Authority and Materiality in the Italian Songbook: From the Medieval Lyric to the Early-Modern Madrigal

The essays in this volume arose initially from presentations given at an interdisciplinary conference on Italian songbooks, sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University on May 1–2, 2015. They advance several contemporary scholarly trends, including an increased academic focus on cross-disciplinarity and the current critical imperative to view premodern books not just as transparent representations of an original text, but as complex material and social artifacts in their own right. In recent decades, scholars of medieval literature and music have increasingly rejected as object of study the artificially coherent, corrected text of the modern critical edition in favor of the instability and singularity of individual manuscripts, while scholarship on the printed book has also begun to take the distinctive features of particular editions and exemplars into its interpretive embrace, and the field of book history has emerged as a recognizably hermeneutic discipline.¹ Critical interest has turned to how, starting with the compilation of the great troubadour chansonniers in the mid-thirteenth century, vernacular lyric anthologies were constructed and author-inflected.² Research on medieval and early-modern lyric compilations has paid particular attention to the relations between the macro- and the microtext, or larger works and their component parts, as evidenced by the format and order in which individual songs and poems come down to us, as well as to the way in which manuscripts and prints convey the authority of poets and musicians by constructing the maker as both responsible for and represented in—in a sense, embodied by—the physical objects. This "material turn" involves taking the sources seriously as ontological and aesthetic objects, not merely as means toward an end (the re-creation of a sound-object, which exists primarily in time), but as ends in themselves (as objects in space, the concrete details of which are potentially significant).

Among the earliest surviving codices of vernacular poetry are multiauthored, scribally compiled anthologies of troubadour songs, composed in Old Occitan (or Old Provençal), but mostly assembled in northern Italy.³ The production of troubadour lyrics spanned the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but none of the manuscripts dates from earlier than the mid-thirteenth century, suggesting that before that time the songs would have been transmitted largely by means of performance.⁴ The earliest Italian poetic compilations also date from the thirteenth century, but although the Italians imitated the troubadours in terms of both form and content, Duecento poetry appears to have been a written tradition, largely independent of music, from the very start; there are few indications that the poems were performed musically and no surviving manuscripts with musical notation.⁵

Key figures in the subsequent development of the author-ordered poetry book are the Italian poets Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374). Dante's early "libello" (little book), the Vita nuova, transformed the format of contemporary anthologies by incorporating only his own poetry and intermingling various metrical forms—unlike the scribal anthologies of the previous century, which separated the different forms into distinct sections—and arranging them (at least ostensibly) in the order of their composition, interspersing love-lyrics with narrative and explanatory passages. Petrarch, who spent his formative years residing near Avignon, in what is today the south of France, put together an author-collection of even greater ambition and scope, eliminating the narrative passages between the poems, as well as the presence of other works in the same volume, thus making the book's material confines coincide with its literary contents. His canzoniere (or "songbook")—of which a partially autograph version has come down to us⁶—is a self-contained assemblage of 366 vernacular poems, in which love poetry alternates with political or moralizing poems and poetic exchanges. Petrarch's transcriptional methods and painstaking corrections and revisions exhibit acute concern with the minutiae of the material production of texts, including such details as the physical dimensions and formal layout of the concrete codex.⁷ The high degree of authorial self-consciousness in the arrangement...