The Codex Buranus, or The First Chansonnier

The format of the songbook-a genre of book destined to extraordinary success-was, originally, neither obvious nor without issues. Transferring a song onto paper entailed the loss of elements essential to oral transmission such as the performance and its context. The written record of songs was facilitated by two factors: on the one hand, the increasing availability of manuscripts; on the other, the need to preserve the memory of the traditions upon which the cultural elites built their identities. The Codex Buranus, one of the earliest songbooks, exposes the challenges of such mutation of medium (from sung performance to written record): till then, notational practices had only been used within the liturgical context. Precise choices were made to give value to content, including a selection of moral texts, which were tropes of sacred intonations, as well as melodies, whose refined status had already been sanctioned by the courtly tradition of the Minnesang. The Codex bears witness to a coherent project, perhaps conceived by a single person who, building on the monastic practice of preserving written records of paraliturgical drama, developed the unusual idea of a songbook, an idea that, over the following decades, would prove immensely successful within the vernacular tradition. © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Vincenzo Borghetti and Alexandros Maria Hatzikiriakos; individual chapters, the contributors.