Petrarch and dante: Anti-dantism, metaphysics, tradition
Abstract
Since the beginnings of Italian vernacular literature, the nature of the relationship between Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) and his predecessor Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has remained an open and endlessly fascinating question of both literary and cultural history. In this volume nine leading scholars of Italian medieval literature and culture address this question involving the two foundational figures of Italian literature. Through their collective reexamination of the question of who and what came between Petrarch and Dante in ideological, historiographical, and rhetorical terms, the authors explore the emergence of an anti-Dantean polemic in Petrarch's work. That stance has largely escaped scrutiny, thanks to a critical tradition that tends to minimize any suggestion of rivalry or incompatibility between them. The authors examine Petrarch's contentious and dismissive attitude toward the literary authority of his illustrious predecessor; the dramatic shift in theological and philosophical context that occurs from Dante to Petrarch; and their respective contributions as initiators of modern literary traditions in the vernacular. Petrarch's substantive ideological dissent from Dante clearly emerges, a dissent that casts in high relief the poets' radically divergent views of the relation between the human and the divine and of humans' capacity to bridge that gap.
The best way to gage Aristotle’s influence on Dante’s work is to follow his progression from poet of the Vita nuova to philosopher of the Convivio to political author of De Monarchia to poet of the Commedia. This sequence establishes Aristotle’s influence before and after the Commedia as it relates to the issue of happiness and greed which prevents it; and differentiates between the mimetic poetry of the “dolce stil nuovo” and the allegorical poetry of the Commedia.
Although rarely discussed within the commentary tradition, the image of Petrarch’s mother — Eletta Canigiani (ca. 1280–1318) — reverberates throughout his body of work. As Petrarch’s friend and closest reader, Boccaccio recognized the significance of the maternal figure in his mentor’s self-mythologizing. This article considers a unique aspect of the intellectual exchange between Petrarch and Boccaccio by focusing on the figure of Eletta. Through the strategic reiteration of her name, Boccaccio pays tribute to Petrarch and aligns his life and work with that of his praeceptor. Boccaccio invokes “eletta” in two texts: (1) a missive addressed to Petrarch (Epistola XV) and (2) his sonnet on Petrarch’s death (Rime 126). In Epistola XV, Boccaccio deploys Eletta to stress similarities between the two authors. Rime 126 echoes Petrarch’s earliest extant composition, Metrica 1.7, an affectionate lament composed to honor his mother. In his eulogy for his friend, Boccaccio carefully invokes “eletta” as a senhal recalling Petrarch’s mother. Between Petrarch and Boccaccio “Eletta” informs a complex genealogical strategy. While Petrarch draws on Eletta in establishing a connection to Dante, Boccaccio invokes Eletta’s name to bolster his relationship to Petrarch in the eyes of posterity, and to promote the legacy of the three crowns.
Whilst it is reasonably assumed that there extended from the Merovingian period a long tradition of oral poetry in France which embraced the lyric, hagiography, epic and drama, a tradition which drew on Indo-European traditions, more localised folklore, and historical events, it is certain that vernacular French literature i.e. What has been set down in letters owes its emergence entirely to the church. It is doubtful whether the romana lingua of the Strassburg Oaths as sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in June 842 can really be called French, but the short Sequence of Saint Eulalia c. 881–2 from the area of Valenciennes is certainly French, as are parts of the Sermon on Jonah, also produced near Valenciennes, towards the middle of the tenth century. A Passion narrative and a Life of St Ledger copied c. 1000 have been preserved in the south-west of France, whilst in the following century we have fragments of Occitan and, from Normandy, two literary masterpieces, the Vie de Saint Alexis and the Chanson de Roland. With the exception of the last two we are dealing with works written in a supra-dialectal koiné or scripta, designed to find favour with supra-regional audiences who could not tackle whatever Latin originals were available. Secular French literature written in a relatively standardised language ultimately identified with that of the Ile de France is the product of the twelfth century. It was preceded in England by the curiously precocious literary productions that owed much to the patronage of Henry I and II. © Cambridge University Press 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Copies of Inferno and Purgatorio were already circulating in northern Italy when Dante died in September 1321, and these lost early exemplars were the forerunners of hundreds of fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Commedia, complete and partial. Few vernacular texts achieved so rapid or widespread a diffusion anywhere in medieval Europe. But Dante's poem was not long allowed to go about unaccompanied. By 1322 commentators were working on Inferno; by the decade's end a commentary on the whole Commedia had appeared, and the first century of Dante criticism eventually yielded a vast crop of exegesis. It includes full-scale commentaries, in which theoretical prologues, proems to each canto and textual glosses are combined to form an organic whole; sets of individual glosses chiose, either discontinuous or in connected prose; and a variety of paraphrases, summaries, introductions, biographies, and