The literary culture of the Trecento

The glittering light of the tre corone has traditionally left the rest of Trecento literature in its shadow. Few of the scholars who have pored so minutely over the voluminous texts of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio have spared more than a glance for the work of the canonical threesome’s contemporaries. Even Natalino Sapegno’s magisterial Storia letteraria del Trecento – still the best short introduction, though sadly never translated into English – is typical in devoting barely sixty (of over four hundred) pages to ‘la letteratura dei minori’. Minor the other writers of the Trecento may be in comparison with the three great Florentines – most writers are – but, for all that, their work offers a richly varied range of literary responses to a historical and cultural situation, that of the Italian peninsula between about 1300 and about 1400, which is itself of unusual interest.

The approach to Italian literature in terms of the relationship between history and geography, pioneered by Carlo Dionisotti, is especially valuable for students of the fourteenth century. In this period none of the convenient shorthand of literary and cultural history – ‘Italy’, ‘Italian’, ‘author’, ‘text’, even ‘literature’ – has enough validity to pass unchallenged. The Italian peninsula in the Trecento, as Dante, Petrarch, and others lamented, enjoyed neither political nor linguistic unity; instead, many relatively small and congenitally hostile administrative units, practising disparate political systems and speaking numerous related but often mutually incomprehensible languages, occupied the region that, centuries later and through processes unthinkable to late medieval intellectuals, was to become the united nation with its standardised national language that we know today.