Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

DA N T E A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F I TA L I A N L I T E R A R Y CULTURE DANTE AND THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN LITERARY...

Author: Teodolinda Barolini

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DA N T E A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F I TA L I A N L I T E R A R Y CULTURE

DANTE AND THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN LITERARY CULTURE

teodolinda barolini

❁

Fordham University Press, New York, 2006

Copyright 䉷 2006 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barolini, Teodolinda, 1951– Dante and the origins of Italian literary culture / Teodolinda Barolini.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2703-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2703-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2704-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8232-2704-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Influence—Italy. 2. Italian literature—History and criticism. I. Title. PQ4381.2.B37 2006 851⬘.1—dc22 2006029447 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

❁ This book is dedicated with much love to the woman who taught me to read, my mother, Helen Barolini, The Original Reader Against the Grain

Contents

Introduction Reading Against the Grain: Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal 1

i. a philosophy of desire 1. Dante and the Lyric Past 23 2. Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire 47 3. Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context 70 4. Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell 102

ii. christian and pagan intertexts 5. Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition 125 6. Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431–33 and Inferno 5.1–24) 132 7. Q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question 151 8. Arachne, Argus, and St. John: Transgressive Art in Dante and Ovid 158

iii. ordering the macrotext: time and narrative 9. Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine: Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova 175

Contents viii 10. The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 193 11. The Wheel of the Decameron 224 12. Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca . . . Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis 245

iv. gender 13. Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10) 281 14. Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, and Gender 304 15. Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli) 333 16. Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax 360 Notes 379 Index 467

Introduction Reading Against the Grain: Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal

O ne of the great pleasures of gathering my essays is the opportu-

nity afforded, by looking back, to chart the maze and find its principles of order. The pillars of my critical praxis stand clear in the light of retrospection. One is the importance of learning from the reception, frequently with the goal of demystifying and deinstitutionalizing viewpoints that have been given too much credence and authoritative weight by centuries of repetition. Perhaps this attitude was born in response to working on a text, Dante’s Commedia, which has produced masses of repetitive exegesis since the fourteenth century, and in the context of a culture—Italian—that invests excessively in the authority of tradition and indeed in the authority of authority itself. As a young scholar I conceived it my duty to learn what had been written, to wade through many commentaries and lecturae. Ultimately I learned not only to value the rare acuity of the fourteenth-century commentator Benvenuto da Imola or the acerbic wit of Ludovico Castelvetro in the sixteenth century but also how to learn from even the most repetitive and least original contributions—which involved less attention to the content of what was said, which had usually been said before, than to the fact of these commentaries’ existence. This authority-laden exegetical tradition taught me that a poet who takes God as his guarantor, like the poet of the Commedia, could generate a commentary tradition, and then exert a pull on his commentators not so dissimilar from that of the Bible. I responded by wanting to study and understand the modalities of how Dante went about constructing an authorial voice that could exert such control, a response that took me first in the direction of intertextuality in Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘‘Comedy’’ and then of narrative theory in The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante.1

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

2

As the years went by I became ever more actively interested in understanding the cultural ground that produced not only Dante himself but also the interaction between Dante and his readers. The commentary tradition to the Commedia is an interactive cultural phenomenon that will repay greater study. There are many questions we might ask: for instance, when Dante omits names from his narratives, as in the story of Francesca in Inferno 5, which names only one protagonist in the celebrated adulterous triangle, and that one only by her Christian name, does he expect commentators to fill in the blanks? Sticking with Inferno 5, we might also wonder: when Dante has Francesca say ‘‘Caina attende chi a vita ci spense’’ (Caina awaits the one who took our life) (Inf. 5.107),2 is he deliberately building in the need for commentators who will tell readers that Caina is the zone of lower hell reserved for traitors of family? The first-time reader of Inferno 5 could conceivably have the classical erudition to know who Minos and Dido and the other classical figures in the canto are, and could perhaps—if Dante’s contemporaries—have knowledge of Francesca and her scandal and murder, but no reader could have known what Caina is, since it is part of the textual world that Dante invents. This is one of Dante’s subliminal strategies for constructing authority: he treats his fictional otherworld as though real by dropping a proper name—this time Caina, later Malebolge3 —into the narrative without explanation. It is subliminal in the sense that it has gone unremarked. Commentators jumped in to gloss Caina as they jumped in to furnish the absent names of Francesca’s husband and lover brother-in-law, but they did not comment on the underlying strategy of being compelled to gloss a fictional place as though it were real. The Commedia’s authority is centered on its truth claims, again a culturally fractious issue that raises the question of the reader’s religious beliefs. There are complex cultural factors indisposing Italian scholars from objectivity regarding the Commedia’s truth claims: either, as believers, they are incapable of taking Dante’s prophetic pretensions at face value, since such claims can only be properly made by real (biblical) prophets; or, as lapsed believers, and frequently converts to a militant secularism, they do not want to. At the same time, a very Italian cultural willingness to accommodate the idea of fiction (along with a Catholic willingness to accommodate commentators and glossators, the students of the Decretals whom Dante so scorns) was perhaps also a factor in the persistent view of Dante as poet rather than truth-teller. This willingness has abetted critical confusion by positing

Reading Against the Grain

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an unnecessary either/or between poet and truth-teller that has persisted to this day. Dante’s readers have, on the whole, always been able and willing to distinguish between a poet and a prophet, and they have categorized him as a poet. In fact, for all that Dante’s early commentators felt the need to protect their poet from the charge of heresy by insisting on allegory and devaluing his truth claims, it is worth noting that Dante never succeeded in eliciting the attention from the fourteenth-century Italian Church that in our times the novelist Salman Rushdie elicited from the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Hoping to persuade the Ayatollah to take his text less seriously, Rushdie pointed to its artifactuality, but the Iranian mullah held that manipulations of narrative voice and other rhetorical techniques offer an author no protective veil. This is not to say that the fourteenth-century Italian Church was not capable of harsh responses. In 1327, six years after Dante’s death, the Italian astrologer, mathematician, and physician, Cecco d’Ascoli, was burned at the stake. But Cecco did not have the cover of being a great poet, a supreme deployer of narrative voice and fictional tropes. Rather he was an astrologer and medical doctor who used the means of narrative verse in L’Acerba to propogate his views. In ‘‘Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition,’’ I argue that Dante, who considered himself not a decretalist but a new St. John, wanted to be taken more seriously as a prophet and visionary than Italian culture was prepared to take him: he saw himself as a poet, yes, but also as a teller of truth, a combination that was difficult for his cultural milieu to accept then, and remains difficult to accept today. Interestingly, and a further reflection of the workings of the Italian cultural imaginary, the canny insertion of a compelling secular story line into the Commedia’s secolare commento—the centuries-long commentary tradition that is the backbone of the Commedia’s reception— could also command acritical acceptance: this is the case, for instance, of Boccaccio’s novelistic rewriting of Dante’s story of Francesca in Inferno 5. Picked up by subsequent commentators, the melodramatic tale of the great raconteur has achieved canonical status and has utterly contaminated the reception of the canto. In Boccaccio’s tale Francesca’s free agency, which is what is most at stake for Dante (making Dante, by the way, quite progressive from the perspective of gender, as I show in ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender,’’ where I also discuss the commentary tradition and Boccaccio’s wholesale infiltration of it), is put aside: she is effectively innocent

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 4

of any misdeed, since her father deceives her into wedlock with the ugly Gianciotto through the use of the handsome Paolo as a proxy for his brother. The active cultivation of Boccaccio’s romance by commentators who repeat his story to this day is a good example of the sometimes willful nature of the exegetical tradition: when a good (love) story is involved, more austere versions of the tale will be eclipsed. Dante is a great poet of silence—Francesca’s ‘‘quel giorno piu` non vi leggemmo avante’’ (that day we read no more) (Inf. 5.138) is speech devoted to closing off the avenues of speech—whose haunting ellipses have been systematically filled in by a commentary tradition that craves a voyeuristic level of color and detail denied it by their poet. A tabloid-like voyeurism not infrequently seems to drive the Italian critical tradition. Most startlingly, Petrarch’s extremely austere version of his own life and love story as chastely ‘‘narrated’’ in his lyric sequence (known as the Canzoniere but named by him Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [Vernacular Fragments]) was rewritten by commentators who—despite the existence of a manuscript authored and authorized by the author himself—added the rubrics ‘‘in vita di Madonna Laura’’ and ‘‘in morte di Madonna Laura’’ as headings to the two parts of the poetry collection. In this way narrative mechanisms explicitly relating to the life and death of Laura that are not part of the author’s vision are imported into the text by the commentators. Just when a little respect for authority would have come in handy, then, other forces gained the upper hand. It shocked me that Petrarch’s own authorial wishes were overwritten first by the need to craft a dramatic narrative of the poet’s life that could more easily be parsed and digested by his readers (in his edition of 1514, Bembo, who possessed the autograph manuscript, moved the beginning of part 2 of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta from canzone 264, where it had been placed by Petrarch, to sonnet 267, the first to proclaim Laura dead, thus accommodating the already existing in vita/in morte rubrics of previous editors), and then by an overwhelming—almost ‘‘religious’’— sense of obligation to a tradition whose accretions could not be altered. The tenacity of the tradition is such that, even after Mestica moved the beginning of part 2 back to canzone 264 in his 1896 edition, Carducci and Ferrari do not ‘‘dare’’ to follow him in their edition of 1899: ‘‘Non osammo seguirlo [Mestica], tenuti dal rispetto alla quasi religiosa consuetudine’’ (We did not dare to follow him [Mestica], held by respect for a custom of almost religious proportions).4 Petrarch

Reading Against the Grain 5

invented the lyric sequence because as a genre it allowed him to engage metaphysical realities: the Self-in-Love really interests him only as the Self-in-Love-in-Time. As a result he deliberately set out to achieve the tenuous and opaque narrativity that is this genre’s hallmark, a narrativity I examine in detail in ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.’’ The audience’s desire for vivid and dramatic narrative trumps Petrarch’s metaphysical quest. The dialectic between a strong and austere metaphysical bent and an elegiac desire to cherish and caress the things of earth, embodied and historical, is, it seems to me, the abiding characteristic of the Italian cultural imaginary. The anti-metaphysical is beautifully expressed by the words of the Prince in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel, Il Gattopardo: ‘‘Potremo magari preoccuparci per i nostri figli, forse per i nipotini; ma al di la` di quanto possiamo sperare di accarezzare con queste mani non abbiamo obblighi’’ (We can maybe worry for our children, for our grandchildren, but beyond what we can hope to caress with these hands we have no obligations).5 But the metaphysical trait is also supremely present, and not just in overtly theological works like Dante’s: the hero of Lampedusa’s novel is an amateur astronomer who spends much of life gazing upward at the stars. A dialectically composed trait, which I have dubbed ‘‘una metafisica artigianale’’—an artisanal metaphysics6 —there is a tendency to flatten it toward one or the other of its two components in considerations of Italian culture, much as Dante is flattened into either poeta or theologus. I believe that in this sense Dante and the critical tradition he has spawned are profoundly reflective of Italian culture as a whole. The degree to which I believe that Dantean philology and literary history reflect Italy and her travails will be apparent to the reader of the essay ‘‘Editing Dante’s Lyrics and Italian Cultural History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca . . . Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis.’’ Italian culture is somewhat heavy—pesante—in its attention to authority and its reflexive genuflections to the past. At the same time, conventionality is not a feature of the great Italian poets and writers I discuss here. From Guinizzelli’s willingness to challenge God on the subject of the beauty of ladies to Cavalcanti’s radical distrust in any comforting belief system, from Dante’s appropriation of God’s perspective to the imaginative freedom that allows Petrarch to make Laura alive after she is dead: these authors share a genuine iconoclasm,


a lightness (leggerezza), in Calvino’s happy expression. Calvino is borrowing from Boccaccio’s description of Cavalcanti in Decameron 6.9, where Guido leaps over a tomb and evades his tormentors ‘‘sı` come colui che leggerissimo era’’ (as one who was very light). This lightness—‘‘l’agile salto improvviso del poeta-filosofo che si solleva sulla pesantezza del mondo’’ (the agile sudden leap of the poet-philosopher who lifts himself above the heaviness of the world)—which Calvino takes as his hopeful symbol for our present millennium, is also an invigorating emblem for the Italian cultural dialectic.7 All these authors share an authentic lightness. Indeed, in many ways my long resistance to thinking of myself as an ‘‘Italianist’’ (as a young scholar, I self-identified as a ‘‘medievalist’’) has mutated into a desire to be an Italianist whose mission is to free these authors from the heavy weight of traditional encrustations and restore them to their most authentic— ‘‘light’’—selves. The vehemence of my response to Domenico De Robertis’s edition of Dante’s lyrics certainly reflects my sense that the eminent philologist has reconsigned Dante to the tradition from which, if anything, it is our job to wrest him. Many times while traveling in Italy I have had the opportunity to speak with young people whose reaction when I have told them I am a Dante scholar—a dantista—has been a variant of ‘‘Dante, what a bore!’’ Because I believe in learning from the reception of a text—in order then to ‘‘unlearn’’ it and to see more clearly the warpings produced by time—I have meditated at length on this response and have come to the conclusion that it is an understandable position vis-a`-vis an author who has been systematically appropriated by both church and state. The Dante whom I know—nonconformist and intellectually independent to a fault—has been tamed and made ‘‘boring’’ by centuries of institutional appropriation: he has been submerged both by nationalism, which has used him as an emblem of the coherence and unity of a state that was for centuries fragmented and incoherent, and by the Catholic Church, which has used him as a conduit for its official dogma. This cultural appropriation, which has little interest in Dante’s personal theological vision—a theological vision that, as I reconstruct it in ‘‘Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell,’’ is made from disparate cultural elements both high and low, from religious opinions both orthodox and not—can be glimpsed for instance in the article ‘‘Inferno’’ in the Enciclopedia Cattolica, where there are citations from Inferno 3 mixed in with the theology of St. Thomas.8 Reading this article, one would never guess the heterodoxy


of Dante’s inventio in Inferno 3, which features an utterly idiosyncratic vestibule of hell to house two groups not recognized by theologians, the neutral angels who took no side in Lucifer’s rebellion and human souls who did not commit themselves fully to good or to evil. Suggesting that commitment even to evil is preferable to no commitment at all, Vergil tells us that these creatures are accepted neither in heaven nor in hell: ‘‘Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli, / ne´ lo profondo inferno li riceve’’ (The heavens drive them out in order not to be less beautiful, nor does deep hell receive them) (Inf. 3.40–41). Generations of Italians do not know that Dante is profoundly heterodox in his religious opinions! In his papal encyclical In praeclara summorum of 30 April 1921, published for the sixth centenary of Dante’s death, Pope Benedict XV praises Dante for accepting ‘‘Sacred Scripture with perfect docility’’ and urges that he ‘‘may be for the pupils the teacher of Christian doctrine.’’9 It can hardly be surprising that under these circumstances Italy’s youth do not love their greatest poet. They revere him, but they do not love him. Italy’s greatest poet is more appreciated by young readers outside of Italy than within her, a fact that suggests a profound loss: the icon to national unity and Christian certainty was bought at the cost of authentic cultural patrimony and identity. Italians should know that if there is a spirit that disdains conventions and smug certitudes it is Dante’s, the poet who questions God’s justice right up to the threshold of the beatific vision. Dante does not simply accept things as they are. Rather, he places adult virtuous pagans in limbo despite there being no theological justification for such a placement (theologians placed only unbaptized infants in limbo, the Hebrew righteous having been freed from limbo by Christ’s harrowing of hell). In heaven he is still struggling against the injustice of damning a virtuous person who happens to be born outside of the bounds of Christianity, chronologically in the case of the virtuous pagans of antiquity, or geographically in the case of Dante’s contemporaries who live ‘‘on the banks of the Indus’’ (Par. 19.70–71). This is the Dante that we must give back to Italian readers for whom he has been domesticated and tamed beyond all recognition. * * * The essays in this volume were published over a twenty-two-year span, from 1983 to 2005, although the majority—twelve of the sixteen—belong to the period after the publication of The Undivine


Comedy in 1992. Collectively this work deals with the literary culture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, especially in the figures of its lyric poets and its ‘‘three crowns’’: Dante (1265–1321), Petrarch (1304–74), and Boccaccio (1313–75). The volume leads off with the important contributions of Dante’s thirteenth-century Italian lyric precursors in ‘‘Dante and the Lyric Past,’’ featuring the Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini, the Tuscan Guittone d’Arezzo, the Bolognese Guido Guinizzelli, and the Florentine Guido Cavalcanti, but also others not well known outside of the Italian scholarly community. These poets played a key role in shaping the cultural and ideological context from which the Commedia would later spring, a context to which I allude in the heading ‘‘A Philosophy of Desire.’’ The first three essays in this volume establish this context. One of the lyric poets in question is Dante himself, whose own lyric past is in my view a largely untapped aquifer for understanding the Commedia. Dante’s lyric poems are truly the ideological wellsprings of his mature work, in ways that I explore here and will explore further in my commentary to these poems for the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli.10 Foremost among Dante’s lyrics in its ideological relevance to the Commedia is the mature canzone Doglia mi reca, whose philosophical depth has solicited much of my attention. ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire’’ use the lyric springboard to establish Dante as a poet of desire in a holistic paradigm that embraces not only Doglia mi reca and other lyrics but also the extraordinary parable of life’s journey as a ladder of increasing desires—from an apple, to a little bird, to beautiful clothing, to a horse, to a woman, to wealth, and then to greater and greater wealth— that Dante outlines in his prose treatise Convivio, in a passage that I read as a template for the Commedia. This paradigm, which reaches back to Dante’s lyric origins and forward to the Commedia’s Ulyssean thematic of desire as transgression, is grounded theoretically in my book The Undivine Comedy, to which the essay ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`’’ furnishes a prehistory that is then further elaborated in ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context.’’ Not coincidentally, the Convivio’s incremental ladder of desire and the philosophy—and poetics—of desire to which it is anchored is invoked also in ‘‘Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell,’’ which treats the philosophical and theological antecedents of Dante’s paradigm.


Dante’s interaction with other traditions—hence ‘‘multiculturalism’’—has been an abiding interest of mine, going back to my first book, Dante’s Poets, which considers the significance of all the poets (classical as well as vernacular, epic as well as lyric) whom Dante places in his afterworld. When I use ‘‘multicultural’’ to refer to the eclectic fusion of intellectual and ideological traditions deriving from different times and places, although current usage of the term refers almost exclusively to historical co-presence and interaction of widely various ethnic communities, I do so deliberately, in order to suggest that Dante’s ‘‘vertical’’ syncretism is just as radical in its own time and place as the ‘‘horizontal’’ variety we practice today. I strongly believe that Dante’s interactions with classical culture are remarkably prehumanist, in ways that have profound implications for a historiography that has traditionally placed Dante at the ‘‘end of the Middle Ages’’ and Petrarch at the ‘‘beginning of the Renaissance.’’ Moreover, as I have already suggested, Dante’s heterodox and problematized thinking on the subject of who will be saved and who will be damned operates horizontally as well—along a geographical axis in the world as he knew it: his concern for justice embraces not only the saved pagans revealed with great fanfare in Paradiso 20, but also the ‘‘Ethiopian’’ who will be saved when many Christians will be damned (Par. 19.109–11). This is absolutely not to say that Dante was immune from the blind spots of his time or that his poem is without historical stain: for a painful demonstration of a deep stain, we need only read Sylvia Tomasch’s discussion of ‘‘Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew.’’11 Tomasch’s use of the The Undivine Comedy in her essay exemplifies what that book is most fundamentally about: I was trying to create a framework of readerly resistance that would allow us to get beyond the Commedia’s masterful self-presentation, and it was deeply gratifying to me—as someone who has not written on the ethnic communities of the Commedia (in the case of the Jews an absent community, since, as Tomasch writes, ‘‘the whole of the Commedia does not include even one postbiblical Jew’’)—to learn from another scholar who used that programmatic resistance to go in directions that I certainly did not explicitly foresee.12 There is no doubt that Dante took pains to contend with—and felt pain with respect to—the historical difference that is embedded in the past, and specifically in classical culture. There is, in my opinion, much more work to be done on this topic. I still strongly endorse what I wrote in ‘‘Arachne, Argus, and St. John: Transgressive Art in


Dante and Ovid’’ in 1989: ‘‘I am concerned that our insistence on Dante’s corrections of classical antiquity, which began as an attempt to replace impressionistic critical enthusiasms with a more rigorous assessment of the poem’s intertextuality, now risks binding the text’s paradoxes in a straitjacket of medieval orthodoxy that is every bit as confining and impoverishingly unilateral.’’ In this volume, my contributions to this ongoing discussion are found under the heading ‘‘Christian and Pagan Intertexts,’’ which is intended to pick up from ‘‘Medieval Multiculturalism’’ and to suggest again the indiscriminate mixing of cultural and ideological programs—past and present, high and low, pagan and Christian—that is Dante’s specific hallmark. The classical tradition and Dante’s relation to it are explored in the essays ‘‘Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431– 433 and Inferno 5.1–24),’’ ‘‘Q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question,’’ and ‘‘Arachne, Argus, and St. John’’ (whose very title signals my early interest in the fusion of classical with Christian intertexts). The first two situate Vergilian intertextual issues in a narratological frame, probing the enterprise of writing a true fiction against the backdrop of writing the great testament to the lacrimae rerum, and the third considers Dante’s Ovidian intertextuality within the context of the visionary tradition and what I believe to be Dante’s assessment of Ovid as in some deep way, mutatis mutandis, a visionary comrade. I conclude this last essay by noting that while Dante’s use of Vergil diminishes over the course of the Commedia, his use of Ovid increases: ‘‘The book that does justice to Dante’s escalating use of Ovid as the poet of transgression and metamorphosis in all senses, from the sexual to the supreme sense of trasumanar, has yet to be written.’’ This sentence, which I wrote at the time of putting together this volume, reflects my mature convictions that 1) Ovid is insufficiently appreciated as a philosopher-poet who probed all boundaries, all identities, all comings into being and goings from it, and that 2) Dante was a great reader of Ovid who did understand him in precisely this way, an understanding that is retrievable from his systematic use of Ovid throughout Paradiso, culminating in the extraordinary image of Neptune’s amazement at looking up and seeing the shadow of the first ship on the hitherto unsullied surface of the sea. Reinstating Dante into the history of the visionary tradition, rather than isolating him on a high-culture peak of literary and poetic greatness, has been a part of my critical effort since The Undivine


Comedy. The work I began there—the work of considering the structure and meaning of hell, purgatory, and paradise as historicized ideas and Dante’s specific place within and contribution to that history of ideas—is further developed in essays included here, especially in ‘‘Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell’’ and ‘‘Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition.’’ However, my commitment to using the visions, not in the way of nineteenth-century positivism and its search for Dante’s sources, but as a powerful lens for interpreting Dante’s choices, is apparent also in ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love),’’ where I use the treatment of lust in Tundale’s Vision and Thurkill’s Vision to show that Dante’s psychological handling of lust is anomalous. We have no way of understanding the cultural anomaly of Inferno 5 (or any other part of the Commedia for that matter) unless we place Dante’s choices within an enriched historical context. Some fraction of an enriched historical context for Inferno 5 and especially for the canto’s protagonist is what I tried to reconstruct in ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender,’’ an essay that grapples with the question of Francesca’s gender and what value to assign to it. The essays on gender in this volume are arranged in the order in which they were written (the last two contain much previously unpublished material). They constitute stepping stones in an argument, ultimately laid out in ‘‘Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax,’’ according to which the progressive strand of early Italian letters was constituted not by the beautiful, courtly, Platonizing poetry for which it is famous but by didactic, moralizing, and not always beautiful works that yet treat women as moral agents. To come to an appreciation of the progressive nature of obnoxiously paternalistic canzoni like Guittone’s Altra fiata and Dante’s Doglia mi reca I had to read against the grain of my own first responses: my marginal comment to Doglia mi reca from 1976 reads ‘‘Of all Dante’s lyrics, the most ‘medieval’ in its approach to women.’’ In ‘‘Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli),’’ I look in particular at canzoni in which Guittone and Dante address a female audience and instruct their women interlocutors, referred to by Dante as those beneath a head covering: ‘‘sotto benda.’’ A contemporary historical reference point is provided by Cecco d’Ascoli, who cites Dante’s ‘‘sotto benda’’ in order to mount a


scornful attack on Dante’s belief that women can be taught. On the spectrum between literature and history, ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini’’ is the most historical of these essays while ‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10),’’ which takes its point of departure from a proverb, is the most focused on decoding fourteenth-century rhetoric. But rhetoric and language are always already historicized, and history is imbricated with rhetoric and language (as exemplified in the Francesca essay by historians who cite Trecento commentators on the Commedia when glossing the vicissitudes of Italian factional politics), so the demarcation here is hardly clear. When I wrote my disparaging marginal note on Doglia mi reca, I still (being young and from a certain kind of almost romantically intellectual family background) reflexively assumed the superiority of the Platonizing current of Italian letters. As time passed, I came to appreciate more the empirical, and indeed I have come to see the mature Dante of the Paradiso as philosophically a unique blend of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic—empirical and mystical—elements. One of the tasks of future Dante scholarship, in my view, will be to untie the Paradiso’s intellectual knots one by one, revealing each one to be a unique and utterly idiosyncratic blend of philosophical elements. Most importantly, I have come to see Dante as profoundly not dualistic, which may be why he was able to view women as interlocutors as well as emanations of the divine. Dante’s unified theory of desire has not fared well in the critical reception, perhaps because unified theories of desire seem in general to withstand with difficulty what seems to be an almost instinctive human reversion to moral Manichaeism. The particular local dualisms dear to dantisti—poeta versus theologus, amore corporale versus amore spirituale—will I hope one day be as outdated as a rigidly conceived body/soul dualism has become among cultural and religious historians of the Middle Ages.13 Similarly, another fundamental binary, woman/man, may turn out to have been more flexibly construed by Dante than we had supposed. Dualisms attract him—body versus soul, love versus intellect, Francis versus Dominic, Aristotelianism versus Neoplatonism, differentiation versus oneness, form versus content—precisely as that which requires integration, in a process that must be accomplished with nuance, detail, specificity, and difference preserved and intact. Dante’s poetic identity is founded on this double-pronged need: the need to uncover aporias and dualisms and the need to reconcile


them, through paradox and metaphor. One could say of Dante what he says of love in his canzone Doglia mi reca, that ‘‘to him was given the power to make one out of two’’: ‘‘e a costui [fu dato] di due poter un fare’’ (14). Reason and appetite are constants of our identities; the goal—and the challenge—is to keep them unified and aligned. Dante’s mature treatment of women tracks his mature conception of desire, which is not dualistic, for it is not appetite that is bad or good, but how we direct it. According to this viewpoint, desire is neither completely intellectualized nor completely subrational, but a continuum that embraces both extremes. By the same token, women for Dante are not located at one pole or the other, Beatrice or femmina balba, but are ultimately somewhere much more complex—and human—in between: Francesca, Pia, Piccarda. If we use women as a gauge with respect to Petrarch, we find him to be less open and more threatened, as befits a poet whose view of desire is fundamentally dualistic. Not surprisingly (although to my knowledge never previously observed), the Platonizing poetry of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta does not embrace moral poems that address women like those of Guittone and Dante. Petrarch’s anxiety toward women is perfectly expressed in his regressive traslatio of Boccaccio’s story of Griselda. Nor is he truly a love poet, as Dante is; Petrarch is fundamentally a metaphysical poet, directing his eros and yearning toward a dimension in which the dualisms that beset him and that he cannot heal will be healed by a higher power. The essay in this volume that is least historical and most philosophical in orientation is, appropriately, on Petrarch. Metaphysical themes are accessed through formal structures by the poets I hold dear, and in the section ‘‘Ordering the Macrotext: Time and Narrative’’ I try to illuminate some of the ways in which this was done. The early Italian tradition boasts every possible variation of the dialectic between lyric and narrative, language versified and not versified: from the uncollected early lyrics, to sonnet cycles and full-fledged sonnet narratives like Il fiore, to the use of octaves deployed as narrative by Boccaccio in Filostrato, to the great narrative verse of the Commedia and the modern lyric sequence of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Which is not to mention prose works that contain lyrical islands: Dante’s treatise Convivio takes the form of prose commentary to lyric canzoni; even the Decameron, one of the world’s greatest testaments to the power of prose, concludes each Day with a lyric ballata.


Much of my work on this tradition has involved finding ways to understand the significance of these forms, the deep meaning of the lyric/ narrative contaminatio. My tools for getting a handle on this problematic have been Aristotle on time, Augustine on time and language, Boethius on eternity, Aquinas on angels and discursive thinking, Dante on the epistemological differences between humans and angels, and Paul Ricoeur’s use of Aristotle and Augustine in his formulation of a modern ‘‘dechronologized narrative.’’14 Using these philosophers, I forged an approach that led me from Petrarch in 1989’s ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’’ to reading the Paradiso as an example of what Ricoeur calls ‘‘dechronologized’’ narrative in The Undivine Comedy and thence back to the ‘‘antinarrative’’ of the Vita nuova as a forerunner to the Paradiso in 1994’s ‘‘ ‘Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine’: Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova.’’ I continue to use this approach in a book I am currently writing on Petrarch as a metaphysical poet.15 In retrospect, it is clear that these are the tools that have helped me to conceptualize and engage with the metaphysical strand of Italian culture and thought. The formal contaminatio of lyric and narrative textuality reflects, I believe, the deep dialectic between metaphysical and historical, between the astral and the artisanal, in Italian culture. Already in the Vita nuova the tension between the lyrics and the prose that surrounds them is the tension between the impulse to evade historicity and the impulse to channel and control it. All products of the human epistemological condition—of what Dante in Paradiso 29.81 calls concetto diviso—are themselves divisible, marked by their existence in time. No verbal artifact is immune from division/distinctio/difference: from time, sequence, and number. Much of the lyrical enterprise could be viewed as a search for indemnity from time; the lyric is a verbal artifact wherein meter, rhyme, and metaphoric density work to simulate the illusion of a protected and extratemporal dimension. When Dante decides, early on in the Vita nuova, to subject a sonnet to division, he is deciding on a convention—which he later calls divisione—whose avowed purpose is to lay bare the poem’s significance and whose more salient purpose is to divest the poem of any residual temporal immunity. He confronts head-on (this is another of Dante’s signature characteristics as a poet and intellectual) the tension between metaphysical and historical that is also at the core of the Commedia’s textuality.


It should be clear that my work is a testament to the idea that there is no such thing as ‘‘mere form.’’ Here, too, I can see traces of a response to my formation, since Italian critical language is full of disparagements of ‘‘mere form,’’ an intriguing attitude in the context of a culture that has frequently been viewed by other cultures as overcommitted to beauty but lacking in substance and grit. Form in my use is Aristotelian. The form is the essence: it is not less deep than metaphysics; it is not abstractable as surface value. My critical blazon is perfectly expressed by Beatrice, who, speaking of paradise, says ‘‘e` formale ad esto beato esse’’ (it is essential to this blessed state) (Par. 3.79), in a phrase where ‘‘e` formale’’ means ‘‘e` essenziale’’: ‘‘it is formal’’ to this state signifies ‘‘it is essential’’ to this state. To make this point more exquisitely, moreover, Beatrice puns, moving from that which is essential or intrinsic to being in ‘‘e` formale’’ to ‘‘esse,’’ the infinitive of ‘‘to be,’’ being itself. To be the form of some thing is to be the thing itself. Thus, the ‘‘order,’’ as he called it, that Petrarch devised as the form of his lyrics (he used the notation ‘‘transcripsi in ordine’’ to mark and cancel a poem he had transcribed from a notebook into the ‘‘order’’ of the Fragmenta) is its essence—it is essential to its being, è formale al suo esse—not a merely superficial trapping of its content. It is the form that renders time in its metaphysical reality, and that comes closest to expressing the deep meaning of Petrarch’s opus. By the same token, Dante’s ideological positions are so powerful because they are expressed through what in The Undivine Comedy I call ‘‘the ideology of the form,’’ not merely as content. Boccaccio, too, whose Decameron might be considered the least formally wrought of these works, invests his ethically and socially (more than metaphysically) inclined meditation on human existence in a complex formal structure, ‘‘The Wheel of the Decameron.’’ And it is Boccaccio who expressly conflates the human fight against entropy with the elaborate formal structure of his masterpiece by having Pampinea declare that the storytellers must organize themselves because ‘‘le cose che sono senza modo non possono lungamente durare’’ (things that are without a definite form cannot last for long) (Decameron, Intro.1.95). Through the verb durare (to endure, to last), we can track an Italian ‘‘poetics of entropy’’: from Dante’s robust embrace of a humanistic duration on the one hand, in ‘‘di cui la fama ancor nel mondo dura’’ (whose fame still endures in the world) (Inf. 2.59) and ‘‘col nome che piu` dura e piu` onora’’ (with the name that most lasts


16

and most honors) (Purg. 21.85), and on the other hand his Augustinian indictment of those mortal things whose fate is to ‘‘venire a corruzione, e durar poco’’ (come to corruption, and last but little) (Par. 7.126), to Petrarch’s aesthetic lament for human life as the venue in which ‘‘cosa bella mortal passa, et non dura’’ (the beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure) (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 248.8). Prior to these authors we find Cavalcanti’s psychological usage in the canzone Io non pensava che lo cor giammai, where he feels his soul tremble from love ‘‘sı` come quella che non po` durare’’ (as one that cannot last) (21). Of all these expressions of entropy and our struggle against it, the one most invested in the social contract is Boccaccio’s ‘‘le cose che sono senza modo non possono lungamente durare.’’ I strongly believe—and this is another pillar of my critical praxis— that there is very little that modern philosophers and theorists have come up with that great authors of the past did not comprehend and address in their work. With respect to time and narrative, for instance, Ricoeur begins his two tomes with a chapter on Aristotle and a chapter on Augustine, because these two philosophers formulated the key insights on which he builds. Dante read Aristotle—he cites Aristotle’s definition of time as ‘‘numero di movimento, secondo prima e poi’’ (number of movement, according to before and after) in Convivio 4.2.6—and he read Augustine’s Confessions, with its great meditation on time and language. The ideas of modern theory are important to keep us as critics alive in terms of the kinds of questions we bring to the texts we read, as a dialogue among ourselves in the here and now, but not as that which we must ‘‘apply’’ to texts of the past in order to formulate questions of which their authors were unaware. There is, in my opinion, a tendency to sequester the modern period and to assume for it a greater conceptual novelty than it merits. History being the unmarked continuum that it is, our attempts to ‘‘discretize the continuum,’’ as scientists put it in a metaphor that I borrow out of proper context, are bound to be subject to endless pushings of the (invented) boundaries forward and back and the privileging of our own time is to be expected. Let me say for the record, however, that in my experience the great texts of the early Italian tradition can be trusted to generate every kind of question pertinent to the human condition, and that we rarely surprise a Dante, a Petrarch, or a Boccaccio with a question that he did not ask himself. In all these essays I have tried to achieve an enriched historical context: in the history of ideas, of literary forms, of human events. My


17

path to an enriched historical context has been a textual one: I have striven to take the text seriously, even literally, and to disregard the commentary material that tells us, implicitly and at times explicitly, not to take what the text says at face value. This most primary of my critical tenets—to which I came intuitively, even before I knew I had critical tenets, and probably through my distaste for authority—has been a hallmark of all my writing. Going back to my first book, certainly the idea that we should take seriously the Commedia’s negative remarks about Vergil and the Aeneid, remarks that are airbrushed out of the commentary tradition with its unrelenting focus on the pilgrim’s filial piety, was key to Dante’s Poets. As a narratological study of the Commedia that deliberately privileges the ‘‘how’’ over the ‘‘what’’ that has dominated Dante criticism, The Undivine Comedy does nothing but take the text seriously: thus, the overlooked prosaic third verse of the Paradiso, ‘‘in una parte piu` e meno altrove,’’ became the cornerstone of my reading of the third canticle as the dialectical struggle between on the one hand the need for (Neoplatonic) oneness and similitude and on the other the equally pressing need for (Aristotelian) differentiation and individuality. And now more than ever, as I work on a commentary to Dante’s lyrics, I find that taking what the poems say at face value reveals a Pandora’s box of material that has simply never been noticed. There is for instance a wealth of social concerns embedded in stil novo poems that have been read only in terms of their ideology of love. To give but one example from volume 1 of the commentary, the two sonnets in Vita nuova xxii/13, in which Dante imagines a dialogue between himself and the ladies who are mourning the death of Beatrice’s father, show us a Dante at odds with the restrictive social conventions of Florentine mourning practices: he desires a level of participation— including participation in the act of weeping—that is inappropriate for him both as a nonintimate and as a man. These sonnets, Voi che portate la sembianza umile and Se’ tu colui c’ hai trattato sovente, testify to a poet who views Florentine society with an almost anthropological interest and also to a poet whose desire to transgress encompasses not only the poetic boundaries to which we are accustomed but social and gender boundaries as well. These reflections, based on just two, not particularly acclaimed, sonnets, suggest the massive work of social and historical contextualization that lies before us.16 With respect to all the texts discussed in this volume but perhaps the Commedia in particular, an enriched historical context and a


18

deeper understanding of its place within various histories—the history of visions, the history of the afterlife, the history of monasticism, the history of Aristotelianism, the history of Neoplatonism, the history of women, the history of gender, the history of Italy—is the great task that lies before us. One of the results of detheologizing—the work I attempt to do in The Undivine Comedy—is that the path is made clear for historicizing: once we make the effort to read the text not through the overdetermined theologized hermeneutic structures manufactured for us by Dante, we are in a position to see much more. Thus, if we take Francesca out of the hermeneutic structure provided by Dante’s hell, we can pose different sorts of questions to the extraordinarily rich text of Inferno 5, in effect seeing a text we have looked at many times before through different eyes, because we look at it through a different prism generated by history. Similarly, thinking about the Commedia in the context of the history of visions gave me new insight into Dante and the classical tradition, into Dante’s humanism. Dante does not differ from his humble visionary colleagues in the inclusion of contemporaries in his afterlife, or in the inclusion of popes or kings who are subject to retroactive visionary sanction; these are actions for which there are precedents. There is, however, no precedent for Dante’s inclusion of figures from classical antiquity. The history of visions thus gave me a new prism through which to perceive Dante’s early brand of humanism, his passionate commitment to classical culture. When scholars of the Renaissance, in search of periodicity and the demarcation between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, point to Dante’s placement of Aristotle and other pagans in limbo and therefore in hell as an emblem of his still being ‘‘medieval’’ in orientation, they miss the significance of his choosing limbo, a space that theologians reserved for the Hebrew righteous and then, after the harrowing of hell, only for unbaptized infants. But Dante goes even further, inventing within the already anomalous choice of limbo a special dispensation, including light, for the great pagans of antiquity (and selected moderns, such as Saladin and Averroes), a special status that gives rise to the pilgrim’s query, ‘‘questi chi son c’hanno cotanta onranza, / che dal modo de li altri li diparte’’ (who are these who have so much honor that it sets them apart from the way of the others?) (Inf. 4.74–75). Dante’s theologically unjustifiable move to sequester the great pagans from the unmitigated reality of hell by placing them in a specially configured section of limbo—and


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indeed by placing them in limbo at all—is of great cultural significance: It speaks to his humanism. We need to revise our notions of periodicity to understand better both the construction of the Italian imaginary and Dante’s role within that historical process. Dante belongs to a specifically Italian historiography which is breathtakingly compressed: the ‘‘Summa of the Middle Ages’’ and the ‘‘Father of the Renaissance’’ were literally walking our planet at the same time. Again, history is a powerful clarifier: if we put Dante’s limbo in historical context, considering the history of the set of concepts aggregated under the rubric ‘‘limbo,’’ we see how anomalous Dante’s limbo really is, despite a commentary tradition that makes little mention of this anomaly, for the history of limbo does not include pagans—and it also does not conjure a lovely greensward bathed in light for the great poets and thinkers of the past. Thus, the point is not so much that Dante put most (but not all) of his pagans in hell (he also was anomalous in saving pagans—in other words, in putting them in paradise), but rather that classical antiquity exerted such a pull on his imagination that he felt compelled to engage with it despite the absence of theological authority or visionary precedent. A distinguishing feature of Italian literary culture, most likely a significant factor in its precocious intellectual maturity and sophistication—not cynicism, not heaviness, but a quality of intellectual joy, a quality of being born like Athena full-grown from the head of Zeus—is the early value put on classical antiquity by Dante. This value and its implicit humanism is stunningly captured by the image on this volume’s cover: the Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo’s fifteenthcentury illustration of Paradiso 33.17 Here we see the sustained magisterial presence of the female teacher, in itself a telling declaration of Beatrice’s importance for Dante’s poem, for the fact that she is no longer at the pilgrim’s side in canto 33 does not succeed in eliminating her from Giovanni’s—and our—experience of the canto. Most remarkably, Giovanni unpacks the image in which Dante compares his wonder to that of Neptune upon looking up and seeing the shadow of the first ship, Jason’s Argo. The result is that the icon of the Virgin Mary, emblem for the fervent prayer to the Virgin uttered by Bernard of Clairvaux with which Paradiso 33 begins (and for which Giovanni created a separate illustration), is on the same visual plane as the ship Argo and Neptune with his trident. Giovanni di Paolo places classical antiquity on an ancient green sea literally alongside a radiant Virgin,


and in so doing he captures a great truth about Dante’s poem—and about Italian culture. Dante is not only present at the origins of Italian literary culture but, in ways that are still relevant today, he is the origin of Italian literary culture. * * * I would like to record my gratitude to Juliet Nusbaum, who as my editorial assistant worked with consistent graciousness, efficiency, and intelligence throughout this project. Fortuna smiled upon me yet again when she brought this book to Fordham; in particular, I would like to thank Helen Tartar, who illuminated the way with her unfailing editorial expertise and wisdom, and Robert Oppedisano, who warmed it with his committed and generous vision of a university press.

part i

A Philosophy of Desire

chapter 1

Dante and the Lyric Past

D ante is heir to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that

had its roots in the Provençal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfth-century southern France. The conventions of troubadour love poetry—based on the notion of the lover’s feudal service to ‘‘midons’’ (Italian, madonna), his lady, from whom he expects a ‘‘guerdon’’ (Italian, guiderdone), or reward—were successfully transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo. Palermo became the capital of the first group of Italian vernacular lyric poets, the so-called Sicilian School; the centralized imperial court did not offer a suitable venue for the transplantation of Provence’s contentious political poetry, which was left behind. The ‘‘leader’’ (Italian, caposcuola) of the Sicilian School was Giacomo da Lentini, most likely the inventor of the sonnet (while the Provençal canso was the model for the Italian canzone, the sonnet is an Italian, and specifically Sicilian, contribution to the various European lyric genres). Giacomo signs himself ‘‘the Notary,’’ referring to his position in the imperial government; this is the title Dante uses for him in Purgatorio 24, where the poet Bonagiunta is assigned the task of dividing the Italian lyric tradition between the old—represented by Giacomo, Guittone, and Bonagiunta himself—and the new: the avant-garde poets of the ‘‘dolce stil novo’’ or ‘‘sweet new style‘‘ (Purg. 24.57), as Dante retrospectively baptizes the lyric movement that he helped spearhead in his youth. Like Giacomo, the other Sicilian poets were in the main court functionaries: in the De vulgari eloquentia Guido delle Colonne is called ‘‘Judge of Messina,’’ while Pier della Vigna, whom Dante places among the suicides in hell, was Frederick’s chancellor and private secretary. Their moment in history coincides


with Frederick’s moment, and the demise of their school essentially coincides with the emperor’s death in 1250. At the heart of troubadour poetry is an unresolved tension between the poet-lover’s allegiance to the lady and his allegiance to God; the love-service owed the one inevitably comes into conflict with the love-service owed the other. Giacomo da Lentini renders the conflict with great clarity in this sonnet (Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire): Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire, com’io potesse gire in paradiso, al santo loco ch’aggio audito dire, u’ si mantien sollazzo, gioco e riso. Sanza mia donna non vi voria gire, quella c’ha blonda testa e claro viso, che´ sanza lei non poteria gaudere, estando da la mia donna diviso. Ma no lo dico a tale intendimento, perch’io peccato ci volesse fare; se non veder lo suo bel portamento e lo bel viso e ’l morbido sguardare: che lo mi teria in gran consolamento, veggendo la mia donna in ghiora stare. I have proposed in my heart to serve God, that I might go to paradise, to the holy place of which I have heard said that there are maintained pleasure, play, and laughter. Without my lady I do not wish to go, the one who has a blond head and a clear face, since without her I could not take pleasure, being from my lady divided. But I do not say this with such an intention, that I would want to commit a sin; but rather because I would want to see her beautiful comportment and her beautiful face and her sweet glance: for it would keep me in great consolation, to see my lady be in glory.1

Giacomo’s sonnet exemplifies the courtly dilemma of conflicted desire. In it, the poet deploys the considerable resources of the sonnet as a formal construct in such a way as to highlight and dramatize his theme, which is that he—like the sonnet itself—is ‘‘diviso’’ (8), divided in two. The Sicilian sonnet is divided into two parts, set off from each other by a change in rhyme: the octave rhymes ababab, and the sextet rhymes cdcdcd. While there are possible variations in the rhyme scheme of the sextet (it could be cdecde, for instance), there is always a switch at this point from the a and b rhymes to a new set of rhymes;

Dante and the Lyric Past 25

there is always, in other words, a cleavage, created by rhyme, between the first eight verses and the latter six. It is this cleavage that Io m’aggio posto exploits in such paradigmatic fashion. Giacomo has perfectly fused form and content: the divisions inherent in the sonnet form express the divisions experienced by the poet-lover, who is himself ‘‘diviso’’ in the octave’s last word. Moreover, subdivisions within the octave, divisible into two quatrains, and the sextet, divisible into two tercets (or, in this case, just as plausibly into three couplets), are also fully exploited in order to render the two poles of the poet-lover’s divided allegiance. As compared to the canzone, the lyric genre that allows for narrative development and forward movement, the sonnet’s compact fourteen-verse form epitomizes a moment, a thought, or a problematic by approaching it from two dialectical perspectives: in a classic Italian sonnet, an issue is posed in the octave, and in some way reconsidered or resolved in the sextet. Looking at Giacomo’s poem, we see that the first quatrain identifies one pole of the poet’s desire: he wants to serve God, to go to paradise. His yearning does not at this stage seem conflicted, and the entire first quatrain could be placed under the rubric ‘‘Dio’’: ‘‘Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire.’’ With hindsight we can see that the potential for conflict is already present in the fourth verse’s very secular—and very courtly—definition of paradise as a place that offers ‘‘sollazzo, gioco e riso’’: a trio lexically and morally associated not with the pleasures of paradise, but with the pleasures of the court. But the fact that there is an alternative pole of desire, an alternative claim on the lover’s fealty, is not made evident until we reach the second quatrain, which belongs to the ‘‘donna’’ as much as the first quatrain belongs to ‘‘Dio’’: ‘‘Sanza mia donna non vi voria gire.’’ Without her he does not want to go to paradise; the octave has neatly posed the problem with which the sextet must now deal. And in fact there is a sharp turn toward orthodoxy in the sextet’s first couplet, in the initial adversative ‘‘Ma,’’ and in the recognition that the lover’s stance harbors a potential for sin, ‘‘peccato’’; but a second adversative, ‘‘se non,’’ follows on the heels of the first, negating its negation and reestablishing the poet’s will to let the lady dominate. What follows is the listing of those literally ‘‘dominant’’ attributes (as in attributes pertaining to the domina) whose absence would render paradise intolerable, a concatenation of three adjective-plus-noun copulae that gains in momentum and power by being somewhat (in contrast to the otherwise relentlessly clipped syntactical standards of this poem) run on from


verse 11 to verse 12: ‘‘lo suo bel portamento / e lo bel viso e ’l morbido sguardare.’’ The lady is in the ascendant, and the poem concludes with a poetic resolution that makes the point that there is no ideological resolution to be had. Although the last verse brings together the two terms of the conflict (the lady and ‘‘glory,’’ or the lady and paradise), they are yoked in a kind of secularized beatific vision that affirms the poet-lover’s commitment not to ‘‘Dio,’’ but to the ‘‘donna’’: paradise is only desirable if it affords the opportunity to see ‘‘la mia donna in ghiora stare.’’ From Sicily the lyric moved north to the communes of Tuscany, where it was cultivated by poets like Bonagiunta da Lucca, Dante’s purgatorial poetic taxonomist, and Guittone d’Arezzo (d. 1294), the caposcuola of the Tuscan School. Although consistently reviled by Dante for his ‘‘municipal’’ language and excessively ornate and cumbersomely convoluted verse, Guittone set the standard for Tuscan poets to follow, or—in the case of Dante and his fellow practitioners of the ‘‘sweet new style’’—to refuse to follow. From a lexical and stylistic perspective, in fact, the new style is best characterized precisely in terms of its rejection of the rhetorical and stylistic norms popularized by Guittone, through a process of winnowing that generated a refined but limited lexical and stylistic range. A genuinely important poet who rewards study on his own terms (this somewhat defensive affirmation of Guittone’s worth is the result of centuries of Dante-inspired devalorization of the Aretine), Guittone is responsible for key innovations in the Italian lyric. Stylistically, his ornatus derives not just from the Sicilians, but also from first-hand appreciation of Provençal language, meter, and rhetoric. Very important, too, is the political dimension of his work; as a politically involved citizen of Arezzo, he is the first Italian poet to use the lyric as a forum for political concerns, in the tradition of the Provençal sirventes. And, perhaps most important for Dante, he experienced a religious conversion (becoming a member of the Frati Godenti circa 1265) that is reflected in his verse. Guittone’s poetry moves, by way of the so-called ‘‘conversion’’ canzone Ora parra` s’eo savero` cantare, from love poetry to moral and ethical poetry, and even to religious lauds in honor of St. Francis and St. Dominic. This is a view of Guittone’s poetic trajectory, it should be said, that was adopted by his contemporaries, who expressed it in a manuscript tradition that divides his verse according to the headings ‘‘Guittone’’ and ‘‘Frate Guittone.’’ Guittone is thus the first Italian


poet to trace in his career a trajectory like that of Dante’s (albeit without the epic dimension), and to embrace in his lyrics issues as diverse as the nature of love, in both its secular and divine manifestations, the moral code, with its virtues and vices, and the vicissitudes of Aretine and Florentine politics. Perhaps most significantly, Guittone’s thematic innovations are at the service of his bourgeois didacticism, his view of himself as a moral auctoritas, a teacher. It is this stance that particularly infuriates his younger rivals, not only Dante but also Guido Cavalcanti, who in the sonnet Da piu` a uno face un sollegismo scorns the notion of Guittone as a source of ‘‘insegnamento’’ (teaching). Ora parra` forcefully announces the transition from a poesis inspired by love to one driven by moral didacticism. In the canzone’s first two stanzas, Guittone strikes a blow at the inherited problem of the lover-poet’s conflicted allegiance, his oscillation between fealty to God and fealty to the lady. Guittone deals with the dilemma of the lover-poet’s dual allegiance by rejecting the courtly troubadour ethos and what he brands carnal love for God and moral virtue. He simply repudiates the courtly ethos, first by denying the courtly linkage between love and worth, especially poetic worth: Ora parra` s’eo savero` cantare e s’eo varro` quanco valer gia` soglio, poi che del tutto Amor fug[g]h’ e disvoglio, e piu` che cosa mai forte mi spare: ch’a om tenuto saggio audo contare che trovare—non sa ne´ valer punto omo d’Amor non punto; ma che digiunto—da verta` mi pare, se lo pensare—a lo parlare—sembra, che ’n tutte parte ove distringe Amore regge follore—in loco di savere: donque como valere po`, ne´ piacer—di guisa alcuna fiore, poi dal Fattor—d’ogni valor—disembra e al contrar d’ogni mainer’ asembra? Ma chi cantare vole e valer bene, in suo legno a nocchier Diritto pone e orrato Saver mette al timone Dio fa sua stella, e ’n ver Lausor sua spene: che´ grande onor ne´ gran bene no e` stato

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 28 acquistato—carnal voglia seguendo, ma promente valendo e astenendo—a vizi’ e a peccato; unde ’l sennato—apparecchiato—ognora de core tutto e di poder dea stare d’avanzare—lo suo stato ad onore no schifando labore: che´ gia` riccor—non dona altrui posare, ma ’l fa lungiare,—e ben pugnare—onora; ma tuttavia lo ’ntenda altri a misora. (Ora parra`, 1–30) Now it will appear if I know how to sing, and if I am worth as much as I was accustomed to be worth, now that I completely flee Love and do not want it, and more than anything else find it very hateful. I have heard it said by a man considered wise that a man not pierced by Love does not know how to write poetry and is worth nothing; but far from the truth this seems to me, if there is concord between thought and word, for in all parts where Love seizes madness is king, in place of wisdom. Therefore how can he have worth or please in any way at all, since from the Maker of all worth he diverges and to the contrary in every way he resembles? But he who wants to sing well and be worthy should place Justice in his ship as pilot, and put honored Wisdom at the helm, make God his star and place his hope in true Praise: for neither great honor nor great good have been acquired by following carnal desire, but by living as good men and abstaining from vice and from sin. Therefore the wise man must be prepared at all times with all his heart and power to advance his state to honor, not shunning toil; since indeed riches do not give anyone repose but rather distance it, and good striving brings honor, as long as one pursues it with measure.

This poem displays essential Guittonian traits. Stylistically, the syntax is anything but clear and limpid, and it is rendered even more convoluted by the complex rhyme scheme with its rimalmezzo, or rhyme in the center of the verse (marked by modern editors with open emdashes). Thematically, a bourgeois ethic comes into play, as the poet, following his rejection of the troubadour equation between Love and true worth, exhorts us to pursue civic morality and virtuous moderation. Guittone here recommends a life of abstinence from vice and willingness to toil; only thus can one advance one’s ‘‘state to honor’’ (stato ad onore [26]). The key to Guittone’s ethical thinking is ‘‘misora’’—


moderation—as we see at the end of the second stanza: ‘‘Good striving brings honor, as long as one pursues it with measure.’’ Moderation is the concept that allows Guittone to endorse a bourgeois ethic and still be morally secure. It allows him to deploy the verb acquistare, ‘‘to acquire,’’ in the extraordinary endorsement of a non-ascetic bourgeois life-style that we find in the formulation ‘‘aquistare gaudendo’’ (joyfully acquiring) from Guittone’s canzone of exile, Gente noiosa e villana (74). A life in which one can take pleasure in acquiring is part of what has been lost from Arezzo, declares Gente noiosa, which concludes with the poet looking forward to life in a community that allows him, unlike Arezzo, ‘‘to acquire worth and joy and material possessions’’ (pregi’ aquistando e solazzo ed avere [146]). For Guittone, the bourgeois ethic of aquistare gaudendo, tempered always by the moderation that precludes the slip into avarice, thus replaces the courtly paradigm put forth by Giacomo da Lentini. In lieu of courtly love, which he has redefined as carnal desire and consequently repudiated, Guittone proposes not monastic withdrawal but a life of civic engagement and joyful (and moderate) acquisition. This bourgeois ethic has important repercussions on the choices Guittone puts forward: although he tells us to reject carnal desire—which is what courtly love becomes when stripped of its sustaining ideology—he does not tell us (as recanting troubadours frequently did) to embrace monastic contemplation. The Guittonian ideal is fostered not in the regional courts of Provence or the imperial court of Palermo, but in the communal life of the emerging Tuscan mercantile class. Recommending a life of measured toil and measured gain, leavened by the pursuit of ‘‘honored Wisdom’’ (orrato Saver), Guittone seeks an honored position in the community and wisdom conceived in terms less metaphysical than practical and ethical. Our historical assessments of the various alliances that both bound these early Italian poets into schools and polarized them as rivals are not merely the product of an arbitrary need to order the unruly past; in the instance of the emerging Italian lyric, the record shows a keen— and frequently barbed—self-consciousness of such groupings on the part of the poets themselves. Thus, in a sonnet attributed to the Tuscan Chiaro Davanzati (Di penne di paone), a fellow poet, perhaps Bonagiunta, is accused of dressing himself in poetic finery stolen from the Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini. In Voi, ch’avete mutata la maniera, the same Bonagiunta will accuse Guido Guinizzelli, the Bolognese poet whom Dante hails as the father of the new style in Purgatorio 26,


of having altered love poetry for the worse, of having ‘‘changed the manner of elegant verses of love’’ (Voi, ch’avete mutata la maniera / de li plagenti ditti de l’amore).2 Considered a ‘‘Siculo-Tuscan’’ for his use of both Sicilian and Guittonian mannerisms, Bonagiunta is unhappy with the newfangled directions in which Guinizzelli is heading: he does not understand what the ‘‘wisdom of Bologna’’ (a reference to that city’s university, noted as a center of philosophical study) has to do with love poetry, and he accuses Guinizzelli of writing pretentious, obscure verse whose philosophical subtleties make it impossible to decode. For modern readers, who find Guittone’s rhetorical virtuosity so much more of a barrier than Guinizzelli’s modest importation of philosophy into poetry (Guinizzelli’s Al cor gentil is a long way from Cavalcanti’s hyperphilosophical Donna me prega), Bonagiunta’s critique may seem misdirected, but his sonnet provides an important contemporary view of the poetic movement that Italian literary historiographers, following Dante, have continued to call the stil novo. The exchange between Bonagiunta and the forerunner Guinizzelli will be echoed in later exchanges between conservatives and full-fledged stilnovisti. We think, for instance, of the correspondence between Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Orlandi, or the parodic indictment of the new style found in the sonnets addressed by Onesto degli Onesti to Dante’s friend and poetic comrade Cino da Pistoia. So, what is this new style that created such consternation among those contemporary poets who were not its adherents? Initiated by the older and non-Florentine Guinizzelli (who seems to have died by 1276), the core practitioners are younger and, with the exception of Cino, Florentine: Guido Cavalcanti (the traditional birth year of 1259 has recently been challenged in favor of circa 1250; he died in 1300), Dante (1265–1321), Cino (c. 1270–1336 or 1337), and the lesser Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani, and Dino Frescobaldi. In characterizing this movement, Bonagiunta was right to point to the yoking of philosophy—indeed theology—to eros. What Bonagiunta could not foresee was the fertility of a conjoining that would effectively dissolve the impasse that drove troubadour poetry and give rise to a theologized courtly love, epitomized by the figure of Dante’s Beatrice, the lady who does not separate the lover from God but leads him to God. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Bonagiunta’s complaint regarding the theologizing of love was directed at Guinizzelli, and Guinizzelli’s canzone Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore is an excellent


case in point: its fifth stanza argues that the noble lover should obey his lady in the same way that the angelic intelligence obeys God, thus implicitly setting up analogies between the lover and the heavenly intelligence, on the one hand, and the lady and God, on the other. As though to acknowledge—and simultaneously defuse—the radical thrust of his argument, in the congedo Guinizzelli dramatizes an imagined confrontation between himself and God, by whom he stands accused of having dared to make vain semblances of the divine, of having presumed to find traces of God’s love in what can only be a ‘‘vano amor,’’ a vain earthly love: Donna, Deo mi dira`: ‘‘Che presomisti?,’’ siando l’alma mia a lui davanti. ‘‘Lo ciel passasti e ’nfin a Me venisti, e desti in vano amor Me per semblanti; ch’a Me conven le laude e a la reina del regname degno, per cui cessa onne fraude.’’ Dir Li poro`: ‘‘Tenne d’angel sembianza che fosse del Tuo regno; non me fu fallo, s’in lei posi amanza.’’ (Al cor gentil, 51–60) Lady, God will say to me: ‘‘How did you presume?’’ when my soul will be in front of him. ‘‘You passed through the heavens and came all the way to me, and you rendered me through the likenesses of vain love; for to me belong the praises and to the queen of the worthy kingdom, through whom all wickedness dies.’’ I will be able to say to him: ‘‘She had the semblance of an angel that was of your kingdom; it was no fault in me, if I placed love in her.’’

In other words, Guinizzelli has God tell him that he has gone too far. This poet, who has in fact transgressed, pushing to new latitudes the boundaries of the tradition in which he works, finds a supremely witty way of solidifying his gains, of sanctioning his boldness and concretizing what could have seemed merely a whimsical passing conceit: he stages the trial of his presumption (‘‘Che presomisti?’’ is God’s opening argument), registering the indictment but also therefore the self-defense, the justification that he offers before the divine tribunal. It is simply this: the lady possessed the semblance of an angel, of a creature of God’s realm—therefore it was not his fault if he loved her. Thus Guinizzelli both acknowledges the dangers of his audacious


yoking of the secular with the divine, and brilliantly defends his analogical procedure. If his original ‘‘fault’’ was a too expansive definition of the likenesses through which we can know God (e desti in vano amor Me per semblanti), the defense will rest on just such a likeness (Tenne d’angel sembianza). Guinizzelli justifies himself with the same analogies that were his sin in the first place, throwing the blame back on the original writer, God, who in his book of the universe made ladies so like angels. In fact, the congedo of Al cor gentil, with its stated likeness between ladies and angels, backs off somewhat from the canzone’s fifth stanza, with its implied likeness between the lady and God himself. The net result of the poem, nonetheless, is to take the possibility of similitude between the lady and the divine much more seriously than it had been taken heretofore, to take her ‘‘angelic’’ qualities out of the realm of amorous hyperbole and into the realm of bona fide theological speculation. With respect to the impasse of troubadour poetry, evoked by Guinizzelli in the ‘‘Donna, Deo’’ conjunction with which the congedo begins, we could say that the explicit dramatization of the conflict in Al cor gentil goes a long way toward removing it as a problem. In sharp contrast to the troubadours, whose careers are frequently capped by recanting both love and love poetry and retiring to a monastery; in contrast to Giacomo da Lentini, who airs the conflict at its most conflictual in the sonnet Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire; in contrast to Guittone, who in a bourgeois Italian variation of the troubadour model rejects love but without retiring from secular life; in contrast to all the above, Guinizzelli provides a first step toward the ‘‘solution’’: he begins the process of making the lady more like God so that the two poles of the dilemma are conflated, with the result that the lover does not have to choose between them. Likeness and similitude are Guinizzelli’s modes of choice, paving the way for the Vita nuova and ultimately the Commedia, where similitude will give way to metaphor, as Dante conflates into one the two poles of his desire, making the journey to Beatrice coincide with the journey to God, and collapsing much farther than theology would warrant the distinction between the lady—the luminous and numinous sign of God’s presence on earth—and the ultimate being whose significance she figures forth. In the sonnet Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare (I want in truth to praise my lady), Guinizzelli’s theologically ennobled lady possesses literally beatific effects: when she passes by, she lowers pride in anyone she greets, makes a believer of anyone who


is not, serves as a barometer of moral worth—since she cannot be approached by anyone base—and prevents evil thoughts, since no man can think evilly while he sees her. This poetics of praise, owed to the lady as a literal beatifier, is the Guinizzellian feature that Dante will exploit for his personal stil novo as distilled in the Vita nuova.3 In that work Dante builds on and further radicalizes Guinizzelli’s theologized courtly love to construct his Beatrice, a lady whose powers to bless (people know her name, ‘‘she who beatifies,’’ ‘‘she who gives beatitudine,’’ without having ever been told) and whose links to the divine are beyond anything yet envisioned within the lyric tradition. While Guinizzelli’s Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare offers us a lady whose effects are morally edifying and in themselves miraculous, it does not conjure an ontological miracle, as does Dante’s sonnet Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare. One could say that the work of Tanto gentile is to elide the poet out of the poem—the ‘‘I’’ is present only in the possessive ‘‘mia’’ in ‘‘la donna mia’’ of the second verse, while the ‘‘I’’ is the first word and driving force of Guinizzelli’s sonnet—and to show forth the lady in her miraculous essence, to make her glory visible, apparent, and manifest: Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia quand’ella altrui saluta, ch’ogne lingua deven tremando muta, e li occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare. Ella si va, sentendosi laudare benignamente d’umilta` vestuta; e par che sia una cosa venuta da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare. (Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare, 5–8) So noble and so honorable appears my lady when she greets someone that each tongue falls tremblingly mute and eyes do not dare to gaze. She passes by, hearing herself praised, benignly dressed in humility; and she appears to be a thing that has come from heaven to earth to show forth a miracle.

The sacramental and Christological dimensions of the Vita nuova’s Beatrice, the fact that she has come from heaven to earth as a manifest miracle, that the portents of her death are the portents of Christ’s death, that she is the incarnate number nine, take Guinizzelli’s solutions an enormous step further along the road from simile (Tenne d’angel sembianza) to metaphor (d’umilta` vestuta): from assimilation to, to appropriation of, the divine.


Along this road that leads in a straight line from the theologized courtly love of the stil novo to the incarnational poetics of the Commedia there is a magisterial detour, a magnificent dead end (a disaventura), and this is the path called Guido Cavalcanti. Guido’s poetic disaventura (to use one of his key words) can be considered a dead end in two ways: first, with respect to its ideology, which conceives love as a dead-end passion, a subrational natural force that leads not to life but to death; second, with respect to its impact on a lyric genealogy that was retroactively pulled into line by the gravitational force of Dante’s achievement, which conceives love as a super-rational force that leads not to death but life. So Guido—the ‘‘best friend’’ of the Vita nuova, the poet whom both his contemporaries and modern scholarship know as the leader and originator of the stil novo movement, a man whose influence over Dante was not just poetic but personal and biographical—was rendered a detour on the highroad of the lyric by the poet of the Commedia, a work that bears the traces of its author’s need to define himself as not (inter alios) Guido Cavalcanti. The negativity that Dante worked so hard to negate is expressed most explicitly and theoretically in the famous canzone Donna me prega, where Guido assigns love to that faculty of the soul that is ‘‘non razionale,—ma che sente’’ (not rational, but which feels), that is, to the seat of the passions, the sensitive soul, with the result that love deprives us of reason and judgment, discerns poorly, and induces vice, so that ‘‘Di sua potenza segue spesso morte’’ (from its power death often follows). But one need not look only to the philosophical canzone for Cavalcanti’s tragic view of love. Although he sings throughout his verse of a lady who is, like Guinizzelli’s lady, supremely endowed with worth and beauty, there is a tragic catch. Yes, she is an ‘‘angelicata—criatura’’ (angelic creature) and ‘‘Oltra natura umana’’ (Beyond human nature) in the early ballata Fresca rosa novella, ‘‘piena di valore’’ (full of worth) in the sonnet Li mie’ foll’occhi, possessed of ‘‘grande valor’’ (great worth) in the sonnet Tu m’hai sı` piena di dolor la mente, and the litany could go on: Cavalcanti’s lady is no less potent than Guinizzelli’s. The problem is that she is too potent with respect to the lover, whose ability to benefit from her worth has been degraded while she has been enhanced. Thus, in the canzone Io non pensava che lo cor giammai, Love warns the lover of his impending death, caused by her excessive worth and power: ‘‘Tu non camperai, / che´ troppo e` lo valor di costei forte’’ (You will not survive, for too great is the worth of that lady). The poet-lover is dispossessed, stripped of his vitality, integrity,


valore, his very self: ‘‘diro` com’ ho perduto ogni valore’’ (I will tell how I have lost all worth), he says in Poi che di doglia cor conven ch’i’ porti. Because of her troppo valore, he will lose ogni valore. From the lover’s perspective, therefore, her worth is worthless because he has no access to it; it is in fact worse than worthless because it destroys him. As a result, the education of the lover is not an issue for Cavalcanti: in a context where the will is stripped of all potency, its redirection from the carnal to the transcendent becomes a moot point. The education of the lover is, however, very much the point in the Vita nuova: Beatrice is a living lady of this earth, and yet the lover has to be weaned from desiring even as noncarnal an earthly reward as Beatrice’s greeting. Unlike Cavalcanti’s lady, a carrier of death, Beatrice is truly a beatrice, a carrier of life, but the beatitudine she brings is not of easy access. To find the blessedness/happiness offered by Beatrice the lover must redefine his very idea of what happiness is. It can have nothing to do with possession (even of the most metaphorical sort), since the possession of any mortal object of desire will necessarily fail him when that object succumbs to its mortality—in short, when it dies. Like Augustine after the death of his friend, he must learn the error of ‘‘loving a man that must die as though he were not to die’’ (diligendo moriturum ac si non moriturum [Confessions 4.8]). Similarly, and painfully, the lover of the Vita nuova must learn to locate his happiness in ‘‘that which cannot fail me’’ (quello che non mi puote venire meno [VN 18.4]), a lesson that constitutes a theologizing of the troubadour guerdon along Augustinian lines: because the lady and thus her greeting are mortal and will die, they are objects of desire that—for all their relative perfection—will finally fail him. Therefore the lover must learn to redirect his longing to that which cannot fail him, namely, the transcendent part of her with which he can be reunited in God, the part that may indeed serve to lead him to God. Viewed from this perspective, the Vita nuova is nothing less than a courtly medieval inflection of the Augustinian paradigm whereby life—new life—is achieved by mastering the lesson of death. The Vita nuova teaches us, in the words of Dylan Thomas, that ‘‘after the first death there is no other’’ (from A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London); having encountered the lesson of mortality once, when Beatrice dies, the lover should not need to be taught it again. This is in fact the burden of Beatrice’s rebuke to the pilgrim when she meets him in the Earthly Paradise: ‘‘e se ’l sommo piacer sı` ti fallio / per la mia morte, qual cosa mortale / dovea poi trarre te nel


suo disio?’’ (and if the supreme pleasure thus failed you, with my death, what mortal thing should then have drawn you into desire?) (Purg. 31.52–54). Formally, the Vita nuova is a collection of previously written lyrics that, sometime after the death of Beatrice in 1290, most likely in 1292– 94, Dante set in a prose frame. The lyrics are chosen with an eye to telling the story of the lover’s development, his gradual realization of Beatrice’s sacramental significance as a visible sign of invisible grace. They also tell an idealized story of the poet’s development, tracing Dante’s lyric itinerary from his early Guittonianism (see the sonetti rinterzati of chapters 7 and 8), through his Cavalcantianism (see the sonnet that begins with the hapax ‘‘Cavalcando’’ in chapter 9, the ballata—Cavalcanti’s form par excellence—of chapter 12, and the Cavalcantian torments of the sonnets in chapters 14–16), to the discovery, with some help from Guido Guinizzelli, of his own voice in the canzone Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore. Prior to the inspired composition of Donne ch’avete, the poet-lover undergoes the inquisition that induces him to declare that he no longer desires that which is bound to fail him, but instead has centered his desire ‘‘in those words that praise my lady’’ (In quelle parole che lodano la donna mia [VN 18.6]). The lover’s conversion, from one desire (the possession of her greeting) to another (the ability to praise her, to celebrate the miracle of her sacramental existence), is here explicitly stated in poetic terms, is indeed presented as a poet’s conversion as well, since his desire for a transcendent Beatrice is formulated as a desire for the words with which to laud her. The Vita nuova’s key spiritual lesson is thus aligned with a poetic manifesto for what Dante will call ‘‘the style of her praise’’ (lo stilo de la sua loda [VN 25.4]). The first poem we encounter after the conversion of chapter 18 is the canzone Donne ch’avete, whose incipit is visited upon the poet in a divine dictation akin to that described by Dante as the source of his ‘‘nove rime’’ in Purgatorio 24. The statement ‘‘la mia lingua parlo` quasi come per se´ stessa mossa’’ (my tongue spoke almost as if moved by itself ) (VN 19.2) adumbrates the Purgatorio’s famous profession of poetic faith: ‘‘I’ mi son un che, quando / Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando’’ (I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and in that fashion that Love dictates goes signifying) (Purg. 24.52–54). Donne ch’avete is canonized in the purgatorial encounter with Bonagiunta as the prescriptive example of the stil novo, the fountainhead and beginning of the ‘‘new rhymes,’’ as


though the lyric tradition had no past but originated with ‘‘le nove rime, cominciando / ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’ ’’ (the new rhymes, beginning ‘‘Ladies who have intellect of love’’) (Purg. 24.50–51; my italics). The authorized version of Dante’s lyric past recounted implicitly by the Vita nuova is thus confirmed by the Commedia, where a selective view of the lyric tradition is put forward through the network of presences and absences, encounters, statements, and echoes that make up the complicated tissue of the Commedia’s vernacular memory. In brief, the Commedia’s version of Dante’s lyric past is as follows.4 The influence of previous moral/didactic/political poetry is discounted. Dante denigrates the strongest Italian precursor in this vein, Guittone, first in the generic distancing of himself from all ‘‘old’’ schools that is put into the mouth of Bonagiunta in Purgatorio 24, then again in Purgatorio 26, where—using Guinizzelli as his spokesperson this time—he singles out the Aretine for attack, ascribing Guittone’s erstwhile preeminence to outmoded tastes. In the same passage, Guinizzelli takes the opportunity to refer in less than glowing terms to Giraut de Bornelh, the Provençal poet whose treatment of moral themes Dante had cited with approbation in the De vulgari eloquentia, calling him a poet of ‘‘rectitude’’ and as such the troubadour equivalent of himself. Purgatorio 26 thus handily liquidates Dante’s major vernacular lyric precursors in the moral/didactic mode. Dante also fails to acknowledge Guittone’s political verse, championing as a political lyricist instead the lesser poet Sordello in an episode that is not without clear intertextual links to the displaced Aretine. With regard to the influence of previous vernacular love poets, the history of Dante’s poetic indebtedness is rewritten in a way that gives disproportionate importance to Guinizzelli: the poetic ‘‘father’’ of Purgatorio 26 absorbs some of the credit owed to Guido Cavalcanti as the major stylistic force in the forging of the stil novo. Dante’s tribute to the love poet Arnaut Daniel, on the other hand, also in Purgatorio 26, is not inconsistent with the influence of the inventor of the sestina on the poet of the petrose; but it is worth noting that the exaltation of the Provençal love poet, Arnaut, is at the expense of the Provençal moral poet, Giraut. Neither the Vita nuova nor the Commedia intends to tell the full story regarding Dante’s lyric past. For that, we have to turn to the lyrics that Dante left as lyrics, that he never pressed into the service of any larger enterprise or ordered in any way, and that are referred to


38

simply as the Rime or ‘‘Lyric Poems’’ (since they were never collected, they have no authorial title). This wonderful collection of sonnets, ballate, and canzoni, traditionally consisting of eighty-eight poems of definite attribution, but expanded in De Robertis’s edition of 2002 by eight more poems, was written over a span of approximately twentyfive years, from circa 1283 to circa 1307–8, that is, from Dante’s teens to after the Inferno was already begun.5 The Rime bring us as close as we can come to the poet’s inner workshop, to glimpsing the ways by which Dante became Dante. These poems testify to the paths not taken, and also help us to see more freshly and vividly when, how, and by what slow process of accretion he embarked on the paths he did take. Moreover, the Rime express the essence of a poetic adventurer; they remind us that Dante’s hallmark is his never-ceasing experimentalism, his linguistic and stylistic voracity. Because they vary so greatly among themselves, editors have found it convenient to order the lyrics under rough chronological headings, as follows: very early poems written in the Tuscan manner (e.g., the tenzone with Dante da Maiano); early poems experimenting in a variety of manners, from the Sicilian (e.g., the canzone La dispietata mente), to the playful realism associated with a Folgo`re da San Gimignano (e.g., the sonnet Sonar bracchetti), to the light strains of the Cavalcantian ballata (e.g., the ballata Per una ghirlandetta); poems of the time of the Vita nuova, and—whether or not included in the libello—written in the style we associate with the stil novo (a style that includes, for instance, the love poems dedicated in the Convivio to, but in my opinion not originally written for, Lady Philosophy). Through the stil novo phase, Dante’s poetic agenda is, as Foster and Boyde point out in their edition, one of contraction and refinement; he eliminates both lexically and stylistically to achieve the refined purity of the high stil novo. The phase of contraction gives way around 1295 to the expansion, both lexical and stylistic, that will characterize the rest of Dante’s poetic career.6 This expansion is pioneered in the following groups of lyrics: the tenzone with Forese Donati, written before Forese’s death in 1296; the so-called rime petrose, or ‘‘stony’’ poems, about a stony, hard, and ice-cold lady, ‘‘la pietra,’’ dated internally by Io son venuto to December of 1296;7 moral and doctrinal verse, written most likely between 1295 and 1300, such as the canzone on true nobility, Le dolci rime, and the canzone on the esteemed courtly quality of leggiadria, Poscia ch’Amor. Finally, there are the great lyrics of exile: the canzone that treats Dante’s own exile, Tre donne; powerful


late moral verse, such as the canzone Doglia mi reca; and late love poetry, such as the correspondence sonnets exchanged with Cino da Pistoia and the canzone Amor, da che convien. Although Dante’s lyrics are sometimes valued less than the more mono-tonal and unified productions of, say, a Cavalcanti or a Petrarch, it is precisely their infinite variety that is the key to Dante’s greatness; they are—with the prose works written during these years—the worthy and necessary prerequisites for a work as nonfinite as the Commedia. The Rime contain the traces of Dante’s stylistic and ideological experimentation. The tenzone of scurrilous sonnets exchanged between Dante and his friend Forese Donati, for instance, was long denied a place among Dante’s works because of its base content, considered inappropriate for the refined poet of the Vita nuova and yet, without it, we would be hard put to trace the passage from the tightly circumscribed world of the Vita nuova to the all-inclusive cosmos of the Commedia.8 Nor does the tenzone’s lowly content obscure the archetypal signs of Dante’s poetic mastery, evidenced by the compact vigor and concise force of his diction, and the effortless energy with which one insult springs from another. Whereas Forese requires a full sonnet to accuse Dante of being a bounder who lives off the charity of others, Dante characteristically packs an insult into each verse of the opening quatrain of Bicci novel, which tells Forese that (1) he is a bastard, (2) his mother is dishonored, (3) he is a glutton, and (4) to support his gluttony he is a thief: Bicci novel, figliuol di non so cui (s’i’ non ne domandasse monna Tessa), giu` per la gola tanta roba hai messa ch’a forza ti convien to`rre l’altrui. (Bicci novel, 1–4) Young Bicci, son of I don’t know who [short of asking my lady Tessa], you’ve stuffed so much down your gorge that you’re driven to take from others.9

Stylistically, the Rime demonstrate continuities converging in the Commedia: thus, we can discern in the tenzone the seeds of a later vulgar and realistic style associated with Inferno. Ideologically, however, the Rime offer fascinating examples of discontinuities: thus, the early and generically stilnovist canzoni E’ m’incresce di me and Lo doloroso amor testify to the possibility of an anti–Vita nuova, a Cavalcantian Vita nuova, whose Beatrice brings not life but death. In Lo


doloroso amor Dante declares ‘‘Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice’’ (I die because of her whose name is Beatrice), a scandalous enough assertion for a poet whose career is forged on the notion that ‘‘Per quella vivo c’ha nome Beatrice.’’ And in E’ m’incresce di me, the birth of a lady who possesses ‘‘homicidal eyes’’ (occhi micidiali) is described in language resonant of the Vita nuova: Lo giorno che costei nel mondo venne, secondo che si trova nel libro de la mente che vien meno, la mia persona pargola sostenne una passıön nova, tal ch’io rimasi di paura pieno (E’ m’incresce di me, 57–61) The day that she came into the world, according to what is found in the book of my mind that is passing away, my childish body sustained a new emotion, such that I remained full of fear.

From the perspective of the Vita nuova or the Commedia, where Cavalcanti is ideologically discounted, what we find here is an impossible hybrid, a fusion of elements that in the more canonical texts are kept separate. There are elements typical of the Vita nuova: the treatment of Beatrice’s presence, in this case her birth, as a historically and literally miraculous event; the reference to the protagonist’s ‘‘book of memory,’’ in which the events of his life have been recorded; his juvenile susceptibility to a ‘‘passıön’’ defined as ‘‘nova,’’ that is, miraculous, unexpected, totally new. But these elements are joined, as they would not be in the Vita nuova, to Cavalcantian stylemes: the book of his mind is failing, passing away, while the ‘‘passıön nova’’ fills the lover with that most Cavalcantian of emotions, fear. Dante cannot be pigeonholed; his lyrics are salutary reminders that the dialectical twists of his itinerary cannot be flattened into a straightforward progress. We must remember Dante’s sonnet to Cino da Pistoia, Io sono stato con Amore insieme, written most likely between 1303 and 1306, and thus a decade or so after the spiritualized love of the Vita nuova, in which he characterizes love as an overriding force that dominates reason and free will, and admits to having first experienced such love in his ninth year, that is vis-a`-vis Beatrice: Io sono stato con Amore insieme da la circulazione del sol mia nona,

Dante and the Lyric Past 41 e so com’egli affrena e come sprona, e come sotto lui si ride e geme. Chi ragione o virtu` contra gli sprieme, fa come que che ’n la tempesta sona (Io sono stato, 1–6) I have been together with Love since my ninth revolution of the sun, and I know how he curbs and how he spurs, and how under him one laughs and groans. He who puts forth reason or virtue against him does as one who makes noise during a tempest.

