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Survey of Italian Literature 101: The Origins and ‘Il Duecento’/ The Origins and the 13th Century


Foreword


The Survey of Italian Literature 101 series aims to offer readers a complete overview of the rich and diverse Italian literary tradition. Through summary and description, this series will provide readers with an understanding of the works from different literary periods and from diverse regions of Italy. It will cover both the classics and works by contemporary authors as well as those from lesser-known areas, providing a broad introductory survey to those who are interested in learning more about Italian culture and the country's literary works.


The Survey of Italian Literature 101 series is divided into eight chapters:

  1. Survey of Italian Literature 101: The Origins and ‘Il Duecento’/ The Origins and the 13th Century

  2. Survey of Italian Literature 101: ‘Il Trecento’/The Three Crowns

  3. Survey of Italian Literature 101: ‘Il Quattrocento’ and ‘Il Cinquecento’/Humanism and Renaissance

  4. Survey of Italian Literature 101: ‘Il Seicento’ and ‘Il Settecento’/Baroque and Enlightenment

  5. Survey of Italian Literature 101: ‘L‘Ottocento’/Romanticism, Realism and Decadentism

  6. Survey of Italian Literature 101: ‘Il Novecento’ Part I/ Crepuscolarism, Futurism and Hermeticism

  7. Survey of Italian Literature 101: ‘Il Novecento’ Part II/Post-war and the Novel

  8. Survey of Italian Literature 101: Italian Literature Today


Survey of Italian Literature 101: The Origins and ‘Il Duecento’/ The Origins and the 13th Century


Ancient Roman civilisation produced great works in the field of theatre (Plautus, Terence), philosophy (Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus) and poetry (Virgil, Horace, Ovid). From the third century AD, the new Christian religion inevitably introduced changes in Latin literature: the first writings were of a religious nature and were written by theologians, clergymen and scholars. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century gave rise to Vulgar Latin, a diatopic variation of Latin mixed with Germanic languages. Around the year 1000, with the dissolution of the Latin language, different neo-Latin languages arose around Europe (Genesini, 2022). Asor Rosa (1986) explains that the new melting pot of linguistic and sociological phenomena gave birth to a whole new culture essentially based on the exclusive use of Vulgar Latin.