TRACING VOICES: SONG AS LITERATURE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ITALY Lauren Lambert Jennings A DISSERTATION in Music Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Supervisor of Dissertation Emma Dillon, Professor of Music and Chair of the Department Graduate Group Chairperson Timothy Rommen, Associate Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies Dissertation Committee Emily Dolan, Assistant Professor of Music Kevin Brownlee, Professor of Romance Languages Fabio Finotti, Mariano DiVito Professor of Italian Studies Tr acing Voices: Song as Literature in Late Medieval Italy © 2012 Lauren Lambert Jennings iii A cknowledgement I owe a deep debt of gratitude to all who have offered me guidance and assistance throughout my graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. First and foremost, this project could never have come to fruition without the support and encouragement of my advisor, Emma Dillon, who took me under her wing the moment I arrived in Philadelphia. Her seminars sparked my interest in the study of manuscripts as material objects and were the starting point for this project. I am especially grateful for the guidance she has offered throughout the dissertation process, reading drafts of the proposal, grant applications, and chapters. Her suggestions and comments have pushed me to clarify my thoughts and to investigate questions I might otherwise have left aside. The rest of my committee deserves recognition and many thanks as well. Emily Dolan has been an invaluable mentor as both a scholar and a teacher throughout my time at Penn. Outside of the music department, I am indebted to Kevin Brownlee for his constant support of my work and for his seminars, which helped to shape the literary side of my dissertation, as well as for his assistance with the translations in Chapter 1. Finally, I thank Fabio Finotti for his willingness to provide a second literary point of view. As a musicologist, I am very grateful to have had two literary scholars on my committee to offer feedback on what ended up as a very literature-centric dissertation. I also wish to express my thanks to the numerous scholars in Italy who helped me in a variety of ways during my two years in Florence. I owe the greatest thanks to Maria Sofia Lannutti and Stefano Zamponi, who have been extraordinarily generous in lending their time and sharing their expertise. I am particularly grateful to Michael Cuthbert as well, who was—fortuitously for me—a fellow at Villa I Tatti during my first year in Florence. iv His willingness to share digital resources and to offer feedback on my research and writing over the past three years has had a major impact on this dissertation. Additionally, I thank Emanuele Senici, Alessio Decaria, Lino Leonardi, Michaelangiola Marchiaro, and Maria Caraci Vela. Correspondence and conversations with several other scholars around the world have impacted this project in a number of ways. In particular, I thank Blake Wilson, Eleonora Beck, Jason Stoessel, John Nádas, and the Portland Medieval Consortium for their thoughtful comments and generous assistance. On a less academic note, my time in Florence would not have been nearly as enjoyable, or nearly as successful, without the friendship of the members of Quodlibet, who welcomed both me and Jeremy into their choir and into their lives. We are eternally grateful to all of them for making Florence feel like home. The direct consultation of primary sources was essential to this project, and my research would not have been possible without the financial support of several institutions. I thank the US-Italy Fulbright Commission for awarding me a grant during the academic year of 2009–2010 and for helping us obtain and renew visas and residence permits even after my period as a grantee was over. My travel to libraries outside of Florence was supported by an E.K. Rand Dissertation Grant from the Medieval Academy of America and by a research grant from the University of Pennsylvania’s Salvatori Fund. I am also grateful to the University of Pennsylvania for financial support throughout my graduate study, in the form of a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship and in the form of multiple small grants to help defray travel costs for research trips and for attending conferences. Just as my research would not have been possible without this financial support, it would also not have been possible without the assistance and cooperation of many libraries, archives, v and librarians around the world. In particular, I thank Richard Griscom and John Pollack at the University of Pennsylvania, Kathryn Bosi at Villa I Tatti’s Morrill Music Library, and the staff at the BibliotecaN azionale Centrale of Florence, the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, the