Here the lover is literally ‘‘beneath’’ love’s dominion, literally sommesso, to use the verb that in Inferno 5 characterizes the lustful, those who submit reason to desire: ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento’’ (Inf. 5.39). As Foster and Boyde comment: ‘‘This is the more remarkable in that Dante is now about forty years old and has behind him not only the Vita nuova with its story of an entirely sublimated ‘‘heavenly’’ love, but also the series of canzoni that more or less directly celebrated a love that had its seat in the mind of intellect’’ (Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2:323). By the same token, Dante’s last canzone is no tribute to sublimation, but Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia, a Cavalcantian testament to deadly eros that has been infused with a decidedly non-Cavalcantian vigor. The poet finds himself in the mountains of the Casentino, in the valley of the Arno where Love’s power exerts its greatest strength; here Love works him over (the untranslatable ‘‘Cosı` m’hai concio’’), kneading him, reducing him to a pulp: Cosı` m’hai concio, Amore, in mezzo l’alpi, ne la valle del fiume lungo il qual sempre sopra me se’ forte: qui vivo e morto, come vuoi, mi palpi, merze´ del fiero lume che sfolgorando fa via a la morte. (Amor, da che convien, 61–66) To this state, Love, you have reduced me, up in the mountains, in the valley of the river along which you are always strong over me; here, just as you will, you knead me, both alive and dead, thanks to the fierce light that flashing opens the road to death.

The love-death of Amor, da che convien, the ineluctable force against which (as explained in Io sono stato) neither reason nor virtue


can prevail, resurfaces in the Commedia’s story of Paolo and Francesca; in Inferno 5 ineluctable passion leads to death and damnation. Nor is the condemnation that awaits those unruly lovers without antecedents in the lyrics; roughly contemporaneous with Io sono stato and Amor, da che convien is the canzone Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire, whose indictment of passion ungoverned by virtue and reason inhabits a moral framework that is highly suggestive vis-a`-vis the Commedia. The breadth and complexity of this canzone can be inferred from its juxtaposition of a courtly discourse with a more strictly ethical and moralizing bent; like Guittone in Ora parra`, but much more systematically, Dante links carnal desire to desire for wealth, thus exploding the courtly ethos that would privilege love over baser desires and illuminating the common ground of all concupiscence. In the second stanza of Ora parra`, cited earlier, Guittone rejects the pursuit of ‘‘carnal voglia’’ (carnal desire) and recommends a life of abstinence from vice and willingness to toil; then, in an apparent non sequitur, he tells us that ‘‘riches do not give anyone repose but rather distance it, and good striving brings honor, as long as one pursues it with measure.’’ Guittone is concerned lest, having exhorted us to reject carnal desire, he may seem—in his pursuit of the good life—to endorse the equally pernicious desire for material gain. The recognition that a repudiation of carnal desire—lust—must not be an endorsement of material desire—avarice—leads to the second stanza’s concluding injunction against ‘‘riccor’’ (riches), and sets the stage for the fourth stanza’s dramatic assertion that it is not we who possess gold but gold that possesses us: ‘‘Non manti acquistan l’oro, / ma l’oro loro’’ (Not many acquire gold, but gold acquires them). In other words, Guittone first demystifies courtly love, calling it lust, carnal desire, and then links it to other forms of immoderate and excessive desire, all rooted in cupidity. It is this conflation between lust and greed, love and avarice, that is the key to Doglia mi reca, a canzone which, although frequently referred to as Dante’s canzone on avarice, and therefore characterized as ‘‘stumbling’’ upon its main theme rather late,10 in fact deliberately sets out to graft a discourse on avarice onto its courtly (actually anticourtly) introduction. Doglia mi reca begins aggressively, by refusing to exculpate women from their share of the moral blame in matters of love; it is their duty to deny their love to men who cannot match in virtue what women offer in beauty. Acknowledging that he will speak ‘‘parole quasi contra tutta gente’’ (words against almost everyone), Dante inveighs, in the


poem’s first stanza, against the ‘‘base desire’’ (vil vostro disire) that would permit a woman to love an unworthy man. He then announces, in the second stanza, that men have distanced themselves from virtue, and are therefore not men but evil beasts that resemble men (omo no, mala bestia ch’om simiglia); although virtue is the only ‘‘possession’’ worth having, men enslave themselves to vice. The submerged logical link between the phases of this argument is desire: we move from the ladies’ ‘‘vil disire’’ for nonvirtuous men in the first stanza, to virtue, the ‘‘possession che sempre giova’’ (possession that is always beneficial), that is, the only possession worth desiring, in the second. The point is that men enslave themselves through their desire; by not desiring to possess virtue, the only possession of real worth, and by desiring to possess what is not virtuous, they are doubly enslaved, being, as the third stanza puts it, slaves ‘‘not of a lord, but of a base slave’’: ‘‘Servo non di signor, ma di vil servo.’’ Once we grasp the logic that links the two phases of the argument, the courtly to the moral, both viewed as discourses of desire, the fourth stanza’s engagement of issues not normally associated with poems addressed to ‘‘donne’’ is less startling: the man whom the ladies are not supposed to love, the man enslaved to vice, is now compared to the miser in pursuit of wealth. In verses whose irascible energy adumbrates the Commedia, Dante depicts the ‘‘mad desire’’ (folle volere) that induces a man to run after that which can never give him satisfaction: Corre l’avaro, ma piu` fugge pace: oh mente cieca, che non po` vedere lo suo folle volere che ’l numero, ch’ognora a passar bada, che ’nfinito vaneggia. Ecco giunta colei che ne pareggia: dimmi, che hai tu fatto, cieco avaro disfatto? Rispondimi, se puoi, altro che ‘‘Nulla.’’ Maladetta tua culla, che lusingo` cotanti sonni invano; maladetto lo tuo perduto pane, che non si perde al cane: che´ da sera e da mane hai raunato e stretto ad ambo mano cio` che sı` tosto si rifa` lontano. (Doglia mi reca, 69–84)

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 44 The miser runs, but peace flees faster: oh blind mind, whose mad desire cannot see that the number, which it seeks always to pass, stretches to infinity. Now here is the one who makes us all equal: tell me, what have you done, blind undone miser? Answer me, if you can, other than ‘‘Nothing.’’ Cursed be your cradle, which flattered so many dreams in vain; cursed be the bread lost on you, which is not lost on a dog—for evening and morning you have gathered and held with both hands that which so quickly distances itself again.

The force and vitality of this passage alert us to the fact that Dante has here tapped into a wellspring of his poetic identity. Indeed, the same miser recurs in the Convivio, presented in very similar terms: ‘‘e in questo errore cade l’avaro maladetto, e non s’accorge che desidera se´ sempre desiderare, andando dietro al numero impossibile a giugnere’’ (and into this error falls the cursed miser, and he does not realize that he desires himself always to desire, going after the number impossible to reach) (Con. 3.15.9). The miser is a figure through whom Dante explores the possibility of expanding the problematic of desire from the courtly and private to the social and public; from this perspective, the miser is an emblem of the transition from the Vita nuova to the Commedia. When, in the final stanza of Doglia mi reca, Dante readdresses himself to the ladies, and denounces anyone who allows herself to be loved by such a man as he has described, he also ties together the poem’s threads of desire into one knot of concupiscence: the depraved call by the name of ‘‘love’’ what is really mere bestial appetite (chiamando amore appetito di fera); they believe love to be ‘‘outside of the garden of reason’’ (e crede amor fuor d’orto di ragione). Dante has here welded the lover and the miser, and in so doing he has created a node of enormous significance for his future, no less than an adumbration of that she-wolf whose cupidity subtends both the lust of Paolo and Francesca and the political corruption of Florence. Courtly literature offers us many examples of lovers whose passion is outside of reason’s garden, who are impelled by the ‘‘folle volere’’ that drives the miser, but courtly literature never dreams of calling the immoderate lover a miser; nor would the protagonist of Dante’s sonnet Io sono stato, which boldly proclaims that reason has no power against love, expect to find himself compared to an avaro maladetto! By making the comparison, Dante skewers courtly values, as Guittone had done before him, and then goes further: the comparison of the lover to the miser lays the foundation for the moral edifice of the


Commedia, which is based on the notion of desire or love as the motive force for all our actions. Misdirected or immoderate desire leads to sin, and is therefore the distant origin for what we witness in hell, where the misshapen desire has crystallized into act, as well as the more proximate origin for what we witness in purgatory, where the soul’s desires and dispositions are still visible in uncrystallized form. Love is, in fact, the impulse to which we can reduce all good action and its contrary: ‘‘amore, a cui reduci / ogne buono operare e ’l suo contraro’’ (Purg. 18.14–15). I will conclude this discussion of the significance of Doglia mi reca with a formal coda. The Commedia is a poem of epic dimension, epic scale, and yet it is also the most lyric of epics: it is the epic of the ‘‘I.’’ Not only its first-person narrator, but also the lyricized narrative texture that is ever more present (for, with due respect to Croce, the ‘‘lyrical’’ canticle is not Inferno, but Paradiso) are indices of a lyric past that Dante chose never to leave behind. One feature of the Commedia that points to Dante’s vernacular and lyric roots is the canto: why does Dante choose to invent the division into cantos, rather than divide his epic into long books of the sort Vergil uses in the Aeneid ? Conceptually, I believe that the choice of the canto is connected to Dante’s obsession with the new; the division into cantos renders the spiraling rhythm of new dawns and new dusks, the incessant new beginnings and endings that punctuate the line of becoming, the cammin di nostra vita. Formally, I believe that the roots of the canto are to be sought in Dante’s vernacular apprenticeship. A long canzone is roughly the length of a canto; indeed, at 158 lines Doglia mi reca is longer than most cantos. When we think of the Commedia as one hundred canzoni stitched together, we can better grasp both the later Dante’s vertiginous distance from, and remarkable fidelity to, his lyric past.

chapter 2

Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire

O ra parra` is well known as the canzone whose opening stanza so

forcefully announces the transition from a poesis inspired by love to one driven by moral didacticism, or, in the terms of the manuscript headings, the transition from ‘‘Guittone’’ to ‘‘Frate Guittone.’’1 In the canzone’s first two stanzas, Guittone strikes a blow at the inherited courtly problem of the lover-poet’s conflicted allegiance, his oscillation between fealty to God and fealty to the lady. Guittone simply repudiates the courtly ethos, first by denying the courtly linkage between Love and worth, especially poetic worth: Ora parra` s’eo savero` cantare e s’eo varro` quanto valer gia` soglio, poi che del tutto Amor fug[g]h’ e disvoglio, e piu` che cosa mai forte mi spare: ch’a om tenuto saggio audo contare che trovare—non sa ne´ valer punto omo d’Amor non punto; ma’ che digiunto—da verta` mi pare, se lo pensare—a lo parlare—sembra, che ’n tutte parte ove distringe Amore regge follore—in loco di savere: donque como valere po`, ne´ piacer—di guisa alcuna fiore, poi dal Fattor—d’ogni valor—disembra e al contrar d’ogni mainer’ asembra? (Ora parra`, 1–15) Now it will appear if I know how to sing, and if I am worth as much as I was accustomed to be worth, now that I completely flee Love and do not

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 48 want it, and more than anything else find it very hateful. I have heard it said by a man considered wise that a man not pierced by Love does not know how to write poetry and is worth nothing; but far from the truth this seems to me, if there is concord between thought and word, for in all parts where Love seizes madness is king, in place of wisdom. Therefore how can he have worth or please in any way at all, since from the Maker of all worth he diverges and to the contrary in every way he resembles?

The poem is a testing ground; its purpose is to prove that the poet, now that he flees Love, is still worth what he used to be worth: ‘‘s’eo varro` quanto valer gia` soglio’’ (2). The repeated forms of valere (varro` [2], valer [2], valer [6], valere [12], valor [14]) keep the tension alive; the issue on the table is a man’s worth, his moral/poetic measure. Does he measure up, now that he no longer desires desire? To desire is a prerequisite of the courtly code; to eschew this mode of being is to unmoor oneself from a powerful governing paradigm and implicitly to pose the question of what to put in its place. But first, before the substitution, comes the process of detachment, of severing love/desire from worth, a process that finds semantic focus in the densely conceptualized coinage disvolere, to ‘‘dis-want’’, to ‘‘not-desire.’’2 Desire thus enters this poem in the antithetical form ‘‘disvoglio’’; our poet does not desire that which is usually desired—Love or desire itself. Rather, he flees and diswants Love (‘‘Amor fug[g]h’ e disvoglio’’ [3]), for where Love holds sway there reigns madness, instead of wisdom: ‘‘regge follore—in loco di savere’’ (11). ‘‘Savere,’’ the wisdom that is crowded out by love-induced ‘‘follore,’’ points us in the direction of the solution; what Guittone will be proposing in this canzone is a world in which regge savere in loco di follore. The wisdom embodied in the noun savere and its variants (the adjective saggio, the verb sapere) gives further conceptual focus to the first stanza, offering the correct alternative to the false wisdom of the ‘‘man considered wise’’ (om tenuto saggio [5]) who does not know (non sa [6]) that one need not be pierced by Love in order to write poetry. Moreover, ‘‘savere’’ (11) at the end of the stanza has the effect of retrospectively motivating the canzone’s great first verse: we are now in a position to understand the significance of ‘‘savero` cantare’’ (1). ‘‘To know how to sing’’ is not an idle phrasing, but a way of signaling a poesis that will be informed by savere, the new poesis that Guittone will achieve by dint of repudiating ‘‘Amor’’ and ‘‘follore.’’ To achieve this new poesis the poet has only to follow the instructions that introduce the second stanza; he must make Right (‘‘Diritto’’ [17]) the

Guittone, Dante, and the Anatomy of Desire 49

helmsman of his ship, place honored Wisdom (‘‘orrato Saver’’ [18]) at the tiller, and sail with God as his star: Ma chi cantare vole e valer bene, in suo legno a nochier Diritto pone e orrato Saver mette al timone, Dio fa sua stella, e ’n ver Lausor sua spene. (Ora parra`, 16–19) But he who wants to sing well and be worthy should place Justice in his ship as pilot, and put honored Wisdom at the helm, make God his star and place his hope in true Praise.

One rarely encounters a citation from Ora parra` that ventures beyond the canzone’s first nineteen verses cited above. While the extraordinary energy of the incipit (which surely lodged in Dante’s mind as he composed ‘‘qui si parra` la tua nobilitate’’ [Inf. 2.9]),3 and the strong posture of the opening cadenza, along with its autobiographical resonance, have preserved the poem from critical oblivion, scant attention has been paid to the rest of the canzone. And yet the remaining strophes continue the indictment of courtly values in a profoundly suggestive fashion. Indeed, the radical nature of Guittone’s critique will prove fertile for Dante’s great canzone Doglia mi reca and thence for the Commedia itself. Ora parra` indicts courtly love by refusing to segregate it. This move allows the poet first to conflate courtly love with lust and then, even more interestingly, to conflate lust with desire in any form. We can see Guittone’s strategy reflected in the transition from the first stanza’s ‘‘disvoglio’’—an emblem for the poem’s anti-courtliness—to the second stanza’s morally infused ‘‘carnal voglia’’ (21): we have moved from a negation, a refusal, to a positive redefinition, which tells us that, once stripped of its sustaining ideology, courtly love is nothing but lust, carnal desire. Proceeding along a trajectory that continues to broaden the conceptual base of desire, Guittone then passes beyond ‘‘disvoglio’’ and ‘‘carnal voglia’’ to simple ‘‘voglia’’ (here the imperative form of the verb volere, positioned as the first word of the third stanza): ‘‘Voglia in altrui ciascun cio` che ’n se´ chere’’ (Let each one desire in others what he seeks in himself ) (31). In order to see how Guittone navigates this transition, we must look back to stanza two: che´ grande onor ne´ gran bene no e` stato acquistato—carnal voglia seguendo,

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 50 ma promente valendo e astenendo—a vizi’ e a peccato; unde ’l sennato—apparecchiato—ognora de core tutto e di poder dea stare d’avanzare—lo suo stato ad onore no schifando labore: che´ gia` riccor—non dona altrui posare, ma ’l fa lungiare,—e ben pugnare—onora; ma tuttavia lo ’ntenda altri a misora. (Ora parra`, 20–30) For neither great honor nor great good have been acquired by following carnal desire, but by living as good men and abstaining from vice and from sin. Therefore the wise man must be prepared at all times with all his heart and power to advance his state to honor, not shunning toil; since indeed riches do not give anyone repose but rather distance it, and good striving brings honor as long as one pursues it with measure.

Noting that by following ‘‘carnal voglia’’ one can attain neither honor nor good, Guittone recommends a life of abstinence from vice and willingness to toil; only thus can one advance one’s ‘‘stato ad onore’’ (26). A bourgeois ethic replaces the courtly paradigm: in lieu of carnal delight Guittone proposes not monastic withdrawal but a life of civic morality and virtuous moderation, measured toil and measured gain leading ultimately to an honored position in the community. It is at this point that Guittone introduces an apparent non sequitur; the last three verses of stanza two tell us that ‘‘riches do not give anyone repose but rather distance it, and good striving brings honor, as long as one pursues it with measure.’’ How have a rejection of carnal desire and an endorsement of civic virtue led to a condemnation of wealth? How is ‘‘riccor’’ connected to a discourse on carnal desire? The answer is that Guittone is concerned lest, having exhorted us to reject carnal desire, he may seem—in his pursuit of the good life—to endorse the equally pernicious desire for material gain. The apparent non sequitur is dictated by the recognition that a repudiation of carnal desire—lust—must not be taken as an endorsement of material desire: avarice. The movement from one type of desire to another—from ‘‘carnal voglia’’ to ‘‘riccor’’—begins to effect a contaminatio between different kinds of desire. The introduction of wealth into the discourse sets the stage for the fourth stanza’s dramatic and rhetorically striking assertion


that not many acquire gold; rather ‘‘the gold acquires them’’ (ma l’oro loro [53]): In vita more, e sempre in morte vive, omo fellon ch’e` di ragion nemico; credendo venir ricco, ven mendico, che non gia` cupid’ om pot’ esser dive: ch’adessa forte piu` cresce vaghezza e gravezza—u’ piu` cresce tesoro. Non manti acquistan l’oro, ma l’oro loro . . . . (Ora parra`, 46–53) The vicious man who is enemy of reason dies in life and always lives in death. Thinking to become rich, he becomes a beggar; for a greedy man cannot be rich: as the wealth grows more, so always does the desire for it grow, and the weight of it. Not many acquire gold, but the gold acquires them. . . .

Having first demystified courtly love, calling it lust, carnal desire, Guittone then links love to other forms of immoderate and excessive desire, all rooted in cupidity. The lexicon for desire expands in this strophe to include the adjective cupido and the noun vaghezza, in place of the earlier voglia: a man guilty of cupidity (‘‘cupid’ om’’ [49]) will never become rich, for his desire will grow along with his treasure: ‘‘piu` cresce vaghezza / . . . u’ piu` cresce tesoro’’ (50–51). Desire for material wealth pits man against reason, making him reason’s enemy, ‘‘di ragion nemico’’ (47); the result is a kind of death in life: ‘‘In vita more, e sempre in morte vive’’ (46).4 * * * The metaphorical death-in-life to which Guittone consigns the seeker of material wealth carries over into Dante’s great canzone, Doglia mi reca, to which we will now turn. The death-in-life motif is one of Doglia mi reca’s three structural metaphors devoted to expressing the antithesis between virtue and vice; these are defined by Foster and Boyde in their commentary as ‘‘life-death,’’ ‘‘man-animal,’’ and ‘‘lordslave.’’5 But the impact of Ora parra` on Doglia mi reca goes beyond the recuperation of metaphors to the very heart of the discourse on desire that we have been analyzing. Before looking more closely at the confluence between these two canzoni, a few points require clarification. First, in claiming a Guittonian influence on Dante’s canzone, I


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am following in the wake of Patrick Boyde who, in the only sustained critical discussion of Doglia mi reca to date, insists on Guittone’s presence: ‘‘Many of the words in Dante’s poem, its syntax, the predilection for repetition, antithesis and the affective figures, are, as we have seen, among the hallmarks of Guittone’s style. Even the structure of the strophe is unlike that of the early Dante, and very Guittonian, in its length, in the high proportion of settenari, and in the succession of couplets in the sirma.’’6 However, the canzone that Boyde posits as the intertext for Doglia mi reca is Guittone’s canzone on chastity, Altra fiata aggio gia`, donne, parlato, whose structure he says ‘‘is quite typical of Guittone and moreover bears a general resemblance to that of Doglia mi reca’’ (324). In particular, he notes the words that conclude the fourth stanza of Altra fiata—‘‘Vertu` e` possession d’onne riccore, / lo qual non perde alcun, se non lui piace’’ (Virtue is the possession of all wealth, a wealth no one can lose, if they don’t want to) (65–66)— which he characterizes as ‘‘strikingly similar to those of the equivalent section in Doglia mi reca’’ (324). Virtue is the possession of all wealth; by implication, material possession is no possession at all, but loss. This, as we have seen, is the thematic core of Ora parra`. It is also fundamental to Doglia mi reca. In Altra fiata, on the other hand, the verses cited by Boyde are quite anomalous, a momentary invocation of a theme that the canzone does not in any way develop, as we shall confirm by briefly recapping Altra fiata. Altra fiata begins with the poet-lover’s repudiation of an earlier self; as a former entrapper of women, he will now offer them advice on staying ‘‘free’’ (stanza 1). It then moves from the particularity of women’s relation to vice and virtue in stanza 2, where we learn that women must hate vice and love virtue more than men, to two generically moralizing stanzas: vice made devils of angels (stanza 3), and virtue almost has the capacity to make man and God one (stanza 4, which concludes with the sentiment that ‘‘virtue is the possession of all wealth’’). In stanza 5 the poet abandons general morality for a discussion of female virtue and specifically chastity, which is, of all the virtues, the sine qua non for women: ma cio` che non vi vol nente fallire e` castita`, for cui donna gradire non, con tutt’altre vertu`, mai poria. (Altra fiata, 70–72) But that which can never fail you [women] is chastity, without which a woman can never be appreciated, even if she has all the other virtues.


Chastity and the dangers of unchastity remain the center of the poet’s attention for the rest of the canzone, which remains firmly focused on women’s issues and does not return to the issue of wealth and material desire.7 The point that I wish to make here is that Altra fiata is a much more homogeneous poem than either Ora parra` or Doglia mi reca; it is not marked by the disjunction between the courtly and the moral that is so striking in the other two. In Altra fiata the opening address to women does not coexist uneasily with the later moral developments; rather, since the virtue to be extolled is chastity and the vice denounced is unchastity, the moral components of the canzone flow straightforwardly from its courtly—or rather, anti-courtly—premise. While it is true, as Boyde points out, that both Altra fiata and Doglia mi reca move from addressing women to moral concerns,8 the transition to chastity in Guittone’s canzone is hardly brusque; rather, chastity is the logical moral focus for a discussion of virtue in womanhood. By contrast, the transition to avarice in Dante’s canzone is startling enough that it causes Foster and Boyde to comment that in verse 67 Dante ‘‘ ‘stumbles’ upon the main theme—avarice’’ (2:305). The problem with this formulation is the assumption that avarice is the ‘‘main theme’’ of the poem, an assumption transmitted through a commentary tradition that routinely affixes to Doglia mi reca the label ‘‘Dante’s canzone on avarice.’’9 In fact, far from being just about avarice, Doglia mi reca is an expansive meditation on desire that takes the lessons of Guittone’s Ora parra` to heart. It is Ora parra`’s suggestive conflation of lust and greed, love and avarice, which furnishes the key precedent for Doglia mi reca. In Doglia mi reca Dante grafts a discourse on avarice onto a courtly materia and deliberately allows the suture marks to show. Indeed, the forcible yoking together of two discourses normally kept separate, a joining whose non-normative nature is purposefully kept in evidence by the visible suture, is exactly Dante’s point: like Guittone in Ora parra`, but much more systematically, Dante links carnal desire to desire for wealth, thus exploding the courtly ethos that would privilege love over baser desires and illuminating the common ground of all concupiscence. In other words, we are heading toward the radical disjunctions contained by the single moral framework of Inferno 5, which embraces both the rude carnality suggested by Minos’s tail and the courtly refinement of Francesca; heading toward the juxtaposition of


Francesca and Ciacco; heading for that composite of all desire—all cupiditas—that is la lupa. But let us proceed in chronological order, and direct our attention to Doglia mi reca. The canzone begins aggressively, refusing to exculpate women from their share of blame in matters of love; it is a woman’s duty to deny her love to men who cannot match in virtue what she offers in beauty. Treating female beauty as the objective correlative of male virtue, Dante inveighs, in the first stanza, against the ‘‘base desire’’ (vil vostro disire [6]) that would prompt a woman to love an unworthy man. Nothing could be more noncourtly than this hurling of the accusation of vil disire against donne ; the poet seems to acknowledge as much, noting that he speaks ‘‘parole quasi contra a tutta gente’’ (words against almost everyone) (4).10 Stanza 2 develops the absence of virtue that is stated as a given in stanza 1—‘‘poi che non c’e` vertu´’’ (since there is no virtue) (17)—launching all three of the metaphorical couplings mentioned earlier: uomo/bestia, servo/signore, and vita/morte. Men have distanced themselves from virtue and therefore are not men but evil beasts that resemble men (‘‘omo no, mala bestia ch’om simiglia’’ [23]); this thought causes the poet to marvel at man’s willful fall from lord to slave, from life to death: O Deo, qual maraviglia voler cadere in servo di signore, o ver di vita in morte! (Doglia mi reca, 24–26) O God, what a marvel—to want to fall from lord to slave, or from life to death!

Also noteworthy in the second stanza is the sustained presence of voyage imagery in a passage that moves from the allegorized voyage of virtue through life to a definition of virtue as the ‘‘possession that is always beneficial.’’ Virtue is this mini-allegory’s protagonist, journeying forth as vassal to the rational soul (the ‘‘donna’’ of verse 33) and happily serving the soul during the brief voyage of human life:11 lietamente esce da le belle porte, a la sua donna torna; lieta va e soggiorna, lietamente ovra suo gran vassallaggio; per lo corto viaggio conserva, adorna, accresce cio` che trova (Doglia mi reca, 32–37)

Guittone, Dante, and the Anatomy of Desire 55 Happily she comes out the beautiful gates, and returns to her lady; happy she goes and stays, happily she works as vassal; along the brief journey she conserves, adorns, and adds to what she finds.

In the paradoxes that conclude the stanza, virtue is the servant that alone makes man master (‘‘tu sola fai segnore’’ [41]) as well as the one possession that always benefits mankind: ‘‘tu se’ possession che sempre giova’’ (42). Very suggestive with respect to Dante’s thought process here is the transition from the metaphor of life as a voyage to the discourse of desire, signaled by the word ‘‘possession.’’ * * * This same discursive and conceptual sequence is the hallmark of the passage that figures life as a pilgrimage in Convivio 4.12 (a passage that is, as I have argued elsewhere, virtually a blueprint for the Commedia).12 As the Convivio passage moves from the figuration of the soul as a pilgrim on the path of life to the objects that the pilgrim successively desires, so in Doglia mi reca we move from a figuration of life as voyage to that which propels us along the path: namely, desire, the desire to possess. Because the desire to possess will never be satiated by any of the earthly desires the soul encounters along the way, the pilgrim-soul moves successively from one desire to the next— greater—desire: ‘‘Onde vedemo li parvuli desiderare massimamente un pomo; e poi, piu` procedendo, desiderare uno augellino; e poi, piu` oltre, desiderare bel vestimento; e poi lo cavallo, e poi una donna; e poi ricchezza non grande, e poi grande, e poi piu`’’ (So we see children desire above all an apple; and then, proceeding further, a little bird; and then, further still, beautiful clothing; and then a horse; and then a lady; and then not great riches; and then great riches; and then more) (Con. 4.12.16).13 We begin, as children, by desiring an apple, a source of nourishment but also—due to its sweetness—of pleasure. (Maybe Dante had the experience of feeding small children, who prefer fruit to equally nourishing but less pleasurable foods.) This first object of desire therefore satisfies needs both pragmatic and affective. Also important and symbolically weighted is the choice of the apple, which serves to inscribe the problem of limits and trespass into this analysis of human desire from the very beginning. After the pomo, Dante depicts us moving on to desire a little bird, ‘‘uno augellino,’’ a source of amusement and delight, a repository for our youthful affections, a friend. Thence we move to beautiful clothing, ‘‘bel vestimento,’’ an object of desire that suggests the burgeoning


need for social integration and position: not just any clothing is desired, not just sufficient protection from the elements, but beautiful clothing, clothing for display. All these components are fused in the desire for a horse, ‘‘lo cavallo,’’ a signifier of the social status that ‘‘knighthood’’—being a cavaliere—still holds for bourgeois Florence. The desire for ‘‘una donna’’ combines all the above and raises the stakes: more delight, more affect, more potential social prestige. In this meditation on human desiring Dante implies that desire for social advancement underpins many of our individual desires, and suggests that it ultimately commodifies them; the objects of desire he lists here are commodities precisely to the degree that their attainment serves to measure our position on the social scale. Moreover, the proximity of horse to woman in this simultaneously very philosophical and very realistic scale of values offers us a view of woman as commodity in Dante’s thought that should not be overlooked: Dante situates una donna in such a way as to suggest that a woman satisfies man’s desire more than a horse but less than wealth.14 Finally, the ladder of desire ends with wealth, an item whose ability to generate unending desire is rendered in the cadence and rhythm of ‘‘ricchezza non grande, e poi grande, e poi piu`.’’ The eternal craving of the she-wolf, laden with all desire (‘‘di tutte brame’’ [Inf. 1.49]), is inscribed into the insatiable openendedness of the last three words: ‘‘e poi piu`.’’ Dante’s list begins by alternating between living and nonliving objects of desire: the first, ‘‘un pomo,’’ is not alive; the second, ‘‘uno augellino,’’ is; the third, ‘‘bel vestimento,’’ is not; the fourth, ‘‘lo cavallo’’ is, as, too, is the fifth, ‘‘una donna.’’ The transition from cavallo to donna offers two items of increasing value on the living side of the equation; they will be followed by three items of increasing value on the ‘‘dead’’ side, namely ricchezza non grande, ricchezza grande, piu` ricchezza.15 We could tabulate these objects of desire as follows: NONLIVING 1) un pomo 3) bel vestimento 6) ricchezza non grande 7) ricchezza grande 8) piu` ricchezza

LIVING 2) uno augellino 4) lo cavallo 5) una donna


The latter half of the pyramid of desire moves from a concentration of objects that are affectively as well as biologically alive, objects that can in different measures reward affection by showing love—or, if we approach the matter more in the spirit of the Vita nuova, objects that can redeem affection by teaching us that love is its own reward—to a concentration of objects toward which any affective inclination is entirely misplaced, because they are truly ‘‘dead.’’ The balance is tipped toward death (there are three items in the ‘‘living’’ column and five in the ‘‘nonliving’’) by the extraordinary importance assigned to ricchezza, the only item for which the use of qualifying adjectives (‘‘non grande,’’ ‘‘grande,’’ ‘‘piu`’’) secures a triple presence.16 The list of Convivio 4.12.16 tells us, in essence, that desire can lead to death-in-life. It figures the series of transitions that lead from the innocent desires of childhood (innocent, but already shadowed by the ominous pomo) to desires that, if not innocent, are still fully comprehensible in the light of basic human needs—for spiritual nourishment, for warmth, for love—and finally to the desire for something cold, inert, dead. By degrees we reach a stage where what we desire is no longer commensurate with our fundamental human needs; while the desire to possess a woman can still be glossed as an extended version of those needs, the desire for greater and greater wealth cannot. The gradual commodification of the living objects adds to the nuanced nature of Dante’s analysis, since commodification is precisely the process whereby the living becomes dead. Something has happened, and the mechanism has changed; one could say that our minds, in diseased form, have intervened, for desire propelled by need has been replaced by an intellectual construct: desire propelled by desire. The fact that the desire for wealth is an intellectual enterprise is reflected in the Convivio chapter that contains the list we have been studying, a chapter that starts out by condemning the desire for wealth on the basis of wealth’s inherent ‘‘imperfection,’’ and then is concerned to clarify the difference between the desire for wealth and the desire for knowledge. After all, if wealth is imperfect because one’s desire for it continues to grow with each new acquisition, never achieving satiety, the same could be said for knowledge: Veramente qui surge in dubbio una questione, da non trapassare sanza farla e rispondere a quella. Potrebbe dire alcuno calunniatore de la veritade che se, per crescere desiderio acquistando, le ricchezze sono imperfette e pero` vili, che per questa ragione sia imperfetta e


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vile la scienza, ne l’acquisto de la quale sempre cresce lo desiderio di quella . . . (Con. 4.12.11) Truly here a doubt is raised, which should not be passed over without being posed and answered. A distorter of the truth could say that if wealth is imperfect and therefore base because desire for it grows as it is acquired, that by the same token knowledge too must be imperfect and base, since in the acquisition of it too desire for more always grows . . .

The rebuttal claims that whereas the desire for knowledge is successive, offering many scaled opportunities for reaching happiness or ‘‘perfection,’’ the desire for wealth is unilateral and homogeneous, leading only to increased desire: E cosı` appare che, dal desiderio de la scienza, la scienza non e` da dire imperfetta, sı` come le ricchezze sono da dire per lo loro, come la questione ponea; che´ nel desiderare de la scienza successivamente finiscono li desiderii e viensi a perfezione, e in quello de la ricchezza no. (Con. 4.13.5) And so it appears that, on the basis of the desire for knowledge, knowledge itself is not to be called imperfect, as riches instead are to be called on the basis of the desire for riches, as the question posed; for in the desire for knowledge successively our desires conclude and come to perfection, and in desiring riches this does not happen.

This view was dramatically introduced in an earlier chapter, which we could call the Convivio’s ‘‘chapter on desire’’ (3.15), where Dante asserts that we humans must be able to attain perfection since otherwise our desire would have been created to no end, or indeed to the end of frustrating us, since it would lead only to further desire.17 Desiring to desire is precisely the error of the ‘‘cursed miser,’’ ‘‘l’avaro maladetto,’’ a figure with great relevance for Doglia mi reca: ‘‘e in questo errore cade l’avaro maladetto, e non s’accorge che desidera se´ sempre desiderare, andando dietro al numero impossibile a giugnere’’ (and into this error falls the cursed miser, who does not realize that he desires himself always to desire, going after a number impossible to reach) (Con. 3.15.9). The miser is doomed to failure since, by pursuing an infinite number, a number that cannot be attained, he desires always to desire: ‘‘desidera se´ sempre desiderare.’’ * * *


In this definition of the miser—a man who desires always to desire—we come to the ideological crossroads where avarice meets courtly love. Of both the courtly lover and the miser we can say that ‘‘desidera se´ sempre desiderare.’’ The courtly lover, we recall from our discussion of Ora parra`, is precisely one who desires to desire; hence, repudiation of the courtly stance can be summed up for Guittone in the formula ‘‘Amor fug[g]h’ e disvoglio,’’ where Amor disvoglio replaces an implicit Amor voglio. To not desire desire is to break with courtly love, and it is also to repudiate avarice. The common ground of avarice and love brings us back to Doglia mi reca, whose real topic is the transition from object five to object six in the Convivio catalogue: how is it that on the path of life/desire a man moves from desiring una donna to desiring ricchezza? Let us recapitulate. After an anticourtly opening stanza castigating women for their vile desire of nonvirtuous men, the second stanza briefly deplores the triune effects of virtue’s absence—men are as animals, falling from master to slave, from life to death—before praising virtue, the one possession that is always helpful, always beneficial: ‘‘che tu se’ possession che sempre giova’’ (42). With this paradoxical gloss— paradoxical since, by definition, possessions are that which can never fully satisfy, must always disappoint, and therefore, again by definition, cannot be ‘‘always beneficial’’—the discourse of desire is squarely joined: the issue is, what do we desire to possess? What are the possessions that we want? And it is with the possibility of misdirected desire, desire not for the ‘‘possession che sempre giova’’ but for other possessions which are not beneficial, that the canzone will now be preoccupied, asking why it is that man wants to fall (‘‘qual maraviglia / voler cadere’’ [24–25]). For, although virtue is the only possession worth having, man does not behave logically, taking virtue as his possession, but rather submits to make a possession of his very self: he enslaves himself to vice. The submerged logical link between the phases of this argument is desire: the canzone moves from the ladies’ base desire to possess nonvirtuous men in the first stanza, to virtue, the only possession worth desiring, in the second. Men enslave themselves through their desire; by not desiring to possess virtue, the only possession of real worth, and by desiring to possess what is not virtuous, they are doubly enslaved, being, as the third stanza puts it, slaves ‘‘not of a lord, but of a base slave’’: ‘‘Servo non di signor, ma di vil servo’’ (43). Once we grasp the logic that links the two phases of the argument, the courtly


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to the moral, both viewed as discourses of desire, the fourth stanza’s engagement of issues not normally associated with poems addressed to ladies is less startling. The man whom the ladies are not supposed to love, the man enslaved to vice, is like a servant following his master on a sorrowful path without knowing where he is headed. He is like the miser pursuing the material possessions (‘‘avere’’) that master us all: Chi e` servo e` come quello ch’e` seguace ratto a segnore, e non sa dove vada, per dolorosa strada; come l’avaro seguitando avere, ch’a tutti segnoreggia. (Doglia mi reca, 64–68) The one who is enslaved [to vice] is like someone who follows hard behind his lord along a sorrowful road, without knowing where it goes; like the miser following possessions, which are the lord of us all.

Boyde makes much of the fact that at this stage in the canzone Dante introduces a simile, and that ‘‘the simile turns out to be his true theme!’’18 But much more is at stake here than the delayed engagement of avarice, viewed as the poem’s ‘‘true theme.’’ The comparison is itself the message: we must not forget that the one who is being compared to the miser (‘‘come l’avaro seguitando avere’’), the servo of vice of the preceding verses, is the man whom the women are being told not to love. Thus, Dante offers as the type of the bad lover a miser, namely, someone who desires wrongly and excessively in a different but analogous sphere. This is a scandalous comparison, absolutely not normative within a courtly paradigm that, even while critiquing the lover, protects his desire from comparison with such base alternatives. Continuing in verses whose irascible energy adumbrates the Commedia, Dante depicts the ‘‘mad desire’’ (folle volere [71]) that induces a man to run after that which can never give him satisfaction: Corre l’avaro, ma piu` fugge pace: oh mente cieca, che non po` vedere lo suo folle volere che ’l numero, ch’ognora a passar bada, che ’nfinito vaneggia! Ecco giunta colei che ne pareggia:

Guittone, Dante, and the Anatomy of Desire 61 dimmi, che hai tu fatto, cieco avaro disfatto? Rispondimi, se puoi, altro che ‘‘Nulla.’’ Maladetta tua culla, che lusingo` cotanti sonni invano! Maladetto lo tuo perduto pane, che non si perde al cane! che´ da sera e da mane hai raunato e stretto ad ambo mano cio` che sı` tosto si rifa` lontano. (Doglia mi reca, 69–84) The miser runs, but peace flees faster: oh blind mind, whose mad desire cannot see that the number, which it seeks always to pass, stretches to infinity. Now here is the one who makes us all equal: tell me, what have you done, blind, undone miser? Answer me, if you can, other than ‘‘Nothing.’’ Cursed be your cradle, which flattered so many dreams in vain; cursed be the bread lost on you, which is not lost on a dog—for evening and morning you have gathered and held with both hands that which so quickly distances itself again.

We noted the same miser in the Convivio, presented in very similar terms: the adjective maladetto, which in the canzone qualifies the miser’s ‘‘culla’’ and ‘‘pane,’’ in the treatise is transposed to the avaro maladetto himself; the hoarding verb from the canzone, raunare, is featured throughout the imprecations against avarice in Convivio 4.12;19 the futile search for ‘‘ ’l numero, ch’ognora a passar bada, / che ’nfinito vaneggia’’ (72–73) is repeated in the treatise’s ‘‘andando dietro al numero impossibile a giugnere’’ (Con. 3.15.9). Most importantly, the force and vitality of this strophe alert us to the fact that Dante has here tapped into a wellspring of his poetic identity. The brief inscribed dialogue, comprising a brutally straightforward question (‘‘dimmi, che hai tu fatto’’ [75]) and a reply in direct discourse (‘‘Rispondimi, se puoi, altro che ‘Nulla’ ’’ [77]), generates much energy.20 This stanza, certainly the most dramatic of the poem (a feature perhaps related to the poet’s preceding statement that he will now make his discourse more accessible to his female audience), is replete with imagery: not only voyage imagery (‘‘e non sa dove vada, / per dolorosa strada’’ [65– 66]), which is heightened to flight imagery (‘‘Corre l’avaro, ma piu` fugge pace’’ [69]), but also the metaphor of the eyes of the mind, with which the miser’s ‘‘mente cieca’’ (70) cannot see. Brutally effective as


well are the retrospective curses of the miser’s cradle, which enticed in vain his infant slumbers, and of the bread which has been wasted on him throughout his life. The point is that all that has been invested in this life has come to nothing, because this life itself has been invested in nothing. The miser has hoarded and grasped the illusory, the fleeting, the void: ‘‘cio` che sı` tosto si rifa` lontano’’ (84). The miser is the figure through whom Dante explores the possibility of expanding the problematic of desire from the courtly and private to the social and public; he is an emblem of the completed transition from the enclosed lyric world of the Vita nuova, where desire is synonymous with eros (albeit eros sublimated and theologized), to the larger social concerns of the Commedia and the treatises, where desire as cupiditas afflicts the body politic as well as the body. Already in the Convivio the social ills provoked by an insatiable desire are underscored: ‘‘E che altro cotidianamente pericola e uccide le cittadi, le contrade, le singulari persone, tanto quanto lo nuovo raunamento d’avere appo alcuno? Lo quale raunamento nuovi desiderii discuopre, a lo fine de li quali sanza ingiuria d’alcuno venire non si puo`’’ (And what daily imperils and destroys cities, territories and individuals as much as someone’s new accumulation of wealth? Such accumulation uncovers new desires, which cannot be attained without injury to someone) (Con. 4.12.9). And in the Monarchia’s discussion of the greatest good to which society can aspire—justice—Dante explicitly states that the opposite of justice is cupiditas : ‘‘iustitie maxime contrariatur cupiditas’’ (1.11.11).21 Misura is the key concept with respect to the deployment of our desire in the social sphere, as Doglia mi reca makes clear: virtue is praised for having plucked ‘‘misura’’ in heaven (‘‘colt’hai nel ciel misura’’ [40]), and the gathering and hoarding of the miser are characterized by precisely their ‘‘dismisura’’: ‘‘Come con dismisura si rauna, / cosı` con dismisura si distringe’’ (Just as immoderately they accumulate, so immoderately they hold on) (85–86). Dismisura is also expressed with the adjective folle: the miser’s ‘‘folle volere’’ (71) blinds him to the futility of his endeavor. It is noteworthy that Ora parra` features both misura (‘‘ma tuttavia lo ’ntenda altri a misora’’ [30]) and its opposite; the ‘‘folle volere’’ of Dante’s miser is preceded by the ‘‘talento folle’’ (78) against which Guittone inveighs in his poem’s congedo. All of this will make its way into Inferno 7, the canto of avarice and prodigality, where the sinners were so mentally blinded while alive that they conducted themselves in spending without ‘‘misura’’:

Guittone, Dante, and the Anatomy of Desire 63 Tutti quanti fuor guerci sı` de la mente in la vita primaia; che con misura nullo spendio ferci. (Inf. 7.40–42) All were so blind in their minds in the first life that they made no expenditure in a measured fashion.

The goddess Fortuna, too, charged with supervising the distribution of wealth, will move from Doglia mi reca to the Commedia; while she figures negatively in the canzone, where Dante attacks her, implying her failure to distribute properly (‘‘che fai, fera Fortuna, / che non solvete quel che non si spende?’’ [What are you doing, harsh Fortune, why don’t you unloose that which is not spent?] [90–91]), in canto 7 she will be providentially endowed and thus infallible. Although these points of literal confluence between the canzoni and Inferno 7 are worth mentioning, I am more interested in pursuing to its logical conclusion in Dante’s thought the conflation between types of desire that is the hallmark first of Ora parra` and then of Doglia mi reca. Dante begins the seventh and final stanza of Doglia mi reca by readdressing himself to the ladies, to whom he has unveiled the baseness of the men who gaze upon them (the ‘‘vilta`’’ of the male admirers corresponds to the ladies’ own initial ‘‘vil disire’’): ‘‘Disvelato v’ho, donne, in alcun membro / la vilta` de la gente che vi mira’’ (I have unveiled for you, ladies, in some respects the baseness of the men who gaze on you) (127–28). Since the type of the bad lover offered earlier was the miser, these verses bring home the radical notion that the miser who yearns to possess avere (what Verga will call la roba) could very well be the same man gazing upon—longing to possess—a woman. (Remembering the Convivio’s list, where ricchezza follows una donna, we note that a superseding desire need not cancel out its predecessors.) Given that a woman’s potential lover is vicious—‘‘In ciascun e` di ciascun vizio assembro’’ (In each is a union of all vice) (132)—the love that results can only be turbid and confused: ‘‘per che amista` nel mondo si confonde’’ (so that love in the world is confused) (133). For mutual love (‘‘amista`’’) to occur, both parties must be virtuous, since the good of the woman requires a corresponding good from the man to draw forth love: ‘‘che l’amorose fronde / di radice di ben altro ben tira’’ (for from a good root another good draws out the leaves of love) (134–35).


Essentially, then, in Doglia mi reca Dante states that love for human beings is inseparable from virtue, from ethics: where there is no corresponding good, there is no love. A woman could only consider herself loved by men like these if she redefined love, ‘‘giving the name ‘love’ to a bestial appetite’’ (chiamando amore appetito di fera) (143).22 Such a woman should perish, since she disjoins her beauty from natural goodness and believes love to be ‘‘outside of reason’s garden’’: Oh cotal donna pera che sua bilta` dischiera da natural bonta` per tal cagione, e crede amor fuor d’orto di ragione. (Doglia mi reca, 144–47) O let such a woman perish, who for such reasons sunders her beauty from natural goodness and believes that love exists outside the garden of reason.

The idea of a love that is ‘‘appetito di fera’’ and ‘‘fuor d’orto di ragione’’ allows us to postulate its converse, namely, a love that is human rather than feral and that is within reason’s garden. In other words, these verses supply the crucial discriminant between types of ‘‘love,’’ or more properly between lust and love: reason, the faculty that renders us human rather than bestial. The anatomy of love that results, with its two opposing categories—‘‘amore appetito di fera’’ versus ‘‘amor . . . d’orto di ragione’’—will find continuation in the Commedia. But it is a view that is by no means unconflicted at the time of Doglia mi reca, a period when Dante was still writing lyrics that refute the very possibility of a love existing within reason’s garden. The canzone that is presumed to be Dante’s last, the so-called canzone montanina, Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia, is a Cavalcantian testament to a deadly eros, a love-death that exerts an ineluctable force. Similarly, neither reason nor virtue can prevail over love in the sonnet Io sono stato con Amore insieme, written to Cino da Pistoia most likely between 1303 and 1306. Here, a decade or so after spiritualizing Beatrice in the Vita nuova, Dante characterizes love as a force that ‘‘rides’’ him, reining him in and spurring him on, dominating reason and free will, and admits to having first experienced love in his ninth year, thus, in the words of Foster and Boyde, ‘‘implicitly admitting to a carnal love for Beatrice’’ (2:323): Io sono stato con Amore insieme da la circulazion del sol mia nona,

Guittone, Dante, and the Anatomy of Desire 65 e so com’egli affrena e come sprona, e come sotto lui si ride e geme. Chi ragione o virtu` contra gli sprieme, fa come que’ che ’n la tempesta sona. (Io sono stato, 1–6) I have been together with Love since my ninth revolution of the sun, and I know how he curbs and how he spurs, and how under him one laughs and groans. He who puts forth reason or virtue against him does as one who makes noise during a tempest.

‘‘[S]otto lui si ride e geme’’: the lover of the sonnet is ‘‘beneath’’ love’s dominion, literally sommesso, to use the verb that in Inferno 5 characterizes the lustful, those who subordinate reason to desire (‘‘i peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento’’ [Inf. 5.38– 39]). The comparison that follows, whereby the attempt to withstand passion with reason or virtue is as futile as the attempt to make oneself heard during a tempest, inevitably evokes Francesca, who speaks to the pilgrim during a brief respite in the buffeting violence of the infernal storm. The lovers of Inferno 5 are reminiscent of the lover of Io sono stato, with the crucial difference that they are condemned for having allowed their reason to be vanquished, while he is not. The sonnet goes on to tell us that within Love’s domain free will (‘‘liber arbitrio’’) has no power—that it is, in fact, not ‘‘free’’ (‘‘franco’’)—and that our deliberative faculty (‘‘consiglio’’) fights in vain to resist Love’s dominion: Pero` nel cerchio de la sua palestra liber arbitrio gia` mai non fu franco, sı` che consiglio invan vi si balestra. (Io sono stato, 9–11) Therefore in the circle of love’s arena free will was never free, so that there in vain our counsel shoots its arrow.

Foster and Boyde comment that the sonnet’s ‘‘consiglio’’ is ‘‘the act of ‘la virtu` che consiglia’ which in Purg. xviii, 61–74 seems virtually equivalent to free will itself as the power to withhold or release a rational assent to natural inclinations’’ (2:324); they further note that a ‘‘comparison of the present passage [in Io sono stato] with Purg. xviii, 40–74, strongly suggests that the carefully reasoned affirmation of free will in the latter text was made with the present denial of free will (where erotic stimuli at least are concerned) in mind’’ (2:324). I agree,


and offer the following textual echo as confirmation of the link between Purgatorio 18 and Io sono stato. The souls found in this canto are ‘‘ridden by their good will and just love’’ (cui buon volere e giusto amor cavalca [Purg.18.96]); the sonnet’s protagonist is also ridden by love—but not by ‘‘giusto amor.’’ The argumentation that in the Commedia will be marshaled to refute Io sono stato is already advanced in Doglia mi reca. Although the context is avarice, not lust, the argument works in the same way, for both are—and this is the point of the canzone—sins of excess desire. In its critique of the miser’s unruly passion, Doglia mi reca tells us that the fault lies in the insufficient exercise of reason: ‘‘Colpa e` de la ragion che nol gastiga’’ (The fault is reason’s for not punishing) (95). The canzone continues: if reason were to offer as justification for her poor performance the excuse that she is taken over, overcome, possessed by desire, possessed (one could add) by the desire to possess—‘‘Se vol dire ‘I’ son presa’ ’’ (If reason wants to say ‘‘I am taken’’) (96)23 —she merely demonstrates the weakness of her resistance, since the master should not be overcome by the servant: ‘‘ah com poca difesa / mostra segnore a cui servo sormonta’’ (oh how paltry a defense is offered by the master whom the slave overcomes) (97–98). The language of being possessed—‘‘ ‘I’ son presa’ ’’—is of course Francesca’s language: ‘‘Amor . . . prese costui’’ (Love took him) (Inf. 5.100–101); ‘‘Amor . . . mi prese’’ (Love took me) (Inf. 5.103–4). Indeed, it is the quintessential language of desire, used in the great explication of love of precisely Purgatorio 18—‘‘cosı` l’animo preso entra in disire’’ (so the soul that has been taken [by love] enters into desire) (31)—where, too, the point will shortly be made that being possessed by desire is no excuse for wrong action, for before we act on our desires they must be passed through the screen of reason. * * * When, in Doglia mi reca, Dante makes the logical leap from the bad lover to the miser, welding together eros and avarice, he creates a node of enormous significance for his future, no less than an adumbration of that she-wolf whose cupidity subtends both the lust of Paolo and Francesca and the political corruption of Florence. Courtly literature offers us many examples of lovers whose passion is outside of reason’s garden, who are impelled by the folle volere that in Doglia mi reca drives the miser, but courtly literature never dreams of calling the

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immoderate lover a miser; nor would the protagonist of Dante’s sonnet Io sono stato, which boldly proclaims that reason has no power over love, expect to find himself compared to an avaro maladetto! By making the comparison, Dante skewers courtly values, as Guittone had done before him, and then goes further: the comparison of the lover to the miser lays the foundation for the moral edifice of the Commedia, which is based on the idea that everything we do can be analyzed back to its root in desire, that desire or love is the motive force for all our actions—‘‘amore, a cui reduci / ogne buono operare e ’l suo contraro’’ (love, to which you reduce all good action and its contrary) (Purg. 18.14–15). It is thus not surprising that the language of Doglia mi reca, a profound meditation on desire, resonates not just in the canto on avarice, Inferno 7, but throughout the Commedia. Ultimately, the Commedia’s lexicon of desire is Ulyssean, keyed not just to the she-wolf but to the rebellious wings and mad flight of that voyager. I have argued previously that Dante’s mature ideology differs from the Convivio in blurring the treatise’s sharp distinction between material and intellectual cupidity. Dante’s mature conviction that the desire for knowledge can become immoderate in ways that render it not so different from other forms of immoderate desire leads him to invoke Ulysses at the threshold of the sins of incontinence, in Purgatorio 19, in the first half of a canto whose second half is devoted precisely to avarice, whose ledge the travelers have reached. Indeed, the linking of material and intellectual cupidity is further highlighted by the juxtaposition of Ulysses, in Purgatorio 19, and the she-wolf, cursed in Purgatorio in the same language used for the avaro maladetto 20: ‘‘Maladetta sie tu, antica lupa’’ (Cursed be you, ancient wolf ) (Purg. 20.10). The presence of Doglia mi reca in the metaphoric tissue of Purgatorio 19, which is noted but not explored by Foster and Boyde, is therefore highly significant. The canzone’s presence signals Dante’s awareness that the anatomy of desire conducted throughout this section of the Purgatorio found an early sophisticated expression in Doglia mi reca (not coincidentally the canzone he offers in the De vulgari eloquentia as witness to his stature as poet of rectitude). The striking consistency of Dante’s iconography for desire is suggested by the Ulyssean texture of Doglia mi reca, as indicated by the proleptically Ulyssean adjective ‘‘folle’’ (preceded by ‘‘follia’’ in verse 52) as well as by the sustained voyage imagery. In the canzone’s sixth stanza the voyage


imagery sprouts wings, as Dante compares virtue to a falconer attempting to attract the falcon/miser to her lure: Fassi dinanzi da l’avaro volto vertu`, che i suoi nimici a pace invita, con matera pulita, per allettarlo a se; ma poco vale, che´ sempre fugge l’esca. Poi che girato l’ha chiamando molto, gitta ’l pasto ver lui, tanto glien cale; ma quei non v’apre l’ale. (Doglia mi reca, 106–13; my italics) Virtue, who invites her enemies to make peace, presents herself before the miser’s sight with a bright object to attract him to her; but little does it avail, since he always flees the lure. After she has circled him calling many times, she throws the food toward him, so much does she care; but he does not open his wings.

These are the lines echoed in the Purgatorio, in the falcon imagery at the end of canto 14 and again in canto 19; Foster and Boyde note that the Purgatorio’s ‘‘two passages represent a later transformation of the present quasi-allegorical scene: abstract virtue becomes the concrete cosmos that with its God-manifesting beauty can tempt man towards goodness’’ (2:307). While in canto 14 we humans are figured as following the devil’s lure and ignoring the call of the heavens, in canto 19 the lure is figuratively in the hands of God, a situation analogous to that of the canzone: ‘‘li occhi rivolgi al logoro che gira / lo rege etterno con le rote magne’’ (turn your eyes to the lure circled by the eternal king with his great spheres) (Purg.19.62–63). These verses are immediately followed by a simile comparing the pilgrim’s upward motion toward the next terrace to the movement of a falcon toward the meal that tempts him: Quale ’l falcon, che prima a’ pie` si mira, indi si volge al grido e si protende per lo disio del pasto che la` il tira, tal mi fec’io24 (Purg. 19.64–67; my italics) Just like the falcon, which first looks down, then turns toward the call and stretches forward with desire for the food that pulls him there, so did I . . .

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While the miser-falcon of Doglia mi reca is oblivious to the ‘‘pasto’’ thrown before him by virtue, and refuses to spread his wings (‘‘ma quei non v’apre l’ale’’ [113]), the pilgrim-falcon of Purgatorio 19 is propelled by ‘‘lo disio del pasto’’ (66) to fly up. By verse 70 he will be on the mountain’s fifth ledge, where he will participate in the purgation of avarice, with the result that the in malo flight imagery of Doglia mi reca—specifically attached to a miser—has been rewritten and given a positive valence in Purgatorio 19. This procedure is not atypical; in fact the Purgatorio is the canticle where the poet lays bare the need for desire as the propulsive force for all life-journeys, informing us in canto 18 that desire is spiritual motion (‘‘disire, / ch’e` moto spiritale’’ [31–32]). No desire, in other words, signifies no motion; no motion, as we know from our passage through the earth’s frozen core, is death. So, we need to desire; the problem lies in how we go about it, or—to adopt the voyage metaphor—in which path we take. This much was clear from the Convivio’s pilgrim passage, which offers the paradigm of two kinds of spiritual motion, exemplified by two voyagers, a ‘‘buono camminatore’’ and an ‘‘erroneo camminatore’’: ‘‘lo buono camminatore giugne a termine e a posa; lo erroneo mai non l’aggiugne, ma con molta fatica del suo animo sempre con li occhi gulosi si mira innanzi’’ (the traveler on the right path reaches his goal and his rest; the traveler on the wrong path never reaches it, but with great weariness of soul always with his greedy eyes looks ahead) (Con. 4.12.19). The adjective chosen to describe the restless avidity of the ‘‘erroneo camminatore’’ is guloso—a choice that is a telling emblem for the profoundly interwoven nature of desire: one could say, indeed, that Dante makes the same point when he puts a graft of the tree of knowledge on the terrace of gluttony, thus suggesting that gula may imply avidity of a metaphorical as well as material sort. Of course, the point is implicit also in the Convivio list, which begins after all with ‘‘un pomo’’; if we bring to bear the full implications of that apple, we find the transgressive desire for knowledge—a fully Ulyssean dismisura—already implicated in the gluttonous yearnings of a young child. The lover/miser of Doglia mi reca, a lupine ‘‘bestia sanza pace’’ (Inf. 1.58) in his mad pursuit of an ever receding peace (‘‘Corre l’avaro, ma piu` fugge pace’’ [69]), becomes the ‘‘erroneo camminatore’’ who ‘‘con molta fatica del suo animo sempre con li occhi gulosi si mira innanzi,’’ who in turn adumbrates Dante’s last great figural node for excess desire: la lupa/Ulysses.

chapter 3

Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context

T

he lyric context of Inferno 5 is a great deal richer and more complex than the routine citations of Guido Guinizzelli’s Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore vis-a`-vis Francesca’s ‘‘Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende’’ (Inf. 5.100) would suggest.1 While we have integrated Francesca’s self-congratulatory exploitation of Guinizzellian principles on love and inborn nobility into our reading of Inferno 5, her blatant citational tactics seem to have obscured the importance of the lyric tradition for other parts of the canto. I will attempt in this essay to cast a wider net with respect to Inferno 5 and the Italian lyric tradition, and to explore how Dante fashions the canto as a meditation on that tradition and that discourse—quintessentially a discourse of desire. The choice of a lyric context for the treatment of lust is in itself unusual and should not be taken for granted; it is important to note that a treatment of lust need have little or nothing to do with a discourse of desire. The souls of canto 5 are explicitly defined as peccator carnali, and yet Dante’s treatment of them differs enormously from the treatment of carnal sinners in vision literature or in moral didactic poetry like that of Bonvesin da la Riva. The visions give us a richer sense of the cultural options available to Dante as he designed his underworld and thus provide a context that, though typically ignored by the Commedia’s commentators, both ancient and modern, is extremely useful for putting what Dante does in perspective.2 The visions tend to treat the sins of incontinence with particular asperity and cruelty; Dante instead treats them with comparative mildness. Most significant is the ‘‘obsession with sexual sin, such as adultery, fornication, promiscuity and sodomy’’ that runs through vision literature and that is essentially absent from the Commedia.3 Dante,

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after all, places Cunizza da Romano, a scandalous adulteress, in paradise, along with Rahab, a prostitute; he puts Thaı¨s, another prostitute, among the flatterers with an emphasis that is more rhetorical than sexual, and even treats sodomy as equivalent to heterosexual indulgence in purgatory. One could argue in fact that the most perversely ‘‘sexual’’ passage in the Commedia is the grotesque copulation of man and snake in Inferno 25, a canto that treats not lust but the sin of fraudulent thievery. By the same token, the most sexual word of Inferno 5 may well be ‘‘coda,’’ referring to the tail used by the infernal judge, Minos, to indicate the circle to which the damned soul is to be sent: ‘‘cignesi con la coda tante volte / quantunque gradi vuol che giu` sia messa’’ (he wraps himself with his tail as many times as the degree to which he wants the soul sent down) (Inf. 5.11–12). The phallic connotations of coda, already present in Horace and Cicero and familiar to us from the Decameron, were evident to the illustrators of the Commedia, who frequently show Minos’s tail appearing phallically from between his legs.4 However, even given the very definite phallic implications of Minos’s tail, Dante’s treatment of lust is remarkable not for how sexualized but for how desexualized it is. Again, the visions demonstrate to what degree Dante, by contrast, could be said to desexualize lust, even—despite the presence among the lustful of the Commedia’s second most famous female—to degender it.5 Compare, for instance, Tundale’s Vision, written in 1149 by an Irish monk, where the punishment of the fornicators is revoltingly gendered. Not only does the punishment take the gendered form of an obscene pregnancy, but the men who suffer this affliction incur what is clearly perceived as the further degradation of being effectively made into women: All of the men and the women who descended into the swamp were actually made pregnant by the beast. In this condition they waited harshly for the time agreed on for their departure. The offspring they conceived stung them in their entrails like vipers, and so their corpses were miserably churned in the fetid waves of the frozen sea by icy death. And when it was time, so that they were ready, they filled the depths crying with howls; and so they gave birth to serpents. I say not only women, but also men, gave birth to them, not through the part that nature constructed suitable for such a function, but through their arms, just as through their breasts, and they went bursting out through all their members. (Gardiner, ed., 169–70)


Likewise, the deflected and literary nature of Inferno 5, so frequently noted, comes into a more telling relief when we consider the adulterers in Thurkill’s Vision (dated 1206, of English provenance), who must fornicate publicly in an infernal amphitheater, and then tear each other to pieces: An adulterer was now brought into the sight of the furious demons together with an adulteress, united together in foul contact. In the presence of all they repeated their disgraceful love-making and immodest gestures to their own confusion and amid the cursing of the demons. Then, as if smitten with frenzy, they began to tear one another, changing the outward love that they seemed to entertain toward one another before into cruelty and hatred. Their limbs were torn to pieces by the furious crowd all around them, and they suffered the same punishments as those who had preceded them. All the fornicators who were also present were tormented in the same way, and the intensity of their sufferings was so great that the pen of this writer is not adequate to portray them. (Gardiner, ed., 230–31) It goes without saying that Francesca and Paolo do not fornicate in public; or, rather, although it has always gone without saying, to say it forces us to envision the possibility of a very different text. In Dante’s text, in the text he chose to create, the lustful do not perform a degraded act of love for the pilgrim and his guide. At the same time, the presence of Vergil’s Minos in canto 5 alerts us to the Aeneid as a frame of reference and prompts us to note that Dante is harsher to Francesca than Vergil is to Dido. We have moved from a context that Dante did not choose to evoke (the visions) to one that he did (the Aeneid): Dido, who killed herself when abandoned by Aeneas, is a touchstone of canto 5, figuring the love-death nexus that is at the canto’s core. Dante’s description of the Phrygian queen as ‘‘the one who killed herself for love’’ (colei che s’ancise amorosa [Inf. 5.61]) recalls the ‘‘Fields of Mourning’’ (lugentes campi) of Vergil’s underworld, where Dido dwells among those ‘‘whom bitter love consumed with brutal waste.’’6 The proximity between Minos and the unhappy lovers in the Aeneid (the ‘‘lugentes campi’’ are separated from Minos by only six verses) sheds light on the controversial decision to place Minos at the threshold of the second rather than the first circle of hell:7 as Vergil’s Minos paves the way for Dido, so, I suggest, Dante’s Minos paves the way for Francesca, who is marked as Didoesque, coming to the pilgrim from Dido’s cohort, ‘‘la schiera ov’e` Dido’’ (85).8


This suggestive symmetry brings us back to the key difference instituted by Dante between his Minos and Vergil’s; it brings us back to that coda. The tail is a Dantesque addition to the figure of the infernal judge as presented in Aeneid 6, a feature that Dante uses to connote something about his hell that is lacking in Vergil’s somber, even tragic, but much more static and monochrome vision.9 Minos’s tail is an early signpost in a web of signifiers extending all the way to Lucifer’s thickly-piled hide, a web that serves to conjure a hell that is densely corporeal, viscously physical, verbally foul—in short, much more degraded and degrading than anything Vergil has to offer. In Inferno 5 Dante follows Vergil, creating an analogy between Francesca and Dido that includes their structural contiguity to Minos, as part of the complex interplay whereby he both appropriates from his precursor (even the pairing of Francesca with Paolo has its forerunner in Aeneid 6’s pairing of Dido with Sychaeus, to whom Dido turns after she spurns Aeneas) and deviates from him, in this case by imposing much sterner conditions on his lovers than does Vergil. Dante uses Vergil to deviate from Vergil, in that it is precisely Minos, as refashioned by Dante, who marks the degree of difference between Vergil’s lugentes campi and the second circle of hell. If we compare Dante’s handling of the lustful to the Aeneid, on the one hand, and to the visions, on the other, we see that he steers a middle course: much harsher than Vergil, he uses his Minos’s phallic tail proleptically to carnalize the figure of Francesca and to offset her romanticizing; at the same time he is infinitely less brutal than the vision writers, compared to whom he offers a romanticized portrait of lust. While the visions emphasize sex itself as degraded and sinful, and subject carnal sinners to degrading and sexualized punishments, the contrapasso fashioned by Dante in Inferno 5, where the lustful are tossed by the hell-storm as in life they were buffeted by their passions, emphasizes the psychology of desire. The story that Francesca relates mirrors the contrapasso, for it, too, is exquisitely psychological: she offers no extenuating circumstances to justify her behavior, not the deceitful father or proxy marriage later added to her story by Boccaccio,10 just the overwhelming force of overriding passion. Desire compels her, and she sins. That is the essence of her story, and it is one that foregrounds the key philosophical issues at stake here for Dante, issues of compulsion and the will, already condensed in his definition of carnal sinners as ‘‘those who subordinate reason to desire’’ (i peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento [Inf. 5.38–39]).11


Reason struggles with desire, and in Francesca’s case desire triumphs. Her discourse of justification engages a deeper logic than Boccaccio’s circumstantial inventions: her point, reflected in her very syntax, is that desire cannot be withstood. Dante is passionately invested in the belief that desire can be withstood, that reason can and must triumph, and it is this profoundly psychological and ethical drama, with deep roots in the courtly tradition, that is ultimately played out in his treatment of lust. Moreover, the contrapasso that Dante fashions for lust may well have benefited also from Aristotle’s discussion of compulsion and the will in The Nichomachean Ethics. In a passage that has not, to my knowledge, been brought to bear on Inferno 5, Aristotle illustrates compulsion by offering precisely the example of a person being carried by a wind: ‘‘Those things, then, are thought involuntary, which take place by force or owing to ignorance; and that is compulsory of which the moving principle is outside, being a principle in which nothing is contributed by the person who acts—or, rather, is acted upon, e.g., if he were to be carried somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power’’ (Nich. Ethics 3.1; my italics).12 Francesca, who speaks of her past actions as involuntary, of herself as having been acted upon rather than acting, and who is now carried by a wind, is the perfect embodiment of Aristotle’s example; we could say that she is Aristotle’s example of compulsion transplanted to the Christian afterlife. What for Aristotle serves as an example of compulsion—the example of a person being carried by a material wind—becomes in Dante’s afterworld the metaphor of a windy, tempestuous passion, a metaphor that has been fashioned into a literal feature of Dante’s infernal landscape. Aristotle’s physically compulsive wind has become the bufera infernal: it has become the tempest that represents the passions that Francesca calls ‘‘compulsive’’ but that Dante believes can and must be withstood by reason. We have extended the frame of reference for this contrapasso to take in visionary and classical contexts, in the latter case even intertexts, both definite (Aeneid ) and possible (Nichomachean Ethics). A further context is offered by the fourteenth-century commentator Guido da Pisa, whose gloss of the contrapasso—‘‘the lustful are moved in this world by every wind of temptation, so that their souls are always in continual motion and continual tempest’’—moves him to cite Isaiah: ‘‘Cor impii quasi mare fervens quod quiescere non potest’’ (The heart of the wicked man is like a troubled sea that cannot rest)


(Isaiah 57:20).13 Beyond the suggestive comparison of the human heart to a turbulent sea, which resonates in canto 5’s description of the circle of lust as a place ‘‘che mugghia come fa mar per tempesta, / se da contrari venti e` combattuto’’ (that bellows as does the sea in a tempest, if it is battered by contrary winds) (28–30), we note the verb quiescere, whose Italian synonyms are found throughout Inferno 5, and indeed throughout the Commedia. The constellation quiescere/restare/posare inevitably invokes yet another philosophical context for the canto, for this is the language of the Augustinian analysis of desire, based on a counterpoint between human motion and divine repose, the human cor inquietum with its restless and unfulfilled longings versus the eternally fulfilled quies of God.14 The language and psychology of Augustine’s analysis of human desire saturate not only the Commedia, but also the linguistic and metaphoric systems of the lyric tradition to which Dante’s poem is heir, and to which we shall now turn. With its emphasis on the psychology of desire, the lyric tradition offers a key and underutilized context for understanding Inferno 5. * * * Giacomo da Lentini’s canzone Madonna, dir vo voglio develops in simile the analogy between the lover’s condition and that of a ship ‘‘in mare tempestoso’’ (in a tempestuous sea) (50). Noteworthy with respect to Inferno 5, where the souls have no hope of posare—‘‘nulla speranza li conforta mai, / non che di posa, ma di minor pena’’ (no hope ever comforts them, let alone of rest, even of lesser pain) (44– 45)—is the dialectic between the restless motion of the tempesta, on the one hand, and, on the other, the lover’s attempt to reach a different state, that of posare: ‘‘posar crio’’ (I hope to rest) (64). Likewise, Guido delle Colonne, in the canzone Ancor che l’aigua, speaks of his desire as a force that puts him in a tempest: ‘‘e lo disıö c’ho lo cor m’abranca, / crescemi volontate, / mettemi ’n tempestate’’ (the desire that I have seizes my heart, increases my will, puts me in a tempest) (43–45). Even more interesting in this regard is another canzone of Guido delle Colonne, Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato, which is in effect a lyric version of Inferno 5 without the eschatological context. The Augustinian dialectic between menare and posare (terms that will govern Inferno 5 as well)15 shapes the canzone from the outset, where the compulsive force of love is compared not to the roiling force of a gale on the sea but to the severe control of a rider on his mount. The lover begs love to loosen the reins by which he is so tightly bound:


‘‘Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato / a freno stretto senza riposanza, / alarga le toi retene in pietanza’’ (Love, who for so long has driven me on a tight bridle with no respite, loosen your reins in pity) (1–3). The wind and sea imagery comes to the fore in the canzone’s conclusion, where, as the wind beats the waves into a frenzy, so love agitates the lover, giving him no peace: ‘‘c’Amor mi sbatte e smena, che no abento, / sı` come vento smena nave in onda’’ (for Love shakes me and drives me, so that I have no peace, as the wind drives a ship in the waves) (63–64). Love moves the lover as the wind moves a ship; this analogy brings us quite close to the contrapasso of the bufera infernal. It is worth noting, moreover, that Dante himself posited the analogy between wind and desire, albeit in benign form, in the early sonnet Guido, i’ vorrei, where he wishes to be placed with his friends ‘‘in un vasel, ch’ad ogni vento / per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio’’ (in a boat that with every wind goes through the sea according to your wish and mine) (3–4).16 The theoretical scaffolding behind this imagery, which is spelled out crisply by Dante in verse 39 of canto 5, where he defines the carnal sinners as those ‘‘who subordinate reason to desire’’ (che la ragion sommettono al talento), is also present in these early lyrics. While Giacomo offers the language of passive surrender to love that Francesca will later use—for example, ‘‘como l’amor m’ha priso’’ (as love has taken me); ‘‘di tal guisa Amor m’ha vinto’’ (in such fashion has love conquered me) (Madonna, dir vo voglio, 2, 72)—Guido delle Colonne, who like Giacomo presents love as a force that seizes and overcomes the lover (for example, ‘‘sı` m’ave preso e tolto’’ [so love has taken and seized me] [Ancor che l’aigua, 33]; ‘‘Amor che vince tutto’’ [Love that conquers all] [Amor, che lungiamente, 24]), more explicitly theorizes the role of reason, ‘‘senno,’’ as the counterweight to passion: Forza di senno e` quella che soverchia ardir di core, asconde ed incoverchia. Ben e` gran senno, chi lo pote fare, saver celare–ed essere signore de lo suo core quand’este ’n errore. (Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato, 48–52) Force of reason is that which overcomes boldness of heart, hides and covers it. It is great wisdom, for the one who can do it, to know how to hide [love] and to be lord of his heart when it is in error.


Elaborating the troubadour topos of fol’amor, Guido delle Colonne writes that love causes even the wisest to stray, that he who loves most has least judgment and is most ‘‘folle’’: ‘‘Amor fa disvıäre li piu` saggi: / e chi piu` ama men’ ha in se´ misura, / piu` folle e` quello che piu` s’innamora’’ (Love makes the wisest go off the path: he who loves most has least measure in himself; most mad is the one who is most in love) (Amor, che lungiamente, 53–55). Here the Judge of Messina anticipates Guittone d’Arezzo, the Italian poet who went furthest in questioning the courtly view that holds desire desirable at all costs. Guittone explicitly repudiates the courtly ethos in his canzone Ora parra` s’eo savero` cantare, where he declares that he flees and diswants love—‘‘Amor fug[g]h’ e disvoglio’’ (3)—‘‘for everywhere that love grips there reigns madness, instead of wisdom’’: ‘‘che´ ’n tutte parte ove distringe Amore / regge follore—in loco di savere’’ (10–11). The commentary tradition is not entirely silent on the subject of vernacular subtexts for this section of canto 5; a small but intriguing set of references has grown up around ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento.’’ Di Siena’s 1867 commentary is the first to mention the similarity between verse 39 and a line from a sonnet of Folgore da San Gimignano,17 which I will cite in full: Quando la voglia segnoreggia tanto che la ragion non a` poter in loco spesse fıäte ride l’uom di pianto e de grave doglienza mostra gioco; e ben serıà de bon savere affranto chi fredda neve giudicasse foco; simil son quelli che gioi’ mostra e canto de quell’onde doler devrıà un poco; Ma ben se po` coralmente dolere chi sommette ragion a voluntade e segue senza freno so` volere; che non e` gia` sı` ricca podestade com se` medesmo a dritto mantenere, e seguir pregio, fu`gger vanitade.18 When the will so takes precedence that reason has no power, many times a man laughs in tears and makes a joke of his grave suffering, and he could well be so cut off from good understanding that he could judge cold snow to be fire; similar are those who show happiness about that which should cause them some grief. Indeed he can heartily grieve, he who subordinates reason to his will, and who follows his desire without restraint; for there is no

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 78 greater ability than to keep oneself on the straight path, to follow honor and to flee vanity.

Folgore’s ‘‘chi sommette ragion a voluntade’’ and Dante’s ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento’’ are strikingly parallel in their use of the construction sommettere a, with reason as the direct object of the verb and desire/will as the object of the preposition a. This is a construction that commentators have turned up in other texts as well. In 1905 Torraca, claiming that ‘‘il concetto era antico, la frase dell’uso,’’ cites Cicero, De Officiis, and Tavola Ritonda 75: ‘‘perch’io non voglio sottomettere la ragione alla volonta`’’ (because I do not want to subordinate reason to will).19 Contini draws attention to a verse of Meo Abbracciavacca: ‘‘e qual sommette a voglia operazione’’ (the one who subordinates action to will).20 The Bosco-Reggio edition of the Commedia cites Mazzoni’s reference to a passage in Brunetto Latini’s Tresor.21 These citations do indeed illuminate the topical currency of Dante’s ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento,’’ while not however venturing beyond fairly trite and hackneyed statements of the moral conflict between reason and desire. I propose a different intertext, a verse whose syntax is different but whose meaning is substantively identical, and whose author—Guido Cavalcanti—enormously enriches and complicates our understanding of Dante’s deployment of ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento’’ in the context of Inferno 5. I refer to ‘‘che´ la ’ntenzione per ragione vale,’’ verse 33 of Donna me prega. Using intenzione to signify desire (or the object of desire or, but in this context it amounts to the same thing, the representation of the object of desire),22 Cavalcanti states that, for a lover, desire takes the place of reason. Although keyed to different registers—one Aristotelian and scholastic, the other more traditionally erotic and courtly, with ‘‘talento’’ replacing ‘‘ ’ntenzione’’ (it is interesting to note that ‘‘talento’’ is the last word of Donna me prega)23 —these two verses make essentially the same point. In fact, ‘‘che´ la ’ntenzione per ragione vale’’ is a philosophically more sophisticated way of saying ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento.’’ In Donna me prega, Cavalcanti takes that rhetorical staple of the lyric tradition, the copula Amore-morte, and endows it with hard philosophical value, arguing in lethally sharp technical language that love is a subrational force that kills. Having assigned love to that faculty of the soul that is ‘‘not rational, but which feels’’ (non razionale,–ma che


sente [31])—in other words to the seat of the passions, the sensitive as compared to the rational soul—he claims that love causes judgment to sicken, since it substitutes appetite for reason, and induces lack of discernment: ‘‘for di salute–giudicar mantene, / che´ la ’ntenzione— per ragione—vale: / discerne male’’ (it keeps judgment out of well being, since desire substitutes for reason; it discerns poorly) (Donna me prega, 32–34). Cavalcanti spectacularly concludes this line of argument by stating that if reason—the faculty that helps us pursue the path contrary to love—is impeded, then from love death will often follow: ‘‘Di sua potenza segue spesso morte, / se forte–la vertu` fosse impedita / la quale aita–la contraria via’’ (From its power death will often follow, if the faculty is impeded that helps the contrary path) (35–37). For Cavalcanti, in other words, love leads us not down the path of life, but down the path of death.24 Now, viewed teleologically, Dante’s work and thought are governed by one principle: that love is a life-force, and that the life-force is love. Love can save, love can beatify, love can give life; these principles are the bedrock of the Commedia. If I state the obvious, I do so in order to make a point about Inferno 5: simply put, it is that Inferno 5 derives its extraordinary importance within the economy of Dante’s oeuvre from its perverse mirroring of the poet’s primal foundational belief. Inferno 5 constitutes Dante’s most synthetic and compelling meditation on love as a death-force, on love as a power that does not defy death but courts it, on love as a dark compulsion that—far from leading us toward salvation—keeps us, as Cavalcanti puts it, ‘‘out of well being’’ (for di salute). We could say, indeed, that Inferno 5 is the venue in which Dante conducts an in malo exploration of the Commedia’s basic premises: the possibility of transcendence through love and the salvific mission of the word. And, if Inferno 5’s profile is heightened by its association with a love that leads us down ‘‘la contraria via’’ from the one on which Beatrice leads Dante, so is Cavalcanti’s, for Cavalcanti is the theoretician of that love. Looking at these issues from the perspective of Cavalcanti’s role vis-a`-vis the Commedia, two points emerge: 1) our persistent sense of a pervasive Cavalcantian presence in the Commedia that goes far beyond explicit citations of or referrals to Guido is accurate; and 2) this is so because Guido is in fact encoded into the problematic that is Inferno 5, and that problematic is in fact coterminous with the poem.25 I articulated in nuce the view that animates these pages in Dante’s Poets:


‘‘Whatever our position on the question of Cavalcanti’s alleged Averroism, so hotly debated by Nardi and Favati, there can be no doubt that the love Guido professes in Donna me prega is diametrically opposed to the love Dante professes in the Commedia. Cavalcanti aligns love and death, Dante love and life; the ending of Donna me prega reads like the antithesis of the Paradiso, or rather the Paradiso reads like a sustained contradiction of Donna me prega’’ (144–45). From this perspective, Guido is akin to Ulysses—another seeker of ‘‘canoscenza’’ (a quintessentially Cavalcantian word, famously used by Ulysses in Inf. 26.120) who, proud of his ‘‘altezza d’ingegno,’’ disdains all help or assistance—in that he is a figure whose literal presence in the poem is only the starting point for the density of significance that ultimately accrues to him. I would argue, indeed, that Dante’s Ulyssean mythography is a composite that draws on Guido’s haughty intellectualism; even more to the point is that the Commedia’s handling of Guido resonates to its overarching Ulyssean thematics.26 The ‘‘Da me stesso non vegno’’ thematic of Inferno 10, a canto whose echoing of Donna me prega is well recognized, projects onto Guido an arrogant self-sufficiency that is emphatically and precisely coded as Ulyssean. Dante achieves this view of Guido by pushing Guido’s own arguments one step further, turning Guido’s despair—his belief that love can never afford canoscenza because of the very nature of what love is—into disdain. Thus, Guido is viewed as ‘‘disdaining’’ the object of Dante’s quest, namely Beatrice: ‘‘Da me stesso non vegno: / colui ch’attende la` per qui mi mena / forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno’’ (I come not on my own; the one who waits there leads me through here, to the one whom your Guido perhaps held in disdain) (Inf. 10.61–63).27 In this way a shared lyric past is invoked in Inferno 10 (and cemented by way of the evocation of Donna me prega in the nome/come/ lume rhyme words of the passage immediately following the naming of Guido in verse 63), a past in which—from Dante’s perspective— one poet gave new meaning to the salvific and life-giving force of love already conjured by Guinizzelli, while the other insisted on the tragic conjunction of love and death. Although a Cavalcantian role in Inferno 5—a text whose subject is none other than ‘‘colei che s’ancise amorosa,’’ that is, the conjunction of love and death—is not dependent on specific citations, I believe that Donna me prega may be discerned as a precise intertextual presence. The canzone tells us that love is formed from darkness (‘‘sı` formato,–come / diaffan da lume,–d’una scuritate’’


[16–17]), and that, seated in darkness, it excludes the light (‘‘assiso–’n mezzo scuro, luce rade’’ [68]); the dwelling of the lustful is twice defined in terms of the total exclusion of light, as ‘‘parte ove non e` che luca’’ (a part where there is nothing that gives light) (Inf. 4.151), and ‘‘loco d’ogne luce muto’’ (a place mute of all light) (Inf. 5.28). The agitated, purposeless motion of Inferno 5 evokes Cavalcanti’s description of love as a condition whose essence is excess, absence of repose, and the inability to endure for long in any single state: L’essere e` quando–lo voler e` tanto ch’oltra misura–di natura–torna, poi non s’adorna–di riposo mai. Move, cangiando–color, riso in pianto, e la figura–con paura–storna; poco soggiorna . . . (Donna me prega, 43–48)28 Love’s mode of being is when the will is such that it goes beyond nature’s measure, because it is never adorned by repose. It moves, changing color, from laughter to tears; through fear it alters one’s appearance; it stays but briefly [in a given state] . . .

