Matteo da Perugia occupies a place of relevance in the late Ars Nova repertoire, a phase of music history in which the composition of vocal polyphony experiences a definite shift in language and expression, opening to new models, aesthetic currents and techniques. Although archival evidence on the composer is scant —he has been traced to the Visconti circles of Milan and Pavia from the beginning of the 15th century until the 1420s— dozens of pieces attributed to him survive in the famous Modena codex and in other fragments now in Europe and the US. Thus, Matteo's exceptional amount of surviving secular works —settings of French fixed forms and two Italian ballate — enable us to make stylistic considerations from an authorial perspective. This paper will discuss Matteo da Perugia's compositional choices based on a large-scale analysis of metrical, stylistic, intertextual, and linguistic features of the lyrics that he set to music. New interpretations of the often obscure meaning of such texts and their literary quality will be offered, and observations will be made on the composer's musical attitude towards form, rhyme, hemistich division, enjambement, and refrain. Intertextual procedures that link Matteo's poetic, melodic and contrapuntal material to other works present in the same codex strengthen the hypothesis that he may have known and assimilated at least part of the Modena repertoire during his career. Moreover, newly found codicological evidence will throw light on scribal practices regarding text and music transcription.