Previous musical studies of Trecento songs have concentrated on those manuscripts that contain the songs with musical notation, luxury sources like the Squarcialupi Codex and other parchment codices, professionally copied and well planned. In her study of what the subtitle terms the ‘literary tradition’ of these songs, Lauren McGuire Jennings focuses instead on the traces of these songs that exist in around 50 unnotated sources – manuscripts with far lower production values, often on paper, and rather scrappy in appearance. While many of these text-only sources (each described in full in her Appendix 2, with the songs appearing in the entire corpus listed by incipit in Appendix 1) have been noted in the broader scholarly literature, Jennings emphasizes their specific significance for musicology's study of Trecento song, arguing in particular that reintegrating them within the musicological account amounts to ‘new evidence of Trecento song's circulation in broad sociocultural circles’ (p. 5).

In Jennings's analysis the current musicological view has two principal problems. The first is that the separation of the text-only copies of the songs from the musically notated versions has resulted in the idea that song texts are poesia per musica, and thus separate generically (and in value as text) from the other lyric and poetic output of the period in Italy. The second is that the concentration on the notated sources has skewed the picture of song's cultural diffusion so that it is generally held to be an elite and conservative production. In seeking to counter both of these ideas, Jennings is forced at once to stress the status of the song texts in the non-notated sources as undifferentiated from non-musical literature, and also to claim the less formal, more middle-class provenance of these sources as evidence of the broader cultural reach of Trecento song. I will return, after giving an account of the ground covered by the book, to the potential contradiction inherent in claiming that the sources she examines are evidence both for these songs’ status as musical culture and also for their non-musical status as literature.

The first chapter introduces the text-only manuscripts’ 130 songs, and attempts to counter claims made by other scholars that they always represent a ‘musical residue’ (p. 148) because they were most likely copied from notated exemplars. If it could not be shown that they are an indirect reflection of notated music, Jennings argues, it would ‘free the literary manuscripts from the assumption that their song texts conceal phantom musical sources by looking beyond these poems alone to the complete material environment in which they appear’ (p. 23). The ultimate benefit would then be to relieve that poetry found set to music from the status of mere poesia per musica, as if it were a lesser form of literary life than the poems that do not need music to adorn them. Jennings adduces criteria that might indicate poetic manuscripts stemming from a notated exemplar (pp. 37–8), each of which she finds unmet in any manuscript. Her stringent criteria are certainly necessary if the goal is to prove that a notated exemplar was almost certainly used, but failing to meet them is not logically indicative of the definite opposite, although this is what Jennings appears to claim.

Chapters 2–5 provide more detailed case studies of manuscripts that will be useful to anyone who is concerned with the specific sources discussed or who has interests in the songs whose texts are in them. Chapter 2 questions genre distinctions between texts set to music and those not, with a specific focus on the poetic output of Sachetti, who clearly ‘envisioned his song texts as being part of a greater poetic and narrative whole’ (p. 68). This is rather akin to the disposition of song texts in Machaut's unnotated lyrics known as the Loange des dames (although Jennings doesn't make this comparison), albeit that in Sachetti's case the poems are mainly found set to music by composers distinct from their poet. But it might be that the lack of a figure like Machaut has facilitated the ‘divorce’ of music and poetry in Italy in this period, so Sachetti provides a useful way of arguing against the distinct identity of poesia per musica.

Chapter 3 examines texts from the songs of Francesco degli Organi (the composer formerly known as Landini) in Genoa, Biblioteca Universitaria, A.IX.28 to argue that their explicit thematization of song can take on primarily literary meaning in a text-only context. Once more, in order to make this claim (that the textual subject matter is enough to explain their inclusion), Jennings has to deem it unlikely that the songs were copied from a notated source, while insisting somewhat contradictorily that the ‘literary and cultural significance of these poems was shaped by, rather than independent from, their musical settings’ (p. 97). Again, I shall return to the nature of this contradiction below.

Chapter 4 argues that Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabechiano VII 1078 is not, as previously claimed, a written testimony to oral tradition. Instead, Jennings hypothesizes that while some isolated texts might have been written from memory, the lack of corrections/hesitations in copying and the occasional eye-skip point more likely to copying from a written source. In attempting to move beyond the twin binaries of high/low and courtly/popular, she ends up plotting these as intersecting axes, and concludes that this source unites previously opposing camps of literary/literate poesia aulica and performance/sound-driven poesia per musica poetry to show a multiplicity of style and reception.