The stanza continues by situating love in ‘‘gente di valor’’—‘‘ancor di lui vedrai / che ’n gente di valor lo piu` si trova’’ (also you will see of love that most often it is found in people of worth) (48–49)—a group in which Francesca would undoubtedly claim membership. Let us return now to the connection between verse 33 of Donna me prega, which states that under love’s sway desire takes the place of reason, and verse 39 of Inferno 5, which states that carnal sinners subordinate reason to desire. The likeness of ‘‘che´ la ’ntenzione–per ragione–vale’’ and ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento’’ is evident: although, as I noted previously, the verses belong to different stylistic registers, they offer the same information about the damaging effects of passion on the alignment of human faculties. Both hold that passion takes our faculties out of alignment, permitting desire to govern reason rather than the other way around. More significant, however, is the difference between the verses, which stems from their contexts and which can be summed up as follows: what Guido says about love, Dante says about lust. What Dante considers, in fact, to be the very definition of lust rather than love—carnal sinners are defined precisely as those who subject reason to desire—Cavalcanti considers to be the very nature of love: all love. So, while we are accustomed to thinking of Inferno 5 as a text that forces us to deconstruct Francesca’s use of


82

the word amore—a text that, by romanticizing in hell, obliges the reader to deromanticize and to learn that what is called love may not always be love, even when enveloped in citations from Guido Guinizzelli and Andreas Capellanus—we can now see that it is also a text that protects and defends love (what Dante would classify as real love) from a blanket indictment like that of Cavalcanti. By working to make distinctions between different kinds of human impulses popularly grouped together under the general rubric ‘‘love,’’ Inferno 5 resists the totalizing effect of Cavalcanti’s philosophy. Dante’s echoes of Donna me prega in Inferno 5 do not confirm the canzone’s views but resist them. But Dante had not always resisted Cavalcanti’s views on love, and so this intertextual moment also affords us a window onto the struggle waged between Dante and Guido, an ideological struggle over Dante’s thinking about desire in human life, its transcendental dimension or lack thereof—a struggle, that is, over Dante’s very soul. There was a time when Dante employed for himself the language that in the Commedia is employed by or about Francesca. Perusing his lyrics in chronological order, we have no trouble finding language retroactively reminiscent of Inferno 5: lo disio che li mena (De gli occhi de la mia donna, 13)

the desire that drives them

Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce a fin di morte . . . Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice . . . E allor non trarra` sı` poco vento che non mi meni, sı` ch’io cadro` freddo; e per tal verro` morto . . . Pensando a quel che d’Amore ho provato, l’anima mia non chiede altro diletto, ne´ il penar non cura il quale attende: che´, poi che ’l corpo sara` consumato, se n’andera` l’amor che m’ha sı` stretto con lei a Quel ch’ogni ragione intende; e se del suo peccar pace no i rende,

Dante and Cavalcanti 83 partirassi col tormentar ch’e` degna; sı` che non ne paventa, e stara` tanto attenta d’imaginar colei per cui s’e` mossa, che nulla pena avra` ched ella senta; sı` che, se ’n questo mondo io l’ho perduto, Amor ne l’altro men dara` trebuto. (Lo doloroso amor, 1–2, 14, 21–23, 29–42) The sorrowful love that leads me to death. . . . For her I die whose name is Beatrice. . . . And then there will be no wind so mild that it will not drive me, so that I will fall cold, and thus I will come to death. . . . Thinking of what I have experienced of love, my soul asks for no other pleasure, nor does it care for the suffering that awaits; for, once my body will be consumed, the love that has so gripped me will go with my soul to the One who understands all causes, and if He does not render peace for its sins, my soul will depart with the torment it merits; but in such a way that it will not fear, for it will be so intent on imagining her for whom it moved that there will be no suffering that it will feel. Thus if in this world I have lost, in the next love will give me recompense. sı` ch’io caddi in terra (E’ m’incresce di me, 64)

so that I fell to earth

. . . un disio che mi conduce . . . una giovane entrata, che m’ha preso, e hagli un foco acceso . . . non soffrir che costei per giovanezza mi conduca a morte (Amor, che movi tua vertu` da cielo, 20, 25–26, 56–57) . . . a desire that leads me. . . . A young woman has entered [my mind] who has seized me, and has kindled a flame there. . . . Do not allow that she by her youth lead me to death

Ben e` verace amor quel che m’ha preso e ben mi stringe forte (Io sento sı` d’Amor la gran possanza, 33–34)

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 84 Indeed it is true love which has seized me and which grips me tight e Amor . . . non m’abbandona . . . che´ li dolzi pensier’ non mi son tolti . . . la morte de’ passare ogni altro dolce29 (Io son venuto al punto de la rota, 23, 25, 37, 65) and love . . . . does not let go of me. . . . for sweet thoughts are not taken from me. . . . death must surpass all other sweetness sı` ch’ella non mi meni col suo freddo (Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna, 23) so that she not lead me with her cold E’ m’ha percosso in terra, e stammi sopra con quella spada ond’elli ancise Dido (Cosı` nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro, 35–36) Love has struck me to the ground and stands over me with that sword with which he killed Dido Corre l’avaro, ma piu` fugge pace . . . Colpa e` de la ragion che nol gastiga. Se vol dire ‘I’ son presa,’ ah com poca difesa mostra segnore a cui servo sormonta! . . . Vedete come conchiudendo vado: che non dee creder quella cui par bene esser bella, esser amata da questi cotali; che se belta` tra i mali volemo annumerar, creder si po`ne, chiamando amore appetito di fera! Oh cotal donna pera che sua bilta` dischiera da natural bonta` per tal cagione, e crede amor fuor d’orto di ragione! (Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire, 69, 95–98, 137–47) The miser runs, but peace flees faster. . . . The fault is reason’s for not punishing. If reason wants to say ‘‘I am taken,’’ oh how paltry a defense is

Dante and Cavalcanti 85 offered by the master whom the slave overcomes! . . . See how I reach my conclusion: she who thinks it good to be beautiful should not believe herself loved by such as these; though if we wanted to number beauty among the evils, then one could believe that—provided one give the name ‘‘love’’ to bestial appetite. O let such a woman perish, who for such reasons sunders her beauty from natural goodness and believes that love exists outside the garden of reason! Io sono stato con Amore insieme da la circulazion del sol mia nona, e so com’egli affrena e come sprona, e come sotto lui si ride e geme. Chi ragione o virtu` contra gli sprieme, fa come que’ che ’n la tempesta sona (Io sono stato, 1–6)

I have been together with Love since my ninth revolution of the sun, and I know how he curbs and how he spurs, and how under him one laughs and groans. He who puts forth reason or virtue against him does as one who makes noise during a tempest. Chi s’innamora sı` come voi fate, or qua or la`, e se´ lega e dissolve, mostra ch’Amor leggermente il saetti. Pero`, se leggier cor cosı` vi volve, priego che con vertu` il correggiate, sı` che s’accordi i fatti a’ dolci detti. (Io mi credea del tutto esser partito, 9–14) He who falls in love as you do, now here now there, and both binds and looses himself, shows that love wounds him but lightly. However, if a light heart so turns you, I beg you to correct it with virtue, so that your deeds accord with your sweet words. Quale argomento di ragion raffrena, ove tanta tempesta in me si gira? (Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia, 26–27) What argument of reason can hold back, where such a tempest whirls within me?


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This compilation gives us much to consider with respect to the lyric context of Inferno 5, ranging from suggestive phrasings to substantive intertexts. Let us begin with the early canzone Lo doloroso amor. The Cavalcantian alchemy of Lo doloroso amor—perhaps one should say the hyper-Cavalcantian alchemy, in that Guido himself never addresses a congedo to ‘‘Morte,’’ as Dante does uniquely in this canzone—is such that Beatrice becomes literally an anti-Beatrice:30 Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce a fin di morte per piacer di quella che lo mio cor solea tener gioioso, m’ha tolto e toglie ciascun dı` la luce che aveän li occhi miei di tale stella, che non credea di lei mai star doglioso: e ’l colpo suo c’ho portato nascoso, omai si scopre per soverchia pena, la qual nasce del foco che m’ha tratto di gioco, sı` ch’altro mai che male io non aspetto; e ’l viver mio (omai esser de’ poco) fin a la morte mia sospira e dice: ‘‘Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice.’’ (Lo doloroso amor, 1–14) The sorrowful love that leads me to death, at the will of her who used to hold my heart joyous, has taken and takes each day the light that my eyes received from a star that I did not believe would ever make me sad. The blow that I carried hidden is now revealed because of excessive pain, born from the flame that has pulled me away from joy, so that I await nothing other than evil. And my life (which must be brief ) sighs on the way to death and says: ’’For her I die whose name is Beatrice.’’

There is no text that more dramatically serves notice of the long path Dante had to travel to become the poet whose beloved is an absolute principle of life than this canzone’s initial stanza, which begins by invoking love as a force that leads to death—‘‘Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce / a fin di morte . . .’’—and concludes by affirming Beatrice’s role, by name (this is the only poem not later included in the Vita nuova in which her name appears), as carrier of death: ‘‘Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice.’’ Fausto Montanari links the lover in Lo doloroso amor to Francesca in Inferno 5, suggesting that the canzone’s


lover comes to life again in her, specifically in the last stanza’s declaration that hell holds no fear for him, since with his lady’s image before him he will feel no pain: Pensando a quel che d’Amore ho provato, l’anima mia non chiede altro diletto, ne´ il penar non cura il quale attende: che´, poi che ’l corpo sara` consumato, se n’andera` l’amor che m’ha sı` stretto con lei a Quel ch’ogni ragione intende; e se del suo peccar pace no i rende, partirassi col tormentar ch’e` degna; sı` che non ne paventa, e stara` tanto attenta d’imaginar colei per cui s’e` mossa, che nulla pena avra` ched ella senta; sı` che, se ’n questo mondo io l’ho perduto, Amor ne l’altro men dara` trebuto. (Lo doloroso amor, 29–42) Thinking of what I have experienced of love, my soul asks for no other pleasure, nor does it care for the suffering that awaits; for, once my body will be consumed, the love that has so gripped me will go with my soul to the One who understands all causes, and if He does not render peace for its sins, my soul will depart with the torment it merits; but in such a way that it will not fear, for it will be so intent on imagining her for whom it moved that there will be no suffering that it will feel. Thus if in this world I have lost, in the next love will give me recompense.

Seeing in these verses a challenge that anticipates Francesca’s later claim to a love that challenges death itself, Montanari writes ‘‘Nelle parole di Francesca rivive il disperato estremismo della canzone giovanile di Dante’’ (In Francesca’s words the desperate extremism of Dante’s youthful canzone comes back to life).31 ‘‘Desperate extremism’’ is, if anything, an understatement when it comes to the rime petrose, poems that offer a template for the dance of desire—of motion versus stasis, life versus death—in the unmoving stone that must be moved, in the pietra as the icon of inert, unmoving ‘‘death’’ that is unresponsive to the lover’s turgid, pressing, all-tooliving need. That urgent, ever-unmet desire is expressed in canto 5 as a tempest, a whirlwind, in imagery that creates a bridge back to the second stanza of the canzone Io son venuto, where, too, as Durling and


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Martinez comment, we find ‘‘wind and storm as erotic passion.’’32 Inferno 5, which seems deliberately to recall the incipit of Io son venuto in verse 26’s ‘‘or son venuto,’’ is thus linking itself to a poem that enacts love as death, eros as thanatos. For, if the canzone’s strophes ring out changes on the topos ‘‘it is winter, that is, death, and yet I love, that is, live,’’ their rhetoric accomplishes an inversion, whereby the natural death of winter lives and ‘‘true’’ death, so to speak, is associated with the lover. All the pulsating vibrant verbs of life belong to the ‘‘dead’’ natural world of the first part of each strophe; when we shift to engage the ‘‘I’’ in the conclusion of each strophe, the living language gives way to the passive static verbs that qualify the lover, whose life/love is more dead than the death of winter. Stanza 2, for example, begins emphatically with ‘‘Levasi,’’ a strong verb that describes the soaring wind as it rises up: ‘‘Levasi de la rena d’Etıöpia / lo vento peregrin che l’aere turba’’ (Rises up from the sands of Ethiopia the wandering wind that unsettles the air) (14–15). The ‘‘I’’ is the mere object in a clause of which triumphant Love, ‘‘Amor,’’ whose nets are carried aloft by the conquering wind, is subject: ‘‘e Amor, che sue ragne / ritira in alto pel vento che poggia, / non m’abbandona’’ (and love, who pulls his nets on high with the wind that blows, does not let me go) (Io son venuto, 23–25). Francesca, too, uses constructions in which Love is subject and she is the passive object. She too says that ‘‘Amor . . . non m’abbandona’’ (Love . . . does not let me go) (Inf. 5.103, 105). Francesca’s ‘‘non m’abbandona’’ is an explicit echo of the lover’s ‘‘non m’abbandona’’ from the canzone Io son venuto, thus confirming Inferno 5’s link to the petrose and the canto’s status as Dante’s consummate statement on the choice—what he would consider the Cavalcantian choice—of a love whose never-loosening grip is the grip of death. The description of the lustful souls as starlings who fly ‘‘nel freddo tempo’’ (41) evokes another petrosa, Amor, tu vedi ben, two of whose rhyme words are freddo and tempo. The presence of Dido in canto 5 constitutes yet another link to the petrose, since Dido is named in Cosı` nel mio parlar, in the only reference to Vergil’s doomed queen in Dante’s lyrics. Love beats the lover to the ground, and then stands over him ‘‘with that sword with which he killed Dido’’ (con quella spada ond’elli ancise Dido [36]); as in canto 5, Dido is the human matrix on which love and death meet. And it is noteworthy that the identical word ‘‘ancise’’ appears in both references to Dido, as if canto 5’s more succinct ‘‘che s’ancise amorosa,’’ which suppresses all other agents, whether they be Love or


Aeneas’s sword, and leaves Dido alone with her fate, bears the verbal traces of the earlier lyric rendering. The common ground between Inferno 5 and the petrose is a love that is not life—not warmth, not motion, not growth. Like the petrose, Inferno 5 meditates on a love that—belied by the apparent turbulence of the bufera infernal—is ultimately motionless, cold, inert, and deadly. For all the restless tumult of the bufera, canto 5 ends with the stillness of death: ‘‘e caddi come corpo morto cade’’ (and I fell as a dead body falls). The petrose ritually enact the love-death; the late sonnet Io sono stato argues that there is no withstanding it. Neither reason nor virtue can prevail over love, the poem explains; free will is powerless to overcome it. Written to Cino da Pistoia most likely between 1303 and 1306, Io sono stato accompanies Epistola 3, in which Dante addresses his friend’s query as to ‘‘whether the soul can move from one passion to another’’ (utrum de passione in passionem possit anima transformari) and replies in the affirmative with language that is strikingly reminiscent of Donna me prega: ‘‘since the concupiscent faculty, which is the seat of love, belongs to the sensitive soul, it is manifest that after the corruption of one passion for which it is translated into act, it is reserved for another’’ (Cum igitur potentia concupiscibilis, que sedes amoris est, sit potentia sensitiva, manifestum est quod post corruptionem unius passionis qua in actum reducitur, in alium reservatur [6]).33 Dante will reverse himself later in another sonnet to his friend, Io mi credea del tutto esser partito, in which he reproves Cino for his changeability and urges him to correct it,34 but in Io sono stato and its companion letter volatility in love is a given, since we are under love’s dominion rather than our own. Moreover, the sonnet makes clear that such love applies even to Beatrice; indeed, its opening verses declare that Dante first experienced love in his ninth year, thus ‘‘implicitly admitting,’’ as Foster and Boyde comment, ‘‘to a carnal love for Beatrice.’’35 Using the same metaphor of love as rider (implicitly lover as mount) that we saw in Guido delle Colonne’s Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato (‘‘Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato / a freno stretto senza riposanza’’), Dante describes love reining him in and spurring him on, dominating reason and free will: Io sono stato con Amore insieme da la circulazion del sol mia nona, e so com’egli affrena e come sprona, e come sotto lui si ride e geme. (Io sono stato, 1–4)


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I have been together with Love since my ninth revolution of the sun, and I know how he curbs and how he spurs, and how under him one laughs and groans.

‘‘[S]otto lui si ride e geme’’ not only recalls Donna me prega, where love changes ‘‘riso in pianto,’’ but places the lover squarely ‘‘beneath’’ love, ‘‘sotto,’’ so that he is literally sommesso, to use the verb that in Inferno 5 characterizes the lustful, ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento.’’ In the comparison that follows, the attempt to withstand passion with reason or virtue is as futile as the attempt to make oneself heard during a tempest: ‘‘Chi ragione o virtu` contra gli sprieme, / fa come que’ che ’n la tempesta sona’’ (He who puts forth reason or virtue against love does as one who makes noise during a tempest) (Io sono stato, 5–6). It is impossible not to think of Francesca, who speaks to the pilgrim during a brief respite in the buffeting violence of the infernal wind: ‘‘noi udiremo e parleremo a voi, / mentre che ’l vento, come fa, ci tace’’ (we will hear and speak to you while the wind is silent) (Inf. 5.95–96). The lovers of Inferno 5 are reminiscent of the lover of Io sono stato, with the crucial difference that they are condemned for having allowed their reason to be vanquished, while he is not. Far from being condemned, his behavior is justified, for, within love’s domain, free will (‘‘liber arbitrio’’) has no power; in fact, it is not free (‘‘franco’’), and our deliberative faculty (‘‘consiglio’’) fights in vain to resist love’s dominion: ‘‘Pero` nel cerchio de la sua palestra / liber arbitrio gia` mai non fu franco, / sı` che consiglio invan vi si balestra’’ (Thus within the circle of love’s arena free will was never free, so that our counsel in vain slings its arrows therein) (Io sono stato, 9–11). The impotence of reason when faced with an ineluctable passion is reaffirmed, and again laced with tempest imagery, in Dante’s last great Cavalcantian testament to a deadly eros, the so-called canzone montanina. Here, in Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia, the lover asks how reason can restrain where such a tempest whirls within: ‘‘Quale argomento di ragion raffrena, / ove tanto tempesta in me si gira?’’ (What argument of reason can hold back, where such a tempest whirls within me?) (26–27). Amor, da che convien accompanied Epistola 4 to Marchese Moroello Malaspina, apparently written circa 1307– 1308, in which Dante describes how ‘‘Amor terribilis et imperiosus me tenuit’’: ‘‘terrible and imperious love holds me’’ (3). He is constrained against his will:


ne contra se amplius anima rebellaret, liberum meum ligavit arbitrium, ut non quo ego, sed quo ille vult, me verti oporteat. Regnat itaque Amor in me, nulla refragante virtute (Epistola 4, 4–5) in order that my soul not rebel against him again, love bound my free will, so that it is necessary for me to turn not whither I, but whither he, wants. So love reigns in me, with no faculty opposing him

The terrible and imperious love sung by these poems resurfaces in the story of Paolo and Francesca, whose unopposable passion leads not only to death—as in the lyrics—but also to damnation. Never are these views disavowed more explicitly than in Purgatorio 18, where the strong statement of free will’s dominating role in all moral transactions suggests a desire to discredit Io sono stato. A textual link is the sonnet’s ‘‘consiglio’’ and the canto’s ‘‘virtu` che consiglia’’ (Purg. 18.62), noted by Foster and Boyde.36 Moreover, while the sonnet’s protagonist is a steed ridden by love, but not by ‘‘giusto amor,’’ in Purgatorio 18 the purging souls are ridden—cavalcati—by their good will and just love: ‘‘cui buon volere e giusto amor cavalca’’ (96).37 But we do not have to await the Commedia to find a condemnation of the views espoused by Io sono stato. Roughly contemporaneous with Io sono stato and Amor, da che convien is the canzone Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire, whose indictment of passion ungoverned by virtue and reason inhabits a moral framework that is highly suggestive vis-a`-vis the Commedia. The chronology of these poems, wherein the ideologically ‘‘regressive’’ Amor, da che convien is accorded the latest date, suggests the fierceness of Dante’s internal struggle; these are not matters that he resolved once and for all without ever looking back, but an arena to which he was called again and again. The argumentation that in the Commedia will be marshaled to refute Io sono stato is already advanced in Doglia mi reca: although the context is avarice, not lust, the argument works in the same way, as I have previously demonstrated, for both are sins of excess desire.38 In fact, the point of the canzone is to show the commonality of all sins of desire, and the necessity of constraining all desire by reason. To this end, Dante systematically links carnal desire to desire for wealth, thus exploding the courtly ethos that would privilege love over baser desires and illuminating their common ground in concupiscence. Like the lover of Donna me prega and the lustful souls of Inferno 5, the avaricious miser of Doglia mi reca is characterized by continuous


futile motion, absence of repose, lack of peace: ‘‘Corre l’avaro, ma piu` fugge pace’’ (The miser runs, but peace flees faster) (69). (Donna me prega contributes to Dante’s agenda of contamination between lust and avarice in another way as well: Cavalcanti defines love’s essence as excess, ‘‘oltra misura,’’ using a term—misura—that Dante, following both Aristotle and Guittone, uses in Doglia mi reca and Inferno 7 to denote correct or incorrect deployment of desire vis-a`-vis material goods. See chapter 2 in this volume.) Continuing to anticipate Inferno 5, Doglia mi reca tells us, in its critique of the miser’s unruly passion, that the fault lies in the insufficient exercise of reason: ‘‘Colpa e` de la ragion che nol gastiga’’ (The fault is reason’s for not punishing) (95). The canzone continues: if reason were to offer as justification for her poor performance the excuse that she is overcome, possessed by desire—‘‘Se vol dire ‘I’ son presa’ ’’(If reason wants to say ‘‘I am taken’’) (96)—she merely demonstrates the weakness of her resistance, since the master should not be overcome by the servant: ‘‘ah com poca difesa / mostra segnore a cui servo sormonta!’’ (oh how paltry a defense is offered by the master whom the slave overcomes!) (97–98). The image of a segnore (reason) who has been sormontato by his servo (desire) is analogous to the image implicit in ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento’’: while Inferno 5 offers the image of reason ‘‘under’’ desire, and the canzone offers the image of desire ‘‘over’’ reason, the point regarding the misalignment of our faculties is the same. Moreover, the language used in Doglia mi reca for being possessed by desire—‘‘ ‘I’ son presa’’—is the language of the lyric tradition. We remember, for instance, Giacomo’s ‘‘como l’amor m’ha priso,’’ Guido delle Colonne’s ‘‘sı` m’ave preso e tolto,’’ and Dante’s ‘‘Ben e` verace amor quel che m’ha preso / e ben mi stringe forte’’ from the canzone Io sento sı` d’Amor la gran possanza.39 It is Francesca’s language: ‘‘Amor . . . prese costui’’ (100–101), ‘‘Amor . . . mi prese’’ (103–4). Indeed, it is the quintessential language of desire, used in the great explication of love in Purgatorio 18, where the discourse of desire—the lyric discourse of desire—receives its positive gloss: ‘‘cosı` l’animo preso entra in disire / ch’e` moto spiritale, e mai non posa / fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire’’ (so the soul that has been taken enters into desire, which is spiritual motion, and never rests until the beloved object gives it joy) (31–33). Here possession (‘‘preso’’), motion (‘‘moto’’), and lack of rest (‘‘mai non posa’’ recalls ‘‘La bufera infernal, che mai non resta’’) culminate not in death but in fulfillment and joy, not in ‘‘e caddi come corpo morto cade’’ but in ‘‘fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire.’’


Following up on my reading of Doglia mi reca as an expansive meditation on desire that in key respects lays the groundwork for the Commedia, I will now elaborate some specific points of contact between Doglia mi reca and Inferno 5. It is useful in this context to view Doglia mi reca against the backdrop of a Guittonian canzone that, as I have shown, greatly influenced it, Ora parra` s’eo savero` cantare. Both are moral canzoni that are explosively anti-courtly and that deal with the interaction between reason and desire, with the result that the differences between them are highly instructive.40 Guittone begins by repudiating love. He pits love against reason: ´ ‘‘che ’n tutte parte ove distringe Amore / regge follore–in loco di savere’’ (for everywhere that love grips there reigns madness, instead of wisdom) (10–11). He redefines love as ‘‘carnal voglia’’ (21). He recommends that we follow not love, but ‘‘honored Wisdom’’—‘‘orrato Saver’’—and God: Ma chi cantare vole e valer bene in suo legno a nochier Diritto pone e orrato Saver mette al timone, Dio fa sua Stella . . . (Ora parra`, 16–19) But he who wants to sing well and be worthy should place Justice in his ship as pilot, and put honored Wisdom at the helm, make God his star and place his hope in true Praise . . .

Noting that neither honor nor good can be attained by pursuing ‘‘carnal voglia,’’ Guittone recommends a life of abstinence from vice and willingness to toil; only so can one advance one’s ‘‘stato ad onore’’ (26). A bourgeois ethic of God-centered savere thus replaces the follore of the courtly paradigm. In Doglia mi reca, on the other hand, Dante does not so much replace the courtly paradigm as correct it, insisting that we distinguish one impulse called love from another. While in Ora parra` Guittone sustains the total incompatibility of love and reason, in Doglia mi reca Dante argues that where there is not reason, there cannot be real love, that what is called ‘‘love’’ in such a case is not love, but bestial appetite. While Guittone rejects the very idea of human love existing on a higher plane, saying in effect that what people call ‘‘amor’’ is always ‘‘carnal voglia,’’ Dante makes clear that love that accords with reason and virtue does exist, and that it is up to us to distinguish such love from carnal voglia.


Dante arrives at his anatomy of love by a negative path, an anticourtly diatribe that refuses to exculpate women from their share of blame in matters of love. He begins Doglia mi reca by insisting that it is a woman’s duty to deny her love to a man who cannot match in virtue what she offers in beauty, and castigates women for the ‘‘base desire’’ (vil vostro desire [6]) that could prompt them to love unworthy men: che´ la belta` ch’Amore in voi consente, a vertu` solamente formata fu dal suo decreto antico, contra ’l qual voi fallate. (Doglia mi reca, 7–10) for the beauty that love concedes to you was formed solely for virtue by his ancient decree, [virtue] against which you are sinning.

In the seventh and final stanza Dante once more addresses the ladies, saying that he has accomplished his mission, in that he has unveiled for them the baseness of their male admirers: ‘‘Disvelato v’ho, donne, in alcun membro / la vilta` de la gente che vi mira’’ (I have unveiled for you, ladies, in some respects the baseness of the men who gaze on you) (127–28). Given that a woman’s potential lover is vicious, ‘‘a union of vice’’—‘‘In ciascun e` di ciascun vizio assembro’’ (In each is a union of all vice) (132)—the love that results can only be turbid and confused, ‘‘per che amista` nel mondo si confonde’’ (so that love in the world is confused) (133), since the good of the woman requires a corresponding good from the man to draw forth love: ‘‘che´ l’amorose fronde / di radice di ben altro ben tira’’ (for from a good root another good draws out the leaves of love) (134–35). Women must remain on their guard against all the nonvirtuous men with whom their roots would yield not ‘‘amorose fronde,’’ ‘‘leaves of love,’’ but only animal appetite, lust. Love, properly understood, is inseparable from virtue; where there is no corresponding good, there is no love. A woman can only consider herself loved by a vicious man if she redefines love, giving the name ‘‘love’’ to what is mere bestial appetite: ‘‘chiamando amore appetito di fera’’ (calling bestial appetite by the name ‘‘love’’) (143). Such a woman should perish, since she disjoins her beauty from natural goodness and believes love to be ‘‘outside of reason’s garden’’: Oh cotal donna pera che sua bilta` dischiera

Dante and Cavalcanti 95 da natural bonta` per tal cagione, e crede amor fuor d’orto di ragione. (Doglia mi reca, 144–47) O let such a woman perish, who for such reasons sunders her beauty from natural goodness and believes that love exists outside the garden of reason.

This final stanza of Doglia mi reca is crucial for our topic, for it adumbrates one of the fundamental issues of Inferno 5, namely, whether the use of the name ‘‘love’’ is sufficient guarantee that we are in fact talking of love. Dante is concerned with human desire, but also with how we use language when we deal with desire. Francesca talks repeatedly of ‘‘love,’’ but the narrator instructs us otherwise, echoing rather Guittone’s ‘‘carnal voglia’’ when he tells us that we will be encountering ‘‘peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento.’’ Similarly, Doglia mi reca raises the possibility that someone who desires—a courtly woman who desires, no less!—could define love in a self-serving way, could justify her actions by calling her appetite by the name of love. As with Francesca, although she may use the word amore, she misapplies the signifier, for the impulse that grips her is in fact an ‘‘appetito di fera.’’ Her mistake comes from the fact that she believes that love is disjoined from reason; literally, she ‘‘believes love to be outside reason’s garden’’ (e crede amor fuor d’orto di ragione [147]). These are very important verses, critical for understanding Dante’s mature view of human love. They do not tell us, as Antonio Gagliardi holds in his book Guido Cavalcanti e Dante : una questione d’amore, that ‘‘Oltre ad ‘amore appetito di fera’ non c’e` altro’’ (Other than ‘love that is bestial appetite’ there is nothing) (86). Rather, as in the Commedia, Dante offers us a choice: appetite divorced from reason, mistakenly called ‘‘love,’’ versus appetite in accord with reason, correctly called ‘‘love.’’ The fact that there is a choice is underscored by the verb credere: the lady ‘‘believes love to be outside of reason’s garden’’ (crede amor fuor d’orto di ragione). From Dante’s perspective, she is wrong. The very idea of an appetite, mistakenly called ‘‘love,’’ that is instead ‘‘bestial’’ and ‘‘outside of reason’s garden,’’ allows us to postulate its converse: it allows us to conjure that which may correctly be called ‘‘love,’’ an appetite that is human rather than feral and that resides within reason’s garden. In other words, what Dante does in Doglia mi reca is what he does in Inferno 5 and Purgatorio 18: insist on the crucial role of reason as the arbiter of human desire, whether in


malo or in bono. Dante does not say, in Doglia mi reca, that ‘‘Il desiderio di per se´ e` vile’’ (Desire in and of itself is vile);41 his point is, as it is in the Commedia, that desire becomes evil when it triumphs over reason. These verses supply the crucial discriminant between types of love, or more properly between lust and love, namely reason, the faculty that renders us human rather than bestial. The anatomy of love that results, with its two opposing categories at either end of the continuum of desire—amore appetito di fera versus amore d’orto di ragione—will find confirmation in the Commedia, where love is not rejected or replaced, but reconceptualized. The reconceptualization of love in a positive direction is already expressed in Doglia mi reca, where in the last stanza Dante moves away from the rigorous separation between virtue and beauty, male and female, that we saw in stanza 1, and instead elaborates on his earlier claim that love has the power to make one out of two: ‘‘e a costui di due poter un fare’’ (and to him [Love] the power to make of two things one) (14). Specifically, love is the process whereby the two goods, virtue and beauty, are commingled, and thus degendered, growing into leafy fronds of love that have drawn equally from the roots of both male and female: ‘‘che l’amorose fronde / di radice di ben altro ben tira’’ (for from one good root another good draws out the leaves of love) (134–35). The integrated view of desire that Dante achieves in Doglia mi reca shows not only in the metaphor of the ‘‘amorose fronde’’ but in the seventh stanza’s repeated yoking of the good and the beautiful: ‘‘cui par bene esser bella’’ (139), ‘‘che sua bilta` dischiera / da natural bonta`’’ (145–46). What troubles the poet is precisely that anyone would seek to unyoke beauty from virtue—‘‘che sua bilta` dischiera / da natural bonta`’’—and thus produce dualism. As in the Paradiso, where Dante uses metaphor to capture paradoxical unities that lie outside of the purview of discursive language, here the metaphor of the ‘‘amorose fronde’’ figures a holistic and degendered vision of beauty grounded in ethics and vice versa. One could say, then, that Dante rejects both Guittone’s and Cavalcanti’s formulations, since in very different ways both view love negatively, because more dualistically. Guittone moralistically condemns amore as carnal voglia, holding that when love is present, reason is absent (‘‘che´ ’n tutte parte ove distringe Amore / regge follore–in loco di savere’’). His is a bourgeois Italian variation of the old troubadour model of recantation and retirement to a monastery: he rejects


love and love poetry but he does not reject secular life. Cavalcanti concludes—despairingly but not moralistically—that love belongs to the seat of the passions, is divorced from the intellect, and can never lead to canoscenza. His is a newer position, philosophical but not didactic, which offers a rationalistic pessimism with regard to love in human life. Both Guittone and Cavalcanti divorce love from reason. In this essential respect, both stand in sharp opposition to Dante, who considers the presence of reason to be the indispensable guarantee of that which is truly love, and not lust. Poetic affect further complicates the picture, for Dante is passionate about the role of reason, in a precise inversion of Cavalcanti, who is cool about passion. In Doglia mi reca, an irascibly passionate poem, Dante sketches the outlines of the situation we find in Inferno 5: a courtly lady who keeps using the word amore to refer to what can only have been an appetito di fera, given that it existed fuor d’orto di ragione. It is the responsibility of the lady in Doglia mi reca to distinguish between lovers, and to make sure that she is not ‘‘amata da questi cotali’’ (loved by such as these) (140), not desired by the men of vice whom the canzone has savaged. If she does give her love to such a man, disjoining her beauty from virtue, she deserves to perish. ‘‘Oh cotal donna pera,’’ says the canzone—and Francesca does indeed perish, killed with her lover on earth and damned for all eternity after her death. Death brings us back to Cavalcanti and to the last of Francesca’s three great Amor verses: ‘‘Amor condusse noi ad una morte’’ (Love led us to one death) (106). It is here that Francesca inscribes the true rubric of canto 5, whose topic is not just sinful love but the love that leads to death. This is the love of which one could say—with Cavalcanti (in what may constitute yet another intertext between Donna me prega and Inferno 5)—‘‘Di sua potenza segue spesso morte’’ (35). Cavalcanti seals Francesca’s canto, his language bringing its dispassionate and quiet power to the end of Inferno 5. The last verses of Inferno 5 are a tissue of Cavalcantisms: ‘‘Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse, / l’altro piangeä; sı` che di pietade / io venni men cosı` com’ io morisse’’ (While one spirit spoke thus, the other wept, so that from pity I fainted as if I had died) (139–41). Although we are in the Commedia and therefore talking of two discrete historical souls, we could as well be in that dim Cavalcantian penumbra of fractured interior space where ‘‘uno spirto questo disse,’’ ‘‘l’altro piangeä,’’ and the ‘‘I’’ to


which both spirits belong swoons as to death from the pity and anguish of his self ’s utter dispossession. Weeping and swooning are prototypical Cavalcantian employments (venire meno is a favorite expression), and indeed Paolo is very like the quintessential Cavalcantian lover’s persona, so alienated from himself that he has lost his voice. The canto’s final verse echoes some of Dante’s early and most Cavalcantian lyrics—‘‘sı` ch’io caddi in terra’’ from E’ m’incresce di me and ‘‘sı` ch’io cadro` freddo / e per tal verro` morto’’ from Lo doloroso amor—though substituting for the Cavalcantian delicacy of the preceding verses a more Dantesque vigor. But, given all that has gone before, how can we resist hearing ‘‘Cavalcanti’’ in the repeated ‘‘ca’’ sounds of ‘‘caddi come corpo morto cade’’? Finally, though, in the same way that Dante uses Vergil to deviate from Vergil through his deployment of Minos, so he uses Cavalcanti to go beyond Cavalcanti. I mean ‘‘go beyond’’ most literally, in the sense of Dante’s going beyond Inferno 5, and removing himself from the Cavalcantian space of love and death. Inferno 6 begins with the pilgrim’s recovery from the swoon caused by the pity and sorrow he experienced at Francesca’s story. Upon regaining consciousness, he becomes aware of new sights all around him: novi tormenti e novi tormentati mi veggio intorno, come ch’io mi mova e ch’io mi volga, e come che io guati. Io sono al terzo cerchio, de la piova etterna, maladetta, fredda e greve; regola e qualita` mai non l’e` nova. (Inf. 6.4–9) New sufferings and new sufferers I see around myself, wherever I move or turn or look. I am in the third circle, of the eternal, cursed, cold and heavy rain; its measure and quality are never new.

I have singled out these verses before, as paradigms of the Commedia’s poetics of the new, noting that: ‘‘For [the pilgrim] alone, in hell, there are ‘novi tormenti e novi tormentati’ (new sufferings and new sufferers) (Inf. 6.4), ‘nove travaglie e pene’ (new travails and pains) (Inf. 7.20), ‘nova pieta, / novo tormento e novi frustatori’ (new anguish, new torment, and new scourgers) (Inf. 18.22–23). For the sinners, instead—as for the angels, but for opposite reasons, and with opposite results—there is no difference, nothing is ever new: ‘regola e qualita`


mai non l’e` nova’ (measure and quality are never new) (Inf. 6.9)’’ (The Undivine Comedy, 23–24). What is interesting, in our present context, about these classic verses of comedic upward mobility is that they are derived from Guido Cavalcanti, the poet of zero mobility: Contini points out the echo of Cavalcanti’s ‘‘una paura di novi tormenti,’’ from the sonnet Perche´ non fuoro a me gli occhi dispenti.42 So Dante has reworked Guido’s fear—his friend’s paralyzing ‘‘paura di novi tormenti’’ (fear of new sufferings)— into his own relentless forward motion; after all, the ‘‘novi tormenti’’ of canto 6 have a positive connotation for the protagonist, not being his. Rather, he revels in the resurgent strength of that unbridled present tense, used in five verbs in three verses culminating in the resounding ‘‘Io sono’’: ‘‘mi veggio intorno, come ch’io mi mova / e ch’io mi volga, e come che io guati. / Io sono al terzo cerchio . . .’’ He is not stuck with Francesca, stuck with the ‘‘novi tormenti,’’ in the space of canto 5, the space of love and death, anymore than he will be stuck with anyone else he meets along the way. And, perhaps, there is a final Cavalcantian echo, not picked up by Contini: the verse that describes the deathly stasis of hell, ‘‘regola e qualita` mai non l’e` nova,’’ seems to me imprinted on a periphrasis for love in Donna me prega, where love is ‘‘La nova qualita`’’ (the new quality) (49). If so, then—in a transformation that accurately sums up Dante’s thoughts on what Guido had to say in his great canzone—Cavalcanti’s love has become Dante’s hell. B ib li og ra ph ic al No te : V ita nuova an d D on na me pr eg a

Much of the material that has accumulated recently on Dante and Cavalcanti has been devoted to the relationship between the Vita nuova and Donna me prega, with a view to suggesting that Cavalcanti intended his canzone as a ‘‘reply’’ to the libello.43 This thesis was put forward in 1993 by Giuliano Tanturli, ‘‘Guido Cavalcanti contro Dante,’’ in Le tradizioni del testo: Studi di letteratura italiana offerti a Domenico De Robertis, ed. Franco Gavazzeni and Guglielmo Gorni (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1993), 3–13. Tanturli builds his argument on a weak foundation, namely a set of assumptions regarding motive and intention. He posits that Dante in the Vita nuova speaks of Guido with an ‘‘aria di perfetta intesa’’ (8), that as a result Dante could harbor no polemical intent vis-a`-vis his friend, and that—given the formal echoes between the two texts—the polemicist had to be Cavalcanti, responding to Dante’s challenge: ‘‘L’intenzione di Dante non e` di contrapporsi all’amico, ma di coordinarsi, o meglio, di coordinare lui


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a se´. La polemica contraddirebbe non solo l’atteggiamento, ma l’intenzione del libro nei suoi confronti’’ (8). But the intentionality of any text, let alone of a text as opaque as the Vita nuova vis-a`-vis the man it labels ‘‘primo de li miei amici’’ but also casts as precursor John the Baptist to Dante’s resurgent Christ, is far less transparent than Tanturli assumes. In response to Tanturli, Giorgio Inglese correctly points out that the Vita nuova already indicates a divergence between Dante and Guido—‘‘Tra l’autore della Vita nuova e il suo destinatario si percepisce un distacco’’—and prudently notes that further precision as to the degree, intentionality, and trajectory of that divergence cannot be reconstructed from the data at hand: ‘‘che esso [il distacco] gia` corrisponda,—in piena coscienza dell’uno, dell’altro o di entrambi,—alla distanza obiettiva che corre fra la dottrina del ‘libello’ e quella esposta in Donna me prega,—questo non si potra` affermare (perche´ Dante ne tace), e non si potra` negare, perche´ le effettive dichiarazioni di ‘intesa’ fra l’autore della Vita nuova e il suo primo amico non consentono la conclusione’’ (182). Inglese’s cogent rebuttal may be found in ‘‘ ‘. . . illa Guidonis de Florentia Donna me prega’ (Tra Cavalcanti e Dante),’’ Cultura neolatina 55 (1995): 179–210. Nonetheless, the theory of Donna me prega as reply to the Vita nuova is put forward again, more assertively, by Enrico Malato in Dante e Guido Cavalcanti: il dissidio per la ‘‘Vita nuova’’ e il ‘disdegno’ di Guido (Roma: Salerno, 1997), a book that has stimulated considerable discussion, including a review article by Nicolo` Pasero, ‘‘Dante in Cavalcanti: ancora sui rapporti fra Vita nuova e Donna me prega,’’ Medioevo romanzo 22 (1998): 388–414. Taken as a whole, this investigation is troubling, for it offers the spectacle of philology degrading into pseudo-philology. The ideological rupture between Dante and Cavalcanti is a given. So, within an arena whose parameters have long been fully established (no one doubts the ideological split between the two), an enormous amount of ‘‘philological’’ energy is devoted to establishing what cannot be established (a precise chronology for the dissidio between them). Since no amount of formalist comparison will yield a definitive chronology, the discussants are driven to base their arguments on opinions (which in themselves are perfectly legitimate, but not when presented as though philology), like Tanturli’s opinion regarding the ‘‘perfetta intesa’’ between the two friends. Another example: in order to break the impasse regarding the chronology of the two texts to which his excellent formal


analysis leads, Pasero appeals to Donna me prega’s character, noted by Tanturli, as more a refutation than a demonstration, and derives from the canzone’s adversative nature its polemical stance toward the Vita nuova: ‘‘Nel caso dei nostri due testi, lo statuto di testo polemizzante compete a Donna me prega piuttosto che alla Vita nuova—ce lo confermano anche le reiterate dichiarazioni ‘avversative’ del testo cavalcantiano, spesso sottolineate dalla critica’’ (412). But—even putting aside the fact that the Vita nuova is polemical enough in its own right, with or without adversatives—there is no reason that the target of Cavalcanti’s refutation needs to be the Vita nuova: he could be aiming at any number of unknown targets, such as a text we do not have, or a fellow poet with whom he had conversed. Indeed, his target could, quite plausibly, be himself: he could be correcting the much more optimistic view of love taken, for instance, in his ballata, Veggio negli occhi della donna mia. Finally, it is troubling to see the opacity of these texts violated so willfully. It is one thing to solicit a text, to probe it for meanings that are not immediately evident; we do this, as literary critics, and our readers let us know if they find our speculations compelling. But it is quite another to mount entire psychodramas on their backs, as Malato does: ‘‘La serie dei testi esaminati, dunque, dimostra come, contrariamente a quanto si e` a lungo ritenuto, non sia mancata una ‘reazione’ da parte di Guido all’offerta della Vita nuova: nettamente negativa, di rifiuto, dettato forse dal fastidio (o dal risentimento) del ‘primo amico’ per il suo coinvolgimento—ritenuto probabilmente abusivo, o comunque per lui inaccettabile—in una situazione e in una dimensione ideale alla quale egli si riteneva del tutto estraneo’’ (65). Even less acceptable is to claim as established that which is conjecture. This Malato does when he constructs an argument that is one conjecture after another in order to use Dante’s Poscia ch’Amor and Voi che ’ntendendo to date Donna me prega and then claims to ‘‘aver stabilito che non solo la grande canzone di Guido non proceda la Vita nuova e non possa essere stata presente a Dante quando elaborava il suo ‘libello,’ ma che, al contrario, Donna me prega segua quest’ultimo, lo presupponga, e . . . sia stata anzi addirittura pensata e scritta allo scopo di contestare l’ideologia rappresentata nell’operetta dantesca’’ (53). That Dante and his early friend were ultimately ideologically opposed we know, but no amount of strong talk will allow us, with the knowledge we currently have, to determine the exact sequence of action and reaction through which the rupture occurred.

chapter 4

Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell

T

urning to the article ‘‘Inferno’’ in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, we discover in microcosm one of the chief characteristics of the field we call ‘‘Dante studies’’: its immunity to the world outside the Commedia, in other words, its immunity to history. After a brief summary of the usage of the term inferno in Dante’s works, the entry turns to ‘‘L’Inferno nella Commedia,’’ a rubric from which it thenceforth does not stray. Adhering to the topic Dante scholars have traditionally labeled ‘‘la struttura morale dell’inferno,’’ the author treats Dante’s hell as though it were a totally self-contained and self-generated Platonic idea, uncontaminated by history.1 Thus, there is no discussion of the development of the idea of hell over time: of the permutations and vicissitudes that the concept of hell underwent as it passed from the Old to the New Testament, and thence from Origen, who affirmed the medicinal and corrective value of a non-eternal system of punishment which would eventually restore all souls to God, to Augustine, who vigorously and successfully defended the eternity of hell, using Matthew 25 and arguing that ‘‘the sentence of the Lord could not be evacuated of meaning or deprived of its force; the sentence, I mean, that he, on his own prediction, was to pronounce in these words: ‘Out of my sight, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the Devil and his angels.’ ’’2 Likewise, there is no reference to the body of texts we can roughly group together as ‘‘visions of hell and heaven.’’3 Of course, as I hope to have demonstrated in The Undivine Comedy, Dante created the conditions that determined this critical reaction, presenting himself, so to speak, as the ultimate essentialist, when he was in fact the ultimate constructivist (in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, as a hedgehog, when he was in fact a fox).4 For, if we were pressed to characterize Dante’s principles of

Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell 103

infernal construction with a single formula, we would have to put forward his extraordinary and purposeful eclecticism, the voracious syncretism with which he embraces and makes his own a veritable cornucopia of cultural traditions. While Dante’s conceptualizing of sin, and thus ultimately of hell, is firmly embedded within orthodox theological tradition, his representation of hell—and thus implicitly his theology of hell—is frequently idiosyncratic to the point of being heterodox. For instance, there is no theological precedent for creating a vestibule of hell that houses neutral angels and cowardly souls ‘‘who lived without infamy and without praise’’ (Inf. 3.36), just as there is no theological justification for putting great pagans into limbo alongside unbaptized children or for claiming that certain traitors are damned before death, their souls sent to hell while devils inhabit their bodies on earth (Inf. 33). This last example, of souls condemned to hell while still alive, furnishes an excellent case of a category that is not acceptable theologically, but that does find precedent in the popular culture of the visions.5 Therefore, although Dante reflects the most informed theological thought on hell, he is certainly not constrained by it. Moving from the theological template, he widens the range of cultural resources available to him in two fundamental ways: one, he utilizes pagan sources as well as Christian ones; two, he does not limit his Christian sources to the high culture of theology. Thus, he explicitly borrows from such (high culture) pagan sources as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which he credits as a source for the structure of his hell, and Vergil’s underworld in Aeneid 6, various of whose characters and features he appropriates and transforms. But Dante’s hell also demonstrates clear links to the established popular iconography of hell and to popular cultural forms like sermons, visions, and the didactic poetry of vernacular predecessors such as Bonvesin da la Riva and Giacomino da Verona. As Alison Morgan correctly notes, Dante ‘‘is the first Christian writer to combine the popular material with the theological and philosophical systems of his day’’ (Dante and the Medieval Other World, 8).6 Dante’s representation of hell is unique in its rich and uninhibited blending of these remarkably heterogeneous constituents into a personal—multicultural—vision:7 while, for instance, scholastic philosophy was rooted in Aristotle, so that Aquinas cites the Nichomachean Ethics in his discussion of sin, and the vision authors knew the Bible,


Dante alone brings all these traditions together, knitting strands as disparate as the Aeneid, on the one hand, and the Vision of Tundale, on the other. Moreover, while Dante’s borrowings from classical authors tend to be overt and intellectualized, his connections to popular culture, although less emphatic, provide much of the poem’s fundamental eschatological structure. For instance, the deployment of what Dante calls the ‘‘contrapasso’’ (Inf. 28.142), the principle of justice that governs the punishments, can be traced back to vision literature. Rudimentary forms of the contrapasso are in evidence as far back as the mid-second-century Apocalypse of Peter : ‘‘In the Apocalypse of Peter, although the locations are distributed no more systematically [than in Plutarch’s On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance] the punishments, in most cases, are very clearly linked to the sins’’ (Bernstein, Formation of Hell, 284). In a move that allows his syncretic penchant greater latitude, Dante resists providing a uniform template for sin; by offering one taxonomy for hell and another for purgatory he is able to widen the cultural resources available to the Commedia. The account of the organization of hell entrusted to Vergil in Inferno 11 explicitly makes use of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to set up a fundamental distinction between sins of incontinence and malice. The sins of incontinence (circles two through five) are sins of impulse, brought about by immoderate passion uncontrolled by reason; they are lust, gluttony, avarice/prodigality (we shall return to the significance of this unique duo), and anger. The sins of malice cause injustice and harm to others, proceeding either by force or by fraud (this is a distinction that Dante finds, as Edward Moore points out in ‘‘The Classification of Sins in the Inferno and Purgatorio,’’ in Cicero’s De Officiis 1.13).8 Injurious acts achieved by fraud are more sinful, since fraud requires the misuse of reason, man’s peculiar gift. The seventh circle, then, houses the violent, while the eighth and the ninth circles contain the fraudulent. Vergil’s account of hell makes no mention of the first circle (limbo) or the sixth (heresy). Dante imagines purgatory as a mountain whose seven terraces of purging souls correspond to the seven capital sins (better called vices, since purgatory deals with the inclination to sin, rather than the sinful action itself ). Of the seven capital vices, four—lust, gluttony, avarice, and anger—appear in hell under the rubric of sins of incontinence. In other words, the organization of hell is revealed in retrospect as a hybrid concoction, whose ‘‘Aristotelian’’ sins of incontinence are also


well housed under the more popular roof of the seven capital vices. (In fact, one suspects that most readers of the Inferno, in Dante’s time as now, are led by the early cantos to a complacent expectation that hell will be structured on a much more familiar and popular template than the one Dante borrows from the Nicomachean Ethics. From this perspective, Inferno 11, frequently classified by readers as ‘‘boring,’’ is a canto that should be read with a certain amount of amazement.) The overlap between the Aristotelian scheme adopted for hell and the theological scheme adopted for purgatory displays a uniquely Dantesque contamination: first, of Christian and classical paradigms (analogously, with respect to the inhabitants of otherworlds, Morgan points to Dante’s complete originality in including classical figures, ‘‘who are totally unrepresented in the earlier medieval texts’’ [Dante and the Medieval Other World, 57]); and, second, of popular with high culture, for Dante is conflating popular religious currents with a hyperliterate textual tradition. According to Moore, ‘‘the Church has by a sort of general consent accepted the doctrine of seven capital, principal, or (according to the more recent phrase) ‘deadly’ sins, but it has not made (as far as I can ascertain) any authoritative declaration which would limit the discretion of individual writers in respect of the relative gravity of these sins, or their mutual inter-connexion.’’9 Thus, though widely known, the scheme of the seven capital vices is not official church doctrine. Picking up where Moore left off, Morgan turns to popular culture and points to the importance of the seven vices for confession manuals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: ‘‘The scheme of the seven capital vices is widely used in the confession manuals, particularly in the thirteenth century but also to some extent in the twelfth.’’ Making the connection to Dante, Morgan further notes: ‘‘The manuals classify sins according to the seven capital vices or the ten commandments, and include almost all those punished in Dante’s Hell’’ (Dante and the Medieval Other World, 122). With respect to the taxonomy of Dante’s hell we could therefore sum up as follows: an arrangement that at first seems to be loosely based on the seven capital vices is then grafted onto Aristotle, whose distinction between sins of incontinence and sins of malice provides the overarching order. However, while this system of classification is overtly labeled Aristotelian, the material remains fundamentally Christian, given that, as Morgan says, ‘‘the thirty-seven sins punished in the Inferno are essentially the same sins as those traditionally represented


in the popular visions of the other world and listed in the confession manuals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’’ (Dante and the Medieval Other World, 131). Thus, we find ourselves facing a remarkable bid on Dante’s part to bring classical authority into contact with that most irreducibly Christian genre, the vision of the Christian afterlife—a bid whose success can be judged, as so often with Dante, by the fact that it has been absorbed with surprisingly little critical fuss. By this I mean that, while much attention has been given to the question of how exactly to make Aristotle’s categories fit, there has been little attention devoted to the question of what Aristotle is doing here at all. With respect to Dante’s purgatory, where the seven capital vices provide the order, the classical/Christian contamination that is Dante’s hallmark as a vision author seems to have disappeared, but it has not. It can still be glimpsed in the theologically unorthodox coupling of avarice with its Aristotelian counterpart, prodigality. This coupling is an anomalous feature of Dante’s eschatological scheme that reflects his commitment to contaminating theological culture with classical culture; as such it deserves greater critical interest. Dante is so wedded to his Aristotelian vision of virtue as the mean between two vices that he incorporates it into his treatment of avarice in hell and—even more remarkably, given the absence of any Aristotelian justification—in purgatory: both the fourth circle of hell and the fifth terrace of purgatory are devoted to avarice and prodigality, despite there being no official, or for that matter unofficial, church doctrine in support of such an idea. And Dante goes further, having the character Statius proclaim, counter to the witness provided by the text of the Purgatorio, the validity of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean for all of purgatory: ‘‘E sappie che la colpa che rimbecca / per dritta opposizione alcun peccato, / con esso insieme qui suo verde secca’’ (And know that the fault that counters any sin as its opposite with it here finds its sap dried out) (Purg. 22.49–51). In other words, Statius says that on each terrace one will find punished not only the sin, but its opposite. We will return later to the question of what is at stake for Dante here, what could compel him to make so apparently gratuitous and absurd a claim.10 Dante’s infernal system of classification is not without its puzzles and inconsistencies. However, when one compares the Inferno to the previous accounts of hell found in vision literature, one is struck not by its inconsistencies but by the opposite: Dante’s Inferno stunningly


conveys the appearance of a totally inclusive penal system from which no sin is omitted and no sinner can escape. Key to creating such an illusion is the deployment of a system of classification that seems so logical, so precise, so rigorous in its definitions and distinctions, and that invokes the immense authority of Aristotle. Visions of hell before the Inferno suffer from lack of difference: all the sinners seem the same, all the punishments merge into one sadistic blur. Where parataxis reigned, both stylistically and structurally, Dante—with passages like Inferno 11—imposes hypotaxis. In comparison to the confused and unsystematic quality of earlier visions—where sins and sinners are frequently piled one upon the other with minimal differentiation, so that the reader has no way of distinguishing the first from the second, third, or fourth, and consequently little incentive to see who comes next—in the Inferno we know the order in which sins will be encountered, and the moral value that has been assigned to each. Nor does Dante make the opposite mistake of relaying such information too soon. He waits until he has taken us through all the circles apparently based on the seven capital vices, whose logic seems easy enough to follow, and only then—when it is clear that we will require assistance—does he intrude. As a result of the discourse on the structure of hell, the reader can anticipate the narrative and is thereby induced to proceed, propelled by the subliminal desire to see how cogently the author’s rendering will conform to his earlier declarations, as well as by the urge to participate in a possible world that seems to make sense, or that can be challenged if it does not, because its structuring principles have been made known to us. Also key to constructing a persuasive representation of hell is the use of the contrapasso, the principle whereby the punishment fits the crime. For Dante, the contrapasso frequently takes the form of literalizing a metaphor: thus, the souls of the lustful are tossed by a hellish storm as in life they were buffeted by their passions, while the schismatics, who in life rent the body politic, now find their own bodies torn and rent. Dante’s contrapassi, which enact the sin for which the soul is damned, display a remarkable inventiveness and draw from a broad spectrum of sources, ranging from traditional motifs like the graduated immersion of a sinner in a river or a lake (already present in the fourth-century Apocalypse of Paul ) to the metamorphosis of man into tree as in Aeneid 3.11 Again, if we look at previous visions where the principle of the contrapasso is less systematically deployed, we see how important it is, not just theologically, but as a narrative anchor


for the text. Dante’s use of the contrapasso indicates by comparison to his visionary precursors not so much the arrival of a theologus-poeta as the arrival of an archi-poeta: the advent of narrative cunning in a visionary context. The comparative effectiveness of Tundale’s Vision (1149), for example, derives in no small measure from its rudimentary deployment of the notion that certain punishments befit certain sinners: ‘‘Which souls in particular might this punishment be for?’’ asks Tundale of his angel guide, thus acknowledging a curiosity that is grounded in an ideology of moral decorum, an ideology that the guide’s reply, ‘‘This punishment is especially fitting for you and those like you,’’ makes explicit.12 This vision also displays an understanding of the need for narrative subordination in order to create differentiation (Tundale is frequently told that the newest punishment will be greater than any he has seen before); moreover, the concern to differentiate has reached the point where the author imagines categories of souls called the ‘‘Not-Very-Bad’’ and the ‘‘Not-Very-Good.’’ These procedures, for all their crudity, anticipate the narrative techniques we find in the Inferno; they are, in effect, the narratological analogues of the ideological innovations that allow Morgan to comment that the ‘‘Vision of Tundale shows the most complex approach to the classification of sin among the twelfth-century texts’’ (Dante and the Medieval Other World, 110). We do well to remember that representers of the Christian afterworld display increasing sophistication, both narratologically and theologically, and that the contrapasso is a device that functions in both domains. Overall, Dante effectively uses the contrapasso to deflect any sense of randomness or arbitrariness and to suffuse his text with a sense of God’s order and justice. The reception of the Commedia offers us an excellent index of Dante’s effectiveness in this regard. We frequently find scholars searching for explanations for the more opaque contrapassi, operating on the assumption, as always in the study of Dante, that the answer will be there if we search long and hard enough: in other words, on the assumption that there is nothing arbitrary in the possible world Dante has created. The contrapasso is a crucial tool in Dante’s attempt to represent hell in a way that bears out the declaration on its gate—‘‘Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore’’ (Justice moved my high maker) (Inf. 3.4)— and in a way that reflects its true theological nature: since hell is deserved separation from God, punishment is not something inflicted by God but the consequence, indeed the enactment, of the sin itself.


Here, too, while some of Dante’s contrapassi may seem less fitting than others, and less transparently suggest the sin being punished, a comparison of Dante’s hell to those of his precursors reveals that he is the only author to deploy an ideology of moral decorum not sporadically but as a systematic feature of his otherworld. Study of Dante’s visionary precursors enables us to see how much he goes beyond them, but also to grasp that his text belongs to a long visionary tradition.13 I fully endorse Morgan’s claim that ‘‘Dante’s classification of sin is in some sense the result of a marriage between a large mass of traditional material and the Aristotelian categories’’ (Dante and the Medieval Other World, 110). She cites the following grounds for comparison between the classification of sin in the Vision of Tundale and the Inferno: The explicit separation of one class of sinner from another; the gradual increase in gravity of sin and corresponding torment as we travel deeper into the pit of Hell; the distinction between sins deserving of punishment in upper Hell and those deserving of punishment in lower Hell, with the offering of a principle according to which the two types are differentiated; the assignment of monsters or guardians to the various classes of sinner, and finally the change in mood as the area of the purgation of minor sins is reached. (Dante and the Medieval Other World, 112)

Most significant is Morgan’s conclusion that the correspondences suggest that Dante was ‘‘not thinking solely of Aristotle when composing his system of classification’’ (Dante and the Medieval Other World, 112). There is no doubt that Dante was not thinking solely of Aristotle, or of Aquinas, or of any single authority. It is a mistake to reduce his text to any single cultural strand, no matter how important. For instance, Marc Cogan has proposed aligning the three zones of Dante’s hell with the three appetites that Aquinas based on Aristotle (the concupiscible, the irascible, the will) and further suggests that ‘‘the gironi of Purgatory share a common substrate with the circles of Hell: dispositions in one, actions in the other are distinguished and organized by their relation to the same three appetites.’’14 While there is much that is useful in Cogan’s discussion of Aristotle and especially Aquinas, his argument’s credibility is weakened by its exclusive focus on one cultural strand. The tidy order that he imposes on Dante’s much more chaotic structure is ultimately reductive and raises as many questions as it answers—precisely because Dante’s structure is not based on any


110

single model. Dante is deeply indebted to Aristotle and to Aquinas for his eschatological structure, but by no means exclusively. Dante’s uniquely rich and complex system is as indebted to popular culture as it is to high culture, given that, as Morgan points out, ‘‘all the sins represented in the Inferno, with the single exception of suicide, are also found in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century representations of the other world and in the confession manuals’’ (Dante and the Medieval Other World, 131). But at the same time Dante is the only representer of the Christian afterworld to really understand and embody in his narrative choices the philosophy and beliefs of high culture, not only pagan but Christian. We previously noted that Dante uses the contrapasso to reflect hell’s true theological nature, which is utter separation from God. The precision and understanding with which Dante gives flesh to the doctrines of the greatest theologians, especially Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, are unprecedented. Laying the eschatological foundations of the later Middle Ages, Augustine writes in the Enchiridion not only of fixed and eternal lots for the bad and the good, but also of degrees of happiness and misery: After the resurrection, however, when the final, universal judgment has been completed, two groups of citizens, one Christ’s, the other the devil’s, shall have fixed lots; one consisting of the good, the other of the bad—both, however, consisting of angels and men. The former shall have no will, the latter no power, to sin, and neither shall have any power to choose death; but the former shall live truly and happily in eternal life, the latter shall drag a miserable existence in eternal death without the power of dying; for both shall be without end. But among the former there shall be degrees of happiness, one being more preeminently happy than another; and among the latter there shall be degrees of misery, one being more endurably miserable than another.15

Both these concepts—fixed, eternal lots and degrees of misery for the wicked proportionate to their sins—are key to Dante’s hell, whose sinners are distributed through nine circles according to the gravity of their sins. The eternity of hell is solemnly proclaimed by the gate of hell itself: ‘‘Per me si va ne l’etterno dolore . . . Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create / se non etterne, e io etterno duro’’ (Through me we go into eternal sorrow. . . . Before me no things were created, except eternal ones, and I endure eternal) (Inf. 3.2, 7–8).


On the question of the eternity of hell, it is worth underscoring that Dante is much more theologically rigorous than is generally understood. The words ‘‘e io etterno duro’’ on the gate of hell point specifically, through the verb durare, to eternity as duration. When commentators and teachers of the Commedia repeat the well-worn maxim of Dante scholarship that holds that hell and heaven are eternal, while purgatory is temporal, we are in fact blurring the distinction that Dante is careful to make: the distinction between eternity as endlessness (hell) and eternity as simultaneous presence (heaven). True eternity, Dante knows, following Boethius, is not the same as endlessness, for eternity requires simultaneity: ‘‘Aeternitas igitur est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio’’ (Eternity therefore is the perfect possession altogether and at the same time of an endless life).16 Over and over, Boethius stresses that what is not ‘‘simul’’ is not eternal: endlessness is one thing, and God’s ability to embrace the full presence of an endless life together and at the same time is another. Endlessness should be called ‘‘perpetual’’ (perpetuum), while only the plenitude of presence in a never fading instant may be called ‘‘eternal’’ (aeternum). I would argue that Dante has conceptualized his hell and heaven according to Boethius’s distinction between perpetual endlessness and eternal timelessness: the air of hell is ‘‘without time’’—‘‘sanza tempo’’ (Inf. 3.29)—because it is starless and therefore endless, deprived of the measured time produced by the motion of the spheres, not because it is truly timeless and eternal, altogether outside of time, in the way that the divine mind exists ‘‘in sua etternita` di tempo fore’’ (in its eternity outside of time) (Par. 29.16). In other words, with respect to the question of eternity, Dante’s treatment of hell and heaven is not simply symmetrical, with hell the in malo version of heaven and heaven the in bono version of hell, as scholars have implied; rather he treats the two realms in an asymmetrical fashion that is theologically precise. What eternity signifies in the context of hell is duration, as Aquinas notes: ‘‘The fire of hell is called eternal only because it is unending.’’17 And this is the eternity Dante renders. Thus, in his representation of hell Dante never problematizes the concepts of space and time as he does in his representation of paradise, where he has Beatrice explain that all the souls are really in the Empyrean and only appear in different heavens as an accommodation for the pilgrim’s limited understanding; he never says (the very ludicrousness of the proposition is telling) that all the souls are really with Lucifer in Cocytus and only


appear in various circles for the benefit of the pilgrim. Spatially, hell is treated as tangible and concrete, while temporally, the fact that it is eternal means specifically and only what is captured by ‘‘ed io etterno duro’’: that it will last forever, that its torments are perpetual. Augustine conceives the wages of sin in terms of loss and alienation: it is ‘‘to be lost out of the kingdom of God, to be an exile from the city of God, to be alienated from the life of God, to have no share in that great goodness which God hath laid up for them that fear Him, and hath wrought out for them that trust in Him’’ (Enchiridion 112). Although there will be degrees of happiness and of misery, the essential conditions after death are eternal life in God or eternal death apart from God. When all is said and done, hell is essentially a condition of perpetual death, of perpetual alienation from the life of God, as he explains in Enchiridion 113: This perpetual death of the wicked, then, that is, their alienation from the life of God, shall abide for ever, and shall be common to them all, whatever men, prompted by their human affections, may conjecture as to a variety of punishments, or as to a mitigation or intermission of their woes; just as the eternal life of the saints shall abide for ever, and shall be common to them all, whatever grades of rank and honor there may be among those who shine with an harmonious effulgence.

If hell, theologically, is the perpetual alienation from God as a result of our sin, then sin is the turning from God whose reification is hell. As defined by Thomas Aquinas, sin consists of two elements: 1) ‘‘aversion, the turning away from the changeless good’’ (aversio ab incommutabili bono); 2) ‘‘conversion, the disordered turning toward a changeable good’’ (inordinata conversio ad commutabile bono) (ST 1a2ae.87.4; Blackfriars 1974, 27:24–25). Quaestio 87 of Summa Theologiae 1a2ae, under the heading ‘‘de reatu poenae’’ (on the guilt of punishment), teaches that aversion from God results in the poena damni or ‘‘pain of loss,’’ which corresponds to the loss of the beatific vision (in the context of purgatory, as Thomas explains elsewhere, this amounts to delay in attaining the beatific vision), while disordered conversion results in the poena sensus, or ‘‘pain of sense,’’ which corresponds to the torments of hell-fire (or punishment by fire in the case of purgatory). The commentator to this passage in the Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, T. C. O’Brien, glosses Aquinas on sin and punishment as follows: ‘‘The theological significance of sin, the actus debito ordine


privatus [an act lacking the order that it should have], is that it is a turning to the creature at the expense of union with God, it is aversio a Deo. . . . God is not the afflictive avenger; punishment for mortal sin is the state of separation and estrangement, of loss’’ (ST 1a2ae.87.5; Blackfriars 1974, 27:105–6). At heart, then, Thomas’s aversio expresses an idea of sin as separation that is profoundly Augustinian, for, as O’Brien explains in the notes to Quaestio 87, Thomas views mortal sin as that which ‘‘breaks the revealed, personal union of man with God through charity’’ and holds that the ‘‘punishment of mortal sin is precisely its mortality; it is the separation, alienation from the life-source, from God as Father and friend, which the sinful act brought about’’ (ST 1a2ae.87.5; Blackfriars 1974, 27:20–21). Both Augustinian alienation and Thomistic aversion are concepts fundamental to Dante, who holds that sin disenfranchises us and separates us from God: ‘‘sin alone is that which unfrees’’ us and renders us ‘‘dissimilar from the highest good’’ (Solo il peccato è quel che la disfranca / e falla dissimı`le al sommo bene [Par. 7.79–80]). However, while Dante’s deep metaphoric structures are profoundly congruent with Augustinian exile, dissimilitude, and alienation, the Florentine poet shares with Thomas an interest in making distinctions within the metaphoric structures. Thomas, after all, is capable of elaborating on sin as follows: Clearly in certain sins, while there is some disorder, it is not one conflicting with the ultimate end, but rather regards some subordinate ends, which a person wills in a manner beyond or short of what is right, while yet maintaining his relationship to the ultimate end. For example: a person, while being too attached to some temporal object, still would not for its sake will to offend God by doing anything contrary to the commandments. Therefore what is due as punishment for such sins is not perpetual but temporary. (ST 1a2ae.87.5; Blackfriars 1974, 27:29)

O’Brien’s gloss to the above passage, which makes use of a metaphor he finds in Thomas, according to which life is a voyage on which humans sometimes ‘‘dally,’’ is remarkably suggestive with respect to Dante: ‘‘There is a dalliance, as it were, with the proper desirability of some subordinate end and a failure to attend to its true relationship to the ultimate end. In II Sent. 42, I, 3 ad 5, St. Thomas makes this comparison: the one sinning mortally is like a man who turns off the road to his destination; the one sinning venially, like a man who delays


too long on the road (recedens a via, nimis moratur in via)’’ (ST 1a2ae.87.5; Blackfriars 1974, 27:28). Thomas’s metaphors for rendering the distinction between mortal and venial sin—‘‘the one sinning mortally is like a man who turns off the road to his destination; the one sinning venially, like a man who delays too long on the road’’—are stunningly apt for describing the Commedia. The sinners of hell are those who have definitively lost the path to their destination, che la diritta via hanno smarrita, whose ships have actually capsized; the souls in purgatory are guilty of having delayed, like Dante and the others whom Cato rebukes as ‘‘spiriti lenti,’’ asking ‘‘qual negligenza, quale stare e` questo?’’ (What negligence, what lingering is this?) (Purg. 2.120–21). Like Thomas, Dante brings nuance and distinction to Augustine’s concepts of death and exile; even more systematically than Thomas, given his central structural metaphor of human life as a path on which the soul journeys, Dante finds voyage imagery a powerful tool for adding such distinctions. The Commedia’s opening metaphor of life as path embodies Aquinas’s ideas of aversio and conversio: at the beginning of the Commedia the pilgrim has lost the right path and figures the state of aversio, of the sinful soul that has turned away from God, in his case temporarily, but with respect to the sinners of hell permanently. The second element of sin, conversio, the turning toward the changeable goods of the world, seems to have particularly engaged Dante’s interest, judging from the degree to which it permeates his thought. What is key for Dante is how clearly Thomas’s category of conversio to sin, with its implied opposite of conversio to God, like Augustine’s idea of malus amor versus bonus or rectus amor, brings sin—and therefore its ultimate consequence, hell—into contact with human desiring. In Convivio 4.12 Dante spells out with limpid clarity his vision of human life as a voyage propelled by desire, in his parable of the pilgrim soul who moves along the road of life from one object of desire to the next as it seeks the inn of repose. In this story, the existential motion of the soul comes into vivid focus, as it voyages on a path on which it has never been, on a path which is by definition always new and unknown—in other words, on the path of life, the path of becoming, the path we are all always on: ‘‘[i]l nuovo e mai non fatto cammino di questa vita’’ (the new and never before traveled path of this life) (Con. 4.12.15). As it voyages, the soul may err, for it can erroneously believe that a lesser good it encounters along the path is the highest good— ‘‘qualunque cosa vede che paia in se avere alcuno bene, crede che sia


esso’’ (whatever thing it sees that seems to have some good in it, the soul believes that it is that highest good) (Con. 4.12.15)—thus exchanging what should be a way-station for the goal or end-point of the journey. The suggestion is that the soul could fail to correct its mistake and could therefore fail to keep moving forward: if the soul believes that some lesser good is the end-point of its journey, the soul will prematurely cease its motion, will attempt to dwell in the lesser good, and will lose itself. This is not to overstate the case; the loss that is latent in the above comparison will become overt in the parable’s conclusion, where Dante writes that ‘‘Veramente cosı` questo cammino si perde per errore come le strade de la terra’’ (Truly this path is thus lost through error like the roads of the earth) (Con. 4.12.18). There is no doubt that Dante’s is a mind that encompasses the possibility of perdition. But the fact of perdition, of total loss—Aquinas’s aversio—is not sufficient to Dante’s analysis, which dwells with remarkable lucidity and penetration on the graduated process of conversio. (Here Dante treats the soul’s conversio to what is not God, while in Purgatorio he treats with equal lucidity and precision the graduated process of the soul’s conversion to God.) Before reaching his stark conclusion, Dante offers a nuanced discussion of the ways by which desire leads to loss, in a lovely gradatio detailing the kinds of objects that threaten sequentially to seduce us as we pursue the ‘‘nuovo e mai non fatto cammino di questa vita.’’ Our ignorance and naivete´ render us susceptible at first to small goods, but as we mature and our appetites increase—and our ability to achieve satiety simultaneously decreases—we proceed to larger and larger objects of desire: E perche´ la sua conoscenza prima e` imperfetta, per non essere esperta ne` dottrinata, piccioli beni le paiono grandi, e pero` da quelli comincia prima a desiderare. Onde vedemo li parvuli desiderare massimamente un pomo; e poi, piu` procedendo, desiderare uno augellino; e poi, piu` oltre, desiderare bel vestimento; e poi lo cavallo; e poi una donna; e poi ricchezza non grande, e poi grande, e poi piu`. E questo incontra perche´, in nulla di queste cose truova quella che va cercando, e credela trovare piu` oltre. (Con. 4.12.16) And because the soul’s knowledge is at first imperfect, because it is neither expert nor learned, small goods seem to it to be big goods, and so from these it begins at first to desire. So we see children desire above all an apple; and then, proceeding further, a little bird; and


then, further still, beautiful clothing; and then a horse; and then a lady; and then not great riches, and then great riches, and then more. And this happens because in none of these things does the soul find what it is looking for, and it believes that it will find it further on.

