Among the narrative works with lyrical insertions, Renart le Nouvel is among those of most interest to musicologists. It is in fact the longest of the texts in this category to contain notated music. Three of its four manuscript copies' contain the notation for all the French refrains and two of the Latin insertions. Furthermore, in one of the mss, a later hand added refrains noted in the margins: these were copied, as far as the text is concerned at least, from the other testimonies of the work. Since each manuscript does not offer the same refrains in the same places, the whole constitutes a corpus of ninety-five French refrains (including thirteen without music), to which must be added five Latin insertions. -[Author]

Language: French