Fortune and Injustice in the Leuven Chansonnier

Abstract

Originating in Savoy in the 1470s, the heart-shaped manuscript known as the Chansonnier Cordiforme (hereafter 'Cord') opens with an illustration of a winged lady riding on a wheel. She is a bifurcated figure, literally two-faced, her black-and-white skin and mi-parti dress-half-black, half-colourful-making her ambiguity doubly apparent. This is Fortune, whose wheel not only raises mortals up to riches and glory, but also brings them down to poverty and dishonour. The theme of Fortune was a pervasive one in late medieval and early modern literature and iconography, and the widely circulated song Fortuna desperata inspired a flurry of settings between c. 1470 and c. 1560. 1 While these settings have stimulated considerable musicological interest, Fortune's place in chansonniers such as Cord has received less attention. 2 The chanson repertoire comprises numerous references to Fortune's (usually unwelcome) changes to people's circumstances, as can be demonstrated by a survey of eleven major chanson albums from the late fifteenth century (see Table 1). 3 Her presence is particularly strong in the Leuven Chansonnier (hereafter the 'LC'), where eight out of fifty pieces refer to her vagaries. This tiny songbook contains a statistically greater proportion of 'Fortune chansons' than any of the five Loire Valley chansonniers to which it is closely related, and indeed easily outstrips many similar sources from the same period in its focus on Fortune's capricious behaviour. 4 The emphasis on Fortune in the LC is unlikely to be a coincidence. David Burn has discerned three scribal hands in the songbook; Scribe 1, who provided forty-three of the fifty pieces, demonstrates a strong inclination for this theme. This is significant, since scribes seem to have exercised near-complete editorial control over the contents of chansonniers, in some cases even mapping out user-friendly indexes and creating clusters of songs possessing similar qualities. 5 For instance, the Dijon Scribe, who * Many thanks to Jane Alden, Adam Knight Gilbert, Honey Meconi, and Scott Metcalfe for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to Scott Metcalfe and Fabrice Fitch for kindly sharing their translations and commentary for the LC unica ahead of the publication of their critical edition.