The LAUDARE project studies the Italian Laude, a poetic-musical genre from the 12th to 16th centuries, focusing on its role in popular piety and oral tradition.

It aims to compile a comprehensive database of Laude manuscripts, exploring their composition, transmission, and cultural significance.

The project will produce various outputs, including a volume of results, a handbook, open access articles, workshops, and international conferences.

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.

Collaboratori#

  • Francesco Zimei (Principal investigator)
  • Marco Gozzi (senior staff)
  • Michele Flammini (senior staff)
  • Francesco Carapezza (senior staff)
  • Ignazio Macchiarella (senior staff)
  • Letizia Bartocci (team member)
  • Matteo Leonardi (post-doc researcher)
  • Lucia Marchi (post-doc researcher)
  • Federico Simonetta (post-doc researcher)
  • Giacomo Pirani (post-doc researcher)
  • Cristina Ghirardini (post-doc researcher)
  • Agnese Bee (Ph. D. student)
  • Angelica Vomera (PH. D. student)
  • Luisa Passamani (Ph. D. student)
  • Anita Sisino (Ph. D. student)
  • Luca Benedetti (Ph. D. student).

Risorse#

Pubblicazioni#

Hereafter a list of books, articles, conference contributions published by the members of the LAUDARE project. See https://laudare.eu/publications/ for the updated list.

Matteo Leonardi, ‘Perfetto, Buono, Lucido e Sereno: L’innocenza del mondo creato nelle rielaborazioni laudistiche del Credo‘ ISSN 2974-7287 «Artes», IV, 2025 https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2974-7287/23550

Thomas Persico – Francesco Zimei (Preface) “Cantasi come” L’eco dell’Ars nova nelle laude imitative dei secoli XIV e XV Sapienza Università Editrice 2025 https://www.editricesapienza.it/sites/default/files/6528_9788893774376_Cantasi_come_eBook.pdf

Agnese Bee – Angelica Vomera, La poesia cantata tra oralità e scrittura: testo, musica, performance 2025-01-01 https://iris.unitn.it/handle/11572/469220

Lucia Marchi – Francesco Zimei, Rethinking the Chronology of the Italian Ars Nova. I. Evidence of long-term continuity in the lauda repertoire (Zimei), II – The long life of the Trecento repertory in late fifteenth-century Siena (Marchi), Recercare 37, 2025 https://www.lim.it/it/recercare/6933-recercare-37-2025-9788855434232.html#/2-tipo_prodotto-libro

Jorge Vega Morgado – Sachin Sharma – Federico Simonetta, Drafting the landscape of computational musicology tools: a survey-based approach, in«12th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology», Seoul, 2025, http://doi.org/10.1145/3748336.3748340.

Sachin Sharma – Federico Simonetta – Michele Flammini, Experimenting active and sequential learning in a medieval music manuscript, in«IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing», Istanbul, 2025, http://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.15633.

Federico Simonetta, Style-based composer identification and attribution of symbolic music scores: a systematic survey, «Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval», 8(1), 2025, http://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.240.

Lucia Marchi – Giacomo Pirani, The Italian lauda from manuscript to byte: a conceptual framework, «Philomusica on-line», 24/1 (2025), pp. 1–22, https://doi.org/10.13132/1826-9001/24.2368.

Marco Gozzi, Illustre e comune nel canto religioso popolare, in «Lingua illustre, lingua comune», Atti della giornata di studi (Trento, Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia. Palazzo Prodi, 23 marzo 2023), a cura di Serenella Baggio e Pietro Taravacci, Alessandria, Dell’Orso, 2024, pp. 83-104, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14226456.

Francesco Zimei, Dinamiche dell’oralità: la simbiosi tra musica e poesia e la funzione del canto, in Lingue vive, lingue morte, Atti della Giornata di studi (Trento, Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia, Palazzo P. Prodi, 22 marzo 2024), a cura di Serenella Baggio e Pietro Taravacci, Alessandria, Dell’Orso, 2024, pp. 31–50, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14218607.

Thomas Persico, Presenze petrarchesche nel codice Angelicano 2274: maestro Antonio di Guido e la Canzone alla Vergine (Rvf, 366), «Scaffale aperto», 14/1 (2024), pp. 41–54, https://doi.org/10.14651/114742.

Thomas Persico, Iacopo di Lorenzo (Benci) nel codice Riccardiano 2871: il copista, il manoscritto e i testi, «Critica Del Testo», 27/2 (2024), pp. 71–106, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14983499.

Attili Cicchella – Thomas Persico, Un cantare tripartito sul ‘transitus Mariae’ nel ms. Angelicano 2273: note stilistiche, contesto storico, edizione, «Carte romanze», 11/2 (2023), pp. 7–77, https://doi.org/10.54103/2282-7447/21596.

Federico Simonetta, Prospettive sull’integrazione di musicologia, filologia e tecnologia, «APRE Magazine», 23 (2023), pp. 24-26, Full Text.