AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND ARTIFICE IN THE MEDIEVAL LYRIC: THE CASE OF CECCO NUCCOLI

Abstract

AbstractThe valiant efforts of scholars and critics have not yet succeeded in rescuing the fourteenth-century lyric poet Cecco Nuccoli from his comparative obscurity. A notary and a native of Perugia, where he seems to have lived from about 1290 to about 1350, Nuccoli was the author of twenty-nine sonnets (two-thirds of them sonetti caudati) preserved in a single manuscript, copied at Perugia between 1345 and 1353 and now in the Vatican Library (MS Vaticano Barberiniano 4036). This source also contains the surviving work of several of Nuccoli's Perugian contemporaries, including Marino Ceccoli, Neri Moscoli, and Gilio Lelli; and it has become conventional to treat these men as the kernel of a self-conscious and cohesive group of poets working within the generic confines of poesia giocosa or comico-realistica. This approach owes much of its prestige to Mario Marti, who produced the (almost) definitive edition of the Perugians' poetry in 1956, and whose work has towered over interpretation of that poetry fo...