Songbook: How Lyrics became Poetry in Medieval Europe

Marisa Galvez argues that both collections accommodate contemporary taste in selecting and arranging their material, and sees both as a result of specific performance practices: an interest in refrain songs, especially in the songs with vernacular strophes, in the case of the Carmina Burana, the use of the estibote, a vernacular genre related to the virelai, the Spanish and Portuguese cantiga, and the Italian lauda and culminating in the refrain-like estribillo, in the Libro de buen amor.The second chapter on chansonnier transmission of troubadour repertoire focuses on constructions of the lyric persona and the use of names, arguing that these were initially direct referents pointing to an actual audience, but gradually transformed into what Gomez terms 'hermeneutic opacity' (p. 60), a form of accumulated knowledge of a poet's œuvre which can be called up by the insertion of a name into a chansonnier.At times, the text makes claims which rely on secondary sources without necessarily reviewing these critically or in the light of contemporary scholarship.[...]the assertion that 'the dance songs of the Carmina Burana may have been performed at large festive gatherings' (p. 22) on closer inspection turns out to be based entirely on an essay by Hans Spanke from 1930/1.