Sage Mir, Mit Wem Du Umgehst ... Sammelprinzipien in Liederhandschriften Des Sechzehnten Jahrhunderts

Abstract

Medieval miscellanies are generally studied as marginal phenomena only. Literary historians prefer to deal with great authors and their works, and literary histories are usually limited by a national view. Also, anonymous shorter works like gnomic verse and songs tend to escape the eye of the literary historian – and the worst cases of negligence are the manuscripts in which these shorter texts have been gathered. This article focuses on a special and neglected type of sixteenth century text collection, the album amicorum. Aspects of the transmission and of the genre of the album amicorum have received very little attention from literary historians, though manuscripts like these can reveal interesting connections between German and Dutch language and literature. A first investigation of songs collected in alba, examples of which will be given from the unedited Album of Maria van Besten (sixteenth century) show that songs in alba amicorum compiled by women are frequently related to songs in other manuscripts from the Eastern parts of the Netherlands and the Western German regions. Notes on the collector reveal that women tended to compile alba with songs written by different hands, while men wrote song books in one (their own) hand. The songs that have been gathered in these collections will have been known among the users of the manuscripts. This shows that in the sixteenth century the eastern Dutch regions, Westphalia and the Rhineland had a common and lively song tradition.1