REFRAIN

Link

refrain.ac.uk

Status

active

How they describe themselves

database

Blurb

The long thirteenth century was characterised by a vernacular musico-poetic culture in which short fragments of text and/or music circulated within and between songs of various types (chanson à refrain, chanson avec des refrains, rondeau), the motet repertory, the romance and a host of other types that impinged on music, literature or both. Controlling the repertory can be time-consuming and problematic: assembling the material to examine even a single family of refrains can involve the identification, location and manipulation of large amounts of material.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars of French literature have been identifying refrains in the single text on which they were working, but it was not until 1964 that Friedrich Gennrich published the first attempt at a catalogue, an experiment that was amplified in 1969 by Nico H. J. van den Boogaard. Both these works were catalogues, and van den Boogaard’s was also an edition of the texts of the refrains. Music was not mentioned in the catalogue and not edited. Both these shortcomings were rectified in Anne Ibos-Augé's dissertation, ‘La fonction des insertions lyriques dans des œuvres narratives et didactiques aux xiiième et xivème siècles’.

REFRAIN seeks to integrate these pre-existing work on the refrain into a single, searchable, database and to bring the data up to date. It indexes not only the location of the refrain in its song, motet, romance or other context but delivers the exact manuscript reading for every occurrence of every refrain in every manuscript source.

Creator(s)

Anne Ibos-Augé, Mark Everist, and Adam Field

Steward(s)

University of Southampton, Université de Tours, Université de Poitiers