1982/01/01 by Paul Oppenheimer
Arts and Humanities · #Medieval European Literature and History
paper · doi:10.2307/1771151
crossref issued 1982/01/01 · crossref published 1982/01/01 · crossref published-print 1982/01/01 · openalex publication_date 1982/01/01 · crossref created 2006/04/26 · crossref deposited 2018/05/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06 · crossref indexed 2026/07/24
A GOOD DEAL of the mystery surrounding the origin of the sonnet was cleared up by Ernest Hatch Wilkins in 1915. In his fine investigative piece The Invention of the Sonnet,l Wilkins establishes, as well as they can be established from the skimpy evidence available, two important facts: one, that the earliest sonnets were written by Giacomo da Lentino, il Notaro (as he is often called by his contemporaries, and as Dante refers to him in Purgatorio, XXIV.56), who lived ca. 1188-1240, was a notary in the service of Frederick II, and appears to have created the form; and two, that in writing the earliest sonnets Giacomo did not borrow from the troubadours' eight-line canzone for the octave of his poems, or indeed from Provengal literature at all, but from the eight-line strambotto, familiar as a song-form among thirteenth-century Sicilian peasants-so that we must today, if we wish to be accurate about the matter, regard the sonnet as Italian, and even Sicilian, in origin. In his 1915 essay, Wilkins speculates that the sestet of Giacomo's sonnets may have derived from the Arab zajal, a rhyming stanza popular with the Arabs living in Sicily in Giacomo's time. Wilkins abandons this idea as negligible, however, in a subsequent essay,2 in which he argues that the sestet came to Giacomo in a burst of sheer inspiration.3 No research done since 1915 has revealed an alternative source of the