Seville Chansonnier: Contents Listing

This is a detailed listing of the items contained in the Seville Chansonnier.

Contents

The so-called Seville Chansonnier is an Italian musical manuscript copied around the late 15th-century and acquired in Rome by Ferdinand Columbus in 1515. After Columbus' death, his personal library ended in the chapter of Seville Cathedral (Biblioteca Colombina) in 1552, most part of it remaining there ever since.
In the fall of 1884 a rare-book market took place in Paris with 15th- and 16th-century books which once belonged to the Biblioteca Colombina and, according to Dragan Plamenac, from which stamps and identification marks might have been deliberately erased trying to hide their origin.
In 1885 the Bibliothèque nationale bought a certain number of old books and manuscripts knowing to have formerly belonged to the Biblioteca Colombina. Apparently, the Seville Chapter had renounced at the time the possibility of restitution of these documents. The similar musical fragments of those volumes were bounded and subsequently cataloged by Bibliothèque nationale as Nouv.[elles] acq.[uisitions] fr.[ançaices] 4379 (NAF 4379). 
According to Plamenac, four of those fragments (fols. 1r―42v) were, in fact, rudely torn apart from the original Seville Chansonnier, probably shortly before appearing in the rare-book market in Paris.
Gathering all the evidence that the detached folios now in Bibliothèque nationale complement the missing parts of the collection in Seville (5-1-43), Plamenac has proposed the following virtual reconstruction of the original Seville Chansonnier that has been widely recognized.

See also:

• Plamenac, Dragan. "A Reconstruction of the French Chansonnier in the Biblioteca Colombina, Seville, I-III." In: The Musical Quarterly, Nos.37-38 (1951, 1952), pp.501-542 (I), pp.85-117 (II), pp.245-277 (III).
• DIAMM: GB-Odiamm Virtual Reconstruction of Seville Chansonnier.