Chapter 5 turns to the personal miscellany of one Amelio Bonaguisi, which survives in part in a combination of the manuscripts Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, II.II.61 and Magliabechiano VII 1040. While some of the complete contents are lost, the surviving materials include a vernacularization of Ovid's Heroides. Although it seems tendentious to assert that Amelio was trying to wrench ‘this repertoire away from the world of “high” art and humanist thought’ (p. 155) just because Ovid's text is presented in Italian rather than Latin, Jennings suggests that some of the poems, and in particular the song texts among them, have connections to the female characters in the Heroides. The manuscript images included in this chapter show a fascinating mix of poetry and amateur pen sketches of heraldry, knights and tourneying which starkly show Amelio's aspiration to courtliness, as furthered in the copying of the poems. One of the joys of the book is seeing images from manuscripts probably entirely unknown to most musicologists, and this chapter is especially rich in this regard.

A broader discussion of the material aspects of the two source groups – the musically notated manuscripts on one hand and the text-only sources on the other – forms the basis of the final chapter, Chapter 6. The musically notated sources are formal, even luxurious, on parchment with high production values and, when the provenance is known, seem to have been compiled for ecclesiastical institutions. The text-only sources, by contrast, are fairly low-grade paper manuscripts, often traceably personal, and not pre-planned. Jennings diagnoses the differences between the two groups as indicative of different audiences and reading practices, in particular a separation – not of poetry for music from poetry not for music, as many have claimed, but of lyrics that are in books to be used in singing from lyrics (even the same lyrics) that are in books not to be used in singing.

As an example, Jennings looks at Francesco degli Organi's song Che pena è quest'al cor, which is copied relatively widely in both kinds of source. Since more is known about the owners of the text-only sources, Jennings is able to show conclusively that this song text circulated among a broad section of Florentine society, including doublet-, sword- and armour-makers, and higher (but still artisanal) members of the Florentine political class. Although less is known about the original owners and use of the notated sources, there is strong indication of associations with monasteries. The disparity between the two is used to argue that notated song manuscripts give a socially very limited view of secular music-making in medieval Italy.

Complicating the material differences between text-only and musical manuscripts are those musically notated sources that are more like the text-only sources in their informality. Jennings treat these as exceptions: convincingly rejecting Agostino Ziino's idea that it might be from a larger planned source, she argues that Bologna, Archivio di Stato, Atti dei notai de distretto di Cologna, Rolando Castellani, filza 23, seconda di coperta 23 is a scrap for a singer's own use; and deftly using suggestions taken from Giuseppe Carsaniga, she argues that London, British Library, Additional 29987 was assembled over time, either also for a practising musician or for a child learning in a nunnery. Jennings adduces these ideas without drawing any further conclusions from them, but it might be that these two musically notated sources represent rare survivals from a class of objects far more likely to be ephemeral than either formally notated music or any kind of text-only source (formal or informal). Informal music sources are typically practical and specific, and their use-value declines sharply over time, especially if they are owned by someone who is not the head of a family with children (for example, a cleric). Conversely, the commonplace book of an Amelio might well be a family treasure, preserved as an object of memory by subsequent generations despite its lack of direct use-value. It is thus possible to argue that we are missing a lot of musically notated, informal sources of which the text-only sources represent the material equivalent.

Jennings's appendices are impressive and extensive, although they raise some questions about issues not fully explored in the main text. For example, in lots of sources the musical texts listed in the text-only manuscripts do indeed seem to appear in clumps, but the intervening texts (if there are any – it is hard to tell) are not given, and the description often says that the musical poems’ texts are ‘fully integrated into the larger lyric collection’, when actually they seem closely copied together. For example (on p. 219), in Florence, Biblioteca Marucelliana, C.155 the poems occupy fols. 50^r–81^v and the musical ones are on 53^v, 54^r (two texts), 54^v (two texts), 56^r and 61^v. Without needing to reopen arguments about whether this points to the use of a musical exemplar, it is possible instead that, as in Machaut's Loange, the placement of known musical texts might serve a binding function within short thematic runs of lyrics, although this is difficult to assess without a full inventory of the lyric contents.

