The Count of Popoli’s "Cansonero", a Neapolitan chansonnier made in the Hispanic way?

Abstract

After Alfonso V of Aragon’s death and during Ferrante’s reign, a new poetic trend in Italian emerged in Naples. This new tendency was named “koine poetry” and has as its main testimony the so-called Cansonero, whose compilation was ordered by Giovanni Cantelmo, sixth count of Popoli. Despite the importance of this text, the main critical studies of this collection seem limited, insofar as they tend to use analytical methods created for the study of single-author chansonniers. In this paper, I intend to apply an analytical method commonly used to study Iberian chansonniers—which mostly gather poems written by more than one author—to the study of the Cansonero. The implementation of such an analytical technique will contribute to discover and underline aspects of the Cansonero that scholars have traditionally ignored or even rejected.