Il canzoniere trobadorico U. Fonti, canone, stratigrafia linguistica, con CD-ROM. by Stefano Resconi (review)

Resconi’s work on chansonnier U, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Pluteus 41.43 offers, to my knowledge, a completely new approach to studies of troubadour chansonniers. This volume, a reworking of his doctoral thesis, shows the kind of attention to detail we expect from such projects, complemented by a CD-ROM that provides the reader additional important details.

Resconi opens with a physical description of the manuscript, followed by an analysis of the various sources for it. He reviews the theories of Gustav Gröber (“Kritik der Sammlungen”), Salvatore Santangelo (who attempted to establish a stemma for U, 26) and D’Arco Silvio Avalle (“la terza tradizione”), relying most firmly on the latter’s work to advance the arguments. Resconi recognizes that U and V2 share a number of sources, and he conducts a canso by canso study of the contents of U so as to be able to get a detailed perspective of his manuscript of choice. Resconi concludes that U represents a melding of a number of different sources (see his diagram, 182), a situation not sufficiently appreciated beforehand.

In general, Resconi compares his text to good critical editions for each troubadour, though he has issues with those editors who do not provide all variants (see his comments on Mouzat’s edition of Gaucelm Faidit, 90). I find it odd that Resconi relied solely on Chiarini for Jaufre Rudel (153)—I would expect the Pickens edition to have provided additional useful information.

The book continues with a linguistic study of the texts, so as to localize the manuscript. The evidence mustered, under twenty-four headers, points to Tuscan origin for this chansonnier, specifically western Tuscany and Florence (265). Lastly, Resconi considers the internal structure of the manuscript and then its interesting mode of transcription, different from other chansonniers in that it is line-by-line, making the rhymes of the lyrics very clear. The volume concludes with what is actually a single synoptic table (covering 17 pages), which is supposed to allow comparison of placement of individual lyrics in comparison to their position in other manuscripts.

The bibliography for this volume offers, first, editions of troubadour texts, where troubadours are identified by their abbreviations, rather than by full name, and then other primary sources, dictionaries and the like, and then critical studies. I noted a few typographical errors in the bibliography and did not try to track typos in the text. There is also an Index of Proper Names (medieval and modern names mixed together) and anonymous works cited, very useful for the scholar who seeks to find the discussion of an individual troubadour or a specific lyric.

The volume comes with a CD-ROM that adds a detailed description of each lyric in the manuscript (67 pages) and a diplomatic transcription of the manuscript (144 pages) which allows the reader to see clearly the presentation of each song in the volume. It would have been very useful to have added the synoptic table to the CD-ROM as well, where it might have been possible to see much of the whole chart in one screen.

While this is a very important study, its very nature means that only experts will read it. Furthermore, its presentation guarantees a limited audience. For example, Resconi refers to many manuscripts by siglum only, starting with his title. For those who know all the chansonniers well, this is no problem. For the individual not that fluent, it would have been useful to include a chart that localized the sigla. My sense is that there is a remarkable amount of “code” in this volume, which should be clear for the expert scholar, but not for anyone else. For example, Resconi has numbered each work in his text, e.g., U001, but there...