other prolegomena, frequently in verse, which flourished on the margins of commentary proper, especially in the 1320s. New material continues to come to light: a long-lost Neapolitan commentary on Inferno, of 1369–73, was published in 1998. Commentators wrote in Italian and Latin, all over Italy Naples, Milan, Bologna, Venice, Verona, Pisa and abroad Germany. Even Dante's loved and hated native city paid tribute to the poem that so ruthlessly dissects it: Giovanni Boccaccio and Filippo Villani lectured and wrote on Inferno in Florence, while the Ottimo commento and the work ascribed to the “Anonimo Fiorentino’ almost certainly originated there. © Cambridge University Press 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Dante Alighieri 1265–1321 reflected on matters of literature throughout his œuvre. His earliest compositions the tenzone with Dante da Maiano, and the sonnets “A ciascun'alma presa e gentil core’ and “Com più vi fere Amor co’ suoi vincastri’ Rime 39–47, 1, 62, written before he was twenty, are lyric “correspondence’ poems, examples of a genre whose self-reflective concern with questions of literature has been amply documented. Dante's youthful rime are largely mechanical and conventional; yet, looked at in terms of his overall development and his general approach to literature, they acquire greater significance. It is suggestive that the poet should have begun writing in a “style’ which allowed him to establish direct textual contact with other poets and their works. From the very start, Dante was intrigued by the “mechanics’ of his art and by the “discourses’ which could accompany a literary text. In the months before his death, Dante once again returned to the formulas of the poetic “debate’ as he had on other occasions, most notably when he exchanged sonnets with Forese Donati and with Cino da Pistoia; see Dante, Rime 73–8; 110–15. Attacked in verse by the Bolognese magister Giovanni del Virgilio for having gone against traditional usage when he employed the vernacular instead of Latin, namely, a “low’ language instead of a “high’ one, to present the intellectually demanding subject-matter of the Commedia see Dante, Egloghe I, 1–34, Dante defended his choice of language through a complex and multi-layered literary strategy. Although, especially in the first of his two replies, the poet explicitly and ironically rejected the idea that he had behaved improperly Egloghe II, 51-4; pp. 44-5, he developed his full critique of Giovanni in a rather more subtle and implicit way: one, in fact, which underlined his poetic sensibility. © Cambridge University Press 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Modern editors divide the Epistle into thirty-three paragraphs or chapters. These fall into three main sub-sections: paragraphs 1–4 dedicate the Paradiso to Can Grande; paragraphs 5–16 begin by presenting a general introductory discussion of allegory with reference to the four interpretative “senses’ of biblical exegesis §7, and then analyse the Commedia as a whole and the third cantica in particular under six headings drawn from one of the standard models of academic prologue to an auctor “There are six parts … which need to be discussed at the beginning of every didactic work, namely, the subject, the author, the form, the aim, the book's title, and the branch of philosophy to which it belongs'; §6; finally, paragraphs 17–33 offer a close “literal’ reading of the opening twelve lines of Paradiso, concentrating in particular and with considerable expertise on many of their philosophical and theological allusions. One of the most controversial issues in present-day Dante studies concerns the authorship and significance of the Epistle to Can Grande, whose apparent addressee was the Lord of Verona between 1311 and 1329. Unlike most other critical disputes, the question of whether the letter is or is not by the poet has a direct and fundamental bearing upon our appreciation of the Commedia and of its author's intellectual development. If genuine, then, the Epistle is a key auto-commentary to the poem, second only in importance to the Commedia's own self-reflexive critical system, although any comparison between them confirms the undoubted greater exegetical range and sophistication of the poem. © Cambridge University Press 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Parisius dispensat in artibus illos, Panes unde cibat robustos. Aurelianis, Educat in cunis auctorum lacte tenellos. In the course of the thirteenth century, the intellectual initiative passed from Orléans to Paris, from school to university, from the antiqui to the moderni. This changed topography of learning had important implications for the ways in which texts were transmitted and read. The continuing ramification of higher education into ever more vocational areas of study and training was a response to the rediscovery of Aristotelian learning and to the pastoral effects of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The technologising of preaching and the development of more sophisticated analyses in applied pastoral theology went hand-in-hand with refinements in logical terminology. When scholastic lectio replaced monastic lectio as the dominant style of academic reading, new questions were asked about how books meant. The modistic analysis of the written word, developed from the practices prevailing in the exposition of secular classical texts, acquired new subtleties in its application to the literary strategies of the Bible and was again in turn reapplied to secular texts with some added emphases drawn from scriptural commentary. Throughout the thirteenth century a fruitfully symbiotic relationship existed between exegesis of the sacred page and of the secular text, mediated through a common interest in the affective force of all literature. These developments depended for their success on a continuing and reliable supply of literate and competent students. Although the logic of language came to be studied with new rigour, it would be wrong to suggest that the old ways of learning decayed. The interplay between disciplines and institutions was always more subtle and profound than medieval satirists and modern social historians care to allow: even logicians must learn to read, and must sit at the knee of Dame Grammar. © Cambridge University Press 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