Had Aquinas been given the opportunity to read this passage, he would have recognized, it seems to me, an extraordinary dramatization of what he calls inordinata conversio ad commutabile bono, the disordered turning toward a changeable good, rendered with a precision that forecasts it as embodied narrative. Dante dramatizes inordinata conversio through time, showing the soul as it moves progressively from one bonum to the next, figuring human desire as successiveness, as successively we are seduced—‘‘converted’’ in Aquinas’s language—by the various objects of desire along the path. Our progress on the path of life is figured linguistically as successiveness: we desire something, ‘‘e poi, piu` procedendo,’’ we desire something new, ‘‘e poi, piu` oltre,’’ something new again, and so on as by virtue of a succession of e pois our desires grow ever greater, and we create what Dante will shortly describe as a pyramid of objects of desire. The progress of the soul along the way stations of the objects of its desire—as it moves from the pomo and then the augellino of childhood to the mature cravings for bel vestimento, lo cavallo, and una donna, and thence to ricchezza non grande, e poi grande, e poi piu`—is drawn in a fashion that is both socially and psychologically acute. Moreover, as I have shown in ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire’’ (chapter 2 in this volume), where a full explication of the list drawn from the Convivio may be found, the treatise’s array of desiderata is also philosophically dense, since it alternates between living and nonliving objects of desire, in such a way as to suggest the death-in-life that occurs when we desire objects toward which any affective inclination is entirely misplaced, because they are truly ‘‘dead.’’ The disproportionate presence of ricchezza on the list figures the series of transitions that lead from the innocent desires of childhood (innocent, but already shadowed by the ominous pomo, a choice of fruits that is of course symbolically weighted, inscribing the nexus of loss/limits/trespass into this analysis of human desire from its very outset) to desires that, if not innocent, are still fully comprehensible in the light of basic human needs—for spiritual nourishment, for warmth, for love—and finally to the desire for something cold, inert, dead. Something has happened,


and the mechanism has changed; one could say that our minds, in diseased form, have intervened, for desire propelled by need has been replaced by an intellectual construct: desire propelled by desire. Albeit narrativized, and related in the form of a parable, the analysis offered by Convivio 4.12 bears striking resemblance to Thomas’s analysis of sensory desire, ‘‘de concupiscentia’’ (ST 1a.2ae.30), which is found in his treatise on the passions.18 Asking, in article 4 of ‘‘de concupiscentia,’’ whether desire is infinite, Thomas, having already distinguished between natural and non-natural desire, argues that: ‘‘Non-natural desire, on the other hand, certainly is infinite. For as we have seen, it follows the reason; and it is in the nature of the reason to proceed ad infinitum.’’ As clincher to his argument, and as example of how reason can intervene negatively in the process of desiring, he offers precisely the example of desire for wealth: ‘‘Thus when a man desires riches he may desire, not riches up to a certain limit, but simply to be as rich as he possibly can’’ (ST 1a.2ae.30; Blackfriars 1967, 19:135). Dante’s version of ‘‘quantumcumque potest’’ is ‘‘e poi piu`’’ in the Convivio, and ultimately the figure of the lupa in the Commedia. Aquinas elaborates on concupiscence in a later passage in which he distinguishes between concupiscence of the flesh, which includes desires that ‘‘are natural in the sense that they relate to things which maintain one’s physical nature, whether it be food, drink and the like which support individual life; or sex, which provides for the preservation of the species,’’ and what he calls ‘‘concupiscence of the eyes.’’ In this latter category, Aquinas puts desire for things that ‘‘delight not because they are felt but because they are thought about, e.g., money, fine clothes and the like’’ (ST 1a2ae.77.5; Blackfriars 1969, 25:175). The parable of the desiring pilgrim in Convivio 4.12 was clearly dear to Dante’s heart, for he inscribes it into the center of the Commedia, in Purgatorio 16’s depiction of the newborn soul as a female child who, set forth by a happy maker on the path of life, willingly turns toward all that brings delight, only to find itself deceived and seduced by earthly goods: ‘‘Di picciol bene in pria sente sapore; / quivi s’inganna, e dietro ad esso corre, / se guida o fren non torce suo amore’’ (First it tastes the savor of a trifling good: there it is beguiled and runs after it, if guide or curb bend not its love) (Purg.16.91–93). And sin as conversio is the centerpiece of the rebuke that Beatrice issues to the pilgrim when they meet at the top of Mount Purgatory, where she compels him to acknowledge that after her death he was ‘‘converted’’ by, and became excessively attached to, temporal objects: ‘‘Le presenti


cose / col falso lor piacer volser miei passi’’ (Present things, with their false pleasure, turned my steps aside) (Purg. 31.34–35). Moreover, Aquinas’s model of sin as not just aversio from God but also conversio toward the secondary objects to which we become excessively and inappropriately attached resonates in Purgatorio 17’s discussion of the moral structure of purgatory, where we learn that all human actions, whether good or evil, spring from love. Vergil explains to the pilgrim that love is the seed of all human activity, of every virtue and of every act that deserves punishment: ‘‘amor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute / e d’ogne operazion che merta pene’’ (love is the seed in you of every virtue and of every act that merits suffering) (Purg.17.104–5). This principle—which implies that love is the foundation for hell as well as purgatory—is restated at the outset of Purgatorio 18: ‘‘amore, a cui reduci / ogne buono operare e ’l suo contraro’’ (love, to which you reduce all good action and its contrary) (Purg.18.14–15). This foundational principle takes us back to Aquinas’s treatise on the passions, since it is the text which contains the dictum that is routinely cited by commentaries on Purgatorio 17:19 ‘‘Unde manifestum est quod omne agens, quodcumque sit, agit quamcumque actionem ex aliquo amore’’ (every agent whatsoever, therefore, performs every action out of love of some kind) (ST 1a2ae.28.6; Blackfriars 1967, 19:106–7). Thomas in turn relies on Augustine’s formulation of bonus amor and malus amor. All through De passionibus he cites book 14 of City of God, and in particular chapter 7, in which Augustine explains that ‘‘amor’’ (as compared to ‘‘dilectio’’ or ‘‘caritas’’) is not just bad, as many believe, but can be taken in a bad sense (‘‘in malo’’) or in a good sense (‘‘in bono’’). Aquinas cites City of God 14.7 repeatedly: ‘‘Augustine says of the emotions: ‘They are evil if our love is evil; good, if our love is good’ ’’ (De passionibus, 33); ‘‘Augustine says that all the other emotions are caused by love’’ (De passionibus, 49); ‘‘Augustine says that all the other feelings of the soul are caused by love’’ (De passionibus, 85); ‘‘Augustine says that love is the cause of all our other feelings’’ (De passionibus, 111); and ‘‘Love seems to be identical with every emotion; for Augustine says, ‘Love longing for the thing it loves is desire; love possessing and enjoying it is pleasure; love shrinking from what endangers it is fear; love experiencing that befall is sadness’ ’’ (De passionibus, 63). Thomas also takes a citation from City of God 14.9: ‘‘Augustine says that when a man loves aright, all his emotions are healthy,’’ in Latin, ‘‘Augustinus dicit quod rectus amor omnes istas affectiones rectas habet (De passionibus, 34–35; my italics).


Most significantly, Augustine’s statement, from City of God 14.7, that ‘‘a right will is good love and a wrong will is bad love’’ (recta itaque voluntas est bonus amor et voluntas perversa malus amor) provides a template for the treatment of love in the Commedia.20 Augustinian bonus amor versus malus amor underwrites Dante’s characterization of the entrance to purgatory as ‘‘la porta / che ’l mal amor de l’anime disusa’’ (Purg. 10.2): the gate of purgatory dishabituates souls from the practice of evil love, from ‘‘mal amor.’’ And Dante comes very close to paraphrasing Augustine in the opening to Paradiso 15, where he aligns a right will (‘‘benigna volontade’’) with properly directed love (‘‘l’amor che drittamente spira’’) and a wrong will (‘‘la iniqua [volontade]) with improperly directed love, that is, cupidity (‘‘cupidita`’’): ‘‘Benigna volontade in che si liqua / sempre l’amor che drittamente spira, / come cupidita` fa ne la iniqua’’ (Good will, in which the love that breathes straight is always distilled, as cupidity is distilled in evil will) (Par. 15.1–3). As noted above, commentaries of Purgatorio 17 routinely refer to the dictum from the Summa Theologiae that is, as I have shown, rooted in an Augustinian analysis of love. But the critical tradition shows little inclination to carry through on the citation, and to deal with its implications: if love is, for Dante, the basis of all human behavior, if it is indeed that ‘‘to which you reduce all good action and its contrary,’’ then the traces of love must be visible in hell as well as in purgatory. Let us consider the case of Inferno 10, where Dante treats the heretics, and in particular the Epicureans, construing followers of Epicurus as atheists, deniers of God and the immortality of the soul, ‘‘who hold that the soul dies with the body’’ (Inf. 10.15). This being said, the density and difficulty of canto 10 derives from the oblique representational tack that Dante adopts: he does not represent the Epicurean heresy in a straightforward way, as denial of God, but rather as excessive attachment to what is not God. Farinata’s excessive attachment is to Florence: his closure toward God is viewed through the lens of political closure, the civic heresy whereby fraternal bonds between fellow Florentines become divisive walls of hurt and betrayal. Cavalcante’s excessive devotion is to his son: his closure toward God is reflected in the poetic closure of his son Guido, whose poetry denied the possibility that women could be beatifiers and lead to salvation. The decision to treat denial of God as an embrace of something else allows Dante to weave a fabric of great complexity whose threads include both contemporary politics and contemporary poetic debates. But what gives Inferno 10 its particular


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pathos and power is the love expressed by its sinners, the urgent and living love that we feel in Cavalcante’s anguished ‘‘mio figlio ov’e`? e perche´ non e` teco?’’ (where is my son? and why is he not with you?) (Inf. 10.60) or in Farinata’s claim that he alone among the Ghibellines preserved Florence from destruction. The mystery at the heart of Inferno 10, the mystery that generates its enormous poetic power, is the connection of love to sin. In the palpable love of the sinners of Inferno 10 Dante dramatizes the law he sets forth in Purgatorio 17, the law that holds that all human action, whether good or evil, has its origin in love. What gives Inferno 10 its special grip on the reader is that the love of Cavalcante and Farinata is still recognizable as love. While the original love of most sinners in hell is perverted and distorted beyond recognition, in Dante’s treatment of the heretics we can still individuate the conversio toward a secondary good that Aquinas delineates as sin. And when that secondary good is a beloved child, whose well-being the father still craves, the impact on us as human beings is very great, since the canto forces us to consider how emotions in which we all share can ultimately become reified and sinful. I will conclude by returning to the disconcerting statement, entrusted to Statius, that not only each of the seven capital vices, but also their opposites, is punished on the seven terraces of purgatory. What compels Dante to make this claim? The answer has to do, I believe, with the complex contamination of Christian and classical thought that is Dante’s single most radical and original contribution to the Christian visionary tradition. My suggestion takes us back to Aquinas’s De passionibus, whose great debt to Augustine, and in particular to the discussion of right and wrong love in City of God 14, we have already discussed. At the same time, of course, Aquinas’s treatment of human emotion is profoundly and avowedly Aristotelian. It is interesting, in this context, to witness Aquinas distinguish the Stoic position, in which all emotions are diseases of the soul, and hence unhealthy, from the Peripatetic view, in which emotions are good when under rational control, and evil when they are not: The Stoics made no distinction between sense and intellect, and hence between the sensory appetite and the intellectual. Accordingly they made no distinction between the emotions and movements of the will, since the emotions belong to the sensory appetite and simple movements of the will to the intellectual appetite. They applied the


term will to every appetitive movement that was under rational control, and the term emotion to every one that was not. Cicero followed their opinion, calling the emotions diseases of the soul. . . . The Peripatetics, however, applied the term emotion to every movement of the sensory appetite. Accordingly they judged emotions to be good when they are under rational control, and evil when they are not; and from this they inferred, as a corollary, the doctrine of the ‘golden mean’ for the emotions. (ST 1a.2ae.24.3; Blackfriars 1967, 19:37; I have altered the translation by using ‘‘appetite’’ instead of ‘‘orexis’’ for Aquinas’s ‘‘appetitus’’)

Particularly suggestive is the conclusion to this passage, where Aquinas states that the doctrine of the golden mean was inferred as a corollary from the Peripatetic view that emotions are good when under rational control, evil when they are not. Aquinas thus links the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean to a view of human emotion—that it is good when under rational control, evil when it is not—that is strikingly consonant with Augustine’s view as expressed in City of God 14.7: ‘‘Recta itaque voluntas est bonus amor et voluntas perversa malus amor.’’ Perhaps, in other words, the doctrine of the golden mean is captivating to Dante because it signifies for him the ethical ground where Aristotle and Augustine meet, where he can conflate these diverse ethical frameworks into his treatment of human desire. Of course, the same argument could be made with regard to Aquinas’s De passionibus itself, in which Aristotle and Augustine had already met, and whose dictum ‘‘omne agens, quodcumque sit, agit quamcumque actionem ex aliquo amore’’ Dante prominently displays at the core of his Purgatorio. At the foundation of Dante’s theology of hell is a theory of human desire that is laid out by Aristotle, parsed by Aquinas, but arguably for Dante most spiritually attuned to Augustine: ‘‘Benigna volontade in che si liqua / sempre l’amor che drittamente spira, / come cupidita` fa ne la iniqua’’ (Par. 15.1–3).

part ii

Christian and Pagan Intertexts

chapter 5

Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition

T

he straightforward answer to the question ‘‘Why did Dante write the Commedia?’’ is Dante’s own: ‘‘Pero`, in pro del mondo che mal vive, / al carro tieni or li occhi, e quel che vedi, / ritornato di la`, fa che tu scrive’’ (Therefore, on behalf of the world that lives evilly, keep your eyes now on the chariot, and once you have returned over there be sure that you write what you see) (Purg. 32.103–5). Exchanging the chariot with any of the other sights that the pilgrim encounters on his journey, any of the other cose nove he sees along the way, we get an answer to our query: on behalf of the world that lives evilly, keep your eyes on what is in front of you, and that which you see— once you return to earth—be sure to write down. Beatrice here echoes many visionary texts, which commonly contain an obligation of denuntiatio: in the Apocalypse the Lord instructs John to ‘‘write the things which thou has seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter’’ (1:19); in St. Paul’s Apocalypse (fourth century), the angel says ‘‘I will show you what you must describe and tell openly’’; in his ninth-century vision, Wetti, a monk of Reichenau, is reluctant to reveal what he has learned and is scolded by his angel guide, ‘‘What God wishes and commands you to do, through me, do not dare put off,’’ eventually telling his fellow monks that ‘‘I was commanded with so much obligation to declare this in public that I am afraid I will be condemned without pardon if I am struck silent and cannot reveal what I saw and heard.’’ Thurkill, an Essex peasant whose vision occurred in 1206, requires a second vision to remind him to reveal his first: ‘‘In his great simplicity, however, he hesitated to relate his vision, until on the following night St. Julian appeared to him and gave him orders to reveal everything he had seen, because he said he had been taken from his body for the purpose of making public


all he had heard.’’1 These injunctions, from texts that are, with the exception of the biblical, not great masterpieces, nonetheless all touch on that complex node where originary presence encounters the belatedness of representation, where vision collides with language. One of the goals of my book The Undivine Comedy is to suggest that the time has come for us to rehabilitate the Commedia as a vision, not making the positivist error of seeing earlier visions as straightforward sources of the Commedia, but reengaging Dante’s text in a dialogue with the visionary tradition. While dantisti continue to debate whether or not to consider the Commedia a vision, scholars in other disciplines have been working to understand the common ground that underlies all vision literature.2 If we wish our more nuanced sense of the Commedia to have any impact on such discussions, we must remove it from its isolated high-culture peak and come to terms with it not only as a literary artifact but also as the record of a visionary experience. Dante’s own suggestions regarding what is clearly a mystical experience have been handled with an excessive timidity that has its roots in our susceptibility to Dante’s narrative realism and our desire to keep poets safely segregated from prophets, as though our tradition were not replete with the complex contaminatio (already theorized by Augustine) of poets and prophets, language-users and visionaries, wordsmiths and truthtellers. Literary self-consciousness is a trademark of visionary authors, from the author of the Apocalypse, who refers repeatedly to himself as a writer and to us as his readers, to the author of Tundale’s Vision (Irish, 1149), who sets himself certain narrative regulations: he believes in selectivity (‘‘we ought to try to be brief, since not all that we hear is worth writing down,’’ he says, anticipating Dante’s ‘‘altro parlando / che la mia comedıà cantar non cura’’ [speaking of other things, that my comedy does not care to sing] [Inf. 21.1– 2]); does not want to be repetitive (‘‘Since we described this before, we should not repeat it again’’); is aware of his limitations (‘‘Neither could your humble writer understand it nor his tongue tell of it’’), and also of the service he performs, noting that he has recorded the vision ‘‘for the benefit of our readers’’ (this is Dante’s ‘‘in pro del mondo che mal vive’’). Poetic self-consciousness, in other words, cannot be used as a litmus test to discriminate between poets and prophets, despite Salman Rushdie’s claims to the contrary. Hoping to persuade Ayatollah Khomeini to take his text less seriously, Rushdie pointed to its evident

Dante and the Visionary Tradition 127

artifactuality, but the Ayatollah remained of the conviction that manipulations of narrative voice and other rhetorical techniques offer an author no protective veil. I think it at least possible that Dante, who considered himself not a decretalist but a new St. John (‘‘solo ai Decretali / si studia’’ [Par. 9.134–35] is his bitter denunciation of modern prelates who devote themselves only to the Decretali rather than to the Gospels), would have welcomed the dangers attendant on being taken more seriously as prophet and visionary. But Dante did not succeed in eliciting from the Catholic Church of his time the attention that Rushdie elicited from the Iranian mullahs of ours. Despite Augustine’s understanding that rhetorical prowess and access to truth can coincide, the church on the whole (with a few telling exceptions like the Dominican ban of 1335) was willing to bracket Dante as a poet, a maker of fictio. And yet Augustine had already disputed the idea—an idea that has been institutionalized in Dante studies through the erroneous theologus-poeta dichotomy—that one whom the Holy Spirit inspires need not also attend to the ‘‘how’’ of language and rhetoric. The use of rhetorical techniques in the service of a divinely inspired message is explicitly defended by Augustine in De doctrina christiana, where he furnishes examples of Paul’s rhetorical prowess and asks: ‘‘Does the Apostle contradict himself when he says that men are made teachers by the operation of the Holy Spirit and at the same time tells them what and how they should teach?’’ (4.16.33). Here Augustine discredits the common misapprehension that a ‘‘prophet’’ cannot also be a ‘‘poet,’’ explaining that the Apostle does not contradict himself when he says that men are made teachers by the operation of the Holy Spirit (that is, they are inspired, they are visionaries, they are prophets) and, at the same time, tells them what and how they should teach (that is, visionaries require rhetorical as well as substantive instruction, like poets). Augustine here makes the point that the contradiction is apparent, not real. This apparent contradiction, endemic to the truth-telling enterprise as a whole, and aggravated with respect to Dante because of cultural factors indisposing Italian Catholics from taking him as seriously as Ayatollah Khomeini took Rushdie, has warped our view of Dante’s enterprise (or, more precisely, our view of his view of his enterprise) ever since his piccioletta barca was first launched. The hermeneutic dance I am suggesting consists of the following moves. First, we need to accept that Dante could have believed in his visionary and prophetic vocation, that he was acutely aware of the


tension between his uncompromising visionary claims, on the one hand, and his extravagant poetic gifts, on the other, and that he considered the latter insufficient arguments against the existence of the former. In other words, Dante agreed with Augustine that the contradiction between visionary vocation and poetic talent is apparent, not real, and considered himself a case in point. Second, the critical reaction that set about dichotomizing what Dante had fused was the result of a cultural posture that preferred to keep poets safely bracketed from prophets (and especially a poet who complicated matters still further by deploying his poetic gifts in an anything but prudent fashion, for instance by invoking classical models alongside biblical ones). In other words, the secolare commento—the history of the Commedia’s reception—was from the start profoundly defensive. Third, Dante differs from the other ‘‘great prophet-visionaries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—Hildegard and Joachim, Mechthild and Marguerite,’’ with whom Peter Dronke would like us to associate him3 —in the immensity of his poetic gift, which induces subconscious suspensions of disbelief in his readers (duly reflected in the critical tradition) on the one hand, and prevents them from taking him seriously as a visionary, on the other. A delicious irony here is that readers who do not ‘‘believe’’ Ezekiel or John the Divine, let alone Hildegard or Joachim, ‘‘believe’’ the Commedia, as is indicated each time a new class of first-time readers challenges their teacher regarding Francesca’s damnation. Finally, if we keep all the above in mind, we can ‘‘look beneath the veil’’ (using Dante’s metaphor of a veil of text, as in ‘‘sotto ’l velame de li versi strani’’ [‘‘beneath the veil of the strange verses’’] [Inf. 9.63] and ‘‘che ’l velo e` ora ben tanto sottile’’ [‘‘for the veil is now so thin’’] [Purg. 8.20]) to catch a glimpse of how—using the only medium he had, words—Dante as poet-fabbro constructed the magic of his compelling realism. So, is there anything to be learned by bringing the Commedia into dialogue with its humble precursors, Dante into dialogue with the likes of Thurkill and Tundale? Precisely because these texts are so much cruder than the Commedia, their fabbri so much less rhetorically gifted, they allow us to see in a clear light—indeed, sometimes to see for the first time—the problems with which Dante would later deal, but which with his art he so masterfully obfuscates. For instance, the ambiguous status of the pilgrim’s body, especially in Paradiso, is reflected in otherworld journeys of all periods, which posit the possibility of experiencing a true vision while the body remains on earth in


apparent sleep. Thurkill is described as ‘‘lying senseless on his bed—as if oppressed with a heavy sleep—for two days and nights’’; the monk of Evesham, too, appears almost dead, and returns to himself ‘‘as if waking out of a deep sleep.’’ Most importantly for readers of the Commedia, such a premise does not pave the way for an abstract and disembodied visionary experience; rather, these accounts are infused with an insistence on the physical reality of the experiences, an insistence that renders the status of the body highly ambiguous. Furseus, after returning, bears the physical marks of the fire that he had felt in his soul, while Thurkill’s apparently lifeless body coughs at the same time as does his spirit in the otherworld. As Carol Zaleski notes, there is no ‘‘coherent rule for the interpretation of visions’’ precisely because of their ambiguity regarding the status of the body: ‘‘Many ambiguities remain, all related to a central question: was the visionary still attached to a body, and, if so, what bearing does this have on the validity of the vision?’’4 The status of the pilgrim’s body is an essentially new arena for students of Dante to explore.5 But visions can also reveal uncharted areas within zones that seem to have been more fully explored. I could give many examples of how the visions help us see the Commedia more clearly, and even they would only represent the tip of the iceberg, since this is truly, in my estimation, a whole new field within Dante studies. For instance, the visions allow us to see that Dante’s treatment of lust is truly anomalous in its psychological (rather than grotesquely physical) focus.6 Broadening our perspective, the visions allow us to see the idiosyncrasies and sheer inventiveness of Dante’s conceptualization of the different realms of his afterworld. With respect to hell, which was the most developed of the three realms in the visionary tradition, we can see how Dante alters the tradition (as in his treatment of lust), how he picks and chooses among the traditional motifs, and how he radically restructures the conceptual bases of hell by using Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.7 With respect to purgatory, the least developed of the three realms, commentaries should explain the freedom in which Dante was working, the carte blanche he enjoyed; it is important to understand that, with respect to Purgatorio more than with respect to Inferno or Paradiso, Dante is truly inventing everything as he goes along. A reading of Jacques Le Goff ’s groundbreaking The Birth of Purgatory helps us to focus on the degree to which Dante was venturing into un-navigated waters as he sailed into his second realm, but even more effective is the realization that Thurkill’s 1206 account is


the first even to clearly distinguish hell and purgatory from each other.8 And, while Le Goff enables us to see how little of the second realm had been codified prior to Dante, the book has yet to be written that will show how Dante’s conceptualization of purgatory influenced successive generations of writers, artists, and thinkers. Coming to heaven, the unique perspective the visionary tradition offers us for assessing the Commedia is never more useful than with respect to the representation of paradise. A perusal of earlier visions reminds us that Dante is unusual even in giving equal time—textually speaking—to heaven. Indeed, there is no precedent for his agenda. If we imagine a contemporary poet attempting to graft into his poetry the concerns of modern theoretical physics, we may perhaps get a sense of what it meant for Dante to embrace in his paradise the discourse of medieval metaphysics. Against the backdrop of what his visionary precursors did not do, we can better appreciate what Dante did, remembering that he need not have chosen to deal with that aspect of his subject that is least accessible to the narrator’s art. He could have followed his visionary predecessors in fashioning a more concrete paradise, whether pastoral or urban: either a supreme locus amoenus, the flowery fields and meadows of so many medieval visions, or, following St. John in the Book of Revelation, a magnificent heavenly Jerusalem. In other words, he could have adopted the caution of previous composers of textual heavens, who make only few representational gestures toward the immaterial paradise favored by philosophers. The infinitely bolder path that Dante pursues is one that the context provided by the visionary tradition helps us to see. In conclusion, let us look briefly at Dante’s internal handling of these issues, such as the meditation on visionary experience we find in Purgatorio 15. When the poet sets out to represent the visioni estatiche that the pilgrim experiences on the terrace of wrath, he puts himself in the position of representing both the content of these visions and the behavior of one who is in the grip of a visionary experience. This passage offers all the hallmarks of visionary experience: the withdrawal of the soul from the body, which lies lifeless, the trance-like state, and the soul’s participation in a different order of reality. This last is most explicitly expressed in the disjunction between ‘‘le cose che son fuor di lei [l’anima] vere’’ (the things that are true outside of the soul) (Purg. 15.116)— that is, ‘‘reality’’ as we normally know it, as constituted by those things whose truth is grounded in external sensory perception—and, by contrast, those ‘‘things that are true inside the soul,’’


cose che son dentro di lei vere : that is, things that are not externally grounded but that are nonetheless real, things whose truth value is constituted in a different way. Finally, this passage offers a visionary who later writes what he sees, and thus a mise en abıˆme of the writing of the Commedia itself, whose author uncompromisingly believes that he, like Ezekiel, can paint things as he saw them: ‘‘ma leggi Ezechıël, che li dipigne / come li vide’’ (but read Ezekiel, who painted them as he saw them) (Purg. 29.100–1)—or at least die trying. Like the visionaries of old, the author of the Commedia consumes himself (this is after all a poem ‘‘che m’ha fatto per molti anni macro’’ [Par. 25.3]), negotiating the perilous straits between the vision and the representation thereof, between vedere and dipignere, between is and as, the is of being and the as of represented being, the latter inscribed in Dante’s verse by the mediating come : ‘‘li dipigne come li vide.’’ Fragile bridge over the abyss though it be, that come, it does the job: Ezekiel does depict them as he sees them. It is into this visionary genealogy that Dante writes himself, aligning himself with his ancient precursors, the Ezekiels and Johns, and disregarding the flourishing contemporary tradition that peaks with Thurkill in the early thirteenth century. When Dante pilgrim says to Marco Lombardo that ‘‘Dio m’ha in sua grazia rinchiuso, / tanto che vuol ch’i’ veggia la sua corte / per modo tutto fuor del moderno uso’’ (God has so enclosed me in his grace that he wants me to see his court in a manner altogether outside of modern use) (Purg. 16.40–42), the poet is suggesting that the mode of seeing vouchsafed him is entirely unique in modern times.9 Reading other visions prevents us from passing over this verse, forces us to query the pilgrim’s claim to see God’s court ‘‘per modo tutto fuor del moderno uso.’’ On the one hand, this statement is historically untrue (and most likely disingenuous): Dante lived at a time of great visionary fervor. On the other hand, if we take ‘‘modo’’ to refer not only to the act of seeing but also to the act of representing, which is—for this tradition—essentially inseparable from the sight itself, how can we challenge the truth of Dante’s assertion? For visionary authors, from the humblest to the most sublime, it is not the ‘‘why’’ of the writing that is problematic but always the ‘‘how.’’ And with respect to the ‘‘how’’ there is no doubt that Dante’s text is indeed del tutto fuor del moderno uso.

chapter 6

Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431–33 and Inferno 5.1–24)

Cosı` discesi del cerchio primaio giu` nel secondo, che men loco cinghia 3 e tanto piu` dolor, che punge a guaio. Stavvi Mino`s orribilmente, e ringhia: essamina le colpe ne l’intrata; 6 giudica e manda secondo ch’avvinghia. Dico che quando l’anima mal nata li vien dinanzi, tutta si confessa; 9 e quel conoscitor de le peccata vede qual loco d’inferno e` da essa; cignesi con la coda tante volte 12 quantunque gradi vuol che giu` sia messa. Sempre dinanzi a lui ne stanno molte: vanno a vicenda ciascuna al giudizio, 15 dicono e odono e poi son giu` volte. ‘‘O tu che vieni al doloroso ospizio,’’ disse Mino`s a me quando mi vide, 18 lasciando l’atto di cotanto offizio, ‘‘guarda com’entri e di cui tu ti fide; non t’inganni l’ampiezza de l’intrare!’’ 21 E ’l duca mio a lui: ‘‘Perche´ pur gride? Non impedir lo suo fatale andare: vuolsi cosı` cola dove si puote cio` che si vuole, e piu` non dimandare.’’ (Inf. 5.1–24)

Thus I descended from the first circle down to the second, which encloses a smaller space, but so much more suffering that it goads the souls to shriek. There stands Minos bristling and snarling: he examines the soul’s guilt at the

Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell 133 entrance; he judges and passes sentence by how he wraps. I say that when the ill-born soul comes before him, it confesses all; and that connoisseur of sin sees which is its place in hell; he girds himself with his tail as many times as the levels he wills the soul to be sent down. Always many stand before him; each goes in turn to judgment, they speak and hear and are cast into the deep. ‘‘O you who come to the dolorous hospice,’’ said Minos when he saw me, leaving off the exercise of his great office, ‘‘beware how you enter and to whom you entrust yourself: be not deceived by the spacious entrance!’’ And my leader to him: ‘‘Why still cry out? Do not impede his going, which is decreed: this is willed where what is willed can be done, so ask no more.’’ 1

Inferno 5 elicited from the ancient commentators two basic views of its structure: while one group divides it into numerous small sections (Boccaccio opts for six, Benvenuto for five), Buti puts forth the suggestion that has proved more congenial to modern interpreters, namely that the canto falls into two parts.2 Indeed, like Inferno 1, which is also sundered by a dramatic encounter that divides the narrative into two halves—pre-Vergil and post-Vergil—so Inferno 5 pivots around the central tercet that paves the way for its monumental encounter with Francesca da Rimini. The first half of canto 5 thus prepares us for the poem’s first great infernal interview, serving as the moral and poetic backdrop on which Francesca’s drama can most effectively be played out; it also participates in the dominant project of creating a possible world in which we can live, breathe, wander at imaginative will, and— most importantly—suspend our disbelief. While that project is one whose boundaries are coterminous with the Commedia itself, at this stage of the narrative enterprise, when the task of beginning is still very much at the forefront of the poet’s agenda, the work of creating a possible world is more discernible than at others. Of the three narrative segments that compose the first half of canto 5, the first—verses 1–24, a segment routinely identified by commentators with Minos—is dedicated most explicitly to the ongoing labor of devising hell. I have written previously of Dante’s ‘‘poetics of the new,’’ his art of transition, gradation, and differentiation intended to mimic the experience of life, an art that attempts to render the human epistemological condition in its essential subjection to the new things that the divine episteme has no part of: God is defined as ‘‘He who never saw a new thing’’ (Colui che mai non vide cosa nova) (Purg. 10.94) and angels have no need of memory ‘‘because their sight is not intercepted by new objects’’ (pero` non hanno vedere interciso / da novo obietto)


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[Par. 29.79–80], while life on earth is subject ‘‘to the influence of the new things’’ (a la virtute de le cose nove [Par. 7.72]), and we experience life as relentless forward motion, mirrored in the pilgrim’s encounters with ‘‘le vite spiritali ad una ad una’’ (Par. 33.24)—which is to say, with the new.3 Dante’s commitment to the poetics of the new, to an ultimate mimesis, a mimesis that aspires not just to the content of life but to its very rhythm and epistemological flow, generates the textual imperatives that govern the opening cantos of Inferno. His will to make a text in which we make choices within a simulacrum of reality involves designing a textual fabric that implicitly counters the artifice of beginning. Dante does this by creating multiple beginnings, so that each beginning undermines the absolute status of the previous beginning. The subversion of absolute beginning that is a textual hallmark of Inferno 1 occurs on a larger scale in the opening cantos as a group, which can be read as a graduated series of textual cose nove, new beginnings: only in canto 2 do we find the poet’s invocation to the Muses, and only in canto 3 does the pilgrim approach the gate of hell and does the actual voyage get under way. Moreover, although the first souls we see are those in hell’s vestibule, in canto 3, we do not reach the first circle, and thus the first souls of hell proper, until canto 4, and the first prolonged infernal interview does not occur until canto 5, when the pilgrim meets Francesca. In each of the Commedia’s early cantos the art of transition is particularly in evidence, as Dante works to make each new beginning the real new beginning at the expense of its predecessor, thus creating the illusion of a deferral of beginning while at the same time relaying information essential to the creation of the possible world that is, in fact, beginning to take shape. Throughout these early cantos there are recurring textual signs related to the work of beginning: we think, for instance, of the recurrent presence of entrare, which will denote transition throughout the Commedia, and which is present at least once in each of the first five cantos of the poem; also significant is the repetition of locative adverbs, such as qui and quivi. The reiterated locatives stress the place where we have arrived, where we are now, at the expense of previous locations; they serve to differentiate our experience of the journey thus far, to mark it off into discrete segments, conferring volume and density on the space that is taking shape in our imaginations. Thus, the passage into limbo in Inferno 4 is marked by little

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verbal markers of newness, words that stress this place and this moment at the expense of the last place and the last moment: ‘‘Or discendiam qua giu` nel cieco mondo’’ (Now let us descend down here into the blind world) (Inf. 4.13), says Vergil, articulating the new both temporally (‘‘Or’’) and spatially (‘‘qua giu`’’). We note the repetition of ‘‘qua giu`’’ a few verses later (‘‘L’angoscia de le genti / che son qua giu`’’ (The suffering of the peoples who are here below) (Inf. 4.19–20) and the use of ‘‘Quivi’’ to lead off a tercet differentiating the sounds of limbo from the sounds of the vestibule we have left behind: with ‘‘Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, / non avea pianto mai che di sospiri’’ (There, as far as could be heard, there was no weeping except of sighs) (Inf. 4.25–26), the poet asserts a new reality to replace the ‘‘Quivi sospiri, pianti e alti guai’’ (There sighs, weeping, loud wailing) (Inf. 3.22) of a similarly aural tercet on the threshold of canto 3. The methods employed for differentiating this newest new place from previous new places now expand to include number, our most precise denoter of difference, used in canto 4 for the first time (in collaboration with the by-now-standard intrare) to tag limbo as the ‘‘primo cerchio’’: ‘‘Cosı` si mise e cosı` mi fe´ intrare / nel primo cerchio che l’abisso cigne’’ (So he put himself, and so he made me enter, into the first circle girding the abyss) (Inf. 4.23–24). The work of beginning comes into sharp focus at the outset of canto 5, in an initial tercet that recapitulates and recombines many of the transitional elements of Inferno 4.23–24 cited above, transposing them from the descent into the first circle to the descent into the second. The use of ‘‘Cosı`’’ as a marker of transition (a ‘‘nesso narrativo,’’ as Mattalia puts it),4 followed by a verb of action in the past absolute, is one such transposed element: ‘‘Cosı` si mise e cosı` mi fe´ intrare’’ becomes ‘‘Cosı` discesi,’’ where further transitional force is accrued from the placement at the canto’s exordium. As always when dealing with recombinatory patterns, repetition is a vehicle that allows us to derive significance from variation: in this case the shift from ‘‘si mise’’ to ‘‘discesi’’ highlights the downward plunge—into what is intended to feel by contrast like ‘‘real’’ sinfulness and ‘‘true’’ hell—that signals the entrance into the second circle. In order to understand fully the way in which Dante marshals this sense of total disjunction between circles one and two, we must bear in mind his will to create a textuality that comes alive by way of a dialectically informed narrative that works at cross-purposes to itself.


Thus, Dante labels limbo with numerical precision, in a fashion that seems not susceptible to confusion: it is the first circle of hell. And yet, master of the manipulation of narrative to create dialectical perspectives, Dante then dedicates the rest of canto 4 to making us disbelieve this simple fact, and indeed, how many readers ‘‘forget’’ that limbo is hell’s first circle!5 The technique involved is basic to the Commedia, a means of structuring tension into the discourse, and it is based on the exploitation of the text’s temporal dimension: first the poet presents a truth, a warning directed at the reader; then he does everything in his power to make us disregard the warning we have received. For instance, although we learn at the outset of the journey that justice governs hell—‘‘Giustizia mosse mio alto fattore’’ (Justice moved my high maker) (Inf. 3.4)—this is information that we will internalize, if at all, only after completing much of the voyage, not here at the outset. Nor would the poet want it otherwise; in fact, he counts on our not internalizing much of the information that he yet so carefully places on the record, since much of the Inferno’s power, as poetry, derives from the tension that exists between abstract verities such as these and the palpable sympathy for the damned that the poet manipulates the reader into feeling. This technique will be very much in evidence in canto 5, whose first half is devoted to establishing the verity of sin and damnation and whose second half is equally devoted to dispelling it. Dante establishes the sinful nature of the second circle by exploiting its difference from the first circle, which in his invention is remarkably unhellish; we remember, for instance, that the souls of limbo suffer less than the souls of the vestibule, souls who do not even technically belong to hell. The second circle thus derives its initial character from the fact that it is not like the first, and it is this disjunction that Dante takes such pains to underscore from the outset of canto 5, and for which he prepares us at the end of canto 4. Inferno 4 ends with the pilgrim’s departure from limbo: ‘‘per altra via mi mena il savio duca, / fuor de la queta, ne l’aura che trema. / E vegno in parte ove non e` che luca’’ (along another way my wise leader conducts me out of the quiet, into the trembling air. And I came to a place where no light shines) (Inf. 4.149– 51).6 These verses highlight those aspects of limbo that will be irretrievably absent from the infernal landscape once we leave it, that make limbo truly different from the rest of hell; we now embark on an ‘‘other path’’ that takes us beyond limbo’s quiet, beyond its theologically stunning and anomalous light. It is the light that no longer shines


in canto 5 that gives us the feeling that we are not really in hell when we are in limbo; by the same token, it is the light that no longer shines in canto 5 that reinforces the feeling that in the darkness of the second circle we have finally reached hell. The last verses of canto 4 implicitly set up the second circle as everything that the first circle is not; canto 5’s opening tercet then affirms and amplifies the difference that is implied by canto 4’s conclusion. After the downward plunge of ‘‘Cosı` discesi,’’ difference is driven home by the numbers ‘‘primaio’’ and ‘‘secondo,’’ whose differentiating function is enhanced by the quantifying adverbs ‘‘piu`’’ and ‘‘meno,’’ used here in tandem for the first time in the poem.7 Looking back at the transition into limbo, ‘‘Cosı` si mise e cosı` mi fe´ intrare / nel primo cerchio che l’abisso cigne’’ (So he put himself, and so he made me enter, into the first circle girding the abyss) (Inf. 4.23–24), we see that the recycled elements include not only the use of Cosı` Ⳮ verb as an incipit, but also ‘‘primo cerchio’’ / ‘‘cerchio primaio’’ and ‘‘cigne’’ / ‘‘cinghia.’’ On this backdrop of similarity, the difference registered by ‘‘discesi,’’ by ‘‘giu`’’ (which will be repeated twice more in this opening sequence, in verses 12 and 15), by the novel correlation between ‘‘men loco’’ and ‘‘tanto piu` dolor,’’ and especially by the specification that this suffering ‘‘punge a guaio,’’ is the more emphatic. The energetic ‘‘giu`’’ at the beginning of the second verse is redundant but crucial to conveying negative movement—into a place labeled ‘‘secondo’’ that embraces less space but more suffering: ‘‘Cosı` discesi del cerchio primaio / giu` nel secondo, che men loco cinghia / e tanto piu` dolor, che punge a guaio’’ (Thus I descended from the first circle down to the second, which encloses a smaller space, but so much more suffering that it goads the souls to shriek) (Inf. 5.1–3). The correlation between ‘‘men loco’’ and ‘‘piu` dolor’’ is particularly forceful because of its unexpectedness; we are surprised by the transition from the neutral physical word loco to the affectively charged dolor. While ‘‘piu` dolor’’ grabs our attention, ‘‘men loco’’ is arguably the more important datum, since it provides precious information on the structure of hell, whose cone-like shape we are now able to infer. Remembering Michael Riffaterre’s injunction that ‘‘description begets narrative; in fact, narrative cannot come into being without description,’’8 we can better grasp the subtlety of this opening tercet, whose coupling of concretely descriptive with intensely emotional elements prevents us from lingering too long on (and perhaps questioning) the concrete information that is discreetly relayed.


All the work done by the opening three verses (and, as we have seen, it is a surprising amount) culminates in the canto’s fourth verse, which makes the change that has already occurred explicit, giving it an institutional cast and converting it into an overbearingly embodied physical presence: ‘‘Stavvi Mino`s orribilmente, e ringhia.’’ There, in that new place to which we have come (we note the enclitic locative ‘‘vi’’ subliminally stressing the new), stands Minos, whose juridical function is succinctly delineated: his task is to examine the sins of the damned, judge the sinners, and dispatch them to their appropriate eternal destinations (‘‘essamina le colpe ne l’intrata; / giudica e manda secondo ch’avvinghia’’ [Inf. 5.5–6]). With the appearance of Minos, the issue of judgment that was presented abstractly on hell’s gate— ‘‘Justice moved my high maker’’—takes on plastic form in a bizarrely configured demonic judge with bestial characteristics. But the first and most important point to make about Dante’s infernal judge is that, as was duly noted by the Commedia’s earliest commentators, Minos has a classical, and specifically Vergilian, pedigree. In other words, the presence of Minos is an installment in the ongoing narrative regarding the use to which Dante puts classical culture in constructing his otherworld; also, given the brief but pungent interaction between Minos and Vergil, it brings up the more specific issue of Dante’s treatment of his great precursor and guide.9 Minos, mythical king of Crete, son of Jupiter and Europa, appears as an underworld judge in Aeneid 6. The Vergilian verses cited by commentators are invariably the two lines that describe him: ‘‘quaesitor Minos urnam movet; ille silentum / conciliumque vocat, vitasque et crimina discit’’ (Minos, the presiding judge, shakes the urn; he calls a court of the silent, he learns mens’ lives and crimes) (Aen. 6.432–33). To these verses commentators frequently add the description of another infernal judge from a later passage in Aeneid 6, Rhadamanthus (Minos’s brother), where the confession of sin and its punishment are more pronounced: ‘‘Gnosius hace Rhadamanthus habet durissima regna / castigatque auditque dolos subigitque fateri’’ (Gnosian Rhadamanthus here holds his iron sway; he flogs them and hears their guile, compelling them to confess) (Aen. 6.566–67).10 In his article on Minos in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, Giorgio Padoan suggests that Dante conflates the two Vergilian judges into one figure (‘‘ha unificato nel suo Minosse . . . quel che Virgilio dice dei due’’),11 a view that seems perfectly plausible.


However, the verse from Aeneid 6 that is, in my opinion, most important in reconstructing what is at stake for Dante in the figure of Minos has, to the best of my knowledge, gone unremarked. It is the verse that introduces the description of Minos, preceding the two lines that are routinely cited, where Vergil links Minos’s presence to the idea of order and procedure in the affairs of the afterlife: ‘‘nec vero hae sine sorte datae, sine iudice, sedes’’ (nor indeed are these places given without lot, without a judge) (Aen. 6.431). As T. E. Page comments in his notes to the Aeneid, the words ‘‘sine sorte, sine iudice’’ are ‘‘a reference to the sortitio iudicum (‘appointment of the jury by lot’) in a Roman court by the magistrate investigating the case (quaesitor), who here is Minos, who ‘shakes the urn and holds assize among the silent, and examines the record of their lives.’ ’’12 Of the three verses devoted to Minos in the Aeneid—‘‘nec vero hae sine sorte datae, sine iudice, sedes: / quaesitor Minos urnam movet; ille silentum / conciliumque vocat, vitasque et crimina discit’’—the key for the Commedia is the ideologically freighted first verse, rather than the descriptive verses that follow. There are fundamentally two connotative features deployed by Dante to shape his Minos, one very physical and the other supremely ideological. These are, on the one hand, Minos’s pronounced bestiality, epitomized in the emphasis placed on his tail (we shall return to this feature), and, on the other, the juridical language in which the figure is enveloped: he examines the sinners (‘‘essamina le colpe’’), judges and disposes of them (‘‘giudica e manda’’), serves as omniscient confessor (‘‘l’anima . . . tutta si confessa’’) and ‘‘knower of sins’’ (‘‘conoscitor de le peccata’’), who renders definitive judgment (‘‘vanno . . . al giudizio’’). This is the language of judgment and justice, which is to say, the language of the ideological structures that hold up the Commedia; its deployment is far from casual. We find in this passage one of only three uses of essaminare, one of only nine uses of confessare, as well as the poem’s only use of conoscitore, a technical juridical term that serves, I would suggest, as Dante’s reply to Vergil’s equally technical quaesitor.13 Most significant are giudicare and giudizio, words that are associated throughout the Commedia with divine justice. After their coordinated appearance with respect to Minos in Inferno 5, giudicare and giudizio appear together again only once, in Inferno 7, where they apply to Fortuna: ‘‘seguendo lo giudicio di costei’’ (according to her judgment), ‘‘questa provede, giudica, e persegue’’ (she foresees, judges, and carries out) (Inf. 7.83, 86). Dante constructs


his Fortuna as a goddess who is a celestial counterpart to Minos; we can say equally of both that they are providentially inspired ministers whose judgments are God’s judgments.14 Giudizio occurs on two other occasions in the Inferno: both ‘‘duro giudicio’’ in Inferno 2.96 and— obviously—‘‘giudicio divin’’ in Inferno 20.30 refer to divine judgments. The third and final use of giudicare in Inferno, after their appearance with regard to Minos and Fortuna, actually constitutes a gloss on Minos’s behavior: thinking that the pilgrim is a sinner, Mohammed suggests that Dante’s scrutiny of the schismatics is a ploy designed to delay the ‘‘punishment that was adjudicated on the basis of your self-accusation’’ (pena / ch’e` giudicata in su le tue accuse [Inf. 28.44–45]). Mohammed thus reminds us that Minos renders his judgments based on the sinners’ own confessions (‘‘le tue accuse’’), a telling reminder of the importance of speech and discourse in Francesca’s canto. This indirect citation of Minos in canto 28 forms, with the namings of Minos in cantos 27 and 29, a crescendo of references that culminate, as indeed all the Inferno’s references to Minos culminate,15 in Griffolino d’Arezzo’s statement that he was damned by ‘‘Mino`s, a cui fallar non lece’’ (Minos, to whom it is not permitted to err) (Inf. 29.120). It is this idea of infallible judgment, of infallibility in the execution of justice (God’s ‘‘infallibil giustizia’’ will be invoked in this same canto) that is at the core of Dante’s conception of Minos. Like Fortuna, Minos cannot err because of whose minister he is. The crucial point for Dante is that the determinations of hell are infallible; they are not random or arbitrary, and—precisely for that reason—they are not unjust. The universe has an order, it is informed by a reasoning presence whose decisions are infallible and—precisely for that reason—just. Giustizia mosse mio alto fattore. Or, as Vergil in the Aeneid had more guardedly put it, ‘‘nec vero hae sine sorte datae, sine iudice, sedes’’ (these places were not assigned without a judge). With respect to the Vergilian Minos, then, Dante takes the message of the Aeneid and he enormously reinforces it, putting steel reinforcing bars into the concrete structure that Vergil had created vis-a`vis justice and the afterlife. This is not, in other words, a case in which Dante rewrites or corrects the Aeneid, as he will so blatantly later in the poem, but a case in which he appropriates a congenial thought from Vergil’s text and emphasizes it. Dante removes the attenuating litotes so typical of Vergil’s doubt-ridden elegiac ethos, and hammers justice home with a contrastingly typical Dantesque vehemence. In


terms of a typology of Dantesque uses of the Aeneid, the figure of Minos constitutes an example of appropriation rather than correction, by which I mean that Vergil’s idea is not negated but amplified; in this case, the Vergilian idea of due process in the afterlife, as incarnated in the judge Minos, is grafted—with juridical language intact and expanded—onto a full-fledged ideology of providential justice. One could say, of course, that a correction of the Aeneid’s worldview is implied by this very shift, that an outright negation of the Aeneid is not required in order to register a critique. Indeed, the critique of the pagan edifice, of the vulnerable Vergilian structure lacking its steel reinforcement, could be seen as already coded into Dante’s first descriptor of Minos, the striking adverb ‘‘orribilmente’’ in the famous introduction: ‘‘Stavvi Mino`s orribilmente, e ringhia’’ (Inf. 5.4). Uncoiling itself ferally over the verse, as shortly we will learn that Minos uncoils and wraps his tail around his body, orribilmente evokes by aural counterpoint the vanished elegiac world of the ‘‘orrevol gente’’ of the previous canto. Where repeated forms of onore, honor being a quintessentially pagan value, marked canto 4, we have now moved to orrore, the dread induced by the embodiment of justice. The transition from orrevol (a contraction of onorevole) to orribil betokens the transition from the pagan to the Christian underworld.16 If Dante reinforces and amplifies the Minos quaesitor of the Aeneid, he also substantially complicates matters by making Minos a composite image in his rendering: not only a minister of divine judgment, but also a figure endowed with a quasi-burlesque bestiality.17 His description oscillates between these two characteristics, which the poet takes no pains to suture together, seeming instead to want to underscore their fantastic convergence, as with the strong caesura separating the two parts of ‘‘Stavvi Minos orribilmente // e ringhia.’’ In verse 4, as again in verse 6—‘‘giudica e manda // secondo ch’avvinghia’’—the first hemistich conveys the judge and the second the beast (the early commentators all agree on the bestial connotations of ringhiare, although they differ on the nature of the sound in question).18 This dichotomy is then replayed on a larger scale in the subsequent tercets. Verses 7–10 elaborate on Minos’s judicial role, explaining that after the soul comes before him and confesses, the judge determines the soul’s placement in hell: ‘‘vede qual loco d’inferno e` da essa.’’ Verses 11–12 then detail the peculiar method adopted by this court to indicate its verdict: Minos wraps his tail around himself as many times as the number of the circle to which he wants the soul sent. With


respect to the precise anatomy of this tail, whether it be a short tail requiring seriatim girdings or long enough to accomplish many girdings simultaneously, I second Mattalia’s witty endorsement of freedom for the reader: ‘‘il lettore scelga liberamente, tra il pensoso dibatter di certi interpreti: o una coda lunga lunga attorcigliata d’un sol gesto per un certo numero di giri; o corta, con avvinghiamenti in ritmata successione’’ (let the reader freely choose, faced with the tedious debate of certain interpreters: either a very very long tail twisted up by one single movement into a set number of turns, or a short tail, with many turns in rhythmic succession) (La Divina Commedia, 110). As it happens, my imagination prefers, upon being granted its freedom, to conjure a long tail, corkscrewing itself around until many times girded (Mattalia instead envisions a short tail: ‘‘Personalmente, questa coda, la vediamo corta’’ [La Divina Commedia, 110]). What is significant here is not the length of the tail, but the existence of critical wrangling on this subject.19 The existence of such discussion is a signal that we are witnessing Dante’s ability, as I put it in The Undivine Comedy, ‘‘to construct a textual metaphysics so enveloping that it prevents us from analyzing the conditions that give rise to the illusion that such a metaphysics is possible’’ (20). Put baldly, the reader is so thoroughly induced to suspend his disbelief vis-a`-vis this possible world that discussion can ensue about matters on which the text has provided no information—as though these matters existed outside the text, in an independently verifiable or deducible reality not limited by what the author/inventor has chosen to tell us. The strategies whereby the poet renders the reader complicit in this process are manifold.20 In the relatively modest case of the representation of Minos, the techniques involved are worth noting precisely because it is a modest rather than a blatant case, and therefore all the more revealing, offering an excellent example of techniques ‘‘employed so unremittingly throughout the Commedia that we barely notice them’’ (The Undivine Comedy, 32). Dante is a master of the art of verisimilitude, an art that is based on furnishing just the right amount of information and no more.21 In the case of Minos’s tail, he tells us enough to make us focus on his infernal judge’s bestial nature, and to make us wed this bestial feature indissolubly to Minos’s judicial tasks: the tail is after all not a decorative afterthought, a bit of grotesque ornamentation, but an essential component of the process whereby infallible justice is apportioned.


The central fact with respect to Dante’s figuration of Minos is precisely, as we noted earlier, his composite nature. Before concluding our discussion of Minos, we will need to assess the significance—the ‘‘deep meaning’’—of an infernal judge who is all-knowing with respect to the sinners, who is vested with divine powers of scrutiny, whose solemn office (‘‘cotanto offizio’’ [18]) is duly acknowledged, but who is at the same time graphically rendered as a brute, who administers his judgments with brutish crudity. Dante uses Minos’s bestiality to connote something about his hell that is lacking in Vergil’s somber, even tragic, but much more static and monochrome, vision. Minos’s tail is an early signpost in a web of signifiers extending all the way to Lucifer’s thickly piled hide, a web that serves to conjure a hell that is densely corporeal, viscously physical, verbally foul—in short, much more degraded and degrading than anything Vergil has to offer. Minos’s tail is an apt emblem for the transition from the homogenous decorum of Vergilian alta tragedıà to the unfettered transgressiveness of comedıà and the vision it entails, a vision that plumbs depths of degradation and scales heights of sublimity equally unknown to the Aeneid. The disjunctiveness of Dante’s Minos, the carefully unblended dichotomy that characterizes this figure, reflects the willed disjunctiveness of the mixed style, a mode that can veer vertiginously from high to low—as, indeed, in a brief textual compass comedıà veers from the vulgar corporeality of Minos’s tail as it coils and uncoils itself to the refined elegance of Francesca’s courtly diction. The figuration of Minos, then, reflects and embodies the radical stylistic choices inherent in the genre comedıà.22 The representation of Minos also testifies to Dante’s ability to deploy techniques of verisimilitude that ‘‘function as tiny and remarkably effective subliminal contributors to a textual metaphysics that seeks to persuade us to accord it the status of reality’’ (The Undivine Comedy, 32). The construction of a possible world in language is effected at the microlevel, not by grand sweeping statements: in the case of Minos, for instance, verisimilitude is garnered by the unpretentious pronoun ‘‘vi’’ in ‘‘Stavvi Mino`s orribilmente,’’ which assumes our acceptance of the ‘‘there’’ in which Minos is situated, a ‘‘there’’ that is reinforced by the repetition of the spatial preposition dinanzi (‘‘li vien dinanzi,’’ ‘‘Sempre dinanzi a lui ne stanno molte’’ [Inf. 5.8, 13]). Analogous assumptions with respect to behavior underwrite the pseudoprecision of the qualifiers in ‘‘secondo ch’avvinghia,’’ or ‘‘cignesi con la


coda tante volte / quantunque gradi vuol che giu` sia messa.’’ Noteworthy in this regard is Dante’s deployment of the concentric-circle technique of narration, whereby the narrator circles back to a previous point in order to expand on it; in this case the cryptically dramatic description of Minos offered in verses 4–6 is amplified in the following tercets. We do well to remember, however, that even when complete the description leaves much to the imagination: what do we really know of Minos’s shape, beyond that he possesses a tail?23 The explicit reprise, signaled by ‘‘Dico che’’ in verse 7, is noted by Boccaccio, who considers it a means of elaborating a succinct description into a more complex one: ‘‘Ora, per cio` che all’autore pare aver molto soccintamente discritto l’uficio di questo Mino`s, per farlo piu` chiaro, reassume e dice: Dico, reassumendo . . .’’ (Now, in that the author thinks he has described the office of this Minos too succinctly, to make it clearer he recapitulates and says ‘‘I say,’’ recapitulating) (Esposizioni sopra la Commedia di Dante, 286). The late-nineteenthcentury commentator Giacomo Belli devotes the most attention to ‘‘Dico che.’’ He insists that Dante loses authorial credibility by demonstrating a need to clarify his discourse: Anche altrove, sebbene di rado, noi vedremo che l’autore riprende la dicitura con un dico, quasi a schiarimento di quello che ha detto e quasi la tirata del periodo sia troppo lunga sicche´ il lettore possa averne dimenticato il nesso. Questo modo di sintassi non e` il piu` regolare, poiche´ il discorso si deve pregiare di essere chiaro per se stesso e non deve confessare di avere bisogno di riprendere il filo per essere chiaro. Cosı` qui avrebbe dovuto l’autore sin dal principio esporre chiaramente l’officio di Minosse senza bisogno di venire poi ad uno schiarimento di quello che crede di aver detto in confuso, poiche´ l’attenzione del lettore nelle due esposizioni va perdendosi; avendosi cioe` gia` formato un qualche concetto della cosa che si descrive e` costretto poi a fare un esame interno se quel concetto era giusto paragonandolo ai susseguenti dettagli e dovendolo confermare o riformare, restringere od ampliare a seconda di quello che deriva del suo confronto. Oltre di che si forma il concetto che non sempre l’autore sappia esporre bene quello che intende di dire e percio` non vi presta tutta quell’attenzione che si richiede, diminuendo in lui la fede nell’autore, e stimando che altrove possa spiegare meglio quello che ha detto, non si sforza di penetrare a prima giunta nel significato di un periodo che non gli riesca subito chiaro e cosı` l’autore non riesce pienamente nel suo intento. Qualunque autore deve far supporre al suo lettore che esso comprende bene quello che dice e che lo


sa spiegare esattamente e non dubita affatto di avere parlato con chiarezza facendo delle correzioni e delle ulteriori spiegazioni a quello che ha detto. Il ripetere la dicitura col dico vale lo stesso che dire: io era alquanto astratto e non ho compenetrato bene nelle parole i termini essenziali di quello che io voleva dire, e percio` dico, il che riesce appunto a far perdere la fiducia in esso ed a svolgere l’attenzione.24 Elsewhere too, although rarely, we see that the author picks up the narrative thread with a dico, as though to clarify what he had said and as though the sentence were too long and the reader might have forgotten the gist. This method of syntax is not the best, since the discourse should be clear on its own and should not confess a need to pick up the thread in order to be clear. So here the author should have from the beginning clearly expounded the office of Minos without needing to add a clarification of what he thinks he left in confusion, for the attention of the reader is lost in the two expositions: having already formed an image in his mind, the reader is now obliged to conduct an internal exam to see if the image was right, comparing it and having to confirm it or reimagine it, restricting or amplifying according to what he learned. Moreover, the reader comes to the conclusion that the author does not always know how best to set forth what he intends to say and therefore does not pay as much attention as is required; because his faith in the author has diminished and he believes that elsewhere there may be a better explanation, the reader does not force himself on first arrival to penetrate into the meaning of a sentence that is not immediately clear to him, and in this way the author does not fully succeed in his goal. Any author must make his reader believe that he understands well what he is saying and that he is capable of explaining it exactly; he must not throw doubt on his clarity of expression by making corrections and adding ulterior explanations. To repeat the statement with dico is tantamount to saying: I was somewhat distracted and did not choose the essential terms for what I wanted to say, and therefore ‘‘I say,’’ which causes the reader to lose faith in him and to cease to pay attention.

This fascinating commentary to Inferno 5.7 constitutes an early example of reader-response theory. Belli here shows great and unusual attention to the narrative exigencies experienced by the author of the Commedia; it is refreshing to encounter a commentator who understands that the Commedia was written and constructed just like any other text. Belli had the right instinct regarding our passage but the


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wrong interpretation. If, with Riffaterre, we bear in mind that ‘‘narrative verisimilitude tends to flaunt rather than mask its fictitious nature’’ (Fictional Truth, 21), we see that the intrusively authorial ‘‘Dico che’’ of Inferno 5.7 (like the analogously positioned ‘‘Vero e`’’ in the seventh verse of the preceding canto) does indeed alert us, as Belli senses, to issues of fictionality and credibility, but that its effect is to authenticate rather than to discredit the description. In his elegant analysis of fictional truth, Riffaterre further reminds us that ‘‘a narrative must contain features that are self-verifiable and therefore resistant to the vagaries of reference’’ (Fictional Truth, 10). This law is never more operative than in a context where the vagaries of reference cannot either support or interfere with the reader’s experience of the text as true, as in a description of hell. And, in fact, if we look back through verses 1–24 of Inferno 5, we are struck by how selfverifying a narrative this is, beginning with the initial tercet’s careful grafting of the second circle of hell onto the first, in a move that both generates textual authority and referentiality from its own already established fictional truth and adds new dimensions to that fictional truth by clarifying the physical shape of the place in which we find ourselves. Likewise, the belt-like girding of Minos’s tail as it wraps about his body—‘‘cignesi’’—echoes the ever-tightening noose of hell, ‘‘che men loco cinghia,’’ with the result that Minos’s coiled tail replicates in a specular mise en abyme the very structure of the realm he serves.25 The repetition of ‘‘dinanzi’’ in verses 8 and 13 is similarly selfverifying with respect to Minos as an embodied presence; moreover, ‘‘Sempre dinanzi a lui ne stanno molte’’ reinforces previous information about hell, for instance regarding the ‘‘tumulto, il qual s’aggira / sempre in quell’aura sanza tempo tinta’’ (tumult, that turns forever in that dark air without time) (Inf. 3.28–29).26 Even the detail of the souls approaching Minos in turn—‘‘vanno a vicenda ciascuna al giudizio’’— adds to the persuasiveness of the possible world under construction by echoing the behavior of the souls on the banks of Acheron, who had thrown themselves from the shore ‘‘ad una ad una’’ (Inf. 3.116). The interaction between Minos and Vergil that takes up the last three tercets of our opening sequence will bring us back to the issue of Dante’s treatment of classical culture in general and of his guide in particular. Before moving on, however, I want to point out that the famous formula that Vergil uses to bypass Charon in canto 3, Minos in canto 5, and (with significant variations) Pluto in canto 7—‘‘vuolsi


cosı` cola` dove si puote / cio` che si vuole, e piu` non dimandare’’— constitutes another self-verifying repetition on the part of the narrative. Indeed, this repetition seems tailored to support Riffaterre’s definition of ‘‘narrative truth as unchanging iteration within changing story,’’ as expressed by Lewis Carroll’s line, ‘‘What I tell you three times is true’’ (Fictional Truth, 21). My reading of Vergil’s repetitive formula demonstrates how a narrative approach—a ‘‘detheologized’’ approach—can offer a fresh dimension to a text that has been approached so thematically for so long: when we consider the formula as a textual building-block in the ongoing construction of a fictionally true hell, we gain a greater understanding of what is going on in these early cantos of Inferno, and are less tempted by the facile critique of Dante’s poetic abilities that bewilderment at the repetition has prompted in commentary after commentary. I offer Sapegno as an example of an all-too-common approach to the problem: ‘‘E` un procedimento, in cui ancora s’avverte un certo schematismo e una certa meccanicita` d’invenzione, che solo piu` tardi lascera` posto a una rappresentazione alquanto piu` variata e drammaticamente mossa del viaggio con i suoi incidenti e le sue peripezie’’ (This is a procedure in which we can still note a certain schematic and mechanical quality to Dante’s art, which will later give way to a more varied and dramatic representation of the voyage with its incidents and adventures).27 The verbal exchange between Vergil and Minos (between, it is worth specifying, Vergil and a character who was once his, in the Aeneid, but who has now become—like Vergil himself—Dante’s), offers us a variation on the Commedia’s Vergilian problematic: if in one set we place Dante’s deformations and revisions of Vergilian texts, notably the Aeneid, to a second set belongs his handling not of Vergil’s texts but of ‘‘Virgilio,’’ the character invented for the Commedia. Although these two sets are inevitably intertwined, it is useful, from a critical perspective, to keep them separate. Thus, another way to approach the surprising complexity of the Minos episode at the beginning of Inferno 5, and another way to indicate the amount of narrative work being accomplished in this brief passage, is to note that both categories of the Vergilian problematic are already operative: verses 1–24 contain both an intertextual resonance vis-a`-vis the Aeneid, which we have discussed, and also a narrative segment to be added to the developing story line under the rubric ‘‘Virgilio,’’ to which we now turn. Minos’s admonition to the pilgrim to beware hell’s entrance contains a gratuitous slight directed at the guide: ‘‘guarda com’entri e di


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cui tu ti fide’’ is a warning that calls Vergil’s personal trustworthiness into question. Benvenuto crisply glosses ‘‘e di cui tu ti fide’’ by remarking that ‘‘Virgilius non erat sufficiens dux’’ (Vergil was not a sufficient leader). Boccaccio recognizes that Minos’s words raise the specter of Vergil’s damnation and implicitly prompt the reader to wonder how a damned soul can lead someone else to salvation: ‘‘quasi voglia dire: ‘Virgilio non ha saputo salvar se´: dunque come credi tu che egli salvi te?’ ’’ (as though he wanted to say: ‘‘Vergil did not know how to save himself; how therefore do you think that he can save you?’’) (Esposizioni sopra la Commedia di Dante, 287). Once again, then, we are left to wonder at Dante’s narrative mastery, for in posing this question, albeit implicitly, he is forecasting the paradox that pulses at the heart of the Commedia’s ‘‘Virgilio,’’ of whom it will ultimately be said, many cantos and much textual time from now, that he behaved ‘‘come quei che va di notte, / che porta il lume dietro e se´ non giova, / ma dopo se´ fa le persone dotte’’ (as one who walks at night, who carries the light behind him and does not help himself, but instructs the persons coming after) (Purg. 22.67–69). The implied query regarding Vergil’s fitness that Boccaccio hears in Minos’s veiled threat will find its answer in Statius’s poignantly beautiful image, which tells us that it is indeed possible to be an unilluminated source of illumination. Dante’s ‘‘Virgilio,’’ a persona that is beginning to take shape in these opening cantos of hell, is—inter alia—the Commedia’s most profound and extensive commentary on, and incarnation of, Vergilian melancholy, Vergilian lacrimae rerum. In concluding our discussion of Inferno 5’s opening sequence, I will return to the poetics of the new. We discussed earlier the ways in which the first tercet, in particular, works toward the goals mandated by such a poetics, but we have yet to note Minos’s role: Minos stands at the entrance (‘‘intrata’’ [5] ‘‘entri’’ [19], ‘‘intrare’’ [20]) to a new narrative beginning as a sentient marker of difference, constituting a barrier between the souls who do not have to submit to his judgment and those who do, a barrier that cuts between canto 5 and all that precedes it, putting canto 5 on the wrong side of the divide, in the same way that Acheron cuts between canto 4 and its predecessors, to the detriment of those in canto 4. Minos’s differentiating function will be recalled later in the poem by none other than Vergil, who tells Cato that he is from limbo by saying that he is not bound by Minos: ‘‘Mino`s me non lega: / ma son del cerchio ove son li occhi casti / di Marzia tua’’ (Minos does not bind me; for I am from the circle that holds the


chaste eyes of your Marcia) (Purg. 1.77–79). Vergil’s eagerness to define himself as not under Minos’s jurisdiction is perhaps related to the barb that Minos had directed at him way back in Inferno 5, and to the complicated web of classical interrelations it suggests: the pagan poet’s own invention, coopted by a Christian text, now finds him wanting as a guide! But, whatever may be the ‘‘personal’’ motivations behind Vergil’s remark, it also serves to highlight the importance of Minos as a boundary: there is a difference between those who have been ‘‘bound’’ by Minos and those who have not. Given that the great majority of the souls in hell is subject to Minos, Dante’s placement of his judge is most immediately relevant to that small but salient minority that is exempted from his rule. In other words, the most explicit ideological thrust of the decision to place Minos at the entrance to the second rather than the first circle of hell (the obvious and logical choice, as Castelvetro remarked with disgruntlement) is to reinforce the heterodoxically outsider status assigned by Dante to limbo. (Castelvetro notes that the judge should be situated in the area preceding limbo, so that no soul remains outside the purview of justice.)28 This is the point underscored in Purgatorio 1 by Vergil, and it brings us back to the underappreciated radicalism of Dante’s conceptualization of limbo. But the placement of Minos is not without relevance to what follows him as well. What follows Minos most immediately is the encounter with the lustful, and particularly Francesca. This is a suggestive symmetry, since what follows Minos in the Aeneid are the ‘‘lugentes campi,’’ where Dido dwells among those ‘‘whom bitter love consumed with cruel waste’’ (Aen. 6.442). The proximity between Minos and the unhappy lovers in the Aeneid sheds further light on the placement of Minos at the threshold of lust in the Inferno: as Vergil’s Minos paves the way for Dido, so, I suggest, Dante’s Minos paves the way for Francesca— who is marked as Didoesque, coming to the pilgrim from ‘‘la schiera ov’e` Dido’’ (the troop where Dido is) (Inf. 5.85). This symmetry brings us back to the differences instituted by Dante between his Minos and Vergil’s; it brings us back to that coda. Dante follows Vergil—creating an analogy between Francesca and Dido that includes a structural contiguity to Minos—as part of the complex interplay whereby he both appropriates from his precursor (even the pairing of Francesca with Paolo has its forerunner in Aeneid 6’s pairing of Dido with Sychaeus, to whom Dido turns after she spurns Aeneas) and deviates from him, in this case by imposing much harsher conditions on his lovers than


does Vergil. Dante uses Vergil to deviate from Vergil, in that it is precisely a refashioned Minos—whose phallic tail proleptically carnalizes the figure of Francesca and offsets her romanticizing—who marks the difference between Vergil’s ‘‘Mournful Fields’’ and the second circle of hell. Francesca’s efforts are so successfully directed at dulling the reader’s perception of her sinfulness that it is bracing to recall that she, too, passed by Minos and was judged by him. Indeed, given the importance of speech and language to Francesca, the most compelling way to formulate her connection to Minos may be by relating her to verse 15: ‘‘dicono e odono e poi son giu` volte.’’ The souls speak to Minos and then hear his judgment: ‘‘dicono e odono.’’ Francesca’s speech to the pilgrim, then, the honeyed discourse that has seduced so many generations of readers, is at the least her second speech since she entered hell. She has spoken at least once before—to Minos. We will never know what she said on that prior occasion: did she favor Minos with echoes of Guido Guinizzelli and Andreas Cappellanus, as she does us, or did she offer him a starker version of her tale? Whatever she told him, her signifying was subjected to a greater signifier: Minos’s tail, an instrument with which Dante’s Minos, having read the sinners’ lives, now writes their futures.29 The tail signifies—va significando, to adopt Dante’s poetic credo from Purgatorio 24—and as a result Francesca is sent to the second circle of hell, to join the lustful, and to experience a torment that the next section of the canto will undertake to describe. What Vergil said about exiting hell, we will apply rather to writing it: Hoc opus, hic labor est.

chapter 7

q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? a: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question

T

he Commedia makes narrative believers of us all. By this I mean that we accept the possible world (as logicians call it) that Dante has invented; we do not question its premises or assumptions except on its own terms. We read the Commedia as fundamentalists read the Bible, as though it were true, and the fact that we do this is not connected to our religious beliefs; for, on a narrative level, we believe the Commedia without knowing that we do so. Whatever else Dante may have had in mind, this fact constitutes his essential ‘‘allegory of theologians’’; indeed, it is possible that rather than continuing to attempt to ascertain Dante’s mode of signifying in the abstract, we should begin with what the poem actually does, and how it accomplishes what it does, and extrapolate backward to its theoretical mode of signifying. The history of the Commedia’s reception offers a sustained demonstration of our narrative credulity, our readerly incapacity to suspend our suspension of disbelief in front of the poet-creator’s masterful deployment of what are essentially techniques of verisimilitude, or (as Morton Bloomfield puts it) authenticating devices.1 Thus, the poet manages our scandalized reaction to encountering his beloved teacher among the sodomites by staging his own—‘‘Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?’’—so creating a complicity between reader and pilgrim that masks the artifice always present in what is, after all, a text. Spontaneous lived experience replaces the artifice of representation. By the same token, we have rarely stopped to consider that the writer of the words on hell’s gate is Dante, that the maker of the ‘‘divine art’’ on the terrace of pride is also Dante, that Beatrice is employed by this same Dante to tell the pilgrim that the souls only appear in the various heavens for his sake because he (the poet) both requires the heavens as narrative differentiators and wishes to pretend that they are not


there—that heaven is undifferentiated unity. All of this and much more: for these examples are culled from a text whose fundamental strategy is that it has no strategy, that everything is described as it was ‘‘seen’’ (here Dante’s analogy between himself and biblical visionaries like the author of the Apocalypse enters, with the whole question of the Commedia’s allegory), a text that propels critics to pose their questions and situate their debates within the very presuppositions of the fiction they are seeking to understand. Thus we find the common defensive move we could call the ‘‘collocation fallacy,’’ whereby a critic argues that reading x is not tenable with regard to soul x because, if it were operative, soul x would be located elsewhere (for example, Ulysses cannot be guilty of fraudulent discourse, because then he would be with Sinon among the falsifiers of words).2 But why should collocation be elevated to a heuristic device? Only because we approach the poem through the lens of its own fiction treated as dogma. * * * How is all this connected to Vergil? One of Dante’s key strategies for achieving our narrative assent involves his handling of other poets: he consistently formulates the difference between his poetry and that of his predecessors as the difference between truth and (with various shadings) falsehood.3 In other words, the entire question of the Commedia’s intertextuality can be placed under the rubric of its truth claims: one of the ways that Dante secures the credibility of his text is by constructing situations designed to reveal the incredibility of his precursors’ texts. I use the terms ‘‘credibility’’ and ‘‘incredibility’’ advisedly; I am echoing Dante’s own ‘‘cosa incredibile’’ from the Pier della Vigna episode, where the ‘‘incredible thing’’ is Piero himself, a tree-man, the fact that a man has become a tree. In this episode Vergil is put into the position of apologizing to Piero for having induced the pilgrim to pluck his branch; he would not have had to make this cruel suggestion had the pilgrim been able to believe, on the basis of his reading of the Aeneid, in the possibility of a tree-man: ‘‘ ‘S’elli avesse potuto creder prima,’ / rispuose ’l savio mio, ‘anima lesa, / cio` c’ha veduto pur con la mia rima’ ’’ (‘‘If he could have believed first,’’ replied my sage, ‘‘O wounded soul, what he has seen only in my rhymes’’) (Inf. 13.46–48). But the ‘‘cosa incredibile’’—the thing’s inherent incredibility—is such that Vergil cannot rely on the pilgrim’s knowledge of the Polydorus episode in the Aeneid; only direct experience can

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impart so incredible a reality—‘‘ma la cosa incredibile mi fece / indurlo ad ovra ch’a me stesso pesa’’ (but the incredible thing made me induce him to do what pains me as well) (Inf. 13.50–51). What is remarkable in this passage is how it succeeds in making us associate the Aeneid with the incredible—the nonbelievable textual world of fiction and make-believe in which men can be transformed into trees—and the Commedia by contrast with a reality in which the incredible is credible because it really is. Cacciaguida is the only other character in the poem to use the word incredibile; in the language of his ancestor, Dante transforms the Aeneid’s pagan incredibilitas into a blazon of the Commedia’s divinely sanctioned claim to credibility against all odds: ‘‘Io diro` cosa incredibile e vera’’ (I will say something incredible and true) (Par. 16.124).4 The pilgrim is not expected to believe the Aeneid, so he must resort to action—to what takes place in the Commedia. He must substitute direct lived experience for the Aeneid’s artificial representation of experience, and that direct lived experience is—we are induced almost subliminally to believe—Dante’s poem. But Vergil is subjected to a dialectical treatment in the Commedia: he is undermined as a source of truth, but not as an object of devotion.5 Instead, the pilgrim’s love for his guide becomes ever greater; indeed, it becomes more felt and more nuanced with the passage of (textual) time, precisely as emotions develop with the passage of time on earth. This love provides Mowbray Allan a pillar on which to rest his belief that the Vergil of the Commedia may be destined for salvation: ‘‘My strongest evidence is the warm advocacy of generations of readers and the pain their belief in Virgil’s permanent damnation has caused them. One need only assume that such reactions are entirely consistent with the pilgrim’s own feelings and, furthermore, with the poet’s intentions.’’6 Moving to a discussion of the heaven of justice and its saved pagans, Trajan and Ripheus, Allan reminds us that caldo amore and viva speranza are said to be able to overcome the divine will, and notes that the saved do not yet know all their brethren: ‘‘che´ noi, che Dio vedemo, / non conosciamo ancor tutti li eletti’’ (for we, who see God, do not yet know all the chosen) (Par. 20.134–35). He concludes: ‘‘There has long been ‘caldo amore’ on behalf of Virgil; I see no reason why there should not be ‘viva speranza’ as well’’ (‘‘Does Dante Hope . . . ,’’ 204).7 To the extent that we choose to grant the possible world depicted by the Commedia the status of an ontological reality with an extension


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into the future, there is no reason why we should not hope for Vergil’s salvation. As Allan points out, ‘‘presumably Trajan was hopeless, too, until Gregory supplied hope’’ (‘‘Does Dante Hope . . . ,’’ 194). Therefore, in the same way that we may wonder about the future of Maggie and the Prince after the conclusion of The Golden Bowl, we may wonder about Vergil’s salvation; in both cases, we wonder because the author has created fictive characters so ‘‘real,’’ so compelling that we invest them with our emotional concern. But whereas such speculation would not be entertained as legitimate scholarly enquiry vis-a`-vis James’s novel, because of its status as fiction, we are persuaded by the Commedia that it is legitimate to speculate about Vergil’s future. And so we do: Vergil’s salvation has been debated by Dante scholars always in terms of its theological plausibility (as Allan now frames the question), never in terms of the legitimacy of the question itself. In other words, the issue is discussed as though it belonged to the real world, rather than to a text whose fictive powers have generated our concern; we do not worry about the fate of virtuous pagans as a group, as Dante did, but about the fate of one fictive construct. We care about Vergil because Dante makes us care, which is why there is no point to speculating about his future: he exists only in Dante’s mind, in the text. The overarching plot requirements of the Commedia undergird Vergil’s damnation and suggest that to think in terms of his salvation is to opt for the lectio facilior, in the sense of the reading that is easier for us emotionally. Why does the critical literature ask only whether Dante hopes for Vergil’s salvation? Does no one else’s matter? Why do we care only about Vergil? The answers, to my way of thinking, are: no, no one else’s salvation does matter to us, because for us the problem is less intellectual than emotional, and our response has been dictated by the text. Dante, like the heavenly eagle, was obsessively concerned with the justice of damning those who did not know God (the eagle formulates in geographical terms, using the example of the man born on the banks of the Indus, the condition that the virtuous pagans exemplify in chronological terms). He incarnates his concern in the figure of Vergil. We, instead, are concerned not with the group, the concept of virtuous pagans, but with the single, singular, unique, and irreplaceable fictive construct: Virgilio. (Another way of saying this is that Dante tries to generate his intellectual passion for justice in his readers through his handling of the figure of Vergil.) Had Allan referred to


any other soul in limbo, had he asked ‘‘Does Dante hope for Horace’s salvation?’’ or even ‘‘Does Dante hope for Aristotle’s salvation?’’, I would not have written my reply. I would have been convinced that he was reacting to the logic of the eagle’s implications, and not to the affective manipulations of the text. The very fact that we pose such questions is an indication that in some way the Commedia does succeed, more than most texts, in constructing a literal sense that we accept—at an almost subconscious level—as true (and thus in constructing an ‘‘allegory of theologians’’). The question ‘‘Does Dante hope for Vergil’s salvation?’’ is based on a suspension of disbelief, on an implicit accordance to the text of a status beyond that of text. It is a question that, like the collocation fallacy, situates itself entirely within the world created by the text, rather than stepping outside and viewing that world as artifice. Yes, Dante knows that the salvation of pagans is theologically possible (if not a topic that the theologians pursued with much vigor);8 yes, he could save Vergil. That is precisely why it is important that he does not, that instead he gives us ample reason to believe that Vergil will return to dwell eternally in the place from which Beatrice summons him, the first circle of hell. Instead of choosing to announce the salvation of Vergil, Dante chooses to return him to limbo and to highlight the fact that, from a theological perspective, pagans can be saved—which he does by saving, with much fanfare, Cato, Trajan, and Ripheus. Allan would say that he may yet intend Vergil to be saved, that he has merely omitted to tell us what he has planned.9 My point is that what Dante tells us is what is—because the Commedia is not a world, but a text, and all we know about the possible world represented by the text is what the text chooses to tell us. As a text, the Commedia is made of a series of choices, none of which had to be. We can look at our topic in terms of the fundamental authorial choices involved, choices that may well have preceded the casting of particular figures for these roles. Dante chose to choose a guide whom he would invest with the pathos of the human condition: a condition in which we love not wisely—which would involve loving only the infallible, incorruptible, and divine—but too well. He chose to choose a guide whom he would cause us to love and then to lose, thus forcing us to participate in the hard exchange of that which can be touched with our hands (as the Prince of Lampedusa memorably puts it) for that which cannot fail us.10 He also chose to invest this


problematic with a historical dimension, so that what must be sublimated is not just the guide but the culture that the guide represents: the classical culture Dante simultaneously adores and distrusts. He further chose to make this representative a fellow poet, the better to charge the dramatization with questions of poetic authority. And he chose to make the loss we suffer (we being the pilgrim and the reader whose complicity with the pilgrim has long been assured) more painful by showing us that the possibility of salvation for the likes of his guide does exist: we would prefer to think of the guide’s damnation as inevitable, as in no way tied to a defect of character, but Dante chooses not to allow us so comfortable a solution.11 So, Dante chooses to structure his text around the pivot of a major protagonist whom the text’s other major protagonist will come to love and lose: in narrative terms, a move of genius. Why? Because the Commedia, as plot, is severely overdetermined, a problem of which Dante is well aware and against which he mounts a remarkably successful campaign, causing us to feel suspense, for instance, on occasions when—from a theological perspective—there can be only certainty (think of the devils’ attempts to obstruct the voyagers’ passage). In hell Dante counters his plot by granting stature, linguistic and otherwise, to the sinners, in paradise by inducing anxiety about the problem of differential grace, whereby God’s light penetrates the universe ‘‘in una parte piu` e meno altrove’’ (in one part more and in another less) (Par. 1.3). Throughout the poem, although most striking in the second realm, runs the current of loss, of melancholy leave-taking, of that ‘‘desire for dead bodies’’ (disio d’i corpi morti [Par. 14.63]) that makes the souls clamor ‘‘Amen’’ at the thought of their resurrection. The figure of Vergil is the author’s most charismatic emblem for this current, his greatest tool in his battle against complacent textuality, against the saccharine and the undramatic: how impossible the figure of Beatrice would be if the poet could not conjure the chiasmic drama of her arrival conjoined to Vergil’s departure, if he could not make us resent her presence, linking it to the loss of the dolcissimo patre, and thereby work against the grain of the sweetly smiling aura of angelic beneficence that we expect! Dante was not obliged to coordinate the pilgrim’s realization of Vergil’s absence with his realization of Beatrice’s presence. Vergil’s absence is noticed when it is in order to create a node of surpassing textual tension, one that teaches us that all forward motion is bought at a price. Moreover, with supreme artistry, Dante registers Vergil’s


absence by way of the words the pilgrim would have addressed to him had he been there to hear them: the pilgrim turns to speak to his guide (‘‘volsimi . . . per dicere a Virgilio’’ [I turned . . . to say to Vergil] [Purg. 30.43, 46]), and the words that he would have uttered are transcribed as direct discourse: ‘‘Men che dramma / di sangue m’e` rimaso che non tremi: / conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma’’ (Less than a dram of blood is left me that is not trembling: I recognize the signs of the ancient flame) (Purg. 30.46–48). Only after reading them do we learn that they are hypothetical, when the narrator abruptly intervenes with the information that Vergil is not there: ‘‘Ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemi / di se´’’ (But Vergil had left us deprived of himself ) (Purg. 30.49–50). Dante thus inscribes his sweet father indelibly into the very syntax that tells us he is gone. Because of its will to force us to live its lesson of loss, to experience the shock of bereavement for ourselves, to feel it as the death of a beloved parent whose presence is still palpable, the text works at cross-purposes to itself, achieving the same kind of dialectical ‘‘living’’ textuality that, for instance, confounds us by both celebrating Ulysses and damning him. In this case, while the content denotes an absence, the form works to make a presence—with the words that are addressed to one who cannot hear them, with the appropriation of Dido’s verse from the Aeneid, and with the incantatory invocations of a repeated name: ‘‘Ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemi / di se´, Virgilio dolcissimo patre, / Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi’’ (But Vergil had left us deprived of himself, Vergil, most sweet father, Vergil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation) (Purg. 30.49–51; my italics). The pilgrim may hope for Vergil’s salvation, but the poet wills otherwise; not because he is the reductively stern moralist of so much Dante criticism, but because Vergil provides the edge, the tension, the pain and irresolution out of which the poet can make effective poetry. My point is not that there is no morality in the Commedia, but that the work’s dialectical texture prevents it from functioning in a reductively schematic fashion. It is, therefore, from a textual point of view, spurious to speculate about Vergil’s salvation: an essential condition of Vergil’s existence in the poem that Dante chose to make is that he cease to exist.12 We can make another text in which he is saved—but it will be precisely that, another text.

chapter 8

Arachne, Argus, and St. John: Transgressive Art in Dante and Ovid

I

n lieu of the traditional portrayal of Dante as an ingenuous and filial devotee of his classical forerunners, American critics have recently proposed a less benign poet who deliberately revises the work of even his most beloved precursors. The paradigm that has emerged from this recent critical interest in Dante’s relations with his classical precursors, not to mention his relations with precursors in general, is a spirallike configuration of confiscation and correction, whereby Dante avails himself of the genius of classical antiquity while at the same time revising it in such a way as to demonstrate its defects and limitations, in a word, its non-Christianity. Thus, the Commedia’s classical intertextuality works to make palpable, by contrast to the shadows of limbo, the bright—and especially the truthful—new world of the Christian dispensation. While, in the case of Vergil, this paradigm operates both with respect to the text of the Aeneid and with respect to the Vergilian persona Dante constructs for his poem, in the case of Ovid such practices are almost exclusively textual, directed at the Metamorphoses rather than at an Ovidian persona who appears only briefly in limbo.1 They are also much more overt. Dante never uses vis-a`-vis Vergil the harsh and strident tone with which in Inferno 25 he silences the poet of the Metamorphoses, announcing that he has bested him in the art of poetic transformation: Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio, che´ se quello in serpente e quella in fonte converte poetando, io non lo ’nvidio; che´ due nature mai a fronte a fronte non trasmuto` sı´ ch’amendue le forme a cambiar lor matera fosser pronte. (Inf. 25.97–102)

Arachne, Argus, and St. John 159 Let Ovid be silent regarding Cadmus and Arethusa, for—if he in poetizing converts the one into a serpent and the other into a fountain—I do not envy him, since he never transmuted two natures front to front so that both forms were ready to change their substance.

