Sicilian School - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Sicilian School was a small community of Sicilian

Sicily

Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...

, and to a lesser extent, mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II

Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor

Frederick II , was one of the most powerful Holy Roman Emperors of the Middle Ages and head of the House of Hohenstaufen. His political and cultural ambitions, based in Sicily and stretching through Italy to Germany, and even to Jerusalem, were enormous...

, most of them belonging to his court, the Magna Curia. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini

Giacomo da Lentini

Giacomo da Lentini, also known as Giàcumu da Lintini and Jacopo Notaro, was an Italian poet of the 13th century. He was a senior poet of the Sicilian School and was a notary at the court of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II...

, they produced more than three-hundred poems of courtly love

Courtly love

Courtly love was a medieval European conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife....

between 1230 and 1266, the experiment being continued after Frederick's death by his son, Manfred

Manfred of Sicily

Manfred was the King of Sicily from 1258 to 1266. He was a natural son of the emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen but his mother, Bianca Lancia , is reported by Matthew of Paris to have been married to the emperor while on her deathbed.-Background:Manfred was born in Venosa...

i. This school included Enzio

Enzio of Sardinia

Enzio was an illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II and King of Sardinia.-Life:...

, king of Sardinia

Sardinia

Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . It is an autonomous region of Italy, and the nearest land masses are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Tunisia and the Spanish Balearic Islands.The name Sardinia is from the pre-Roman noun *sard[],...

, Pier delle Vigne, Inghilfredi, Stefano Protonotaro, Guido and Odo delle Colonne, Rinaldo d'Aquino, Giacomino Pugliese, Giacomo da Lentini

Giacomo da Lentini

, Arrigo Testa, Mazzeo Ricco, Perceval Doria

Perceval Doria

Perceval Doria was a Genoese naval and military leader in the thirteenth century. A Ghibelline, he was a partisan of the Hohenstaufen in Italy and served the Emperor Frederick II and Manfred of Sicily as vicar of Romagna, the March of Ancona, and the Duchy of Spoleto.He was probably a member of...

, and Frederick II himself.

Origins

These poets drew inspiration from the troubadour

Troubadour

A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....

poetry of Southern France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

written in langue d'oc, which applied the feudal code of honor

Honor code

An honour code or honour system is a set of rules or principles governing a community based on a set of rules or ideals that define what constitutes honorable behavior within that community. The use of an honor code depends on the idea that people can be trusted to act honorably...

to the relation between a man (acting as the vassal) and a woman (acting as king or superior). This is a reversal of the traditional role of women, traditionally dependent on men, and marks a new awareness in medieval

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

society: the decadence of feudalism

Feudalism

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...

with the increasing power of the middle class

Middle class

The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....

, causes a shift in the reading public, the epic (traditionally devoted to great military pursuits) gradually giving way to the lyric (generally focused on love). In the lower Middle Ages more and more women were reading books than ever before and poetry tried to adapt to their point of view and their newly acquired role in society.

These features are shared with French poetry, then very influential in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. What distinguishes the Sicilian School from the troubadours, however, is the introduction of a kinder, gentler type of woman than that found in their French models; one who was nearer to Dante

Dante Alighieri

Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...

's madonnas and Petrarch

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...

's Laura, though much less characterised psychologically. The poems of the Sicilians hardly portray real women or situations (Frederick's song cannot be read as autobiographical), but the style and language are remarkable, since the Sicilians (as Dante called them) created the first Italian literary standard by enriching the existing vernacular base, probably inspired by popular love songs, with new words of Latin and Provençal

Provençal language

Provençal is a dialect of Occitan spoken by a minority of people in southern France, mostly in Provence. In the English-speaking world, "Provençal" is often used to refer to all dialects of Occitan, but it actually refers specifically to the dialect spoken in Provence."Provençal" is also the...

origin.

The work of a roving school

"It is lyric poetry to be in the forefront of literature, inspiring a widespread enthusiasm
whose effects will be felt for centuries. The initial boost given by the Sicilian poets from the Svevs' court, the first to use a standardised vernacular to make art poetry will be passed on to many others: and all of them, not just the pedantic imitators of the Siculo-Tuscan school (such as Bonagiunta Orbicciani

Bonagiunta Orbicciani

Bonagiunta Orbicciani, also called Bonaggiunta and Urbicciani , was an Italian poet of the Tuscan School, which drew on the work of the Sicilian School. His main occupation was as a judge and notary...

