Mossèn Avinyó, the Cancionero de Vindel and the Cançoner llemosí del siglo XV

This article illustrates an important while comparably unattended role played by the making of digital databases in our contemporary philological study of medieval poetry. By presenting a case study devoted to the figure of Mossèn Avinyó, a fifteenth-century Catalan nobleman and poet, the authors of this essay exemplify the need for a rigorous perusal of the material evidence that is being archived in digital projects. With paleographical, codicological, and literary evidence, the authors show with great probability that Avinyó himself compiled two manuscripts currently held by the Hispanic Society of America: the Cancionero de Vindel and the Cançoner llemosí del siglo XV. In doing so, the authors also show that these two manuscripts contain the entirety of Avinyó’s lyric production, along with a sampling of the poetry produced by those who traveled in Avinyó’s cultural circles.

The proliferation of databases dedicated to literary studies is a genuine blessing for the philologist. 1 As a tool for study and reference, they provide fast and reliable access to a great deal of information that, in the past, had to be collected and reviewed with patience, and most likely some degree of error or carelessness. Furthermore, online databases are particularly useful for the study of songbooks and medieval poetry because they make it possible to coordinate and relate the fragments and small pieces of which by nature they are composed. Among the databases dedicated to medieval poetry are: Repertorio informa-tizzato dell'antica letteratura catalana (Rialc), Repertorio informatizzato dell'antica letteratura trobadorica e occitana (Rialto), Bibliografia Elettronica dei Trovatori (BEdT), An Electronic Corpus of 15 th Century Castilian "Cancionero" Manuscripts, Corpus des Troubadours, Base de Datos da Lírica Profana Galego-Portuguesa (MedDB), and PhiloBiblon.
For the last several years, the Institut de Llengua i Cultura Catalanes of the Universitat de Girona has been sponsoring the Cançoners DB project, whose objective is the elaboration of a well-founded, digitized corpus of all of the Catalan cançoners of the Middle Ages for specialists to consult online. It is an initiative that will bear (and is already bearing) fruit, of which this article is just one example. In fact, the digitization and preparation of a detailed study of the Cancionero de Vindel (copied toward the end of the fifteenth century) has not only led us to examine carefully the digitized images of all of its folios, problems of attribution, the authors included, and the copyists involved; it has also afforded us the possibility of studying the manuscript directly and delving deeply into some of its most urgent questions.

The Cancionero de Vindel (The Hispanic Society of America, New York, MS B2280)
The truth is that the Cancionero de Vindel, cited or used by editors and specialists many times in recent decades, is a very little-studied manuscript; in fact, the articles or monographs dedicated to the codex can be counted on one hand. It is no less true that only in recent years has new research of genuine importance appeared. The fact that we have made new discoveries is therefore not surprising, since strictly speaking we are the first to study the manuscript in such detail.
In the current article we do not attempt to exhaust all scholarly approaches to the Cancionero de Vindel, nor is it our intention to examine in detail all of its nooks and crannies. It is too complex a manuscript to be fully explored in these few pages. Our purpose is more limited, but at the same time spans the entire manuscript, and its conclusions transcend the limits of its pages. In the interests of greater clarity, we will declare from the beginning our thesis: we believe that the Cancionero de Vindel belonged to the poet Mossèn Avinyó; we suspect that he himself copied it partly or completely and corrected it; 2 we believe that Mossèn Avinyó also commissioned and copied a large part of the Hispanic Society's songbook of Ausiàs March, the Cançoner llemosí del siglo XV (MS B2281); finally, we are of the opinion that both codices contain a canon not only of the Catalan and Castilian poetry found in Catalonia at the end of the fifteenth century, but also of Avinyó himself-the entirety of his surviving literary production.
To a certain extent, this thesis was already suggested, in a much more limited fashion and as a mere suspicion, in Rafael Ramírez de Arellano's selective and sometimes deficient edition. The Hispanist writes: ...I believe that Mossèn Avinyó, a Catalan noble of whom almost nothing is known, ordered the production of this songbook, and that, human nature being what it is, together with the well-known texts, he asked the copyists to include his lyric poems alongside a selection of the poetic invention of Guabert, Urrea, Benavente, Gras, Crespa, Forcén, Luna, Furtado, Urrías, Torroellas, Valladolid, Rojas, Manrique, and Ávila....From Crespa's poem one learns that he was a friend or acquaintance of Avinyó, and I believe that the other perhaps belonged to his circle of friends, and that for this reason he ordered their poems copied. 3 Of course, with no evidence to support it, Ramírez de Avellano's supposition was somewhat daring, but we believe that he was not, in this respect, misguided, and Garcia Sempere and Martín Pascual repeat his suspicion (117-18).