This critique, which implicitly defines pagan metamorphosis as repetitive, nonregenerative, and dead-ended, and contrasts it to Christian metamorphosis—conversion in this life and rebirth in the next— handily exemplifies Dante’s treatment of Ovid within the Commedia.2 If in this essay I distance myself somewhat from this model of a revisionistic or corrective poet, it is not because I do not believe that it is frequently the operative paradigm or because I am recanting the readings put forth in Dante’s Poets. Rather, I am concerned that our insistence on Dante’s corrections of classical antiquity, which began as an attempt to replace impressionistic critical enthusiasms with a more rigorous assessment of the poem’s intertextuality, now risks binding the text’s paradoxes in a straitjacket of medieval orthodoxy that is every bit as confining and impoverishingly unilateral.3 My view of a dialectical Dante has deepened to the point that I consider it imperative to demonstrate both sides of the equation: not just the corrections that make Dante appear so orthodox, but also the emulations that make him so radical. We must be careful not to settle too complacently into an in malo/ in bono approach, remembering that Dante is a supremely dialectical poet, who always preserves both horns of whatever dilemma he is confronting. With respect to classical antiquity, and especially the poets he defies theological protocol to celebrate as ‘‘la bella scola’’ in his limbo, Dante displays a fervor of appreciation that is an integral component of his prehumanistic forma mentis and of his entire poem, and that cannot simply be discounted later on, from heaven’s privileged perspective, as an outgrown infernal commodity. Limbo is indeed a place of shadow in comparison to the dazzlement of paradise, but we should never underestimate the significance of the light that Dante assigns to the ‘‘honorable folk’’ of the noble castle, the special dispensation he imagines—having already imagined, against all precedent, that they belong in limbo at all—that their honored names have won for them in heaven. The tranquil and undramatic pace of Inferno 4 should not cause us to overlook the melodramatic and theologically willful nature of the canto’s implied poetic choices, its suppression of unbaptized infants (for whom, if for anyone, theologians declared


their sympathies) in favor of pagan poets and philosophers.4 While it is true, as scholars of the Renaissance never tire of pointing out, that Dante places Aristotle and the others in hell, it is also true, and much more relevant to Dante’s contemporaries, and thus to Dante himself, that he places them in limbo. My point is that, although the poem is replete with ‘‘corrections’’ of Ovid, one should not therefore leap to the assumption that Dante is correcting out of existence the enormous tribute implied by the heterodoxy of Inferno 4.5 That tribute exists, and is one horn of an unresolved dialectic that we must handle with care, lest we smooth over the tensions that, precisely by impairing the stability of the mighty edifice, provide us an unmatched source of insight into its construction. As it happens, Inferno 25 amply illustrates such tensions: its strong dose of what Auerbach calls Dante’s ‘‘tensely dramatic relationship to his own work’’ has fostered an interesting critical debate focused on Dante’s poetic pride.6 In 1973 Richard Terdiman framed the issue in terms of Dante’s ‘‘problematical virtuosity.’’ Noting that his ‘‘extreme pride in his craftsmanship, which seems to force its way into the poem here in the Seventh Bolgia, posed a serious moral problem within Dante’s system of belief, and necessarily requires a correction,’’ Terdiman suggests that such correction comes later in the poem, with Oderisi’s critique of artistic pride in Purgatorio 11 and with the allegedly nonvirtuosic simplicity of the Paradiso’s Beatrician poetry.7 Although he posits sufficient self-awareness on Dante’s part to mandate a correction, his essential argument is that Dante is in the grip of historical forces; in this respect, he echoes Auerbach, who had argued that Dante’s very success in figuring reality poses a danger to the divine order he wishes to celebrate.8 Taking issue with Terdiman’s assumption that the poetic pride of canto 25 is ‘‘spontaneous and unconscious,’’ Peter Hawkins proposes a fully conscious poet, whose error in the bolgia of the thieves is ‘‘both deliberate and heuristic,’’ part of a plan that includes the juxtaposition of the poet in this bolgia with Ulysses in the next: ‘‘In Cantos 24–25 Dante deliberately loosens the grip on his genius and in his subsequent flight shows the tendency in all poets to become a Phaeton, an Icarus, a Ulysses.’’9 With respect to subsequent correction, Hawkins turns to Oderisi, to Purgatorio 24’s demonstration of a non-Ulyssean ‘‘willingness to fly ‘di retro al dittator,’ ’’ and to the ‘‘redeemed poesis’’ of the Paradiso. It is interesting that, for all their differences, both critics approvingly cite the lesson

Arachne, Argus, and St. John 161

Dante learns from Oderisi: on the terrace of pride, they tell us, the artistic hubris displayed earlier in the poem is deflated. In challenging this view, I will begin by looking at Dante’s Ovid-like handling of the mythological figure most associated with artistic pride, Arachne. Arachne is first invoked in the context of a description of Geryon, who in many ways sets the stage for our discourse; he is a monster derived from classical mythology whose patently fictional characteristics Dante first heightens and then uses as the stake on which to gamble the veracity of his poem: Sempre a quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogna de l’uom chiuder le labbra fin ch’el puote, pero` che sanza colpa fa vergogna; ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note di questa comedıà, lettor, ti giuro, s’elle non sien di lunga grazia vo`te, ch’i’ vidi per quell’ aere grosso e scuro venir notando una figura in suso, maravigliosa ad ogne cor sicuro . . . (Inf. 16.124–32) To that truth which has the face of a lie a man should always close his lips as long as he can, since without fault it brings him shame, but here I cannot be silent; and by the notes of this comedy, reader, I swear to you—so may they not be empty of long grace—that I saw through that dense and dark air a figure come swimming upward, a cause for marvel to even the most secure of hearts . . .

In this context, already brimming with artistic self-consciousness, the poet introduces the Lydian weaver, comparing the designs on Geryon’s flanks to the webs woven by Arachne: ‘‘ne´ fuor tai tele per Aragne imposte’’ (nor were such webs loomed by Arachne) (Inf. 17.18). Here, too—not coincidentally the locus of the poem’s self-baptism as a ‘‘comedıà,’’ a term that should be glossed, as I have argued in Dante’s Poets, with the earlier ‘‘ver c’ha faccia di menzogna’’—Dante establishes a precedent that has important repercussions for our theme of artistic pride and the episode of Inferno 25: to wit, the least credible of his representations will be supported by the most unyielding and overt of authorial interventions.10 Thus, just as in the Geryon episode Dante weds ‘‘maravigliosa’’ with ‘‘vidi,’’ thereby closing off all escape routes to both himself and us by going out of his way to insist that he sees


something that he acknowledges is incredible—and thereby, incidentally, creating a ‘‘truth that has the face of a lie’’—so, faced with the equally fantastic sight of the thieves’ metamorphoses, the poet opts for a bold frontal attack on the reader’s credulity: ‘‘Se tu se’ or, lettore, a creder lento / cio` ch’io diro`, non sara` maraviglia, / che´ io che ’l vidi, a pena il mi consento’’ (If you are now, reader, slow to believe what I will say, it is no wonder, since I who saw it hardly consent to it myself ) (Inf. 25.46–48). The Geryon episode is fundamental to the Commedia’s poetics, which we might call the ‘‘poetics of the mira vera’’—true marvels— using the expression Dante coins in one of his Eclogues for the miraculous flute, an instrument that produces not sounds but words. In his second Eclogue, Dante, personified as the aged Tityrus, receives the young Melibeus, who plays for him Mopsus’s (Giovanni del Vergilio’s) new eclogue on his flute. The wonder is that, when Melibeus lifts his flute to his lips, it sings Mopsus’s opening verse. Describing this miracle of the singing flute, the narrator inserts the phrase ‘‘mira loquar, sed vera tamen’’ (I tell of marvels, but they are nonetheless true) (4.40).11 This oxymoronic formulation demonstrates the poet’s awareness of his own intransigence and corresponds precisely to the equally oxymoronic juxtaposition of ‘‘maravigliosa’’ (‘‘mira’’) with ‘‘io vidi’’ (‘‘vera’’). Far from giving quarter, backing off when the materia being represented is too maravigliosa to be credible, Dante raises the ante by using such moments to underscore his poem’s veracity, its status as historical scribal record of what he saw. Thus, in another of Inferno’s moments of greatest maraviglia, as the narrator sets out to represent the headless Bertran de Born, he reapplies the ‘‘Geryon principle,’’ once again challenging the reader to disbelieve him: Ma io rimasi a riguardar lo stuolo, e vidi cosa ch’io avrei paura, sanza piu` prova, di contarla solo; se non che conscıënza m’assicura, la buona compagnia che l’uom francheggia sotto l’asbergo del sentirsi pura. Io vidi certo, e ancor par ch’io veggia, un busto sanza capo . . . (Inf. 28.112–19) But I remained to look over the troop, and I saw a thing that I would be afraid even to recount without more proof, except that my conscience—the

Arachne, Argus, and St. John 163 good companion that gives a man courage under the hauberk of feeling itself pure—reassures me. I certainly saw, and still seem to see, a trunk without a head . . .

Dante’s strategy is bold, but it is also logical. By underlining what is apparently least verisimilar in his representation, and by letting us know that he fully shares our assessment regarding this material’s lack of verisimilitude, which he does by posing as reluctant to represent it lest we lose confidence in him, the narrator secures our confidence for the rest of his story. Why is the plight of the lustful or the gluttonous any more verisimilar, or any more credible, than the plight of the thieves or the schismatics? By urging us to identify heightened drama with decreased verisimilitude and credibility, Dante is subtly encouraging us to accept his text’s basic fictions and assumptions: usurers with purses around their necks are acceptable, but flying monsters are not. In this way he becomes the arbiter of our skepticism, allowing it to blossom forth only in authorially sanctioned moments of high drama. The question of verisimilitude is brought most explicitly to the fore on purgatory’s terrace of pride, where the travelers encounter visual mira vera, visual analogues to the artistic wonder of the singing flute from Dante’s second Eclogue. As the flute bypasses its normal role as a purveyor of art to become a purveyor of reality, bringing Mopsus’s words to life, so the marble engravings of this terrace are not ‘‘verisimilar’’ but the ver—truth—itself: ‘‘Morti li morti e i vivi parean vivi: / non vide mei di me chi vide il vero’’ (The dead seemed dead and the living alive: he who saw the truth saw no better than I) (Purg. 12.67–68). By concentrating on the divine authorship of the engravings, to which the poet alerts us only after the lengthy ecphrases of Purgatorio 10, we have allowed Dante to obscure the crucial question: why does he choose to posit an art that is the equivalent of life, deliberately putting himself in the position of having to re-present God’s more than verisimilar art with his own? Dante’s ecphrases are skillfully wrought, compounded of narrative devices that work to make the engravings affect the reader as real, blurring the boundary between art and life; these same devices also blur the distinction between God’s representation and the representation that represents it. As the sculpted figures in the engravings are portrayed as real, so the ‘‘real’’ souls of the terrace are portrayed as works of art: their speech patterns are made to recall those of the sculpted widow, and they are likened to


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caryatids,12 whose nonreal suffering causes real distress in the observer. Dante thus sustains rather than lessens our confusion regarding what is art and what is life; his rendering of the engravings and their context conspires to suggest the interchangeability of the divine and human artists. And, indeed, what are Dante’s textual goals if not the achievement of a supreme verisimilitude, an art in which ‘‘the dead seem dead and the living alive’’? Dante is not unaware of the dangers inherent in such goals, the dangers, in fact, of claiming that his subject is ‘‘quella materia ond’io son fatto scriba’’ (that matter of which I am made the scribe) (Par. 10.27). His awareness causes him not to desist from what he is doing, but to invoke the figure of Ulysses, who in my reading functions in the Commedia as a lightning rod placed in the poem to attract and defuse the poet’s consciousness of the presumption involved in anointing oneself scriba Dei.13 Among the examples of pride, therefore, we find Arachne, accompanied by the adjective folle, which signals Ulysses and reminds us that she is his surrogate in the sphere of art: O folle Aragne, sı` vedea io te gia` mezza ragna, trista in su li stracci de l’opera che mal per te si fe´. (Purg. 12.43–45) O mad Arachne, I saw you already half spider, wretched on the rags of the work that evilly by you was done.

Although commentators have routinely indicated the Metamorphoses as the source for this exemplum, none to my knowledge has noted that Ovid’s account of Arachne and Dante’s terrace of pride share an authorial self-consciousness that is underscored by their common use of ecphrasis (wherein one form of representation undertakes to represent another), or that the Ovidian story demonstrates the dangers of human representation in a way that is extremely suggestive in the context of Purgatorio 10–12.14 Like Daedalus, Arachne is famous for her art (‘‘non illa loco nec origine gentis / clara, sed arte fuit’’ [she was famous not for place of birth or ancestry, but for her art] [Met. 6.7–8]), the art of weaving in which she will yield pride of place not even to Minerva.15 Like Phaeton, whose steeds run wild (‘‘ruunt’’ [Met. 2.167, 204]), Arachne, called ‘‘temeraria’’—‘‘reckless’’ (Met. 6.32)—rushes to her fate: ‘‘in sua fata ruit’’ (Met. 6.51). Ovid’s language underscores the connection between textile pursuits and textuality: when Arachne challenges the goddess to a contest, the narrator


describes how the contestants set up their webs (‘‘intendunt . . . telas’’ [Met. 6.54]), how different colors are woven (‘‘texitur’’ [Met. 6.62]) onto the loom, and finally how each embroiders into her fabric an ancient story (‘‘vetus . . . argumentum’’ [Met. 6.69]). As God inscribes his warnings into stone, so Minerva (for whom Ovid interchanges verbs like ‘‘pingit’’ and ‘‘inscribit’’) attempts to warn her rival (‘‘aemula’’ [Met. 6.83]) with embroidered examples (‘‘exemplis’’ [Met. 6.83]). But, if the goddess’s work is so effective that one of her figures appears to weep (‘‘lacrimare videtur’’ [Met. 6.100]), Arachne’s is such that not only does Europa seem to be looking back and calling to her companions on the shore, but an observer would think that the bull and the sea were real: ‘‘verum taurum, freta vera putares’’ (Met. 6.104). Arachne, aemula indeed, matches verisimilitude with greater verisimilitude. Thematically, too, Arachne is the goddess’s rival, answering Minerva’s pictures of stately gods and humbled mortals with pictures of deceitful gods and violated mortals. Minerva’s ‘‘text’’ is double: it shows the gods gathered for an artistic creation of sorts, the naming of Athens, and, in the corners, it depicts men and women changed from their original forms as punishment for their presumption: those who dared to emulate the gods (‘‘nomina summorum sibi qui tribuere deorum’’ [who attributed to themselves the names of the most high gods] [Met. 6.89]) have become a frame to set off the gods’ accomplishments. Arachne counters with an act of creation that is not only as accomplished as Minerva’s—‘‘Non illud Pallas, non illud carpere Livor / possit opus’’ (Not Pallas, not Envy, could criticize that work) (Met. 6.129–30)—but that sets out to expose the gods’ failings: her Olympians use their powers not to create a great city, but to adopt other shapes in order to deceive and seduce. Both embroiderers weave miniature versions of the text that tells their tale, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Minerva shows the metamorphoses of men, Arachne the metamorphoses of gods, Ovid the metamorphoses of both.16 In this passage, Ovid—like Dante on the terrace of pride—depicts a depicting strangely like his own. Like Dante, Ovid seems aware of the perils of his own project. Dante and Ovid play with the slippery boundaries of mimesis, including the boundary between the animate and inanimate. Ovid’s ultimate example of verisimilitude, much like Dante’s purgatorial engravings, is his story of Pygmalion, whose female sculpture comes to life, and whose art is so skilled that it conceals itself: ‘‘ars adeo latet


arte sua’’ (Met. 10.252). We remember the inanimate flute that becomes animate and begins to sing in Dante’s Eclogue. Perhaps not surprisingly, given their common concern with crossing boundaries, Dante follows his Eclogue’s singing flute with another Ovidian figure who confuses the boundaries between nature and art, the animate and inanimate:17 Midas.18 The flute, in its ability to form words, is said to be similar to the reeds that exposed the shame of Midas’s ass ears—ears that were visited upon Midas by Apollo when the king asininely judged Pan’s playing superior to that of the god—by repeating the secret that his slave had whispered into a hole in the ground. Dante drastically conflates the two phases of Midas’s story—first, his wish for the golden touch, and the subsequent bathing in the river that removes it; second, his interference in the contest between Pan and Apollo, rewarded by the ass’s ears that, by contrast, he must learn to live with—in four dense verses: Tibia non sentis quod fit virtute canora numinis et similis natis de murmure cannis, murmure pandenti turpissima tempora regis qui iussu Bromii Pactolida tinxit arenam? (Eclogues 4.50–53) Do you not understand that the flute is made songful by virtue of a god and is similar to the reeds born of the whisper, the whisper that revealed the most shameful temples of the king who by order of Bromius [Bacchus] colored the Pactolian sands?

Dante’s version of the Ovidian account harbors two acts that could be exploited as examples of artistic hubris: Midas’s transgression of the boundary between nature and art, recalled by the colored sands that absorb the golden tincture as it washes out of the king; and the misplaced critical judgment that leads to his ass ears and thus to his barber’s revelatory murmur. But, apart from the censure implicit in ‘‘turpissima tempora,’’ Dante does not evoke Ovid to condemn artistic hubris; rather, he compares the singing flute, its successful transgression of the boundary between art and life, to the reeds that have been rendered, by virtue of a god—virtute numinis—similarly transgressive. The breath of life that Apollo gives to the reeds foretells that life that is conferred upon the flute: Ovid’s art anticipates Dante’s. The paradigm that emerges from the Eclogues is of particular significance because these works belong to the last years of Dante’s life, 1320–1321, and, in the case of the second Eclogue, perhaps to his last months.19


One could see these texts as proposing a final succinct statement of Dantesque poetics, in which we move from the first Eclogue’s defense of comica verba (2.52) to the second’s ultimate gloss of the province of such verba: mira vera. I am arguing, then, that Ovid’s art anticipates Dante’s in fundamental ways. In contrast, Peter Hawkins argues, in his study of Purgatorio 32, that Ovid is viewed as ‘‘a counter-type for the poet of the Commedia,’’ with the result that Dante’s use of Ovidian material in deploring his inability to represent himself while falling asleep signals the ‘‘narrowly aesthetic and ultimately self-serving preoccupations’’ into which Dante as poet is still capable of momentarily lapsing and from which he is roused by the scripturally attuned voice that awakens him.20 Comparing his slumber to that of Argus when Mercury’s narrative prowess finally conquers all his wakeful eyes, the poet wishes that he could represent the experience of falling asleep: S’io potessi ritrar come assonnaro li occhi spietati udendo di Siringa, li occhi a cui pur vegghiar costo` sı` caro; come pintor che con essempro pinga, disegnerei com’io m’addormentai; ma qual vuol sia che l’assonnar ben finga. (Purg. 32.64–69) If I could depict how the pitiless eyes closed in sleep while listening about Syrinx—eyes whose wakefulness cost so dear—then as a painter who paints from his model, I would draw how I fell asleep; but let someone else be the one who adequately represents the act of falling asleep.

This passage is followed by a simile in which the pilgrim’s awakening is likened to that of the apostles Peter, James, and John when they awaken after the sight of the transfigured Christ. Far from disputing the pointed transition that Dante has effected from classical to Christian experience, I would sharpen it by noting his emphasis on Argus’s eyes in the anaphoric ‘‘li occhi spietati . . . / li occhi a cui,’’ and by pointing out that on the one other occasion in which Argus is mentioned in the Commedia his eyes are also a focal point. Occurring as it does within these same visionary cantos that end the second canticle, the passage in question is undoubtedly related to the passage in Purgatorio 32. Again, the context is a self-conscious authorial meditation on representation, and again we find a marked transition from classical to Christian, indeed from Argus to St. John:

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 168 Ognuno era pennuto di sei ali; le penne piene d’occhi; e li occhi d’Argo, se fosser vivi, sarebber cotali. A descriver lor forme piu` non spargo rime, lettor; ch’altra spesa mi strigne, tanto ch’a questa non posso esser largo; ma leggi Ezechıël, che li dipigne come li vide da la fredda parte venir con vento e con nube e con igne; e quali i troverai ne le sue carte, tali eran quivi, salvo ch’a le penne Giovanni e` meco e da lui si diparte. (Purg. 29.94–105) Each one was feathered with six wings, and the feathers were full of eyes; the eyes of Argus, if they were alive, would be like these. In describing their forms I will scatter no more rhymes, reader, for other spending constrains me, so much so that I cannot be generous in this one. But read Ezekiel, who depicts them as he saw them come from the cold parts with wind and cloud and fire, and as you find them in his pages, so were they here, except that in the matter of the wings John is with me and departs from him.

Twice, then, a transition is enacted from the eyes of Argus to the eyes of Christian visionaries, with the common denominator on the Christian side of the equation being the author of the Apocalypse, the sighted text par excellence. The issue is emphatically sight—what Argus sees, what the pilgrim sees, what Ezekiel sees, what John sees, what Dante sees, what Ovid sees—and Dante is certainly letting us know that he sees better than Ovid (but let us not forget that he sees better than Ezekiel, too!). The clarity of vision to which Dante aspires is that of John, who foresaw the very vicissitudes of the church that are revealed to the pilgrim in Purgatorio 32; as a telling periphrasis later in the poem reminds us, John is ‘‘quei che vide tutti i tempi gravi, / pria che morisse, de la bella sposa / che s’acquisto` con la lancia e coi clavi’’ (he who saw, before he died, all the grave times of the beautiful bride who was won with the spear and nails) (Par. 32.127–29). John is invoked in the Purgatorio’s final cantos with great frequency:21 in canto 29, Dante’s identification with John is expressed by way of the formula ‘‘Giovanni e` meco,’’ in which the poet tells us that John agrees with him in the matter of the wings of the ‘‘quattro animali’’ who surround the chariot; also in canto 29 we find the Apocalypse personified in a way that underscores the text’s sightedness, by an old man


who comes forward ‘‘dormendo, con la faccia arguta’’ (sleeping, with a penetrating gaze) (Purg. 29.144); finally, in the simile of canto 32, ‘‘Pietro e Giovanni e Iacopo’’ see their master changed back to his earlier form after seeing his transfigured form in vision. John’s triple appearance in the allegorical procession, as one of the winged animals figuring the Gospels, as one of the minor Epistles (‘‘Poi vidi quattro in umile paruta’’ [Then I saw four with humble appearance] [Purg. 32.142]), and finally, ‘‘di retro da tutti,’’ as the senex figuring the Apocalypse, need not per se indicate the special importance Dante attaches to him. However, Dante also finds a way to introduce his name, alone among the four evangelists, and to pair it with that of the prophet Ezekiel, thus creating a visionary configuration that is reprised and brought home by the sleep-walking senex and the awakened apostle of the simile.22 Argus’s sight leads Juno to choose him as guardian for Io and thus to his death at Mercury’s hands; therefore, his sight costs him dearly (‘‘li occhi a cui pur vegghiar costo` sı` caro’’), costs him his life. Sight leads to sleep leads to death. In the case of the apostles, and in the case of the poet who will shortly be enjoined to transcribe what he sees—‘‘Pero`, in pro del mondo che mal vive, / al carro tieni or li occhi, e quel che vedi, / ritornato di la`, fa che tu scrive’’ (Therefore, on behalf of the world that lives evilly, keep your eyes now on the chariot, and, once you have returned over there be sure you write what you see) (Purg. 32.103–5; my italics)—sight follows sleep rather than preceding it: sleep leads to sight leads to life. Visionary sleep occurs regularly in the Commedia: we think of Ugolino, of the dreams of Purgatorio, of St. Dominic’s godmother, who ‘‘vide nel sonno il mirabile frutto / ch’uscir dovea di lui e de le rede’’ (saw in sleep the marvelous fruit that was to come from him and from his heirs) (Par. 12.65–66). Indeed, as far as we can infer from his elliptical comments, visionary sleep underlies the experience of the Commedia’s author, who is ‘‘pien di sonno a quel punto / che la verace via abbandonai’’ (full of sleep at that point when I abandoned the true path) (Inf. 1.11–12), and whose vision draws to an end ‘‘perche´ ’l tempo fugge che t’assonna (because the time that puts you to sleep flees) (Par. 32.139). As we saw, the ‘‘faccia arguta’’ of the Apocalypsesenex of Purgatorio 29 penetrates the unknown while he sleeps; for Dante as for John, the Vangelista, this kind of sleep does not compromise the truth of a vision, but rather makes vision possible. The vision afforded the apostles in their sleep, the vision afforded the senex in his


sleep, the ‘‘visıöne / estatica’’ afforded the pilgrim on the terrace of wrath—all are analogues to the vision afforded Dante as author of this poem, analogues to the Commedia.23 The transition from Argus to St. John reminds us that Dante sees better than Ovid, but it does not therefore signify that the poet’s expressed desire to represent the Ovidian act of falling asleep is wrong. To represent the act that Dante denotes with the verb assonnare would be to represent transition into the state that furnishes the materia of the poem, and especially the Paradiso, the state that, as Augustine speculates, may have furnished St. Paul his experience of the third heaven.24 Transition in the Commedia is regularly represented by sleep, a quintessentially liminal condition that participates in both life and death. The pilgrim’s faints in early hell and his dreams in purgatory are literalizations of sleep as a metaphor for transition. But the verb assonnare is reserved by Dante for supreme transition, for the rapt reverence that overcomes him in the presence of Beatrice, bowing him over ‘‘come l’uom ch’assonna’’ (like the man who falls asleep) (Par. 7.15), a phrase that yields the poem’s only use of assonnare besides St. Bernard’s ‘‘ ’l tempo fugge che t’assonna’’ and the two uses in our Argus passage of Purgatorio 32 (‘‘S’io potessi ritrar come assonnaro . . . ma qual vuol sia che l’assonnar ben finga’’). The somnolence that overcomes the pilgrim at the sound of Beatrice’s name is related to the ecstatic torpor that overcomes him on the terrace of wrath, where his stumbling along ‘‘a guisa di cui vino o sonno piega’’ (like one whom wine or sleep bends over) (Purg. 15.123), until he frees himself ‘‘sı` com’om che dal sonno si slega’’ (as a man who unbinds himself from sleep) (Purg. 15.119), indicates a waking sleep, like that of the old man figuring the Apocalypse in the procession. If he could depict the assonnare of Argus’s eyes, says the poet, then ‘‘I would depict how I fell asleep.’’ What he wishes he could represent is the transition, ‘‘metamorphosis’’ in Ovid’s word, into the potentially visionary state—not visionary for Argus, who could only see while awake, but visionary for those, like the disciples in the simile, who can see while sleeping—that generates the nonfalse error of the poem.25 Dante’s transgressive art, a marvelous fusion of Ovidian and Johannine metamorphic elements, is one in which Ovid becomes more— not less—present to the poet as he goes forward on his impresa, which is why the Paradiso is bracketed by Ovid: Glaucus in Paradiso 1 and the shadow cast by the Argo in Paradiso 33. (Interestingly, the word ‘‘Argo’’ appears only twice in the Commedia, once for the monster and


once for Jason’s ship, both times in strikingly visionary contexts which emphasize the eyes and the gaze: ‘‘li occhi d’Argo’’ [Purg. 29.95] and ‘‘che fe´ Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’Argo’’ [Par. 33.96].) In Dante’s Poets I noted the diminishing presence of the Aeneid in the Commedia as Dante’s poem proceeds to its ultimate materia.26 The book that does justice to Dante’s escalating use of Ovid as the poet of transgression and metamorphosis in all senses, from the sexual to the supreme sense of trasumanar, has yet to be written.

part iii

Ordering the Macrotext: Time and Narrative

chapter 9

Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine: Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova

D ante’s view of the human experience as a linear path affording

encounters with the new, a line of becoming intercepted by newness, may be extrapolated from a passage in the Paradiso that denies the faculty of memory to angels. Because angels never turn their faces from the face of God and see all things in his eternal present, their sight is uninterrupted by new things, and they have no need of memory (which we use to store the new things once they are no longer new):1 Queste sustanze, poi che fur gioconde de la faccia di Dio, non volser viso da essa, da cui nulla si nasconde: pero` non hanno vedere interciso da novo obietto, e pero` non bisogna rememorar per concetto diviso. (Par. 29.76–81; my italics) These substances, since they were gladdened by the face of God, have never turned their faces from it, from which nothing is hidden; therefore their sight is not intercepted by new objects, and therefore they have no need to remember by means of divided thought.

This passage is of particular relevance to the Vita nuova, a text whose proemial invocation of the ‘‘libro de la mia memoria’’ (book of my memory) constitutes an acknowledgment of the narrativity inherent in remembering. More generally, one could say that both the passage in Paradiso 29 and the first chapter of the Vita nuova are symptomatic of an author profoundly conscious of the narrativity of the human condition. The condition of angels, whose ‘‘sight is not intercepted by new objects,’’ is precisely not the human condition; our


condition, the cammin di nostra vita, imitated by the narrative cammino of the text, is precisely vedere interciso / da novo obietto. The novo obietto, moreover, requires a mental structure that can accommodate it, and so concetto diviso is born; since we do not see everything all at once, but must see and remember many new things sequentially, one by one, ad una ad una (as in ‘‘le vite spiritali’’ of Par. 32.24, which the pilgrim is said to have experienced ‘‘ad una ad una’’), human beings think differentiatedly, by way of divided thoughts, per concetto diviso. Concetto diviso, in other words, is the result of our existence in time. Time, according to the Aristotelian definition that Dante offers in the Convivio, is ‘‘numero di movimento, secondo prima e poi’’ (4.2.6): ‘‘numerus motus secundum prius et posterius’’ (number of motion in respect of ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’) (Physics 4.11.219b). Time, therefore, comports otherness, difference, nonidentity, nonsimultaneity. As a result of our existence in time, we do not think as angels do, by intuiting first principles, but by ‘‘distinguishing and combining concepts’’: ‘‘componendo et dividendo’’ in Aquinas’s Latin.2 Aquinas’s ‘‘dividendo,’’ used as a talisman for human thought processes that are necessarily subject to time, sequence, number, and difference, is echoed not only by Paradiso 29’s ‘‘concetto diviso’’: Vergil punctuates one of his discourses in the Commedia with ‘‘se dividendo bene stimo’’ (if distinguishing I consider well) (Purg. 17.112); the pilgrim’s ‘‘mente unita’’ (united mind) must naturally revert to being ‘‘in piu` cose divisa’’ (divided between many objects) (Par. 10.63); and in the Convivio Dante characterizes the writer’s task as ‘‘mestiere di procedere dividendo’’ (to proceed by distinguishing) (2.12.10). In this way Dante echoes Augustine’s meditation on the temporality of human language and narrative in book 11 of the Confessions, while noting that angels read God’s will ‘‘sine syllabis temporum’’ (without the syllables of time) (13.15), and shows that he is fully capable of articulating for himself Paul Ricoeur’s maxim that ‘‘the world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world.’’3 The writer is one who harnesses human concetto diviso in the creation of a linguistic system of differences, which is to say, that the writer employs the divisioni of the mind to create the divisioni of the text. All products of the human epistemological condition—of concetto diviso—are themselves divisible, marked by their existence in time. No verbal artifact is immune from division/distinctio/difference4 —from time, sequence, number. At the same time, much of the lyrical enterprise could be viewed as a search for indemnity from time; we could

Forging Anti-narrative in the Vita nuova 177

say, generalizing and simplifying, that the lyric is a verbal artifact wherein meter, rhyme, and metaphoric density work to simulate the illusion of a protected and extratemporal dimension. When Dante decides, early on in the Vita nuova, to subject a sonnet to division, he is deciding on a convention—which he later calls divisione—whose avowed purpose is to lay bare the poem’s significance and whose more salient purpose is to divest the poem of any residual temporal immunity. Everything about the little paragraph that follows the Vita nuova’s first sonnet spells time: the verb dividere, the ordinal numeral ‘‘due,’’ the cardinal numerals ‘‘prima’’ and ‘‘seconda,’’ and the verb cominciare. Questo sonetto si divide in due parti; che ne la prima parte saluto e domando risponsione, ne la seconda significo a che si dee rispondere. La seconda parte comincia quivi: Gia` eran. (VN 3.13) This sonnet divides into two parts; in the first part I greet and request a response, in the second I indicate to what one should respond. The second part begins: Gia` eran.

The divisioni point to our epistemological condition; they tell us that concetto diviso subtends all human creation by imposing linearity and narrativity upon the poem’s lyrical unity. They narrativize—or delyricize—the lyric. Lexically, this process is reflected in the presence of words like narrare and narrazione, concentrated in the divisioni (‘‘ne la seconda [parte] narro’’ [in the second part, I narrate] [VN 7.7]; ‘‘E anche si divide questa seconda parte in cinque, secondo cinque diverse narrazioni’’ [This second part is also divided into five parts, according to five different narrations] [VN 15.8]). We remember, too, the striking label narratore used for the three sonnets that ‘‘fuoro narratori di tutto quasi lo mio stato’’ (were narrators of almost all my condition) (VN 17.1), as well as the author’s later decision to turn to the canzone form, because he does not believe that he can narrate what he has to say in the brevity of the sonnet (‘‘non credendo potere cio` narrare in brevitade di sonetto’’ [VN 27.2]).5 It may seem, then, that I fully endorse the proposal that ‘‘the Vita nuova tells the story of Dante’s discovery of narrative time, over against lyric time.’’6 Rather, I believe that in the Vita nuova Dante learns to play narrative time and lyric time against each other, as he had perhaps already begun to do in the Fiore (a point to which we shall return), and as he would certainly later do in the Commedia,


notably in the Paradiso. In the Paradiso chapters of The Undivine Comedy, I sketch Dante’s shifts from a discursive logical mode based on embracing distinzione, that is, from a mode that accepts the fundamental subjection of narrative to linear time, to a lyrical, or ‘‘antinarrative,’’ mode that rebels against the dominion of time, and elaborate these principles into a reading of the third canticle that focuses on Dante’s willful alternation between the two modes: the one, ‘‘narrative,’’ is discursive, logical, linear, intellective; the other, ‘‘lyrical,’’ may be defined as the opposite of the former, that is, nondiscursive, nonlinear or circular, and affective. Of course, the term ‘‘lyrical’’ with respect to the Paradiso is used loosely, in an attempt to define a discrete narrative mode that is peculiarly resistant to subdivision—resistant to time. In the Vita nuova, on the other hand, ‘‘lyrical’’ need not be used loosely; the libello’s alternating prose and verse offers us a literalization of the Paradiso’s alternation between a ‘‘narrative’’ mode, based on an Aristotelian sense of time as duration and continuum, and a ‘‘lyrical’’ mode, based on an Augustinian sense of time as an indivisible instant: ‘‘In fact the only time that can be called present is an instant, if we can conceive of such that cannot be divided even into the most minute fractions, and a point of time as small as this passes so rapidly from the future to the past that its duration is without length.’’7 The Vita nuova’s literal alternations between prose narrative and verse lyrics may thus be seen as an antecedent for the Paradiso’s more figurative alternations between a narrative and a lyrical mode. In both cases, what is at stake is time: the Paradiso’s lyrical, or anti-narrative, mode surfaces most dramatically in those cantos—such as 23, 30, and 33—in which the poet most heroically strives to deny the time and difference inherent in his medium in order to simulate the totum simul of paradise. The lyrical mode of the third canticle could be called, in Ricoeur’s terminology, a form of ‘‘dechronologized narrative’’;8 by the same token, it could be called ‘‘lyricized narrative.’’ We have already taken note of the Vita nuova’s attempt to narrativize the lyric through the deployment of divisioni. What I would like to show in this essay is the presence of a double contamination, whereby the libello is the locus not only of a narrativized—chronologized—lyric, but also of a lyricized—dechronologized—narrative. The circular, time-resistant anti-narrative of the Paradiso is forged in that crucible of juvenile invention, the Vita nuova. The Vita nuova both gives the impression of telling a linear story, and at the same time continually subverts this impression through its


actual storytelling techniques. This is the reason that its simple plot and story line defy detailed retention, that the ordered sequence of events fails to stand out in high-focus relief (except at the most macroscopic level), but tends to revert very quickly, even after many readings, to an unfocused, hazy blur. Among the factors that contribute to this experience are several features of the text that have been studied in other contexts. We think, for instance, of the carefully undefined setting of the Vita nuova, in which urban, architectural, and geographical particulars are winnowed out, so that the reader is insulated from spatial and historical specificity and is left to flounder about in an atmosphere of murky abstraction.9 We think also of the undulating psychological state of the protagonist, who does not so much proceed in a consistently forward direction—along a narrative cammino furnished with a clearly marked beginning, middle, and end—as return again and again to his previous condition, from which he must once more start forth: textual indices of this condition are the ri prefix in ‘‘ripigliare lo stilo de la sua loda’’ (to retake the style of praise) (VN 26.4),10 and the unusual recording of two initial quatrains—a ‘‘primo cominciamento’’ and a ‘‘secondo cominciamento’’ (‘‘first beginning’’ and ‘‘second beginning’’)—for one of the later sonnets. Even the libello’s ending is presented not as an ending but as an ultimate beginning, a final new point of departure, the relapse vis-a`-vis the donna gentile having mandated a post-textual ‘‘re-retaking’’ of the praise-style for Beatrice at some unspecified future time.11 It is worth considering from this perspective the text’s heavy but ambivalent use of cominciare (the verbal analogue for the ri prefix). On the one hand, this verb is the icon of Aristotelian time, of relentless forward motion, of narrative progression, of commitment to what lies ahead. It appears in Latin at the text’s beginning, as the rubric under which the author is to transcribe the memories that furnish his book: ‘‘Incipit vita nova’’ (Here begins the new life).12 The Latin proemial word incipit (literally, ‘‘it begins’’) is echoed in Italian translation in each of the divisioni, whenever Dante indicates the first verse of a poem or section of a poem by using the phrase ‘‘lo quale comincia’’ (‘‘which begins’’): ‘‘E allora dissi questo sonetto, lo quale comincia: Con l’altre donne’’ (I then wrote this sonnet, which begins: Con l’altre donne) (VN 14.10). The text’s ‘‘action sequences,’’ too, make frequent use of cominciare. Let us look at a passage that is notorious as a new beginning within the Vita nuova, the passage in which the mocking


ladies force Dante into the realization that his happiness lies not outside him, but within him, in ‘‘quelle parole che lodano la mia donna’’ (in those words that praise my lady) (VN 18.8). E poi che m’ebbe dette queste parole, non solamente ella, ma tutte l’altre cominciaro ad attendere in vista la mia risponsione. . . . Allora queste donne cominciaro a parlare tra loro. . . . E pero` propuosi di prendere per matera de lo mio parlare sempre mai quello che fosse loda di questa gentilissima; e pensando molto a cio`, pareami avere impresa troppo alta matera quanto a me, sı` che non ardia di cominciare; e cosı` dimorai alquanti dı` con disiderio di dire e con paura di cominciare. (VN, 18.3–9) And after she had said these words, not only she, but all the others, began visibly to await my response. . . . Then these ladies began to speak among themselves. . . . And therefore I proposed to take for the material of my poetry always and only what would be praise of this most noble one; and thinking much on it, it seemed to me an enterprise too high for me, so that I did not dare to begin, and so I remained several days with the desire to write and the fear of beginning.

As is indicated by the double appearance of the infinitive cominciare, beginningness is itself thematized here: this passage, like Inferno 2 with which it has much in common, is actually about beginning— wanting to begin, fearing to begin.13 As a result, we find cominciare accorded a greater dignity than it usually possesses, serving as the prelude to the presentation of the libello’s first canzone: ‘‘io cominciai a pensare . . . Queste parole io ripuosi ne la mente con grande letizia, pensando di prenderle per mio cominciamento . . . cominciai una canzone con questo cominciamento’’ (I began to think. . . . These words I stored in my memory with great happiness, thinking to use them for my beginning. . . . I began a canzone with this beginning) (VN 19.1–3). Given that ‘‘le nove rime, cominciando / ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’ ’’ (the new rhymes, beginning with ‘‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’’) (Purg. 24.50–51) are again proclaimed a cominciamento in the Commedia, this is a new beginning that will eventually be viewed as authentic—the real thing.14 Nevertheless, within the Vita nuova, the protagonist will need to ‘‘ripigliare lo stilo de la sua loda’’—the style of Donne ch’avete—later on. So, what is the real new beginning? What is the beginning from which there is no backsliding, the beginning to which there is no need ever to return, ripigliandolo? The Vita


nuova reminds us that overusing cominciare is a double-edged sword: one could say that the entire text is committed to incipience, to beginning the new life, but one could also say that so much beginning undercuts incipience, making the text almost pre-Petrarchan.15 If every point is a new beginning, which are the real new beginnings? Or, if each new beginning is real, why doesn’t it lead to more than another new beginning? Here are some examples of action sequences (taken from the beginning, middle, and end of the Vita nuova) that are littered with the construction cominciare in the passato remoto followed by an infinitive (also, less frequently, by other forms of the verb and by the noun). In quello punto dico veracemente che lo spirito de la vita . . . comincio` a tremare. . . . In quello punto lo spirito animale . . . si comincio` a maravigliare molto. . . . In quello punto lo spirito naturale . . . comincio` a piangere. . . . D’allora innanzi dico che Amore segnoreggio` la mia anima . . . e comincio` a prendere . . . (VN, 2.4–7) At that point I say truthfully that the spirit of life . . . began to tremble. . . . At that point the animal spirit . . . began to marvel greatly. . . . At that point the natural spirit . . . began to weep. . . . From then on I say that Love ruled over my soul . . . and he began to take . . . E quando ei pensato alquanto di lei . . . sı` cominciai a piangere. . . . E pero` mi giunse uno sı` forte smarrimento, che chiusi li occhi e cominciai a travagliare . . . ne lo incominciamento de lo errare che fece la mia fantasia. . . . Cosı` cominciando ad errare la mia fantasia. . . . Allora cominciai a piangere. . . . E quando io avea veduto compiere tutti li dolorosi mestieri . . . incominciai a dire. . . . E dicendo io queste parole . . . una donna giovane e gentile . . . con grande paura comincio` a piangere. . . . E quando mi videro, cominciaro a dire . . . (VN, 23.3–14) And when I had thought somewhat about her . . . I began to weep. . . . And thus came over me so powerful a sense of loss that I closed my eyes and began to be agitated . . . at the beginning of the wandering that my fantasy took to. . . . Thus, my fantasy beginning to wander. . . . With that I began to weep. . . . And when I had seen completed all the doleful ministrations . . . I began to say. . . . And while I was saying these words . . . a lady young and gentle . . . with great fear began to cry . . . And when they saw me, they began to say . . .


Allora cominciai a pensare di lei . . . lo mio cuore comincio` dolorosamente a pentere. . . . E dico che d’allora innanzi cominciai a pensare di lei . . . (VN, 39.2–3) Then I began to think of her . . . my heart began painfully to repent. . . . And I say that from then forward I began to think of her . . .

Like the narrative itself, of which it could be taken as an emblem, cominciare seems to function both according to expectation and counter to expectation. According to expectation, it serves to buttress narrativity: one should note, in the passages cited above, the frequent linking of the verb to adverbs of time like ‘‘allora’’ (then) and ‘‘d’allora innanzi’’ (from then forward). Even more striking is the way these sequences seem to push the author into compliance with narrativity, as in Dante’s decision to narrate his vision to the ladies at his bedside, omitting only Beatrice’s name: ‘‘Allora, cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine, dissi loro quello che veduto avea, tacendo lo nome di questa gentilissima’’ (Then, starting from the beginning [and continuing] until the very end, I told them what I had seen, keeping silent the name of this most gentle one) (VN 23.15). Likewise, his renewal of fealty to Beatrice’s memory takes the form of a narrativizing of his memories of her: ‘‘Allora cominciai a pensare di lei; e ricordandomi di lei secondo l’ordine del tempo passato, lo mio cuore comincio` dolorosamente a pentere’’ (Then I began to think of her, and remembering her according to the order of time past, my heart began painfully to repent) (VN 39.2). However, it is also true that the relentless presence of cominciare, if viewed from the perspective of the overall pattern and not of the isolated instance, yields the impression of the protagonist being on a treadmill, of his beginning over and over and thus in truth never beginning at all. The Vita nuova’s deployment of cominciare reflects the text’s programmatic contaminations: between lyric and narrative, stasis and conversion. Typical of the Vita nuova is the fact that the narrative breakthrough achieved by the mocking ladies leads to the lyrical pinnacle of Donne ch’avete: the temporal urgency of conversion issues into the (relatively) atemporal form of a lyric, which is immediately retemporalized through the agency of the libello’s longest and most formidable divisioni.16 In retrospect Donne ch’avete is labelled ‘‘cotale trattato’’ (that treatise) (VN 20.2) as though the minuteness of the divisions had rendered


it prose. The divisions serve to make it better understood,17 to tame it, to bring it within the scope of the volgo to which it will be ‘‘divolgata’’ (VN 20.1). But—to insist on the dialectical contaminatio to which I referred earlier—if in the Vita nuova verse is corralled and domesticated, prose on the other hand is given remarkably free license, despite the famous suggestion that vernacular prose cannot be granted the same ‘‘license to speak’’ (licenza di parlare) (VN 25.7) claimed for the vernacular lyric.18 Not even its syntax seems to be held accountable; consider, for instance, the anomaly of a passato remoto that, in phrases like ‘‘Apparve vestita’’ (She appeared dressed) (VN 2.3), effects not temporal progression but rather atemporality, abstraction from the conditions of time.19 Enlarging our purview from the syntactic to the narratological, we will now examine some of the Vita nuova’s most egregious narrative behavior, its shocking inclusions and its even more shocking omissions. When, early on, Dante indicates that he will pass over— trapassare—some of the events of his life in order to transcribe only those he considers sufficiently significant, he indicates both his sense of the linearity and temporality of narrative and his willingness to subvert and reorder that linearity to his own purposes. He writes: ‘‘e trapassando molte cose le quali si potrebbero trarre de l’essemplo onde nascono queste, verro` a quelle parole le quali sono scritte ne la mia memoria sotto maggiori paragrafi’’ (and passing over many thing that might be drawn from the exemplar from which the present ones originate, I shall come to those words that are written in my memory under the greater paragraphs) (VN 2.10). In this passage Dante emphasizes (with the verbs ‘‘trapassando’’ and ‘‘verro`’’) the narrative journey as a correlative to the journey of our life, but at the same time he unsettles the analogy by emancipating the author from a linear recounting and freeing him from the narrative cammino. If there is to be a trapassare of narrative sequence, then we are constrained to ask: what are the events skipped over, the events not to be transcribed? And what of the order in which the events occurred? The suggestion that our author is unwilling to be bound to a temporal sequence is soon confirmed, when Dante interrupts a past-tense account of Beatrice’s greeting to interpolate her present-tense death and glory: e passando per una via, volse li occhi verso quella parte ov’io era molto pauroso, e per la sua ineffabile cortesia, la quale è oggi meritata nel grande secolo, mi salutoe molto virtuosamente . . . (VN, 3.1)


and passing along a street, she turned her eyes to that place where I stood in great fear, and in her ineffable courtesy, which today is rewarded in life everlasting, she greeted me with exceeding virtue . . .

Beatrice is thus dead before she has even begun to live. In narrative terms, one could say that the book has ended before it has ever begun; and, indeed, a similar interpolated present tense is found at the book’s end. The reference to Christ’s ‘‘most beautiful countenance, which my lady sees in glory’’ (bellissima figura, la quale vede la mia donna gloriosamente) (VN 40.1), although no longer shocking in the aftermath of Beatrice’s death, echoes the earlier ‘‘which today is rewarded in life everlasting,’’ and underscores our sense of having encountered the text’s ending at its beginning. Dante inscribes circularity into the narrative timeline by using techniques which seem to foreshorten the text: in this case the intrusive present tense whereby he anticipates an event to which, as the circle completes itself, he will later return. Prolepsis—literally, a taking beforehand, an anticipation of what is to come—is one of the building blocks of the Vita nuova. Here are some instances: • the decision to omit the poems written for the first screen-lady unless they praise Beatrice, constituting ‘‘loda di lei’’ (praise of her) (VN 5.4), anticipates the discovery of the ‘‘parole che lodano la mia donna’’ (words that praise my lady) (VN 18.8) and the ‘‘stilo de la sua loda’’ (style of her praise) (VN 26.4); • the decision to mention the (omitted) serventese containing the names of sixty ladies because Beatrice’s name miraculously took the ninth position anticipates the discussion of Beatrice and the number nine; • the reference to ‘‘Geremia profeta’’ (Jeremiah prophet) (VN 7.7), immediately preceding the Vita nuova’s first death, anticipates the prophet’s recurrence on the occasion of Beatrice’s death and the later reference to ‘‘Geremia profeta’’ (VN 30.1); • the early description of the effects of Beatrice’s greeting on the author anticipates her later effects on the populace; • the discussion of the legitimacy of addressing and thus personifying a ballata terminates by inviting the reader to a later discussion of the same intellectual problem (‘‘dubbio’’) in an even more difficult context (‘‘e pero` dico che questo dubbio io lo intendo solvere e dichiarare in questo libello ancora in parte piu

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dubbiosa’’ [and therefore I say that I intend to resolve and explain this problem in an even more problematic section of this little book] [VN 12.17]), thus explicitly anticipating the passage on the personification of the god of Love; • the early ‘‘battaglia de li diversi pensieri’’ (battle of the diverse thoughts) (VN 14.1) anticipates the later ‘‘battaglia de’ pensieri’’ (VN 38.4). In the Vita nuova events are coordinated to former events, to which they accrue in a widening gyre: the second screen-lady follows the first, as the first death (of a lady) is followed by the second (of Beatrice’s father) and ultimately by the third, the death of Beatrice herself. The preceding examples of prolepsis highlight the issue of narrative prerogative: the narrator may choose to omit (for example, the poems to the screen-lady), exercizing his right to trapassare, or he may choose to include (for example, the reference to the serventese).20 The text’s most remarkable example of narratological fiat is the decision to omit from the narrative the account of Beatrice’s death. Returning to our two axes, if the prose axis is intended as the repository of the historical, then once again we find Dante manufacturing a prose that hardly respects its own raison d’eˆtre: for Beatrice’s death is certainly central to the history that the author has undertaken to record. By choosing to omit the narrative of Beatrice’s death, Dante dramatically defies history, time, sequence—all the values apparently exemplified within the libello by the prose narrative. By choosing to invest a prose narrative with such values, but then further choosing to divest it of its single most crucial potential undertaking, Dante creates a kind of black hole in the Vita nuova: time goes in, but does not come out. How is Beatrice’s death conveyed? First, by prolepsis. In other words, it is narrated before it occurs, by way of the vision visited on the protagonist, the ‘‘erronea fantasia’’ (erroneous fantasy) (VN 23.8) that—like the ‘‘non falsi errori’’ of the Commedia (Purg. 15.117)—tells the truth. The recounting of the vision, notable for its unrestrained use of the visionary marker parere, used for Dante’s ecstatic visions and prophetic dreams in the Commedia as well, becomes the recounting of her death: he sees premonitions of her death (disheveled weeping ladies, a darkened sun and discolored stars, birds falling dead to earth, earthquakes); he sees angels taking her soul to heaven; he sees her dead body, and, before the ladies cover her head with a white veil, the very expression of her face. All this he sees; this is the death of Beatrice,


narrated through the veil of parere, through the screen of his ‘‘fallace imaginare’’ (false imagining) (VN 23.15). Dante tells us all this now, in a defiance of narrative sequence that is all the more intriguing if we consider that he takes this same moment in the story as an opportunity to represent himself as an exemplary narrator, one who is committed to telling the ladies at his bedside everything he saw in his vision, in the proper order, proceeding from the beginning and arriving at the end: ‘‘Allora, cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine, dissi loro quello che veduto avea, tacendo lo nome di questa gentilissima’’ (Then, starting from the beginning [and continuing] until the very end, I told them what I had seen, keeping silent the name of this most gentle one) (VN 23.15). If this passage seems, on the one hand, not to reflect the author’s behavior, which manifests no such concern for the proprieties of orderly sequence, on the other it does speak to a governing principle of the libello’s narrative construction. The reticentia whereby the protagonist deletes Beatrice’s name from his account to the ladies—as though her name were not the very essence and substance of her historical incarnate meaning, as though she were not ‘‘chiamata da molti Beatrice li quali non sapeano che si chiamare’’ (called by many Beatrice who did not know what she was called) (VN 2.1), as though he should still be governed by a courtly ethos of secrecy rather than by a Christian ethos of revelation—this reticentia parallels the principle of omission whereby the unscreened and unveiled account of her death and resurrection is deleted from a narrative that can in fact be grounded in nothing else. That is one way to look at it. Another way would be to conclude that the omission is salutary and necessary precisely because so much more is at stake than the death of a courtly beloved, that the secrecy in this case safeguards the special nature of Beatrice, and protects her departure (la sua partita) (VN 28.2) from being sentimentalized, vulgarized, cheapened—from being rendered one more pathetic event in the long record of human pathos. Could he have done her dying justice, given the significance he intended it to have? Could he have made it so different from any other death? We all feel that the deaths we personally experience are more significant than other deaths, but Dante wants to make us acknowledge that in his case the feeling is objectively true. Looking at the question from the perspective of the problems Dante faced, rather than from the perspective of the solutions he offers, we can entertain the possibility that, as he confronted


the problem of narrating Beatrice’s death, Dante decided that it was not something he could tackle head-on. Maybe he means what he says when he declares, as the second of his three reasons for silence, that ‘‘ancora non sarebbe sufficiente la mia lingua a trattare come si converrebbe di cio`’’ (my tongue would not yet be sufficient to treat as one should of this) (VN 28.2). Maybe, therefore, he decided that the most effective way to handle Beatrice’s death would be through a combination of prolepsis and praeteritio. At any rate, the formal announcement of Beatrice’s death is chiefly devoted to telling us why he cannot tell us about it. At the same time, it is important to note, with regard to the forging of a narrative that is in some ways antithetical to itself, that Dante registers his awareness of going against the grain. He knows that he is going against the expectations—indeed the pleasure—of his audience: ‘‘E avvegna che forse piacerebbe a presente trattare alquanto de la sua partita da noi, non e` lo mio intendimento di trattarne qui per tre ragioni’’ (And although it might be pleasing to treat somewhat of her departure from us, it is not my intention to treat of it here for three reasons) (VN 28.2). Needless to say, his readers have never been satisfied with the three proffered reasons, and the bereftness of the widowed city, so ostentatiously proclaimed in the citation from Jeremiah’s Lamentations which immediately precedes the announcement of Beatrice’s death (‘‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo! facta est quasi vidua domina gentium’’ [How solitary lies the city, once full of people! Once great among nations, she has become like a widow] [VN 28.1]), is replicated and internalized in the bereftness of the reader, who is left even more frustrated by the ‘‘tre ragioni’’ than by the simple absence of narration. But Dante is deliberately asserting a new kind of narrative logic, one which demands an absence where the reader desires a presence, and he goes on to institutionalize this absence by ‘‘widowing’’ the remaining poems, a procedure that he initiates with respect to the canzone Li occhi dolenti and to which he holds from then on: ‘‘E accio` che questa canzone paia rimanere piu` vedova dopo lo suo fine, la dividero` prima che io la scriva; e cotale modo terro` da qui innanzi’’ (And so that this canzone may remain more widowed after its end, I will divide it before I transcribe it; and I will hold to this method from here forward) (VN 31.2). If we had not been acclimated to the presence of the divisioni we would probably not miss them. On first encountering the divisioni readers tend to experience them not as comforting, but rather as dry,


tedious, and inimical to the lyrics they allegedly serve. But, given the carefully cultivated process of acclimation, the removal of the divisioni from the space following the poems to the space preceding them does in fact produce a sense of emptiness: gone are the cushions of time and history that protect a lyric’s conclusion, ‘‘lo suo fine.’’ By contrast to the previous poems, cosily sandwiched in between their prose pads, the poems deprived of their concluding divisioni are left to face the void alone—are indeed bereft. The first lyric whose ‘‘widowhood’’ is procured as a result of the plan cited above is the canzone Li occhi dolenti, which is the first poem encountered after the formal announcement of Beatrice’s death. However, the first lyric to be in fact deprived of the cushioning provided by the divisioni is the one-stanza canzone Sı` lungiamente, which is presented as literally interrupted by the occurrence of Beatrice’s death: ‘‘Io era nel proponimento ancora di questa canzone, e compiuta n’avea questa soprascritta stanzia, quando lo segnore de la giustizia chiamoe questa gentilissima’’ (I was still intent on this canzone, and had completed the stanza transcribed above, when the lord of justice called this most gentle lady) (VN 28.1). Here, too, we have an instance of prolepsis: the soon-to-be-programmatic widowing of lyrics as a sign of Beatrice’s absence has been anticipated by the missing divisioni following Sı` lungiamente. In a move that we have seen to be typical of the Vita nuova’s idiosyncratically circular narrativity, the thing is done before we have been given the framework within which to understand it, in the same way that Beatrice’s present-tense glory is inserted into the narrative before she has had a chance to die. Likewise the verse from Jeremiah’s Lamentations is cited before we know of Beatrice’s death, and is separated from its gloss both by the discussion of the narrative omission of her death and by the inclusion of the so-called digression on the significance of the number nine. On the one hand, Dante seems preoccupied with incipits and narrative order; he uses Jeremiah’s incipit (which he notes as such) as his own incipit, thus indicating a new beginning of particular thematic weight: Poi che fue partita da questo secolo, rimase tutta la sopradetta cittade quasi vedova dispogliata da ogni dignitade; onde io, ancora lagrimando in questa desolata cittade, scrissi a li principi de la terra alquanto de la sua condizione, pigliando quello cominciamento di Geremia profeta che dice: Quomodo sedet sola civitas. E questo dico, accio` che altri non si maravigli perche´ io l’abbia allegato di sopra, quasi come entrata de la nuova materia che appresso vene. (VN 30.1)


After she had departed from this world, all the above mentioned city remained almost like a widow despoiled of all dignity; so that I, still weeping in this desolate city, wrote to the princes of the earth somewhat of the city’s condition, taking my start from Jeremiah prophet who says: How solitary lies the city. And I say this so that no one may wonder why I have cited it above, almost as an introduction to the new material that comes after.

But, on the other hand, in no other section of the Vita nuova is expected narrative behavior so thoroughly flouted, as is indicated by the fact that the above explanation for the citation of Jeremiah’s incipit is textually separated from the death that was the citation’s precondition. Dante need not have concerned himself with his reader’s maraviglia if his narrative had only followed sequential order—if it had proceeded ‘‘dal principio infino a la fine.’’ By disrupting his narrative timeline with the interpolated discussion of the number nine, as by omitting any account of Beatrice’s death, Dante is countering our inherent narratological expectations and creating a circular anti-narrative, contaminated by the lyric. Beatrice dies not in medias res but in mediis verbis, when ‘‘I had completed the stanza transcribed above.’’ In this way historical time is absorbed by lyric time: even in a text where the conflation of lived experience and written word is programmatic from beginning to end (from the proemio’s ‘‘book of my memory’’ to the discovery that happiness lies in ‘‘those words that praise my lady,’’ to the concluding vision that appears ‘‘[a]fter this sonnet’’), the fact that Beatrice’s death is recorded in the interstices of an interrupted canzone is noteworthy. The Vita nuova’s ongoing dialectic of temporal contaminatio mandates not only that diachrony be imposed upon synchrony, the prose controlling and determining the interpretative reach of the poems, but also that synchrony make inroads upon diachrony, in the form of a narrative whose temporal coordinates are occasionally skewed. The anti-narration of Beatrice’s death is the highlight of the Vita nuova’s narrative experimentation, marking an important step toward the dechronologized narrative that will be the signature of the Paradiso. In important ways we can see that the Vita nuova is an extended prolepsis vis-a`-vis the Commedia. I have suggested that the Vita nuova’s prose anticipates not only the narrative future of Dantesque terza rima, but also the undercuttings to which Dante subjects his narrative in the Paradiso: the last canticle’s techniques for dechronologizing narrative have their distant precursor in the means used to destabilize the


narrativity of the Vita nuova’s narrative. A distinction needs to be made at this point, for while the Paradiso’s lyricized narrativity is intended to subvert the linearity of time, it in no way participates in the libello’s drama of protracted conversion (but it does participate in a drama of protracted gratification, and in narrative terms, from the point of view of the representational issues involved, the two are not so different). The notion of a drama of protracted conversion brings us back to my earlier suggestion regarding the Vita nuova’s many ricominciamenti and the pre-Petrarchan qualities of this text. It is with the libello’s status as double forerunner, of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as well as of the Commedia, that I would like to conclude. In ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’’ (chapter 10 in this volume), I have attempted to define the paradoxes of the lyric sequence: as a genre, it insists simultaneously on fragmentation—each lyric is an individual entity endowed with a beginning and ending—and on fragmentation’s opposite, namely, a sequentiality, a linearity brought about by the existence of the larger unit that subsumes the individual parts into a common structure, with a common beginning and end. In other words, the lyric sequence is a hybrid form: it is a blend of lyric and narrative drives, a programmatic contaminatio that is neither purely lyric nor purely narrative. Petrarch deliberately plays the two drives against each other, exploiting narrativity to the extent of undermining the fragmentariness of his fragmenta, while at the same time keeping excessive narrativity at bay. Excessive narrativity, from the Petrarchan standpoint, will be the future of the genre: later lyric sequences throughout Europe become ever more overtly biographical, ever more incapable or unwilling to resist the blandishments of storytelling. Petrarch is never seduced by narrativity, at least in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (the Trionfi, by contrast, can be read precisely as what occurs when Petrarch tries to use narrative in Dante’s manner). The lyric sequence, in Petrarch’s hands, has both narrativized one part of its past and shed the narrativity of another, and has not yet reverted to the encroaching narrativity of its future. Looking to the past, to the ‘‘preistoria’’ of the Petrarchan lyric sequence, as Marco Santagata calls it, we find that Dante is present on at least three counts.21 1. Dante wrote lyrics that he never collected, as Arnaut Daniel and Guido Cavalcanti and all the lyric poets had done before him;

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that is, he defines the absolutely not-narrative tradition that Petrarch, by inventing the lyric sequence, narrativizes and changes. 2. If Dante wrote the Fiore, he wrote an extended version of the kind of corona of sonnets in which Folgore da San Gimignano and Guittone d’Arezzo had dabbled;22 this operation does not entail collecting previously written lyrics and transcribing them in a newly significant order, but composing sonnets with the express purpose of telling a story. The story in question is that of the Roman de la Rose, which the Fiore’s sequence of 232 sonnets condenses and retells in a mode that is less philosophically digressive and hence, if anything, more dedicated to narrative thrust than the octosyllabic original. In fact, if we consider the Fiore a pre–Vita nuova example of Dante’s experimentation with lyric/narrative contaminatio, then the point we have to bear in mind is that this sequence of sonnets in no way eschews narrativity. It is best compared not to the lyric sequence of the future, in which the contaminatio is so delicately balanced, but to a work like Boccaccio’s Filostrato:23 the sonnets take the place that later will be taken by octaves. In other words, although made of lyrics, the work is a narrative. Of course, that fact in itself cannot but be suggestive of contaminatio, and therefore, despite all my caveats, of the lyric sequence. By the same token, it is equally suggestive with regard to the Commedia, itself a narrative in verse. 3. In the Vita nuova, Dante takes the step that is fundamental for conceptualizing the lyric sequence, namely, that of collecting previously written lyrics and transcribing them in a new and significant order (‘‘transcripsi in ordine’’ is the refrain that runs through Petrarch’s copy books). C. S. Lewis commented that ‘‘[t]he difference between the Vita nuova and Petrarch’s Rime is that Petrarch abandoned the prose links; and it was they that carried the narrative.’’24 In fact, it is important to remember that the Vita nuova’s narrative is not carried solely by the prose; Dante preempted the idea of arranging previously unarranged lyrics to make them signify something they had not previously signified. At the same time, it is also important that, of Dante’s two means for generating narrativity, Petrarch discards the more heavy-handed, namely, prose, and retains the more supple, namely, order. The Vita nuova occupies a special position in this genealogy because of the clarity of its double allegiance, the straightforwardness of its duplicity: it is, without a doubt, both prose and verse, both narrative and lyric.25 The fact that the libello’s duplicity turns out to be


even more duplicitous, because of a programmatic contaminatio that results in a narrativized lyric and a lyricized narrative, makes it an even more prophetic text, both with respect to the Paradiso (lyricized narrative) and with respect to the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (narrativized lyric). Hence, it is not surprising to find that supremely Petrarchan way of marking time, the anniversary poem, anticipated by the Vita nuova: ‘‘mi venne un pensero di dire parole, quasi per annovale’’ (there came to me the thought of writing poetry, as for her anniversary) (VN 34.3). The invention of the anniversary poem is a perfect emblem for the nature of Dante’s prolepses vis-a`-vis history, which have an uncanny way of forecasting even the future they do not choose. Dante intends to use time, not to mark it, and therefore the Vita nuova contains only one anniversary poem; it serves its memorial purpose, with the result that the protagonist moves forward (albeit with the stuttering of the two cominciamenti). Nothing could be less Petrarchan. And yet the utterly Petrarchan convention of the anniversary poem originates here, in the Vita nuova, which thus—despite its profound eccentricity—provides yet another point of departure. Combining alterity and identity, difference with genesis: nothing could be more Dantesque.

chapter 10

The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Now if things are regarded as part of a continuum, they can be taken either as many or as one; for taken separately, one by one, they are many; and as such they do not form a single object for an act of sensation or thinking, nor are they sensed or thought of simultaneously. But they can be regarded in another way, namely as composing the whole continuum; and as such they are apprehended all at once and by one act, whether of sensation or intelligence. —Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.58.2

T

his essay seeks to show that, in making his lyric sequence, and in forging the model that would be so variously imitated, Petrarch was above all concerned with what always concerned him most—the experience of the passing of time, the fact that he was dying with every word he wrote: Having reached this point in the letter, I was wondering what more to say or not to say, and meanwhile, as is my custom, I was tapping the blank paper with my pen. This action provided me with a subject, for I considered how, during the briefest of intervals, time rushes onward, and I along with it, slipping away, failing, and, to speak honestly, dying. We all are constantly dying, I while writing these words, you while reading them, others while hearing or not hearing them; I too shall be dying while you read this, you are dying while I write this, we both are dying, we all are dying, we are always dying.

