Cançoners DB: A New Research Tool for the Study of Medieval Catalan Songbooks

4This article presents the Cançoners DB, a database devoted to medieval Catalan songbooks transmitting Catalan lyric and verse narrative works ca. 1300–1500. In addition to introducing the aims and scope of the project, this essay reflects on the challenges and prospects of studying and indexing the material characteristics of Catalan songbooks in order to research works in verse, book production, and the compared structure of songbooks in Romance language traditions.


Introduction: History, Scope, and Main Goals
The study of Catalan medieval lyric has illustrious origins. More than a century ago, Manuel Milà i Fontanals, followed by Amadeu Pagès, and Jaume Massó i Torrents ("Bibliografia"; Repertori), concretely set the grounds for future research in this field. From these early works, undoubtedly the most important result with regards to the study of songbooks is the census of manuscripts, authors, and poems compiled by Massó i Torrents ("Bibliografia"). For each manuscript containing Catalan lyrics, Massó offered a brief codicological description, a bibliographic note, and a sequential table of lyric poems, each one identified by its incipit and attributed to an author whenever possible. This corpus, with all the subsequent additions up to now, amounts to roughly 1900 pieces by some 200 authors, dated between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, copied into 30 songbooks, with an extravagant manuscript tradition that includes 60 other manuscripts. 1 After such a promising beginning, not many studies followed this lead, and the study of songbooks has been fairly neglected until recent times. With the exception of works that approach the lyric manuscript tradition from very specific angles, such as the extremely useful metrical repertoire in Parramon, not much research was carried out in this field. The twentieth century saw the edition of the great majority of medieval Catalan lyrics, as well as a remarkable number of commentaries on the poems and substantial research on the poets from a literary and biographical point of view, amounting to enough data to allow for the first critical surveys of this period to be produced. Conversely, the study of lyric manuscripts still has considerable lacunae and, to date, it would be next to impossible to give a coherent interpretation of all the relevant aspects in this tradition. 2 The great number of unica among medieval Catalan lyrics has perhaps given the impression that it was not possible or worthwhile to filiate the manuscript witnesses, or has favoured an image of a "simple" or "limited" tradition that has gone unchallenged. For whatever reason, the research of the manuscript tradition has significantly lagged behind the results on the study of lyric poems and their authors until the past twenty years or so.
The turn of the century was a turning point for the study of the Catalan medieval songbooks, with the publication of several monographs that analysed manuscripts not merely as a storehouse of textual variants (to borrow Billanovich's expression) but also as a cultural and historical artefact, produced in a specific milieu according to a cultural and ideological agenda. These studies-many of which are results from our team's research-have provided new data on the songbooks known as M, L, P, S 1 , VeAg, X 1 , X 2 , and the Catalan troubadour songbooks, Mh, Sg, and V, very often by taking up new methods. 3 One of the main stimuli in this academic field has been the Italian filologia materiale, which comprises both an internal and external analysis of the manuscripts: codicological data-resulting from the study of the manuscript make-up and its history-is projected onto the textual analysis of its sources. The combination of these two sets of data often throws light onto the map of sources of the manuscript; it may highlight regions that might otherwise seem homogeneous and present an image of the chronological-and sometimes geographical and linguistic-parameters of its compilation. In general terms, these techniques emphasize the links between songbooks and production centers, and are therefore very useful in grouping manuscripts into families beyond their textual affinities, as troubadour studies have shown. 4 Thanks to these publications, the knowledge on Catalan medieval songbooks has greatly advanced, but most studies are very focused on specific corners of the tradition, since systematic access to detailed data on the whole of the lyric manuscripts is not currently available. This is the insurmountable problem that the Cançoners DB (http://candb.narpan.net) wants to address, by providing complete updated information on all of the Catalan lyric manuscripts, poems, and authors in a single site (comprising codicological, biographical, metrical, and literary details as well as bibliographic entries). Each manuscript in the Cançoners DB brings into the database all previously known information about it-checked and systematized-as well as new research whenever convenient. Additionally, the Cançoners DB will provide a diplomatic transcription of early manuscript witnesses, and, whenever possible, it will include links to MS images. Links to a digital library containing edited poems will also eventually be developed (see below). Finally, the Cançoners DB intends to present a general overview of the Catalan lyric manuscript tradition and some additional information on selected aspects for non-specialists.
In order to fulfil these objectives, the Cançoners DB was conceived as a powerful yet flexible tool. It would store complex data and reflect the way it was interconnected. It would be able to serve a variety of users with differing interests and allow for the kinds of searches they would require. Finally, it would also be able to accept new challenges over time without the need for a complete overhaul. It is also worth remarking that our database is part of the Narpan DB, a joint research effort and meta-database that Anthony Bonner, Albert Soler, and Lola Badia describe later on in this volume. What for a Cançoners DB user may be data related to songbooks, for the Narpan DB user might become another manuscript within his or her search for, say, identified scribes or decorative patterns in Catalan medieval manuscripts. It was clear from these premises that this tool had to take the shape a searchable relational database, capable of storing data of very different nature, updating whenever necessary, crossing different fields in a reliable manner, and providing sophisticate search functions. It needed the capability to create and store an analytic indexation of relevant manuscripts, poems, and attributed authors, and to link all of these to available bibliographic information. This data also had to be linked to a digital library (for the transcription and the edition of the poems) within a system that would allow discretional navigation through the overall data as well as combined and customized searches, which would have to be exported to the formats needed by different scholars.
In order to define the corpus for the Cançoners DB, some questions regarding selection criteria and boundaries with other traditions had to be assessed. 5 In a few words, in order to not skip valuable links in the historical chain of book production or misjudge the connection between both the troubadour and the Catalan lyrics and songbooks, it was in-advisable to leave out the early lyric songbooks copied in the Crown of Aragon, even if they do not include Catalan lyrics. 6 On the other hand, the feasibility of the project would be risked by including all of the witnesses of Ausiàs March's works-which would take the project well into the sixteenth century and thus consider artefacts that are no longer medieval-or the cancionero witnesses that had been made in the Crown of Aragon. 7 The same considerations apply to the early printed editions of Ausiàs March's works. Other than chronological limits, another question was whether to consider manuscripts that transmitted some lyric poems, or to include songbooks only. A compromise had to be reached since the main goal of the Cançoners DB is the study of songbooks, but many of the earliest manuscripts cannot be classified as such, and several poets-including some very important figures-have extravagant manuscript traditions associated with them. Consequently, some manuscripts that clearly fall outside the boundaries of this typology will be included because of these issues or because of their importance for the Catalan medieval lyric tradition.
Other than the studies on several songbooks published by members of our research group, the Cançoners DB benefits from the results of previous research projects in which our team has contributed. Many of the transcriptions of Catalan medieval songbooks published in the 1990s as microfiches in the series Concordances lèxiques dels cançoners catalans medievals were a research output of our team. 8 At the end of 1990s we also partnered with a team from the Università di Napoli Federico II to create the Repertorio informatizzato dell'antica letteratura catalana medievale (RIALC) <http://www.rialc.unina.it>, a digital archive in HTML featuring editions of all verse texts in medieval Catalan. 9 Furthermore, in recent years the field of Romance studies has been particularly active in developing digital projects focused on lyric texts and their manuscript transmission, including one of the chief models for the Cançoners DB: the Bibliografia elettronica dei trovatori <http://www.bedt.it>. Directed by Stefano Asperti and based at the Università La Sapienza in Rome, the BEdT is a relational database which brings together data on all known troubadour songbooks (including fragmentary ones), as well as details on the complete corpus of troubadours and troubadour lyrics. Some members of our research team collaborate on the BEdT, which has become the starting point for any research on the troubadour tradition. We hope that Cançoners DB will eventually integrate into a macrodatabase on European lyrics, with the BEdT at its centre. 10

