Songs that survive inside their own gossip

Claim (verbatim)

The razos - the prose anecdotes explaining what occasion a song answered - are usually read as commentary on the surviving corpus. This conjecture reads them as a transmission channel of their own, and a leaky one that indexes loss as it goes. Razos and vidas quote incipits and whole coblas; the biographer kept the story and quoted only the lines the story needed, so when the songbook chain behind an anecdote broke, the anecdote sometimes floated on alone, still carrying its fragment. The biographical prose of the tradition (a hundred-odd vidas and the razo collections, edited by Boutiere and Schutz) is therefore a loss-index with numbers in it: songs that survive only as quotations embedded in the prose - BEdT records such prose sections of manuscripts as witnesses - and quoted or narrated songs that survive nowhere at all. Bertran de Born, the most razo-encrusted of the troubadours, already shows the mechanism: parts of his transmission lean on the razo-carrying manuscripts rather than on the anthology canon. If the prose was doing salvage work at the margin of the songbooks, then quotation inside an anecdote should fail to resolve to an independently transmitted song at a rate far above zero - each failure being a song the chansonniers dropped and the gossip kept, or half-kept.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: compiling the distinct song-quotations (incipits and embedded verse) across the vida-razo corpus in Boutiere-Schutz, Biographies des troubadours, with its apparatus of identifications, at least one in six will lack any chansonnier transmission independent of the biographical prose itself - either surviving solely inside vida/razo text or matching no PC/BEdT item at all (primary clause: the one-in-six no-independent-transmission rate over distinct quotations; the verdict follows it). Quotation is delimited by a fixed rule - verse of one line or more explicitly set inside the prose - and the test voids if fewer than 30 distinct quotations can be so delimited.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Boutiere-Schutz apparatus of quoted and cited verse joined to BEdT per-song witness lists - count quotations whose only witness class is biographical prose, and quotations matching no catalogued song.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That the biographical prose quotes verse whose chansonnier transmission sometimes fails is visible in Boutiere-Schutz's own apparatus of identifications, and razo-dependent transmission is established for Bertran de Born, the most razo-laden corpus; but no one has computed a no-independent-transmission rate over the full delimited quotation set of the vida-razo corpus, so the one-in-six primary clause is a genuinely un-run count.

• J. Boutiere & A.H. Schutz, Biographies des troubadours: textes provencaux des XIIIe et XIVe siecles, rev. ed. (Paris, 1964)
• W.D. Paden, T. Sankovitch & P. Stablein (eds.), The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born (Berkeley, 1986)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.