Apologies again for the temporary lapse in posts, but I have some good news: I've finished sorting out the French secular repertory that have mixed types of untexted passages, and you can see the data for all the French secular repertory in Oxford 213 here!
Since I don't have any means of organizing the information I have yet, I am planning to see if there are any trends by composer, fascicle or other factors. For composers, there are a few that I am planning to look at first: namely, Binchois and the two Lantins (for those unfamiliar, they're each called Hugo & Arnold). They have a relatively stable style and (at least in Binchois's case) could probably be the result of working for specific employers. Dufay, who works for the Malatesta court and conducts 10,000 experiments on fifteenth century music per day, is an outlier and should not be considered (yet).
There is also the question of how the scribe copied the works of older composers. While a lot of Ox213's repertory is from the 1420s-30s, some of it is older stuff from the late 1300s. An example that has given me some food for thought is the anonymous Medee fu en amer veritable, which is both in Ox213 and in an older manuscript, the Chantilly Codex (fol.24v). Chantilly Codex's text underlay is notably different from Ox213: it has a lot of melismas (eg. on 'veritable', 'mondain avoir') that did not make it into Ox213. And because Chantilly Codex is older than Ox213, this likely reflects a text underlay closer to the original composition of the piece. So a question arises: what happened in the transmission of older music like this, and why were the melismas not present in Ox213? It could be scribal corruption, changes in taste, or other factors I haven't considered. It's fascinating to think about.
Regarding fascicles: since the different parts of this book1 were compiled across the 1420s and 30s, it is possible that some ways that the scribe notated text layout would have changed over the years. I figured that maybe there was a change in whether the scribe notated melismas or not and thus whether unseperated passages may be created as a result of omitting melismas, but at the same time, I should look out for other changes in musical notation and text-setting habits as I go along. I remember mentioning Lawrence Earp's general overview of text-setting change (that scribes would go from 'text first, music after' in the late 1300s/early 1400s to 'music first, text after' later on in the 1400s),2 and there's probably some of that happening in Ox213 (at least from 'text first, music later' to 'text and music at the same time') but there may also be other, smaller, changes that happen within the Veneto or in Ox213 specifically.
Mon chier amy. Fun fact, it's the only song I don't remember by its incipit (or its title, apparently. I mistook it for another Dufay song, Mon cuer me fait). I only remember the untexted passage part of it (which in this wonderful recording is played instrumentally as a nod to this bit being untexted). It just scratches a melodic itch in my brain for some reason...
1. Boone, Graeme Macdonald. “Dufay's early chansons: Chronology and style in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici. misc. 213." See also Hans Schoop's Entstehung und Verwendung der Handschrift Oxford Bodleian Library. Canonici misc. 213, but basically Boone provides evidence for 10 different fascicles within Ox213, the earliest one being Fascicle 5 (82-90v) and the latest one being Fascicle 1 (fols. 1-15v).↩
2. Earp, Lawrence. “Texting in 15th-Century French Chansons: A Look Ahead from the 14th Century.” Early Music 19, no. 2 (1991): 195–210.↩