Technical Data and Internal Structure
The Cançoners DB is supported by a relational database programmed in PHP+SQL, which exports data to a website based currently on a CMS Joomla interface. It is also connected to a textual digital library built on an XML-TEI encoding (www.tei-c.org), and managed with the open source engine eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), developed in Java by the California Digital Library. A basic open search will retrieve information such as general tables of contents for each songbook, linked to the author and poem files; biographical and chronological data for each author, with a listing of his works; a list of manuscript witnesses for each poem; a glossary of basic terms (such as genres within the Catalan tradition, metrical aspects, etc.); and bibliographic items searchable by any field. In other words, basic searches will provide a quick access to updated data regarding the general parameters of the Catalan medieval lyric tradition and its manuscript transmission. Advanced searches (only available to registered users) will allow for a deeper, customized interrogation of most data on the Cançoners DB thanks to a search engine that, on the one hand, will permit variable searches through several database fields and, on the other, will also grant access to diplomatic transcriptions of the songbooks. Examples of these searches will be discussed below.
The core of the Cançoners DB is built on the interactions between three main building blocks of relational data on: the manuscript witnesses, particularly their codicological details, linked to the works each contains; biographical data on the authors, linked to their literary output; and files for each poem, involving literary data. Each of these is also linked to relevant bibliographic references.

