Four anonymous Italian poems in Giovan Francesco Buonamico’s manuscript

Abstract

The Bonello Manuscript contains four poems written in Italian: a pastoral poem consisting of five stanzas of six octosyllabic lines each, two sonnets, and a love poem consisting of seven stanzas with eight short lines each. The pastoral poem is in fact a hyperbolic eulogy of Grand Master Nicolas Cotoner. The two sonnets are apparently moralistic, having been written for Carnival, or rather for the days of repentance that follow it: in the first one a “sinner” purports to show remorse for having wasted his lifetime in profane activities, and in the second, which is declared as being in answer to the first, the same sinner hopes and prays that he would be given a last-minute opportunity to repent before giving up the ghost. More than true repentance the two sonnets show a humorously naughty vein because there is a hint that the happy-go-lucky “sinner” is not yet ready to mend his bad ways. The love poem is untitled but the genre is called canzonetta, which is a canzone with short lines instead of the solemn hendecasyllables. It consists of seven octaves with six-syllable lines, and repeats the traditional themes and vocabulary of medieval poems in the genre of the amour courtois. The rubrics do not say whether Buonamico is the author of these poems.