Magdalena Maria Kubas, Litania come strategia retorica nelle Laudi del Bianco da Siena, “Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria”, CXII (2015).
The aim of the essay is to analyze the link between Il Bianco da Siena’s poetry and the the litany. In the large corpus of Laudi by this author the litany is a source of textual strategies based on repetition. We analyze different degrees of intensity – which makes some laudas poetical prayers – together with the ways of disseminating the litanic repetition within the mystical type of lauda, in which the possibility of creating recognizable rhythmic patterns is exploited as well. This aspect of Il Bianco’s work is strongly linked with the poetry of Jacopone da Todi. Nevertheless, in his works Il Bianco da Siena introduces new rhetorical and rhythmic solutions using the litanic verse as a unifying factor for some monumental texts. The author works also on literary genres, enriching them with a good culture of prayer at a time when the liturgy was still Latin, but the faithful prayed in their vernacular, native languages.