| dc.description |
It is a curiosity of British cultural history that the surviving Anglo-Norman (AN) songs of medieval England have attracted so little interest amongst musicologists English or French. Such knowledge as we have of them is mostly garnered from two pioneering facsimile volumes: Early English Harmony, edited in 1897 for the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society by Harry E. Wooldridge; and Early Bodleian Music (1901), an even finer collection, edited by Sir John Stainer, his son and his daughter, with exemplary studies of many of the manuscripts by Bodley's Librarian, Edward B. Nicholson. These two volumes contain about half of the songs listed here. Their French equivalent, Pierre Aubry's Les plus anciens monuments de la musique française (1905), contains two AN songs in facsimile. Others were published at around the same time (‘buried’ might be a better word) in isolated facsimile: El tens d'iver (Baker), Quaunt le russinol (Petersen). Yet others have only recently emerged, or re-emerged, into scholarly consciousness: Volez oyer le castoy (Wilkins), Si tost c'amis (Page, 1988) |