) but also Guinizzelli, the poets of Dolce Stil Novo

Dolce Stil Novo

Dolce Stil Novo , or stilnovismo, is the name given to the most important literary movement of 13th century in Italy. Influenced by both Sicilian and Tuscan poetry, its main theme is Love . Gentilezza and Amore are indeed topoi in the major works of the period...

and more widely all writers of verse, will have to deal, though by different degrees, with the Sicilian models, so that some peculiarities will be assimilated into standard usage of Italian poetry

Italian poetry

-Important Italian poets:* Giacomo da Lentini a 13th Century poet who is believed to have invented the sonnet.* Guido Cavalcanti Tuscan poet, and a key figure in the Dolce Stil Novo movement....

." (Bruno Migliorini

Bruno Migliorini

Bruno Migliorini was an Italian linguist and philologist. He was the author of one of the first scientific histories of Italian language and was president of the Accademia della Crusca.-Biography:...

, Storia della letteratura italiana)

Though yet confined to a few notaries and dignitaries of the emperors, such poetry shows for the first time uniform linguistic traits and a richness in vocabulary far exceeding that of the Sicilian dialect(s) by which it was inspired. The Magna curia was not based in any given city, but always moving across Southern Italy, a fact which helped the school avoid the temptation of choosing any local dialect as the starting point for their new language. That is why the new standard turned up to be a koinè, a melting pot of many different vernaculars.

The reason for moving from city to city was mainly political. Although his experiment was short-lived, Frederic successfully created the first modern state in Europe, run by an efficient bureaucracy: its members were neither appointed from the aristocracy nor the clergy with good reason, since the former were far more interested in defending their own privileges than the welfare of the country and often plotted against him in the hope of regaining their power, while the latter were basically faithful to the Pope, his biggest enemy.

Frederic was in fact dismantling the feudal system of government inherited from the Normans, his magna curia and minor dignitaries were usually chosen from lay orders (like his poet-notaries). He also abolished internal barriers: free trade brought prosperity to the South, making Bari

Bari

Bari is the capital city of the province of Bari and of the Apulia region, on the Adriatic Sea, in Italy. It is the second most important economic centre of mainland Southern Italy after Naples, and is well known as a port and university city, as well as the city of Saint Nicholas...

(as witnessed by Cielo in his Contrasto) one of the richest cities in the Mediterranean. But, keeping this modern state afloat, meant that his barons had no power to collect taxes, their greatest source of revenues. Hence the necessity for Frederick to bring law and order by moving his court to and through.

Style and subject-matter

Though the Sicilian School is generally considered conventional in theme or content it rather "stands out for his refined lexicon, near to the style of trobar clus and for the wise treatment of figures of speech and metaphors of stylnovistic taste taken from natural philosophy" (Cesare Segre). There is a visible move towards neoplatonic models, which will be embraced by Dolce Stil Novo

Dolce Stil Novo

in the later 13th century Bologna

Bologna

Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...

and Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, and more markedly by Petrarch

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...

. Unlike the Northern Italian troubadour

Troubadour

s, no line is ever written in Occitan. Rather, the Occitan repertoire of chivalry

Chivalry

Chivalry is a term related to the medieval institution of knighthood which has an aristocratic military origin of individual training and service to others. Chivalry was also the term used to refer to a group of mounted men-at-arms as well as to martial valour...

terms is adapted to the Siculo-Italian phonetics

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...

and morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

, so that new Italian words are actually coined, some adapted, but none really loaned. A most famous specimen is Io m'aggio posto in core by Giacomo da Lentini

Giacomo da Lentini

, who apparently inspired the movement. Giacomo da Lentini is also widely credited by scholars (as Francesco Bruni, Cesare Segre et al.) for inventing the sonnet

Sonnet

A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...

, a literary form later perfected by Dante and, most of all, Petrarch. He uses it in a number of poems. We quote here the most famous that probably inspired the whole school:

Io m'aggio posto in core a Dio servire,

com'io potesse gire in paradiso,

al santo loco c'aggio audito dire,

o' si mantien sollazzo, gioco e riso.

sanza mia donna non vi voria gire,

quella c'ha blonda testa e claro viso,

che sanza lei non poteria gaudere,

estando da la mia donna diviso.

Ma no lo dico a tale intendimento,

perch'io pecato ci volesse fare;

se non veder lo suo bel portamento

e lo bel viso e 'l morbido sguardare:

che 'l mi teria in gran consolamento,

veggendo la mia donna in ghiora stare.