Just who was Mossèn Avinyó? Until recently nothing was known of him, but fortunately this is no longer the case. Today we know that the poet was named Lluís d'Avinyó, that he lived in Tarragona, that there are surviving documents about him from between 1435 and 1480, and that he was knighted in Barcelona by Charles of Aragon, Prince of Viana, in the summer of 1461. He died between October 25, 1474 and July 8, 1477. He was active as a poet during the last years of his life, given that in 1473 or shortly thereafter he dedicated a poem to Castellana de Requesens.
The Cancionero de Vindel entered the Hispanic Society's library together with another manuscript that still accompanies it (Foulché-Delbosc), MS B2281, which is dedicated to Ausiàs March, Pere Torroella, and a few other poets. All of its texts are in Catalan. As Pedro Vindel confessed, he bought both manuscripts "en un poblet de Espanya, de persones completament ignorants" (Pagès 1: 54; "in a small Spanish village, from completely ignorant people"), showing that their mutual travels began significantly before they entered the library that now houses them. If one examines attentively the hands involved in their production, it seems incontrovertible that they had belonged to the same person in the fifteenth century, since the more cursive bastarda script that occupies dozens of pages in the Cancionero de Vindel is exactly the same as the one that reappears in the Cançoner llemosí del siglo XV on pages as Charles Faulhaber suggested. 4 This is not at all strange: the songbook dedicated to Ausiàs March (B2281) contains exclusively poetry in Catalan, whereas the Cancionero de Vindel is a songbook of Castilian poetry, with some last-minute additions of Catalan poetry. They are, therefore, two completely complementary manuscripts that have offered, since the fifteenth century, a single repertoire of Catalan and Aragonese poetry divided by language into two volumes.
Let us focus on the Cancionero de Vindel, although further on we may manage to recover some information about the manuscript that accompanies it. MS B2280 comprises 156 paper folios that present only modern pagination (in total, 312 pages). Although it has suffered some alterations (about which we won't go into detail here), it presently consists of twelve quires and a few residual leaves between them. The quires may be classified into two different groups according to the type of paper used: some predominantly feature a ring watermark (and sometimes a hand and star watermark), whereas other quires include a cat watermark (along with, on occasion, watermarks featuring a woman's head with a star, a cart, or a tower). Both types of quire alternate throughout the manuscript seemingly not following any regular distribution pattern. In addition, there are two types of handwriting: a lightly Gothic, fractured one (Hand A) and another that matches the characteristics of a somewhat cursive and relaxed Catalan bastard script (Hand B). 5 All of the quires prepared by Hand A were originally sexternions, and those prepared by Hand B are longer and of irregular composition. They could belong to a single scribe or to two different copyists, a problem that we will discuss further on.
Whether both copies were produced by one person or two, what is clear is that they reflect two distinct stages of copying. In general, the type of script employed corresponds to the quality of the paper and the distribution of the sections: Hand A appears in the quires that contain the ring watermark, whereas Hand B appears in sections with the cat's watermark. Occasionally, Hand A left blank pages in its sections, which were used by Hand B. One also observes that Hand B often corrects, annotates, or underlines text copied by A. These facts demonstrate two things: that Script A is earlier than Script B, and that Script B carried out a codicological expansion with paper different from that of the previous manuscript. These facts do not depend on the question of whether both scripts can be attributed to the same person because it is quite possible that the same copyist worked at two different moments, imitating the handwriting of two different antigraphs. The last quire (in which the only Catalan texts of the collection appear) seems to have been added at the last moment, also by Hand B.

One or Two Copyists?
