The relationship of text and music has long been a subject of spirited debate. Examples range from Richard Strauss’s Konversationsstück für Musik, Capriccio (1940–1), via Giambattista Casti and Antonio Salieri’s satirical divertimento teatrale Prima la musica e poi le parole (1786) to the Artusi–Monteverdi controversy of the early 1600s. Such debates about the primacy of one art over the other largely depend on the assumption that composing poetry and music are two mutually independent, autonomous métiers. This has been the mainstream point of view – and indeed the practice – for a long time now, although counter-examples may be found, even in recent times: outside the realm of ‘art’ music, the twentieth-century figure of the singer-songwriter comes to mind, and within it, composers who write their own librettos, most prominently Richard Wagner.

Modern scholars have expended considerable time in trying to identify the earliest moment of the presumptive ‘divorce’ of poetry and music. Scholars of Romance languages tend to situate this emancipatory event somewhere in the fourteenth century. One cause célèbre is Eustache Deschamps’s L’art de dictier (1392).Footnote ¹ For the vernaculars of the Italian peninsula, Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (1305) is often cited as an early witness to poetry and song starting to go their separate ways, as are the Paduan Antonio da Tempo’s Summa artis rithimici vulgaris dictaminis (1332) and the Florentine Franco Sacchetti (1335–1400).Footnote ² It is worth noting that no such discussion seems to have arisen for Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, German or Latin, which prompts the suspicion that the debate might have been fuelled – if not triggered – by the discovery, from the eighteenth century onward, of a number of large sources of complex mensural polyphony setting poetic texts in a way that deceptively resembles contemporaneous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices – notably the Machaut manuscripts and, for the Italian-texted repertory, the well-known group of large-scale retrospective collections including, most spectacularly, the Squarcialupi codex. Upon this intellectual bedrock the early history of musicology was built, as were the narratives of the various vernacular ‘literatures’: both depended on the implied a-musicality of the works of, in the Italian case, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.

Such former certainties have undergone revision in recent years: neither late medieval texts and music notations nor the sources that transmit them are any longer seen as inert and separate objects. Instead, we conceive of them now as multimedia performances linking visual, semantic, material and aural/oral components.Footnote ³ Sources are seen as interacting with their readers or listeners, as well as with other texts and notations, or with spatial and social environments. Transformed into dynamic entities whose potential meanings are myriad, they are now open to a wide range of interpretative possibilities. Unsurprisingly in this context, the separation between text and music, too, is being eroded by dynamic and interactive readings of texts, (reimagined) sounds, notations and images.Footnote ⁴

The survival of song texts without notation in late medieval sources is one aspect of this polyvalent relationship that has suffered from undeserved marginalisation as a result of established disciplinary boundaries. Deprived of their notational ‘vestments’, such sources were considered secondary at best by musicologists, if not ignored altogether. Literary scholars in turn tended to focus their attentions on the large-scale narrative genres, mostly neglecting the small lyrical forms that typically were the objects of (notated) musical settings. Nevertheless, the occasional forays by musicologists into literary territory yielded promising results. As early as the 1990s, Andrew Wathey, for example, revealed the literary life of motet texts associated with Philippe de Vitry among humanist circles,Footnote ⁵ and John Kmetz could show that, in mid-sixteenth-century Basle at least, untexted music sources were by no means necessarily intended for instrumental performance only, nor should unnotated text sources a priori be seen as divested from musical performance.Footnote ⁶

For the Italian peninsula, there has so far not been a comparable study, systematically investigating the transmission of fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century texts associated with polyphony in unnotated manuscripts.Footnote ⁷ Lauren McGuire Jennings’s recent book (a reworked version of her 2012 University of Pennsylvania dissertation) fills this gap, providing a welcome addition to the ongoing debate.Footnote ⁸

Reviewing the existing scholarship in her chapter 1, Jennings lists a number of long-accepted dichotomies in literary scholarship that invite scrutiny and serve as themes for what follows: the conventional opposition between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (‘colto’ and ‘popolare’ or ‘popolareggiante’) culture; the presumptive emergence of strictly separate domains for ‘literature’ and ‘music’ on the peninsula between the late thirteenth and the mid-fifteenth century, and the consequent relegation of notated sources to ‘musicology’ and unnotated ones to ‘literary studies’ among modern scholars.

