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H. B. Cotterill
Medieval Italy

CHAPTER IV
ORIGINS OF ITALIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE TO ABOUT 1300

1. LANGUAGE

Some have believed in a 'primitive Romance language' formed by the combination of a fairly pure Latin with Gothic and Lombard and spoken 'by all peoples who were subject to Charlemagne throughout the south of Europe' (Raynouard). About the eleventh century this widespread primitive Romance, it is said, broke up, and the seven Romance languages originated by a natural process of differentiation. Further research has however shown that in Western and southern Europe, and especially in Italy, the Northern invaders soon adopted the Latin forms both of thought and of speech that were prevalent throughout the Empire and ere very long gave up entirely their native tongue, which left but few traces.1

Now of Latin there were two distinct and ever more divergent varieties, namely the literary language and the conversational. The vigorous, conversational 'Roman' — that sermo usualis, rusticus, or castrensis, early evidences of which are supplied by the classical comic writers, and of which later many dialects existed in the provinces as well as in Italy itself — separated itself in course of time wholly from the old dead or dying language — the literary, official, and ecclesiastical Latin — that Latin which was still used in its silver-age purity by Claudian, Boëthius, Cassiodorus, and a few other medieval writers, but which in documents, chronicles, hymns, letters, treatises, epitaphs, etc., of the ninth and tenth centuries we find to have become very degenerate.

It was, however, a long time before this lingua popularis became the sole spoken language. The degenerate classical Latin held its place for centuries — perhaps down to the twelfth or thirteenth century — side by side with the volgare, and was evidently 'understanded by the people.' This is proved by numbers of songs which were evidently meant for popular recital. Some of these songs are in quite correct Latin;2 others contain a very considerable amount of very bad grammar, as exemplified in the following lines — the beginning of a soldiers' song, composed about 871, when the Emperor Louis II was taken prisoner (see p. 316 n.) by the Lombard duke of Benevento:

On other occasions we have a queer medley of Latin and genuine Italian words and constructions, as in a letter3 of Pope John XII (c. 963) — who, by the way, is said to have used nothing but the popular Roman in conversation.

Thus, side by side with degraded literary Latin but entirely distinct from it, was the popular volgare. This in time not only became the ordinary conversational language but also began to be used for ballads and love-songs (ladies, as Dante reminds us, often not understanding Latin), and ultimately was adopted by the writers of the new school of poetry and was raised by Dante to the rank of a great literary language.

Proofs of the early existence of this primitive Italian are rare, for in its first stages it was but rarely, if ever, written, and was not used in public inscriptions. The very first written specimens are said to be some testimonies of witnesses inserted in Latin legal documents of about the year 960, found at Capua and Teano. Of the same date is the recorded excuse of a learned Italian, Gonzon, who, when on a visit to the great monastery at St. Gallen, was ridiculed for committing a grammatical blunder: 'I allow,' he answered, 'that I am sometimes impeded by the use of our vulgar tongue, which is related to Latin.' Finally we find in old chronicles, from the ninth century onward, many genuinely Italian words and names, such as guerra, rocca, favellare, cambiare, Capo-in‑sacco, Rubacastello, Ubbriachi, Frangipani, Viva-che‑vince, etc., and by the twelfth century expressions such as Papa vittore! San Pietro l'elegge! and the popular cry of the Milanese at the election of an archbishop, Ecco la stola!

The tendency of a synthetic language towards decomposition induced conversational 'Roman'4 to discard terminations, or to ignore their force and meaning, and therefore necessarily to adopt prepositions, auxiliary verbs, articles, and a more invariable arrangement of the sentence. Even in the Catacombs we find many examples of this, such as salbo (salvus), unu (unus), locu (locus), homine (hominem), quae cum eum bene vixit, de via noba (viae novae), and later we constantly come upon such jargon as feminas qui natas fuerint, or occisus factum est. At length all attempt to use case-endings ceased, an invariable form (generally the accusative docked of its final consonant) was adopted for the singular, the prepositions supplied the place of cases, and auxiliaries helped to form tenses.5

In this connexion it will be interesting to hear what Dante thought about his mother language at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In his Latin treatise De Vulgari Eloquio he first indulges his imagination about the perfect speech of angels and of Adam. Then he laments the imperfections of all post-Babel languages, and gives their various groups. Of the Romance languages (quae oc aut oil aut sí affirmando loquuntur) he selects the Italian as the more venerable and noble.6 But what, he asks, is Italian? Where shall we find an idioma illustre, cardinale, aulicum, fit for national literature? In order to discover this he examines the chief Italian dialects and lashes the ugly vulgarisms and the barbarous pronunciation of most of them, stigmatizing the Roman as the basest of all.7 For three dialects he has a good word to say, and it is for us especially interesting that these are thirteenth-century Tuscan, Sicilian, and Bolognese, for they are the three forms of early Italian which will occupy most of our attention in the following section. From the various forms of Tuscan (Pisan, Sienese, Florentine, etc.) he gives examples of ugly words and expressions, but says that the capabilities of this vigorous volgare have been recognized and put to a good use by certain writers, among whom he mentions Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino of Pistoia, and 'one other' — evidently meaning himself.

Of the Sicilians and Apulians he says — what we shall find to agree with modern theories — that while the common people spoke a base and barbarous jargon (turpiter barbarizant) the poets used a more than usually refined and courtly language (curialiora verba) so that it had come about that all poetry written by Italians was called Sicilian (ut quicquid poetantur Itali Sicilianum vocetur).

The dialect of Bologna Dante calls 'perhaps the best,' and at this we need not wonder, for, as we shall see, there were already poets of the Bolognese school, one of whom (Guido Guinicelli) Dante calls 'the father of myself and my betters.'

His final conclusion is that, 'as noble actions belong to Italy as a nation, so must the language be found in, and formed from, the whole of Italy.' It is, however, curious that probably among no other European people has the literary language been formed less from the whole country and so exclusively from the ordinary speech of one single district — indeed, one might almost say, from one single city.

II THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN LANGUAGE

This is a subject on which to write a long treatise, wherein one might (as Dante says) squeeze out more fully the juice of one's opinions, would be a comparatively easy task. But to try to put is all in a nutshell, so to speak, is a difficult and thankless undertaking.

Dante's great poem has already illuminated for us many a dull passage; but the influence of the Divina Commedia first began to work strongly after the epoch at which this volume ends, and it will be better to defer the great subject till we can examine it as a whole. Here I shall only attempt to trace from their diverse sources some of the rivulets which, like the mountain-rills that form the river of Tuscany —

gathered their waters together to form the fair, broad river of Tuscan and Italian literature.

We have already heard how Italian arose and gradually established itself in the place of Latin as the spoken language. We have now to hear how this vulgar tongue became the literary language of Italy. In order to put this briefly and distinctly I shall give a few significant facts under the following heads:1 Native Italian literature;2 The Provençal school;3 The Sicilian poets;4 Their influence in North Italy;5 IL dolce stil nuovo.

 

(1) Although, as we shall see, the Provençal, and perhaps also the Sicilian, school of poetry influenced considerably the external form of early Italian poetry, the living power that vitalized this poetry, as well as the vigorous outgrowth of Italian prose, was drawn not from the amorous ditties of Troubadours and courtiers, but from native stock. Evidences of the existence of this native stock have become in the course of centuries difficult to discover, but there are some relics, and one of these, a Hymn of Praise by St. Francis, somewhat resembling the Benedicite, must excite both admiration and wonder. Indeed, so wonderful does it seem that this so‑called Cantico del Sole should have been composed sixty years before Dante's Vita Nuova that some sceptical persons have declared that it must have been entirely rewritten in later times, if not translated (as were the Fioretti of St. Francis) from a Latin original.

This, however, is a baseless assumption unless we found it on the fact that, as often occurs when a composition is widely used for recitation, there are several slightly different versions. And even if the language has been modernized, it seems indubitable that a fine poem was written in Italian volgare in the year 1224.

The following extracts will show that this song uses a language which differs from that of Dante no more than Chaucer's differs from Shakespeare's:

Thanks are given for many other gifts, such as 'sister water,'

and 'brother fire,' who is so jocundo e robusto e forte.