Both the Gothic (A) and cursive (B) scripts are of Catalan hand, as indicated by their graphic habits (identical in both cases), typical of the northeastern region of the peninsula (ny, ss, vowel reduction of unstressed a and e, etc.). It is also evident that both hands belong to individuals with an identical cultural profile, given that they had access to collections of poetry that circulated in the same environments and years and that, furthermore, demonstrate shared literary tastes. In fact, Hand A, the first to work on the manuscript, transcribes works by Juan de Mena, the bachiller Alfonso de la Torre, Pere Torroella, Lope de Estúñiga, Mossèn Gras, Hugo de Urriés, Mossèn Avinyó, Lope de Urrea, Gauberte, Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, and Sancho de Rojas, along with a few anonymous occasional works. There is no doubt that the majority of these authors were active in the courts of the kings and infantes of Aragon since the mid-fifteenth century. Those who were not actually active (as in the cases of Juan de Mena and Juan Rodríguez del Padrón) still enjoyed exceptional success in those same courts during that same period. Hand A's sections, as we have seen, align perfectly with the poetic canon that circulated throughout the fifteenth century in Crown of Aragon, at a time when love poetry and the works of certain established authors (Mena, de la Torre, Estúñiga, and Torroella) were dominant. The poems of Mossèn Avinyó included in Hand A's sections are composed exclusively in Castilian, a fact we will need to have in mind further on. As for Hand B, the copyist admires the same authors but adds several other occasional works and pieces by hardly known poets. Hand B's sections thus include Castilian authors of great prestige in Aragon, such as Juan de Mena, the Marquis of Santillana, Gómez Manrique, and Fray Íñigo de Mendoza; authors associated with the courts of the Crown of Aragon such as the Count of Benavente, Juan de Dueñas, Alfonso de la Torre, Pere Torroella, and Gonzalo de Ávila; Antón de Montoro's coplas to Juan Poeta; Catalan and Aragonese poets of little renown such as Mossèn Avinyó, Lope de Urrea, Forcén, Juan de Luna, and Furtado; and other occasional compositions. Furthermore, he transcribes an amusing collection of motes and invenciones and a poetic exchange between Juan Poeta and the "Prince," that is, Charles of Ara-gon, Prince of Viana. The fact that the only Catalan poems appear in Hand B's section, and that they do so in the last quire and are Mossèn Avinyó's is not trivial. We have already seen that this quire appears to have been a last-minute addition, which would explain the inclusion of pieces that disrupt the dominant linguistic criteria of the collection.
Alongside these considerations, Hands A and B reflect the same cultural profile: that of a Catalan man of letters who lived during the endof-the-century Aragonese courts, who had access to authors associated with John II of Aragon, and the Prince of Viana, who admired Juan de Mena, the Bachiller de la Torre, and Pere Torroella, who enjoyed both love lyric and erudite poetry, and who followed a strictly linguistic criterion in the songbook's production, with the exception of the last quire. On the other hand, it is hardly extraordinary for a copyist to modify his handwriting: a professional scribe of this period had a scriptural repertoire more complex than we can imagine, and could often imitate his model's handwriting when what he wanted was to draw (more than write) the traces of a formal script. We could in fact say that the copyist of the Cancionero de Vindel draws in Gothic script when prompted by a formal collection (imitating the great Castilian cancioneros) and writes in cursive script when compiling miscellaneous material.

Mossèn Avinyó, Crafter of the Cancionero de Vindel
At the end of the manuscript, among the anthology's few Catalan poems, are several poems by Mossèn Avinyó. They are of particular interest because they are the only ones with marginal glosses. Those glosses (as was frequent in other poems of the same style) can only have been added by Avinyó himself. This is clear not only from the deep knowledge of mythology shared by the author of the poems and the author of the glosses, but also from the content of the glosses themselves. The annotations (which appear in the margins of the poems "Socors de les muses no·m par que fretura" and "Si·nvega fos morta tornar'a reviure") expound upon the words muses, Elicona, Sabba, Minerva, Venus, Philomena, Marcia, Caleophea, Diana, ambrogida (ambrosia), Dane (Daphne), Camilla, and Driana (Ariadne). The glossator underlines the word in the text and writes above it a reference note. Other words, such as Phebo, are underlined but lack a note, leading us to believe that no gloss was planned for them, or even likelier, that the term was defined in another gloss, as in the case of Phebo, explained in the note dedicated to Diana.
Although any educated person could refer to contemporary erudition to gloss these words, it is undeniable that the author of these poems  is the likeliest candidate, given that the glosses explain not only the meaning of the terms, but also (and this is what matters most) the meaning the terms have in these particular lines of poetry. Thus, in the second poem, Avinyó writes: "Mirant-vos se gèlan com cavalls qui pòrtan / lo gran Sol ab carro, qui primer se pexen / d'ambrogida erba perquè mils comporten / la gran calentura…" (311; "Gazing upon you, they freeze, like the horses that draw / the great Sun in a chariot, who first graze / on ambrosia, to better bear / the great heat..."). The gloss explains not only the meaning of "ambrogida," but also the exact sense of the word in the text: Ambrosia. The poets say that it is such an extremely frigid herb that the four horses that draw the Sun's great triumphal coach from east to west, if it not were for its great frigidity, would perish and be consumed by the great heat retained by the Sun. And since the horses first graze upon this cold herb that refreshes them and thus mitigates the great heat, by this herb's virtue these horses can bear the Sun freely without being consumed by it.
