Writing Southern Italy Before the Renaissance: Trecento Historians of the Mezzogiorno

Writing Southern Italy before the Renaissance is the first comprehensive book in English to examine the works of trecento historians of the Mezzogiorno. It introduces these writers, their lives, works, sources, language choices, narrative communities and strategies, and their styles and forms.

Ronald G. Musto brings to bear current methodological and theoretical frameworks to develop this analysis. Central to his examination are the role of trecento visual language and the impact of fictional forms on this historiography. He traces the fine line between historia and fabula and the ability of trecento writers to absorb and utilize the symbolic forms deployed by such artists as Giotto, Lorenzetti and Francesco da Barberino and such romances as Meliadus, the Contesse d’Anjou and Constance.

To illustrate and test these analyses, Musto offers case studies examining rituals of punishment and prison dialogues. He traces the development of a grand narrative - the black legend of the Angevins - through Petrarch, Villani, Boccaccio and Gravina. A final chapter compares trecento historiography to that of the southern humanists.

This second, revised edition is published by special arrangement with Routledge. It presents revised text; revised and updated notes; a chronology of persons and events; and a complete, updated and comprehensive bibliography. It also incorporates selected new source materials and secondary research published since that first edition. For consistency of reference, all numbering of chapters, subsections, annotation and pagination remain the same as in the hardcover edition.