Very numerous 'praises' (laude or lodi) of like character and similar language, but with scarce a trace of poetry, were initiated by this Song of St. Francis and were carried through the whole of Italy by his disciples as well as by other wandering preachers; and the hysterical Flagellant movement of 1258 (see p. 509) called into existence thousands more. Some of the oldest and best of the many laude which have survived in Umbrian and Tuscan manuscripts, and which, like the hymns of certain modern religious bodies, often consist of a strange medley of banalité, pathos, and sublimity, are attributed to Jacopone of Todi, who by some is believed to have been the author of the Stabat Mater. His experience is worth relating.

In 1278 he was converted from a careless life by the death of his wife, who was killed by the fall of a tribune at a festival and was found to be robed in sackcloth worn beneath her festal finery. He forthwith gave up all his wealth and courted destitution and despite, assuming the guise of an idiot, and when refused admission into the Franciscan Order he explained the motives of his pazzia in a strangely beautiful 'mystic song,' which begins thus;

and he goes on to say, in language wondrously modern, that he has given up Plato and Aristotle, for the simple-minded can reach heaven without philosophy:

After admission as Franciscan he took zealous action as reformer. He wrote hotly on this subject to Celestine (that hermit-Pope who 'made the great refusal'), and naturally came into violent collision with Boniface VIII, whom he lampooned and by whom he was imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon for four years.

Another striking evidence of the existence of native Italian verse before the Vita Nuovo is the Tesoretto, an allegorical Vision in 2940 jingling verses, not unlike the Vision of Piers Plowman, by Ser Brunetto Latini, for whom Dante, his pupil, had evidently considerable respect and affection, although on account of certain failings he felt obliged to doom him to the fiery plain of the Inferno. The Tesoretto was written, according to Boccaccio, before 1260. In this year Brunetto seems to have been forced by the Guelf defeat at Montaperti to take refuge in Paris, where he wrote a more pretentious work, Le Trésor, in the French language.

But it was not only verse that was written in the early Italian volgare. Many translations were made from French and from Latin — versions of Northern and classical legends. Aesop's Fables were volgarizzate. Brunetto's Trésor was translated. Moreover chronicles, moral treatises, etc., began to appear in the vulgar tongue, and what were probably the first Italian romances now (c. 1260‑90) saw the light. Of these the Conti d'antichi cavalieri and the Cento Novelle, which seem to preherald Boccaccio's Decameron, are the most notable. By the time that Dante was nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Italian translations and histories were becoming fairly plentiful. As may be remembered, Giovanni Villani conceived the design of his great work when he was at Rome during the Jubilee of 1300.

(2) In the case of genius — such genius as that of Homer, or Shakespeare, or Dante — although it is interesting to note the effect of external influences on external form, it is of course for the most part profitless to attempt the discovery of 'sources'. Dante's sublimity of imagination, his 'love of love and hate of hate,' his tenderness and fierceness, were all his own; but some of his rugged forms were doubtless due to the native ore on which he put his mighty stamp, while some of the gracious beauty of his 'sweet new style' was, we may feel sure, borrowed from Provençal and Sicilian song, which he inspired with a nobility and dignity that will be sought in vain in the often rather abject ditties of French Troubadours or the Canzoni and sonnets of Sicilian court poets.

Any long digression into the realm of the Troubadours and Trouvères of France — a realm, be it noted, much older than that of early Italian literature — is here uncalled for. It will suffice to note that the cult of Dieu et ma dame with its amorous ecstasies of la Joie, that produced such choirs of knightly and princely bards, was first awakened by the Oriental Crusades, while on the other hand Provençal song was almost entirely silenced by the hideous atrocities of the Crusade against the Albigenses.8 Even before this catastrophe (1210) Provençal bards had found their way to North Italy,9 but now they seem to have come in great numbers, and, as was natural, sang more of war and revenge than of chivalry, indulging in satirical and political Sirventes more than in love-lorn ballads; and similar vigorous strains, both in the Provençal tongue and in volgare, were taken up by Italian singers, who were inspired by their own wars and feuds. Among these early Italian-Provençal bards was Sordello, who has been immortalized by Dante's verse (shall we add Browning's?) rather than by his own.10

