Anachrony and Identity in the Loire Valley Chansonniers

Abstract

Polyphonic chansonniers originating in the Loire Valley are linked to a new market for luxury books that emerges in the later fifteenth century among the class of rising nobility working in the orbit of the French royal court. Theories advanced by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood are used to show how chansonniers serve a substitutional role, standing in for, and evoking, the noble world to which their bourgeois owners sought entry. Various elements within these manuscripts, including their illustrations and thematic content, draw from a shared repertoire of established types. The practice of universalizing would have fed the cultural aspirations of the notaries and secretaries who counted among their patrons. Nagel and Wood’s articulation of multiple temporalities also serves to help contextualize the disrupted preparation of the Loire Valley Chansonniers. The interventions of a certain copyist (the ‘Dijon Scribe’), who took on an unusual variety of editorial responsibilities, enabled these anachronic objects to stay current.