La forma poetico-musicale del motet enté secondo le fonti medievali (fine del XIII-inizio del XIV secolo)

A rubric in the French chansonnier N (Paris, BnF, fr. 845) assigns a brief section of the codex to the «motets entés». Based on the collected specimens, the motet enté may be described as a monostrophic musical- poetic composition devoid of a clearly-structured metrical and melodic pattern, thus similar to a single voice of a polyphonic motet. The adjective enté refers to another specific feature of this monophonic motet: «grafted» onto a refrain, it appears to be a sort of stuffing – and often also a gloss – to the refrain itself. Although dozens of akin compositions are preserved in a few other songbooks, with or without musical notation, the motet enté has been so far considered only by musicologists, who have tried to determine its melodic structure and questioned its possible relationship with polyphony, while philologists have almost completely ignored it. This paper aims to provide an accurate description of this form and a first delimitation of the corpus, based on the medieval sources at disposal and taking into account textual as well as musical aspects. This is intended to be the first step towards a critical edition and thorough study of the monophonic motet repertoire.