Reference works disagree as to the number of extant chansonniers: those that give a higher number include fragments and manuscripts that are collections in other languages, but which include some Occitan lyrics. For the fullest list, see Brunel, Bibliographie. The following list draws on Pillet-Carstens, Bibliographie, pp. x–xliv, Riquer, Los trovadores, I, pp. 12–14 and Zufferey, Recherches, pp. 4–6; it does not include fragments, which are usually classified in relation to the chansonniers they are thought to resemble most closely (see Zufferey, Recherches, p. 5 for details).

The sigla with which the chansonniers are conventionally designated were first assigned by the nineteenth-century scholar Karl Bartsch (Grundriss, pp. 27–81). He used the letters of the alphabet to rank the chansonniers in order of merit: thus MSS assigned letters at the beginning of the alphabet in his view constituted good sources for the poems they contain, whereas MSS assigned letters towards the end of the alphabet were deemed inferior or corrupt. But as John Marshall has argued (Transmission), when a MS seems to offer a clean copy of a poem this does not necessarily mean that it preserves what the troubadour composed: it may in fact indicate that a scribe has intervened in order to make his source understandable to a later (often Italian) readership (see Chapters 14 and 15). Bartsch's classification has probably influenced editors unduly, particularly those using a ‘best manuscript’ method of editing (see Chapter 14).

PARCHMENT CHANSONNIERS

Bartsch used upper-case letters for parchment MSS.