[2] He joined the Order of the Knights of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a relatively exclusive group permitting members on the basis of financial background, showing Guittone's aristocratic familial origin and wealth.

He started to sign his works as Fra Guittone, and in the canzone "Ora parrà s'eo saverò cantare" he refers to his previous love poems as foolish.

They introduce a body of mature work, much of it in correspondence form, in which he preached an austere code of practical civic conduct to all ranks of contemporary central Italian society.

He invented the double sonnet and perfected the lauda-ballata; he addressed the communes of Arezzo, Pisa, and Florence, and leading political figures like Nino Visconti and Corso Donati; and his exchanges with poets like Chiaro Davanzati, Guido Guinizzelli, and Guido Cavalcanti point to a looming crisis of allegiances and styles in which Guittone's prosaic moralizing and dense style were to be the anti-model of the Tuscan lyric avant-garde.

The manner of his canzoni and sonnets remains constant, however, in its cultivation of all the artifice and deliberate obscurity of expression inherent in the Provençal tradition of the trobar clus.

But though often graceless, his verse does achieve more solid meaning and a firmer contact with life than the rather fragile poetic tradition of his Sicilian predecessors.

In spite of recent reappraisals his work is still struggling to recover from Dante's brief but deadly dismissals (De vulgari eloquentia 1, xiii, 1 and II, vi, 8; Purg.