In these terms, the most interesting gloss is, without a doubt, the one dedicated to Marcia. In the first of the poems (a eulogy of Castellana de Requesens) we read: "Mas pus de gran Màrcia teniu saviesa / e de les ja ditas portau l'aventatge" (310; "But you are wiser than the great Marcia / and superior to the aforementioned women"). The gloss adds: "Màrcia fou duquessa de [Br] ncara s'i serven" ("Marcia was duchess of Britain, and so wise that all the people of that province were under her rulership. And she used certain laws in Britain, which are still in force"). If the glossator were someone other than the author, upon reading "de … Màrcia … saviesa" in the context of a eulogy of a noblewoman, he would have thought of one of the Roman Marcias (the daughter of Varro, and the wife or youngest daughter of Cato of Utica), emblems of chastity. They were all frequently mentioned in the principal repertoires of illustrious women circulating in the fifteenth century, from Dante in the Divina commedia (Inferno 4.128 and Purgatorio 1.79: Marcia, wife of Cato of Utica), Dante's commentators, and Boccaccio's De claribus mulieribus (Ch. 66: Marcia, daughter of Varro) to the Libro de las virtuosas e claras mujeres by Álvaro de Luna (2.9 and 2.14: Marcia, daughter of Cato and Marcia, daughter of Varro). Mossèn Avinyó, on the other hand (and the glossator was aware of this), was thinking of the legendary queen Marcia (here, duchess) who supposedly commissioned the Lex Martiana in the fourth century and who had been mentioned by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his famous chronicle. Considering the relationship between the gloss and the poem, Avinyó must be the author of both.
We can go one step further still. The person who transcribed the glosses (Hand B) is the same one who copied this poem and left various marks on the songbook's earlier pages. It is at least curious that his interests were the same as those of Mossèn Avinyó. In fact, in one of the few glosses not accompanying a poem by Mossèn Avinyó, but rather the Marquis of Santillana's Comedieta de Ponza, the glossator, using the same kind of catchword as in the final poems, draws a mark in the line "y las que altercaron sobra la mançana" (304) and notes: "Las tres dehessas, Venus, Juno, Pallas" ("The three goddesses, Venus, Juno, and Pallas"). In the poem "Socors de les muses" (309), Mossèn Avinyó writes: "pus tant gentilea en vos és sobrada, / sens dupte la poma a vos fóra dada" ("Since your courtesy is so much higher [than Venus's], / the apple would doubtless have been given to you"). It seems clear that Hand B and Mossèn Avinyó share the same interests and cultural coordinates, since the myth of Paris's apple is exceedingly rare in the cancionero poetry of the fifteenth century (Crosas 355-56; ; after all, the gloss on the Comedieta reveals one of Avinyó's sources for his own poetry. In addition, on page 285 of the manuscript, the glossator pauses upon some Comedieta lines as he drops a no[tatur] on the margin. The stanza, dedicated to the pagan invocations in erudite poetry, begins: A mí non conviene aquellos favores de los vanos dioses nin los invocar, que vos los poetas y los oradores llamades al tiempo de vuestro exortar It is not right for me to invoke the favors of those vain gods that you, poets and orators, call upon in your speeches. It is no coincidence that the glossator finds this couplet remarkable, since he shares his obsession with Mossèn Avinyó, one of whose Catalan poems begins: Socors de les muses no·m par que fretura ni veure de l'aygua de font Elicona, ha hon grans poetas trobaren dulçura, e qui beu d'aquella no fall en mesura ni pot rebre ·ncontre d'avisada persona (309) The aid of the muses does not seem necessary to me, nor to drink from the Helicon spring where great poets found sweetness, and he who drinks from it does not lack measure and will not clash against the wise.