Biblioteca Riccardiana, and the Biblioteca Marucelliana. For their assistance in matters both big and small throughout my graduate career, I thank the staff of the music department, Alfreda Frazier, Maryellen Malek, and Margaret Smith, as well as graduate chair Timothy Rommen. This process would surely have been much less smooth without their hard work. I also feel very fortunate to have been part of such a uniquely collegial group of graduate students in the music department and across Penn campus. I am especially glad to have enjoyed the friendship and camaraderie of Emily Zazulia, Suzanne Bratt, and Alix Davis over the last several years. Finally, I owe my largest debt of gratitude to my family. My parents instilled in me a love of music from a young age, and I am eternally grateful for their unflagging support of my musical and scholastic endeavours, in spite of my refusal to pursue a more sensible field. I am also indebted to them for their help editing many, many papers over the years, and for editing this dissertation. And last but not least, I owe countless thanks to Jeremy, and to Katie Saxon. It was singing with them at the University of Oregon that I first became familiar with the trecento repertoire. In the many years since, Jeremy has had the thankless task of keeping me calm (or at least, trying to) through the stress of graduate study and several moves around the globe. I doubt I would have made it past my first semester of graduate school without his love and support. vi AbACSTR T TRACING VOICES: SONG AS LITERATURE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ItALY Lauren Lambert Jennings Emma Dillon The metaphor of marriage is often used to describe the relationship between poetry and music in both medieval and modern writing. The fuzzy semantic boundaries between these two disciplines, famously characteristic of troubadour song, extend into the realm of Italian poetry through the use of genre names like canzone, sonetto, and ballata. Yet para- doxically, scholars have traditionally identified a “divorce” between music and poetry as the defining feature of early Italian lyric. It is this latter view that has colored scholarly discourse surrounding poems set to music by trecento composers, as has the term “poesia per musica.” Starting with a close examination of this term, investigating its origins and tracing its subsequent development, I argue for the reintegration of poetic and musical traditions in the trecento. My aim is to re-evaluate the role of song in literary manuscripts and the role of poetry in musical manuscripts through a uniquely material approach. This methodology highlights a variety of ways in which trecento scribes and readers interact with song as a fundamentally interdisciplinary genre. In so doing it moves the repertoire’s un-notated sources from the sidelines of musicological discussion to the center. These literary manuscripts freely juxtapose genres in a variety of contexts rather than segregating “musical” poems from “non-musical” ones. Through their physical form, they thus illustrate that their scribes and readers would have vii understood song texts not in isolation and not on purely musical terms but rather in relation to the greater Italian lyric tradition. By challenging the traditional narrative of trecento song, in which “musical” poetry and “non-musical” poetry are held firmly at arm’s length, this dissertation brings to light new audiences and new modes of reception that ask us to reevaluate the role of music in the broader cultural world which surrounds its composition, performance, and manuscript circulation. viii C ontents A cknowledgement iii Abstract vi Contents viii Sources, Sigla, and Abbreviations x List of Tables xiv List of Figures and Examples xv Chapter 1: POESIA PER MUSICA or MUSICA PER POESIA? Reconsidering the Relationship Between Song and Poetry 1 Giosuè Carducci and the Origins of “Poesia per Musica” 7 Poetry for Singing or Poetry for Reading? On The “Divorce” between Word and Music in the Italian Poetic Tradition 13 Where We Are Today: “Poesia per Musica” in Modern Scholarship 19 The Literary Transmission of Trecento Song: An Introduction 31 On the Possibility of Musical Origins 35 Other Methodologies 42 Chapter 2: Song as Literature in Collections of POESIA AULICA 50 The Importance of Having an Author: Song Texts in Single-Poet Cycles 56 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Ashburnham 574: 59 Poetry as Song in Franco Sacchetti’s Libro delle rime 59 Canonizing Song: The Raccolta Aragonese and Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Palatino 204 71 Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana 1100: Niccolò Soldanieri and Song in Pre-Aragonese Anthologies 76 Other Kinds of Scribal Rationale: Genre and Thematic Material 81 Donato da Firenze’s