Magdalena Maria Kubas, “La lauda spirituale e i moduli litanici,” Studi Medievali, serie terza, 60 (2019).
In the present paper we discuss a link existing between the genre of lauda and medieval litanies, those of the Virgin and the Saints. We demonstrate that the litanies influenced the evolution of the spiritual lauda in Italy during the XIII, XIV and XV centuries. In the complex history of the literary genre its formal cohesion was strengthen by repetitive litanic patterns – rhetorical and rhythmical – which permitted to preserve an oscillating versification of the early period during all the history of the lauda. At the same time the greater poets were developing the metrical canon which never became a formal constituent of the lauda.