The Medieval Song Network (includes text of my 2005 ‘Learning French by Singing’ article)

New website launched to bring together scholars working on medieval song from various disciplinary perspectives

When Ardis Butterfield and Helen Deeming announced the setting up of the Medieval Song Network in 2009, I was an enthusiastic volunteer for core membership. The Network is funded by the AHRC and has already had its first workshop (another is planned for later this year). The idea is to bring ‘create a focus for all kinds of research on the medieval lyric and its manuscript sources’ with an initial focus on England. This blogpost is designed to make available to MSN members (and others who might be interested) the text of an article I published in Early Music in 2005 which describes a song whose music is found in an early 15thC Italian manuscript, but whose text is found (in full) in a number of copies of the Manieres de langage, a dialogue treatise designed to help English speakers learn or improve their (Anglo-)French. While the Medieval Song Network can’t make the text available directly, the author permissions allow me to post it on my own website, so I’m doing that here to allow the Medieval Song Network to link to it.