‘Canciones y villancicos, para cantar y tañer’ (RM 1066): pliego suelto e historia poética en el Renacimiento

TL;DR

Vicenç Beltran reconstructs the textual and bibliographic history of the chapbook (pliego suelto) RM 1066, "Canciones y villancicos, para cantar y tañer," a late-sixteenth-century songbook of lyrics for singing and playing. Through systematic collation of all surviving testimonies, he argues the pliego preserves unusually faithful texts of poems by Encina, Urrea and others, and proposes that such cancionerillos are an underused vector for the poetic history of the Spanish Renaissance.

Key findings

• The text of "Romerico tú que vienes" with its gloss shows "una fijeza y una seguridad textual que excluyen de entrada la hipótesis de una transmisión oral" over roughly a century, despite its musical character and mixed manuscript/print transmission; only LB1's third stanza departs from this stability.
• Surprisingly, pliego 1066 — the latest witness (ca. 1560-1575) — is the most faithful to the oldest manuscript models (MP4, LB1) and shows the greatest literary awareness (e.g. reading "nueuas de mi amiga" in v. 4, and the correct "despues de mi partida" in v. 8).
• The Encina villancico "Ningún cobro ni remedio" appears in 1066 and 775 in a version remodeled into Dido's complaints with a five-line reply by Aeneas; 1066 cannot derive directly from 775 because it avoids several of 775's errors (vv. 19-22), implying a lost common antigraph.
• "Pásesme por Dios barquero" appears in pliegos 677.5, 678, 882, 883 and 1066; the printed gloss (12 stanzas) is a longer, more courtly and abstract development of the shorter musical gloss in the Cancionero musical de Palacio.
• Two poems, "Cómo te va en amores" and "En los tus amores," are known only from 1066; the paper attributes them to the anonymous compiler only by convention, and Beltran says he personally considers this "algo arriesgado."

Methods

• Textual criticism: full collation (colación) of all testimonies of each poem across pliegos sueltos, manuscript cancioneros and musical cancioneros (Palacio, Segovia, Elvas, Lisboa), following the method of weighing repeated small variants theorized by Segre (1961) and applied by Beltran (1991).
• Bibliographic analysis of pliego editions, printers and dates (e.g. 678, Juan de Junta, 1540-1543; 775, 1550 or slightly later; 882, ca. 1560-1565; 883, 1564?; 1066, ca. 1560-1575; pliego 63, Granada, Hugo de Mena, 1570), drawing on Rodríguez-Moñino's Nuevo diccionario and Fernández Valladares.
• Comparative reading of the poems against their sources: Encina's Cancionero (1496), Urrea's Cancionero (1513, 1516), and the Flor de enamorados (1562).

Limitations

• The paper states that the source of most poems is not identifiable except in the case of Timoneda and his circle, and that the loss of the central bifolio of pliego 775 leaves only two and part of a third poem collatable, preventing a clear dependency link.
• On the authorship of the two poems unique to 1066, Beltran explicitly prefers "pronunciarme con la máxima reserva," and on the relation between 1066 and the Flor de enamorados debate he concludes it is "lo más prudente... dejar el problema en suspenso a la espera de más datos."
• Evident from the text: the argument repeatedly rests on lost or mutilated witnesses (677.5 lost, 775 mutilated, a hypothetical lost Valencian 1556 edition of Flor de enamorados), and the dating of several pliegos is approximate, which weakens claims of priority among testimonies.