comparisons among these copies indicate substantial homogeneity in transmission. The
treatise displays a detachment and succinctness that are uncharacteristic of 13th-century
writing in general.
Sandra Pinegar
[See also: MUSIC THEORY]
Franco of Cologne. Franconis de Colonia Ars cantus mensurabilis, ed. Gilbert Reaney and André
Gilles. N.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1974.
Haas, Max. “Die Musiklehre im 13. Jahrhundert von Johannes de Garlandia bis Franco.” In Die
mittelalterliche Lehre von der Mehrstimmigkeit, ed. Frieder Zaminer. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984, pp. 89–159.
Huglo, Michel. “De Francon de Cologne à Jacques de Liège.” Revue belge de musicologie 34–
35(1980–81):44–60.
Strunk, Oliver. Source Readings in Music History. New York: Norton, 1950, pp. 139–59.
FRANCO-ITALIAN LITERATURE
. A collective classification given to a sizable corpus of texts of the late Middle Ages,
sharing a north Italian provenance. Genre varies widely, including chansons de geste,
romance epics, romans, chronicles, and hagiography; the common element is linguistic
hybridism issuing from varying combinations of Old French interference with several
north Italian dialects, especially Lombard. As testimony to the prestige with which
French language and letters were regarded, Franco-Italian literature offers a unique area
of cultural and ideological contact in the cities, courts, and prehumanist centers of
northern Italy.
The largest collection of these works, twenty-five manuscripts, is now in the Marciana
Library in Venice; sixteen can be traced to the extensive library holdings of Francesco
Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. At his death in 1407, an inventory listed some sixty-seven
manuscripts in lingua francigena. Numerous manuscripts of French chansons de geste
and Arthurian romances were also held by the Este court in nearby Ferrara and may have
also circulated among other courts of the region, such as the Scaglieri in Verona, Visconti
in Milan, and Da Carrara in Padua. It is likely that many of these works were
commissioned by such regional potentates for recitation/reading in their opulent courts,
precursors to the great Renaissance courts and the Italian masterworks that they in turn
fostered, such as Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.
Formerly regarded as contaminations of both national languages and literatures, Franco-
Italian texts were frequently dismissed as by-products of French works disseminated to
the south or as primitive versions of Italian works of the following generations. Scholars
now recognize the significant literary and linguistic value of many of these texts,
particularly the V4 and V7 Chansons de Roland, Aspremont, Aquilon de Bavière, Entrée
d’Espagne, the Attila of Nicholas of Casola, and the works of Nicholas of Verona, which
include the sequel to the Entrée d’Espagne, the Prise de Pampelune. Among other
Carolingian works in the Marciana Franco-Italian collection is a vast compilation known
as the Geste Francor, which includes Enfances texts of Roland and Charlemagne;
The Encyclopedia 699