Manuscript Files
In general terms, codicological data is distributed into three big files: General Data, Units of Composition, and Internal Description, each of which is divided into several subfields. To simplify a very complex structure, under General Data, we include items such as Identification, Binding, History of the Codex, and Bibliography on the Codex. Under Units of Composition: Date and Geographic Origin, Writing Support, Foliation, Dimensions, Material Composition, Page Layout, Text Layout, Script and Hands, Old Corrections, Decoration and Textual Hierarchy, and History of the Codex. Finally, under Internal Description all the works copied in the manuscripts are identified in sequential order. Each work is described by the name of its author or authors, incipit and explicit, rubrics, consistency (whether the work is complete or fragmen-tary), and location (the folios where it is copied). Additional information on metrics, marginalia, punctuation, and other peculiarities of the version copied in a particular witness is also included, while a summary of the textual tradition of a given work and links to diplomatic transcriptions, editions or digital reproductions may also be included. The Internal Description files are linked to the appropriate unified files for each of the poems-in which all the non-MS-specific data is stored.

Author Files: Biography and Literary Output
This set of files includes historical details to identify and contextualize authors and their works. In addition to attribution issues, the Cançoners DB will provide chronological and geographical points of reference that will be as reliable and accurate as current research makes possible; these are crucial not only to characterize authors, but also to optimize the utility and the searchability of the database. 11 The reference number used to identify the poets is taken from Parramon's classification, which has become a widely accepted standard. The few corrections and additions to his census in the Cançoners DB that have been necessary so far have been mainly accepted from those proposed in RIALC, and by Marfany, and Mahiques. To these main references, the Cançoners DB adds all the identifying codes that these authors have been assigned in other repertoires. As a result of the often undefined boundaries between the Occitan and the Catalan traditions, or because in fifteenth-century Catalan songbooks one often finds bilingual authors and poems in languages other than Catalan, numerous authors and anonymous pieces are listed in repertoires of other traditions. This means that on occasion, because of an overlapping of the Catalan and the Occitan traditions, the Cançoners DB incorporates reference numbers from Pillet-Carstens's Bibliographie des troubadours, BEdT, and Zufferey's Bibliographie des poètes provençaux; and, to account for the Castilian tradition, it also includes the reference numbers from Dutton's El cancionero del siglo XV.
Other than referring to all the catalogues that list an author, the author files in the Cançoners DB also aim to describe his or her social status and profession, compile a relevant secondary bibliography, and suggest useful external links-particularly to other databases given the overlapping cases mentioned above.

Poem Files
Each poem has a unified file that includes all of its identifying information (author, description of title or first line, literary form, manuscript tradition, literary dissemination, specific bibliography, and links to other databases, digital editions and facsimile pages). This file is linked to the sequential description of pieces in the MSS description as seen above.

Bibliographic Entries
These files provide complete bibliographic information for each item (name, title, publisher, year, etc.) and subject keywords that link the file to a subject index. The search engine will thus be able to call on all of the bibliographic items regarding each MS, author, etc. The Cançoners DB bibliography is shared with all the projects of the Narpan DB, and can be interrogated independently or together with bibliographies from other projects.

Digital Library
At the present stage, poem files link to the works' digital editions in RIALC. As mentioned above, this project, finished in 2001, was entirely encoded in HTML and had not initially planned to implement a general search engine. The team working on the Cançoners DB has obtained funding to update and complete RIALC, while at the same time, gradually create a new digital library of revised and updated editions encoded in XML-TEI format. This new digital library will be managed by an XTF search engine, and will also include the diplomatic edition of the earlier lyric manuscript witnesses. This digital library will be a part of, and consequently linked to, the wider digital library of the Narpan DB, allowing for comprehensive searches.

Sections for Non-Specialists
The Cançoners DB website will also include sections for students and the general public, beginning with the illustrated article "What is a medieval songbook?" More materials will be added to offer both college and pre-college students basic notions about medieval Catalan lyrics, verse narrative, and their manuscript transmission. Other articles will be aimed at scholars from related fields wanting to include medieval Catalan songbooks in their research. The bibliography associated with the Cançoners DB will also provide links to articles, studies, reviews, and will reflect all the relevant novelties on this field of study.

