A War of Words Among Women: An Anonymous Bolognese Poem from 1282

Abstract

Abstract Not only do the city registers of medieval Bologna, the Memoriali Bolognesi, contain legal and economic transactions, but they also transmit poetry of the age. Across the decades, the scribes introduced poems between the transactions; over some one hundred such poems have been preserved, many of them unica. Thus, the registers offer a glimpse into the popular entertainments of the times, providing valuable information about the culture of thirteenth-century Italy. One such poem is the ballata “Oi bona gente, oditi et endenditi” (“Oh, good people, hear and understand”), an insulting dialogue between two women. Intended to provoke laughter, the poem traffics in traditional misogynistic stereotypes. Its two antagonists accuse one another of drunkenness, gluttony, but mostly sexual impropriety such as cuckolding their husbands and attempting to pimp one another out to the parish priest. Through analysis of the poem, the anxieties provoked by the socio-economic changes of the Italian communes come into focus. The society was in flux, and the ballata employs the traditional insults of women to address the concerns that it raised.