«En attendant» «Soufrir m’estuet» «Sus la fontayne» from Pavia to Florence and Rome

The poetic texts of the Ars Nova repertoire are mainly transmitted in musical manuscripts, whose primary purpose is the preservation of music. For this reason, those texts are particularly subject to innovations and errors that compromise their metrical structure and linguistic and conceptual coherence, making it difficult in many cases to accurately and completely identify the quotations and allusions they contain and to formulate well-founded hypotheses on the motivations that led the authors to use them. At the same time, intertextual relations can make a decisive contribution both to philological work – in particular to the choice of variants and the correction of corrupt passages – and to the literal and symbolic interpretation of texts. This essay aims to highlight the importance of intertextuality in the fundamental interactions between philology and interpretation through three case studies: the ballata Sofrir m’estuet et plus non puis durer set to music by Paolo da Firenze; the ballade En attendant, souffrir m’estuet, set to music by Filippotto da Caserta; and the virelai Sus la fontaine, en remirant, set to music by Johannes Ciconia. The analysis also reveals that the three texts are examples of a very complex and refined allusive art that is functioned as political propaganda in Italian territories during the years that followed Boniface IX’s election (1389).