Senza vestimenta: The Literary Tradition of Trecento Song.By Lauren McGuire Jennings

Abstract

The musical legacy of the Italian Trecento has generated surprisingly few book-length studies beyond inventories, editions, and commentaries on manuscript sources. Although the monograph Senza vestimenta: The Literary Tradition of Trecento Song by the American scholar Lauren Jennings may also be regarded as a kind of inventory and commentary, it is conceptual as well. Jennings explains that the question that motivated her research was the applicability and cogency of the ‘commonly-used modern term poesia per musica (poetry for music)’, which became the hallmark of Trecento musicological studies. ‘By implying that song texts were born as unavoidable by-products of vocal polyphony, rather than as poetry in their own right, these two concepts [also the idea of the so-called “divorce” between music and poetry] have encouraged musicologists to focus more on the music than on the verbal texts and, simultaneously, discouraged the literary scholars from taking “musical” poems seriously as literature’ (pp. 6–7). She thus exchanges the term poesia per musica for ‘song texts’.