(3) But we must also consider another school of poets which doubtless influenced (how much or how little it is very difficult to say) the early singers of North Italy. Provençal bards, as we have seen, had already been introduced by Frederick Barbarossa into the imperial and princely courts of Italy, so that it was but natural that Barbarossa's grandson, Frederick II, that 'Wonder of the World' who patronized all kinds of learning and art and was addicted to Oriental voluptuousness and amorous dalliance, should encourage

Provençal songsters at his Sicilian court. Indeed, Frederick himself tried his hand at Canzoni, and so did his unfortunate son Enzio, and his unfortunate secretary, Piero delle Vigne, and his chancellor, the Notary Lentini.11

These Sicilian Troubadours made no use of that Sicilian dialect which Dante calls a base and barbarous jargon, nor were they influenced in the least by the Arabian tendencies of Frederick's court. They adopted a conventional 'poetic' language, in which Provençalisms and Latinisms were mingled with a king of refined Italian volgare. This literary language of the Sicilian court (lingua cortegiana) has an amazingly close resemblance to the language used by early Tuscan poets and it is a most interesting and puzzling question how we are to account for this resemblance. As the Sicilian school12 died out with the Hohenstaufen dynasty, is it possible that these Sicilian Canzoni and sonnets were originally in a mixture of Sicilian and Provençal and were Tuscanized in order to be introduced into Northern Italy?13 Or were Tuscan writers invited to Frederick's court, and did they bring with them their Tuscan poetical dialect? Or did the early Tuscan poets accept this Sicilian poetry as their model and adopt this Sicilian lingua cortegiana as their language, and was therefore Sicily the native home of that dolce stil nuove and that lingua Toscana which are the glory of early Italian literature? If the last supposition is right, then Italy owes her greatest literature to the semi-Oriental Sicilian court of a German Emperor — a fact that would be still more startling than the Apulian origin of the great Tuscan school of sculpture.

(4) However that may be, it seems certain that the Sicilian school did to some extent affect North Italy. We have already seen how in this part of Italy there existed from early days a vigorous native literature, and how the advent of Provençal bards occasioned a great deal of imitative Provençal poetry and also influenced the writers of Italian prose and verse. We now, about 1260 — that is, ten years after the death of Frederick II and not long before the death of Manfred and the overthrow of the Hohenstaufen dynasty by Charles of Anjou — find Tuscan poets who are professedly followers of the Sicilian school.

Of these poets one of the first was Guittone of Arezzo, a member of the Order of Frati Godenti (Jovial Friars). In later years he abandoned the erotic Sicilian mode and took up more serious subjects. His disciple, Guido Guincelli of Bologna, also wrote at first in the Sicilian style, but afterwards affected poetry of a mystic and symbolic character with a tendency towards Platonic idealism and intellectual profundity. It was doubtless his later poetry which caused Dante to call him, when he met him in Purgatory, 'the father of me and of my betters who have ever practised the sweet and gracious rimes of love.'

(5) But a new race of poets was now to arise. This Provençal and Sicilian verse, though it showed some vigour in its satirical and political Sirventes, and though its form and its music were often exquisite, was on the whole very empty and wearisome, and its attitude towards woman was almost contemptible. In the healthier atmosphere of North Italy 'chivalrous love,' as Symonds says, 'was treated in a more masculine way and with far more intellectual depth of meaning.' In order to realize this fully one has only to read a few ditties of these Provençal or Sicilian rimesters, or a few effusions of some of their Italian imitators, and then turn to the sonnets and Canzoni of Dante's Vita Nuova.

The younger Italian poets, who had begun to cast off the trammels of a false style, poured much contempt on the old-fashioned imitators of the Sicilian mode. Here are some verses, possibly by Davanzati, a follower of Guittone's later style, addressed to some plagiarist of this genus, whom he accuses of decking himself out in the gay feathers of the Notary Giacomo da Lentini, Frederick's chancellor:

Nor did the older verse-writers fail to respond — as we see from the contemptuous reception by some of his contemporaries of Dante's first sonnet.