Current Stage of Completion
At the present stage, the following manuscripts are being indexed in the database: B, c, E, Fa-Fb, G, J, K, L, Sg, S 1 /BM1, M, N, P, S 2 , X 1 , VeAg and the Castelló d'Empúries poems. A complete bibliography on Catalan songbooks, from the earliest research up to 2014, is also available.
In the next stage, we plan on analysing and indexing MSS C, Hk, O 1 , O 2 , O 3 , Q, R, T, U, X 2 , the Catalan troubadour MS Mh, the fragment from Sant Joan de les Abadesses, and the Occitan songbook t.
In a third stage, we plan on encoding and including in the digital library most diplomatic editions of both the earliest Catalan and Occitan-Catalan lyric MSS (which are currently under revision), these are respectively, MSS c, E, Fa-Fb, G, and B, C, Mh, Sg.
Finally, we are planning a fourth stage in which we will analyse and index a few relevant MSS that are not strictly songbooks-such as those transmitting Ramon Llull's poetry (D 1 -D 7 )-and transcribe VeAg and V. For the moment, we are not considering to systematically include diplomatic editions of later songbooks (from the second half of the fifteenth century on), but some of them may be added-such as bilingual songbook S 1 /BM1-if only as a point for contrast with the earlier production.

Future Research Perspectives
With the completion of each stage and once a search engine is implemented and open to registered users (a development planned for June 2014), several possibilities will unfold which will turn the Cançoners DB into a powerful research tool capable of promoting substantial contributions to the study of Catalan lyrics and songbooks.

Codicological Parameters
By assembling in one site codicological data that is so far dispersed or undescribed, the analytic indexation of the material features of manuscripts will make possible the comparison between the key elements that characterize songbooks. For the first time it will be possible to reliably define the typology of Catalan songbooks and compare it with other traditions. Both a general overview of the Catalan tradition and the detailed analysis of various aspects of Catalan songbooks will be possible-be it the format, the rubrics, or the metrical punctuation. 12 It is important to remark that although the Cançoners DB will consider manuscripts outside the strict definition of "medieval songbook" (see above), those codices will be labelled clearly so that different categories of MS witnesses can be differentiated in searches.
In addition, as part of the Narpan DB, the manuscripts described in the Cançoners DB will also enrich any study, so far only possible with estimated and uneven data, concerning the salient features and evolution of medieval book production in the Crown of Aragon. In other words, the Cançoners DB will open the door to studies on quantitative codicology involving the Catalan manuscript corpus, and facilitate its comparison with other medieval traditions, particularly with those of other Romance languages. 13 Beyond the possibility of typological descriptions based on quantitative data, material features are also crucial to identify codicological families, that is to say, to link MSS to production or patronage centres. 14

Dates, Places, and Names: Populating Medieval Catalan Book Production and Circulation
The systematic and analytic indexation of MS witnesses, combined with the data on authors and poems, and the possibility to search these in connection to other manuscripts indexed in the Narpan DB is bound to be fruitful in many aspects. While issues of authorship seem to be resolved to a reasonable degree in the Catalan medieval tradition, there are other authors and works that still lack but the roughest chronological coordinates. The Cançoners DB will make it easier to visualize the chronologic and geographic grids of Catalan lyrics, verse-narratives, and their manuscript transmission, and will maximize their applicability. 15 In some cases, this will only have a fine-tuning effect, but in other cases it might provide crucial clues to locate works and authors in a more specific chronological context, thus providing key leads for their study.
By showing systematic recurrences that are now only noticed by chance or through a much more laborious and estimative research, connections between names and places in the Cançoners DB (and the Narpan DB) will support analyses like the ones proposed in the previous section. For example, it will be much easier to obtain reliable data on the intellectuals, artisans, and patrons involved in the production of books in the medieval Crown of Aragon. 16 A new section in the Narpan DB, the Documents section, which contains inventories that provide information on book ownership, will also be supported in the Cançoners DB.

Versification and Genres: Evolution, Continuity, and Fracture
The analytical description and study of the evolution of poetic genres in medieval Catalan poetry still needs much research, despite the comprehensive information given by Parramon. The Cançoners DB is an ideal tool for this research, since it will present information on genres and versification in a systematized and easily accessible format, including elements useful for making connections with other traditions, such as stanza and rhyme patterns. This is crucial, since first the Occitan tradi-tion, and later on the Italian, French, and Spanish lyric traditions are not only neighbouring, but also models for substantial, and sometimes very specific, influences.
A similar case can be made for studies on metrical issues. In this regard, the Cançoners DB will offer metrical information for each poem that researchers will be able to access according to customized searches, thus obtaining systematic data in a format much more manageable than that of traditional printed studies.
In short, the Cançoners DB will allow searches in the entire Catalan tradition, poet by poet, period by period, genre by genre, metrical scheme by metrical scheme, and so on, also in a combination of these fields. This means, as remarked in previous sections of this article, that the general tendencies of a whole medieval tradition, the evolution of particular forms, the points of fracture or inflection, will be easily visualized. The same may be said regarding the corpus of individual authors, or in comparing two authors or two sets of data in any of these fields. 17

The Catalan Poetic Language Before 1450
One of the major, unresolved aspects of the cultural history of the medieval Crown of Aragon is the characterization of the language used by lyric poets between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries (especially during the first third of the fifteenth), and to a lesser degree by the authors of narrative verse. Scholars have only been able to typify this hybrid of Catalan and Occitan and its evolution in barely approximate terms, precisely because of a lack of access to the necessary data and tools to analyse it. 18 It should be recalled that while early manuscript witnesses contain works in a language that is in the boundary between Catalan and Occitan, later manuscripts contained sometimes poems in Spanish that were also tinted with Catalanisms.
By bringing together all diplomatic transcriptions of early witnesses of this phenomenon and allowing customized searches on a TEI-encoded linguistic corpus, the Cançoners DB will be an optimal tool to approach such a study. Thanks to linguistic searches (graphic, morphological, lexical, etc.), either comparing linguistic features in several manuscripts or in a series of witnesses to one single poem, instead of perpetuating unproved assumptions, it will finally be possible to outline a grammar for fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Catalan poetry and to study the graphic system of Catalan songbooks. When these kinds of results are achieved, they will also provide a new, enhanced tool to editors of medieval Catalan texts. As they wait for a thorough analysis of the evolution of poetry's language in the medieval Crown of Aragon and for studies of the linguistic traits of each manuscript, editors will at least have at the tips of their fingers a powerful tool to contrast and corroborate their editorial choices. 19

Notes
This article has been funded by the research project MICINN Coditecam: Eiximenis y cancioneros III based at the Institut de Llengua i Cultura Catalanes (Universitat de Girona; FFI2011-27844-C03-02).
1. See the latest additions to the census in Mahiques, which often derive from a wider chronological scope, and chiefly regard previously undetected anonymous pieces. Marfany also gives some leads to complete the existing catalogue.
2. The only attempts to give a panoramic overview of the lyric manuscript tradition are Compagna; Avenoza; and Cabré, "La circolazione." 3. The system of siglae that identifies the MSS is that of Massó i Torrents (Repertori), now widely used and accepted. However, some MSS might have an alternative sigla as witnesses to the works of a specific author, notably in the case of Ausiàs Marc (Pagès, Les obres). As a pioneering work on one of the Catalan tradition manuscript witnesses, any review must begin with the study of c in Badia. For X 1 , see Torró ("El ms. 151"); for S 1 , Martí (El Cançoner del marquès de Barberà; "El cançoner del marquès de Barberà"; "Fonts i problemes"; and "Escolios sobre impaginación"); for X 2 , Martos ("El Cançoner de Maians"; "El Còdex de Cambridge"; and "La génesis de un cancionero"); for M, Beltran; for VeAg, Alberni; for L, Rodríguez Risquete (Vida y obra; and Obra completa); for P, Rodríguez Risquete (Vida y obra; and Obra completa) and Torró ("La compilació"). Regarding the troubadour songbooks manufactured in the Crown of Aragon, for V see Zamuner; for Sg see Cabré and Martí ("Le chansonnier"); and Ventura; and for Mh see Boadas and Cabré. In addition to the revision and updating of these studies to introduce them in the Cançoners DB, our research group is working on other songbooks or MSS: the verse narrative songbook Fa-Fb (M. Victoria Rodríguez Winiarski), the Occitan songbook known as Registre Cornet (t; Marina Navàs "Le Registre"), and the new study and edition of the poems copied in the notary registers from Castelló d'Empúries (Anna Radaelli).
4. See the results compiled in the monumental Avalle and a general discussion and a practical application of the filologia materiale methods in Ferrari; Careri, Il canzoniere provenzale; Zufferey, "Philologie matérielle."; and Leonardi, La tradizione (and Martí's review). The most recent critical outline of the troubadour tradition is Asperti, "La tradizione occitanica." 5. See Cabré and Martí ("Per una base de dades") for a preliminary description of the project and Cabré ("La circolazione") for a more detailed discussion of the issues behind the limits established for the corpus included in the Cançoners DB.
6. On these early witnesses, see also Asperti,"'Flamenca' e dintorni" 70. 7. On this issue, see for instance, Torró "Una cort a Barcelona" and "Las cortes de Aragón"; as well as Galí, Ramos, and Torró. Moreover, these cancionero manuscripts are described and analysed in another project, see note 10.
8. The Seminari de Filologia i Informàtica (http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ sfi/), coordinated by Lola Badia and Joan Torruella, published in microfiche format the text and concordances of Catalan songbooks c, J, L, M, N, P, S 1 , VeAg, and X 1 (Concordances Lèxiques dels cançoners catalans medieval). These editions will be thoroughly revised and adapted to the Cançoners DB criteria.
9. This project was born from a partnership between a team of researchers at the Università di Napoli Federico II, and another jointly based at the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and the Universitat de Girona. It resulted in a website that gives access to editions of medieval Catalan verse works-fourteenth through fifteenth centuries-which either were specifically edited for this project or reproduced existing authorized editions.
10. On BEdT, see Asperti-Zinelli. Among the projects within this field, it is worth highlighting Concordance de l'Occitan médiéval (COM), coordinated by Peter T. Ricketts, and published in three CD-ROMs so far: one devoted to troubadour lyrics (COM1), a second CD dedicated to Occitan verse narrative (COM2), and a third one to Occitan prose (COM3). The project will be completed with COM4, containing a double edition (diplomatic and interpretative) of the troubadour songbooks. An Electronic Corpus of Fifteenth-Century Castilian Cancionero Manuscripts, directed by Dorothy S. Severin and based at the University of Liverpool, aims at presenting a critical hyperedition of all cancionero lyrics <cancionerovirtual.liv.ac.uk/>. Finally, I would like to mention the Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (CLPIO); the Lirica italiana degli origini research project; and see Leonardi, I canzonieri). The Cançoners DB shares some goals and some technical aspects with these projects, but it owes a greater debt to BEdT, in terms of structure and desired research outcome.
11. Some recent studies, notably Torró (Sis poetes) and Rodríguez Risquete (Obra completa) have contributed to the identification and biographical characterization of some medieval Catalan poets, thus enhancing the chronological accuracy of the Cançoners DB.
12. See, for instance, Careri's study on metrical punctuation ("Interpunzione"), or Leonardi's considerations on lyric layout ("Le origini"). The Cançoners DB will make possible the analysis of such aspects in the Catalan tradition with all the data in hand. See Cabré and Martí ("Per a una base de dades"), and Cabré for a preliminary discussion on the aspects involved at the turn of the fifteenth century in format changes concerning the Catalan tradition, and the convenience of comparing this phenomenon with other traditions that might have provided outside stimuli.
13. See the initial programmatic propositions of Bozzolo and Ornato; and, from a more general point of view, Maniaci. 14. For some recent examples of this type of research, see Flores D'Arcais; and Zinelli, both on troubadour songbooks originated in a Venetian scriptorium. For the Catalan tradition, Cabré and Martí have linked MS Sg to other manuscripts produced in a scriptorium connected with the University of Lleida, on the grounds of its textual layout, decoration, and folio signatures ("Le chansonnier"). As discussed in Cabré, it is likely that this latter hypothesis may be enriched when set against the background of the MSS analysed in Narpan DB (1162 up until now, February 2014).
15. As noted above, these are two parameters that deserve the utmost attention, since their accuracy has widespread implications in the database. 16. Using another example from our previous research, the Cançoners DB will greatly enhance any attempt to reconstruct networks of patronage and lyric circulation such as that presented in Cabré, Martí, and Navàs. 17. On the need to study genres as historical entities, see Paden. For the shortcomings of genre studies and the applications of BEdT to this issue, see Asperti ("Théorie").
18. Massó i Torrents ("Bibliografia") already touches upon the thorny issue of the fluid boundaries between fourteenth-century Catalan and Occitan lyrics, particularly from a linguistic point of view. For discussion and background information on this issue, see Riquer, Poesies; and "La lengua"; Bohigas, "La llengua"; Aramon; Nadal-Prats 386-90 and 483-504; Asperti, "'Flamenca' e dintorni" 69-70; Zufferey, Recherches linguistiques; and Gimeno Betí. 19. Such has been one of the effects of the COM corpora for the editors and researchers in medieval Occitan texts.