The sonnet is credited to Giacomo da Lentini and the notaries of the Sicilian School at the court of Frederick II in the early thirteenth century, but the precise process by which the form's octave and sestet, and the turn between them, first took shape is not settled. Only a small corpus of early Sicilian sonnets survives, their relative order is not firmly established, and the extent to which the form drew on earlier oral or vernacular song traditions that left no written trace is a genuinely open question in the philology of the form.
Open Question
The sonnet is credited to Giacomo da Lentini and the notaries of the Sicilian School at the court of Frederick II in the early thirteenth century, but only a small corpus of early Sicilian sonnets survives, their relative chronological order is not firmly established, and the extent to which the fixed octave and sestet, and the turn between them, drew on earlier oral or vernacular song traditions that left no written trace cannot be settled from the surviving record.
What would resolve this No new manuscript evidence is expected; the question is treated by scholars of the form as an interpretive one about how much of the Sicilian sonnet's structure was a single deliberate invention versus a codification of practices already circulating orally, rather than a fact-finding gap a future discovery would close.
OpenMedieval Italian philology and the study of the Sicilian SchoolThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Cross-Tradition Connections
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