SOURCE: Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. “Poetry of the Latter Half of the Thirteenth Century.” In A History of Italian Literature, pp. 23-35. Boston, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954.

In the following excerpt, Wilkins explores the political and social setting in which Guinizelli and his fellow poets worked.

The second half of the thirteenth century was marked by violent local warfare, by political upheavals, by extreme religious excitement, by a sudden flowering of activity in architecture, sculpture, and painting, and by a sudden and great expansion of literary production in Italian. It was marked also by the emergence of Tuscany, and especially Florence, into cultural primacy.

With the death of Frederick II the power of the medieval empire came virtually to its end, and the fragmentation of Italy began. Frederick's son Manfred held out for a time in Southern Italy; but the pope offered the kingdom of Naples and Sicily to...