The chapters that follow are devoted to a series of case studies. Jennings begins with sources dedicated to what scholars of Italian literature have dubbed poesia aulica, i.e. the ‘high style’ of poetry. She focuses on the autograph of Franco Sacchetti’s poems (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ashburnham 574) and their circulation in a variety of miscellanies. Ashburnham 574 dates from the early 1380s, when Sacchetti (c. 1332–1400) undertook a personal edition of his oeuvre that was modelled on Petrarch’s canzoniere, to which he later made a number of additions. For this purpose Sacchetti produced an oversized codex of roughly 30 by 40 cm – designed, by its format alone, to reflect the importance of the materials copied into it while at the same time keeping things affordable for the author-scribe by the choice of paper as the writing material and the modest level of decorations. Jennings shows how Sacchetti kept careful track of those among his poems that were set to music (‘intonata’), all the while integrating them into his pseudo-autobiographic project, suggesting that for Sacchetti there was no deep-seated cleavage between his poetic oeuvre and polyphonic settings of his texts – quite the contrary: the musical settings, understood as an additional, particularly beautiful rendition of the poet’s texts, appear as a source of pride to him, acknowledging and perpetuating his standing among Florentine cultural in-groups.

Petrarch’s canzoniere also provided the primary material for the next source discussed, Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, Parmense 1081. What makes the Parma manuscript of particular interest to Jennings is its ascriptions of poems known to have been written by figures like Sacchetti and Boccaccio to individuals known to us primarily as musicians, notably Niccolò del Preposto. These observations raise the question of the ‘multiple’ identities of musicians writing poetry and poets composing mensural music, casting further doubt on their separate modern, hence anachronistic, identities. The same theme re-emerges in chapter 3, which focuses on Genoa, Biblioteca Universitaria, A.IX.28, a late fifteenth-century miscellany copied by the Benci brothers, sons of a commercially successful Florentine wool merchant (lanaio). The two brothers were part of a movement among mid- to late Quattrocento Florentines to construct a (retrospective) canon celebrating their city’s cultural accomplishments; they did so – remarkably for a volume with the likes of Aristotle’s Ethics in Italian and Plato’s Laws in Latin – by also including four vernacular texts set to music (but probably also written?) by the ‘ciecho delli horgani’, Francesco (Landini). His qualities as a musician, a poet and an intellectual and philosopher appear fused in the Bencis’ perception, and the fact that Francesco’s primary claim to fame lay in his mastery of music as opposed to the other arts certainly proved no hindrance to the brothers to incorporate him in their panoramic display of their home town, Florence, as a cultural epicentre.

Having explored the interstices between poetry and music in the ‘high style’, Jennings turns next to poetic anthologies that mix ‘high’ (‘colto’) and ‘low’ (‘popolare’) registers. Her primary example is Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabechiano VII 1078. The collection’s unusual mise en page, which lacks the conventional hierarchy of capitals and indentations that would allow readers visually to discern the genre and make-up of the poems, suggests to Jennings that the manuscript’s primary function might have been to serve as an aide-memoire for a user (possibly a professional?) who largely relied on his memory when savouring or presenting to an audience the poems preserved in the miscellany. This opens up the question how ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’ interacted in the various cultural environments that existed within a late medieval city like Florence. High (and therefore ‘literate’) and low (hence ‘oral’) styles appear cheek by jowl in this collection, and Jennings deftly points out that the songs in ‘low’ style in Magliabechiano VII 1078 display similar evidence of written transmission as do the texts in the ‘high’ style. Not only do the the boundaries between ‘music’ and ‘literature’ therefore become increasingly blurred, but also the distinctions conventionally made between the antonyms ‘literate/elite/high-brow’ and ‘oral/popular/low-brow’.