Translation:

I have a place in my heart for God reserved,

So that I may go to Heaven,

To the Holy Place where, I have heard,

People are always happy and joyous and merry.

I wouldn't want to go there without my lady

The one with fair hair and pale complexion,

Because without her I could never be happy,

Being separated from my lady.

But I do not say that with blasphemous intent,

As if I wanted to sin with her:

If I did not see her shapely figure

And her beautiful face and tender look:

Since it would greatly comfort me

To see my woman shine in glory.

The limitations of Sicilian poetry

The main inhibiting factor on Sicilian poetry was probably the political censorship imposed by Frederick: literary debate was confined to courtly love. In this respect, the poetry of the north, though stuck to the langues d'oïl

Langues d'oïl

The langues d'oïl or langues d'oui , in English the Oïl or Oui languages, are a dialect continuum that includes standard French and its closest autochthonous relatives spoken today in the northern half of France, southern Belgium, and the Channel Islands...

, provided fresher blood for satire

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

. The north was fragmented into communes or little city-states which had a relatively democratic self-government, and that is precisely why the sirventese genre

Genre

Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...

, and later, Dante's Divina Commedia and sonnets were so popular: they referred to real people and feelings, though often idealised like Beatrice. A sirventese is, in effect, eminently political: it usually refers to real battles and attacks real military or political enemies, the author often being the soldier or the knight involved in the strife, as in Guittone d'Arezzo

Guittone d'Arezzo

Guittone d'Arezzo was a Tuscan poet and the founder of the Tuscan School. He was an acclaimed secular love poet before his conversion in the 1260s, when he became a religious poet. In 1256, he was exiled from Arezzo due to his Guelf sympathies....

's Rotta di Montaperti (Defeat of Montaperti), a bloody battle where Manfred of Sicily

Manfred of Sicily

, Frederick's son, defeated the guelfs. Dante himself will commemorate the event in the Commedia many years later, where, mindful of the political strife that had him exiled, he will attack many princes and popes, such as Boniface VIII, one of his biggest personal enemies.

Frederick's censorship is also apparent from the structure of the song: the Sicilians transformed the tornada
Tornada (Occitan literary term)
In Occitan lyric poetry, a tornada refers to a final, shorter stanza which is addressed to a patron, lady, or friend. They often contain useful information about the piece's composition and the troubadour's circle....

, the strophe which in troubadour poetry contains a dedication to a famous person with a congedo, where the poet bids goodbye to his reader and asks the song to bear his message to his lady. The re-shaping of the Occitan model also involved the suppression of music. The authors were great readers and translators, but apparently could not play any instrument, so their work was intended for reading, which called for logical unity, posing a question, proposing, and finding a solution in the end.

That meant no interchangeable lines as in troubadour poetry and fewer repetitions: for a French jongleur who sang his poems these were necessary, but they sounded redundant to the Sicilian authors. Their poetry was music to the eye, not to the ear, and their legacy is also apparent in Dante and Petrarch's lyrics. The sonnet is even more exacting on this point: the separation between the octave and the sestet is purely a logical one, the rimes drawing a visual line between the first and last part. However, the fact that Italian poetry was being made for the reading public may have facilitated its circulation.

Realism and parody: Cielo d'Alcamo
Cielo d'Alcamo
Cielo d'Alcamo was an Italian Sicilian poet, born in the early 13th century. He is one of the main exponents of the Italian medieval jester poetry...

Though lyric poetry

Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...

prevailed at Frederick's (and later Manfredi's) court, it is at this time that we have an interesting exception in Rosa fresca aulentissima (transl: "Fresh very perfumed rose"), widely known as Contrasto and attributed to Cielo d'Alcamo

Cielo d'Alcamo

Cielo d'Alcamo was an Italian Sicilian poet, born in the early 13th century. He is one of the main exponents of the Italian medieval jester poetry...

