The Italian Lauda: Disseminating Poetry and Concepts Through Melody (12th-16th centuries)

Introduction

The lauda, a vibrant expression of popular piety, is the poetic-musical genre that from the second half of the twelfth century marked the birth and the spread of singing in the Italian language. It was based on melodies of varied origins, but mostly functional in orally conveying – through minstrels, lay confraternities, and preachers – the dissemination of texts and (not only spiritual) concepts among a largely illiterate population.

Preservation and Importance

Despite this ‘volatility’, a good corpus of laude has been preserved in written form for ritual needs, sometimes with musical notation, forming an impressive repository of ‘frozen orality’. While realizing the importance and vastness of this heritage, scholars for over a century have been mainly engaged in alternatively considering it either from a literary or a musical point of view.

Research Gaps

Therefore, no systematic research has yet to shed light on the specific nature of the phenomenon, its dynamics of creation and transmission, and all indicators that make it a reliable mirror of society, culture, and mentality in medieval and early Renaissance Italy.

Project Objectives

The LAUDARE project aims to approach the Italian lauda in its intrinsic intermediality by:

1. Collecting the whole corpus of texts handed down with music up to the mid-1500s.
2. Comprehensively exploring the dynamics of composition and transmission of poems and related tunes according to the mechanisms of orality.

Database and Outputs

An open access database, making searchable the entire corpus, will allow wide-ranging surveys such as:

• The territorial impact of a text and/or its musical setting.
• The diffusion of melodic patterns and text formulas.

The results will be collected in a specific volume. Other expected outputs include:

• A handbook.
• At least ten open access articles.
• Three workshops.
• Two international conferences with proceedings, one of which will involve related disciplines such as medieval and religious history, linguistics, palaeography, iconography, anthropology, and urban studies.