MLN 120.1 (2005) 30-49
A distinct tendency toward the repudiation of Petrarch's desire for Laura had, in fact, informed the general orientation of the putative first published form of the Canzoniere, also known as the "Correggio" form (dated 1356-58), especially in the first part which is presumed to have ended with the penitential sestina 142, A la dolce ombra de le belle frondi. Nevertheless, as Santagata has demonstrated, this model appeared to be already in crisis by the end of the second part of that form. Petrarch's continuation of the book in the Chigi form that followed shortly after the Correggio between 1359-63, further destabilized the penitential model that had informed the Correggio Canzoniere, since while reopening the book (and perhaps dividing it for the first time) Petrarch added poems to both parts but did not resolve the ideological and formal dilemma regarding Laura that had emerged. The abrupt ending of the Chigi form in both parts, but particularly in the first part characterized by the pessimistic and Cavalcantian shipwreck poem 189 ("Cavalcantian" in the sense that there is no penitential dimension but only despair), marked a moment when from both ethical and structural-aesthetic perspectives, the book can be said to have risked shipwreck.
One can better appreciate the seriousness of the threat of naufragio by recalling that the trauma was such as to leave a blank space for a time in the order of the book, between poems 178 and 180. As Santagata notes in his edition's detailed summary of the "making of the Canzoniere," Petrarch had his copyist Giovanni Malpaghini leave a blank space between number 178 and 180 when he copied out the poems that brought to a close part one of what is known as the "forma di Giovanni" (dated 1366-67), the form of the book that came after Chigi, the third form of the book coming after Correggio and Chigi according to Santagata (the fourth major form of the nine according to Wilkins), and which went as far as poem 190 in the first part. While the fact of this blank space is well-known and was first signaled by Wilkins in The Making of the Canzoniere, no one seems to have given much thought to the gap in the order of the Giovanni form, or made anything of the fact that it occurs at precisely the point of transition or intersection between the end of the Chigi and Giovanni forms in the first part.
As one can see schematically represented in Appendix 1a and 1b below, while the three journey poems which had marked the end of Chigi in the first part (178-176-177) are reordered in the Giovanni form (to 176-177-178), the location of this triptych clearly suggests that the...
MLN 118.1 (2003) 1-45
Readers now recognize that the first words of Petrarch's Canzoniere— "Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse . . ."—are modelled in part on Lamentations 1.12, which is spoken by a personified Jerusalem lamenting her captivity and abjection: "O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, adtendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus." Beginning a sonnet with the citation of this verse was domesticated for Italian vernacular lyric especially by Cavalcanti and Dante; Dante in particular begins the second sonnet of the Vita nuova "O voi che per la via d'amor passate." And as Giovanni Pozzi has recently pointed out, the beginning of the sestet of Petrarch's proemial sonnet, "Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto / favola fui gran tempo," also draws on Lamentations, in this case 3.14: "factus sum in derisum omni populo meo, canticum eorum tota die" [I am made a derision to all my people, their song all day long]: in this way, allusion to the book of laments attributed to Jeremiah articulates the principal parts of the poem.
In his reliance on the text of Lamentations, Petrarch was unlikely to be citing unadorned scripture merely. He was arguably drawing on the sacred text as it was received, adapted, and even performed by late medieval culture. For late medieval readers, whose Bibles were often provided with commentaries, Lamentations was thought to be a poetic text in Sapphic meter. From the 12th century onward it had been held up as a rhetorical treasury for topics of conquestio and indignatio, figures adapted to excite the sympathy, pity, or righteous indignation of the listener, reader, or spectator. And since the time of Gregory the Great, Lamentations exegesis had also made it plain that the moral sense of Lamentations (among numerous other meanings) dramatizes how the sinful soul, signified by the besieged Jerusalem, suffers in its alienation from God. But probably the most consequential effect of the exegesis and liturgical use of Lamentations for Petrarch's readers was that Lam.1.12 and 3.14, among other passages, were widely and persistently thought of allegorically, as spoken by Christ suffering derision and crucifixion. Whether in the form of the Holy Week liturgy, during which Lamentations readings feature prominently, or in popular meditations on the Passion, where the rhetorical possibilities of the Lamentations text were fully exploited, the 14th century association of certain texts of Lamentations and the suffering of Christ was all but inescapable.