It is my thesis that Petrarch responded to what he perceived as the mutually reinforcing tyrannies of time and narrative by devising the lyric sequence: a genre in which he could manipulate the properties of narrative in such a way as to confront and defuse the passage of time. Let us begin at the beginning, with the title. Petrarch himself gave his collection only the Latin title, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. The traditional title Canzoniere (derived from a common noun referring literally to a collection of canzoni) testifies to the unity that earlier


generations saw in and/or imposed upon the collection; by forcing us to speak of the text in the singular, it conveys a sense of unity, and hence of willed narrative progression. The vernacular title currently in vogue, Rime or Rime sparse, borrowed from the first verse of the collection’s first poem, ‘‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono,’’ more accurately reflects the original; not only does it provide an equivalence for fragmenta with the Italian sparse, but it preserves the plurality of the Latin title, obliging us to speak of ‘‘them’’ rather than ‘‘it.’’1 While the history of the Fragmenta’s reception most often demonstrates an implicit rejection of the title’s assessment, our own times have witnessed an upsurge in critical willingness to take Petrarch’s title at face value.2 Once more, however, the critical pendulum has swung, and recent studies return to the attempt to formulate the nature of the Fragmenta qua collection: in reaction to Bosco’s ‘‘Petrarca senza storia,’’ Santagata urges us to ‘‘reimpostare il problema del Canzoniere nella sua diacronia.’’3 In fact, in the dialectic between collection and fragment, neither pole should be privileged; the genius of the genre lies precisely in its balancing of both. Petrarch himself does not uniformly avoid all forms of narrativity in the fashioning of his fragments; rather, he not infrequently exploits the properties of narrative, most notably in his deliberate contrivance of a beginning, middle, and end, and in the deployment of sufficient plot to provoke the crude biographical readings we enjoy lampooning today.4 Thus, a poet whose paradoxical project is the collecting of fragments engages in strategies that further heighten the disjunction between the mode of binding and the mode of loosing: he undermines the fragmentariness of his fragments. We could more simply say that Petrarch adopts the genre of the lyric sequence, since the paradoxes posed above are inherent in the genre itself.5 Such a choice was not automatic for Petrarch, neither time-honored nor sanctioned by tradition, as it will be for later Renaissance poets: indeed, Petrarch invented the modern lyric sequence.6 He could have written lyrics in the manner of the poets before him, poets like the ones he celebrates in canzone 70, where he rehearses the lyric tradition from its Provençal origins to his own time by citing incipits of Arnaut Daniel,7 Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, Cino da Pistoia, and himself; that is, he could have written lyrics that would not have tantalized readers with a faint but unmistakable story-line, that would not have demonstrated the tentative but provocative unity that led to the title Canzoniere. Instead of following in the wake of Dante’s lyrics, which

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are in fact rime sparse, connected by no internal principles of construction, Petrarch followed in the wake of Dante’s Vita nuova, the first modern collection of lyrics to be deliberately arranged according to a predetermined sequential order, an order that is invested with a narrative burden. But whereas Dante connects the lyrics of the Vita nuova by means of prose passages that are intended to elucidate the poetry, and thus to control and limit its narrative reach, Petrarch removes the connecting prose passages, and leaves his poems unglossed except by each other, open to interpretations that are limited by nothing but the order in which the poems are arranged.8 In other words, Petrarch takes from Dante the idea of transcribing previously written lyrics into a new order where the order generates significance, but he does not take Dante’s means of controlling significance, namely, the prose. The results are twofold. First, we have a form that is programmatically open, that seems devised for the multiplication—in Petrarchan diction, metamorphosing—of meaning, thus generating the paradox of mobile fixity, of themes and topoi that are unchanged but also unrestrained, free to accrete greater and greater significance, in the same way that the ‘‘monotonous’’ language develops an intense power of suggestion.9 Second, we have a genre where order, although frequently used to destabilize, is also the basis for what stable significance we can grasp, where indeed order is everything, as is indicated by the telling phrase ‘‘transcripsi in ordine,’’ used by the poet to note that he had transcribed a poem from a reference collection into the Fragmenta.10 ‘‘Transcripsi in ordine’’ is emblematic of the narrativity that inheres to Petrarch’s fragments, and whose value is far from merely formal: since narrativity is essentially time in its textual dress, and time is the major concern of the Fragmenta,11 we are asking how the poet’s obsession with the passing of time takes textual shape in the form of narrativity, in textual time as articulated in unavoidable temporal constraints like beginnings, middles, and ends.12 Although unavoidable, these are constraints that a poet, especially a lyric poet, can minimize. Such, however, is not Petrarch’s tack. Instead, he alternates between evading narrativity and confronting it, exploiting the dialectical tension between the lyric sequence’s lyric and narrative drives to tread a tightrope between the safety of stasis and the exigency of motion. Thus, the basic feature of this problematic is the paradox of narrativity’s simultaneous absence and presence, a paradox that informs the lyric sequence as a genre and underlies the Fragmenta as a


whole: Petrarch seems to accept the narrative burden of time when he arranges his lyrics in a sequence; he seems to deny it by calling them— and to a lesser extent by making them—fragments. From a narratological perspective, the lyric sequence is a peculiarly paradoxical genre, since it insists simultaneously on fragmentation— each lyric is an individual entity endowed with a beginning and ending, with its own entelecheia—and on fragmentation’s opposite, namely, a sequentiality, a linearity brought about by the existence of the larger unit that subsumes the individual parts into a common structure, with a common beginning and ending. But the truly noteworthy feature of the lyric sequence, and the one that renders it as a genre so suited to its inventor, is that these terms could be reversed and the paradoxes cited just now ‘‘squared’’: thus, the individual lyric could be viewed as the paradigm of unity, of anti-fragmentation, and the common structure as the agent of fragmentation, as that which continuously disrupts the unity achieved by the individual poems.13 In the same way, then, that with respect to content, the poet precisely calibrates information and disinformation in such a way as to hook the reader without ever gratifying her, at the level of form he holds the agents of unity and of disunity in a severe and paradoxical balance. Whichever way we look at it, Petrarch has created a genre in which the peace he is always seeking is as elusive formally as it is thematically. A typically opaque but crucial index of our poet’s concern with narratological issues is his division of the collection into the two parts traditionally, but erroneously, labelled ‘‘in vita di madonna Laura’’ and ‘‘in morte di madonna Laura.’’ The most overt exploitation of formal structure in the text, Petrarch’s division is a creative act without precedent in the lyric collections of his forebears. Our mishandling of the division is thus worth looking at in some detail. The manuscripts testify that the division was placed by authorial fiat at canzone 264, I’ vo pensando: in the Vatican manuscript 264 is marked, like the collection’s opening sonnet, with a large ornamental initial, and there are seven blank pages between it and 263;14 the fact that I’ vo pensando is similarly marked in the Chigi collection indicates that the idea of using it to begin part 2 was one of long standing.15 Nonetheless, from Bembo’s 1514 edition until Mestica’s 1896 edition, part 2 begins with sonnet 267, Oime` il bel viso, the first poem to register Laura’s death, thus accommodating the in vita/in morte rubrics invented by the text’s editors.16 Nor does our century’s acceptance of the manuscript evidence resolve all the problems posed by the division, since reluctance

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to accept 264 as the starting-point of part 2 is fueled not only by the apparent suitability of 267 for the post, but also by the two sonnets that follow the canzone: 265 and 266 refer to Laura alive.17 Moreover, one of these two sonnets, 266, is an anniversary poem, ostentatiously declaring itself composed 18 years after the poet’s innamoramento, and thus three years before Laura’s death, a fact that has weighed heavily in such a chronologically oriented debate: Wilkins argues that the decision to use 264 to begin part 2 must have been made before Laura’s death, a view that has been challenged by Rico, who suggests 1349– 1350 instead.18 The debate about the division is marked by an inability to focus on the express intent—indeed on the very actions—of the author. To say, with Mestica, that the division is intended to reflect not external events but an internal struggle sharpened by external events, is to say correctly, but not enough.19 Unless we choose to ignore the author’s intentions, like Carducci and Ferrari, or seek to show that Petrarch intended to move 265 and 266 to the end of part 1, like Cesareo, we are faced with the following facts. Part 2 begins with 264, which is followed by two sonnets that treat of Laura alive; this fact becomes significant when we reach 267, where she is dead, and it becomes more significant when we finish reading the collection and realize that the rest of the Laura poems in part 2 endorse Laura’s death in 267, with the result that 265 and 266 are unique. So we have a moral canzone, a meditation on the transitory nature of all earthly attachments, followed by two sonnets that strike the reader as a return to the status quo, in that they do not pursue the moral program of detachment suggested by the canzone. If, with respect to the canzone that precedes them, these sonnets are discontinuous, with respect to the poems that follow them they are completely anomalous, since they represent a living Laura. Their anomaly is heightened, as though to make sure we notice it, by their dates: poem 266 expressly instructs us to view it as composed in 1345, before the death of Laura in 1348. And while the 1350 date of poem 265 is not apparent to the reader, it, too, is of interest, because it tells us that Petrarch was capable, if he deemed the effort advisable, of writing as though Laura were alive after her death, and thus further underscores the painstaking construction that characterizes this portion of the text.20 What, then, is the function of these two sonnets? Besides providing, as Phelps suggests, an ironic rejoinder to the canzone,21 their presence in part 2 indicates that the significance of the second part cannot


be located wholly in Laura’s death. It therefore constitutes a deliberate non-privileging of 267, and, thus, an affirmation, a deliberate privileging, of 264. In prototypical fashion, Petrarch has used order and form to signal that we must not be distracted by the superficial suitability of 267 as a new beginning, but persevere in looking to 264 for his message, which regards not the transit of one of life’s creatures but transition itself—our ability to make transitions in the face of the transitory nature of all life. By giving 264 an ornamental initial and creating a space between it and 263, the poet marks a textual new beginning, a textual transition; by making the first poem of part 2 one that addresses precisely his ability to effect a spiritual new beginning, to put a space between himself and his past, Petrarch has created a remarkable consonance between form and content. The question posed by the content of the canzone—is the poet capable of conversion, is he capable of transition?—is thus also posed formally; the space that delimits part 1 from part 2 signifies the idea of change as surely as anything the poet can say. A method of composition that, definitely from the time of the Chigi collection and very likely even before, hinges on the bipartite structure—poems 1 and 264 were fixed as the beginnings of parts 1 and 2, and the collection grew by a process of accretion to each part—tells us that the division is a key index to the text. As I hope to show, the two parts of the Fragmenta reflect diametrically opposed attitudes toward narrativity, and, in fact, embody contradictory but ultimately compatible strategies for defeating time. * * * Part 1 is dominated by non-narrativity, by the refusal or inability to move forward. Emblematic verses articulating variations on this motif include: ‘‘Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo’’ (I turn back at each step) (15.1),22 which presents the basic paradigm volgere or tornare plus indietro; ‘‘et tornai indietro quasi a mezzo ’l giorno’’ (and I turned back almost at midday) (54.10), where the anti-Dantesque variant is established, since the middle of the path provides Petrarch an opportunity not for turning (con-vertere) but for returning;23 ‘‘ne’ primi empii martiri / pur son contra mia voglia risospinto’’ (I am driven back just the same into the first cruel tortures) (96.7–8), where the poet views his backward turning as involuntary, and anticipates a later poem where the attempts of his mente to cross the ford to virtue are turned back by a superior force, ‘‘quasi maggior forza indi la svolva’’ (as if a


greater force turned it back from there) (178.12); ‘‘l’aura mi volve, et son pur quel ch’i’ m’era’’ (the breeze turns me about, and I am still just what I was) (112.4), where his personal version of the winds that buffet Francesca, the agent of his private ‘‘bufera infernal, che mai non resta’’ (infernal storm, which never rests) (Inf. 5.31), is identified as l’aura/Laura; ‘‘io son pur quel ch’i’ mi soglio, / ne´ per mille rivolte anchor son mosso’’ (I am still what I used to be, nor for a thousand turnings about have I yet moved) (118.13–14), where his capacity for turning without ever converting is even more explicitly reiterated; ‘‘poi tornai indietro’’ (then I came back) (120.9), where the classic paradigm refers to a return from the threshold of death, thus beginning to reveal the advantages of not moving forward, and to clarify such refusal as a strategy for denying the passage of time;24 ‘‘Vero e` il proverbio, ch’altri cangia il pelo, / anzi che ’l vezzo’’ (True is the proverb, one’s hair will change before one’s habits) (122.5–6), where we learn that, though we may grow old, we will not alter our habits, that is, we will not change, a sentiment echoed in ‘‘gia` per etate il mio desir non varia’’ (and my desire does not vary at all with age) (168.13); ‘‘saro` qual fui, vivro` com’io son visso’’ (I shall be what I have been, shall live as I have lived) (145.13), where the poet emphatically confirms the truth of the above proverb with respect to himself; ‘‘ma spesso a lui [⳱Quel sempre acerbo et honorato giorno] co la memoria torno’’ (but often to it [that always cruel and honored day] with memory I return) (157.4), a verse that illuminates the key role of memory as part 1’s nonforwardmoving mechanism par excellence; ‘‘a vespro tal, qual era oggi per tempo’’ (at evening just as she was early today) (175.11), where the stages of the day are invoked to tell us that the ‘‘sun’’—Laura—shines on him in the evening of his day as she did in the morning, so that the course of his life brings no change; ‘‘torna volando al suo dolce soggiorno’’ (returns flying to his sweet dwelling) (180.14), where his soul flies back to Laura though his body sails away from her down the Po; and the verse that perfectly captures the paradoxical nature of his stationary movement, ‘‘ch’i’ pur vo sempre, et non son anchor mosso’’ (for I still go and yet have not moved) (209.6). The attitude sketched by these verses is quite unshakable. Thus, a poem that seems at first glance to express a contrary opinion is 86, where we find the idea that time cannot turn back, that is, that change is inevitable, expressed in the same language used elsewhere to express the self ’s continual turning back and refusal to change. However, on closer examination of the sonnet, we find that the poet feels compelled


to instruct his soul regarding the passage of time—‘‘Misera, che devrebbe esser accorta / per lunga experıëntia omai che ’l tempo / non e` chi ’ndietro volga, o chi l’affreni’’ (Miserable soul, who should have been aware by now, through long experience, that there is no one who can turn back time or rein it in!) (9–11)—precisely because his soul is unwilling to accept the verdict. Similarly, we note that Petrarch designates even positive forward movement, genuine change, as backward motion, as a return from the state in which he was. Thus, in 119, he credits Glory, here personified as a woman, with having turned him from less noble youthful endeavors toward the pursuit of poetic immortality: ‘‘Solo per lei tornai da quel ch’i’ era’’ (Only for her I turned back from what I was) (9). Although phrases like tornare indietro are the clearest indicators of the poet’s attitude, there are others. We think, for instance, of the important verbs rinfrescare and disacerbare, used to denote the lover’s increasing or decreasing pain, as in ‘‘ragionando si rinfresca / quel’ardente desio’’ (by speaking I refresh that burning desire) (37.49–50) and ‘‘perche´ cantando il duol si disacerba’’ (because, singing, pain becomes less bitter) (23.4). In one case discourse causes desire, hence suffering, to wax, and in the other discourse causes suffering to wane, and yet these two contradictory emotions are conveyed through verbs that describe identical— backward—motion: rinfrescare, to refresh, tells us that desire grows by returning to a point of origin; disacerbare, to debitter, tells us that suffering is lessened by a removal of what is acerbo, again by a return to an earlier state. Thus, Petrarch finds ways always to go back, never forward, a fact that highlights the importance of the first verse of the first canzone, poem 23, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. For Petrarch, there are no new beginnings (because there are constant new beginnings), and so the first time—the ‘‘prima etade’’—is the only time.25 Whether by turning back or by not moving forward, he never gets beyond square one; like the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, he moves in order not to move.26 This principle is stated in its most extreme form in another paradigmatic part 1 verse: ‘‘mille volte il dı´ moro et mille nasco’’ (a thousand times a day I die and a thousand am born) (164.13). Further textual support for the non-narrativity of part 1 may be found in its high proportion of sestine, a form whose very structure, based on the compulsive return of six identical rhyme words repeated in different order in each of its six stanzas, constitutes a denial of time and narrativity.27 Although it has been argued that the circularity of


the six stanzas is tempered by the congedo,28 if we consider the form from which the sestina evolved—the canzone—it seems fair to say that here we have a canzone that has been rigidified (by the use of rhyme words rather than sounds) and stylized (by the use of retrogradatio cruciata as an organizing device) to the point where it becomes the textual equivalent of the illusion that time has stopped: if meter (and hence rhyme) is the poetic means of measuring time, then the sestina has discovered a meter that subverts itself, that—by producing circular stasis instead of linear movement—in effect refuses to do what meter must do.29 Nor should we forget that, in practical terms, the sestina is the poetic alternative to the standard canzone, and that the standard canzone as a form is almost ‘‘narrative’’ by comparison. Thus, it seems not insignificant that of the Fragmenta’s nine sestine, eight are in part 1. The first sestina is poem 22, A qualunque animale alberga in terra, whose importance is enhanced by its position within the collection. Sestina 22 is the first nonsonnet, nonballata to appear in the text, and serves as a kind of dialectical preparation for the canzone that follows. As its preponderantly temporal rhyme words indicate (overtly temporal are sole, giorno, stelle, and alba), poem 22 could be seen as a manifesto for the sestina form: while any sestina, no matter what its content, is temporally charged, here the content fully supports the form. (For contrast, we need only look at the next sestina, poem 30, Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro, where only one rhyme word—anni—is overtly temporal; instead of the eroticizing of time that we find in A qualunque animale, in Giovene donna we find the temporalizing of eros.)30 Although, in sestina 22, the illusion that time has stopped can hardly be achieved in isolation from the incantatory effect of the poem as a whole, it is most clearly expressed in the series of impossibilia that articulate the core of the poet’s desire. He craves only one night, but that night must know no dawn: ‘‘Con lei foss’io da che si parte il sole, / et non ci vedess’altri che le stelle, / sol una nocte, et mai non fosse l’alba’’ (Might I be with her from when the sun departs and no other see us but the stars, just one night, and let the dawn never come!) (31–33). This use of the rhetorical figure of adynaton as a ‘‘time-stopping’’ element, a use which occurs in other sestine as well, may be taken as emblematic of the role played by the sestina form within the Fragmenta. I am aware of the paradoxes that obtain with regard to the Petrarchan sestina, in which the circularity of the form is frequently vitiated by a narrative program. It could be argued that a characteristic of the


Petrarchan sestina is to let time in; this is most apparent in the penitential sestine, 80, 142, and 214, where the conversion thematic fights against the circularity of the form and somewhat ‘‘straightens’’ it.31 Indeed, in his penitential sestine, Petrarch undertakes a characteristically paradoxical project, namely, the wedding of a linear program to a circular form—and in so doing he once more registers his ambivalence about conversion. We could restate this insight by noting that while Dante’s stony sestina, Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra, locked in its erotic petrifaction, is as spiritually distant from the Commedia as anything he wrote, Petrarch goes counter to all precedent by adopting the sestina to write some of his most Commedia-like poems. If the form affects the content, throwing doubt on the expressed desire to change, the content also affects the form, resulting in a stretching, a depetrifying, of the genre. While Dante aims to make his sestina as petrified verbally as the petra it describes, Petrarch aims for greater fluidity, seeking ways to reduce the form’s resistance. For instance, while Dante strives to keep the rhyme words in their primary significance, Petrarch ‘‘cheats’’ by adopting equivocal and impure rhymes.32 This line of argument could be pursued by looking at the sestine as a group, in terms of the narrative purpose they may serve as a set. If, as I hope to show in future elaborations of this essay,33 Petrarch distributes even this most anti-narrative form throughout his collection with a narrative purpose, then his sestine are compromised by definition, and it is not surprising to find them letting time in. Like all aspects of Petrarch’s poetics, his sestina is paradoxical; he contaminates the rigidity of its form because his way is based on ambivalence and paradox, to the point that it would be unlike him to exploit even the sestina’s form absolutely.34 Nonetheless, I believe that the previous paragraphs are not incorrect as a first step in the analysis: Petrarch is attracted to the sestina for its time-stopping properties, which he exploits but also— typically—distorts. If rhyme is semantic time or change, and the sestina is a game in which you drastically reduce the possibilities for such change, Petrarch is the master of playing these two ends against the middle: while Dante uses the form to achieve stasis, Petrarch uses it to achieve the paradox of mobile stasis/static movement. In the same way that the sestine serve to dissolve time, there is another group of poems that exists to mark it. The anniversary poems commemorate the date of the poet’s falling in love on 6 April 1327, and carry their own time bombs in the form of numerical expressions


indicating the precise number of years that have elapsed since that fatal day, ‘‘ ’l primo giorno’’ (the first day) (107.8). The very existence of a set of fifteen anniversary poems scattered through the Fragmenta confirms Petrarch’s manipulation of latent narrative structures in his text, and also illuminates his keen awareness of the relation between narrative and time.35 The anniversary poems are a sequence of poems whose physical order is invested with not only a generally narrative but also a specifically temporal burden: that is, they are arranged chronologically, with the result that sequentiality, the flow of the text, and chronicity, the flow of time, are—more concretely than usual— one. Although, as groups, the sestine and the anniversary poems seem intended to counter and defuse each other, I believe that in fact the two sets move toward the same goal—the liquidation of time—from opposite perspectives. The anniversary poems are emblematic of Petrarch’s paradoxical relation to time: although a sequentially linked narrative set whose common and avowed purpose is the marking of time, they contain some of the poet’s most pronounced refusals to accommodate time. (In this respect, too, the anniversary poems are the mirror image of the sestine: the poems that work to stop time are recast so that they show time’s ravages, while the poems that exist to salute time are infused with a fierce resistance.) Refusals to accommodate time from the anniversary poems include: ‘‘fine non pongo al mio obstinato affanno’’ (I put no end to my obstinate trouble) (50.52), which announces limitless suffering but also rejects finitude, limits, for the sufferer—‘‘fine non pongo’’; the middle and the end of the fourteenth year are said to correspond to its beginning, thus denying both time and narrative (‘‘S’al principio risponde il fine e ’l mezzo / del quartodecimo anno ch’io sospiro’’ [If the middle and end answer to the beginning of this fourteenth year of sighs] [79.1–2]); in his fifteenth year, Laura’s ‘‘amorosi rai . . . m’abbaglian piu` che ’l primo giorno assai’’ (love-inspiring rays . . . dazzle me much more than on the first day) (107.7–8); when the sixteenth year of his love remains behind him, the lover moves forward toward his death, only to find that he has returned to the beginning, ‘‘parmi che pur dianzi / fosse ’l principio di cotanto affanno’’ (yet it seems to me that the beginning of all this suffering is still ahead) (118.3–4). Of the examples of non-narrativity cited earlier, three—‘‘io son pur quel ch’i’ mi soglio, / ne´ per mille rivolte anchor son mosso,’’ ‘‘ch’altri cangia il pelo / anzi che ’l vezzo,’’ and ‘‘saro` qual fui, vivro` com’io son visso’’—are from anniversary poems. Indeed, this


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last verse recalls Dante’s Capaneo, who sums up hell as a condition of eternal stasis and repetition when he exclaims ‘‘Qual io fui vivo, tal son morto’’ (As I was alive, so am I dead) (Inf. 14.51).36 The verse ‘‘saro` qual fui, vivro` com’io son visso’’ comes from poem 145, Ponmi ove ’l sole occide i fiori et l’erba, one of two anniversary poems that are out of chronological order; in this case, a poem referring to the fifteenth year of the poet’s love follows anniversary poems commemorating the sixteenth and seventeenth years.37 Readers of Wilkins will remember how much he makes of the break with chronology incurred by poem 145. Reasoning on the basis of Phelps’s three principles of construction for the Chigi collection—general chronological order, variety of form, and variety of content—and noting that there is noticeably less variety of form and content in part 1 after 145 (that is, there are longer stretches of sonnets not interspersed with canzoni, ballate, sestine, or madrigals, and longer stretches of love poems not interspersed with political poems, moral poems, friendship poems, and the like), Wilkins extrapolates a so-called Pre-Chigi form that ended before 145, indeed with sestina 142, and that was composed with greater care than the sections of part 1 added later. I say ‘‘extrapolate’’ and ‘‘so-called’’ because the Pre-Chigi form (also called Correggio) is not extant; unlike the Chigi form, it does not actually exist. Since Wilkins’s enormous contributions have led to the damaging repetitions of his conjectures as facts, I will take this opportunity to point out that the Pre-Chigi form is a hypothesis whose shape is based in great part on the out-of-order poem 145.38 Wilkins concludes that the penitential sestina 142, A la dolce ombra de le belle frondi, is the last poem of part 1 of the Pre-Chigi form; he reaches this conclusion by looking for a poem with a ‘‘specific character of finality’’ among the poems immediately preceding 145, and he lands on 142, which ‘‘would have made a dignified and appropriate ending to Part 1.’’39 On this basis it is now commonly taken for granted that 142 is the end of part 1 of the Pre-Chigi form, whose existence is also taken for granted.40 All this because of the ‘‘notable disregard’’ for the poet’s presumed original principles of construction that the out-of-order 145 supposedly ushers into the collection. Far from showing disregard for such principles, I contend that the out-of-order anniversary poems are key to understanding what Petrarch’s principles of construction really are: fragmentation is brought about by establishing and then destroying its opposite. The out-of-order anniversary poems perfectly reflect the paradoxes of the set to which they belong. They function as subverters


of narrative order—of progression, linearity, time—of all that the anniversary poems as a set seem to represent. Let us consider the placement of the two out-of-order anniversary sonnets. With regard to poem 145, one could deduce from the lack of variety in form and content following it that it serves to announce a set of poems devoted to repetition, indeed to a formal dramatization of its key verse, ‘‘saro` qual fui, vivro` com’io son visso.’’ In other words, the chronology-breaking 145 heralds chronological rupture writ large, in the form of a more marked lack of chronicity or temporal flow than has previously been encountered.41 The second out-of-order anniversary poem is sonnet 266, Signor mio caro, which commemorates eighteen years of love for Laura and follows anniversary poems referring to twenty years of passion. Signor mio caro, the most gravely out of sequence of the anniversary poems,42 draws attention to itself in other ways besides: it is the only anniversary poem to allude to a double devotion, celebrating not only eighteen years of love for Laura but also fifteen years of friendship with Cardinal Giovanni Colonna; it is the first anniversary poem in part 2, and is separated from I’ vo pensando only by one intervening sonnet. These two facts seem not to be unrelated: the presence of an earthly attachment other than Laura is another way of showing us that part 2 deals with the implications of the passing of all mortal loves, which is to say that this text is more philosophic than romantic (as confirmation, sonnet 269 laments the deaths of both Laura and the Cardinal). If beginning the second part of anything necessarily implies a transition, a movement forward, what could more effectively suggest a conversion manque´ than a backward-moving anniversary poem, a poem that should have moved forward, beyond a point we indicate as ‘‘twenty,’’ and instead has regressed to ‘‘eighteen’’? Finally, perhaps the most satisfying sign that the anniversary poems are not what they seem, that they resist time as well as affirm it, comes from an instance of collusion between two sets: the first anniversary poem, Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro, is a sestina, resulting in a poetic hybrid that is the formal equivalent of a contradiction in terms. From this perspective, Giovene donna constitutes an impasse between form and content; the first—prime—example of the species we call anniversary poems, the poem charged with initiating the series’ narrativity, starting the set on its temporal path, is crippled, rendered incapable of accomplishing its textual mission, by being cast as a sestina.43


The collection opens with a sequence of poems that, like the anniversary poems, possesses a narrative thrust. As readers have long noted, poems 2–5 provide plot information regarding first the lover’s first becoming enamored (2 and 3) and then the beloved (4 and 5). This narrative sequence introduces the problematic of time into the text; it offers Petrarch an opportunity to establish the ideological underpinnings for part 1’s animosity toward narrativity. Poems 1–4 are about first things, first times, first (birth- ) places: the poet’s ‘‘primo giovenile errore’’ (my first youthful error) (1.3); Love’s ‘‘primiero assalto’’ (first assault) (2.9); the day when ‘‘i miei guai / nel commune dolor s’incominciaro’’ (my misfortunes began in the midst of the universal woe) (3.7–8); and the place where ‘‘sı´ bella donna al mondo nacque’’ (so beautiful a lady was born to the world) (4.14). The last poem in the sequence, poem 5, the first poem to contain ‘‘il fine’’ (and, perhaps not coincidentally, the first poem to begin with ‘‘Quando’’), introduces the consequence of all beginnings, namely, endings. This famous play on the beloved’s name, parsed as LAU-RE-TA, far from being a frivolous gesture toward rhetorical virtuosity, instructs us that narrativity resides in her, in her name, represented here as syllabified by time:44 LAUdando s’incomincia udir di fore il suon de’ primi dolci accenti suoi. Vostro stato REal, che ’ncontro poi, raddoppia a l’alta impresa il mio valore; ma: TAci, grida il fin, che´ farle honore e` d’altri homeri soma che da’ tuoi. (5.3–8; my italics) [T]he sound of its first sweet accents is heard without in LAU-ds. Your RE-gal state, which I meet next, redoubles my strength for the high enterprise; but ‘‘TA-lk no more!’’ cries the ending, ‘‘for to do her honor is a burden for other shoulders than yours.’’

Particularly noteworthy are the narrative markers that the poet has linked to the syllables of her name: LAU with ‘‘s’incomincia,’’ RE with ‘‘poi,’’ and TA with ‘‘il fin.’’ The first syllable corresponds to beginnings, the middle syllable to middles, and the last syllable to endings; thus, to the extent that the text engages a being defined as existing in time, such as Laureta, it engages the temporal/narrative problems of beginnings, middles, and ends. Most prophetic for the rest of the Fragmenta is the negative sense of endings introduced here. The ominous ‘‘TAci, grida il fin’’ foreshadows the poem’s final tercet, where the unexpected turn toward death is expressed in the possibility


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that Apollo will disdain the poet’s ‘‘lingua mortal,’’ and it establishes, in the link between the last syllable of her name and finality, the narratological consequences of loving—or, for that matter, being—a living creature, a creature subject to time, to death, to endings. Sequentiality created by the linking of canzoni is encountered in poems 70–73, a series of four successive canzoni. Here narrativity is confronted in the form of metrical uniformity: not only do we find four canzoni in a row, in itself an occurrence of note, but poems 71, 72, and 73, the so-called canzoni degli occhi, are more specifically emblazoned. In the midst of the Fragmenta’s flagrant cultivation of metrical variety, they are the only canzoni to be marked by identical meter and rhyme scheme, differing from each other only in number of stanzas, and thus in overall length. Far from being haphazard, this sequence of three canzoni possessing identical stanzaic form offers us another example of the collaboration of form and content. The poet has found a metrical means of mirroring his thematic concerns. These poems, in which the poet requests Amor to harmonize his rime with desire (‘‘et col desio le mie rime contempre’’ [and tune my rhymes to my desire] [73.6]), air the relation between writing and eros: writing begets desire, they tell us; an activity undertaken as a means of ending desire succeeds only in renewing it. This theme in itself is not new (we think of the verse from poem 37 quoted earlier: ‘‘ragionando si rinfresca / quel’ardente desio’’); what is new is the poet’s use of the formal metrical properties of the canzone to highlight the problem. Thus, the congedo—the ending—of canzone 71 states: ‘‘Canzone, tu non m’acqueti, anzi m’infiammi / a dir di quel ch’a me stesso m’invola: / pero` sia certa de non esser sola’’ (Song, you do not quiet me, rather you inflame me to tell of what steals me away from myself; therefore be sure not to be alone). Since poetizing has inflamed desire rather than satisfying it, the poem cannot end; another must follow. Likewise, the congedo of canzone 72 insists: ‘‘Canzon, l’una sorella e` poco inanzi, / et l’altra sento in quel medesmo albergo / apparechiarsi; ond’io piu` carta vergo’’ (Song, one of your sisters has gone before, and I feel the other in the same dwelling making herself ready, wherefore I rule more paper). Again, the poem’s resolution is dedicated to affirming its inability to resolve itself, to terminate. This denial of closure is given added force by the metrical uniformity, which promotes the illusion that the three poems are one, that we have not ended one poem and begun another, but instead have refused to end and returned in a circle to the first poem’s beginning.


These canzoni thus subvert narrativity, using the congedi to deny the closure that it is their poetic function to effect, and thus denying the quiescence—the peace—that is brought about by the full stop and blank space at the end of all poems. For, despite the fact that Petrarch frequently destabilizes the conclusions of his poems by introducing conditionals, and despite the fact that poems not undercut in their own conclusions are routinely contradicted in the poems that immediately follow—despite all this, not even Petrarch can avoid the momentary peace of the physical ending. This physical resolution is undercut in the canzoni degli occhi, whose refusal to satisfy or to accommodate closure suggests a lesson to be applied to the Fragmenta as a whole. The poet now faces the problem engendered by his own strategy: if he were not to bring this sequence of canzoni to an end, he would be moving toward narrative; he must therefore end even this sequence dedicated to disproving all endings. How then to end these poems that deny endings? Petrarch’s solution is to import for the last congedo a biological rather than textual necessity: ‘‘Canzone, i’ sento gia` stancar la penna / del lungo e dolce ragionar co llei, / ma non di parlar meco i pensier mei’’ (Song, I feel my pen already tired from the long and sweet speech with her, but not my thoughts of speaking with me). His weariness forces him to end. But we note, first, that the end imposed on his writing is not imposed on his thoughts; second, even the end imposed on his writing is reversed in the next two sonnets. Sonnet 74 begins ‘‘Io son gia` stanco di pensar si come / i miei pensier’ in voi stanchi non sono’’ (I am already weary of thinking how my thoughts of you are weariless). Here the reprise of stanco from the conclusion of 73 echoes the canzone in typically contradictory fashion: he is weary of thinking about how tireless—nonweary—are his thoughts of her. Sonnet 75 then takes this process a step farther, so that not only are his thoughts not weary, but in fact his ability to discourse is not weary either: ‘‘questi son que’ begli occhi che mi stanno / sempre nel cor colle faville accese, / per ch’io di lor parlando non mi stanco’’ (these are those lovely eyes that are always in my heart with kindled sparks, wherefore I never tire of speaking of them) (12–14). In this way the poet does his best to undo the ending he was obliged to posit at the end of canzone 73. Canzone 70 serves as a kind of prologue to canzoni 71–73, a role for which it is formally fitted by its lack of congedo. This is the poem in which each stanza but one ends with the first verse of a precursor’s poem: stanza 1 ends with an incipit that Petrarch ascribed to Arnaut Daniel, ‘‘Drez et rayson es qu’ieu ciant e ’m demori’’ (It is right and


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just that I sing and be joyful); stanza 2 ends with an incipit of Guido Cavalcanti’s, ‘‘Donna me priegha, per ch’io voglio dire’’ (A lady begs me; therefore I wish to speak); stanza 3 ends with the incipit of one of Dante’s petrose, ‘‘cosı` nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro’’ (So in my speech I wish to be harsh). The poet’s anxieties about poetic discourse, expressed in the first strophe’s rhetorical question ‘‘che se non e´ chi con pieta` m’ascolte, / perche´ sparger al ciel sı` spessi preghi?’’ (For if there is no one who will listen to me with pity, why scatter prayers to the heavens so thickly?) (3–4), are reinforced by these first three citations, each of which emphasizes an outpouring of poetic expression, either joyful (‘‘Drez et rayson es qu’ieu ciant e ’m demori’’), emotionally neutral (‘‘Donna me priegha, per ch’io voglio dire’’), or harsh (‘‘cosı` nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro’’). If the poet seems up to this point expressively blocked, in part by his own fears, and in part by the force of the tradition in which he works, finding himself constrained to appropriate the voices of others, it seems significant that, in the fourth stanza, where Petrarch shifts the blame for his unhappiness from Laura to himself, he should cite a poet whose voice is so much more like his, Cino da Pistoia, and that the final stanza should end with a verse of his own. As though to underscore the limited breakthrough he has achieved, Cino’s verse, ‘‘la dolce vista e ’l bel guardo soave’’ (The sweet sight of her and her lovely soft glance), is not related to the writing of poetry, like the first three incipits, and it is tonally similar to the Petrarchan verse with which the poem ends, ‘‘nel dolce tempo de la prima etade’’ (In the sweet time of my first age)—the main difference, in fact, is the temporal anxiety that Petrarch infuses into Cino’s unalloyed sweetness. The suggestion, at the conclusion of canzone 70, that the poet’s expressivity is no longer obstructed, that he has found his voice, serves to usher in the three canzoni that follow: the blocked voice of 70 makes way for the released voice of 71–73, as the inability to begin succumbs to the inability to end. The most unusual feature of canzone 70 is that its strophes’ final verses are the first verses of previous canzoni. In other words, former incipits have become explicits, beginnings have become endings. Most striking is Petrarch’s use of the first verse of his own collection’s first canzone, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade, as the last verse of canzone 70. Thus, not only have beginnings been converted into endings, but endings into beginnings, since the canzone’s end finds him at the beginning of his own story, at the ‘‘prima etade.’’ It also finds him at the beginning of the canzoni degli occhi, addressed in turn to each of his


story’s chief protagonists: Laura’s eyes, Laura herself, and Love. Thus, the circularity of discourse—beginnings that are endings and endings that are beginnings—is inscribed into canzone 70, before being enacted by canzoni 71–73, where each ending sets the stage for a new beginning. The interchangeability of beginnings and endings is further figured through the presence of stanco in sonnets 74 and 75: the congedo of canzone 73 (‘‘stancar la penna’’) becomes the incipit of sonnet 74 (‘‘Io son gia` stanco’’), which in turn becomes the explicit of sonnet 75 (‘‘per ch’io di lor parlando non mi stanco’’). In general metrical terms, such a pattern of recurrence is expressed by the type of rhyme scheme used in the sestina, which is a particular form of coblas capcaudadas, ‘‘head-tailed’’ rhyme, where the last rhyme of one strophe recurs as the first rhyme of the next.45 I would suggest that the circular or head-tailed quality of the canzoni degli occhi makes them a kind of analogue to the sestina within the collection; like the sestina, they refuse time, embodying stasis. But, as we have seen, Petrarch’s poetic categories mimic the fine line he treads between motion and stasis. In this case, the very refusal to end that produces the circularity of the canzoni degli occhi also creates a sense of ongoingness, and thus a kind of mini-narrative within the Fragmenta.46 If, as subverters of narrative that are still subject to narrative, the canzoni degli occhi are analogous to the sestine, their mirror image—related to the canzoni degli occhi as the anniversary poems are related to the sestine—is the collection’s next series of canzoni, 125–129. The great sweep of five canzoni that runs from 125 to 129 is the longest such series in the collection, a series whose visibility is guaranteed not only by its length but also by its concentration of poetic brilliance. Following the principle that narrativity must be established in order to be more visibly fragmented, and considering that the canzone is the closest approximation to narrative in a lyric universe (it is most conducive to logical exposition and to narrative development, hence its use by Guinizzelli in Al cor gentil, by Cavalcanti in Donna me prega, by Dante in Le dolci rime), it seems not insignificant that the Fragmenta’s two largest blocks of canzoni should be found in part 1.47 To this second sequence the poet has entrusted the demonstration of his ultimate desire vis-a`-vis narrative: to escape from it. Thus, it is a linear sequence, marked not by the circular recurrence of the canzoni degli occhi but by narrative progression and change. While 126, Chiare, fresche et dolci acque, breaks through the impasse experienced in 125 (epitomized in the conditional incipit, Se ’l pensier che mi strugge


[If the care that torments me]), and accomplishes the poet’s goal of turning back time, of achieving ‘‘oblio’’ (forgetfulness) (126.56), the poem that follows it, In quella parte dove Amor mi sprona, shows the return to the conditions of time and narrative, to oblio’s opposite, ‘‘istoria’’ (history) (127.7), a word that appears for the first time in this canzone’s opening strophe.48 And the history to which the poet is reconsigned in 127 is rehearsed again—macrocosmically—in 128, Italia mia, and finally in the sequence’s concluding canzone, Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte, whose acknowledgment of the prison of forward motion is apparent in its first verse. This series takes the poet from the brink of escape, in 125, to actual ec-stasis in 126, where momentarily the turning-back mechanism of memory places him outside the temporal continuum, only to return him to the adamantine chains of time and narrative in 127, 128, and 129. Thus, the narrativity of these poems serves not to deny the constraints of narrative, as with the canzoni degli occhi, but to further underscore their thematic burden: there is no escape from narrative sequence, from moving ‘‘di pensier in pensier,’’ from time. Instead of signifying identity and recurrence, as in the canzoni degli occhi, in canzoni 125–129 meter is called upon to reflect linear change and progression. The poet supplies just enough circularity to make this series a precise inversion of the previous series, where, by contrast, a touch of linear motion was injected into the prevailing stasis:

Canzone

Number of Strophes

Fronte / Congedo

125

6

126

5

127

7

128

7

129

5

abCabC Abb abCabC AbB ABCBAC ABCcBcDD AbCBaC aBCcBbdEdE ABCABC aBCcBDD

Sirma cdeeDff cdeeDfF CDEeDeFF cDEeDdfGfG cDEeDFF

Verses in strophe / settenari in strophe Verses in congedo / settenari in congedo 13/10 3/2 13/9 3/1 14/2 8/2 16/7 10/5 13/2 7/2


The metrical patterns of 125 and 126 are identical but for the fact that the last verse of the strophe (and the congedo) is a settenario in 125 and a hendecasyllable in 126. The relaxation of the settenario of 125 into the longer verse of 126 yields a sense of closure, achievement, peace— the metrical equivalent of the ecstatic oblio achieved in Chiare, fresche et dolci acque.49 The meter of 127 creates a sharp break between 125–126 and the rest of the set; here begins the process of enlargement that will culminate with 128. The leggerezza of 125 and 126 (they are the only canzoni in the collection where settenari outnumber hendecasyllables)50 gives way to the gravita` of the entirely hendecasyllabic fronte of 127, where the reversal of the second pes from abc to bac indicates the backward turn to istoria. A connection to the previous canzoni is maintained in 127’s sirma, which—although mainly hendecasyllabic— conserves the rhyme scheme of 125–126 but for an additional e rhyme. Altogether, however, the strophes of 127 are longer, the number of its strophes is greater, its proportion of hendecasyllables much higher, and its congedo has developed from three verses to eight: the net result is a much heavier poem. The growth pattern continues in 128, whose size reflects its ‘‘large’’ materia: both strophic length and congedo length peak at sixteen verses and ten verses, respectively. The addition of rhymes not present elsewhere in the series—the g rhyme in the sirma and the e rhyme in the congedo—further underscores the canzone’s uniqueness as the only political poem in the group. Nonetheless, 128 is less dark a poem than 127, a fact reflected in its higher proportion of settenari. Although the fronte of 128 declares its connection to its predecessor by conserving the bac twist, it is no longer entirely hendecasyllabic. Finally, with 129 the poet introduces a falling-off from the pattern of enlargement: from seven strophes we return to five (the number in 126), from a sixteenverse strophe to a thirteen-verse strophe (as in 125–126), from a tenverse congedo to a seven-verse congedo. Although 129 retains the hendecasyllabic fronte of 127 and a long congedo, its strophic rhyme scheme is identical to that of 125–126. In this way, Petrarch incorporates circularity into the sequence, allowing the last canzone to return metrically to the first two, while still retaining the signs of the narrative path traveled after 126. The strophic patterns are thus carefully modulated to reflect the thematic progression of these canzoni, which ends in 129 on an ambiguous note: the series’ last canzone does indeed return to 126 in its appreciation of oblio, but with a less optimistic attitude determined by the intervening experiences of 127 and 128.51


Narrative sequence is exploited to express our subjugation to time again in part 1 of the Fragmenta, in a series of sonnets dealing with presentiments of Laura’s death that begins (perhaps not coincidentally) one hundred poems after the out-of-order anniversary poem discussed previously, 145, and embraces poems 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, and 254. These poems share a lexicon that links mortality, death, and the passing of time to narrativity, the order in which we do things. In 246 the poet arranges his protagonists in a narrative sequence, praying that God send his death, his fine, before Laura’s death: ‘‘O vivo Giove, / manda, prego, il mio in prima che ’l suo fine’’ (O living Jove, send, I pray, my end before hers!) (7–8). Since life is governed by temporal rules, the critical questions, as with narrative, are those of priority and sequence: whose end comes first, whose end comes second, whose end comes last. Thus, in 248 we are apprised that whoever wants to see the best that nature has to offer had better come soon, since death takes the best first; if he comes in time he will see the sum of all virtue and beauty, but if he delays he will have cause for eternal weeping. This little narrative is inscribed into the poem with a purpose; it hinges on expressions that denote temporal anxiety in narrative terms (‘‘et venga tosto,’’ ‘‘prima i migliori,’’ ‘‘Vedra`, s’arriva a tempo,’’ ‘‘allor dira`,’’ ‘‘ma se piu` tarda, avra` da pianger sempre’’ [‘‘and let him come soon,’’ ‘‘first the best,’’ ‘‘He will see, if he comes in time,’’ ‘‘then he will say,’’ ‘‘but if he delays too long he shall have reason to weep forever’’]), adding urgency to the temporal message at the poem’s core: ‘‘cosa bella mortal passa, et non dura’’ (this beautiful mortal thing passes and does not endure) (248.8). Similar strategies abound in these poems. Sonnet 250 recounts a dream in which Laura speaks proleptically to the poet of ‘‘quella ultima sera / . . . ch’i’ lasciai li occhi tuoi molli / et sforzata dal tempo me n’andai’’ (that last evening . . . when, leaving your eyes moist, I departed forced by time) (9–11), warning him in the sonnet’s last verse, ‘‘non sperar di vedermi in terra mai’’ (do not hope ever to see me on earth). Sonnet 248 ends with sempre, and 250 with mai, marking the contours of a semantic field in which the Fragmenta’s strikingly temporal language is even more densely packed than usual. Sonnet 254, the final poem in this group, rehearses the poet’s own ending: ‘‘i miei corti riposi e i lunghi affanni / son giunti al fine’’ (my short reposes and my long troubles have come to an end) (10–11), where the abrupt and unusual full stop in the middle of the verse is a formal enactment of the fine invoked by the poet. The poem concludes with Petrarch’s


own conclusion, ‘‘La mia favola breve e` gia` compita, / et fornito il mio tempo a mezzo gli anni’’ (My brief tale is already told and my time filled up in the middle of my years). The poet calls his life a favola knowing well what a favola and his existence have in common; they are similarly sforzati dal tempo, to use Laura’s words. Thoughts of her death, her end, have imposed a narrativity on his own life that he usually avoids, as expressed in the extreme anomaly of poem 252’s ‘‘vivo ch’i’ non son piu` quel che gia` fui’’ (I live that I am no longer what I was before) (13). His fears regarding her death have forced him to let time in, and therefore to say what he has never before said: ‘‘vivo ch’i’ non son piu` quel che gia` fui’’ acknowledges the change once so categorically denied by ‘‘saro` qual fui, vivro` com’io son visso.’’ The particular interest of these poems for us resides in the fact that they constitute a verifiable sequence—let us call it the ‘‘death sequence’’—that runs virtually from 246 to 254.52 In other words, the poet underscores the thematic content of these sonnets—intimations of Laura’s mortality—by arranging them in a sequence of manifest narrativity, where the sequential shape lends significance to the expressed fear that time is passing, that beautiful things do not last, that she will die. In order to signify her death, he permits a narrative sequence to enter the text, a fact that illuminates by contrast the dominant strategy of the Fragmenta up to now: it is a strategy that calls for fragmentation of the text into rime sparse precisely as a defensive bulwark against the forces of narrativity, time, death. The death sequence not only illuminates part 1, by clarifying what the majority of poems in part 1 does not do, but it also anticipates part 2, where narrativity— for the most part an absence previously—is to a much greater degree a presence. Poem 248’s dictum, ‘‘cosa bella mortal passa, et non dura,’’ will be echoed throughout part 2, most notably in the prototypical exclamation from canzone 323: ‘‘Ahi, nulla, altro che pianto, al mondo dura!’’ (Ah, nothing but weeping endures in the world!) (72). While in part 1 encounters with narrativity occur in isolated instances, in part 2 such encounters are an intimate component of the textual fabric, a fact that has a very practical correlative: if one does not trust one’s own experience as a reader of the Fragmenta, one, if she is a teacher, need only meditate on the experience of one’s students to realize that the poems of part 2 are in general easier to read than those of part 1. This is due to the narrativity that has been infused into the text; the static, self-referential discourse that dominates part 1 has given way to


a discourse that has been simplified by the intrusion of narrative elements, by the linear flow of the miniature vignettes or stories the we encounter so frequently in part 2. Emblematic of this shift in tonality are those two structural columns of the Fragmenta, canzoni 23 and 323: the storybook linearity that characterizes the presentation of the symbolic dramas in 323, Standomi un giorno solo a la fenestra—not for nothing called the canzone delle visioni—contrasts strikingly with the compact impenetrability that (despite its narrative program) characterizes the canzone delle metamorfosi, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. Metamorphosis, as a way of changing without changing, moving forward without moving, is a hallmark of part 1, and canzone 23 perfectly reflects these principles in its themes and in its linguistic texture: dense, convoluted, an icon to reified—or, as Petrarch would put it, petrified—immobility.53 The story-like flow of 323, on the other hand, is a stylistic correlative of the governing principles of part 2: time flows, nothing lasts, death comes. As the poet declares in the same canzone, ‘‘ogni cosa al fin vola’’ (Everything flies to its end) (323.55). Petrarch’s methods for infusing narrativity into part 2 may be classified as follows. 1. The use of direct discourse, more prevalent in part 2 than in part 1. By my calculation, direct discourse occurs in 45 poems in part 1 and in 25 poems in part 2. Due to the disparity in the size of the two parts (263 poems in part 1, 103 in part 2), these figures indicate a higher proportion of poems containing direct discourse in part 2 than in part 1 (24.27 percent as compared to 17.1 percent).54 Moreover, in part 2 direct discourse appears in major canzoni, of which a significant proportion are in dialogue form (either completely, like 359 and 360, or attenuatedly, like 264, 268, and 325).55 Thus, part 2 begins with 264, I’ vo pensando, a canzone that is based on a prose dialogue, the Secretum, from which it takes as its subject the inner conflict of its protagonist; as in the source, this conflict is rendered through a dialogue (attenuated, in that only the first pensier uses direct discourse) between two adversarial points of view. Canzone 268 contains a dialogue between the self and Love, who speaks in direct discourse, while in 325 we find a similar exchange between the poet and Fortuna, in which direct discourse is used by the lady. Of great importance are canzoni 359 and 360: 359 recounts a dialogue between the poet and his lady, who is at his bedside; in 360 the poet and Love argue their cases before


the tribunal of Reason (who also uses direct discourse, so that we move from the dialogue to a mini-drama), in the same way that Augustinus and Franciscus argue before Truth in the Secretum. Dialogues are a textual way of making time palpable, as is indicated by their conspicuous use of such temporal/narrative props as ‘‘et poi demando’’ (and then I ask) (359.13); ‘‘respond’io allora’’ (‘‘I reply then’’) (359.45); ‘‘e ’ncomincio’’ (and I begin) (360.9); ‘‘Il mio adversario . . . comincia’’ (My adversary . . . begins) (360.76–77). The use of direct discourse is a way of creating the illusion of reality in a text; thus, in Purgatorio 10, Dante constructs the dialogue between Trajan and the widow, rendered in direct discourse, to lend the illusion of a fourth dimension to the sculpted reliefs on the terrace of pride.56 2. The use of a narrative ploy regarding a ‘‘second love’’ whom he rejects in order to remain true to Laura, called, with narratological emphasis, ‘‘’l mio primo amor’’ (my first love) (270.45; see also 271, 280).57 Indeed, the idea of a second love seems to belong to a category of ‘‘doubles’’ that Petrarch creates for part 2 and that could be seen as a means of drawing our attention to the deep meaning of part 2, to the flow of time implied by the very existence of a part 2 that follows a part 1. These ‘‘doubles’’ include: the unique celebration of two loves in 266, the double anniversary poem for Laura and Cardinal Colonna; the commemoration, in 269, of the double death of this same duo, who both died of the plague in 1348; and, on a formal level, the presence, as the only sestina of part 2, of the two-part or double sestina, poem 332, a sestina that has been extended by a factor of two to double its normal length. 3. Clinging to past narrative. Under this rubric I would place: a. Poems on Laura’s resistance, the severe onesta` that he now realizes was beneficial to him, as in 289.5–6 (see also 290, 297, 315, 351): ‘‘Or comincio a svegliarmi, et veggio ch’ella / per lo migliore al mio desir contese’’ (Now I begin to awaken, and I see it was for the best that she resisted my desire). Her chastity is a matter of historical record and should be of no particular importance now, a principle whose validity we can test by imagining that Beatrice and Dante discuss her erstwhile sexual virtue when they meet in the Earthly Paradise. b. Poems on Vaucluse as a place consecrated to her, a place where the ‘‘fior’, frondi, herbe, ombre, antri, onde, aure soavi, / valli chiuse, alti colli et piaggie apriche’’ (flowers, leaves, grass, shadows, caves, waves, gentle breezes, closed valleys, high hills, and


open slopes) (303.5–6) bespeak her (see also the poems in 4a, below). c. Poems that rehearse the narrative of her life and death, such as poems that mention the day he first saw her (284, 298); poems on her last day, ‘‘l’ultimo giorno et l’ore extreme’’ (the last day and the final hour) (295.5); poems on the date of her death, for example 298, which belongs to this category as well as to the first, since the ‘‘sempre dolce giorno et crudo’’ (day always sweet and cruel) (13), April 6, is both the day of her death and the day of his having first become enamored of her. Here we should note also 336, where he specifies that her soul left her body ‘‘ ’n mille trecento quarantotto, / il dı´ sesto d’aprile, in l’ora prima’’ (in 1348, on the sixth day of April, at the first hour) (12–14). d. Poems devoted to their last meeting, such as 314 (‘‘Questo e` l’ultimo dı´ de’ miei dolci anni’’ [This is the last day of my sweet years] [8]); 328 (‘‘L’ultimo, lasso, de’ miei giorni allegri’’ [The last, alas, of my happy days] [1]); 329 (‘‘O giorno, o hora, o ultimo momento’’ [O day, O hour, O last moment] [1]); and 330, in which he imagines what she said to him with her gaze during their last encounter. e. Poems on her arrival in heaven. Most notable is 346, where the angels and other heavenly citizens gather around Laura on her ‘‘primo giorno’’ (first day), asking what ‘‘nova beltate’’ (new beauty) has arrived; she, although perfectly happy with her new ‘‘albergo’’ (dwelling), turns back now and then to see if the poet follows (‘‘et parte ad or ad or si volge a tergo, / mirando s’io la seguo, et par ch’aspecti’’ [and still from time to time she turns back, looking to see if I am following her, and seems to wait] [11–12]), and is concerned that he hasten to join her. Indeed, the poem ends with the temporally charged verb affrettare: ‘‘perch’i’ l’odo pregar pur ch’i’ m’affretti’’ (for I hear her pray that I may hasten). Poem 326, although not as remarkable an example of the temporalizing of paradise as 346, again refers to her status as a newly arrived denizen of heaven, an ‘‘angel novo’’ (new angel). 4. The fashioning of a narrative regarding their present together. This category includes: a. Poems describing him in Vaucluse looking for signs of her: ‘‘Cosı` vo ricercando ogni contrada / ov’io la vidi’’ (Thus I go


searching through every region where I saw her) (306.9–10; see also 280, 288, 301, 304, 305, 320). Although this search often results only in traces of Laura (‘‘Lei non trov’io: ma suoi santi vestigi’’ [Her I do not find, but I see her holy footprints] [306.12]), it can also lead to more substantive results: thus in 281 his calling yields visions of Laura, ‘‘Or in forma di nimpha o d’altra diva’’ (Now in the form of a nymph or other goddess) (9), which have materialized to the point where he can say that he sees her ‘‘calcare i fior’ com’una donna viva’’ (treading the fresh grass like a living woman) (13). Indeed, she is sufficiently ‘‘donna viva’’ that he can specify her piteous attitude toward him: ‘‘mostrando in vista che di me le ’ncresca’’ (showing by her face that she is sorry for me) (14). b. Poems in which she returns to console him. These poems constitute the logical next step after the successful search described in 281. Her concern leads her to return with the express purpose of consoling her lover, as we learn in 282: ‘‘Alma felice che sovente torni / a consolar le mie notti dolenti’’ (Happy soul who often come back to console my sorrowing nights) (1–2). In this poem, the process of materialization begun in 281, where she appears ‘‘com’una donna viva,’’ is crystallized in his recognition of her unique presence, manifested ‘‘a l’andar, a la voce, al volto, a’ panni’’ (by your walk, by your voice, by your face, by your dress) (14). She returns thus in 283 (‘‘Ben torna a consolar tanto dolore / madonna, ove Pieta` la riconduce’’ [My lady does indeed come back to console so much sorrow, for pity leads her back] [9–10]) and in 343, where her consolation takes the form of listening to, and commenting on, his history—his life’s narrative—which causes her to weep (‘‘et come intentamente ascolta et nota / la lunga historia de le pene mie!’’ [and how intently she listens to, and takes note of, the long history of my sufferings!] [10–11]); in 285, on the other hand, she is the storyteller (‘‘contando i casi de la vita nostra’’ [telling over the events of our life] [12]). This category (see also 284 and 286) is summed up by a verse in 285, ‘‘spesso a me torna co l’usato affecto’’ ([she] often returns to me with her usual affection) (7), which exemplifies the process whereby the affection she shows in death is projected backwards onto her life: ‘‘usato affetto.’’ Whereas, in the above poems, Laura is described as speaking but her speech is not expressed, in 279 and 341 she speaks in


direct discourse, and in 342 and 359 she not only comes to him and speaks to him, but also sits on his bed and dries his tears.58 c. Poems in which his thoughts rise to her in heaven, where they communicate with her, such as 302, where what she has to say to him extends for more than six verses of direct discourse, and 362, where both Laura and God speak to him, the latter responding to the poet’s urgent request to stay in heaven with an entirely temporal injunction: ‘‘Responde:—‘Egli e` ben fermo il tuo destino; / et per tardar anchor vent’anni o trenta, / parra` a te troppo, et non fia pero` molto’ ’’ (He replies: ‘‘Your destiny is certain, and a delay of twenty or thirty years will seem much to you, but it will be little’’) (12–14). Thus, God (whose direct discourse is the last instance of such speech in the Fragmenta) is like everyone else in the Petrarchan universe: concerned with time, which He counts out in ciphers, a not unimportant consideration in a text that we cannot read, discuss, or think about without encountering and manipulating numbers. Numbers signify time, as Dante tells us in the Convivio (in the same chapter in which he relates rhyme to time, as noted earlier): ‘‘Lo tempo, secondo che dice Aristotile nel quarto de la Fisica, e` ‘numero di movimento, secondo prima e poi’ ’’ (Time, according to Aristotle in the fourth book of the Physics, is ‘‘number of movement, according to before and after’’) (4.2.6). A key strategy in the fashioning of a present narrative is the literalization of the turning-back topos: from a trope of memory, in part 1, it becomes a literal description of her various returns to him. Thus, rimembrare gives way to richiamare, rivedere, ricercare, ritrovare, and the expression ‘‘tornami avanti’’—where the verb tornare applies to her rather than to him—becomes a textual emblem for part 2 (see, for instance, 268.46, 272.9, and 336, where the opening ‘‘Tornami a mente’’ [She comes to mind] allows the poet to build up to the vivifying exclamation: ‘‘Ell’e` ben dessa; anchor e` in vita’’ [That is she, she is still alive!] [7]). 5. The fashioning of a narrative regarding their future together. Here I would place: a. Poems referring to an unattainable future, the chaste old age they could have shared had she lived: ‘‘Presso era ’l tempo dove Amor si scontra / con Castitate, et agli amanti e` dato / sedersi inseme, et dir che lor incontra’’ (The time was near when Love


can be reconciled with Chastity and lovers may sit down together and say what occurs to them) (315.9–11). Their virtuous colloquies are detailed further in 316 (‘‘Con che honesti sospiri l’avrei detto / le mie lunghe fatiche’’ [With what virtuous sighs I would have told her of my long labors] [12–13]) and 317, where in response to the burden he would deposit in her ‘‘caste orecchie’’ (chaste ears) she would reply with ‘‘qualche santa parola sospirando’’ (with some holy word, sighing) (13). b. Poems in which he prays that she may meet him at his passing: ‘‘Piacciale al mio passar esser accorta, / ch’e` presso omai; siami a l’incontro’’ (Let it please her to pay heed to my passing, which is nearby now; let her meet me) (333.12–13); ‘‘et spero ch’al por giu` di questa spoglia / venga per me con quella gente nostra’’ (and I hope that when I put off these remains she will come for me with our people) (334.12–13). c. Poems that display the other side of her alleged concern that he hasten to paradise, where he begs her to pray that he may soon join her (‘‘prega ch’i’ venga tosto a star con voi’’ [pray that I may soon come to be with you] [347.14]), and is impatient as to precisely when this shall be: ‘‘Sarei contento di sapere il quando, / ma pur devrebbe il tempo esser da presso’’ (I would be glad to know when, but still the time ought to be near) (349.7–8). 6. Emphasis on the narrativity inherent in life in general, and in his own life, whose story he so enjoys recounting, in particular. Part 2 contains the bulk of the Fragmenta’s proverbial expressions relating to the fleetingness of life: ‘‘Veramente siam noi polvere et ombra’’ (Truly, we are dust and shadow) (294.12); ‘‘nulla qua giu` diletta et dura’’ (nothing down here both pleases and endures) (311.14); ‘‘O caduche speranze, o penser’ folli!’’ (Oh short-lived hopes, o mad cares!) (320.5); ‘‘ogni cosa al fin vola’’ (everything flies to its end) (323.55); ‘‘Ahi, nulla, altro che pianto, al mondo dura!’’ (ah, nothing but weeping endures in the world!) (323.72); ‘‘quante speranze se ne porta il vento!’’ (how many hopes does the wind carry off !) (329.8). Regarding Petrarch’s own life and poetry, we find ‘‘Or sia qui fine al mio amoroso canto’’ (Now here let there be an end to my song of love) (292.12) and ‘‘ch’i’ chiamo il fine’’ (I call out for the end) (312.13). * * * According to the persistent reading of the Fragmenta that posits conflict in part 1 and its resolution in part 2, we could view the


narrativity of part 2 as a textual analogue to the spiritual resignation these critics have perceived: a stylistic acceptance of the dictates of narrative that translates into a spiritual acceptance of the dictates of time. However, for those of us who are dissatisfied with the view of the Fragmenta that reads the ending as achieved resolution and conversion, I would note that Petrarch’s adoption of linear/narrative strategies in part 2 could be viewed as more anarchic than resigned. As he himself is well aware, he introduces these elements precisely where, from a traditional perspective, they should not be. Petrarch knows—indeed he tells us, in some sonnets located toward the beginning of part 2, where the course he will travel for the rest of the text is still being debated—that he is supposed to use Laura’s death, as Dante used Beatrice’s.59 He states this with great clarity in sonnet 273, where he begins by pointing to his incurable tendency to look backward when he should look forward—‘‘Che fai? che pensi? che pur dietro guardi / nel tempo, che tornar non pote omai?’’ (What are you doing? What are you thinking? Why do you still look back to a time that can never return anymore?) (1–2)—and then links this Orphic pose to the desire to refind her here, on earth, rather than acknowledge her definitive departure: Le soavi parole e i dolci sguardi ch’ad un ad un descritti et depinti ai, son levati de terra; et e`, ben sai, qui ricercarli intempestivo et tardi. (273.5–8) The gentle words and the sweet glances that you have described and depicted one by one, have been taken from the earth; and it is, you well know, unseasonable and too late to seek them here.

The tercets of sonnet 273 conclude by stating the Dantesque alternative: she is not to be resought on earth, but to be followed as a guide to heaven and sought there; only then will the fact that she is dead begin to yield its fruits, by protecting him from other temptations, less alluring than she was while alive. Only when reclassified as dead, that is, immortal, will she cease to impede his voyage toward certainty, stability, and peace, and instead promote it: Deh non rinovellar quel che n’ancide, non seguir piu` penser vago, fallace, ma saldo et certo, ch’a buon fin ne guide.

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 222 Cerchiamo ’l ciel, se qui nulla ne piace: che´ mal per noi quella belta` si vide, se viva et morta ne devea toˆr pace. (273.9–14) Ah, do not renew what kills us; do not follow any longer a deceptive yearning thought, but a firm and certain one that may guide us to a good end. Let us seek heaven, if nothing pleases us here; for we ill saw that beauty if living and dead it was to rob us of peace.

The last verse, ‘‘se viva et morta ne devea toˆr pace,’’ epitomizes the problem: although dead, she functions not as a promoter of peace but as its destroyer; the beneficial effects of her death are blocked by a poet who prefers to treat her death like her life. To continue with the Augustinian terminology, instead of using Laura’s death in the manner outlined in 273, Petrarch enjoys it, in the sense that he inscribes it in narrative, he pickles it in the saline waters of time. Even heaven exists in time as a result of the conversations that take place there during his visiting hours.60 In other words, Petrarch’s acceptance of the dictates of narrative is governed by his nonacceptance: in part 1 narrative is avoided because the goal is to stop time, resist death; in part 2 narrative is invoked because in order to preserve her as she was he must preserve her in time. He thus adopts opposite and apparently contradictory strategies to achieve the same results. When she is alive, he needs to cancel time. When she is dead, he needs to appropriate it. So, Petrarch both evades narrativity and confronts it because both postures figure in his dialectical struggle to overcome the forces of time. This fact is never more evident than at the text’s beginning, middle, and end. The original beginning, according to Wilkins, is the present sonnet 34, Apollo, s’anchor vive il bel desio, an archetypal poem of part 1. Temporal sequence is invoked in the process whereby Apollo loved first what the poet loves now—‘‘difendi or l’onorata et sacra fronde, / ove tu prima, et poi fu’ invescato io’’ (now defend the honored and holy leaves where you first and then I were limed) (7–8)61— only in order to be nullified: in that she is ‘‘la donna nostra’’ (our lady), both Apollo’s Daphne and Petrarch’s Laura, whom both together will watch (‘‘si vedrem poi per meraviglia inseme / seder la donna nostra sopra l’erba’’ [thus we shall then together see a marvel—our lady sitting on the grass] [12–13]), all identities are conflated and time ceases to exist.62 By contrast, our present number 1 is atypical. Its purpose is


to establish temporal sequence: a verse like ‘‘quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono’’ (when I was in part another man from what I am now) (4) suggests narrative movement from the past into the present and seems to promise more such movement leading from the present into the future. In this sense, the poem imposes a beginning in quasi-narrative terms. But, by the same token, it also subverts it, precisely by virtue of its position at the text’s beginning. A recantation at the outset makes no more sense than Guido da Montefeltro’s attempt to repent before sinning. ‘‘Forse / tu non pensavi ch’io loïco fossi’’ (Perhaps you did not think I was a logician!) (Inf. 27.122–23), says the devil to Guido as he drags him off to hell: it is not logical—in narrative or in life—to renounce the ‘‘breve sogno’’ before engaging in it, succumbing to it, representing it.63 Moving on to the Fragmenta’s version of a middle, we arrive at 264, a poem whose resolution regards its failure to resolve: ‘‘et veggio ’l meglio, et al peggior m’appiglio’’ (and I see the better but I lay hold onto the worse). Again, Petrarch could have avoided invoking the category of a middle altogether; instead, he gives 264 an illuminated capital and leaves a space signifying transition between parts 1 and 2, a transition his transitional poem then denies. Finally, we arrive at the end, or, better, to that place where an expressed desire for ending is followed by physical closure. As we know from sonnets 363 and 364, the poet is tired: ‘‘et al Signor ch’i’ adoro et ch’i’ ringratio, / che pur col ciglio il ciel governa et folce, / torno stanco di viver, nonche´ satio’’ (and to the Lord whom I adore and whom I thank, who governs and sustains the heavens with His brow, I return, weary of life, not merely satiated) concludes 363, and 364 echoes ‘‘Omai son stanco’’ (Now I am weary) (5). Biological weariness was used as a means of ending once before, in the closing congedo of the canzoni degli occhi. If that series of poems serves to dramatize the arbitrariness of all endings, then the fact that their mode of ending is echoed in the text’s ultimate ending might make us wonder: what makes the final ending less arbitrary than the forced resolution of canzone 73? The answer lies not in the poet’s will, which in the final poem is still commanding itself to be full,64 but in the conditions to which his will, like ours, is subject. None of Petrarch’s textual tactics can finally prevail over the truth of his assessment, applicable to texts as well as to ladies: ‘‘cosa bella mortal passa, et non dura.’’

chapter 11

The Wheel of the Decameron

F

rom its first clause, indeed from its first word, the Decameron signals its nontranscendence: ‘‘Umana cosa e` aver compassione degli afflitti’’ (To take pity on people in distress is a human quality), begins the author, locating us in a rigorously secular context and defining its parameters.1 At this point, compassione degli afflitti belongs to an amorous register, referring to Boccaccio’s past affliction as a lover for whom his friends felt pity; thus, he claims that he is writing the Decameron to repay their kindness, since ‘‘la gratitudine, secondo che io credo, trall’altre virtu` e` sommamente da commendare’’ (it is my conviction that gratitude, of all the virtues, is most highly to be commended) (Proemio, 7). Here again, the Proem continues to insist on a human set of values, for gratitude is technically not a virtue at all, but a social grace, a virtue only in that it makes life more livable. And, because he wants to make their lives more livable, Boccaccio writes for the ladies, shattering their enforced contemplation with novelle, news of life, life-surrogates. Beginning as it does with the author’s gratitude for the generosity of his friends, which encourages him in turn to show generosity to the ladies, the Decameron comes full circle by ending with the generosity—liberalita`—of the characters of Day 10. Generosity, like gratitude, is a social virtue, one which palliates and civilizes the experience of living, and in fact the stories of the last Day are the final step in a process which has made the brigata fit to reenter society, to embark once more on the business of life.2 Generosity is generated by compassion; this compassione, which motivates the author in his Proem at one end of the book and the characters of Day 10 at the other, is not only the social glue which holds together the fabric of human society,

The Wheel of the Decameron 225

which literally humanizes that society, but is also the textual glue linking the several levels of the Decameron. The transition from the courtly atmosphere of the Proem to the onslaught of the great plague is mediated by compassion, either present (in the Proem) or absent (in the Florentine society afflicted by the plague as described in the Introduction to Day 1), but always the irreducible standard by which human affairs are measured. The Introduction to the First Day is the catalyst of the rest of the Decameron in that it defines the text’s negative pole, the level of loss from which the brigata must recover. The reduction of Florentine society to grade zero is accomplished rhetorically through the Introduction’s portrayal of two discrete stages of loss which together bring about total collapse; the narrator concentrates first on the loss of ingegno and secondly on the loss of compassione. The first part of the plague narrative emphasizes intellectual failure: ‘‘in quella [la peste] non valendo alcuno senno ne´ umano provedimento’’ (in the face of the [plague’s] onrush, all the wisdom and ingenuity of man were unavailing) (1.Intro.9). The qualification of ‘‘provedimento’’ with the adjective ‘‘umano’’ underscores the fact that the intellect is, with compassion, the essential ingredient of human society; but here, as society crumbles, the intellect is powerless, human ingenuity is unavailing. Failure in one quintessentially human sphere leads, predictably, to failure in the other; thus the narrator passes in linear fashion from depicting the loss of ingegno to depicting the loss of compassione; since compassione is the umana cosa par excellence, its disappearance signals the final breakdown. The process of decay, once initiated, is as inevitable as the disease itself, progressing from the incapacitation of the intellect to the denial of all ethical commitment; this chain effect is indicated by the narrative sequence, which moves from the symptoms of the plague, the horrid gavoccioli which the doctors are unable to treat (Boccaccio stresses the ‘‘ignoranza de’ medicanti’’ [13]), to its powers of contamination. The fact that the disease is contagious leads to a widespread callousness toward the sufferings of others, a lack of compassion marked in narrative terms by the use of the adjective crudele: ‘‘e tutti quasi a un fine tiravano assai crudele, cio` era di schifare e di fuggire gli infermi e le lor cose’’ (And almost without exception, they took a single and very cruel precaution, namely to avoid or run away from the sick and their belongings) (19).


Crudele, the word contrasted with compassione throughout the plague description, signifies for Boccaccio a destructive autonomy, an inhuman desire to preserve the self at all costs. By abandoning the sick, many believe that they will save themselves: ‘‘e cosı` faccendo, si credeva ciascuno a se medesimo salute acquistare’’ (by which means they all thought that their own health would be preserved) (19). The author outlines four types of popular reaction to the plague. There are the introverted extremists, who lock themselves in their houses; the extroverted extremists, who pursue a policy of ‘‘eat, drink, and be merry’’; the moderates, who do not greatly alter their behavior; and last, the group Boccaccio labels, significantly, ‘‘di piu` crudel sentimento’’ (of more cruel feeling) (25). These are the ones who, caring for nothing but themselves, abandon ‘‘la propia citta`, le proprie case, i lor luoghi e i lor parenti e le lor cose’’ (their city, their homes, their relatives, their estates and their belongings) (25), the ones by whom the most sacrosanct bonds of human life (stressed by the repetition of the possessive adjective) are broken: ‘‘l’un fratello l’altro abbandonava e il zio il nepote e la sorella il fratello e spesse volte la donna il suo marito; e, che maggior cosa e` e quasi non credibile, li padri e le madri i figliuoli, quasi loro non fossero, di visitare e di servire schifavano’’ (brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them) (27). The dissolution of the parental bond is the last step in the society’s achievement of a nonhuman, negative, status. The city’s descent into noncivility is complete.3 It is in the wake of this analysis of its citizens’ behavior that Boccaccio outlines the city’s moral degeneracy: the women who allow themselves to be tended by male servants, the forming of a class of profiteers who for a sum will take bodies to burial, and so forth. Running throughout is the motif of indifference to others, the lack of compassion, a moral flaw with relentlessly practical consequences; as the narrator emphasizes, many were left to die unaided because they had previously set just this example: ‘‘avendo essi stessi, quando sani erano, essemplo dato a coloro che sani rimanevano, quasi abbandonati per tutto languieno’’ (having themselves, when they were fit and well, set an example to those who were as yet unaffected, they languished away with virtually no one to nurse them) (26). Their previous cruel behavior thus guarantees not their preservation but their ruin, since


there is no one who will care for them when they in turn fall victims to the scourge. The moral code implicit in this passage is practical, civic, social; far from promising rewards to the servants who tend the sick for a fee, the author does not hide the fact that such actions often bring about their deaths: ‘‘se´ molte volte col guadagno perdeano’’ (they frequently lost their lives as well as their earnings) (28). Compassion is not so much a good as it is a necessity, a sine qua non of our identities, as stated in the text’s opening sentence and repeatedly underscored by the narrator’s animal analogies, his insistence that bestiality is the inevitable outcome of indifference: ‘‘non come uomini ma quasi come bestie morieno’’ (dying more like animals than human beings) (43).4 The Introduction to Day 1 is divisible into two distinct parts roughly equal in length. The first recounts the events surrounding the plague’s arrival in Florence, detailing the loss of ingegno and compassione (through paragraph 48, or roughly ten and one half pages in the Mondadori edition); the second recounts the gathering of a group of young people in Santa Maria Novella and their decision to leave Florence for their salvation (through paragraph 115, or about twelve pages in the same edition). If the purpose of the first part is, in narrative terms, to create a tabula rasa on which the brigata and the text can build (in fact, before introducing the ladies, the narrator claims that the city is ‘‘quasi vota’’ [49]), the second part initiates the process of construction. The change in tone is signaled by Pampinea’s speech on their inalienable right to life; the change in atmosphere is palpable as the moral turpitude of the pestilential city gives way to the ‘‘leggiadra onesta`’’ (49) of the brigata.5 We note, however, that the brigata’s behavior is rigidly premised on what came before; they must establish their difference precisely with respect to the prevailing norm. Therefore Pampinea stresses not only their right to survival, but also the fact that, in leaving the city, they will be abandoning no one, since all their kin is dead. It is paramount for Boccaccio to establish that the onesta brigata does not behave like any of the groups described in the first part of the Introduction; although their program shares features with some—like the introverts, they isolate themselves and refuse to entertain news from the outside; like the cruel ones, they leave the city—the crucial difference is that they do these things only now, when there is nothing else left to do.6 As Pampinea declares: ‘‘noi non abbandoniam persona, anzi ne possiamo con verita` dire molto piu` tosto abbandonate’’ (we shall not be abandoning anyone by going away from here;


on the contrary, we may fairly claim that we are the ones who have been abandoned) (69). The rest of the Decameron constitutes the gradual re-creation, through recreation, of the brigata, whose chief characters represent not only facets of the author, but also basic aspects of human nature.7 Pampinea, whose name means ‘‘vigorous,’’ is the force of order; the instigator of their flight from the city, she takes immediate steps to organize their idyll, remarking that ‘‘le cose che sono senza modo non possono lungamente durare’’ (nothing will last very long unless it possesses a definite form) (95). She proposes a form of government, with rotating rulers, to regulate their otherwise potentially anarchic existences, and assigns specific tasks to the servants who have accompanied them. Her last words to these, her most significant commandment, is that, whatever they see or hear, they are to bring no unhappy news from the outside world: ‘‘niuna novella altra che lieta ci rechi di fuori’’ (bring us no tidings of the world outside these walls unless they are tidings of happiness) (101). Again, there is a deliberate echo of the introverts’ program for survival, since they, too, refused all news of death or sickness, closing themselves inside: ‘‘senza lasciarsi parlare a alcuno o volere di fuori, di morte o d’infermi, alcuna novella sentire’’ ([they] refrained from speaking to outsiders and refused to receive news from outside of the dead or the sick) (20; my italics). The use in both instances of novella in the sense of ‘‘news,’’ along with the fact that the isolationists are the only previous group to be called a ‘‘brigata’’ by the author, underscores their role as precursors of the onesta brigata. In demanding complete protection from external events, Pampinea is acceding to Dioneo, who had stipulated, as the necessary condition determining his stay with the others, that there be a total severance of their ties to the city. Establishing two distinct spheres of existence, according to the binary opposition ‘‘in’’ versus ‘‘out,’’ he states that he has left his cares in the city, ‘‘li miei [pensieri] lasciai io dentro dalla porta della citta` allora che io con voi poco fa me ne usci’ fuori’’ (my own [troubles] I left inside the city gates when I came out from there a short while ago in your company) (93; my italics), and that they must either join with him in amusement, laughter, and singing, or give him leave to return to the ‘‘citta` tribolata.’’8 We know Dioneo’s hallmarks: his etymological sensuality (his name derives from Dione, Venus’s mother); his defense of women’s rights (a defense which goes beyond feminism in the narrow sense if we consider that,


in the Proem, the women seem tantamount to all those deprived of the opportunity to live their lives); his privileged status as the storyteller who always has the last word. Dioneo and Pampinea are the brigata’s ideologues: while she is in charge of the details of their daily existence, he is concerned with outlining the essential prerequisites for new life. Thus, it is he who delivers the ultimatum insisting on their quarantine from unhappiness and, essentially, from reality. Although Pampinea, ruler of the First Day, leaves the subject of the Day nominally open, critics have long noted that the stories of Day 1 are characterized by the triumph of the intellect, which succeeds through a brilliant use of language in reversing a given situation, sometimes effecting a return to the status quo, otherwise simply improving conditions for the story’s protagonist:9 the Marchesana di Monferrato rids herself of the King of France’s dangerous importunities by staging a clever joke (1.5); the courtier Bergamino embarrasses Cangrande della Scala into showing his accustomed generosity (1.7); the rebuke by a lady from Gascony transforms the King of Cyprus from a weak man into a brave one who will redress her wrongs (1.9). Day 2, dealing as it does with lucky resolutions to unlucky situations, introduces the problematic of Fortune into the Decameron; here Fortune has the upper hand. Nonetheless, most of the happy endings of Day 2 are achieved by dint of some cooperation on the part of the protagonist’s intellect: in his final predicament, it occurs to Andreuccio to grab the priest by the leg (2.3); even Alatiel, the Decameron’s most buffeted heroine, has the wit required to convince her father that she has been in a nunnery, rather than the consort of eight different men (2.7). Day 3 alters the balance by adding our efforts, ‘‘industria,’’ to the equation. Here man is no longer Fortune’s plaything, but is able to overcome through use of intelligence: Ricciardo wins Catella by deceiving her, commenting in words that aptly represent Day 3, ‘‘quello che io semplicemente amando aver non potei, Amor con inganno m’ha insegnato avere’’ (what I was unable to achieve by mere wooing, Love has taught me to obtain by deception) (3.6.42); in the same way Giletta, with a display of deceptive wit surely intended to contrast with Griselda’s brute patience, wins back her reluctant husband (3.9). As Days 1–3 effect the brigata’s recovery of ingegno, so the tragic love of Day 4, offset by the happy love of Day 5, effects their recovery of compassione. Before beginning the first novella of Day 4, the tale of Tancredi and Ghismonda, Fiammetta comments on the nature of the king’s assignment. She considers Filostrato’s topic particularly cruel,


‘‘Fiera materia di ragionare n’ha oggi il nostro re data’’ (Cruel indeed is the topic for discussion assigned to us today by our king), because they have come here to be cheered, ‘‘per rallegrarci venuti siamo’’ (having come here to fortify our spirits), and instead are forced to recount the sorrows of others: ‘‘ci convenga raccontar l’altrui lagrime, le quali dir non si possono che chi le dice e chi l’ode non abbia compassione’’ (we are obliged to recount people’s woes, the telling of which cannot fail to arouse compassion in speaker and listener alike) (4.1.2; my italics). It is thus established from the outset of Day 4 that the effect of the Day’s stories is to elicit the compassion of the storytellers, a notion stressed throughout the Day in the narrator’s accounts of the brigata’s reactions: Filomena is ‘‘tutta piena di compassione del misero Gerbino e della sua donna’’ (quite overcome with compassion for the hapless Gerbino and his lady-love) (4.5.2); Neifile concludes her story of Girolamo’s and Salvestra’s thwarted love ‘‘non senza aver gran compassion messa in tutte le sue compagne’’ (having planted no small degree of compassion in the hearts of her companions) (4.9.21; my italics); Filostrato follows Neifile by assuring his audience that their reaction to his bloody tale ‘‘vi converra` non meno di compassione avere che alla passata’’ (must inevitably arouse as much pity among you as the previous one) (4.9.3; my italics). Only Pampinea refuses to obey Filostrato, insisting instead on the necessity of counteracting compassione with ricreazione. Thus, her story of Frate Alberto complies with the letter of Filostrato’s order, but not with the spirit, for although the novella’s protagonist comes to a miserable end, the story itself is amusing. Her inclination is not to please the king but to restore her companions from the sorrow aroused in them by the previous novella; she is ‘‘disposta a dovere alquanto recrear loro’’ (more inclined to amuse them) (4.2.4; my italics). Precisely because she finds them ‘‘pieni di compassione per la morte di Ghismunda,’’ she hopes that her story will have the effect of enlivening them: ‘‘forse con risa e con piacer rilevare’’ (perhaps I can restore your spirits a little by persuading you to laugh and be merry) (4.2.7). Telling the tragic tales of Day 4 has moved the brigata to pity; as Filostrato remarks (with respect to himself, but the comment seems applicable to all), the effect of the stories is to allow the dew of compassion to put out the fire within (he praises Fiammetta’s novella, and exhorts Pampinea to tell a similar one, because ‘‘senza dubbio alcuna rugiada cadere sopra il mio fuoco comincero` a sentire’’ [I shall doubtless begin to feel one or two dewdrops descend on the fire that rages


within me] [4.2.3]). We may assume that a story that so moves Filostrato will have an even greater impact on his comrades, since Filostrato is more immune to compassion than the others, assuming a ‘‘rigido viso’’ (stern visage) (4.2.2) at the end of the first novella while the ladies weep, and showing ‘‘nulla compassion’’ (no compassion) (4.7.2) to Andreuola. If the stories of Day 4 are intended to elicit compassion and thereby, as Fiammetta remarks, to temper the brigata’s gaiety (‘‘Forse per temperare alquanto la letizia avuta li giorni passati l’ha fatto’’ [Perhaps he has done it in order to temper in some degree the gaiety of the previous days] [4.1.2]), Pampinea, as chief executrix of that gaiety, is concerned lest the cathartic effect of Day 4 be too pronounced. The words she uses to counteract Filostrato— recreare, rilevare—are references to the brigata’s primary mission. Dioneo’s story, 4.10, picks up on Pampinea’s concern and marks the shift from a ‘‘cosı` dolorosa material’’ (so sorrowful topic) to one that is ‘‘alquanto piu` lieta e migliore’’ (a better and rather more agreeable theme) (4.10.3). The happier materia introduced by Dioneo, the only other member of the brigata who, like Pampinea, has the stature and authority to counter Filostrato, will be developed on the following Day, which, as the mirror image of Day 4, rewards lovers with a happy ending. While Day 4 elicits compassion from the members of the brigata, Day 5 takes compassion on them; this transition is underlined by the narrator himself, who remarks that, whereas the first stories of Day 4 had saddened the ladies, Dioneo’s has made them laugh, and restored their spirits: ‘‘questa ultima di Dioneo le fece ben tanto ridere . . . che esse si poterono della compassione avuta dell’altre ristorare’’ (this last one of Dioneo’s caused so much merriment . . . that it restored them from the compassion engendered by the others) (4.Concl.1; my italics). The role of the tragic tales as generators of compassion is thus underscored at the Day’s end. The recovery of compassione is a necessary step in the brigata’s journey back to their starting-point, but it is also a step which must be superseded, placed into proper perspective with respect to their ultimate goal as stated by the author above: ristorare (restoration). Renewed in the basic human faculties of ingegno and compassione, they must now be prepared more specifically for the return to Florence and reality. Day 6 marks the new beginning, and is not coincidentally therefore likened by the author to Day 1. Critics have noted similarities between the two Days, pointing to thematic parallels: Day 6, like Day 1, stresses reversal through repartee.10 A marker of the link existing


between the two Days is Filomena’s verbatim repetition, in the first story of Day 6, of Pampinea’s words from the last story of Day 1:11 both ladies agree that brief witticisms, ‘‘leggiadri motti,’’ are to all pleasant discourse ‘‘come ne’ lucidi sereni sono le stelle ornamento del cielo e nella primavera i fiori ne’ verdi prati’’ (just as the sky . . . is bejewelled with stars on cloudless nights, and the verdant fields are embellished with flowers in the spring) (1.10.3 and 6.1.2). Nor can this repetition be considered a simple authorial lapse, since Filomena explicitly calls attention to the fact that she is treading on familiar textual territory: ‘‘Ma per cio` che gia` sopra questa materia assai da Pampinea fu detto, piu` oltre non intendo di dirne’’ (Since Pampinea has already spoken at some length on the subject, I do not propose to elaborate further upon it) (6.1.4). Filomena’s prologue therefore constitutes a deliberate link between 1.10 and 6.1, implying that Day 6 picks up where Day 1 leaves off.12 Even more important is the Introduction to Day 6, which exactly parallels in its function its counterpart in Day 1: as the Introduction to the First Day (which is not, technically, a general introduction, but the preface to a particular Day) starts the brigata moving away from Florence, so the Introduction to the Sixth Day starts them moving back again. The preface to Day 6 is therefore marked by an event which is, as the narrator takes care to point out, unique in the Decameron’s frame: ‘‘avvenne cosa che ancora adivenuta non v’era’’ (something happened which had never happened before) (6.Intro.4). He is referring to the quarrel among the servants, an outbreak that erupts into the staid world of the frame characters with profound consequences. Licisca, a maid, maintains that women do not go to their wedding-beds virgins; Dioneo not only supports her contention but will later decide to use her observation in formulating the topic of his Day, thus allowing the world of the servants to have direct repercussions on that of their masters.13 If Licisca operates as a kind of reality principle, whose function it is to introduce aperture where there was closure, reversing the brigata’s isolationism and turning them back toward Florence, her effect should be felt at once, even before her argument inspires the theme for the following Day. And, indeed, there are immediate indications of a significant shift. Whereas the stories of the previous five Days have ranged geographically from Babylon and Alexandria to London and Paris, those of Day 6 are situated in Tuscany, for the most part in Florence.14 The only novelle not explicitly located in or around the Tuscan capital are story 7, which takes place in Prato; story 8, whose


location is unspecified; and—in the ultimate Boccaccesque figure for homecoming—story 10, which is located in Certaldo, Boccaccio’s birthplace. But the most dramatic indication of a change is in 6.3, where Dioneo’s rule is broken, and the plague is allowed to enter the world of the stories for the first time in the Decameron. In presenting the protagonist of her story, Lauretta inserts a subordinate clause of great importance, specifying that she was a young woman killed by the plague, ‘‘la quale questa pistolenzia presente ci ha tolta’’ (who this current plague took from us) (6.3.8). Because they are set in Florence, the stories of Day 6 involve characters whose lives and histories are known to the brigata, with the result that the plague—and reality— must finally intrude.15 Nor is this insertion of an alien element into the narrative accomplished casually. The deliberateness of Boccaccio’s reference to the ‘‘pistolenzia presente’’ in the third novella is evidenced by the Conclusion to this Day, where Dioneo himself, the original drafter of their isolationism, invokes the ‘‘perversita` di questa stagione’’ (the perversity of the times we live in) (6.Concl.9) as an inducement to the ladies to comply with his risque´ theme for Day 7.16 Ready now for immersion into life at its most real, a vicarious dip into the complete amorality of existence, the brigata tells the coarse, and at times brutal, stories of Days 7, 8, and 9. Dioneo, who as early as the Conclusion to Day 5 had foreshadowed the change in tone of the second half of the Decameron, attempting to sing bawdy popular songs instead of the courtly material favored by the ladies, rules Day 7. The Day’s theme is provided by Licisca, who has helped to dispel the courtly atmosphere further by insisting that ‘‘messer Mazza’’ entered ‘‘Monte Nero’’ not ‘‘per forza e con ispargimento di sangue,’’ but ‘‘paceficamente e con gran piacer di quei d’entro’’ (Sir Club entered Castle Dusk, not by force and with shedding of blood, but with the greatest of ease and to the general pleasure of the garrison) (6.Intro.8). Not surprisingly, therefore, on this Day the floodgates of sexuality are opened. One could trace a crescendo in sexual explicitness, beginning with Peronella in 7.2, continuing through the scholar’s reaction to the widow’s nudity (8.7), and culminating in Day 9’s final novella, in which Father Gianni attempts to transform his neighbor’s wife into a mare. Although (as Dioneo had foreseen while defending his topic) the brigata’s own behavior remains circumspect, a gradual relaxation overcomes them during these Days; the stories, not for nothing the Decameron’s most concentrated tribute to the fabliaux, mark the high point of the brigata’s verbal indecency. Another factor


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stressing the turn toward reality is the continued insistence on Florence. In the opening story of Day 7, Santa Maria Novella is mentioned for the first time since the brigata met there in the Introduction to Day 1. The church, originally the scene of their departure, thereafter appears only in the half of the Decameron devoted to their return: after serving as headquarters for the cuckolded laud-singer Gianni Lotteringhi (7.1.4), it is mentioned twice as a rendezvous in the Rabelaisian course of Maestro Simone’s induction into Florentine life (8.9.81 and 93). Finally, Santa Maria Novella figures in the final sentence of the Conclusion to the last Day, to mark the end of the cycle that was initiated within it:17 E come il nuovo giorno apparve, levati, avendo gia` il siniscalco via ogni lor cosa mandata, dietro alla guida del discrete re verso Firenze si ritornarono; e i tre giovani, lasciate le sette donne in Santa Maria Novella, donde con loro partiti s’erano, da esse accommiatatosi, a’ loro altri piaceri attesero, e esse, quando tempo lor parve, se ne tornarono alle lor case. (10.Concl.16; my italics) Next morning they arose at the crack of dawn, by which time all their baggage had been sent on ahead by the steward, and with their wise king leading the way they returned to Florence. Having taken their leave of the seven young ladies in Santa Maria Novella, whence they had all set out together, the three young men went off in search of other diversions; and in due course the ladies returned to their homes.