As if this were not enough, he himself clarifies in the corresponding gloss: Les muses dien los poetas a las scièncias qui tenen contínua habitació en lo munt de Pernaso, y és pràticha de oradós invocar al principi de les obres, ço és invocar per auxili de la obra a Déu ho algun planet ho scièncias qui muses són ditas, e la obra és més ornada e mostra's istorial qui invoca. (309) Muses is the name poets use for the sciences that live permanently on Mount Parnassus, and it is customary for orators to begin their works with an invocation, that is, invoking, for the aid of the work, God or some planet or the sciences called muses, and the work is more ornate, and the invoker shows his historical knowledge. Furthermore, some lines and concepts from Ausiàs March's Poem 23 are translated in these Catalan poems according to Mena's lyrical code . Suspiciously, the profile of Hand Script B is identical to that of Avinyó. 6 The Cançoner llemosí del siglo XV, where we again find Hand B, is precisely the famous codex of the Hispanic Society's Ausiàs March songbook (MS B2281). As Faulhaber highlighted, Hand B reappears on pages 266-70, 346, 7 and 347-50 of this manuscript. These two codices were never separated and were even stored side by side for a long time: first the Cancionero de Vindel and then the Cançoner llemosí del siglo XV. Witness to this is the moisture stain shared by the last folios of the Cancionero de Vindel (MS B2280) and the first of the Cançoner llemosí (MS B2281). This stain reveals to us that pages 347-50 of the Cançoner llemosí, written by Hand B, are a bifolium that was kept for a long time at the end of the Cancionero de Vindel. This is confirmed by the cat watermark of these pages, which was typical of the latter codex. Those pages were not the only loose bifolium kept in the Cançoner llemosí. It could also have been the same case for some bifolia featuring various watermarks, such as the one comprising pages 147-50. When the current binding was carried out, all those loose bifolia must have been sewed in and the blank folios cut and trimmed again. It was decided that the bifolium with the copy of Mossèn Navarro's lai be relegated to the last pages of the songbook of Ausiàs March and Pere Torroella.
The similarities do not end here. In both his Castilian and Catalan poetry, Lluís d'Avinyó's models of inspiration are clear. He had read  Boccaccio (whom he cites in a gloss); he admired Ausiàs March (whose influence in his poetry is evident); he had memorized Pere Torroella's verses; and he tried to emulate the erudite poetry of Juan de Mena, and the Marquis of Santillana, by adapting it to the register of Catalan poetry. It is one of the first examples of Catalan poetry in arte mayor, with its attendant classicizing and erudite ornamentation, as the surviving glosses show. Mossèn Avinyó's poetic models are precisely those best represented in the songbook: Juan de Mena, Pere Torroella, and Alfonso de la Torre. One should recall here that MS B2281, dedicated to Ausiàs March and Pere Torroella, belonged to the same person whom we have identified with Hand B, and was the Cancionero de Vindel's natural pair. Together, they constitute a kind of textbook in which Mossèn Avinyó learned the art of composing poetry and emulating his models. Both songbooks, and the poems they contain, fit the form, tone, models, and substance of Mossèn Avinyó's poetry like a glove.
There are other signs that confirm these to be Mossèn Avinyó's personal songbooks, copied or overseen by him personally. On page 237 of the Cancionero de Vindel, in a Castilian poem by Avinyó himself copied in Gothic script (Hand A), the following stanza appears: De otras perfeciones tenéys en tan alta suma que con muy bivas razones tomaran fin qüestiones si'lguna ser tal presuma; y non solo las beldades con vós digo yo que moran, mas grandes honestidades por las quales vos adoran, nin solas graciosidades.
You hold other perfections in such a great sum that very lively reasons will put an end to the question whether another presumes to be your equal; and I do not say that beauties alone live in you, but great honesties for which you are adored, and not just charms.
Throughout the poem, the rhyme scheme is abaabcdccd. This stanza, in contrast, presents a change in the final quintain: abaabcdcdc. In the margin, in the same cursive handscript we have called B, two letters indicate the revised order of the quintilla's lines: y non solo las beldades con vos digo yo que moran nin solas graciosidades, mas grandes honestidades por las quales vos adoran.
And I do not say that beauties alone live in you, nor charms alone, but great honesties for which you are adored.
Although an extraordinarily attentive reader could have found and corrected the error, it will not be denied that the correction is too brilliant for an average fifteenth-century reader. Another correction, much more eloquent, allows us to confirm that Script B does, in fact, belong to Mossèn Avinyó. The end of Avinyó's poem beginning "Los mals cuberts no porten may planyença" appears, written in the bastarda Hand B, on page 297 of the manuscript. In the last stanza, before the tornada, we read: Com la soplich ab veu molt piadosa me do remey, pus no·m plau pus viure, plaure no·m vol perquè yo fos desliure de ma dolor he pena trebellosa.
