"Intavulare": Tavole di canzonieri romanzi ed. by Luciana Borghi Cedrini and Walter Meliga

Abstract

Reviewed by: "Intavulare": Tavole di canzonieri romanzi ed. by Luciana Borghi Cedrini and Walter Meliga Courtney Joseph Wells Borghi Cedrini, Luciana and Walter Meliga, eds. "Intavulare": Tavole di canzonieri romanzi, directed by Anna Ferrari. I, Canzonieri provenzali, vol. 14. Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana a, aII (2814); Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria a1(Campori γ.N.8.4: 11–13) (Canzoniere di Bernart Amoros). Modena: Mucchi, 2020. 321 pp. + 8 color ill. ISBN: 978-88-7000-649-0. €35 Created and directed by Anna Ferrari, the project Intavulare has published thirteen volumes on eighteen Occitan songbooks, five volumes on eight French chansonniers, and one volume dedicated to an Italian canzoniere.1 As stated in the original preface by Aurelio Roncaglia, the project's name is inspired by Renaissance humanists who compiled tables of medieval codices that often circulated separately from their sources ([2001] 2020, v–vi). These tavole umanistiche informed scholars on the presence of texts and authors contained in a manuscript, though they did not identify where these texts could be found specifically or their placement in relation to other texts in the codex (Ferrari 2020, viii). The title Intavulare is a nod to these tables, to the tavole antiche that often accompanied medieval songbooks (Ferrari 2020, vii), and to the multiple tables in the tavole di studio employed by modern scholars and especially Gustav Gröber (Ferrari 2020, viii). For scholars of Gröber's generation, these tables, in conjunction with diplomatic editions of individual manuscripts, facilitated a comparative analysis of textual variants and a global understanding of the relationships between different songbooks, without the need to examine in person the many manuscripts of the Occitan lyric tradition in libraries across Europe. Indeed, even with great advances in our modern infrastructure for travel (planes, high-speed trains, affordable cars, etc.), it is still only with great effort, resources, and time that a scholar can study a songbook such as N [End Page 51] in the Morgan library in New York and then go to the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, for example, to study the contents and structure of canzoniere a. Even then, to gain a full view of the sixteenth-century copy of Bernart Amoros's medieval songbook that is lost to us today, that same scholar would have to travel on to Modena to study the second section of that same manuscript.2 The volumes of Intavulare thus have the purpose of bridging these great distances and putting a systematic presentation of the contents of major songbooks at the fingertips of scholars worldwide. In her introduction to the series, Ferrari explains that the volumes of Intavulare provide an X-ray of the medieval songbooks; the ultimate goal is to arrive at a CAT scan or, eventually, an MRI (Ferrari 2020, viii).3 The bones of these manuscripts, as it were, can be found in the tables of each volume. In each book, there are: 1) an index of the texts contained in the manuscript(s) studied, in order of appearance; 2) an index of the troubadours contained in the manuscript(s), in order of appearance; 3) an index of authors' names, organized alphabetically; and 4) an index of the incipit of each text, organized alphabetically. In volumes "tabulating" songbooks that contain vidas and razos, these are indexed in their own fifth section at the end. I confine my remarks in the remainder of this review to this latest installment, edited by Luciana Borghi Cedrini and Walter Meliga, that focuses on the sixteenth-century copy of the lost songbook of Bernart Amoros (a + aII + a1). In relation to the other installments of the series, this volume boasts a number of welcome innovations. While the other books in the Intavulare series have facsimiles in black and white of some parts of the manuscripts [End Page 52] studied, this volume boasts eight high-quality photographs in color. The enhanced reproduction makes reading these images far easier—and these reproductions are all the more precious, since a has not yet been digitized. Another important addition to this installment is an updated introduction by series coordinator Anna Ferrari, where she discusses why, after roughly ten years of intense activity—eleven of the thirteen volumes...