The crown of sonnets: problems of genesis and genre formation

The established, yet unconfirmed, viewpoint states that the crown of sonnets originated in the 13th century, although the first known instances of this genre form belong to the 16th century. These works differ from the modern (canonical) crown by the unregulated number of texts and the absence of the master sonnet. The thematic and stylistic variety of the Baroque crowns suggests that certain sonnet crown sequences did exist before the 16th century, albeit they are still undiscovered. In the absence of relevant texts, the study of the formal poetic preconditions required for the emergence of the crown of sonnets could clarify the time of the appearance of this supertextual form. Two factors determine the structure of the crown: the cohesion of adjacent texts and the ring-like organization of the supertextual unit. The first refers to the repetition of the last verse of the preceding text at the beginning of the following one. This poetic technique originates from the Provençal troubadours, who created a specific form of chained stanzas ( coblas capfinidas ); the Galician-Portuguese poets discovered another form of strophic concatenation ( leixaprén ). The second factor is the repetition of the first verse of the initial text at the end of the last one. Despite the verbatim coincidence, these verses are not semantically equal to each other, since the last verse, enriched by the previous context, acquires new semantic characteristics. One of the first poetic forms that combines the beginning and end of the text was the rondel, created in the 15th century. The examination of medieval poetic genres from the point of view of their crown-forming potential led to the conclusion that only the sonnet form meets the requirements for a poetic crown. The studied material suggests that, despite the common opinion, the non-canonical crown of sonnets could not appear in the 13th century, as the entire complex of formal poetic conditions for the emergence of this genre form developed at the end of the 15th century.