FIG. 4-8 Dances from the Manuscrit du Roi, a huge codex, copied in the mid-thirteenth century, that contains songs of the
troubadours alongside those of the trouvères, and even a few items, like these dances, in mensural notation (that is, notation
prescribing rhythm).LAUDE AND RELATED GENRES
The earliest surviving genre of Italian vernacular song was cultivated by a very different sort of musician
from those we have examined thus far. The thirteenth-century lauda spirituale (“devotional [song of]
praise”) was not a courtly genre but a frankly religious one, sung in congregational unison by lay
fraternities who called themselves laudesi, by Franciscan street missionaries who called themselves
“God’s minstrels” (joculatores Dei), and by ardent penitents, called disciplinati or flagellanti, who sang
them while walking naked through the streets and lashing themselves with whips. Many laude were sung
as contrafacta to familiar melodies and could thus be characterized as pious pop songs. Others,
particularly those used by the Franciscans, were the work of skilled and highly educated poets from the
urban upper classes like the Florentine Jacopone da Todi (ca. 1230–1306), a jurist turned monastic
ascetic, two of whose laude survive with music. Jacopone is also credited in the Vatican chant books,
however dubiously, with the Marian sequence Stabat mater dolorosa (“The mother stood by
sorrowfully”), one of the latest additions to the canonical liturgy.
Like most genres of medieval vernacular song, laude were written down somewhat after the fact, in
large “gift-shop” manuscripts that had little to do with their performance occasions. (Flagellants, even if
they could read, had their hands full.) Like many of the cantigas, to which they were contemporary, laude
were apt to be cast in the popular form of the virelai (stanza plus contained refrain: A bba A bba A, etc.).
In Italy, beginning in the fourteenth century, such songs would be called ballate, betraying their descent
from the dance.
The flagellant movement was international. From northern Italy it spread into Germany and thence as
far east as Poland, as far west as Britain, and as far north as Scandinavia, becoming especially intense in
the mid-fourteenth century, when the population of Europe was devastated by epidemics. It was then that