(also known as Ciullu di Vincenzullu), about which modern critics have much exercised themselves. This Contrasto is written in a Sicilian dialect

Sicilian language

Sicilian is a Romance language. Its dialects make up the Extreme-Southern Italian language group, which are spoken on the island of Sicily and its satellite islands; in southern and central Calabria ; in the southern parts of Apulia, the Salento ; and Campania, on the Italian mainland, where it is...

close to that spoken in the city of Messina, with several influences from continental Italian variants. The subject is a humorous fight between two young lovers, a kind of poetry quite common in the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

(as contrasti or pastorelle). It is about a young suitor who sneaks into the garden of a young lady from a rich Sicilian family and secretly declares his love to her. He then tries to seduce the girl with his one-liners; she berates him for his "ill" intentions and keeps him at bay to protect her honor, but her prudeness proves eventually to be just a love game: she gives in completely to his bold advances. However, the language uses much of the courtly language of lyric poetry and the result is a parody of the Sicilian School's clichés. The Contrasto belongs to the time of the emperor Frederick II (it can be dated between 1230 and 1250, but probably closer to the latter), and is also important as a proof that there once existed a popular, independent of literary, poetry prior to Frederick's times. Now most critics agree that the Contrasto of Cielo d'Alcamo is probably a scholarly re-elaboration of some lost popular song. It is perhaps the closest to a kind of poetry that has perished or which was smothered by the Sicilian literature of Frederick's. Its distinguishing feature was its hilarity and down-to-earthedness as opposed to the abstract verse of the Sicilian School. But it has been argued that its style betrays a profound knowledge of Frederick's movement and some critics have hinted the man who penned it must have been acquainted with or even been part of, the court itself. Given the highly satiric and erotic vein Ciullo d'Alcamo may well be a fictitious name. His Contrasto shows vigor and freshness in the expression of feelings: Such "low" treatment of the love-theme shows that its subject-matter is certainly popular. This poem sounds real and spontaneous, marked as it is by the sensuality characteristic of the people of southern Italy.

Linguistic notes on the Sicilian standard

The standard of the Sicilian school combines many traits typical of the Sicilian, Latin, Provençal and to a lesser, but not negligible extent, Apulian and certain southern dialects. Such a melting pot

Melting pot

The melting pot is a metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, the different elements "melting together" into a harmonious whole with a common culture...

greatly helped the new Italian language

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

: the Provençal suffixes -ière and -ce, for example, generated hundreds of new Italian words in -iera and -za as it. riv-iera ("river") or costan-za ("constancy"). Such affixes would be then adopted by Dante and his contemporaries, and handed on to future generations of Italian

Italy

writers. Dante's styles illustre, cardinale, aulico, curiale were partly developed from his close study of the Sicilian School which he quotes widely in his studies, especially in his De Vulgari Eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia is the title of an essay by Dante Alighieri, written in Latin and initially meant to consist of four books, but abandoned in the middle of the second. It was probably composed shortly after Dante went into exile; internal evidence points to a date between 1302 and 1305...

. The Sicilian school was later re-founded by Guittone d'Arezzo

Guittone d'Arezzo

in Tuscany

Tuscany

Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....

following the death of Manfredi, Frederick's son, so many of these poems were later copied in manuscripts that widely circulated in Florence

Florence

. This first standard in which they were written, was, however, modified in Tuscany. In fact, Tuscan scrivener

Scrivener

A scrivener was traditionally a person who could read and write. This usually indicated secretarial and administrative duties such as dictation and keeping business, judicial, and history records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities...

s perceived the five-vowel system used by southern Italian dialects (i, e, a, o, u) as a seven-vowel one (i, é, è, a, ó, ò, u). As a consequence, the Italian texts may contain lines that no longer rhyme with each other (sic. -i > tusc. -é, sic. -u > tusc. -ó). Tuscans also changed words as gloria [pron. glòreea] to ghiora, aju [pron. àyoo] ("I have) to aggio [pron. adjo] etc. Though some original texts have been restored to their original Sicilian, we must see such remakes only as tentative reconstructions of originals that, unfortunately, may have been lost forever. Dante and his contemporaries would take this newborn language a step further, expanding and enriching it with even more words of Latin and Florentine origin, carefully working on the style to create volgare illustre, a higher standard quite close to today's polite Italian.

Origins

The work of a roving school

Style and subject-matter

The limitations of Sicilian poetry

Realism and parody: Cielo d'AlcamoCielo d'AlcamoCielo d'Alcamo was an Italian Sicilian poet, born in the early 13th century. He is one of the main exponents of the Italian medieval jester poetry...

Linguistic notes on the Sicilian standard

See also

Realism and parody: Cielo d'Alcamo
Cielo d'Alcamo
Cielo d'Alcamo was an Italian Sicilian poet, born in the early 13th century. He is one of the main exponents of the Italian medieval jester poetry...