Senza vestimenta: The Literary Tradition of Trecento Song by Lauren McGuire Jennings (review)

The musical legacy of the Italian Trecento has generated surprisingly few book-length studies beyond inventories, editions, and commentaries on manuscript sources. Although the monograph Senza vestimenta: The Literary Tradition of Trecento Song by the American scholar Lauren Jennings may also be regarded as a kind of inventory and commentary, it is conceptual as well. Jennings explains that the question that motivated her research was the applicability and cogency of the ‘commonly-used modern term poesia per musica (poetry for music)’, which became the hallmark of Trecento musicological studies. ‘By implying that song texts were born as unavoidable by-products of vocal polyphony, rather than as poetry in their own right, these two concepts [also the idea of the so-called “divorce” between music and poetry] have encouraged musicologists to focus more on the music than on the verbal texts and, simultaneously, discouraged the literary scholars from taking “musical” poems seriously as literature’ (pp. 6–7). She thus exchanges the term poesia per musica for ‘song texts’.

Jennings has examined the manuscripts in which the musical poetry of the Trecento is transmitted without musical notation. At present, fifty such codices are known, from the end of the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century, comprising 109 texts that also exist with musical notation. With the addition of twenty-one poems by Franco Sacchetti, labelled as set to music but for which no music survives, the number of song texts in literary manuscripts rises to 130. Owing to the limited digitization of manuscript catalogues and inventories in Italian libraries, the list of the works may well increase in the future (p. 23).

Hitherto, these literary manuscripts with Trecento songs have chiefly been mentioned as concordances and used by scholars to correct texts, for example, Giuseppe Corsi, Poesie musicali del Trecento (Bologna, 1970). Analysing earlier musicological interest in these sources by F. Alberto Gallo (‘The Musical and Literary Tradition of Fourteenth Century Poetry Set to Music’, in Ursula Günther and Ludwig Finscher (eds.), Musik und Text (Kassel, 1984), 55–76) and Gianluca D’Agostino (‘La tradizione letteraria dei testi poetico-musicali del Trecento: Una revisione per dati e problemi. (L’area toscana)’, in Antonio Delfino and Maria Teresa Rosa-Barezzani (eds.), Col dolce suon che da te piove: Studi su Francesco Landini e la musica del suo tempo. In memoria di Nino Pirrotta (Florence, 1999), 389–428), Jennings observes that the authors ‘treat these manuscripts more as musical than literary objects’ and ‘see the unnotated poetic collections as reflections of each poem’s musical circulation rather than as witnesses to an independent literary tradition. … Consequently, scholars have all but ignored the literary context in which these manuscripts place song’ (p. 22).

The importance of the surrounding literary context has led Jennings to scrupulous exploration of these manuscripts from perspectives that are pertinent for modern codicological and palaeographical studies: contents, gatherings, scribal hands, types of paper, ink, scripts, and so on. She divides the manuscripts into several categories according to their appearance, level of performance, contents, and other criteria (from collections designed for sale to those for personal use, such as miscellanies or zibaldoni). In chapters 2–5 she undertakes an analysis of the most interesting and representative examples of each category, supplementing her cogent explanations with numerous tables and charts, and with several reproductions of manuscript pages, which illustrate her story in tangible ways.

Challenging the hitherto accepted opinion that the song texts must have been copied into literary manuscripts from certain notated sources, both existing and lost, Jennings proposes six criteria ‘to evaluate the likelihood that a poetic manuscript stems from notated exemplars’ (p. 37). In fact, it turns out to be ‘extremely rare for a literary manuscript to meet even one of [these] criteria in an undisputable way’ (p. 38). Two representative collections of poesia aulica, that is, high-quality professional poetry, are the focus of chapter 2. The...