Cancioneiro da Vaticana

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Cancioneiro da Vaticana, or Vatican Songbook, is a medieval collection of Galician-Portuguese troubadour lyrics. It was discovered around 1840 in the Vatican Library and first edited in 1847 by D. Caetano Lopes de Moura, with a later edition by Ernesto Monaci in 1875. The book contains 228 folios and 1,205 lyrics dating from the 13th and 14th centuries. Most poems belong to the three main secular genres: cantigas de amigo (songs to a friend), cantigas de amor (love songs), and cantigas de escárnio e maldizer (mocking or insulting songs). The texts were meant to be sung, but there is no musical notation or space for it. The Cancioneiro da Vaticana, together with the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon, was copied around 1525 in Rome from an earlier manuscript at the request of the Italian humanist Angelo Colocci. The two songbooks are closely related, possibly sister manuscripts.