The thirteenth-century troubadour manuscripts are among the earliest known collections of lyric poetry in a European vernacular and the first in Occitan to treat secular rather than religious works. With their large number and variety of songs, frequent emendations, attention to distinctions of genre and attribution, consciousness of literary history, and comprehensive plans for rubrication, they proclaim their double status as book, rather than mere compendium, and art object, worthy of collection. Prized from the outset, multiple copies were often made from the same source (for example AA′ and the Auvergnat B, or the important series IKK′K″) or sometime later in cheaper editions (such as a, a copy on paper of the Bernart Amoros chansonnier). Both the Italian and slightly later Languedocian codices served as models for the Italian lyric collections of the fourteenth century and as source books for Italian poets, including Dante and Petrarch, and the Occitan anthologist-critic Matfre Ermengaud. Indeed, Occitan poetry and French romances were in demand at the Northern Italian courts throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as badges of aristocratic legitimacy (Krauss, Epica feodale).

There are forty chansonniers extant. The earliest of them (the group dated from 1254 to approximately 1300) were either produced in the workshops of Venice, Padua and Treviso, often by Occitan scribes (AIKDDaHST), or brought to Italy shortly there-after (as in the case of V, and the original from which a was copied). More than 50 per cent of those dating from the fourteenth century were likewise made in Northern Italy. In the wake of Napoleon's grand conquest and the nascent nationalism that followed, Romantic critics undertook the systematic study of these rediscovered treasures.