It was round Dante that the younger poets grouped themselves. Among these we should note14 especially Guido Cavalcanti and that Lapo Gianni who is mentioned in Dante's early sonnet beginning with the words:

Guido Cavalcanti is well known to all who have read the Inferno, for there is no more pathetic episode in that poem than where Dante meets in hell the father of his great friend; and this friend was also doubtless that Guido who in another well-known passage is said by Dante15 to have 'taken from the other Guido [Guincelli] the glory of the Italian tongue':

'And perhaps,' adds Dante, with a consciousness of his own supreme power, 'he is already born who shall chase both the one and the other from his nest':

A touching confession of this supremacy (not the less touching because put into the speaker's mouth by Dante himself) is given by a poet of Lucca called Buonagiunta, whom Dante meets in Purgatory. This Buonagiunta, a writer of the earlier school, speaks with admiration and wonder of one of Dante's Canzoni, and when Dante thus explains the new inspiration:

he answers:

The explanation of the mystery which Dante offers is that his poetry is dictated by love. A like answer might perhaps have been given by any Provençal singer. But how totally different is Dante's conception of love from that of Troubadours and Sicilian rimester, or even from that of Petrarca himself! This difference is intimated by the last words of his Via Nuova, which tells us of his determination to write of his Lady Beatrice 'that which hath never yet been sung by any man.' And the record of his great sorrow is closed by the prayer that his spirit 'might go hence to behold the glory of its Lady who gloriously gazeth on the face of Him who is through all ages blessed.'

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The Author's Notes:

1 This seems true of the Goths, Vandals, and Franks, the relics of whose languages in Italy, Spain, and France are very inconspicuous. On the other hand, the Angles and Saxons imposed their language on Britain — till the coming of the Norman. By the way, the Normans themselves lost their original language (Danish) and adopted the Frankish Romance with wonderful rapidity. See p. 400 n.

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2 E.g.:

sung (c. 924) by soldiers guarding Modena against the Hungarians.

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3 Nos audivimus dicere quia vos vultis alium papam facere. Si hoc facitis excommunico vos da deum omnipotentem. It may be remembered that at the very Council which deposed John XII the Saxon speech of the Emperor Otto I was translated by Bishop Liutprand into Latin for the benefit of the audience (p. 336 n.).

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4 This tendency is perceptible also in old Latin inscriptions, and in antique forms preserved by Livy, Ennius, Lucretius, and others.

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5 Note the use of avere and avoir in servir-a and servir-ai (also Spanish comeré = hé de comer).

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6 In the Convito he calls Latin nobler than Italian as being 'more fixed and incorruptible,' but elsewhere he speaks of a living language as nobler than a dead.

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7 He calls it a tristiloquium. Of the Sardinians he contemptuously remarks that they imitate grammatical Latin like apes.

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8 It seems strange that the last of the real Provençal Troubadours was apparently the notorious Folquet, who became Bishop of Toulouse and abetted Simon de Montfort in his extirpation of the Albigenses.

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9 Frederick Barbarossa may have first introduced them. We hear of such French court-bards in Italy down to about 1360.

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10 None who have read it can ever forget Dante's description of Sordello, guardando a guisa di leon, quando si posa — nor much else in the three cantos filled by his personality. Some doubt whether Dante's Sordello was the Troubadour or the Podestà of Mantua. Perhaps he was both.

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11 Frederick II is credited with at least two extant Canzoni (De la mia dezianza . . . and Dolze mio drudo . . .), Enzio with a couple, Piero delle Vigne with about eight and a sonnet (Però ch' Amore non si può vedere).

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12 As Frederick held court much in Apulia these bards doubtless flourished also there, and there is a good deal of Apulian verse extant, but of uncertain date.

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13 Sometimes the rimes in the extant version of Sicilian poetry are imperfect unless the words are restored to the Sicilian dialect. A strophe by Enzio exists in pure Sicilian, though his other poems are quite Tuscan-like.

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14 One should also mention Cino of Pistoia, the Ghibelline mourner of the death of Henry VII and the writer of some very beautiful sonnets in a style afterwards brought to exquisite perfection by Petrarca. But Cino, although a contemporary and friend of Dante, stood somewhat apart and did not accept fully the new school.

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15 Purg. xi (the passage in which Giotto is said to have outrivalled Cimabue.)