Description:
Senza Vestimenta reintegrates poetic and musical traditions in late medieval Italy through a fresh evaluation of more than 50 literary sources transmitting Trecento song texts. These manuscripts have been long noted by musicologists, but until now they have been used to bolster rather than to debunk the notion that so-called 'poesia per musica' was relegated to the margins of poetic production. Jennings revises this view by exploring how scribes and readers interacted with song as a fundamentally interdisciplinary art form within a broad range of literary settings.
Review Quotes:
'In Senza Vestimenta, Lauren Jennings turns the conventional understanding of medieval "poesia per musica" on its head, revealing that poems recognized by historians only for the music that adorns them in manuscript anthologies like the Squarcialupi Codex also led unsung lives of considerable significance - copied, collected, and contemplated as texts by generations of readers. Armed with formidable codicological expertise, a lively historical imagination, and a firm command of scholarship across a range of disciplines, Jennings constructs a new cultural anthropology of fourteenth-century Italian song and its material traces.'
Michael Long, Indiana University, USA
'Jennings' book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding by showing how trecento song texts, often largely ignored by musicologists, were of literary merit, enjoyed an independent existence as poetry and were appreciated by different levels of society. ... it is a thorough and excellently referenced text, with detailed analysis and well-chosen photographs of some manuscripts not reproduced elsewhere ... I found much to interest me here, and personally enjoyed riding, on the vehicle of Jennings' detailed research, through the vibrant cultural life of late medieval Florence.'
The Consort
'Lauren Jennings is to be congratulated for her excellent and conceptually well-founded study, which gives such solid and material proof of the literary value of the musical poetry of the Trecento. It is the fitting opening volume of the new Ashgate series, 'Music and Material Culture'.
Music and Letters