Italian literature: Encyclopedia II - Italian literature - Origins

Italian literature - Origins

At the end of the 5th century, when the western Roman empire waned, Latin tradition was kept alive by writers such as Cassiodorus, Boetius, Symmachus. A new kingdom arose at Ravenna under Theodoric. The liberal arts flourished, the Gothic kings surrounded themselves with masters of rhetoric and of grammar. There remained in Italy some lay schools, and some extraordinary scholars, such as Magnus Felix Ennodius, a poet more pagan than Christian, Arator, Venantius Fortunatus, Venantius Jovannicius, Felix the grammarian, Peter of Pisa, Paulinus of Aquileia and many others.

The Italians who were interested in theology gravitated towards Paris. Those who remained tended to be attracted by the study of Roman law. This furthered the later establishment of the medieval universities of Bologna, Padua, Vicenza, Naples, Salerno, Modena and Parma; which, in turn, helped to spread culture, and to prepare the ground in which the new vernacular literature would develop. The tenacity of classical traditions, the affection for the memories of Rome, the preoccupation with political interests, particularly shown in the wars of the Lombard communes against the empire of the Hohenstaufens, and a spirit more naturally inclined to practice than to theory combined to influence the development of Italian literature.

Unlike other countries, Italy lacked legends, tales, epic poems, and satires. The Historia de excidio Trojae, which purported to have been written by a certain Dares the Phrygian, an eye-witness of the Trojan war, provided inspiration for writers in other countries, such as Benoit de Sainte-More, Herbort of Fritzlar and Conrad of Wurzburg. Whilst Benoit de Sainte-More wrote his poem in French, taking his material from a Latin history, and the two German writers, from a French source, made an almost original work in their own language, Guido delle Colonne of Messina, one of the vernacular poets of the Sicilian school, composed the Historia destructionis Trojae. Guido was an imitator of the Provençals; he understood French, and yet wrote his own book in Latin, changing the romance of the Troubadour into serious history.

Much the same thing occurred with other great legends. The life of Alexander the Great gave rise, in Italy, only to the Latin distichs of Qualichino of Arezzo. Europe was full of the legend of King Arthur, but the Italians contented themselves with translating and abridging the French romances. Even religious legend only put out a few roots in Italy. Jacobus de Voragine, while collecting his lives of the saints, remained only an historian, a man of learning, almost a critic who seemed doubtful about the things he related. The intellectual life of Italy showed itself in an altogether special, positive, almost scientific, form, in the study of Roman law, in the chronicles of Farfa, Marsicano and many others, in translations from Aristotle, in the precepts of the school of Salerno, in the travels of Marco Polo, and in a long series of facts which seem to detach themselves from the surroundings of the middle ages, and to be linked both with classical Rome and with the Renaissance.

The Latin language was tenacious in Italy, and the elaboration of the Italian language was very slow, being preceded by two periods of Italian literature in foreign and French languages. There were many Italians who wrote Provençal poems, such as the Marchese Twy Alberto Malaspina (12th century), Maestro Ferrari Ferrara, Cigala of Genoa, Zorzi of Venice, Sordello of Mantua, Buvarello of Bologna, Nicoletto of Turin and others, who sang of love and of war, who haunted the courts, or lived in the midst of the people, accustoming them to new sounds and new harmonies.

At the same time there was poetry of an epic kind, written in a mixed language, of which French was the basis, but in which forms and words belonging to the Italian dialects were continually mingling. We find in it hybrid words exhibiting a treatment of sounds according to the rules of both languages, French words with Italian terminations, a system of vocalization within the words approaching the Italo-Latin usage,in short, something belonging at once to both tongues, as it were an attempt at interpenetration, at fusion. Such were the chansons de geste, Macaire, the Entre en Espagne written by Niccola of Padua, the Prise de Pampelune and some others. All this preceded the appearance of a purely Italian literature.

The French language gradually gave way to the native Italian. Hybridism recurred, but it no longer predominated. In the Bovo d'Antona and the Rainardo e Lesengrino the Venetian dialect makes itself clearly felt, although the language is influenced by French forms. Thus these writings, which G. I. Ascoli has called miste (mixed), immediately preceded the appearance of purely Italian works.

There is evidence that a kind of literature already existed before the 13th century: The Ritmo cassinese, Ritmo su Sant'Alessio, Laudes creaturarum, Ritmo Lucchese, Ritmo laurenziano, Ritmo bellunese are classified by Segre et al. as "Archaic Works" (Componimenti Arcaici): "such are labeled the first literary works in the Italian vernacular, their dates ranging from the last decades of the 12th century to the early decades of the 13th" (Segre: 1997). However, as he points out, such early literature does not yet present any uniform stylistic or linguistic traits. This early development, however, was simultaneous in the whole peninsula, only there was a difference in the subject-matter of the art. In the north, the poems of Giacomino of Verona and Bonvecino of Riva were specially religious, and were intended to be recited to the people. They were written in a dialect partaking of the Milanese and the Venetian; and in their style they strongly bore the mark of the influence of French narrative poetry. They may be considered as belonging to the popular kind of poetry, taking the word, however, in a broad sense. Perhaps this sort of composition was encouraged by the old custom in the north of Italy of listening in the piazzas and on the highways to the songs of the jongleurs. To the very same crowds who had been delighted with the stories of romances and who had listened to the story of the wickedness of Macaire and the misfortunes of Blanziflor, another jongleur would sing of the terrors of the Babilonia Infernale and the blessedness of the Gerusalemme cclese, and the singers of religious poetry vied with those of the Chansons de Geste.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Origins", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki