Rogue Poetry: Cecco Angiolieri and the TroubadourTradition

Drawing on evidence produced by original manuscriptresearch, performance history, and poetic analysis,this book offers a comparative, inter-vernacularperspective to the century of critical scholarship onCecco Angiolieri's comic sonnets by examining thepoems' interplay of gender and genre in relation toOld Occitan forms of lyric and prose. This bookaddresses questions of poetic mobility among theRomance vernacular languages by tracing specificliterary elements--gendered dialogue, amorous debate,conventions of comic verse, and hemistichdivisions--as they arrive in the Italian canon.Cecco, the first Italian poet to alternate male andfemale voices by hemistich, invented the interlineardialogued sonnet, in which the poet plays his personaoff against his sharp-tongued beloved, Becchina; thisbook shows how this breathless, witty Italian formsynthesizes Occitan mixed-gender tensos, pastorellas,and the biographic vidas of the chansonniermanuscripts. The implications of this work touch uponoral culture, the ventriloquizing of women's voicesin an all-but-exclusively-masculine poetic context,and the permeable boundaries between live performanceand written work.