The Leuven Chansonnier: A New Source for Mid Fifteenth-Century Franco-Flemish Polyphonic Song

In December 2015 a music manuscript that had been purchased at auction by a private Belgian art-dealer was brought to the Alamire Foundation in Leuven for examination. The manuscript, it turns out, is a previously unknown later fifteenth-century chansonnier, complete and in its original cloth binding. The book is clearly a prestigious personal object for wealthy nobility. It contains forty-nine French songs from the Ockeghem- Busnois generation and one Latin-texted work. Along with concordances for works known from elsewhere, it also contains twelve entirely unknown pieces. The discovery counts as sensational: only a very small number of similar sources survive. The book was considered of such importance that it was acquired by the Koning Boudewijn Stichting and deposited with the Alamire Foundation. This article presents the first scholarly discussion of the source and its contents.