Project description
The functionality of singing explored through the early Renaissance Italian Laude
Harking from the middle of the 12th century, Laude was a musically based poetry genre which instigated Italian singing. It was mainly used by lay people outside the official liturgy to convey religious and non-religious messages to a mostly uneducated and unlettered audience. As such, it represents a rich historical resource. The EU-funded LAUDARE project aims to compile surviving 12th to 16th century Italian Laude manuscripts to study the inner workings of its dynamics in terms of composition, conveyance, music and oral nature. The resultant open-access database will allow investigations into lyrical and/or musical origins and geographical dissemination patterns. Project findings will be published in various forms and presented in workshops and conferences.
Objective
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. 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. 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. The LAUDARE project aims to approach the Italian lauda in its intrinsic intermediality by collecting the whole corpus of texts handed down with music up to the mid 1500s and comprehensively exploring the dynamics of composition and transmission of poems and related tunes according to the mechanisms of orality. 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 as well as the diffusion of melodic patterns and text formulas. The results will be collected in a specific volume. Other expected outputs are a handbook, at least ten open access articles, three workshops and two international conferences with proceedings, one of which will have involved related disciplines such as medieval and religious history, linguistics, palaeography, iconography, anthropology, and urban studies.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedHost institution
38122 Trento
Italy