In the light of these traditions, the articulation of Petrarch's sonnet, rhetorically and psychologically, by citations of Lamentations appears even more suggestive. With the apostrophe of a reading public in the first line, Petrarch as the speaker appropriates the emotional intensity of the spectacle of the Passion, while his explicit rhetorical aims—"spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono"(1.8)—reflect the tradition of Lamentations as a rhetorical treasury. The penitential turn that marks the beginning of the sestet ("Ma ben veggio or sì . . ." 1.9) might also follow the exegetical definitions of the moral, or tropological, sense of the Lamentations text, as well as penitential passages in the Holy week liturgy. In short, Petrarch's adaptations of Lamentations in the proemial sonnet heralds that reciprocal osmosis (as well as conflict) between sacred and profane affect that has long bemused interpreters of Petrarch's vernacular collection of lyrics.
At the same time, since probably written not long after Laura's death, the first sonnet commences the Canzoniere as a work of mourning. It is a work of mourning for Laura, to be sure, but also, perhaps predominantly, for the speaker, who laments, if not always convicingly, the sacrifice of his moral autonomy to desire. It can be added that what critics such as Adelia Noferi, Alfred Noyer-Weidner, Daniela Goldin-Folena and Marco Santagata have observed regarding the complex vocative stance of the proemial sonnet is perfectly consistent with its appeal to the broadly phrased vocation in the text of Lam. 1.12, especially as interpreted by contemporary exegesis. My arguments in this paper will offer a preliminary glance at Petrarch's articulation of this double subject of mourning, for Laura and for...
New Literary History 26.4 (1995) 717-730
One of the techniques for describing the self that evolves during the later ancient period involves the real or imagined use of reading and writing. The notion of the self thereby becomes interdependent with the subject's literary understanding. Augustine brings the method to perfection in the Confessions, and largely through his influence its importance grows during the critical period between ancient and early modern culture. By the end of the Middle Ages, the literary approach to the self occupies as important a place as the venerable concern with the self as an aspect of soul or mind.
Petrarch plays a major role in the last phase of this development, which takes place between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. He describes relationships between reading, writing, and the self in unprecedented detail. His much discussed "modernity" and "individuality" are best understood in the context of his search for the manuscripts of ancient authors and his accompanying reflections on his own literary activities. His voluminous correspondence also bears witness to his desire to leave a predominantly literary portrait of himself for posterity. Even allowing for features of his approach which are his alone, it can be asked whether his manner of depicting the self belongs to a recognizable tradition of thinking. If so, who are his forerunners? What are the direct and indirect channels by which their ideas find their way into his books? Also, can chronological boundaries be placed around the development, which grows from modest ancient roots into a major medieval language for describing the self?
The chronology can be briefly traced through two quotations that are widely separated in time. The first is taken from Augustine's De Utilitate Credendi: "Cum legerem, per me ipse cognovi. Itane est?" (When I read, it was I who gained knowledge through myself. Or was it?). These enigmatic words form a part of his review of his youthful reading of ancient poetry, especially Virgil, in Madaura and later in Carthage, written during the year of his ordination. He proposes that one learns nothing through the act of reading itself, just as in De Magistro, written two years earlier, he maintains that knowledge about realities cannot be acquired uniquely through spoken words. In both cases (in fact a single case), one does not gain information about things through linguistic signs but through a type of interior instruction whose origins can be traced ultimately to God. Furthermore, what one learns when one reads a potentially instructive text like the Aeneid or the Bible is what one has in mind beforehand, although that knowledge may be tucked away in the memory, far from conscious thought. When Augustine wrote the Confessions in 397-401, he transferred this manner of thinking to the problem of self-understanding. The reading of a book and the understanding of the self became analogous intentional activities. The autobiography thus emerged as a canonical document in self-education in which the figure of the reader was both utilized and transcended.
The second quotation by which this tradition's chronology can be illustrated is from Part One of Descartes's Discours de la méthode. Well aware of the tribulations of Augustine's education, he also mentions that he was "nourished on letters" from childhood, and he too rejected the standard classroom experience. He was taught to believe "that by means [of books] a clear and certain knowledge could be obtained of all that was useful in life." Yet, the more he acquired booklearning, the less he was convinced that this was the case: "I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance." In contrast to Augustine, to whom truth is revealed in a single book, he repudiates the entire "scholastic method," that is, the typically medieval way of establishing valid knowledge by comparing and consolidating different interpretations of texts. He shares with Augustine a skeptical outlook as well as the theme of docta ignorantia. Yet his solution to the problem of philosophical uncertainty is a return to ideas prevalent before...