Manuscript songbooks as a very important source have only partly been taken into account in research on church songs and religious folk songs and in the process of folklorization of art songs. This article analyzes the reasons for researchers’ lack of interest of in this topic, and it presents the problems of genre demarcation in manuscript songbooks, which contain both church songs and folk songs. Discussion of the relations between institutional religious and folk elements are complemented by the interplay between written and oral material.Rokopisne pesmarice so pomemben, a premalo upoštevan vir raziskovanja cerkvenih in ljudskih nabožnih pesmi ter procesa ponarodevanja avtorskih pesmi. V članku so analizirani vzroki za nezanimanje raziskovalcev za to področje in predstavljene dileme žanrskega razmejevanja v rokopisnih pesmaricah, v katerih so zapisane tako avtorske cerkvene kot ljudske pesmi. Vprašanja razmerij med institucionalno religioznim in ljudskim dopolnjujejo prepletanja med pisnim in ustnim