There is certainly plenty of material in this study of the materiality of Trecento sources. Its problems stem from wanting simultaneously to reverse binaries (of value) and to remove them. The former move ends up reinscribing them, and latter ends up undercutting all the efforts of the former. The best example of this is the wish to revise a received view that there are poems written for music and poems written as literature. This view has resulted in poems with musical settings being less valuable as literature and the denial that they have any independent literary transmission. When they are copied without musical notation, people assume they are copied from musical exemplars (a view refuted in Chapters 1–2) and/or from hearing them sung (a view refuted in Chapter 4). Jennings shows that they are mixed in with genres never set to music and can't be shown to have come from musical exemplars, so are just poetry like other poetry and nothing to do with music (in Chapter 2). However, collapsing this entirely is Chapter 3's interlude, which argues that even when the exemplars are probably not musical, the fact of the text being a song can signify in a non-music-notated manuscript. In short, the wish to argue that these sources tell us about a socially broader musical culture and the wish to see them instead as evidence that the texts of musical pieces were properly part of the non-musical literary culture appear to contradict each other.

When is a song text not a song? This ostensibly strange question besets Jennings's entire study and leads her in a number of interesting directions, albeit directions often frustratingly resistant to any eventual destination. Is it a song when the verbal text has no musical notation? Or when it was not copied from a musically notated source? Or when the scribe doesn't know it's a song? Or when the reader doesn't know it's a song? Or is something once a song, always a song? It is possible to argue that the ‘notation’ of text is a kind of performance notation in itself, although whether it cues a recitational or sung performance depends on the knowledge of the reader in each case. At times, even Jennings seems unclear on whether or not these text-only sources are or are not musical documents. In the introduction, Jennings says that ‘as much as I aim here to emphasize the literariness of these poems, it must also be borne in mind that they were not necessarily wholly divorced from music when copied without notation’ (p. 7) and that ‘texts could encode musical information and serve as guides for sung performance even without the aid of notation. That, however, is a story for a different book’ (pp. 7–8). In fact, this is then a story explicitly countered in this book, whose central chapters (2–5) argue that ‘once entered into these literary collections, song texts function as poetry’ (p. 7).

The competing desire to ‘reconsider the weight we give to the elite, scholarly side of Trecento song’ (p. 157) may seem driven by a need to democratize the past: surely Amelio's interest in song texts, Ovid and heraldry arose precisely because he valued and aspired to an elitism that was not the dirty word and concept that it is in today's neo-Liberal democracies. Nonetheless, Jennings ultimately claims that the wider reception of these texts tells us something about the musical culture of Trecento Italy, specifically that it was less confined to elite and ecclesiastical institutions and permeated political, mercantile and artisanal classes in Florence, effectively being the secular counterpart to the laudesi companies. The implication of that, though, is that its reception among this broader class of people was still a musical one, as indeed it was with the laudesi. In fact, although this comparison is raised only in the Epilogue, laude might have offered a more thoroughgoing parallel, since their texts are similarly much more often copied just as text, rather than with musical notation. Yet no one doubts the musical nature of the lauda or seeks to integrate its poetry into a purely literary tradition of recited (or silently read) verse. There are, of course, differences: material differences in that the notated laudaria are scarcely more plush than the unnotated ones (unlike the general case with secular songs, whose musically notated versions are in far more formal sources than the text-only ones); and stylistic/notational differences in that the music of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century lauda is that of a monophonic refrain song, designed for amateur performance and notated in non-mensural form (whereas the secular song repertory is predominantly polyphonic, complex art music in mensural notation). These musical-stylistic and notational differences between the Trecento lauda and Trecento song are not something the book treats, but to have done so might have allowed first a comparison with, and then a differentiation from, laude. One might have proposed, for example, that the ‘elite’ nature of the Trecento song repertory lies exclusively in its musical aspect and is, perhaps, a predominantly ecclesiastical ornament, maybe with the express purpose of dignifying non-liturgical song sufficiently for it to grace a fairly worldly (civic) Italian monastic culture. Without getting into the musical aspects of the repertory, however, this kind of hypothesizing cannot be attempted.

The book is valuable in that it identifies some absolutely genuine problems in the historiography and understanding of this repertoire, all of which are the result of historical features of the modern academy, among them the nationalism of the nineteenth century and reliance on folk/popular/oral versus courtly/written/elite; and the related idea of some things belonging to music and other things to literature, which says more about modern university disciplinary divisions than it does about the Middle Ages. While the reasoning Jennings brings to bear to unseat these things is often no less certain than what it replaces, her willingness to open up these questions for discussion is laudable. And while overall the book leaves a fairly limited sense of what the Trecento literary tradition was about and what it concerned, the book's extensive appendices are useful. In short, Jennings has single-handedly brought an extensive body of unusual and neglected manuscripts into view within the sphere of anglophone scholarship. It is to be hoped that others will now incorporate her insights as they look comparatively at this material within the broader context of medieval European song in Latin, French, English and other vernaculars.