Lauren McGuire Jennings, Senza Vestimenta: The Literary Tradition of Trecento Song. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014. xxiii + 288 pp. ISBN 978-1-4724-1888-3

The relationship of text and music has long been a subject of spirited debate. Examples range from Richard Strauss’s Konversationsstück für Musik, Capriccio (1940–1), via Giambattista Casti and Antonio Salieri’s satirical divertimento teatrale Prima la musica e poi le parole (1786) to the Artusi–Monteverdi controversy of the early 1600s. Such debates about the primacy of one art over the other largely depend on the assumption that composing poetry and music are two mutually independent, autonomous métiers. This has been the mainstream point of view – and indeed the practice – for a long time now, although counter-examples may be found, even in recent times: outside the realmof ‘art’music, the twentieth-century figure of the singer-songwriter comes to mind, and within it, composers who write their own librettos, most prominently Richard Wagner. Modern scholars have expended considerable time in trying to identify the earliest moment of the presumptive ‘divorce’ of poetry and music. Scholars of Romance languages tend to situate this emancipatory event somewhere in the fourteenth century. One cause célèbre is Eustache Deschamps’s L’art de dictier (1392). For the vernaculars of the Italian peninsula, Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (1305) is often cited as an early witness to poetry and song starting to go their separate ways, as are the Paduan Antonio da Tempo’s Summa artis rithimici vulgaris dictaminis (1332) and the Florentine Franco Sacchetti (1335–1400). It is worth noting that no such discussion seems to have arisen for Spanish,