When I ask her with a very pitiful voice to give me relief, for I no longer desire to live, she does not want to please me so that I might be free of my grief and painful hardship.
In the second line, the last hemistich is hypometric. Furthermore, it presents a twofold stylistic problem, since pus is repeated in the same verse, and the verb plaure reappears at the beginning of the next one. Hand B attempted various corrections to rectify these problems. First, it crossed out m plau pus and, above the line, wrote: desitg lo ("me do remey, pus no desitg lo viure"). In this way, both the metrical problem and the lexical defects were resolved. However, unsatisfied with the change lo viure, it crossed out the article and, above the already-eliminated word pus, wrote més, thus returning to the original sense of the text. The final line, "me do remey, pus no desitg més viure" ("give me relief, for I do not desire to live on"), is the fruit of various purely stylistic attempts that can only be attributed to an author's zeal for the aesthetic refinement of his verse. We have no doubt that it is Avinyó's own authorial correction.
All of the facts examined, as we have seen, lead us to the same conclusion. Both the Cancionero de Vindel, and the Ausiàs March songbook that has accompanied it since the beginning, represent as a unified ideal, albeit physically divided according to a linguistic criterion, the cultural horizons, tastes, and models of Mossèn Avinyó. The glosses on the last poems of the Vindel, perfectly authorial, are copied in the same script (B) that shows itself to be interested in the same myths and topica as the poet Mossèn Avinyó. Hand B's corrections, in both his own texts and those of Hand A, are clearly authorial and only affect poems by Avinyó. It is not superfluous to add that the occasional poems found in the songbook (the poetic exchanges between Juan Poeta and the Prince of Viana, the celebration of the wedding of Joanna of Aragon sung by Pere Torroella, and the couplets exchanged between Avinyó and Mossèn Crespa), transmitted here alone and possibly of a later date, are more than explained if we consider the environments frequented by Avinyó. We should not forget that Avinyó was knighted by Charles of Aragon, Prince of Viana, in 1461, during the same years that Juan Poeta was serving the Prince (Rodríguez Risquete 1: 71-72); that Antoni Pere de Rocacrespa, who can be definitively identified with Mossèn Crespa , belonged to the same circles; nor that Avinyó must have met Pere Torroella personally earlier, during and after the Catalan civil war (1462-72). In the humanities, scholars work with probabilities, only rarely with absolute proof. But it must be recognized that the probability that Avinyó were the manuscript's scribe is so high as to constitute proof.
No philological argument can be considered rigorous if it fails to take into account possible objections. In this case, such objections, we believe, are not strong, but honesty demands that they be articulated so that readers have all of the facts in question and can judge their pertinence. The first is of little importance: all of Mossèn Avinyó's poems, in both Catalan and Castilian, include the rank and name of the author (generally, "Mossèn Avinyó" or "Mosén Avinyón"). One might think that in a personal manuscript, the only name that should not appear is that of the author and copyist. In reality, this is not the case. There are numerous authorial manuscripts in which the poet displays his name with pride, sometimes alone, and at other times compared to the names of the great poets that accompany it. Such is the case of the Cançoner dels Masdovelles and Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles, to cite just one nearly contemporary to our own. 8 Avinyó, in this case, includes his poems among those of Mena, Torroella, and de la Torre, his models, and along with those of Crespa, Gras, and other minor authors who must have been his companions at the court of John II of Aragon and Charles of Aragon. As we see, signing one's own texts is no objection to our thesis.
Another objection, perhaps stronger, addresses the quality of the text. Indeed, the poems of Mossèn Avinyó, those copied by Hand A as well as B, contain some mechanical errors and other errors of composition or transmission. Thus, for example, on pages 309 and 312, there are some hypermetric lines. The opposite phenomenon, that is, hypometria, is found on page 311. On page 232, some typical copyist's errors committed by A are corrected by B, while on pages 278 and 310 there are two evident errors that can be easily remedied ("més tengut" in place of "menystengut," and "presenta" in place of "representa"). Upon closer inspection, however, these are not substantial objections. The metrical problems we have described are concentrated in the more experimental poems, just where Avinyó tries to adapt the rhythm of Castilian's arte mayor to the Catalan language. As we have already said, it is likely that Avinyó's attempts at this adaptation are the first to be documented, so it is hardly surprising that they contain imperfections and irregularities. Even the Marquis of Santillana's sonnets are not metrically impeccable, as is well known. Furthermore, the copyist's errors we have detected in other pieces are not entirely unforgiveable. In the end, when poets transcribe their own verses they become copyists wholly and can make the same mechanical mistakes (among others) as a professional scribe.
Of course, the appearance of the Cancionero de Vindel (and of the Ausiàs March songbook that is housed now, as it was before, at the same library) is not what one expects of an author's manuscript, with corrections, erasures, and stylistic experiments of all sorts. But it should not be forgotten that both manuscripts are exactly what they appear to be: clean collections, meticulous and more or less organized, perfectly divided into two volumes and with discreet and very sparse corrections. An author's copy need not be a draft, and in this case it is not. A good example of this are the glosses that appear at the end of the Cancionero de Vindel: Hand B (that is, Avinyó himself) copied the text of the poem first and only later added the marginal glosses. Of course, they were not improvised on the manuscript's pages; rather, he transcribed them, pristine and with no lexical, syntactical, or stylistic errors, from some earlier version.
The last objection touches on the dates of the manuscript's poems and of the poet's life. The most recent poem seems to be the one Pere Torroella dedicated to the infanta Joanna of Aragon on the occasion of her marriage to the king of Naples. The poem can be dated definitively to September 1476. We know, meanwhile, that Lluís d'Avinyó died before the eighth of July, 1477, but was still alive, at least, on the October 25, 1474 (Galí et al. 492). These dates are clearly very close, but two important facts must be kept in mind. First, Avinyó was still active as a poet after 1473, since it was after this date that he dedicated one of the poems in the Cancionero de Vindel to Castellana de Requesens (Galí et al. 483). Second, both this poem and that of Torroella (whose detailed rubric indicates that the rubricator was very familiar with the narrated events) appear in the last section of the manuscript, which, as we have already mentioned, appears to be a last-minute addition, owing to both the type of paper used and the intrusion of Catalan as a poetic language. Both facts make it not just possible, but probable, that Avinyó copied the songbook's last poems shortly before his death, which would allow us to date his last stage of compilation or copying to a very narrow period: between September 1476 and July 1477.
Finally, what might have been posed as an objection could turn out to be, in reality, a point in favor of our hypothesis. Indeed, if Avinyó worked on his manuscript until the last months of his life (something highly probable, since he was still active as a poet, as we have seen), his death would explain some loose ends presented by the collection.
It would explain, for example, why only a few lines were corrected, but no more; it would account for the partial presence of glosses and the presence of numerous names that were underlined but not annotated, perhaps with an eye toward the addition of new glosses in the future. It would explain, in the end, the slightly incomplete character of the manuscript and Lluís d'Avinyó's inconsistent intervention therein as glossator of his own texts and those of others, as well as corrector of his own compositions.

Conclusion
At first sight, a songbook is an opaque system in which texts accumulate in an apparently random order. Upon closer inspection, an order and logic impose themselves (there is always some logic behind a book), and the object comes transparent, as if the book opened up in time and showed, frozen at an exact moment, its little history, its transformations and constants. The young nobleman Lluís d'Avinyó, knighted in 1461, possessed two collections of verse in order to learn to write his own or to remember how he had learned to write it-one songbook in Catalan and one in Castilian, containing the cream of the period's love poetry: Ausiàs March, Juan de Mena, the bachiller de la Torre, Pere Torroella, and a handful of other celebrated quills. With time, he decided to enrich them with verse by himself and others. At the end of his life, perhaps forgetting or ignoring his initial plan, he added Catalan poems to the Castilian manuscript and tried to emulate Juan de Mena as a poet of erudition and historical learning, having also tried to imitate him in glossing his own compositions. He died during this attempt. Today, philologists can reconstruct only part of this journey. With time, advances unimaginable today (as the databases that made this article possible were compiled not long ago) will (perhaps) allow us to retrace Lluís d'Avinyó's steps from the last days of his life to the origins of his songbook.

Notes
1. This project is part of the subproject Corpus digital de textos catalanes medievales: Eiximenis y cancioneros (y III) FFI2011-27844-C03-02, financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. This article has been translated by Henry Berlin.
2. It could also be the case that a copyist was following Mossèn Avinyó's instructions, but this would not affect our argument.