Drawing on evidence produced by original manuscript
research, performance history, and poetic analysis,
this book offers a comparative, inter-vernacular
perspective to the century of critical scholarship on
Cecco Angiolieri's comic sonnets by examining the
poems' interplay of gender and genre in relation to
Old Occitan forms of lyric and prose. This book
addresses questions of poetic mobility among the
Romance vernacular languages by tracing specific
literary elements--gendered dialogue, amorous debate,
conventions of comic verse, and hemistich
divisions--as they arrive in the Italian canon.
Cecco, the first Italian poet to alternate male and
female voices by hemistich, invented the interlinear
dialogued sonnet, in which the poet plays his persona
off against his sharp-tongued beloved, Becchina, this
book shows how this breathless, witty Italian form
synthesizes Occitan mixed-gender tensos, pastorellas,
and the biographic vidas of the chansonnier
manuscripts. The implications of this work touch upon
oral culture, the ventriloquizing of women's voices
in an all-but-exclusively-masculine poetic context,
and the permeable boundaries between live performance
and written work.