The fifth chapter explores Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale II.II.61, a late fourteenth-century collection compiled by Amelio Bonaguisi, a member of a moderately affluent merchant family who nevertheless copied Italian translations of Classical works like Ovid’s Heroides alongside lyrical texts familiar to musicologists from mensural settings. For Jennings, Bonaguisi’s personal anthology reinforces her claims of a much broader diffusion of song texts – and quite possibly their musical settings, too – among Florentines than hitherto allowed for, including social strata not otherwise considered to be part of the elite of Florentine society.Footnote ⁹

Chapter 6 summarises the previous chapters by comparing the transmission pattern typical of the text-only sources – generally low-key personal collections copied on paper – to the well-known de luxe sources of Trecento polyphony like the Squarcialupi codex. Using Francesco (degli Organi)’s three-voice ballata Che pena è quest’al cor, Jennings traces the various versions of the text and the music associated with it through its full array of sources, from plain and unnotated personal copies to exquisitely beautiful parchment codices including mensural notation. She then proposes approaching the poetic and musical sources jointly and no longer differentiating them according to the presence or absence of notation, but on their material qualities. Personal miscellanies such as the text sources introduced by Jennings find their musical analogue in ‘messy’ music sources such as London, British Library, Additional 29987, or casually notated fragments like Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare CV (104). The other extreme of the spectrum is occupied by lavishly illuminated and laid out luxury anthologies combining texts and notation such as the Squarcialupi codex, or the luxurious manuscripts of works deemed canonic like Dante’s Commedia; if the former reflect the day-to-day circulation of poetry and music among enthusiasts and professionals, the latter were produced to build up cultural capital, and to establish their patrons and their communities (in this case, Florence) as paragons of culture within Italy. The generally less lavish nature of the text-only sources in the Italian vernacular, for Jennings, points to a widely disseminated book culture in Florence that was spurred not least by the requirements of a merchant city, where literacy was necessarily much more widely spread than in many other places in Europe at the same time, simply owing to the requirements of trade, which necessitated good record-keeping and hence broad literacy. If this literacy left its cultural traces in comparatively larger numbers of personal literary anthologies, it is surprising to find that the patrons who commissioned luxury anthologies such as the Squarcialupi codex remain obscure. Clearly, the individuals or corporate entities concerned – whoever they were – invested heavily, not least in economic terms, in the constitution and preservation of their cultural heritage, and consciously differentiated, in matters musical, between local repertories with texts in the Tuscan vernacular and the French-texted music simultaneously circulating in Florence as well as elsewhere in Italy. Another relevant conclusion is that the materiality of the sources of polyphony attests to the very high status assigned to mensurally notated and composed music. Clearly, such music required a great deal of skill and professionalism simply to be copied in a competent way, thereby a priori raising the financial and cultural stakes for potential patrons quite considerably if compared to copying a poetic text – a point I myself made in quite a different context when attempting to explain the choice of the humble stroke notation for the complex melodies of the Gruuthuse manuscript from Bruges (anthologised around 1410–20).Footnote ¹⁰ It is gratifying to see Jennings arrive at similar conclusions based on an entirely different chain of reasoning.

In summary, Jennings makes an eloquent case for abandoning the traditional dichotomies that have prevailed among scholars of Italian literature since the days of Carducci. Her book opens up a wealth of new sources to musicologists, certainly in the English-speaking world; the material is well documented by a list of text sources for Trecento songs (Appendix 1), short codicological descriptions of the text-only sources (Appendix 2), and a detailed description of the Bonaguisi source (Appendix 3). As such, her book will be a very helpful springboard for future research.

Jennings’s findings resonate considerably with recent research results concerning other late medieval vernaculars, and while she does occasionally allude specifically to sources such as Machaut E (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France fr. 9221), more could and perhaps should have been made of these transversal lines. Notably the situation in northern France and the Low Countries – similarly prosperous and highly urbanised regions with a hitherto underestimated degree of literacy – invites comparison. As it is, the Italian situation appears as a phenomenon without parallels in Jennings, when in fact very similar phenomena arguably could be observed in other regions of Europe. Having said this, the sheer quantity of material considered by Jennings is large indeed, often forcing her to forgo more detailed readings in favour of the bigger picture even within the thematic limits that she set herself. Nonetheless, some well-placed additional references to the wider European context might have added a sharper edge to Jennings’s findings.

The book is aptly illustrated and generally well edited, notwithstanding occasional lapses such as ‘rerum vulgaria fragmenta’ (p. 8 and even in the index, p. 288) to designate Petrarch’s canzoniere. I was curious whether the term ‘senza vestimenta’ came from one of Jennings’s sources, but if so I could not find any mention of it.Footnote ¹¹