The Dating of the Cancioneiro de Paris and a Proposed Timeline for its Compilation

Abstract

The Cancioneiro de Paris (manuscript F-Peb Masson 56) is the largest known Portuguese collection of sixteenth-century secular music; as such, it constitutes a source of primary importance for the history of music in Portugal.  However, the problem of its dating has been largely neglected, with the exception of some brief contributions by Eugenio Asensio (1989) and Manuel Pedro Ferreira (2008).

In my master’s thesis (2017) I presented the first ever proposal for a dating for the cancioneiro based on a thorough study of the manuscript’s physical and repertorial aspects. In this article I revisit these aspects to present a revised proposal.

Thus, to begin with, I analyse the codicological and palaeographical properties of the cancioneiro through the study of watermarks and handwriting styles, which will provide an understanding of its successive layers of compilation and its several intervening hands. Next, I tackle the issue of the dating of the repertory—mainly from the biographical data of the few identifiable authors represented in the cancioneiro, but also from the historical context of forms and genres—which will allow us to set approximate terminus a quo limits for each layer of the manuscript. Finally, on the basis of this analysis, a timeline is proposed for the compilation of the cancioneiro, summarising, for each of its stages, the intervention of the respective scribes and the approximate period in which they occurred.