Love Songs of the 15th Century

Folger Consort invites listeners back to the rich fabric of courtly life in 15th-century France and Burgundy, a period and region that extolled the romances between chivalrous knights and noble ladies in paintings and illustrations, poetry and music.

This Valentine’s Day concert draws heavily from the Chansonnier Cordiforme (c. 1470s), a heart-shaped manuscript with the most popular love songs of the 15th century by Guillaume Du Fay, Gilles Binchois, Johannes Ockeghem, Antoine Busnoys, and others. Full of passion and beauty, these secular songs and popular chansons serve as musical counterparts to the elegantly rendered illuminations in contemporary manuscripts.

The concert program features multiple songs sung from a woman’s perspective, including the sole surviving musical setting of a ballad written by poet Christine de Pisan, author of the early feminist utopia The Book of the City of Ladies.