Trecento Italy

Abstract

Italian polyphonic music in the fourteenth century has been likened to a ‘dazzling meteor’,¹ suddenly flaming into existence against an obscure background and, its fireworks spent, disappearing just as abruptly. Characterized by an unprecedented union of structural clarity with melodic and rhythmic inventiveness and often spectacular virtuosity, the musical settings of the trecento adorned a new type of text lyric, equally fresh in outlook and technique. Vernacular literature in thirteenth-century Italy, bound to the models of imported traditions for its style and even its language, was still in its infancy. The courts of northern Italy provided a home for the fin-de-siècle Occitanian courtly lyric; the south, also visited by emigré troubadours, witnessed the development of a corpus of Sicilian poetry rooted in the Arabic conventions and language which permeated courtly society in that region.² Aside from the sketchy remnants of the Siculo-Arabic school, most native vernacular literature before the very end of the duecento reflected in its style and content the central concerns of literate Italians of the period: religion, law and government. The composition of sacred vernacular poetry (encouraged especially by the Franciscans), and the occasional production of vernacular translations of civic statutes or notary manuals, may have provided some impetus towards the establishment of a loftier body of vernacular literature, but it took the conscious efforts of the leading figures of the next century (most notably the tre corone: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio) to unite the sound of the mother tongue with the courtly models provided by non-Italian poetry.