jeu-parti to be of no less importance than grand chant or the pastourelle: C stands in contrast to other trouvère chansonniers organised by genre, such as a, A, Z, W, or I, in which grands chants are copied first and jeux-partis occupy the less-prestigious second or third place. The jeux-partis of C therefore offer a very different perspective on the role of the jeu-parti in thirteenth-century musical life. This chapter considers the jeux-partis of C in relation to the wider corpus of jeux-partis, and, through a close reading of one jeu-parti contrafact group, shows the extent to which C might have been embedded in networks of musical exchange.