Up to the 13th century, most poets in Northern Italy wrote in Old Occitan and are therefore considered troubadours. There are no examples of the Western Lombard language from that age, but some pieces were written in related Gallo-Italic languages, such as Sordello da Goito's Sirventese lombardesco (in the Eastern Lombard language of Mantua), as well as Rayna possentissima (1254), lauda of the Servi della Vergine, and the notary registers of Bologna (in whose white spaces, folk tales or literary poems were inserted to avoid illegal insertions), all of which are in the Bolognese.
Bonvesin da la Riva
Bonvesin da la Riva is the most important Northern-Italian writer of the 13th century. Born in Milan between 1240 and 1250, he was a secular friar belonging to the 3rd order of Umiliati and is acknowledged as doctor in gramatica, a title that few people had. His most important work is the Book of the three texts (Libro delle tre scritture), an epic poem in quatrains in Old Insubric language, in which he describes the underworld realms. The book is divided into three parts, different for style and atmosphere, in which Hell, Christ's Passion and Paradise are represented. The anticipation of Dante's Divina Commedia is evident, with an attentive use of language, with lexical and rhetoric ability. This work of art is a sort of screenplay of the afterlife, of considerable historic value and of hard poetical suggestion. The Essay on the months in form of apologue and the Vulgare de elymosinis, raw description of terrible maladies, similar to the realism of Jacopone da Todi, are also very important. A sort of Medieval etiquette is the treaty De quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam, lively and realistic representation inserted in the manualistic tradition of the time. The Contrasti are other poems, series of disputies, enriched by skillful alternance of descriptive tones, grotesque and soft, meditated and exemplar, like the Disputatio rosae cum viola in which the humble bourgeois virtues of the violet prevail on the aristocratic ones of the rose. In religious works the most precious are The passion of Job, The life of Saint Alexey and overall, between Laudes de Virgine Maria, the legend of Frate Ave Maria, of touching religious intensity because of its inspiration by a strong Christian devotion.
In 1274 the Sermons in verses, in a Lombard language, are the sole work of Pietro da Pescapè with precise date in the didactic-religious literature of Northern Italy that gave noticeable texts to Lombards Girardo Patecchio from Cremona, the Book of Uguccione da Lodi, Bonvesin de la Riva and Giacomino da Verona.
Language evolution
The written use of Insubric resumes in Milan under the House of Visconti, such as in the case of Lancino Curti and Andrea Marone. Written example from the 15th century are still uncertain in orthography; Dei, in this century, composes the first Milanese glossary. In the 16th century, Gian Paolo Lomazzo founded the Academy of Val di Blenio, which also provides information about other dialects of the period. In 1606 G.A. Biffi, with his Prissian de Milan de la parnonzia milanesa, tried a first codification of orthography, regarding vowel length and sound /ö/ for which he found the solution ou; Giovanni Capis elaborated the first blurb of a dictionary, the Varon Milanese; Fabio Varese, anticlassicist poet, created some thirty of humouristic-veristic sonnets in Milanese (with an answer for every sonnet in which he blames himself). Carlo Maria Maggi, a playwright, finally codified the writing of Milanese dialect at the end of the 17th century, introducing the French oeu, thus creating the classical Milanese orthography that would be refined in the centuries until the current version of Circolo Filologico Milanese. At the end of the 18th century, there were some at some shifts in the linguistic structures, such as the abolition of no (meaning "not") before he verb, on behalf of postposed nò or minga, or the abolishing of past tense, which is still found in Balestrieri and in Maggi.
Bosinada is a poetic form of popular composition, written in Insubric on loose sheets, told by storytellers (bositt, sing. bosin) and with often satyric contents. The first essays of the genre are at the end of the 16th century. One of the first bositt is Gaspare Fumagalli, whose we know nine bosinad of the 1723. Also greater poets such as Carlo Porta liked describing themselves as bositt, even if their poems were much more meditative than popular ones. Bosinada didn't have a rigid form: the metre could be of various sizes (lame verses were a frequent characteristic), from eight to eleven syllables long, often in rhyming couplets, in long stanzas.