6 - The Segovia Manuscript as Chansonnier

Summary

The Segovia manuscript is routinely referred to as either a chansonnier or a cancionero. It is neither. It is a mixed manuscript of basically three collections in one: a sacred compilation and both a chansonnier and a cancionero, now laid out mostly in that order and usually arranged by descending number of voices. There are various other means of internal organization as well.

Of these three collections, the sacred one fills the largest part of Segovia. Itself divided into three main sections, it takes up about 60 percent of the manuscript. Yet despite this dominance, the tendency to think of Segovia as secular is understandable, given that the secular pieces have received far more attention than the sacred ones and that we are not always fastidious in our descriptions of manuscripts. Although the secular works take up less space, they are greater in number than the sacred ones. The cancionero section is an important example of its type, while the chansonnier component contains some extremely interesting compositions that have elicited a good deal of scholarly scrutiny, and sometimes controversy as well.

Close attention to the specific part of Segovia that we might most accurately refer to as a chansonnier provides additional context for the manuscript, strengthening several of the hypotheses about the origins of the collection's contents. Chansons in general are not a major presence in Iberian manuscripts surviving from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Census-Catalogue lists barely two dozen manuscripts originating in Spain or Portugal during this period. Few contain chansons, and nowhere are they the significant presence they are in Segovia. Yet the chanson was far from unknown in Spain. The inventory made at Queen Isabella's request in 1503 shows no fewer than three separate manuscripts described as chansonniers: two specifically as French cancioneros and one as a manuscript of polyphony in French. A 1505 inventory made after her death lists another ‘songbook in French’. The presence of so many chansons in Segovia, then, was not an isolated phenomenon, even if it may look that way to us now.