The history of the cittern called the english cittern has been clearly traced he history back ofto the Elizabethan cittern, often times, calledwhen the English it was one cittern, of the has most been popular clearly instruments, available in every self-respecting barber's shop for the convenience of the waiting customer.2 England's claim to the invention of the cittern dates back to the Renaissance: as erudite a humanist and music historian as Vincenzo Galilei writes in 1581 in his Dialogo delta Musica Antica e Moderna: "... fu la Cetera usata prima tra gli Inglesi che da altre nationi, nella quale isola si lavorano gia in eccellenza ..." But Galilei cannot have read his Dante well, for in the Divina Commedia, Paradiso, Canto XX, the cetra figures in a wonderful metaphor comparing the formation of sound in an eagle's neck with that of a cittern..)

("And as the sound takes its form at the cittern's neck, and as the vent of the bagpipe enters its neck, so the sound rose up through the neck of the eagle.") Cetera means here, of course, the cittern, not the kithara of antiquity (which was also called cetera in Dante's time, as it still is today), since the neck is described as the place where "the sound takes form", that is, where the stopping of the strings takes place. The metaphor could not be more telling! The names for old musical instruments are very confusing. The same instrument often had many names, and one name often indicated various
instruments. The mediaeval vocabulary alone includes kithara, citola, cistole, sitole, cuitole, sytole, cycolae, and later we find gittern, getern, kitaire, quitare, guiterne, guitarra. Which are actually the prototypes of the cittern and which those of the guitar? And are all of them children of the ancient kithara? Johannes de Grocheo (c. 1300), enumerating instruments, mentions the kithara and the gitarra side by side, and the Speculum Musices, attributed to Johannes de Muris (1290-1358?) , and recently to Jacobus von Liittich, groups together in a list of instrumenta artificialia cytharae, psalteria, and cycolae
 

The survival of the kithara and the evolution of the English cittern: A study in morphology