Another marker of the turn toward reality/Florentinity is the emergence of a local folk hero, Calandrino, and of a group of characters, all Florentines, who recur from story to story. Kinship and friendship bonds begin to dominate the novelle: Nello, who in 9.3 is presented as a friend of Bruno and Buffalmacco, in 9.5 turns out to be related to Calandrino’s wife, Tessa. The incidence of characters who appear in more than one story is high: besides Bruno, Buffalmacco, Calandrino, and Tessa, there are also Nello, Maestro Simone, and Maso del Saggio, who like Calandrino becomes the center of his own cycle of novelle. These developments are reflected in an overt intratextuality: the brigata becomes extremely concerned with referring one story to another, making links between the novelle, and between characters in the novelle, explicit. One story thus leads to another, as Filomena explains: ‘‘come Filostrato fu dal nome di Maso tirato a dover dire la novella la quale da lui udita avete, cosı` ne´ piu` ne´ men son tirata io da quello di Calandrino e de’ compagni suoi a dirne un’altra di


loro’’ (just as Filostrato was prompted to tell you the previous tale by hearing the name of Maso, in precisely the same way I, too, have been prompted by hearing the names of Calandrino and his companions to tell you another) (8.6.3). Because of their common urban setting, these novelle are particularly interchangeable: Filostrato announces, in the beginning of 8.5, that he is discarding the story he had intended to tell in order to tell one about Maso del Saggio, prompted by Elissa’s previous tale about Maso (8.3); when Filostrato later decides, on Day 9, to return to the novella he had discarded on Day 8, it turns out to be a Calandrino story (9.3). Not only are the members of the brigata preoccupied with establishing relations between their stories, but the novelle themselves develop a memory, articulated by the characters within them: in the second Calandrino story, 8.6, Bruno and Buffalmacco bludgeon their friend into surrendering his capons, recalling that he had already fooled them once, on the occasion of their search for the heliotrope in the first Calandrino story, 8.3; in 9.5 Nello stirs up Tessa against her husband by reminding her, too, of the events recounted in 8.3, which for her took the form of an undeserved beating. All of these narrative devices underscore the basic fact that the brigata is now, in narrative terms, on home ground. ‘‘Io non so se voi vi conosceste Talano d’Imolese’’ (I don’t know whether you were ever acquainted with Talano d’Imolese), says Pampinea in her preface to 9.7, thus underlining the possibility and likelihood that her companions might personally know her neighbor, the protagonist of her story. This sense of a shared social identity pervading Days 7–9 is further evidenced by the stories which refer to Florentines known not only to contemporaries, like Calandrino, but also to posterity. Here, too, Day 6 initiates the trend: 6.2, where Cisti is introduced as ‘‘nostro cittadino’’ (our citizen) (3), contains Geri Spina, one of the leaders of the Black Guelphs in Florence circa 1300; Giotto is present in 6.5, returning from his property in the Mugello region to Florence; Guido Cavalcanti is the hero of 6.9. The other stories replete with famous Tuscans are both in Day 9, which—although technically an open Day—is in fact a continuation, thematically, of Days 7 and 8. Novella 9.4 contains the Sienese poet Cecco Angiolieri, while 9.8 is perhaps the most quintessentially municipal story of the Decameron, crowded with figures from the Comedy, the text which more than any other has immortalized Florentines, albeit often negatively: it contains the glutton Ciacco, the wrathful Filippo Argenti, as well as the leaders of both the White


and the Black factions, respectively Vieri de’ Cerchi and Corso Donati.18 Ciacco’s existence, unlike Calandrino’s, is thus confirmed by an extra layer of textuality, provided by Dante. Moreover, the narrative employs various techniques to embed these real people into the flux of real—municipal—life. Although 9.4 recounts the deception played by Cecco Fortarrigo on Cecco Angiolieri, the story ends by preparing us for another story, not presently forthcoming, that of Angiolieri’s later reprisals. This teasing conclusion has the effect of opening up the text to the ‘‘real life’’ of the characters: ‘‘E cosı` la malizia del Fortarrigo turbo` il buono avviso dell’Angiulieri, quantunque da lui non fosse a luogo e a tempo lasciata impunita’’ (Although Fortarrigo’s cunning upset the well-laid plans of Angiulieri on this occasion, he did not go unpunished . . . when a suitable time and place presented themselves) (25). Likewise, 9.8 ends by letting us know that Biondello took care never to trick Ciacco again, thereby inserting the story into a chain of events operating outside of, and independently of, the text. All of these developments, by creating an atmosphere of dense municipality in which the brigata is seen to participate, belong to the thematics of the return. For all that the stories of Days 7, 8, and 9 are remembered primarily as amusing beffe, there is a serious theme as well, best stated by the topic of Day 7, where the wives are motivated to trick their husbands ‘‘per salvamento di loro’’ (for self-preservation). Self-preservation is the name of the game, first through the pronta risposta—the word—in Day 6, and then through the practical joke or beffa—the deed—in Days 7–9. Only when the brigata is fully coached in the lessons of survival does it complete its turn toward Florence, with Day 10, which shows men and women practicing generosity and renunciation, the very social virtues required for the brigata’s reintegration into society. The amoral vagaries of Days 7, 8, and 9—summed up in the ultimate Dionean story, 9.10—come to an abrupt halt when Panfilo announces the topic for Day 10. Panfilo proposes the subject of Day 10 with an explicitly exemplary goal. In the Conclusion to Day 9, Panfilo announces that the discussion of munificent and liberal deeds will kindle in the members of the brigata a desire to emulate such behavior in their own actions: ‘‘Queste cose e dicendo e faccendo senza alcun dubbio gli animi vostri ben disposti a valorosamente adoperare accendera`’’ (The telling and hearing of such things will assuredly fill you with a burning desire, well disposed as you already are in spirit, to comport yourselves valorously)


(9.Concl.5). And what must the brigata seek to incorporate into their lives? From the fourth novella, in which Messer Gentile returns the lady he has raised from the dead to her husband, to the eighth, in which Gisippo gives Sofronia to Tito, all the stories of Day 10 are concerned with sexual renunciation; thus, the central portion of the Day presents generosity in a particularly aggravated form. Within this kernel of novelle, moreover, the key stories are numbers 6 and 7, in which we witness the renunciation not of commoners but of kings, that is, of those responsible for the well-being of the social order. Especially important is the story of King Charles the Old, who forgoes the delightful Ghibelline sisters, Ginevra and Isotta. In setting the king on the right path, his friend advises him that true glory lies less in the ability to overcome one’s enemies than in the ability to overcome oneself, especially when one is in the position of setting an example for others: ‘‘Io vi ricordo, re, che grandissima gloria v’e` aver vinto Manfredi, ma molto maggiore e` se medesimo vincere; e per cio` voi, che avete gli altri a correggere, vincete voi medesimo e questo appetito raffrenate’’ (Let me remind you, my lord, that you covered yourself with glory by conquering Manfred . . . but it is far more glorious to conquer oneself. And therefore, as you have to govern others, conquer these feelings of yours, curb this wanton desire) (10.6.32; my italics). This principle is echoed verbatim by the narrator, Fiammetta, who, in the novella’s conclusion, reemphasizes the connection between self-discipline and social responsibility: ‘‘Cosı` adunque il magnifico re opero`, il nobile cavaliere altamente premiando, l’amate giovinette laudevolmente onorando e se medesmo fortemente vincendo’’ (Thus then did this magnificent king comport himself, richly rewarding the noble knight, commendably honouring the girls he loved, and firmly conquering his own feelings) (10.6.36; my italics). The following story, 10.7, reconfirms the principle by reversing the plot structure: Lisa, the apothecary’s daughter, falls in love with King Peter of Aragon, who responds not by taking advantage of her but by arranging her marriage to a young nobleman. Day 10 not only advocates self-discipline for the characters in its stories, but the Day constitutes as well a form of self-discipline for the brigata telling the stories. In justifying his return to a defined theme for Day 10, Panfilo comments on the invigorating effect of the narrative freedom allowed by his predecessor: ‘‘la discrezion d’Emilia, nostra reina stata questo giorno, per dare alcun riposo alle vostre forze arbitrio vi die` di ragionare cio` che piu` vi piacesse’’ (our queen of today,


Emilia, prudently left you at liberty to speak on whatever subject you most liked, so that you might rest your faculties) (9.Concl.4; my italics). The result of the open Day is that now, rested and refreshed, they are able to return to the ‘‘accustomed law’’: ‘‘per che, gia` riposati essendo, giudico che sia bene il ritornare alla legge usata’’ (now that you are refreshed, I consider that we should revert to our customary rule) (9.Concl.4; my italics). Indeed, the very act of telling stories is itself presented as a form of discipline from the beginning of the Decameron; although amusing, novellare is nonetheless a restraint, a limitation imposed on the total self-indulgence that would otherwise engulf the brigata. Thus, Pampinea tells her companions that, if they do not care for her suggestion, they should amuse themselves however they please, ‘‘e dove non vi piacesse, ciascuno infino all’ora del vespro quello faccia che piu` gli piace’’ (if you disagree with my suggestion, let us all go and occupy our time in whatever way we please until the hour of vespers) (1.Intro.112), using a variant of the expression later adopted for the theme of the two free Days (where they discuss ‘‘quello che piu` aggrada a ciascheduno’’ in Day 1 and ‘‘secondo che gli piace e di quello che piu` gli agrada’’ in Day 9), an expression which recurs throughout the Decameron: whenever the brigata is not telling stories, they are doing ‘‘whatever they please.’’ Within this context—whereby the ordered telling of a story, its form, imposes a ‘‘law’’ which justifies its content, whatever it may be—Day 10 can be viewed as exacting a more contentually rigorous application. In fact, Day 10 imposes a law with respect to all the rest of the Decameron, and not only, as Panfilo says, with respect to Day 9; or rather, Day 9, described by Emilia as affording the opportunity ‘‘di vagare alquanto e vagando riprender forze a rientrar sotto il giogo’’ (to wander at large for a while, and in so doing recover the strength for returning once again beneath the yoke) (8.Concl.4), stands paradigmatically for all the previous Days. While usually the novelle have encouraged the following of one’s instincts and have exposed the pathology of repression—as, for instance, in Tancredi’s incestuous relationship with his daughter in 4.1—in Day 10 the positive aspects of repression are stressed. While sexual renunciation has previously been viewed negatively—as, for instance, in 8.7 where the scholar deflects his carnal desires to exasperate his appetite for vengeance—Day 10 presents renunciation as a socializing force, required for the preservation of a civilized society. In a larger sense, then, the riposo has been all the Decameron, and the legge usata is civilization, society, Florence.


The Decameron could be pictured as a wheel—Fortune’s wheel, the wheel of life—on which the brigata turns, coming back transformed to the point of departure. In Days 1 through 5 they move steadily away from the city as they are renewed in ingegno and compassione, that is, intellectually and ethically. The outward turn of the wheel is completed with their arrival at the Valley of the Ladies in the Conclusion to Day 6. Geographically, they are now at their farthest remove from the city. Here the ladies relax to an unparalleled degree, taking off their clothes for a swim (an action anticipated at the end of Day 1, where, however, they merely step barefoot and with naked arms into the water): ‘‘tutte e sette si spogliarono e entrarono in esso, il quale non altramenti li lor corpi candidi nascondeva che farebbe una vermiglia rosa un sottil vetro’’ (all seven of them undressed and took to the water, which concealed their chaste, white bodies no better than a thin sheet of glass would conceal a pink rose) (6.Concl.30). The Valle delle Donne is the Decameron’s locus amoenus par excellence, an even more perfect conflation of the natural with the artificial than the garden they reach at the beginning of the Day 3.19 Here, where the ladies finally unveil their ‘‘corpi candidi,’’ the brigata convenes to tell the sensual stories of Day 7.20 However, just as they locate the epitome of the ideal, the place most distanced from reality, the wheel reaches its zenith and begins its inevitable descent, back toward Florence and back toward reality. Diagramming this wheel, one notes that there are four Days which are equidistant from and parallel to each other: Days 1, 4, 7, and 10 are all separated by two intervening Days (see chart). In other words, these Days seem to initiate precisely marked legs of the brigata’s spiritual journey, a hypothesis which is supported by the fact that the rulers of these Days are the four characters whose physiognomies are most clearly delineated: Pampinea, Filostrato, Dioneo, and Panfilo. The Decameron depicts human beings in a moment of crisis; the brigata’s handling of this crisis can serve as a model for human deportment, and for the sage deployment of the various facets of our natures. First, Pampinea takes over, and there is an attempt to impose unity where there was fragmentation: the structure of the frame, the order of art. The second stage is marked by the governance of Filostrato, the despairing defeatist, under whose aegis the brigata is forced to dwell again on the tragic aspect of existence, to readmit the possibility of death (a very imminent possibility, we recall, since there is no indication that the brigata’s return to Florence coincides with the end of the plague). Dioneo, the life-affirmer, initiates the third


major stage and it is on this leg of their journey that the plague is reintegrated into the brigata’s lives and their cure is pronounced complete. Death holds no more power over them; were anyone to witness their morning walk through the forest, comments the author in the Introduction to Day 9, he would be forced to say ‘‘O costor non saranno dalla morte vinti o ella gli uccidera` lieti’’ (Either these people will not be vanquished by death, or they will welcome it with joy) (9.Intro.4).21 They bend their thoughts now for the first time to the future, as Panfilo exhorts them to perpetuate their lives in laudable deeds: ‘‘che la vita nostra, che altro che brieve esser non puo` nel mortal corpo, si perpetuera` nella laudevole fama’’ (thus our lives, which cannot be other than brief in these our mortal bodies, will be preserved by the fame of our achievements) (9.Concl.5). In the opening to Day 10 we find them ‘‘molte cose della loro futura vita insieme parlando e dicendo e rispondendo’’ (talking about the lives they intended to lead in the future, and answering each other’s questions) (10.Intro.3; my italics). As Dioneo balances Filostrato and life balances death (Day 7 paralleling Day 4), so Panfilo—the only one of the male frame characters never to make even verbal assaults on the propriety of the ladies— completes Pampinea (Day 10 paralleling Day 1), ensuring that the order she institutes will be grounded in a clearly defined secular morality. Some conclusions may be drawn also regarding the alliances of the lesser frame characters. Fiammetta, the only member of the brigata to be ‘‘physically’’ described, is depicted in strict accordance with the prevailing literary and amatory codes, and seems to represent a courtly and artistic ideal. She is the one of the company best able, says Filostrato, to restore the spirits of the ladies after the bitterness of Day 4, the ‘‘aspra giornata d’oggi’’ (4.Concl.3; immediately after being thus distinguished from her peers, Fiammetta is further isolated by means of the unique descriptio). Dioneo, who is ‘‘life’’ to Filostrato’s ‘‘death,’’ is also the ‘‘real’’ to Fiammetta’s ‘‘ideal’’; the two play music together before the storytelling of Day 1 begins, thus prefiguring the contamination of reality with ideality throughout the Decameron, and they sing a courtly song derived from the thirteenth-century French poem La Chastelaine de Vergi in the Conclusion to Day 3. It is therefore interesting that in the Introduction to Day 6, a moment whose importance to the text cannot be stressed enough, Dioneo should sing not with Fiammetta but with Lauretta. Their material is still courtly and literary; in fact, they sing of Troilus and Criseida (one wonders if the


242

location of such tragic material immediately before Licisca’s comic entrance is not a means of further defusing Filostrato, whose name is the doomed Troilo’s sobriquet in Boccaccio’s early text, Filostrato). Dioneo’s shift in companions is further emphasized by the fact that Fiammetta sings alone in the Conclusion to Day 6. Dioneo will not sing with her again until after the crucial moment has passed, in the Conclusion to Day 7, where the parallel between the couples DioneoLauretta and Dioneo-Fiammetta is made explicit by the fact that the subject is again drawn from one of the author’s own earlier works, in this case the Teseida. Why, then, does Dioneo choose Lauretta in the Introduction to Day 6? Lauretta, it turns out, is associated with Dioneo and reality in a number of ways: she anticipates his reference to the plague in the Conclusion to Day 6 by being the first to mention it, in 6.3; she is chosen by him as the queen of Day 8, an opportunity she uses to confirm Dioneo’s approach to storytelling, enlarging his topic from the tricks played by wives on their husbands to the tricks which ‘‘tutto il giorno o donna a uomo o uomo a donna o l’uno uomo all’altro si fanno’’ (people in general, men and women alike, are forever playing upon one another)—that is, her topic is, as her language itself makes clear, the open-ended bedlam and chaos of unexpurgated life.22 If Lauretta is associated with Dioneo, Elissa is linked with Filostrato. She, too, is connected by her name to tragic love and to death: as Filostrato is related to Troilus, so is Elissa to Dido, whose alternate name she bears. Elissa’s song, like Filostrato’s, tells of unhappy, indeed cruel, love; she is the only other one of the frame characters to be asked, like Filostrato, to sing her song on the Day she rules (Fiammetta asks Filostrato to sing on his own Day so as to disable him from extending his morbid influence beyond it, ‘‘accio` che piu` giorni che questo non sien turbati de’ tuoi infortunii’’ [so that no day other than this will be blighted by your woes] [4.Concl.9]). Most importantly, Elissa is at odds with Dioneo, as a number of critics have noticed.23 She is the queen whose composure he upsets by attempting to introduce vulgar and plebeian material into the brigata’s courtly repertoire. Her rebuke in the Conclusion to Day 5 constitutes the severest confrontation between members of the brigata in the course of the frame story. She is ‘‘un poco turbata,’’ and warns him to desist lest he discover ‘‘come io mi so adirare’’ (what it means to provoke my anger)


(5.Concl.14); she also threatens Licisca with a whipping in the Introduction to Day 6. Finally, in the Conclusion to that Day, after Licisca’s presence has been registered and Dioneo has announced that the maid has inspired him with a new topic (in what is surely the Decameron’s most explicit application of the author’s dictum from the Introduction to Day 4, that ‘‘le Muse son donne’’ [35]), and after the ladies have surreptitiously sneaked away to the Valle delle Donne, prompting Dioneo to ask them if they are doing first in their deeds what they will later recount in words, thus associating the ladies of the brigata with the independent adulteresses of Day 7—after all this has happened to change the tone of the Decameron, Elissa sings her unhappy song, which she follows with ‘‘un sospiro assai pietoso’’ (a most pathetic sigh) (6.Concl.47). But the tide has definitively turned, a fact marked by the adversative ‘‘Ma’’ and Dioneo’s peremptory reaction: ‘‘Ma il re, che in buona tempera era, fatto chiamar Tindaro, gli comando` che fuori traesse la sua cornamusa, al suono della quale esso fece fare molte danze’’ (The king, however, who was in good mettle, sent for Tindaro and ordered him to bring out his cornemuse, to the strains of which he caused several reels to be danced) (6.Concl.48; my italics). Dioneo, who is in a good mood, refuses to allow the company’s spirits to be dampened by Elissa’s song, and so he calls out Tindaro, the same servant who had that morning with Licisca disrupted their peace, and whose bagpipes will entertain them again under Lauretta’s auspices, in the Conclusion to Day 7. We remember that the brigata’s key rule for their new life was that no news, ‘‘niuna novella,’’ may penetrate to them from outside, ‘‘di fuori.’’ But, although they take refuge in an ideal world, the brigata passes its time telling stories that are for the most part taken from the real world. In other words, the novelle—or news—from the real world of Florence are replaced by the novelle—or stories—of the Decameron. Thus, the Decameron’s most perfected locus amoenus, the Valley of the Ladies, is the scene for the telling of some of its least perfect tales; thus, the Proem’s lovesick ladies are offered not an opportunity to withdraw from love, but the chance to engage in it vicariously. Connected to this insistence on engagement is the author’s disapproval, also registered in the Introduction to Day 1, of living each day with the fear of death. Boccaccio sees indifference to death not as wise and stoic resignation but, ultimately, as indifference to life:


anzi tutti, quasi quel giorno nel quale si vedevano esser venuti la morte aspettassero, non d’aiutare i futuri frutti delle bestie e delle terre e delle loro passate fatiche ma di consumare quegli che si trovavano presenti si sforzavano con ogni ingegno. (1.Intro.44) Moreover they all behaved as though each day was to be their last, and far from making provision for the future by tilling their lands, tending their flocks, and adding to their previous labours, they tried in every way they could think of to squander the assets already in their possession.

Here we see the psychological ills brought about by the plague, which has succeeded in making the feeblest minds accept death in a way previously not attained by the wise, and has therefore forced an entire populace to become ‘‘scorti e non curanti’’ (aware and not caring) (41), more knowledgeable than is good for them. These ills— characterized by a nonchalance toward the ‘‘futuri frutti’’ and a mad consumption of the ‘‘presenti’’—result in a kind of spiritual sickness, from which the brigata is cured: hence their talk of the future, their freedom from indifference and from the paralysis of the non curanti. They are freed, however, by precisely what they initially reject, by the novelle, which become increasingly less fabulous and increasingly more newsworthy as the arc of the brigata’s journey declines toward its end, until in Day 10 the two threads are interwoven and the magical is incorporated into the real, which is revealed to possess a luster the plague had all but obliterated: Messer Gentile rescues his beloved, a new Eurydice, in Bologna; a spring garden blossoms in the dead of winter, in the province of Friuli; Messer Torello is whisked home on Saladin’s bed, to Pavia; Griselda’s extraordinary trials take place in ordinary Saluzzo. The point of the novelle, which are not ‘‘stories’’ but ‘‘news,’’ carriers of the real, is what the ladies of the Proem knew all along—that life is the only antidote for life.

chapter 12

Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca . . . Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis

I

n this essay I will consider the great editions and commentaries of Dante’s rime that have been produced in the last century: the editions with commentary of Michele Barbi and Gianfranco Contini, the commentary of Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, and the edition of Domenico De Robertis. The result of my undertaking a commentary of the rime for the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli,1 this paper tracks an experience that has opened up intellectual and cultural vistas that extend far beyond the philological domain to which it might have seemed limited. As I immersed myself in the editorial history of the rime, I found myself (as someone who claims no expertise as a philologist or an editor) fascinated by the cultural history embedded in the editorial history. This metacritical meditation has therefore a double focus. I analyze the contribution of each of these editions and commentaries in the complicated history of our reception of Dante’s rime. I also suggest that a discourse has built up around the enterprise of editing the rime—signaled by terms like raccogliere, organico, frammento, estravaganti2—that has become freighted with the emotional value that the binary raccogliere versus frammento has assumed over centuries within the Italian imaginary. An enterprise that might seem like a sluggish philological backwater is quickened and made treacherous by the mighty current of Italian identity-formation and cultural history. Its literary giants peculiarly mark Italian identity—and each of the tre corone plays a part in this story. Indeed, the significance of this particular editorial history is highlighted by the way it implicates right from the start, as we shall see, not only Dante but also Boccaccio and Petrarch. The role of literary culture in overall Italian culture has


traditionally been a powerful one: the great cultural debate that resulted in the choice of Tuscan as the national language was a literary debate; by the same token, Italian nationalism was in part constructed on the shoulders of Dante and other literary icons, as all the statues and street-names attest. The ideological and cultural pressures that beset any philological enterprise, given the connection to canonformation, are supremely present in filologia dantesca, because of the enormous cultural investment in Dante’s status as a national icon. The Dante monuments whose cultural significance I seek to interpret here are not the monuments in stone, but rather the great editions of the rime that were produced along the arc of the twentieth century in an editorial enterprise that recently both culminated and concluded with the publication of Domenico De Robertis’s five-volume—truly monumental—undertaking.3 Each of these great editions and/or commentaries of Dante’s lyrics is magisterial in its own way. Michele Barbi’s 1921 edition for the Societa` Dantesca Italiana forms the textual nucleus of the posthumous edition with commentary published by the two disciples he chose to complete his work, Francesco Maggini and Vincenzo Pernicone.4 Working with Barbi’s notes and integrating his material, both published and unpublished, with their own, Maggini and Pernicone gathered the fruits of Barbi’s long philological and historical labors on the Rime into two volumes: Barbi-Maggini, Rime della ‘‘Vita Nuova’’ e della giovinezza, 1956, and Barbi-Pernicone, Rime della maturita` e dell’esilio, 1969.5 In the meantime, Gianfranco Contini’s edition and commentary of the Rime, noted for the pithiness and elegance of its formulations, was published first in 1939, then in revised and expanded form in 1946, with a second revised edition in 1965.6 In 1967 the British scholars Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde published their translation and commentary, exceptionally useful for its comprehensiveness and for the lucidity of the historical portrait that emerges of the early Italian lyric schools.7 Finally, the edition by De Robertis that came out in 2002, and that Contini announced as long ago as his 1965 ‘‘Postilla del curatore’’ (xxv), has replaced Barbi’s as the authorized edition of the Rime. The editorial history of Dante’s lyrics is remarkably complex, and it is so for structural reasons. Because Dante viewed his lyrics, with the eventual exception of the ones he included in the Vita nuova and the Convivio, as independent, free-standing texts rather than as parts of a whole, the editorial tradition has to be tackled poem by poem. As a

Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History 247

result of not belonging to a single work, in other words, the rime pose a daunting editorial challenge: the dispersion of the poems requires the editor to deal with a very high number of manuscripts,8 and to follow individual poems and groups of poems through anthologies prepared by copyists. As Contini explains in the ‘‘Nota al testo’’ to his edition, ‘‘la storia della tradizione di quelle che chiamammo le ‘estravaganti’ dantesche si converte nello studio comparativo degli antichi canzonieri e nell’esame genetico della varia lectio delle singole liriche’’ (284).9 Pernicone, who in turn received the baton from Barbi, entrusted this massive task of reconstructing the manuscript tradition for each poem to De Robertis; De Robertis’s edition thus stands as a direct geneological descendant of Barbi’s and technically completes the task that Barbi envisioned.10 The most important editor/copyist in the editorial history of Dante’s rime is Dante himself, who copied some poems but not others into the Vita nuova and Convivio. His choices reverberate down through the editorial history—and literary history—of these poems. Indeed, as a result of the historical impact of Dante’s decisions, in many ways this essay’s true topic will turn out to be the manifold effects of this self-intervention, the historical compensations and distortions that developed in response to Dante’s decision to choose some of his poems for inclusion in new texts that will have their own editorial traditions, their own receptions, and their own complex literary genealogies. With respect to literary history, I am thinking in particular of the line that leads from the Vita nuova to Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, a genealogy that seems, on the one hand, to exclude the rime but that, on the other, will have a direct bearing on the assumptions of the rime’s editors. As we shall see, of all the choices that an editor of Dante’s lyrics is obliged to make, none reveals more about his or her hermeneutic assumptions—none has greater ideological significance—than the choice of what to do with the poems of the Vita nuova. The second most important editor/copyist in the editorial history of the rime is Boccaccio. Boccaccio copied fifteen of Dante’s canzoni in Toledano 104.6, a codex which includes his first redaction of the Vita di Dante and in which he also copied the Vita nuova and Commedia. He copied the same fifteen canzoni, in the same order, in Chigiano L. V. 176, where he copied also his Vita di Dante, Dante’s Vita nuova, Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega, his poem to Petrarch Ytalie iam


certus honos, and the early form of Petrarch’s authorially collected lyrics, titled Fragmentorum liber, known as the ‘‘Chigiano form.’’ Boccaccio in this way fashioned a group of Dante’s lyric poems, all canzoni, which became, in effect, a canon. These fifteen poems, which Boccaccio labels ‘‘le canzoni distese di Dante,’’ are transcribed by him in the following order:11 Cosı` nel mio parlar vogli’esser aspro Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete Amor che nella mente mi ragiona Le dolci rime d’amor ch’io solea Amor che movi tua vertu` dal cielo Io sento sı` d’Amor la gran possanza Al poco giorno ed al gran cerchio d’ombra Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna Io son venuto al punto della rota E’ m’incresce di me sı` duramente Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato La dispietata mente che pur mira Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute Doglia mi reca nello core ardire Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia Subsequent anthologists picked up not only Boccaccio’s choice of these particular fifteen canzoni but also his sequencing, as seen above. We note that Boccaccio’s canzoni distese include the three canzoni of the Convivio, in the order in which they appear in the Convivio, but not the canzoni of the Vita nuova, which he copied separately by virtue of transcribing the entire libello. Of the first print anthologies, the most important is the 1527 volume of the Florentine Giunti brothers, Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani, commonly known as the ‘‘Giuntina.’’12 The Giuntina has exerted its authority both in the textual domain (‘‘Si puo` dire che nulla in ispecie per le rime di Dante e` stato fatto fino ad oggi, anche dal punto di vista testuale, senza tener presente Giunt[ina]’’ writes De Robertis [Introduzione 2:1074]), and with respect to the overarching issue of how to organize the poems. Offering what De Robertis calls ‘‘[l]a prima proposta di sistemazione e d’ordinamento delle rime di Dante’’ (Introduzione 2:1141),13 the Giuntina devotes its first four books to Dante’s lyric output, under the following headings:


Sonetti e canzoni di Dante Alaghieri ne la sua Vita Nuova. Libro primo Sonetti e canzoni di Dante Alaghieri. Libro secondo Canzoni amorose e morali di Dante Alaghieri. Libro terzo Canzoni morali di Dante Alaghieri. Libro quarto As we can see, the Giuntina here adopts a variety of taxonomic criteria, all inconsistently applied. There is a formal criterion, in that two of the four books are restricted to canzoni (traditionally, copyists grouped poems by genre, and according to a hierarchy that began with canzoni, followed by ballate and sonnets). There is also a thematic criterion, given that book 4 purports to contain only moral canzoni (here at the outset are the three canzoni of the Convivio, again in their order of appearance in that text), while book 3 contains ‘‘Canzoni amorose e morali.’’ Most significantly, the author’s own editorial interventions constitute a basis for classification, for book 1 segregates the poems that Dante had selected for the Vita nuova, reprinting the thirty-one canzoni, sonnets, and ballate of the Vita nuova in the order in which Dante places them in the libello, but without the prose frame. Finally, in that the Vita nuova poems are placed first in the Giuntina’s order and the mature canzoni last, there seems to be a very crude overarching chronological criterion at work as well.14 By the twentieth century the chronological criterion that we see only implicitly in the Giuntina had become the explicit basis for ordering Dante’s poems. Barbi, and after him Contini—for although Contini does not intervene with respect to the actual sequence of the poems, which he copies from Barbi, he frequently comments on what he sees as their ‘‘cronologia ideale’’ (67)—weave the empirical evidence that we possess into a chronological framework provided by Dante’s overall artistic trajectory. Key to achieving this loose chronology was an ever more systematic analysis of the stylistic, rhetorical, and intertextual features of the poems, as first Contini and then Foster and Boyde built on Barbi’s foundational edition. The move toward an ever more empirical approach in these areas of scholarship is evident in Foster and Boyde’s commentary and finds full expression in Patrick Boyde’s use of quantitative tools as a way of understanding the development of Dante’s lyric production in his book Dante’s Style in his Lyric Poetry, published four years after the commentary he did in tandem with Kenelm Foster.15 In their commentary, Foster and Boyde press this approach into the service of reconstructing Dante’s artistic


development over time, carefully showing, for instance, how Dante first restricts his vocabulary to forge the stilnovo and then gradually allows it to expand again as he matures beyond the stilnovo. This brief survey reminds us of what is in any case a logical necessity, namely that any editor of Dante’s lyrics is constrained—in the absence of a work constructed by the author—to adopt his or her own principles of construction, in short, to make his or her own choices. In examining the choices of the editors I will be surveying here, I am going to begin with the most recent, De Robertis. As one can immediately grasp by looking at the Tables of Contents in the appendix (see below; I include them because they afford a valuable synoptic view of each edition), De Robertis stands apart in his choices. His edition is truly anomalous with respect to the modern tradition, because he rejects altogether the chronological criterion for order that dominates the great twentieth-century editions. De Robertis instead chooses to follow where possible the traces of the editorial history that he tracked so assiduously in his decades of manuscript review. In other words, he substitutes the history of the transmission of the poems for the history of Dante’s development as a poet. De Robertis outlines the two choices that confront an editor of the rime—the choice of attempting to follow in Dante’s footsteps or the choice of following in the footsteps of previous editors—and he chooses to follow the editors: ‘‘O si traccia, si rintraccia una storia, la storia beninteso del lavoro poetico di Dante, quella che la stessa Vita Nova per la sua parte adombra e che la secolare interpretazione, tra Otto e Novecento, si e` sforzata di perseguire; ovvero si propone una forma, almeno quella che la tradizione, la tradizione del testo delle rime di Dante, ha via via coagulato e sembra autorizzare . . . con la segreta speranza, magari, che la tradizione rispecchi la storia del lavoro del poeta o restituisca (tradisca) un’ipotesi ordinatrice’’ (Introduzione 2:1144).16 De Robertis’s edition thus opts to forgo the attempt to reconstruct ‘‘la storia del lavoro poetico di Dante’’ and to offer us instead ‘‘la tradizione del testo delle rime di Dante’’; at the same time he nurtures the ‘‘segreta speranza’’ that in choosing the latter path he will end up on the former. De Robertis’s hope that the tradition may reflect Dante’s own arrangement of his poems—that it may mirror ‘‘la storia del lavoro del poeta o restituisca (tradisca) un’ipotesi ordinatrice’’ (Introduzione


2:1144)—seems unfounded, given the imbalance between the conservative backwardness of the editorial tradition and the radical adventurism of the man who wrote the poems in question: if, according to Contini’s dictum, ‘‘L’impressione genuina del postero, incontrandosi in Dante, non e` d’imbattersi in un tenace e ben conservato sopravvissuto, ma di raggiungere qualcuno arrivato prima di lui,’’ we can safely say that Dante left the editorial tradition light-years in his wake.17 While a tradition may possibly reflect the will of an author, there are many cases in which it does not (Petrarch is an immediate example who springs to mind);18 certainly, to use the tradition as the ordering principle of this edition is to give it an altogether disproportionate and unmerited importance. In effect, De Robertis has staged a kind of regressive coup d’etat, in which he has handed over Dante’s rime to an editorial tradition known more for its deference—in this case toward Boccaccio—than for its hermeneutic brilliance. The reasons De Robertis gives for his choice are both positive and negative. On the positive side of the ledger, he is proposing a ‘‘philological model’’ of Dante’s rime and vindicating what he calls the rights of the philologist over the rights of the author: ‘‘Se questo vuol dire proporre un modello ‘filologico’ della raccolta delle rime di Dante (contro, s’immagina, l’interpretazione di una pretesa volonta` dantesca, diritti del filologo contro diritti dell’autore), questo e` quanto e` possibile e legittimo fare’’ (Introduzione 2:1198). The negative side of the ledger is related to the positive, in that it, too, involves the rights of philology, narrowly conceived as that which is opposed to interpretation: ‘‘E per contro, ogni razionalizzazione storica analoga a quella proposta dal Barbi, oltre alle possibili (e ormai ampiamente registrate, e attuate) controdeduzioni, include sempre una componente d’interpretazione che nulla ha a che fare con quella di cui la critica testuale non puo` mai fare a meno’’ (Introduzione 2:1155).19 De Robertis is worried about the open-endedness of interpretation. He is concerned that an interpretive ordering on his part would substitute ‘‘interpretazione a interpretazione,’’ thus revealing the free and uncontrollable nature of interpretation: ‘‘Come minimo la nuova serie, sostituendo interpretazione a interpretazione, comporterebbe tavole di concordanza e un rinvio (come per es. nell’edizione FosterBoyde) alla numerazione ossia all’interpretazione precedente’’ (Introduzione 2:1155).20 Noteworthy here is the clear understanding that, absent the author’s numbering, the editor’s numbering or ordering of


the poems constitutes in itself an act of interpretation (‘‘un rinvio . . . alla numerazione ossia all’interpretazione precedente’’). De Robertis’s fear of interpretation and its radical instability takes the form of a preoccupation with the practical complications of numbering and with the need for tables to coordinate any new numbering with Barbi’s old numbering, ‘‘che ha fatto legge dal 1921’’ (Introduzione 2:1155).21 This preoccupation bears very little relation to the reader’s reality. For whereas Barbi’s numbering of the chapters of the Vita nuova, replaced by Guglielmo Gorni in his edition of the libello,22 is in fact difficult to relinquish—for all those who have spent a lifetime accustomed to chapter 19 as the site of Donne ch’avete and chapter 25 as the locus of Dante’s theory of poetry, it requires real effort to ‘‘renumber’’ the text in one’s mind—Barbi’s numbering of the rime does not carry the same weight for the reader: one does not think of Dante’s rime by Barbi’s (or anyone else’s) numbering system. Barbi’s numbers never became shorthand for referring to the rime in the way that occurred with the numbered chapters of the Vita nuova (which were treated as Dante’s). There has never grown up around Dante’s rime the habitual use of numbers—as for instance one refers to canzone 126 of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta—which makes sense, for Petrarch’s numbers are his own, while Barbi’s are merely an editor’s. De Robertis seems unaware, or unwilling to acknowledge, that philology, too, necessarily involves ‘‘una componente d’interpretazione’’ (Introduzione 2:1155). Wanting at all costs to avoid the free flow of interpretation, the indecorous and uncontrollable spectacle of an infinite substitution of ‘‘interpretazione a interpretazione’’ (Introduzione 2:1155), he takes us to a higher ground allegedly free of interpretation: this safe place is constituted by the ‘‘tradizione.’’ Once there he concludes by endorsing a methodological principle for ordering Dante’s rime—the principle of nonchronology—that is in fact as interpretive as the principles he rejects: ‘‘Non e`, in conclusione, proponibile non solo un ordinamento ma una prospettiva di queste rime, delle rime, se non secondo i dati della tradizione, nel caso specifico, di una tradizione, a differenza che per le canzoni, non ordinata’’ (Introduzione 2:1162).23 That ‘‘i dati della tradizione’’ are also interpretive choices is never acknowledged. The logical inconsistencies of De Robertis’s position are apparent in his use of the issue of authorial will: on the one hand, he discredits the attempt to order the poems chronologically by telling us that Dante would not have arranged a collection so, had he made one (and hypothesizes as to which poems Dante would have


excluded from his hypothetical edition [Introduzione 2:1150 ff.]); on the other, he discredits a chronological ordering by suggesting that it serves ‘‘una pretesa volonta` dantesca’’ and views himself as championing ‘‘diritti del filologo contro diritti dell’autore’’ (Introduzione 2:1198). But, in any case, it is not the will of the author that is at stake in attempting to order the poems according to the history of their composition. It is the reader who gains from an ordering of the poems that allows one a window onto Dante’s poetic development. De Robertis puts aside the genuinely editorial impulse to create a poetic history as an interpretive enterprise in the service of understanding the poems, and replaces it with an antiquarian impulse that venerates a different history, the history of the editorial transmission. This is a history that compensates for the disorder bequeathed to us by Dante: it is fixed, it brooks no contradiction, and it admits no interpretive challenge. The ordinamento of the rime that results from this methodological choice is a bizarre grafting of Boccaccio onto the Giuntina. De Robertis’s order begins with the canzoni: first the fifteen canzoni distese copied by Boccaccio, then the canzone not copied by Boccaccio (Lo doloroso amor), then the incipit of the lost canzone mentioned in the De vulgari eloquentia (Trag[g]emi de la mente), and last the trilingual descort that he restores to Dante (Aı¨ faus ris). From what he calls the ‘‘grande prefazio delle canzoni’’ (Introduzione 2:1172), De Robertis proceeds to the sonnets and ballate, which he calls ‘‘le ‘rime sparse’ ’’ (Introduzione 2:1165);24 with this label De Robertis explicitly invokes the incipit of the first sonnet of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, where Petrarch thematizes the fragmentariness of his verse (‘‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono’’). In his order De Robertis preserves the Giuntina’s segregation by genre, while reversing the Giuntina’s sequence of genres: the Giuntina’s second book consists mainly of sonnets and ballate, De Robertis’s ‘‘rime sparse,’’ while its books 3 and 4 are devoted to canzoni. He also forgoes the Giuntina’s partial adoption of a thematic criterion for organizing the canzoni, canzoni morali versus canzoni amorose, deferring instead to Boccaccio’s canon. Numbers 1–18 of De Robertis’s Indice delle rime del volume iii are thus canzoni (Boccaccio’s 15 Ⳮ 3). They yield a tally that is already misleading, given that number 17 (Traggemi de la mente) does not exist. The numbering of a poem that is not extant suggests the degree to which any shard of ‘‘history,’’ however fragmentary, is fetishized in this edition. The phantom of authenticity takes precedence over the


actually extant, given that the nonexistent Traggemi de la mente has a place in De Robertis’s tabula whereas, as we shall see, existent poems like Donne ch’avete do not. The fragmented and chaotic order generated by De Robertis’s system of inclusions and exclusions effectively controls the impulse to interpretation. Indeed, how could anyone interpret Traggemi de la mente? After the initial canzoni, there follows the large heterogeneous group of ‘‘rime sparse,’’ numbers 19–73 (‘‘Seguono, editorialmente non distinte se non dal loro ‘venir dietro,’ le ‘rime sparse,’ nn. 19–73’’ [Introduzione 2:1165]), a group that begins with a subcategory, numbers 19–25, consisting of poems that in some way refer to or connect with the canzoni, that constitute ‘‘quella che possiamo dire la ‘storia delle canzoni’ ’’ (Introduzione 2:1169). This large category of ‘‘il Dante secondo, quello che ‘viene dopo le canzoni’ ’’ (Introduzione 2:1173) contains sonnets and ballate—including some but not all of the poems of the Vita nuova, a point to which we shall return—interwoven with other poems of particular relevance, such as Cavalcanti’s Fresca rosa novella and poems from Cavalcanti to Dante. Numbers 77–108 comprise ‘‘le rime di corrispondenza o di tenzone, conforme del resto a un criterio che gia` valeva in alcuni antichi canzonieri’’ (Introduzione 2:1166).25 If one takes the index to the poems as an index of the editor’s methodology and approach, De Robertis’s index is notable for presenting information in what might well be the least accessible way possible. An alphabetical listing of the poems, indispensable for actually using the edition, may be found in the frontmatter of the first of the five books, I documenti, Tomo 1, as far away as possible from the book that contains the poems, which is the last of the five. A listing according to Barbi’s edition (‘‘Rime di Dante e dei suoi corrispondenti secondo l’ordine di Dante ’21’’) may be found at the end of I documenti, Tomo 2. The volume that contains the texts includes only the listing that follows De Robertis’s order that I have included in the appendix to this essay. Moreover, De Robertis follows Barbi in the less-thanhelpful practice of including the poems of correspondents in his consecutive numbering along with Dante’s own poems, discontinuing the practice, used by Contini and Foster-Boyde, of numbering the poems of Dante’s interlocutors in such a way as not to add to the total tally.26 The result is that this edition of the rime does not offer a list of poems


from which one can easily ascertain the total number of poems assigned to Dante, a particularly unfortunate lacuna in an edition that reassigns to the poet a number of the poems that Barbi had placed in the ‘‘dubious’’ category. By tallying De Robertis’s index and cross-referencing it with Barbi’s, I obtained the following data—unavailable in clear form anywhere in the five volumes. Barbi assigns a total of 88 poems to Dante, including the 31 poems of the Vita nuova and the 3 poems of the Convivio, and puts 26 poems in the ‘‘dubious’’ category. De Robertis’s edition, on the other hand, contains 79 poems attributed to Dante and 16 of doubtful attribution. Starting with Barbi’s total of 88 poems, De Robertis’s total of 79 poems is achieved thus: 1) by subtracting the 31 Vita nuova poems from 88, he reaches a total of 57; 2) by adding 14 Vita nuova poems back to the base of 57, he reaches a new total of 71; 3) by adding to 71 the 8 dubbie that he reclassifies, De Robertis reaches a final total of 79. De Robertis reduces the number of dubbie from 26 to 16 by moving 8 of them to the regular canon and excluding 2 altogether (the excluded are Deh, piangi meco tu, dogliosa petra and Nulla mi parve piu` crudel cosa). The 8 that he moves to the canon are: Aı¨ faus ris, Quando ’l consiglio degli ucce’ si tenne, Amore e monna Lagia e Guido ed io, Se ’l viso mio a la terra si china, Questa donna ch’andar mi fa pensoso, Non v’accorgete voi d’un che 䡠 ssi more, Io sento pianger l’anima nel core, and Degli occhi di quella gentil mia dama. The most significant difference between the Barbi and De Robertis editions, however, is not the recalibration of the dubbie. It consists of a hermeneutic—rather than a philological—difference, and it occurs because De Robertis takes his philological principles to such an extreme that he reaches a kind of hermeneutic materialism. In sharp contrast to Barbi, De Robertis does not include in his edition of Dante’s lyrics every lyric poem that he assigns to Dante. While the Convivio canzoni are present because Boccaccio copied them among the canzoni distese, only 14 Vita nuova poems—and none of its canzoni—are included. Why does De Robertis choose to include only 14 of the 31 Vita nuova poems in his edition? The answer is formulated, again, as an allegiance to philological principles. De Robertis includes only the Vita nuova poems that we happen to possess ‘‘nella lora veste pre-VN’’ (Introduzione 2:884), in a ‘‘prima redazione’’27—and this despite the acknowledgment that all the Vita nuova poems may well have


come into existence independent of, and prior to, the libello: ‘‘anche ammettendo che tutte le rime della Vita Nova siano nate indipendentemente dalla loro (successiva) destinazione, non puo` (non deve) accogliere in un’edizione delle Rime se non quanto riconoscibile secondo tratti che dalla Vita Nova lo distinguano e ne garantiscono l’indipendenza (un componimento, e ce n’e` diversi, che non presenti di questi tratti e` irrelevante dal punto di vista filologico benche´ con ampia testimonianza fuori della tradizione organica, in quanto nulla garantisce che non rappresenti un prelievo dalla Vita Nova)’’ (I documenti 1:xvi).28 De Robertis proposes a hermeneutic template for the rime that elevates the contingencies of material history—of what has been lost and what has been preserved—to a more important principle than the reality of what Dante actually produced. Being one of Dante’s extant lyrics is thus no longer a sufficient condition for inclusion in an edition of Dante’s lyrics. At the same time, De Robertis’s criterion for inclusion, although presented as philological, also defers to Dante’s authority: the decision to include poems that we happen to possess ‘‘nella lora veste pre-VN’’—and only those poems—is conditioned by Dante’s will as author of the Vita nuova. In fact, in its own convoluted way De Robertis’s criterion for inclusion of Vita nuova poems is as deferential to Dante as the more straightforward claim by Picone, to which we will arrive in due course, that Dante’s rime are by definition poems not included in the Vita nuova or Convivio. De Robertis runs counter not just to Contini’s ideal history (‘‘cronologia ideale’’) of the poet’s development, but also to real history, defined as Dante’s real and extant lyric production, all of which merits inclusion in what purports to be an edition of his lyrics. At this point, we need to bring some clarity to the term and concept ‘‘history,’’ which has been much bandied about by Guglielmo Gorni in his assault on the Barbian chronological template for the ordinamento of the Rime. In his recent apologia for De Robertis, Gorni takes him to task for being insufficiently militant in support of his editorial reforms and reformulates De Robertis’s positions in a way that makes explicit both the fear of interpretation getting into the hands of the noninitiates and the use of ‘‘history’’ as a defensive bulwark behind which to protect Dante’s poems from the contagion of unlicensed and uncontrolled interpretation.29 Any attempt to recreate a chronology of Dante’s lyrics Gorni views as fanciful and frivolous; the history of the editorial tradition, on the other hand, is serious and sacrosanct, because it alone is history:


Perche´ questa specie di rassegnazione, questo farsi scudo dell’ineluttabile? Altro premeva dire, avendo deciso di rinnovare in modo cosı` traumatico la vulgata. Se l’opinione o il criterio professati erano questi, andava difeso con energia il principio che l’editore critico e` in primo luogo al servizio della storia, non di organigrammi ideali sovrapposti ai documenti; che un conto sono l’esegesi e la cronologia, reversibili e sempre perfettibili, e un altro la serie dei testi quale si legge nei manoscritti, serie che va rispettata il piu` possible, perche´ e` storia.30 (‘‘Sulla nuova edizione delle Rime di Dante,’’ 588)

Throughout this passage Gorni establishes a false dichotomy between what he calls, on the one hand, ‘‘storia,’’ and, on the other, ‘‘organigrammi ideali sovrapposti ai documenti,’’ ‘‘un feuilleton senza fine,’’ ‘‘la ricapitolazione degli amori di Dante’’: In assenza di collezione d’autore, e` prevalsa qui (e sempre prevalga) la storia della tradizione, che al riguardo e` unanime a proporre, nei codici piu` antichi, piu` completi e che piu` contano, le ‘‘distese’’ di Dante compattamente. L’opzione di De Robertis trova un supporto nell’ordinamento dei canzonieri storici duecenteschi, in cui le canzoni precedono sempre; ma e` meno in omaggio a quel modello, che per ossequio alla reale tradizione dantesca, che ha proposto quella serie non piu` vista in tempi moderni. Non e` infatti il caso di scusarsi col mondo dei dantisti, che vorrebbero prima le rime per Beatrice o presunte tali; poi quelle per le donne schermo (impalpabili e tutte congetturali); poi per la donna gentile, per la donna petra, nonche´ da ultimo la canzone ‘‘montanina’’ per la misteriosa montanara del Casentino. . . . No, ne vien fuori proprio un feuilleton senza fine, per saggi liricamente disposti. Basta con le ricostruzioni artificiali. Si dica francamente: la mia non e` la ricapitolazione degli amori di Dante; la mia e` una silloge storica, fondata sui documenti antichi. Vi do il Dante lirico come lo leggevano il Boccaccio, Antonio di Tuccio Manetti e tutti quanti fino all’Ottocento.31 (‘‘Sulla nuova edizione delle Rime di Dante,’’ 588)

The fallacies here are obvious. First, the ancients are just as capable of ‘‘ricostruzioni artificiali’’ as we are. And, in fact, the ‘‘silloge storica, fondata sui documenti antichi,’’ put together by Boccaccio and copied by others, is nothing if not artificial. Second, the history involved in the enterprise of attempting to reconstruct Dante’s historical development as a poet is real history as well: the history of Dante’s development, stylistically and ideologically, is equally as real as the history of


the manuscript tradition. It is a real history that we cannot fully establish, because we do not have the data to fill it in with absolute precision, and that is therefore vulnerable to interpretive license, but it is nonetheless real and nonetheless history. To say that it is not history, and to dismiss it as ‘‘la ricapitolazione degli amori di Dante,’’ is to suggest that if we cannot make a perfect history we should give up on history altogether. The ‘‘ordinamento dei canzonieri storici duecenteschi, in cui le canzoni precedono sempre’’ is as much an artificial construct as Contini’s ‘‘cronologia ideale,’’ and it is one that offers us much less insight into Dante than the modern Barbian construct. What it offers instead is insight into Dante’s readers: ‘‘il Dante lirico come lo leggevano il Boccaccio, Antonio di Tuccio Manetti . . .’’ In other words, it is an order that gives us a window onto Dante’s reception—onto how his lyrics were read in other times. It is certainly important to know how Boccaccio and others read Dante lirico. But, while this is information worth having, and worth studying, is it really the case that past reception should determine our reception? Should Boccaccio’s way of reading Dante’s lyrics be the privileged way of reading Dante’s lyrics? Why? Just because it is old and through convention and authority became editorially institutionalized? When we follow this order, are we reading Dante, as Gorni claims in his conclusion (‘‘Il presente intervento, di prima ricezione dell’opera, vorrebbe spezzare una lancia a favore di questo nuovo modo di leggere Dante’’ [‘‘Sulla nuova edizione delle Rime di Dante,’’ 598]),32 or are we reading Boccaccio reading Dante? As readers of Dante go, Boccaccio is certainly among the most brilliant, but he is anything but neutral, and he is not committed to reconstructing Dante’s history. As a reader and interpreter of Dante, Boccaccio had a complex agenda that involves both his pigeonholing Dante in order to better position himself as what Dante was not—this tactic is displayed throughout the Decameron—and the task he set himself to negotiate between the dead Dante and the living and muchrevered Petrarch. Through his interventions as reader and interpreter of Dante, Boccaccio has imposed himself so cannily on the reception of Dante that we have much work to do to recover uncontaminated readings: the case of Inferno 5, where current commentaries still carry Boccaccio’s version of Francesca’s story as though it were Dante’s, is but one example, the case of the canzoni distese another.33 To promote Boccaccio’s reading as the ordering principle of Dante’s rime on the


basis of its being a historical document is absolutely unacceptable. Far from acquiescing in Boccaccio’s contamination of the reception, our work as historians of literature and critical readers of these texts must be to reverse it, to study what it shows us about Boccaccio while trying to ‘‘unlearn’’ it and return to a pre-Boccaccio understanding of Dante. Our work should not be to institutionalize Boccaccio’s reading. De Robertis offers an interpretation of Boccaccio’s order, which he reads as a response to Petrarch, without seeming to realize that his own interpretation of Boccaccio’s order disqualifies it from serving as the appropriate lens through which to approach Dante’s poems. At the head of his list of canzoni distese Boccaccio placed Cosı` nel mio parlar, a poem that, along with its fellow rime petrose, can be dated to circa 1296; not only does Boccaccio thus separate Cosı` nel mio parlar from the other three petrose, but he places it before earlier poems, indicating that he either did not know or did not care about the historical disposition of the poems. Certainly, De Robertis does not view Boccaccio as swayed by historical concerns; he suggests that Cosı` nel mio parlar is at the head of Boccaccio’s list as an homage to Petrarch, who cited it in Lasso me: ‘‘Che poi Cosı` nel mio parlar vogli’esser aspro inaugurasse la serie, staccata dal terzetto compatto delle altre petrose, a cui corrisponde come materia (con qualche riserva in proposito) piu` che come tecnica, e piu` probabile che dipenda dalla sua citazione esemplare nella canzone Lasso me (RVF 70) di Petrarca (e sarebbe stato un buon invito per Boccaccio, colla sua inclinazione per la conciliazione delle tradizioni, e delle contraddizioni: se non fosse che, s’e` appena ricordato, la ‘forma’ preesiste all’edizione Boccaccio) piu` che la citazione petrarchesca cedesse alla suggestione di una tale testa di serie’’ (Introduzione 2:1148).34 While Boccaccio’s desire to bring together his two great precursors is certainly worth studying in its own right, our task as editors of Dante’s rime must be to keep these issues separate from the interpretive frame that we bring to understanding poems that predate Boccaccio’s birth. De Robertis and Gorni seem to want to impose on Dante a compliance with convention, when in fact we could speculate that the conventionalism of the canzoni distese may well have been dictated by Boccaccio’s desire to reconcile Petrarch with Dante. Gorni notes with approval that Dante’s lyrics have been forced to comply with the conventional ‘‘ordinamento dei canzonieri storici duecenteschi, in cui le canzoni precedono sempre’’ (‘‘Sulla nuova edizione delle Rime di Dante,’’ 588). And yet we know that Dante himself was not wedded


to this model, for in the Vita nuova he created a new kind of canzoniere storico duecentesco, one in which he shows his willingness to mix the various lyric genres and to experiment with a chronological ordering. Nor is this all: Dante inscribes the incipits of three of his own canzoni into the Commedia as signposts of a chronologically based poetic autobiography, thus confirming the Vita nuova’s principle of using lyrics as markers of personal history.35 It is interesting that Boccaccio fixes Dante into the older convention in the very codex, the Chigiano, in which he copied the first extant form of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, a collection of lyrics in which Petrarch, too, like Dante in the Vita nuova, dispensed with the convention according to which ‘‘le canzoni precedono sempre’’ and mixed the lyric genres. In any case, speculations aside, Boccaccio—because he is a great author in his own right, with his own agendas—cannot provide the appropriate filter through which to present Dante’s poems to the world. The task of the Edizione Nazionale of Dante’s lyrics should be to present Dante’s poems as free of intervening filters as possible, not to reify the filters already imposed on them by time. In effect, De Robertis has abdicated a part of his task as editor of these poems. He has given us Gorni’s ‘‘silloge storica, fondata sui documenti antichi,’’ a conflation of Boccaccio’s mini-edition with the Giuntina’s edition. So doing, he has taken us backward, rather than forward. Let me be clear: De Robertis is a great philologist and scholar to whose unstinting work over the past decades we are all deeply indebted. Precisely because he has given us invaluable aids in the work of interpretation— his magisterial editions of the Vita nuova and Cavalcanti, for instance, which contain so much interpretive insight along with philological acumen—it is particularly troubling that his authority now buttresses a choice that will hinder the work of interpretation, rather than promote it. Most unfortunate is the institutionalization of this choice in the Edizione Nazionale, which carries the imprimatur of the Societa` Dantesca Italiana. The irony is that had De Robertis chosen instead to invest his unique authority in this field, accumulated over so many years, in establishing his own chronological ordering of all Dante’s rime, including the Vita nuova poems, it is unlikely that he would have encountered many challenges. Even if not accepted in every instance, an ordinamento of Dante’s full lyric canon constructed by De Robertis would be an enormous asset from which we would all benefit. I for one


would certainly welcome De Robertis’s chronological ordering of all Dante’s rime and indeed hope that he will still produce one. As matters stand, De Robertis’s monumental accomplishment on the philological and textual level—he has after all completed the painstaking ‘‘esame genetico della varia lectio delle singole liriche’’ of which Contini wrote, so that with respect to decisions about textual variants it would be foolish not to accept his authority36 —is unfortunately compromised not only by his choice with respect to the order but also by his edition’s systematic lack of transparency. The arbitrariness and opacity of De Robertis’s edition is exemplified by his handling of the Vita nuova poems: witness De Robertis’s decision to break his own rules and to include A ciascun’alma, ‘‘che non puo` essere edito altrimenti che nella Vita Nova, per non essercene altra versione, e che si produrra` solo pro memoria’’ (Introduzione 2:1175).37 De Robertis gives us an edition of Dante’s rime that includes the canzoni of the Convivio, because Boccaccio copied them, and excludes the canzoni of the Vita nuova, because Boccaccio, having copied them as part of the Vita nuova, did not recopy them among his canzoni distese.38 With respect to the canzoni of the Vita nuova, De Robertis writes, ‘‘[C]he non spettano qui, per il fatto di non designare, nella veste in cui ci sono pervenute, che solo quel libro’’ (Introduzione 2:1169).39 But had Boccaccio chosen to recopy the Vita nuova’s canzoni among his canzoni distese, De Robertis would have given them to us, issues of their ‘‘veste’’ notwithstanding. The De Robertis edition of the rime differs greatly from the edition it is intended to replace: the salient characteristic of Barbi’s edition is its openness, its will to make manifest. Moreover, Barbi accepts responsibility for difficult editorial decisions. Barbi’s generosity toward his readers, his desire to share information, is apparent throughout an edition whose hallmarks are exhaustive historical and philological explication. Barbi does not wield philology as a weapon to keep out the uninitiated; he wants to make these texts more, not less, accessible. While it has become fashionable to denigrate Barbi and to show one’s critical independence by criticizing him (I am not referring here to De Robertis, who is always generous and honorable toward his predecessors), we should not forget that the greatness of Barbi’s contribution is that he gives us the very material that we can ultimately use to disagree with him. Barbi does not fear his successors, or worry about what we will do with the poems; he gives us an order based on a


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reconstruction that he lays out in diligent detail, and he trusts us to do with it what we will. Barbi’s desire for transparency is expressed in his division of the collection into seven books (as they were called in the 1921 edition, or parts, as they were renamed in the later commentary volumes), each of which has a title. The titles provide explicit categories that parse and anchor the poems according to a variety of possible and overlapping criteria. The first of these criteria is authorial and editorial, with biographical and chronological implications; in making the first book of his edition ‘‘Rime della ‘Vita Nuova,’ ’’ Barbi is following in the editorial tracks of the Giuntina, which in turn followed Dante. Barbi continues in a chronological and biographical vein with the second book, ‘‘Rime del tempo della ‘Vita Nuova’ ’’; the same principle will be applied in book 7, ‘‘Rime varie del tempo dell’esilio.’’ Biographical and chronological criteria combined with formal and thematic considerations undergird the third section, ‘‘Tenzone con Forese Donati,’’ while thematic principles inflected formally and biographically sustain the fourth, fifth, and sixth parts: ‘‘Rime allegoriche e dottrinali’’ (this section contains the Convivio canzoni), ‘‘Altre rime d’amore e di corrispondenza,’’ ‘‘Rime per la Donna Pietra.’’ The seven books are arranged in an order that is intended to be overarchingly chronological. Barbi’s edition is generous to a fault. He includes everything: all compositions of correspondents replying to Dante, all poems whose attribution to Dante is uncertain, and all poems of Dante’s, even if they were destined by the poet for inclusion elsewhere. His goal is to include all of Dante’s lyric production. As we noted previously, the total number of poems that Barbi assigns with certainty to Dante and includes in his edition is 88; of these 88 poems, 31 were destined for the Vita nuova and 3 for the Convivio. Barbi’s practice is closer to the Giuntina, which prints all the poems of the Vita nuova together in its first book, than to Boccaccio, who copied the Vita nuova entirely, with its prose, and then, in the same manuscript but separately, copied the 15 canzoni distese. Barbi in essence honored the Giuntina’s innovative solution to the problem that is at the heart of this story: the problem of how to respond to what Dante had already done. In comparison to Boccaccio, who does not allow the Vita nuova poems any separate status as lyrics, the Giuntina affords them that status by including them in a collection that is by definition, as its title Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani states, a collection of lyrics. At the same time, by keeping the Vita nuova poems together


and in the sequence that they follow in the libello, and by placing a boundary between them and the other lyrics, the Giuntina effects a compromise of sorts: Dante’s will as author of the Vita nuova is respected, on the one hand, but, on the other, the poems that Dante placed in the Vita nuova are not lost to the lyric tradition. At some level the Giunti brothers understood that to keep these poems part of that tradition they have to be represented in it editorially and materially; they have to actually appear in a form and under a rubric that is not that of the book Vita nuova. This may seem like a small matter, or an obvious one, but in fact it has been neither, given the gravitational pull of Dante’s will on the editorial tradition. It is interesting, moreover, that the Vita nuova exacts a higher degree of respect for Dante’s will than does the Convivio, which from the beginning suffered the loss of its canzoni to the lyric tradition with impunity. Another way to put this is that the unity of the Vita nuova seems to be viewed by Dante’s posterity as more sacrosanct, or more fragile (maybe because poems constitute a much higher proportion of the Vita nuova’s textuality than of the Convivio’s, maybe because the Vita nuova is gendered as ‘‘fervida e passionata’’ while the Convivio is ‘‘temperata e virile’’ [Conv. 1.1.16]), so that tampering with that unity is more problematic. Whatever the causes for the divergent treatment, the Convivio canzoni have a long history of being transmitted as independent lyrics—kept together, however, and with the Convivio order preserved—going back to Boccaccio and the Giuntina. Barbi’s much-subdivided index now seems somewhat fussy, redolent of nineteenth-century positivism, particularly when compared to Contini’s streamlined alphabetical listing of the poems. Contini’s index exudes a high-modernist purity: its lack of subdivisions, the shift from Roman numerals to Arabic, and the volume’s overall concision conspire to create a format that even typographically signals itself as new and modern. To weigh the impact of Contini’s contribution we need to remember that, in 1939 and 1946, when his volume first appeared, the Barbi-Maggini and Barbi-Pernicone volumes were not yet published, so that Barbi’s writings on the lyrics had to be accessed piecemeal. Contini’s sleek volume with its 54 poems attributed to Dante offered by contrast both poems and commentary in one compact and elegant presentation. Contini’s commentary brings an altogether new standard of literary insight and interpretation to a body of work that has always been underinterpreted. Thus, although Contini


is not stylistically a forthcoming author, his style being rather to engage in a dance of dispensing and withholding information that flatters the reader with its teasingly elliptical quality, he is—for all his rhetorical reticentia—extremely forthcoming in the way that counts the most: he gives us actual readings of Dante’s poems, poems that— mirabile dictu—have hardly ever been read. His commentary shows us that these are poems and that as poems they need to be read and interpreted. While we still turn to Barbi’s commentary for its historical and philological wealth, Contini’s commentary provides brief but authentic lecturae. As a result of so much that is new in Contini’s presentation of the Rime, it has been easy to overlook the crucial way in which his edition is not just similar but indeed identical to Barbi’s: Contini follows Barbi’s sequence exactly, a fact that is obscured by his alphabetical rather than chronological index and which he himself hardly trumpets, noting it on the twentieth page of his ‘‘Nota al testo.’’40 How then does his volume contain only 54 poems? We remember that, of Barbi’s total of 88 poems, 34 were the lyrics that Dante placed in the Vita nuova and Convivio; Contini reaches a total of 54 by omitting those poems. As a result of omitting the Vita nuova poems, Barbi’s Parte prima, Contini begins his edition with Barbi’s Parte seconda, namely ‘‘Rime del tempo della ‘Vita Nuova,’ ’’ and thus with the exchanges with Dante da Maiano, which Barbi places at the head of that section. It is a little startling to realize that the seamless flow of lyrics in Contini’s edition deviates not at all from the Barbian template, or rather deviates only through omission: gone are the 31 poems of the Vita nuova and the 3 canzoni of the Convivio, gone are the suture marks created by the divisions into books. What remains is Barbi’s order. Before proceeding to the analysis of these editorial choices, we should note the existence of a third chronological model, put forth by Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, which could be described as faithful to the Barbian spirit of inclusion, but updated in the Continian fashion by removing the unnecessary subdivisions. The Foster-Boyde edition, which contains 89 poems rather than Barbi’s 88 because the editors (incorrectly, in my opinion) invert the order of attribution in a five-sonnet exchange between Dante Alighieri and Dante da Maiano and thereby attribute one more sonnet to Dante Alighieri, adopts the Barbian template. But Foster and Boyde go further than Barbi in their practice of his principles of inclusion and chronology. They make a courageous and unprecedented adjustment, which is truly innovative


in the history of the editions of Dante’s rime: they integrate the Vita nuova poems fully into the canon. The Foster-Boyde edition thus is the first to include the Vita nuova poems not separately—a` la Giuntina and Barbi—but interleaved in a way that attempts to recreate a plausible chronological and stylistic arc. Barbi’s principles of inclusion and integration—the hallmarks of his scholarly temperament—are fully realized by Foster-Boyde’s decision not to segregate the Vita nuova poems within their edition. Contini’s major structural contribution, on the other hand, is the omission from his Rime of the poems of the Vita nuova and Convivio. His omission of these poems has resonated strongly in ways that suggest that this is not a ‘‘neutral’’ philological issue but rather one that taps a profound cultural nerve. Contini addresses the issue, not directly but nonetheless forcefully, in the first words of his ‘‘Nota al testo’’: ‘‘Dante non raccolse organicamente le sue liriche . . .’’ (Rime, 283).41 Already here, in the code word ‘‘organicamente’’ and in Contini’s characterization not of what Dante did do but of what he did not do (‘‘non raccolse’’), we can glimpse the defensive posture that has governed discussions of Dante’s rime and that is still visible in recent contributions, such as Michelangelo Picone’s 1995 essay ‘‘Dante rimatore.’’ Reviewing what he calls the ‘‘maximalist’’ or ‘‘minimalist’’ reconstructions of the Rime of the modern critical tradition—that is, Barbi’s reconstruction versus Contini’s—Picone asks, ‘‘Quali delle due ipotesi ricostruttive possiamo considerare piu` fondata?’’ and ends up opting for Contini: ‘‘Dovendo scegliere fra le due ipotesi, io mi schiererei decisamente dalla parte di Contini’’ (‘‘Dante rimatore,’’ 174).42 Picone’s choice is the more surprising in that he shows such a clear intellectual appreciation of what is at stake in Barbi’s format; for this reason, it is worth tracing his argument in some detail. Picone explains the significance of Barbi’s decision to include the poems of the Vita nuova and Convivio in his edition thus: ‘‘Ha cosı` ragione Barbi nel ritenere essenzialmente diversa una lirica letta nel contesto della Vita nuova o del Convivio dalla stessa lirica letta invece singolarmente. Una rima accompagnata o meno dal commento dell’autore non viene insomma recepita nello stesso modo dal lettore. Come dimostrato da D. De Robertis, tale diversita` trova talvolta dei riscontri anche al livello della lezione: una poesia puo` aver subito delle piccole ma significative variazioni testuali quando e` passata dalla tradizione extravagante a quella organica della Vita nuova’’ (‘‘Dante rimatore,’’ 174).43 Picone’s defense of Barbi is impeccable: poems read in


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the context of the Vita nuova or Convivio will indeed be received differently by the reader than the same poems read independently.44 Moreover, Picone invokes De Robertis’s finding that the divergent editorial histories between libello and free-standing poems may generate minor textual variations, using this finding to highlight the existence of the Vita nuova poems prior to the existence of the Vita nuova. In other words, in Picone’s analysis divergent editorial histories serve not as yet another pretext for excluding the Vita nuova poems from editions of the rime, but rather as a reminder that these poems started as independent rime and therefore have a claim to being included in editions of the rime. Picone’s statement of the view that holds that the Vita nuova and Convivio poems deserve their own space within the lyric tradition seems irrefutable. And yet it did not seem irrefutable to Picone, who ends up siding with Contini. What I find interesting is the change of language that heralds his choice, a shift to a lexicon that is freighted with cultural—rather than philological—baggage. Already signaled in his contrast between ‘‘la tradizione extravagante’’ and ‘‘quella organica della Vita nuova,’’ the value judgments that accrue to these supposedly objective categories—one ‘‘extravagante,’’ the other ‘‘organica’’— jump out at us from the following sentence: ‘‘D’altro canto ha ragione anche Contini nel rispettare l’indipendenza e la specificita` di opere come la Vita nuova e il Convivio; nel non ritenere cioe` estrapolabili le poesie ivi raccolte, e quindi nell’applicare un’ermeneutica del frammento solo alle Rime extravaganti’’ (‘‘Dante rimatore,’’ 174).45 Suddenly, we are immersed in an anthropomorphic rhetoric whereby Contini ‘‘respected’’ what by implication Barbi did not. What Contini respected, moreover, was nothing less than the ‘‘independence’’ and identity of the Vita nuova and Convivio. Respect was shown by keeping what was ingathered safely inside, by making sure that the lyrics once ‘‘raccolte’’ never again be plucked out, never again be considered ‘‘estrapolabili’’ and thereby lowered to the status of fragment, of ‘‘rima extravagante.’’ The repetition of the prefix extra here—in the slide from ‘‘estrapolabili’’ to ‘‘extravaganti’’—is not coincidence, for this rhetoric, constructed around the binary inside versus outside, raccogliere versus frammento, is in fact built into a philological discourse which has traditionally and suggestively referred to the poems not included by Dante in the ‘‘organic’’ Vita nuova and Convivio as ‘‘rime extravaganti’’: literally poems that wander outside, outsiders.


This language, structured around the terms organico and esxtravagante, terms that permeate all criticism on the rime, suggests an analogy between Italy and the macrotext: it conjures the vulnerability of a feminized Italian state (feminized like the ‘‘fervida e passionata’’ Vita nuova), a body politic that, because it existed in name only (‘‘serva Italia’’ for Dante, ‘‘Italia mia’’ for Petrarch), was unable to gather up and incorporate its citizens who—like the poems, the microtexts— thus remained for centuries dispersed, ‘‘estravaganti.’’ More culturally than philologically grounded, Contini’s choice has been heard to say more or less this: once unity has been achieved, once an author has come along who with his authority ingathers and collects that which is otherwise dispersed and homeless, no one should presume to undo it. We should not ‘‘extrapolate’’ those poems; we should not take them out of their context and lower their status from part of an organic whole to mere wandering fragment. The emotional force of this argument lies in words like organico, unitario, raccogliere, frammento, estravagante, estrapolare—words which have the effect of reversing what it is that needs to be respected: rather than respecting the independent existence of these poems, which predate the works in which they were gathered, it turns out that we are disrespecting the unity of the Vita nuova and Convivio, and that we are uprooting the poems from their homes. Two forces are at work here. One is the need to respect Dante’s will as auctor of the Vita nuova and the assumption that we can best do that by never removing from the Vita nuova the poems that he situated within it. The other is the enormous influence of Petrarch, whose brilliant authorial innovation—the lyric sequence—contaminated editorial response to the lyric tradition before him. While these two forces might seem antithetical to each other (one respects Dante’s will too much, and the other retroactively imposes a later will and viewpoint onto his lyrics), in fact they have a common denominator in preferring poems that are brought together into an ‘‘organic’’ and unified whole: the Vita nuova, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. The literary and cultural imbrication here is massive, for Petrarch positioned himself in a way that has proved to have almost infinite cultural appeal. By inscribing political and cultural fragmentation into his work as the explicit analogue of existential fragmentation (and by dropping all the anachronistic stuff about empire with which Dante freighted a similar view), Petrarch created a text that spoke in tongues, culturally speaking, leaving traces that range from Machiavelli’s impassioned invocation of


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Italia mia at the end of the Principe to Contini’s talismanic opening words: ‘‘Dante non raccolse organicamente le sue liriche.’’ As with Boccaccio’s editorial interventions, Petrarch’s influence retroactively contaminates our reception of the lyric tradition that precedes him. Our dealings with that tradition are overdetermined by Petrarch’s creation—the metaphysically charged lyric sequence, whose manipulation of material and spatial order is consciously conceived as a way of playing with the properties of time—a creation that is indebted, moreover, in a wonderful twist of history, to none other than the Vita nuova, which provided Petrarch an example of sequenced lyrics in a form that he could then radicalize by removing the prose.46 Petrarch’s decision to raccogliere organicamente—an accurate description of the process whereby he sequentially transcribed poems from his draft notebook into the unified and organic book of poems he nonetheless chose to call Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and ‘‘rime sparse’’ (to thematize fragmentation is not necessarily to be fragmented!)—has become the benchmark by which the preceding tradition is measured. As a result a lyric tradition in which no stigma attaches to the free and uncollected lyric is viewed through an inappropriate lens that describes it in terms of what it is not. De Robertis, too, can be seen to be responding to Petrarch, in a way that we can better understand by contrasting him to Contini. Whereas Contini’s ‘‘Dante non raccolse organicamente le sue liriche’’ responds to Petrarch defensively, De Robertis adopts an aggressive stance vis-a`-vis the Petrarchan legacy, as though he were preemptively making sure that we never commit the sin of associating Dante’s lyrics with an ordered and sequenced canzoniere. Whereas Picone, following Contini, seeks to ‘‘applicare un’ermeneutica del frammento solo alle Rime extravaganti,’’ avoiding the ‘‘ermeneutica del frammento’’ whenever possible (‘‘Dante rimatore,’’ 174), De Robertis has the opposite inclination: he opts for a radical fragmentariness as a mark of historical—that is, pre-Petrarchan—authenticity. Labelling Dante’s noncanzoni the ‘‘rime sparse’’ of his edition, De Robertis betrays the ways in which he is conditioned by Petrarch: he adopts a Petrarchan rubric to designate the fragmentary and non-Petrarchan nature of Dante’s rime. De Robertis turns to the ‘‘documenti antichi,’’ through which he hopes to recreate the authentically fragmented and resistant-tointerpretation Duecento experience, as a response to Petrarch and his ‘‘organic’’ collection. The underlying credo of his edition is in this sense anti-Petrarchan, in that he is committed to opposing what he


views as an anachronistic Petrarchan solution to the ordering of lyric poems. As a result, there can be no narrativity, no implicit chronological and autobiographical arc, no love story (no ‘‘ricapitolazione degli amori di Dante,’’ in Gorni’s words). De Robertis wants to make clear in his edition that Dante’s rime do not form a canzoniere. As usual, the Vita nuova poems—the poems with respect to which Dante complicated matters initially, even before Petrarch’s arrival on the scene, by being the first to exert editorial control over their disposition—are the major indicators of critical stress. Thus, we have Picone arguing that the Vita nuova poems are merely prove until they are absorbed into the organic macrotext: ‘‘Ritengo infatti che una lirica, una volta che e` stata inclusa nella Vita nuova o nel Convivio, ha perduto il suo carattere di prova estemporanea, per entrare a far parte di una totalita` letteraria e di un ingranaggio compositivo dai quali soltanto riceve il suo significato’’ (‘‘Dante rimatore,’’ 174).47 Assuming that a poem that existed before the Vita nuova was merely a prova until it was placed in the libello and that such a poem can ‘‘only’’ receive significance from its new position, Picone reaches the conclusion that the rime are to be defined as those lyrics that Dante left out of the Vita nuova and Convivio.48 De Robertis achieves a similar result, though he reaches it from the opposite route: he only accepts into his edition of the rime those Vita nuova poems for which he has manuscript evidence of textual variants by virtue of which he can categorically claim their existence before the Vita nuova. In his quest to recover pre-Petrarchan authenticity, De Robertis thus creates a new group of estravaganti. By excluding 17 Vita nuova poems, he has created a reverse stigma: the Vita nuova poems for which the vagaries of material history do not provide sufficient proof that they existed independently of the libello must be left out of his edition, while their fellows—along with the Convivio poems, accepted unquestioningly because included among the canzoni distese—are brought in. More typical than the problem of Vita nuova poems rebuffed by an edition of the rime is that of rime presumed second-class because excluded from the Vita nuova. An example of this view is offered by Giovanni Cappello, who, in the essay ‘‘Per un ordinamento delle ‘Rime’ di Dante,’’ struggles to build a case for the autonomous value of the rime from the following self-inflicted premise: ‘‘Non sembra legittimo, senza testimonianza esplicita della volonta` dell’autore, che uno stesso testo possa figurare come parte integrante di due opere.’’49


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Cappello wants to reach the conclusion that Dante’s rime possess ‘‘valore autonomo’’ and are not just preliminary sketches, but he fears that Dante may have declared his derogatory intent toward the freestanding lyrics in the act of excluding them from the Vita nuova and Convivio. Assuming that the critic is obliged to find a compensatory Dantesque imprimatur to set against the imprimatur of the Vita nuova, he ultimately reassures himself by turning to the De vulgari eloquentia as auctoritas, noting that Dante in the treatise cites all his lyrics in the same way, not according lesser status to the poems that remained independent (or, in Cappello’s term, ‘‘isolate’’).50 Cappello’s essay makes clear the stigma that accrues to being left out of the Vita nuova in a context in which Dante’s artistic decisions are taken as the ultimate value judgments. From this perspective, the reception accorded the free-standing lyrics is not unlike the reception traditionally accorded the poets, like Guittone d’Arezzo, whom Dante devalues in the Commedia: Dante’s value judgments for centuries conditioned the terms of the debate.51 In the case of the rime, the critical agenda was set by decisions of Dante’s that are not even explicit value judgments but that are presumed to be such. Just as Dante’s stated judgments vis-a`-vis Guittone long impacted our reception of the Aretine poet, so Dante’s presumed judgments vis-a`-vis his poems have impacted the transmission of his lyrics. The most notable example of the stigmatization caused by Dante’s presumed judgment is offered by the canzone Lo doloroso amor: excluded from the Vita nuova, this canzone has come down to us in very few manuscripts (‘‘I codici, per questa canzone, non si contano a centinaia come per le altre . . . bensı` sulle dita di una mano’’ [De Robertis, Introduzione 2:1152]),52 because it was further excluded by Boccaccio from his tally of Dante’s canzoni, and then excluded from the Giuntina as well. I believe that the systematic exclusion of this canzone from the canon of Dante’s lyrics is the result of the danger it poses to the master narrative, scripted by Dante, of who Dante is: he cannot be the poet who once wrote, in the last verse of the first stanza of Lo doloroso amor, ‘‘Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice’’ (I die for the one whose name is Beatrice). The anthologists who excluded Lo doloroso amor are merely doing what Dante’s interpreters have always done: whether vis-a`-vis figures in the Commedia or Dante himself, we read in ways that conform to the authorized narrative. The history of the transmission of Lo doloroso amor, a canzone De Robertis aptly calls


‘‘estravagante tra le estravaganti’’ (Introduzione 2:756), is one more illustration of the importance that Dante’s presumed judgments—and then judgments about his judgments—have always exerted. From this perspective, we could think of De Robertis’s misplaced allegiance to ‘‘diritti del filologo contro diritti dell’autore’’ as an understandable reaction to the excessive deference given to Dante’s will throughout the editorial history of the rime. By contrast, Contini’s edition seems to mask this unspoken deference, according to which commingling the poems of the Vita nuova with other lyrics constitutes a kind of desecration. The cultural embeddedness of these issues is confirmed by the most recent participant in this debate, Gorni, when he wonders whether De Robertis’s enterprise, ‘‘per le difficolta` che comporta, non rischi di essere mal recepito, specie all’estero e presso chi guarda alla filologia come un mondo a se´’’ (‘‘Sulla nuova edizione delle Rime di Dante,’’ 597).53 What an odd remark, with its suggestion, despite the example of Foster and Boyde, that the ‘‘outside’’ world will fail to understand a philological contribution to the editorial history of Dante’s rime. The scrupulous contribution of Foster and Boyde—who respond to their precursors in ways that fulfill the implications of the Giuntina and Barbi’s edition—shows us that the tradition has transcended national boundaries (as has long been the case with the Commedia). Most of all, Gorni seems to forget that De Robertis’s innovation, if it can be called that, is not based in philology. As Gorni well knows, the innovations of the De Robertis edition are ‘‘di ordinamento piuttosto che di lezione, di forma (in senso tecnico) piuttosto che di sostanza’’ (‘‘Sulla nuova edizione delle Rime di Dante,’’ 577).54 The ordinamento of the rime is not an issue that is susceptible to a once-and-for-all philological solution; that is precisely the problem. Had the issue been soluble through philology, De Robertis would have solved it; since it was not, he has returned to the arbitrary conventions of the past. Barbi’s inclusion of all of Dante’s lyrics in his edition respects the history that matters most to Dante’s readers, which is the full and complete poetic history of the lyric poet who would eventually write the Commedia. Therefore, although I would much rather deal with 54 poems (or 62, if consensus emerges to accept the 8 poems that De Robertis has added to the canon) than with 88 (or 96), and despite the fact that I am much more interested, as a critic, in the late poems than in the early and stilnovo lyrics that ended up in the Vita nuova, I feel


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an obligation to include every lyric poem Dante wrote.55 My commentary will be less historical and philological than those of my illustrious predecessors, and more interpretive; the project as I see it is to continue Contini’s mandate to read the poems, to interpret them. For the task of interpretation is not complete with respect to these poems; indeed, it has barely begun. We have a story to uncover, a history to write. The story of Dante’s becoming requires a chronological arc, and therefore we must accept the responsibility of a chronologically ordered edition despite the lacunae in our knowledge and despite the likelihood of variations between editions. (These variations are not as critical as they would be if we habitually used numbers to refer to these poems.) The lyrics afford us an unparalleled opportunity to trace the twists and turns in Dante’s ideological and spiritual development, and to gauge how far from complacent and overdetermined his journey was. They harbor implicit and at times explicit debates on issues of great immediacy for Dante and his audience: the nature of cortesia and nobility, the desire for wealth and its relationship to other types of desire, the limits and constraints of political loyalty, the male/female dichotomy and the construction of gender, the lack of justice in human life.56 Like Barbi, I believe that these poems can communicate most effectively when presented to the reader in an order that accepts—with the requisite humility—the task of reconstructing Dante’s development chronologically, of illuminating for the reader the poetic, philosophical, and psychological paths he took on his way to il mezzo del cammin. How Dante became Dante is the story told by his lyrics, but they cannot tell their story unless we let them speak.

Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History 273 A pp en di x: Ta bl es of Co nt en ts f ro m E di ti on s o f t he Ri me






part iv

Gender

chapter 13

Le parole son femmine e i fatti sono maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10)

I

will begin with a proverb, one that the Dizionario comparato di proverbi e modi proverbiali gives in Latin, French, Spanish, German, and English, as well as Italian. It is ‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi’’ (or, in Florio’s 1598 translation from the Italian, ‘‘Wordes they are women, and deeds they are men’’), and I will be using it as a rubric and point of departure for conceptualizing a pervasive Decameronian thematic regarding the relation of words to deeds and of both to gender. Indeed, the proverb is particularly apt for investigating such concerns since it addresses issues of gender both biologically and, at least in Italian, where words have genders, also grammatically, suggesting that the grammatical genders of parola and fatto are rooted in nature, in a kind of universal natural gendering that encompasses the sexes and their not asexual offspring, words. This intersection of the grammatical/poetical with the biological/sexual is especially suggestive with regard to an author whose commitment to linking the two is such that he reminds us that ‘‘Le Muse son donne’’ (The Muses are ladies) (4.Intr.35) in a programmatic assertion of what I am calling his ‘‘sexual poetics.’’1 ‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi’’ succinctly captures Boccaccio’s sexual poetics by suggesting both a mutual exclusion between the sexes and their proper spheres, and an inevitable contamination between these same spheres, since fatti are masculine, but the word ‘‘fatti’’ is a parola, and thus feminine. In other words, the boundary that the proverb at first glance so emphatically delineates, between women and words, on the one hand, and men and deeds, on the other, is much less rigid than it first appears. The proverb’s ambiguity makes it all the more applicable to Boccaccio, who both invokes two separate and gendered domains, one connoted by words and one by


deeds, and then effects a conflation that culminates in the ladies’ return from the Valle delle donne, when Dioneo asks—using precisely the terms of the proverb—‘‘cominciate voi prima a far de’ fatti che a dir delle parole?’’ (Do you mean to say you have begun to do these deeds even before you talk about them?) (6.Concl.34). The idea that the world of deeds belongs to men and the world of words to women is encountered immediately, in the Decameron’s Proem. The pains of love are alleviated for men, who have access to a host of distracting activities, fatti: ‘‘per cio` che a loro, volendo essi, non manca l’andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare’’ (For if they wish, they can always walk abroad, see and hear many things, go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding and gambling, or attend to their buisness affairs) (Proemio, 12). Women who are in love have no such resources, and so Boccaccio offers them his novelle, his parole; men have deeds, women have words. And in fact Boccaccio’s verbal offerings to the ladies— ‘‘cento novelle, o favole o parabole o istorie che dire le vogliamo’’ (a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories or whatever you choose to call them) (Proemio, 13)—are listed in a series of nouns (parole, so to speak) that precisely parallels the previous listing of masculine pursuits in a series of verbs (fatti, so to speak): ‘‘l’andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare.’’ Dioneo’s resonant query, ‘‘cominciate voi prima a far de’ fatti che a dir delle parole?’’, is found in the Conclusion to Day 6, more elaborate than most of the Conclusioni to the Decameron’s giornate. Once Dioneo has finished recounting the story of Frate Cipolla, Elissa puts the crown on his head, announcing that it is time for him to experience the burden of having ladies to govern and guide: ‘‘che carico sia l’aver donne a reggere e guidare’’ (what a burden it is to have ladies under your control and guidance) (6.Concl.2). This remark grows in interest when we consider that the ladies are about to go, alone and unescorted, to a place that is identified only as theirs, ‘‘La Valle delle donne’’ (‘‘The Valley of the Ladies’’) (18), a place where presumably women are able to govern and guide themselves, where presumably no one would propose, as Filomena had at the outset of their journey, that women are ‘‘mobili, riottose, sospettose, pusillanime e paurose’’ (fickle, quarrelsome, suspicious, cowardly, and easily frightened)

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(1.Intr.75), and that therefore they had better not leave Florence unsupervised by men and with only themselves as guides (‘‘senza la provedenza d’alcuno uomo’’ [74], ‘‘alcuna altra guida . . . che la nostra’’ [75]). Dioneo replies with one of those sexual overtures that occur in words but never in deeds in the frame-story, remarking that if the ladies were to obey him as a real king should be obeyed, he would procure for them that enjoyment without which no entertainment is ever completely happy: ‘‘io vi farei goder di quello senza il che per certo niuna festa compiutamente e` lieta’’ (6.Concl.3). But it is best to proceed from words that can only remain words (‘‘Ma lasciamo star queste parole’’ [But let us put aside these words] [3]) to the novelle, the words that are the ‘‘deeds’’ of this text, and so he broaches the topic of his Day: the beffe that women have played on their husbands. In so doing, Dioneo notes that he would have been hard-pressed to come up with a theme were it not for the morning’s outbreak of the servant Licisca. With this Dioneo does something new: he is the first ruler to propose a topic suggested by someone else.2 To heighten the anomaly, the person to whom he appeals as auctoritas for his topic is not a social equal but that intrusive member of the volgo who spoke so vulgarly of the sexual proclivities of her neighbors, the very Licisca who, in an event defined in the Introduction to Day 6 as ‘‘cosa che ancora adivenuta non v’era’’ (something which had never happened before) (4), had burst into the mannered and decorous world of the cornice—the world of parole—with two rude and indecorous fatti: first, that brides are rarely virgins and second that, once wed, women play all manner of tricks on their husbands.3 Dioneo discards the former of these two fatti as ‘‘opera fanciullesca’’ (child’s play) (6.Concl.6) and puts the latter before the ladies as the topic for the following Day, at which point another anomaly occurs: for the first time some of the ladies object to the stated theme and ask that it be changed. Dioneo is therefore forced to defend himself (much as Boccaccio had done in the Introduction to Day 4), and his defense takes the form of a meditation on the dialectic between words and deeds, ragionare versus operare. He argues that the desperate circumstances brought about by the plague have suspended normal mores, so that, as long as men and women refrain from ‘‘operar disonestamente, ogni ragionare e` conceduto’’ (dishonorable behavior, all subjects may be freely discussed) (8). Moreover, whatever they may have said during their sojourn outside the city, the brigata has not


stained itself with any dishonorable action (non mi pare che in atto alcuno si sia maculata [12]); the ladies of the brigata are widely known for an onesta` that could not be swayed by the fear of death, let alone by ‘‘ragionamenti sollazzevoli’’ (a little pleasurable discourse) (12). In fact, says Dioneo, giving an extra twist to the logic whereby one can speak of what one cannot do, if the ladies were to refrain from speaking of such ‘‘ciance’’ (idle gossip) (13) people would suspect that they harbored guilty consciences. Dioneo’s argument thus hinges on the notion that there is no limit to what the ladies can say—to the parole they can use—as long as they do not translate words into deeds, as long as they do not cross the bridge that separates the world of women from the world of men. To anticipate his later query, they can ‘‘dir delle parole’’ but not ‘‘far de’ fatti.’’ And yet, the Decameron does nothing if not effect the translation from words into deeds, from the sequestered world of women to the engaged world of men, and Dioneo is the chief instigator of this process. He defends the dangerous freedom of his topic by insisting that the liberty of which the ladies will speak will have no effect on their actions, and yet immediately after Dioneo has completed his self-defense and the ladies have accepted his topic, they act in a new way—with an unparalleled liberty and initiative. Going to the Valley that is named for them alone, the ladies divest themselves of both clothes and social restraints, frolicking in the water naked and unabashed; upon their return the connection between what they do and the stories they recount is underscored. Pampinea announces that, like the women of the forthcoming Day, they have deceived the men— ‘‘Oggi vi pure abbiam noi ingannati’’ (6.Concl.33)—and Dioneo replies with the question, ‘‘cominciate voi prima a far de’ fatti che a dir delle parole?’’, which is to say: ‘‘Have you begun to do the deceitful deeds that women do to men, the deeds we will recount in Day 7, before you have even recounted them?’’ In other words, have you ‘‘done a Day 7’’ before ‘‘telling a Day 7’’? Licisca’s intrusion and her insinuation into the Decameron of a materia that draws much of its rationale from the crucial if underappreciated Dionean story that precedes the Introduction to Day 6, namely 5.10, a story to which we shall return, has brought about a contamination between the pure world of the frame and the less pure world, the stained or ‘‘maculato’’ world, of the novelle.4 The novelle of Day 7—although made of words, parole—serve as vicarious fatti encouraging the Decameron’s ladies to progress from parole to real fatti


(and it is of course significant in this regard that these stories tell of beffe—deeds—rather than the verbal retorts of Day 6). Words can be liberating, words can lead to deeds, or, in the logic of our proverb, women can become men. For, according to our proverb, Dioneo’s question can be construed: ‘‘Are you beginning to act like men rather than like women?’’ This last reflection delivers us to our small quadrant in the Decameron’s great map of human affairs, namely novelle 2.9 and 2.10. I link them because, as Dioneo makes clear in the opening of 2.10, his story cannot be disjoined from its predecessor. If Bartolomea, the heroine of the first novella Dioneo narrates after being granted his special privilege in the Conclusion to Day 1, is in many respects a woman who anticipates the women of Day 7, insisting on the right to sex as a fundamental right of life,5 Zinevra is a woman who crosses the bridge from words to deeds, literally becoming a man in order to preserve her life and honor, ‘‘per salvamento di se´’’ (for motives of self-preservation) in the language of the rubric of Day 7. Zinevra, when the need arises, will effortlessly take on the attributes of maleness in a paragraph where she changes her clothes and her name while Boccaccio changes the gender of his participles, moving from one sentence’s ‘‘Col quale entrata in parole’’ to the next’s ‘‘di miglior panni rimesso in arnese’’ (2.9.43). Looking back, we realize that we are prepared for Zinevra’s sexual transformation by the terms of Bernabo`’s ill-fated praise of his wife: she is not only able to do anything ‘‘che a donna appartenesse, si come di lavorare lavorii di seta e simili cose’’ ([any] womanly pursuit, such as silk embroidery and the like) (8), but she is also better at ‘‘cavalcare un cavallo, tenere uno uccello, leggere e scrivere e fare una ragione che se un mercatante fosse’’ (horse-riding, falconry, reading, writing and book-keeping [than] the average merchant) (10). This list of verbs—fatti—recalls the list of masculine pursuits in the Proem: ‘‘l’andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare.’’ We note, moreover, that the list of Zinevra’s male-coded accomplishments elaborates on the earlier list by specifying that the simple ‘‘mercatare’’ of the Proem includes an education in reading, writing, and arithmetic: ‘‘leggere e scrivere e fare una ragione.’’6 Zinevra, unique among the Decameron’s women in having such accomplishments, has already attained the ability to deal in fatti rather than parole and as a result is fully equipped to make the transition from woman to man.


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Dioneo begins his story, 2.10, with a stinging critique of the stupidity of Bernabo`, ‘‘la bestialita` di Bernabo`’’ (3) as he puts it, in a phrase that anticipates the ultimate Dionean story and the ‘‘matta bestialita`’’ (10.10.3) of its anti-hero, Gualtieri. But Dioneo does not just react to the previous story; he essentially transforms it in an act of willful misprision that allows him to refocus the issues according to his own hermeneutical imperatives. We can better appreciate Dioneo’s exegetical sleight-of-hand if we recall the key elements of 2.9. A group of Italian merchants, ‘‘grandissimi mercatanti italiani’’ (very prosperous Italian merchants) (2.9.4), is sitting around in a Parisian inn one evening (we note the archetypal resonance of this setting for Boccaccio’s own personal mythography) when the talk turns to the women they have left at home and the effects of physical separation on their marriages: aware of their own infidelities, the merchants agree that they could not expect anything less from their wives and come to the conclusion that ‘‘le donne lasciate da loro non volessero perder tempo’’ (the women they had left on their own would not want to waste time) (7). Only one dissents, our friend Bernabo`, who holds that his wife is so honest and chaste that she would never involve herself with another man, were he to be away from home ten years or indeed the rest of his life. In the company is a young merchant, Ambruogiuolo da Piagenza, who takes umbrage at Bernabo`’s claim, telling him that he has insufficiently considered the nature of things: ‘‘tu hai poco riguardato alla natura delle cose’’ (13). Given that men are the most perfect of mortal creatures and possessed of greater firmness of will than women, and given that men continually yield to their desires, it follows that women, who are ‘‘piu` mobili’’ (more fickle), will yield even more: ‘‘che speri tu che una donna, naturalmente mobile, possa fare a’ prieghi, alle lusinghe, a’ doni, a’ mille altri modi che usera` uno uom savio che l’ami?’’ (what chance then do you think a woman, fickle by nature, can have against all the entreaties, the blandishments, the presents, and the thousand other expedients to which any intelligent lover will resort?) (16). Bernabo`’s wife, being a woman, and admittedly made of flesh and bones like other women (‘‘tu medesimo di’ che la moglie tua e` femina e ch’ella e` di carne e d’ossa come son l’altre’’ [you told us yourself that your wife is a woman, made of flesh and blood like the rest] [171]), is subject to the same irresistibile ‘‘naturali appetiti.’’ Ambruogiuolo’s view of female inconstancy is not just condescending and unpleasant: he actively attempts to exploit this alleged weakness and when he encounters a woman who does not fit his


model he tricks her husband into believing that she does, thus victimizing her despite her lack of frailty. The novella treats Ambruogiuolo’s behaviour as criminal and metes out retribution: tied to a pole and smeared with honey, he is left to be devoured by insects, and the story concludes by noting that the deceiver ends up at the feet of the deceived, that is, that Ambruogiuolo has gotten his comeuppance. But the lessons to be learned from Zinevra’s story (which, we recall, is not her story according to the rubric, but Bernabo`’s) are not straightforward.7 On the one hand, Zinevra counters the notion that women are mobili in Ambruogiuolo’s sense of the word, that is, in the metaphorical sense of fickle, lacking in firmness of will and hence loyalty. Thus, Boccaccio tells us that she is ferma, firm, the opposite of mobile, having her look at Ambruogiuolo with a ‘‘fermo viso’’ (a firm visage) (50) when she fears that he suspects her identity. It is significant that Zinevra saves herself and refutes the charge of metaphorical mobilita` by becoming literally mobile, by breaking out of the female confines of the Proem, where women are ‘‘racchiuse’’ (notice the negative connotations of this feminine antonym of ‘‘mobili,’’ as compared to the positive connotations of the masculine ‘‘fermo’’), and are denied the mobility of that list of male pursuits that begins precisely ‘‘l’andare a torno . . .’’ When she becomes a man, Zinevra takes on male mobility and travels about the world; the first thing she does as a man is to board a ship, whereupon she receives a man’s name and identity: ‘‘Col quale entrata in parole, con lui s’acconcio per servidore e salissene sopra la nave faccendosi chiamare Sicuran da Finale’’ (Engaging him in conversation, she persuaded him to sign her on as his cabin-boy, callin herself Sicurano da Finale) (43). On the other hand, Zinevra takes on male mobility in order to return to female immobility; she transforms herself into a man in order to be able to go back to being a woman, the loyal wife of the foolish and disloyal Bernabo`. This is the element of the story that provokes Dioneo; as we have already noted, he is interested in the ‘‘bestialita` di Bernabo`.’’8 But— and this is the exegetical sleight-of-hand to which I referred earlier— Dioneo completely alters the nature of Bernabo`’s stupidity. Within the context of 2.9, Bernabo`’s stupidity consists in allowing himself to be deceived by Ambruogiuolo. He should not have allowed himself to be dissuaded from his original assessment of his wife, which is proved correct: Zinevra is chaste and loyal. Dioneo however rewrites 2.9 in such a way that Ambruogiuolo rather than Zinevra is vindicated. Eliminating the unsavory aspects of


Ambruogiuolo’s discourse, Dioneo appropriates the sections that deal with women’s ‘‘natural appetites.’’ Further, while Filomena had never specified whether Bernabo` slept with other women while away from Genoa, Dioneo lumps Bernabo` in with all the other unfaithful wandering husbands; he is incensed at the obtuseness, the ‘‘sciocchezza’’ (4), of those who believe that while they go about the world disporting themselves with one woman after another their wives remain at home inactive: ‘‘s’immaginan che le donne a casa rimase si tengan le mani a cintola, quasi noi non conosciamo, che tra esse nasciamo e cresciamo e stiamo, di che elle sien vaghe’’ (they imagine that the wives they left behind are simply twiddling their thumbs as though we, who spend our lives in the company of women from the cradle upwards, do not know perfectly well what they enjoy doing most) (2.10.3). Unlike Freud, Dioneo knows what women want. They want not to be left idly twiddling their thumbs, not to be rendered inactive or immobilized, and because he knows ‘‘di che elle sien vaghe,’’ he considers Bernabo` foolish for believing that a woman left at home alone will remain constant—or, better, immobile.9 So, Dioneo endorses Ambruogiuolo. He affirms categorically that a woman left at home alone will not be faithful. To make the point that Dioneo is endorsing Ambruogiuolo, Boccaccio has Dioneo echo the language used by that villain when he recounts his exploits to his erstwhile victim, the transvestite Zinevra. Bernabo`’s sciocchezza and bestialita`, as well as the notion that one can know what all women do or want, were Ambruogiuolo’s ideas before they were Dioneo’s: ‘‘Ora risi io, per cio` che egli mi ricordo` della sciocchezza di Bernabo`, il qual fu di tanta follia, che mise cinquemilia fiorin d’oro contro a mille che io la sua donna non recherei a’ miei piaceri: il che io feci e vinsi il pegno; e egli, che piu` tosto se della sua bestialita` punir dovea che lei d’aver fatto quello che tutte le femine fanno, da Parigi a Genova tornandosene, per quello che io abbia poi sentito, la fece uccidere’’ (I was laughing just now because I was reminded of the foolishness of her husband, who was insane enough to wager five thousand gold florins against a thousand that I would not succeed in seducing his lady. I won the wager of course, and I am given to understand that the husband, who should have punished himself for his stupidity instead of punishing his wife for doing what all other women do, returned from Paris to Genoa and had her put to death) (2.9.54; my italics). Dioneo is thus apparently aligned with the discredited and misogynist Ambruogiuolo.


But Dioneo’s reasoning is in fact completely different from Ambruogiolo’s. He does not arrive at female inconstancy by way of female inferiority; rather he seems to insist on women’s right to sexuality as a way of instituting some parity between the sexes. Filomena tells a story of female constancy and female strength (this is interesting in itself, for Filomena was the first to apply the adjective mobili to women, when she called them ‘‘mobili, riottose, sospettose, pusillanime e paurose’’ in the Introduction to Day 1; if such was Filomena’s view of her sex then, does she now revise it by telling the story of Zinevra?), Ambruogiuolo tells a story of female inconstancy and female weakness, and Dioneo tells a story of what seems like female inconstancy but is in fact female strength. In other words he follows Ambruogiuolo in one key respect, insisting on female inconstancy or mobility, but he redefines mobility, viewing it positively as activity rather than negatively as frailty or moral failure. Dioneo’s point is that a woman who is left home alone should assert herself by sleeping with other men. The version of 2.9 told by Ambruogiuolo, in which Zinevra slept with him and offered him tokens of her love (‘‘queste mi dono` con alcuna altra cosa una gentil donna di Genova chiamata madonna Zinevra, moglie di Bernabo` Lomellin, una notte che io giacqui con lei, e pregommi che per suo amore io le tenessi’’ [These things were given to me, along with various others, by a gentlewoman of Genoa called donna Zinevra, the wife of Bernabo` Lomellin. It was after I had slept with her for the night, and she asked me to keep them as a token of her love] [53]),10 and which includes his suggestion that Bernabo` should have been punished for his stupidity rather than Zinevra for merely doing what all women do, anticipates the novelle of Day 7. In Day 7 women break out of the confines of their repressive marriages by taking lovers, usually adopting the stealth and deceit that the proleptic Ambruogiuolo had already imputed to unfaithful women in his discourse to the merchants of 2.9.11 Escape from a repressive marriage is very much the topic of 2.10 as well, although its heroine, Bartolomea, is nothing if not forthright and open about her intentions and her motivations. Her forthrightness finds voice in the great speech that she hurls at her former oppressor, a speech that—more than any event—functions as the climax of her story.12 For the story of Bartolomea is in many respects the story of a metaphor, and this metaphor reaches a peak of expressiveness in her declaration of marital emancipation. But let us backtrack and review the preceding events.


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Stimulated by the ‘‘bestialita` di Bernabo`,’’ Dioneo chooses to tell a tale that will exemplify not only the foolishness of the Bernabo`s, who create a void by their absence and do not realize that those left in the void are bound to take steps to fill it, but the even greater foolishness of those whose personalities are such that they create a void even when they are present and yet try to force others to go against the grain of their natures by living within such pinched parameters. This is the case of one Riccardo di Chinzica, whose success as a judge prompts him to overestimate himself in other avenues of endeavor; using the leverage afforded him by his wealth, he seeks not a wife commensurate with his abilities as a lover but one of youth and particular beauty, thus establishing the instability in his marriage that will provide the catalyst for Bartolomea’s rebellion as it will for that of later Decameronian heroines. (Despite Pampinea’s tribute to the prowess of older men, compared in 1.10 to leeks for their white heads and green tails, Dioneo’s paradigm of the impotent yet possessive senex will find more favor in the text at large.) Having barely succeeded in consummating the marriage, and requiring restorative doses of vernaccia the next morning, Riccardo takes steps to defer the evil day when his powers will again be so tested. He instructs his wife as to the many saints’ days when sexual intercourse should be avoided, with the result that she lives a life of almost perpetual abstinence: Per cio` che, secondo che egli le mostrava, niun dı` era che non solamente una festa ma molte non ne fossero, a reverenza delle quali per diverse cagioni mostrava l’uomo e la donna doversi abstenere da cosı` fatti congiugnimenti, sopra questi aggiugnendo digiuni e quatro tempora e vigilie d’apostoli e di mille altri santi e venerdı` e sabati e la domenica del Signore e la quaresima tutta, e certi punti della luna e altre eccezion molte, avvisandosi forse che cosı` feria far si convenisse con le donne nel letto, come egli faceva talvolta piatendo alle civili. E questa maniera, non senza grave malinconia della donna, a cui forse una volta ne toccava il mese e appena, lungamente tenne, sempre guardandola bene, non forse alcuno altro le ’nsegnasse conoscere li dı` da lavorare, come egli l’aveva insegnate le feste. (2.10.9–10) For he made it clear to her that there was not a single day that was not the feast of one or more Saints, out of respect for whom, as he would demonstrate by devious arguments, man and woman should abstain from sexual union. To the foregoing, he added holidays of obligation, the four Ember weeks, the eves of the Apostles and a numerous array of subsidiary


Saints, Fridays and Saturdays, the sabbath, the whole of Lent, certain phases of the moon, and various special occasions, possibly because he was under the impression that one had to take vacations from bedding a woman, in the same way that he sometimes took vacations from summing up in the law-courts. For a long time (much to the chagrin of his lady, whose turn came round once a month at the most) he abided by this re´gime, always keeping a close watch on her lest anyone else should teach her as good a knowledge of the working-days as he had taught her of the holidays.

In that concluding reference to ‘‘li dı` da lavorare,’’ we first encounter the metaphor that will structure Bartolomea’s later speech: sex as work, as activity, as deed, as fatto—sexual intercourse, therefore, as one of the forms of human intercourse and engagement that lend dignity and meaning to life. Taken by her husband to the sea during the hot weather, Bartolomea and Riccardo go fishing in separate boats, he with the fishermen, she with the ladies. They are spied by the pirate Paganin da Mare, who, ‘‘veggendo la bella donna, senza altro volerne, quella . . . sopra la sua galeotta posta ando` via’’ (on catching sight of the fair lady, he disregarded everything else and took her aboard his galley before making off again) (13). There is a romantic flavor to this act of piracy, since Paganino chooses Bartolomea from among the group of ladies, ‘‘senza altro volerne,’’ that is heightened by his most unpiratelike reflections: ‘‘A Paganino, veggendola cosı` bella, parve star bene; e non avendo moglie, si penso` di sempre tenersi costei’’ (Paganino reckoned himself very fortunate when he saw how beautiful she was, and since he was unmarried, he made up him mind to keep her) (15). Indeed, within the Decameron, these reflections are romantic not just by the standards of pirates but by those of most would-be husbands, for money never crosses his mind. The fact that Paganino does not have a wife and immediately views Bartolomea as taking the place of a wife is what distinguishes this story from its Day 7 variants; the emphasis on marital contentment and on the fact that, even before they marry, Paganino ‘‘onoratamente come sua moglie la tenea’’ (honorably treated her with all the respect due to a wife) (16), makes this story an interesting blend of Day 5 and Day 7 motifs. Bartolomea seeks no great liberty, from a modern perspective; she seeks only to be a wife. Like Zinevra she desires only what she considers a woman’s lot. But she desires a full woman’s lot, not the pinched


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and repressed life offered her by Riccardo, a life whose impoverishments become even more severe—both affectively and societally— when we consider that she is not likely, as his wife, to ever bear children. So when mobility comes to Bartolomea—which again it does by way of the sea—she accepts the sexual consolations of Paganino, appropriately surnamed ‘‘da Mare.’’ These consolations, Boccaccio specifies, are deeds, ‘‘fatti,’’ rather than words, ‘‘parole,’’ once more, as in the previous metaphor of ‘‘li dı` da lavorare,’’ associating sex with activity, with fare: E venuta la notte, essendo a lui il calendario caduto da cintola e ogni festa o feria uscita di mente, la comincio` a confortar co’ fatti, parendogli che poco fossero il dı` giovate le parole; e per sı` fatta maniera la racconsolo`, che, prima che a Monaco giugnessero, e il giudice e le sue leggi le furono uscite di mente e comincio a viver piu` lietamente del mondo con Paganino; il quale, a Monaco menatala, oltre alle consolazioni che di dı` e di notte le dava, onoratamente come sua moglie la tenea. (2.10.16; my italics) When night descended, having come to the conclusion that he had been wasting his time all day with words, he turned to comforting her with deeds, for he was not the sort of man to pay any heed to calendars, and he had long since forgotten about feasts and holy days. So effective were the consolations he provided, that before they had reached Monaco, the judge and his laws had faded from the lady’s memory, and life with Paganino was a positive joy. And after he had brought her to Monaco, in addition to consoling her continuously night and day, Paganino treated her with all the respect due to a wife.

Apprised that his wife is in Monaco, Riccardo goes in search, willing to spend on her the one commodity with which he is well endowed, being ‘‘disposto a spendere per lo riscatto di lei ogni quantita` di denari’’ (quite prepared to pay for her ransom any amount of money) (17). Somehow he sees Bartolomea, and she him, whereupon she alerts Paganino. Riccardo in short order ingratiates himself with Paganino, and then proposes to ransom Bartolomea; Paganino replies that he has a lady living with him who is free to go with Riccardo if she likes. If she does not, he says, it would be wrong of Riccardo to try to take her, for he is a young man and as able to keep a woman as anyone, especially this one who is the most pleasing he has ever seen: ‘‘io son giovane uomo e posso cosı` come un altro tenere una femina, e spezialmente lei che e` la piu` piacevole che io vidi mai’’ (for I am a


young man and no less entitled than anyone else to keep a woman, especially this one, for she is the nicest I ever saw) (20). Paganino’s pointed reference to youth as a prime qualification for marriage sets up the confrontation between wife and unfit husband that constitutes the story’s climax. Undeterred by this allusion to his missing youth and vigor, and buoyed by the consciousness of the wealth at his disposal, Riccardo assures the pirate that Bartolomea will throw her arms around his neck when she sees him, and so off they go to Paganino’s house. Bartolomea first pretends not to recognize Riccardo, thus thwarting the archetypal recognition scene he expected.13 Thinking she is constrained by fear of the pirate, Riccardo asks to interview her in private; Paganino consents, on condition that he not try to kiss her against her will—no doubt Bartolomea’s earlier briefings had indicated the minimal likelihood of this event. The scene that ensues is a kind of reversal of the courtship engineered by Zima in Decameron 3.5. There Zima offers messer Francesco his palfrey on condition that he be allowed to speak with Francesco’s wife in private. Francesco agrees but, when telling his wife about the arrangement, orders her to make no response, thinking thus to obtain Zima’s palfrey without giving anything in return. Zima’s courtly eloquence succeeds in moving the lady, who wishes she could reply. Faced with her silence, Zima cleverly turns Francesco’s strategem to his advantage, giving voice to the response that he would have wished her to make, complete with directions as to the signal by which he will know she is free for a lovers’ tryst. Shortly thereafter, Francesco leaves for a six-month stint as podesta` of Milan and his wife finally speaks: ‘‘Che fo io?’’ she says to herself, ‘‘perche´ perdo io la mia giovinezza? Questi se ne e` andato a Melano e non tornera` di questi sei mesi; e quando me gli ristorera` egli giammai? quando io saro` vecchia?’’ (What am I doing? Why am I throwing away my youth? This husband of mine has gone off to Milan and won’t be returning for six whole months. When is he ever going to make up for lost time? When I’m an old woman?) (3.5.50). Although her words are expressed only to herself (‘‘disse seco medesima’’), their convertibility into deeds has already been assured by Zima’s exceptionally dialogic monologue, and so the affair is successfully launched. The lady’s concern with wasted youth recalls 2.9, where the merchants had agreed that ‘‘le donne lasciate da loro non volessero perder tempo,’’ and it anticipates 5.10, where the old woman counselling the young wife with a homosexual husband provides the theoretical foundation for a wife’s


infidelity, or indeed for any woman’s sexual mobilita`, noting with proto-Marxian clarity that youth is a woman’s capital.14 The old woman advises the wife of 5.10 to take a lover, if only because she is young and should not ‘‘perdere tempo’’ or ‘‘lose time’’: ‘‘sı` ’l dovresti far tu e ciascuna giovane per non perdere il tempo della vostra giovanezza, per cio` che niun dolore e` pari a quello, a chi conoscimento ha, che e` a avere il tempo perduto’’ (you should never waste a moment of your youth, and the same goes for all other women. To anyone who’s had experience of such matters, there’s no sorrow to compare with that of having squandered time) (15). Her message, however, is not to be classified under an elegiac Carpe diem rubric. Rather, it is part of a rigorous and brutal analysis of the different standings that biology and society have conspired to accord men and women within the social order. Men have many forms of leverage they can exert, many commodities they can exchange, while women have only one that is prized: Degli uomini non avvien cosı`: essi nascon buoni a mille cose, non pure a questa, e la maggior parte sono da molto piu` vecchi che giovani; ma le femine a niuna altra cosa che a fare questo e figliuoli ci nascono, e per questo son tenute care. E se tu non te ne avvedessi a altro, sı` te ne dei tu avvedere a questo, che noi siam sempre apparecchiate a cio`, che degli uomini non avviene: e oltre a questo una femina stancherebbe molti uomini, dove molti uomini non possono una femina stancare. E per cio` che a questo siam nate, da capo ti dico che tu farai molto bene a rendere al marito tuo pan per focaccia, sı` che l’anima tua non abbia in vecchiezza che rimproverare alle carni. Di questo mondo ha ciascun tanto quanto egli se ne toglie, e spezialmente le femine, alle quali si convien troppo piu` d’adoperare il tempo quando l’hanno che agli uomini . . . (5.10.18–20; my italics) With men it is different: they are born with a thousand other talents apart from this, and older men are worth far more than younger ones as a rule; but women come into existence for no other purpose than to do this [have sex] and to bear children, and for this they are ‘‘held dear’’ [valued]. If you doubt my words, there’s one thing that ought to convice you, and that is that a woman’s always ready for a man, but not viceversa. What’s more, one woman could exhaust many men, whereas many men can’t exhaust one woman. And since this is the purpose for which we are born, I repeat that you are very well advised to pay your husband in his own coin, so that when you’re an old woman your heart will have


no cause for complaint against your flesh. You must help yourself to whatever you can grab in this world, especially if you’re a woman. It’s far more important for women than for men to make the most of their opportunities . . .

Although interlarded with some standard misogynist fare (for instance, the notion that one woman cannot be satisfied except by many men), this discourse is in the main hard-headedly realistic and certainly not inaccurate with respect to the society it represents. And we have only to think of current marriage patterns, where it is not uncommon for a successful older man to marry a much younger woman, or remember the complaints of actresses and television anchorwomen who are forced to retire sooner than their male counterparts, to realize that we have still not left behind the problem of men being valued more as they get older while women by contrast depreciate with the passing years. Particularly important here is Boccaccio’s exploitation of idiomatic usage in both Italian and English whereby affective value—that which is ‘‘dear’’ to one in affective terms—is conflated with monetary value, that which is ‘‘dear’’ in economic terms, namely that which something or someone is worth: if men are valued more when they are old it is because they are usually ‘‘worth more’’ financially, with the result that they are ‘‘held dear,’’ ‘‘tenuti cari’’ in the language of 5.10. Whereas a woman’s value is tied up with her childbearing ability, which alone causes her to be of worth, to be ‘‘held dear,’’ ‘‘tenuta cara’’: ‘‘ma le femine a niuna altra cosa che a fare questo e figliuoli ci nascono, e per questo son tenute care’’ (but women come into existence for no other purpose than to do this [have sex] and to bear children, and for this they are held dear [valued]) (5.10.18). Bringing the analysis of 5.10 to bear on 2.10, we find an old man whose biological age does not limit or diminish him in society’s eyes; rather, his age works to his advantage because he is able to reap the fruits of his many studious years of juridical achievement.15 We find a young woman who is exchanged in a transaction where her youth and beauty are the capital that offsets the judge’s wealth. (As a Gualandi, she also has noble birth; interestingly, no mention is made of a dowry, suggesting that nobility and beauty are deemed sufficient assets to bring to a marriage with a wealthy but non-noble professional. But even in material terms, we should note that Bartolomea makes a better deal for herself than her family had made for her, since Paganino, who also requires no dowry beyond her beauty, is from a noble family like her own.) But her capital then ceases to bear fruit prematurely, since


it is not even fully exploited for the returns it should offer, access to sex and thereby to children (ma le femine a niuna altra cosa che a far questo e figliuoli ci nascono, e per questo son tenute care): because she and Riccardo do not have sexual relations, Bartolomea can neither ‘‘far questo’’ nor ‘‘[far] figliuoli.’’ The only return she gets on her investment is her legal position as his wife. Legalistically attuned as he is, he does not fail to emphasize that he offers her legality and security, as well as honor and freedom from mortal sin, and that in Monaco she is a whore rather than a wife.16 While Paganino is free to get rid of her when he tires of her, Riccardo announces that he will always value her, using the same language as 5.10’s ‘‘tenute care’’ (‘‘io t’avro` sempre cara’’ [I will always hold you dear] [35]); moreover, as the judge points out with unflattering punctiliousness, the nature of the contract that binds her to Riccardo is such that he could not rid himself of her even if he wished: ‘‘ancora che io non volessi, sarai donna della casa mia’’ (you will always be the mistress of my house, even if I did not want it so) (36). But Bartolomea is inflexible: with respect to her honor, she wishes that her parents had cared for it enough not to give her to an old man, thus constraining her to choose between dishonor and happiness.17 Reminding Riccardo that their union was based on his money, as compared to mutual feeling or attraction, Bartolomea tells him that here she feels like Paganino’s wife, whereas in Pisa she felt like a whore: ‘‘qui mi pare esser moglie di Paganino e a Pisa mi pareva esser vostra bagascia, pensando che per punti di luna e per isquadri di geometria si convenieno tra voi e me congiugnere i pianeti, dove qui Paganino tutta la notte mi tiene in braccio e strignemi e mordemi, e come egli mi conci Dio vel dica per me’’ (I am Paganino’s wife here. It was in Pisa that I felt like a strumpet, considering all that rigmarole about the moon’s phases and all those geometrical calculations that were needed before we could bring the planets into conjunction, whereas here Paganino holds me in his arms the whole night long and squeezes and bites me, and as God is my witness, he never leaves me alone) (38). And as for the notion that, now that he knows what she desires, he will force himself to have sex (‘‘io da quinci innanzi, poscia che io conosco il tuo disidero, mi sforzero`’’ [Now that I know what you want, I’ll make a special effort in the future] [36]), she counters with, ‘‘Andate, e sforzatevi di vivere’’ (Go, and put your efforts into staying alive) (39). Putting her final refusal into the fiscal terms that he will understand, she tells him that she would not go back to him even if


Paganino were to leave her, since her life with him was all loss (‘‘con mio grandissimo danno e interesse vi stetti una volta’’ [Life with you was all loss and no gain as far as I was concerned] [40]); in the future, come what may, she will seek her profit (‘‘mia civanza’’)—in other words, she will insist on getting a better return on her investment. Whereas in 3.5 Zima does all the talking, in the decidedly noncourtly atmosphere of 2.10 it is primarily Bartolomea who speaks. As in Zima’s case, her words are her deeds. That her words are not ‘‘mere words’’ is evident from Riccardo’s shocked reaction to her first fusillade, when he asks her, ‘‘che parole son quelle che tu dı`?’’ (what words are these that you say?) (35), and then moves to the legalistic consideration that we have just examined. If we look back at the parole that so wound the judge, we see that they are nothing less than a manifesto of a woman’s right to sexuality—‘‘voi dovevate vedere che io era giovane e fresca e gagliarda, e per conseguente cognoscere quello che alle giovani donne, oltre al vestire e al mangiare, benche´ elle per vergogna nol dicano, si richiede’’ (You certainly should have had the gumption to realize that a fresh and vigorous young woman like myself needs something more than food and clothes, even if modesty forbids her to say so) (31)—which right is climactically couched in the metaphoric language we have already encountered: E dicovi che se voi aveste tante feste fatte fare a’ lavoratori che le vostre possession lavorano, quante faciavate fare a colui che il mio piccol campicello aveva a lavorare, voi non avreste mai ricolto granel di grano. Sommi abbattuta a costui, che ha voluto Idio sı` come pietoso raguardatore della mia giovanezza, col quale io mi sto in questa camera, nella quale non si sa che cosa festa sia, dico di quelle feste che voi, piu` divoto a Dio che a’ servigi delle donne, cotante celebravate; ne´ mai dentro a quello uscio entro` ne´ sabato ne´ venerdı` ne´ vigilia ne´ quatro tempora ne´ quaresima, ch’e` cosı` lunga, anzi di dı` e di notte ci si lavora e battecisi la lana, e poi che questa notte sono` mattutino, so bene come il fatto ando` da una volta in su`. E pero` con lui intendo di starmi e di lavorare mentre saro` giovane, e le feste e le perdonanze e’ digiuni serbarmi a far quando saro` vecchia; e voi colla buona ventura si ve n’andate il piu` tosto che voi potete, e senza me fate feste quante vi piace. (2.10.32–34; my italics) And I can tell you this, that if you had given as many holidays to the workers on your estates as you gave to the one whose job it was to tend my little field, you would never have harvested a single ear of corn. But


by the merciful will of God, who took pity on my youth [we note that God himself looks after Bartolomea’s sexual felicity], I chanced upon the man with whom I share this room, where holy days—the ones you used to celebrate so religiously, being more devoted to pious works than to the service of the ladies—have never been heard of. And not only has that door remained firmly shut against sabbaths, Fridays, vigils, Ember Days and Lent (which is such a long drawn-out affair), but work goes on all the time here day and night, so that the place is a positive hive of activity. Why, this very morning, the bell for matins had barely stopped ringing before he was up and about, and I can’t begin to tell you how busy we were. Hence I intend to remain with him, and work while I am still young, and save up all those fasts and holy days so that I can turn to them, along with pilgrimages, when I am an old woman. As for you, be so good as to clear off as soon as you can, and have as many holidays as you like, but not with me.

To indicate sexual activity Bartolomea talks about work: in her parole, having sex is lavorare, a primordial fare, as it is in 5.10 (‘‘ma le femine a niuna altra cosa che a far questo e [a far] figliuoli ci nascono’’). Let me now conclude by elaborating on the importance that I attach to these metaphorical expressions for sexual activity, not just in 2.10 but throughout the Decameron. Our story—Dioneo’s first tenth story according to the special dispensation he asks for and receives to tell the last story on each Day of storytelling—is also the first to be structured around a metaphor of this sort (the first actual occurrence of such a metaphor is in 2.7, the not-unrelated story of Alatiel).18 As in 5.4, the nightingale story, the plot of 2.10 hangs on the scaffolding provided by the metaphor, whose presence is required to bring the novella to resolution:19 ‘‘per sua legittima moglie la sposo`, e senza mai guardar festa o vigilia o far quaresima, quanto le gambe ne gli poteron portare lavorarono e buon tempo si diedono’’ (he made her his legitimate wife. And without paying any heed to holy days or vigils or observing Lent, they worked their fingers to the bone and thoroughly enjoyed themselves) (43). Boccaccio’s language—‘‘buon tempo si diedono,’’ as compared to the expression used by women without lovers, ‘‘perder tempo’’— shows us that this is a matter of existential import. Bartolomea’s words, her parole, both describe the fatti of her life with Paganino (we remember that Boccaccio specified that ‘‘la comincio` a confortar co’ fatti’’) and constitute the determining fatti of her existence thus far, as


she opts out of her repressed life with Riccardo for an engaged life with Paganino. It is true that the engagement she attains has its limitations; she is not embarking on a mercantile or professional career. But, within the context of the options available to her, Bartolomea has chosen life, as she makes clear in her retort to Riccardo: ‘‘Andate, e sforzatevi di vivere.’’ Moreover, she has done so at considerable risk: Riccardo’s point about the security she is forfeiting is not insignificant (nor is it even in our own day altogether outdated as a female concern), since she has no way of knowing that Paganino will make her his ‘‘legittima moglie’’ after Riccardo dies. In the terms of Dioneo’s question to the ladies at the end of Day 6, Bartolomea has chosen to far de’ fatti rather than to dir delle parole; more precisely, in her case dir delle parole constitutes far de’ fatti. We noted earlier that, although Dioneo expresses concern lest the ladies cross the bridge from the world of women to the world of men, translating their words into deeds, he is nonetheless the chief instigator of the process whereby this translation is effected. Under the rubric of Dioneo the instigator goes his insistent yoking of 2.10 to 2.9; he ends his story not with the happiness of Bartolomea and Paganino but by drawing the following moral from Bartolomea’s story: ‘‘Per la qual cosa, donne mie care, mi pare che ser Bernabo` disputando con Ambruogiuolo cavalcasse la capra inverso il chino’’ (So it seems to me, dear ladies, that our friend Bernabo`, by taking the course he pursued with Ambruogiuolo, was riding on the edge of a precipice) (43). Once more Dioneo subjects 2.9 to a salutary misinterpretation. Moreover, his insistence on the wrongheadedness of Bernabo`, as though 2.9 had ended with Bernabo`’s disgrace rather than with Ambruogiuolo’s, is picked up and institutionalized by the ladies in their reaction to Dioneo’s story: they laugh so hard that their jaws ache (this in itself is significant; after Dioneo’s first story, 1.4, they permit themselves only a little covert sogghignare)20 and agree ‘‘che Dioneo diceva vero e che Bernabo` era stato una bestia’’ (that Dioneo was right and that Bernabo` had been an ass) (2.Concl.1). Boccaccio thus implicitly urges us to recall the nature of Bernabo`’s stupidity: he was a fool to expect women to stay home idle, with ‘‘le mani a cintola,’’ while their men rove. He was a fool, in other words, to expect women to accept the enforced restraint and the enfeebling ozio that is their lot in the Proem: ‘‘ristrette da’ voleri, da’ piaceri, da’ comandamenti de’ padri, delle madri, de’ fratelli e de’ mariti, il piu` del tempo nel piccolo circuito delle loro camere racchiuse dimorano e quasi oziose sedendosi,


volendo e non volendo in una medesima ora, seco rivolgendo diversi pensieri, li quali non e` possibile che sempre sieno allegri’’ (confined by the whims, fancies, and dictates of their fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, they spend most of their time enclosed within the narrow confines of their rooms, where they sit in apparent idleness, wishing one thing and at the same time wishing its opposite, and reflecting on various matters, which cannot possibly always be pleasant to contemplate) (Proemio, 10; my italics). The pathology of women, described so eloquently in the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta, is brought on by forced inertia: as a result of being ‘‘ristrette,’’ ‘‘racchiuse,’’ and ‘‘oziose,’’ women lose the will to act, and then the disempowered will disempowers itself further, cancelling itself out, trapping itself in a spiral of self-negation (‘‘volendo e non volendo in una medesima ora’’), further incarcerating and immobilizing itself. Dioneo’s misinterpretation of 2.9 is thus an act of female empowerment, as is his categorical statement that we all know what women want, ‘‘di che elle sien vaghe.’’ Certainly his heroine knows what she wants; Bartolomea is not rendered impotent by a conflict within, ‘‘volendo e non volendo in una medesima ora.’’ Rather than be a prisoner ‘‘nel piccolo circuito della sua camera,’’ Bartolomea’s camera is the one in which she works so hard with Paganino (‘‘col quale io mi sto in questa camera, nella qual non si sa che cosa festa sia’’). Dioneo frees women from debilitating ozio—from the many feste that Bartolomea rejects, given that, as the deranged Riccardo puts it at the end, ‘‘Il mal furo non vuol festa’’ (The wicked hole refuses to take a holiday) (42)21—to the empowerment of work. And thus Bartolomea works. In fact, she has sex, while in words—metaphorical words—she works. And this is the key point about the Decameron’s metaphors for sex: they are a verbal mechanism (rather than a plot mechanism; note again the dichotomy words/deeds with metaphor as parola and plot as fatto) for effecting the translation—the literal translation, since ‘‘metaphor’’ is the Greek for trans-latio, or carrying over—of words into deeds.22 In the case of 2.10, lavorare il campo, one seminal human activity, takes the place of sexual intercourse, another seminal human activity, and widens the scope of the latter by metaphorical transference. Having sex, which is a fairly restrictive activity, thus opens up to include all sorts of other activities, including—for the Decameron’s repertory of sexual metaphors is capacious—some of the very activities engaged in by men but off-limits to women in the Proem: ‘‘uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare.’’ We could view the sexual


metaphors as bridges between two gendered activities that are accorded different status and worth along gender lines: the metaphors serve to transfer or carry over (again, this is what meta-fero tells us that metaphors do by definition, but here their essential function is put very consciously to an ideologically defined end) some of the worth accorded men’s work to women’s work. The Decameron’s metaphors for sex inscribe women’s work (sex) within the broader context of men’s work, thus transferring to women some of the symbolic worth accorded to men and appropriating for women the larger frame of reference—the broader playing field—usually reserved for men. In the terms of our proverb, the metaphors allow women to become men, words to become deeds. Men can do many things—‘‘essi nascon buoni a mille cose,’’ says the old woman of 5.10—while women can only do one thing: ‘‘ma le femine a niuna altra cosa che a fare questo e figliuoli ci nascono, e per questo son tenute care.’’ But the sexual metaphors of the Decameron are a way of allowing the one thing women do to take on the dimension of the many things men do, as the pointed use of the verb fare for sexual activity in both 2.9 and 5.10 underscores. His wife most likely does as he does, says one of the merchants of 2.9, whether or not he wants to admit it: ‘‘E io fo il simigliante, per cio` che se io credo che la mia donna alcuna sua ventura procacci, ella il fa, e se io nol credo, si ’l fa’, e per cio` a fare a far sia: quale asino da` in parete, tal riceve’’ (I do the same, because whether or not I believe my wife is behaving herself, she will do it, and if I do not believe it, she will likewise do it, thus doing as one is done to: so it’s a case of tit for tat) (2.9.6; my italics). This same language, with the verbatim repetition of the tit-for-tat proverb, is reprised by Dioneo at the end of 5.10, as he rejects any double standard in matters of sexual satisfaction: ‘‘Per che cosı` vi vo’ dire, donne mie care, che chi te la fa, fagliele; e se tu non puoi, tienloti a mente fin che tu possa, accio` che quale asino da` in parete tal riceva’’ (So my advice to you, dear ladies, is this, that to him who does it to you, do it back; and if you can’t do it at once, bear it in mind till you can, so it’s a case of tit for tat) (5.10.64). Fare, the world of men, is thus appropriated for women. In a larger sense, the poetics of the Decameron as a whole is reflected in its sexual metaphors, as their insistent and provocative presence in the Author’s Conclusion indicates. Why does Boccaccio end his work with a concentrated restatement of the sexual metaphors that limn his pages? I would go so far as to suggest—bearing in mind


that key metaphoric terms of Bartolomea’s story, including ‘‘foro,’’ are prominently displayed in the Conclusione dell’Autore23 —that the text’s sexual metaphors carry (meta-fero again) the Decameron’s basic genetic material, with which they imprint the entire organism. The Decameron’s most fundamental project is the restoration, through words, of the will to live, to do. By telling stories, by using parole, the members of the brigata regain their grasp on life, forging a future in which to commit more fatti. And yet, the cleavage between words and deeds is profound and complex, marked by an abiding distrust for words that is expressed in the gender alignment of our original proverb (a distrust, by the way, that is rather poignantly expressed in our writerly reliance on expressions like ‘‘indeed’’ and ‘‘in fact,’’ which try to make our parole stronger by casting them as fatti). The long list under the rubric ‘‘Fatti e parole’’ in the Raccolta di proverbi toscani gives us much to consider:24 ‘‘Chi molto profferisce, poco mantiene’’ (He who proffers much, does little); ‘‘Chi sa favellare, impari a praticare’’ (Let the one who knows how to speak learn how to do); ‘‘Dove bisognan fatti, le parole non bastano’’ (Where deeds are needed, words do not suffice); ‘‘Il bel del giuoco, e` far de’ fatti e parlar poco’’ (The beauty of the game is in doing deeds and speaking little); ‘‘Lingua cheta, e fatti parlanti’’ (A quiet tongue, and deeds that speak); ‘‘Dove son donne e gatti, son piu` parole che fatti’’ (Where there are women and cats, there are more words than deeds); ‘‘Gran vantatore, piccol facitore’’ (Great boaster, small do-er); and this succinct summation of the tenets of figural allegory, ‘‘I detti son nostri e i fatti son di Dio’’ (Words are ours and deeds are God’s). These proverbs, based on the cleavage between words and deeds, testify (eloquently, I might add) to a pervasive suspicion of language and, because they are gendered, to an analogous suspicion of women. The Decameron does not subscribe to suspicion of language or suspicion of women, nor to the reifying of the divide between words and deeds that allows both types of distrust and suspicion to flourish. Rather, it embraces a sexualized variant of Dante’s credo of indivisible words and deeds: ‘‘sı` che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso’’ (so that my word is not different from the deed) (Inf. 32.12). The Decameron depicts parole/femmine as conduits to fatti/maschi and fatti/maschi resulting in parole/femmine in a mighty interwoven skein of word and deed, male and female, interconnected and unsunderable. As a variant of ‘‘Le parole son femmine, e i fatti son maschi,’’ the editor of the Raccolta di proverbi toscani adds ‘‘Le parole non fanno fatti’’ (Words do


not make deeds). But the whole point of the Decameron, whose novelle are both words (‘‘favole o parabole o istorie’’) and deeds—the very news or essence of life from which the brigata must be protected (‘‘niuna novella altra che lieta ci rechi di fuori’’ [bring no tidings of the world outside these walls unless they are tidings of happiness] [1.Intr.101])—is that the proverb is wrong: le parole fanno fatti.

chapter 14

Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender

W hile we are accustomed to Dante’s appropriations and revisions

of history, the case of Francesca da Rimini (Inf. 5.73–142) is rather different from the norm, since in her case no trace remains of the historical record that the poet could have appropriated. There is no completely independent documentation of Francesca’s story; we are indebted for what we know to Dante and to his commentators. A fourteenth-century chronicler of Rimini, Marco Battagli, alludes in passing to the event, but his history was written in 1352, thus postdating by three decades Dante’s death in 1321.1 Two factors come into play when we assess Battagli’s chronicle as an independent verification of Francesca’s story: on the one hand, he is an indisputable authority regarding Rimini and the Malatesta;2 on the other, he knew Dante’s poem.3 Therefore, Battagli’s passing and indirect reference (to which we shall return in due course) serves at best as plausibly independent confirmation of an occurrence about which the contemporary historical record is silent. That silence is broken by Dante.4 By reintegrating history—including the silence of history—into our reading of canto 5, we restore a context in which to remember that in the case of Francesca da Rimini, Dante is the historian of record: in effect he saved Francesca from oblivion, giving her a voice and a name. Technically, we know that Dante is the transmitter of the little that we know about Francesca da Rimini. Francesco Torraca, whose 1902 essay on Inferno 5 has not been surpassed in historical richness, clearly states as much (‘‘Del fatto, nessuna cronaca contemporanea, nessun documento ci ha conservato memoria; primo, e solo narratore contemporaneo, Dante’’),5 and the point is repeated in the Enciclopedia Dantesca’s article on Francesca (‘‘Il racconto dantesco resta l’unica testimonianza antica intorno al dramma di adulterio e di morte

Dante and Francesca da Rimini 305

consumato alla corte malatestiana, ignorato dalle cronache e dai documenti locali coevi o posteriori’’).6 Similarly, when we begin to wonder about the historicity of Francesca, we discover the existence of a specialized bibliography on the historical Francesca of great erudition. But it rarely intersects with the much larger literary bibliography on Inferno 5, and its findings—including the fundamental fact that there is no historical record of the events narrated in the canto—are rarely factored into literary readings. Torraca’s clarity about the silence of the historical record has not informed subsequent readings of the canto. This essay attempts to recuperate the significance of the fact that Dante is the historian of record with respect to Francesca da Rimini and to integrate the implications of this understanding, as well as the implications of a historicized Francesca, into our critical response to Inferno 5. My subtitle outlines the parameters of my reading: realpolitik, because Dante viewed Francesca’s life as politically determined, her death the result of the pragmatic matrimonial politics that governed dynastic alliances;7 romance, because Dante injected romance into Francesca’s essentially political story, as a way of highlighting the tension between her role as pawn of the state and her desire for personal fulfillment (romance is the genre, in fact, that makes possible the focus on personal desire); gender, because the choice of romance as the modality for this particular narrative, a narrative founded on dynastic marriage, is a choice that necessarily brings us to gender. Ultimately, I hope to throw light on the ways in which Francesca’s story, as told by Dante, is a gendered story, one in which unusual value is placed on the personhood of the dynastic wife.8 The key fact of Francesca da Rimini’s life is a dynastic-political fact: Francesca was born into a family that aspired to dominion over Ravenna (and achieved it, in 1275); she married into a family that aspired to dominion over Rimini (they, too, succeeded, twenty years later, in 1295). She thus served a dynastic function, as a link between the two most powerful rising dynasties of Romagna. She was the daughter of Guido Minore da Polenta (so called to distinguish him from his cousin Guido Riccio; he is also referred to as Guido il Vecchio da Polenta), lord of Ravenna. Circa 1275 she married Giovanni (called Gianciotto, ‘‘crippled John’’) Malatesta, the second son of Malatesta da Verucchio, first lord of Rimini (Gianciotto himself was never lord of Rimini).9 She died because of this marriage, between 1283 and 1286.


Early commentators of the Commedia show their awareness of the significance of these facts by giving Francesca’s story a political frame; they stress the importance of her marriage as a political alliance, as an attempt to bring peace and stability to Romagna by allying the region’s two most powerful families. Beginning with a succinct statement about dynastic power—‘‘In Romagna sono due grandi case, in Rimino i Malatesti, in Ravenna quelli da Polenta’’ (In Romagna there are two great families, in Rimini the Malatesta, in Ravenna those from Polenta)—the Florentine writer of the Ottimo commento (ca. 1333) explains that these warring dynasties made peace and that Gianciotto married Francesca in order to guarantee, to bring ‘‘fermezza’’ to, their accord: [L]e quali case per la loro grandezza ebbero guerra insieme, della quale fecero pace; alla cui fermezza Gianni Sciancato di Messer Malatesta, uomo de l’abito rustico, e del cuore franco, e armigero, e crudele, tolse per moglie Francesca figliuola di Messer Guido il vecchio da Polenta, donna bellissima del corpo, e gaia ne’ sembianti. [T]hese dynastic houses on account of their importance were at war with each other and then made peace; to guarantee the peace Gianni Sciancato of Messer Malatesta, a man of rustic dress, brave heart, a warrior, and cruel, took as wife Francesca, the daughter of Messer Guido the elder of Polenta, a lady very beautiful of body and lighthearted in demeanor.10

The Ottimo’s comment, while incorrect in its details (there was no war between the Malatesta and the Polentani at that time),11 is correct in its fundamental analysis, which views dynastic houses (‘‘case’’) of a certain importance (‘‘grandezza’’) as operating in a framework that is entirely political and that precludes neutrality: they are either enemies or—as was already the case with these two—allies.12 Boccaccio (ca. 1373) follows the Ottimo in recounting that upon the cessation of hostilities between Guido da Polenta and Malatesta of Rimini, the marriage of their offspring was engineered as a way of cementing (‘‘fermeza’’ again) the new peace: E` adunque da sapere che costei fu figliuola di messer Guido vecchio da Polenta, signor di Ravenna e di Cervia; ed essendo stata lunga guerra e dannosa tra lui e i signori Malatesti da Rimino, adivenne che per certi mezzani fu trattata e composta la pace tra loro. La quale accio` che piu` fermeza avesse, piacque a ciascuna delle parti di volerla fortificare per parentado; e ’l parentado trattato fu che ’l detto messer


Guido dovesse dare per moglie una sua giovane e bella figliuola, chiamata madonna Francesca, a Gian Ciotto, figliuolo di messer Malatesta. You must know that she was the daughter of Guido da Polenta the elder, lord of Ravenna and Cervia. A long, harsh war had raged between him and the Malatesta, lords of Rimini, when through certain intermediaries, peace was treated and concluded. To make it all the more firm, both sides were pleased to cement it with a marriage. Whereupon it was arranged that Messer Guido was to give his beautiful young daughter, called Madonna Francesca, in marriage to Gianciotto, son of Messer Malatesta.13

Benvenuto da Imola, despite being from Romagna, seems to possess no more information than the Ottimo, whose descriptions of the protagonists he translates; he does specify that Gianciotto is the son of Malatesta senior, who was the first to seize power over Rimini: ‘‘filius Domini Malatestae senioris, qui primus acquivisit dominium Arimini’’ (DDP). The commentary of the Anonimo Fiorentino (ca. 1400) follows Boccaccio in every way, including the dynastic frame.14 Over the centuries, however, by the time we reach the commentaries of Daniello (1568) and Castelvetro (ca. 1570), the dynastic and political element of Francesca’s story begins to fade, as the reception foregrounds the romance elements of Dante’s story and abandons the political framework. If we were to try to reconstruct the basic biographical data of Francesca’s life from the Commedia, we would find the task impossible. The text offers only the following facts: Francesca’s birthplace (‘‘Siede la terra dove nata fui / su la marina dove ’l Po discende / per aver pace co’ seguaci sui’’ [Inf. 5.97–99]); her Christian name (‘‘Francesca, i tuoi martı`ri’’ [Inf. 5.116]); the fact that she and her lover were killed by a kinsman (‘‘Caina attende chi a vita ci spense’’ [Inf. 5.107]); and the fact that the lovers are related by marriage (‘‘i due cognati’’ [Inf. 6.2]).15 This presentation is remarkably oblique, on a number of counts. First, it omits altogether the names of Francesca’s lover and husband. Second, while Francesca’s Christian name is registered, her family name must be inferred from her natal city, Ravenna, which in turn is never named but alluded to in a geographical periphrasis that places her land of birth ‘‘on the shore where the Po descends to be at peace with its followers,’’ that is, where it reaches the Adriatic. Third, the fact that she and her lover were killed by a brother is presented in


one compact and elliptical verse that itself requires glossing: ‘‘Caina awaits him who put out our life’’ implies that the lovers’ murderer is a brother, destined for that part of hell’s lowest circle that houses traitors of kin and is named after Cain, the first fratricide. (While readers of the Inferno eventually learn that this zone houses all traitors of kin, the word ‘‘Caina’’ causes one to think, in this case correctly, of fratricide.) Fourth, the fact that the murderer is related to both lovers, in other words, the fact that the lovers were themselves linked by ‘‘parentado,’’ to use Boccaccio’s word, is given to us only after the encounter with Francesca has ended, at the beginning of canto 6 when the narrator refers to them as ‘‘i due cognati.’’ According to the accounts that accreted around the spare nucleus in Inferno 5, Francesca entered into an adulterous love affair with Paolo Malatesta, third son of Malatesta da Verucchio, known as Paolo il Bello; she and Paolo were killed by Gianciotto, most likely between 1283 and 1286. The date of death must be inferred circumstantially, like every other event of Francesca’s unrecorded life. Paolo, who in 1269 married Orabile Beatrice, countess of Ghiaggiolo (by whom he had two children), was in Florence as capitano del popolo in 1282; he tendered his resignation on the first of February 1283 and returned to Rimini.16 By 1286 Gianciotto had remarried.17 So the deaths of Paolo and Francesca had to have occurred between 1283 and 1286. Stepping into the information vacuum left by Dante, the earliest commentators begin by offering the crucial data that the Commedia omits. Jacopo Alighieri (ca. 1322) gives the names of all the protagonists and a schematic rendering of events: Essendosi degli antichi infino a qui ragionato, di due modernamente si segue, de’ quali l’un fu una donna nominata monna Francesca figliuola di messer Guido da Polenta, cioe` Guido Vecchio da Polenta di Romagna, e della citta` di Ravenna, e l’altro Paolo d’i Malatesti da Rimini, la quale essendo del fratello del detto Paolo moglie, il quale ebbe nome Gianni Isciancato, carnalmente con lei usando, cioe` col detto suo cognato, alcuna volta insieme, dal marito fur morti. (Jacopo Alighieri, DDP) Having discoursed of the ancients up to now, what follows regards two moderns, of whom one was a lady named Madonna Francesca, daughter of Messer Guido da Polenta, that is, Guido the elder of Polenta from Romagna, and from the city of Ravenna, and the other Paolo of the Malatesta of Rimini. She was the wife of the brother of said Paolo, whose


name was Gianni Sciancato, and having carnal relations with him, that is, with her aforementioned brother-in-law, on a few occasions together, they were killed by the husband.

Shortly afterward, Jacopo della Lana (1324–1328) adds some color, including the first description of the death scene: ‘‘infine trovolli in sul peccato, prese una spada, e conficolli insieme in tal modo che abbracciati ad uno morirono’’ (finally he found them while sinning, took a sword and pierced them at the same time in such a way that locked together in one embrace they died) (DDP). The Ottimo commento goes further, adding the dynastic frame, character sketches of the protagonists, and a servant who conveys the news of the adulterous liaison to Gianciotto. It is Boccaccio, the great raconteur, who elaborates Francesca’s story to novella-like proportions and whose imprint on it is most indelible. We have seen that Dante himself tells us very little. This fact in itself requires critical acknowledgment, as well as recognition of how different our readerly situation is from that of the poem’s early readers, for whom the historical importance of Dante’s intervention would have been explicit. We, on the other hand, have heard or encountered so many tellings of Francesca’s tale—our cultural imaginary has been for so long overstocked with commentaries, paintings, dramas, tragedies, poems, and musical responses to Francesca—that we only with difficulty clear the cultural underbrush enough to re-create the relative emptiness in which Dante wrote Inferno 5.18 The case of Francesca is only one example—albeit a major one—of a problem that we encounter in any centuries-long critical enterprise: the problem of a reception that to some degree we must unlearn. In the particular case of Francesca da Rimini, unlearning the reception entails keeping clear the boundaries between what Dante tells us and what is added to the story later on and, most importantly, staying focused on the significance of the existence of Dante’s telling—without which we would not have heard of Francesca at all, let alone elaborated her into the heroine of all those melodramas.19 In staging the infernal meeting between himself and Francesca, Dante represents himself as able to identify her on the basis of very little information. She tells him that she is from Ravenna (in an ambiguous fashion, since Ravenna is not the only city that fits her description),20 that love bound her partner to her and her to him, that love led her and her lover to one death, and that Caina awaits their


murderer. After he has learned this much, the pilgrim is able to address Francesca by her Christian name: ‘‘Francesca, i tuoi matı`ri / a lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio’’ (Francesca, your sufferings make me weep for sadness and pity) (Inf. 5.116–17). Dante’s staging thus offers us two possibilities: 1) that he considered Francesca’s story notorious, despite its absence from the chronicles available during his lifetime; 2) that he wanted to render the story notorious, which he does principally through the immortal verses he dedicates to its protagonist, but also by treating her as always already famous. The reality is most likely a combination of both possibilities, namely, that he took a story that was notorious enough for him to have heard it, but that eventually would have been lost, and made it a story that has never been forgotten. Given that we can infer from Dante’s staging both the conferred and the genuine notoriety of Francesca’s story, we can further infer that cultural celebrity is part of the point here: Dante is investigating a certain kind of fame and what it signifies about the public imaginary, and he is inventing a certain kind of fame, one that resonates still in our own day. Inferno 5 testifies that Francesca’s story had made her, by the first decade of the fourteenth century in central Italy, a cultural icon whose recognizability is analogous to that of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, today. It further testifies that Dante, in taking the notorious but forgettable events of the nascent Malatesta dynasty and fashioning them into Francesca’s unforgettable story—which happens also to be the story of its dynastically least-valuable member—invented a new kind of celebrity. This new—and, I would argue, gendered— celebrity arises from the dynamic collision of two opposed stresses: the realpolitik of dynastic marriage and the wish-fulfillment fantasy of romance. The paradigm that results revolves around the necessary passivity, and indeed victimhood, of the story’s protagonist, in one domain, and her agency as she refashions her life to her liking, in the other. Moreover, through the pilgrim’s behavior, Dante charts the culture’s voyeuristic response to such a female protagonist—a response that we have witnessed exponentially multiplied (in the case of Diana, for instance), although not fundamentally altered, in our own time. But the canto’s austere biographical minimalism also suggests that Dante, while wanting to engage in a cultural debate whose coordinates are dynastic marriages, on the one hand, and romance, on the other, wanted to set the terms of the debate at a relatively high level. While our compulsion to cultural voyeurism is necessarily part of what needs


to be examined in this context, it is not a compulsion to which Dante panders. Or is it? Here, too, the issue is a complex one, for while Dante does not stoop to the tabloid level of the commentators, one could reasonably claim that he solicits their reactions by setting romance as part of his agenda. He does indeed set romance as part of a broad agenda, one that also includes politics and power and the interplay between those forces. Over centuries of interpretation we have impoverished the canto by reading it primarily in the key of romance, at most expanding the discourse along the moral axis where (in a reading that has always coexisted with the romantic one and that has dominated for some time) romance is countered by reason. Moreover, it is the nature of the Commedia’s ‘‘living’’ textuality to be dialectical, to catch the reader in the vice, for example, of loving Vergil and losing him, or, in this instance, in the act of voyeurism that the text both solicits and rebukes.21 What happened after Francesca and Paolo ceased to read that day? Where the commentary/tabloid is driven to create completion at all costs, the Commedia gives us the generative openness of life itself: a world of possibilities, not of answers. Dante places Francesca among the carnal sinners, driven by a relentless wind in hell as they were driven by their passions in life: ‘‘a cosı` fatto tormento / enno dannati i peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento’’ (to such torment are damned the carnal sinners, who subject reason to desire) (Inf. 5.37–39). Vergil identifies Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra—the presence of three ruling queens here seems relevant to the dynastic considerations that underwrote the union of Francesca with Gianciotto—and then Helen, Achilles, Paris, and Tristan. (He points to and names over a thousand shades, but these are the ones whose names Dante shares with us.) In the course of listing these souls, the narrative register shifts (beginning with Achilles, the first man) from critical and moralistic to pitying and romantic. In semantic terms, we move from ‘‘lust’’ to ‘‘love’’: from lussuria and lussurıösa, referring to Semiramis’s ‘‘vice of lust’’ and Cleopatra ‘‘the lustful,’’ we move to the love with which Achilles struggles at the end (‘‘Achille, / che con amore al fine combatteo’’ [Inf. 5.65– 66]) and the love that has caused more than one thousand souls to depart this life (‘‘ch’amor di nostra vita dipartille’’ [Inf. 5.69]). Tercet 70–72, which functions as a pivot between the two halves of canto 5, between the half of the canto that builds up to Francesca


and the half that she dominates, is tasked with romanticizing the discourse. Here the narrator refers to the previously named ‘‘peccator carnali’’ as ‘‘le donne antiche e’ cavalieri’’ (Inf. 5.71): carnal sinners become ladies of old and knights. The earlier figures are here indiscriminately recast in a romantic glow; they are now ladies and knights, romance heroes and heroines. With a romantic register arrives a romantic agenda, signaled by the issues of complicity and involvement that suddenly surface. When the pilgrim has heard Vergil name the ladies and knights of old, pity overcomes him and he is ‘‘almost lost’’: ‘‘pieta` mi giunse, e fui quasi smarrito’’ (Inf. 5.72). The narrator’s moral clarity (‘‘to such torment are damned the carnal sinners, who subject reason to desire’’) has given way to the pilgrim’s moral confusion. Under the aegis of this moral confusion the encounter with Francesca takes place, initiated by an expressed attraction on Dante’s part; summoned by the pilgrim, the two approach and Francesca begins to speak. The Trecento commentators commonly mark this juncture as a transition from ancients to moderns (see the passage from Jacopo Alighieri cited above: ‘‘Essendosi degli antichi infino a qui ragionato, di due modernamente si segue’’). This is certainly an important consideration, although it should be noted that the boundary between ancients and moderns is in fact somewhat fuzzier; Tristan, named last in the previous list, is already a modern, and a quintessentially romantic modern at that. As is frequently the case in the dynamic between the Commedia and its critics, a transition viewed by critics as absolute is engineered by the poet as a graduated process. So, too, in this particular case, the transition does not occur all at once: stringent precepts slacken gradually, until we reach the pivotal tercet that proclaims the ‘‘peccator carnali’’ to be ‘‘donne antiche e’ cavalieri,’’ by which point we have entered a new frame of reference. Once accomplished, the transition from ancients to moderns is a subset in the larger transition from the frame of moral responsibility to the frame of romance. In theologized terms, to enter the frame of romance signifies entering a context in which moral responsibility and personal agency are suspended by an all-consuming sentiment, where passion rules untrammeled by reason. In this context Francesca’s passivity is a function—as also etymologically—of her passion; her passivity reflects her sinful refusal of moral agency, her refusal to fashion herself as a Christian agent. She consistently produces herself as an object, and the critical tradition has responded by reading her story, and even her syntax, as a symptom of the lust for which she is damned. To give a recent


example from my own writing, I offer the syntax of the lover in Dante’s erotic canzone Io son venuto as a source for Francesca’s syntax, noting that ‘‘Francesca, too, uses constructions in which Love is subject and she is the passive object.’’22 Specific to my argument is the connection to Dante’s lyric past, whereas the reading of Francesca’s syntactic passivity as inherently sinful is by now a critical topos. Like the lover persona of Dante’s canzone, Francesca experiences love as a compulsive force, as a desire that cannot be withstood, even if it leads to death; unlike the lover in the canzone, she is situated in a moral context in which desire unchecked by free will and reason is sinful. Such a reading, absolutely not gendered, is not only not wrong; it is canonical and hermeneutically fundamental, as the canto’s reception demonstrates. I believe that a gendered reading can supplement our understanding of what is at stake for Dante in Inferno 5, and that the paradigm of realpolitik versus romance provides the framework for a gendered reading. Against this framework an alternative reading suggests itself, whereby Francesca’s syntactic passivity reflects, first, her authentic historical passivity as dynastic pawn in a world where matrimonial alliances were power politics and, second, her ability to create pleasurable passivity for herself as the object of a man’s attention. To the degree that Francesca succeeds in obtaining pleasure for herself that would otherwise be denied her, to the degree (I should probably specify) that Dante’s Francesca definitely succeeds in obtaining pleasure that may or may not have been obtained by the historical Francesca, it is possible to find agency in her passivity. Thus, by figuring herself as object in a romantic fantasy, as literal syntactic object in a verse like ‘‘la bocca mi bascio` tutto tremante’’ (all trembling he kissed me on the mouth) (Inf. 5.136; my italics), Francesca may be seen as asserting her agency and her personhood against a dynastic patriarchy that assigned no value to her pleasure.23 I am arguing, in other words, that agency is doubly constituted in this canto, both along the moral axis to which we are accustomed and along a gendered-historicized axis. Although we are not explicitly accustomed to the latter, its latent presence is nonetheless most likely responsible for the sympathy the canto has always elicited for its female protagonist from the mostly male readers who have traditionally written about the experience of reading Inferno 5. Sensing the presence of gendered issues in the canto, these readers have expressed their awareness in sympathy for Francesca: thus there have been romantic celebrations of her refined ‘‘femininity’’ that have in turn drawn the


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scorn of less impressionistic commentators, who have insisted, legitimately enough, on the rubric ‘‘carnal sinners.’’24 Sympathy for Francesca has taken the form of male gallantry, wanting to excuse her simply because of her sex, but without taking into account what her sex actually signifies. Dante, however, I propose, does take into account Francesca’s sex and its significance: the issue of agency is complicated precisely by Dante’s desire to engage, along with the nongendered moral issues, also the gendered and historical issues that are implicit in his choice of a female protagonist whom he situates within the coordinates of dynastic marriage and romance. While it is a critical commonplace to note that Francesca takes no responsibility for her life-story, it is not a critical commonplace to historicize her life. As I indicated at the outset, the historicizing framework provided by the early commentators was lost to the tradition by the Renaissance. Only the act of historicizing Francesca, however, allows us to remember that, in real life, responsibility was available to her exclusively in the forms of acceptance and resignation. I will turn later to reconstructing in greater detail the context of the historical Francesca as Dante may have viewed it; for the moment, in returning to the text I would ask the reader to bear in mind that lack of agency in Francesca’s language is a complex signifier that cuts across multiple domains and resonates differently in each. In her famous tercets, each beginning with ‘‘Love’’ as subject, Francesca draws on the fundamental tenets of the established amatory code to tell her story in, precisely, coded form. The chosen code dictates biographical and historical opacity. In place of recognizable humans engaging in recognizable human behavior, the code renders the lovers as particles adrift in a force field governed by powers beyond their control: love, beauty, nobility. When other people are involved, they are rendered as demonized abstractions. Deftly and densely these verses weave a plot that contains no human agency. The first tercet goes to the heart of Francesca’s story by placing her and her lover on a matrix of love and violent death, while at the same time evading all responsibility for either that love or that death. Profoundly ahistorical, the tercet yet sketches the lineaments of a history that is initiated with the passions of the man. In this chronology Paolo is the first to love: ‘‘Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, / prese costui de la bella persona / che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende’’ (Inf. 5.100–102). The syntactic density of this language creates a sense of tightly compacted ineluctability, of a destiny that cannot be escaped. Francesca


tells us that love, which is quickly kindled in a noble heart, seized Paolo, that the love that seized him was for her beautiful body, the same body that was taken from her, and that the mode (of what? of loving? of being murdered?) still offends her.25 The agents of causality here are: love, which the noble-souled are not able to withstand (this precept recapitulates the poet Guido Guinizzelli, implicitly an authority, and thus another agent of causality);26 Francesca’s physical beauty, which seizes Paolo; the unnamed agents that take her body from her; and the mysterious modo—the way, the modality—that still offends her. The next tercet is only somewhat less dense. Francesca explains that, since reciprocity in love is obligatory (here she draws on The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus, another implicit authority, hence agent), love caused by Paolo’s beauty bound her reciprocally— and eternally: ‘‘Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, / mi prese del costui piacer sı` forte, / che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona’’ (Love, that absolves no beloved from loving, seized me so strongly for his beauty, that, as you see, it has not yet let me go) (Inf. 5.103–5). Francesca’s two-verse conclusion is less syntactically complex, more stark, still opaque, however, and equally devoted to maintaining the role of object: ‘‘Amor condusse noi ad una morte. / Caina attende chi a vita ci spense’’ (Love led us to one death. Caina awaits him who put out our life) (Inf. 5.106–7). Again, let us take note of the celebrity these verses imply, for these abstract and codified declarations manage to reveal the speaker’s identity to her interlocutor. Once he knows her identity, the pilgrim formulates a query that is undeniably voyeuristic: how did love first permit the lovers to recognize their desires? