It's been a month without posting, but the research process has hit the point where it's basically sorting through stuff without much new to say. I've also been tired out from MedRen last week, what with taking notes on all the interesting research being presented, writing emails (and there are some I have yet to write), the technical problems encountered online... So there's been a bit of a pause on this blog.
I have been thinking about the untexted passages and what they possibly could represent when copied down on manuscript. To get the obvious out of the way: it does not necessarily represent compositional intent. Often, trusting a scribe's copy wholesale is inadvisable, since there are so many things scribes and copyists can be imprecise or wrong about- not to mention the differences that exist in other copies of the works. Even within the same manuscript, there might exist different notations of the same song (see the tenor part of Arnold de Lantins's Se ne prenes, on fols. 35v-36 and 129v-130), so it is understandable that a particular song copied in different manuscripts might not have untexted passages exactly in the same place as in Ox213.
We also need to consider that maybe the copyist captures specific performance, compositional and editorial habits each time he was writing, and that each notated piece is reflective only of a particular set of conditions. The copyist of Ox213 might be working under specific habits that are either personal or regional, which may change as he copied the songs in Ox213 over a decade or so. He may also be copying from exemplars that work from other copied versions of the songs- which might explain why other sources don’t necessarily concord with Ox213 on untexted passages and their length, or where where they start or stop.1 These are very preliminary ideas, but it's important for me to keep these in mind as I go through the repertory and determine why or where untexted passages are in the songs.