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Thematic Catalogue of Troubadour and Trouvère Melodies. By Donna Mayer-Martin and Dorothy Keyser. (Thematic Catalogues Series, no. 18.) Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2011. [v, 739 p. ISBN 9780918728821. $120.] Music examples, bibliography.
Scholars of troubadour and trouvère song are indebted to and deeply reliant upon catalogs. Most research on these repertories begins by consulting either the catalog of Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens (Bibliographie des Troubadours [Halle: Niemeyer, 1933]) or that of Gaston Raynaud and Hans Spanke (Hans Spanke, G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes [Leiden: Brill, 1980]). These foundational resources organized the sprawling corpus of troubadour and trouvère song into a tidy series of entries indicating the text incipits of thousands of songs and their manuscript concordances. Donna Mayer- Martin and Dorothy Keyser have combined the information in these volumes for the first time, producing a single catalog of both troubadour and trouvère songs. They have also added a new thematic index of melodic incipits. The result is a welcome resource that is sure not only to facilitate future research, but also to help inspire comparative work on the troubadours and trouvères.
The catalog begins with a short introduction explaining its unusual genesis. The project began when Mayer-Martin signed the contract with Pendragon Press in 1984; Keyser joined her in 1992 and completed the catalog after Mayer-Martin's death in 2009 (pp. vii-ix). Mayer-Martin was unable to complete a planned study of the manuscript history, a lacuna that has already been partially filled by Mary O'Neill's recent monograph on trouvère song, which is curiously absent from the bibliography (Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France [Ox ford: Oxford University Press, 2006]). Keyser's introduction offers a brief summary of the troubadour and trouvère traditions, a discussion of issues...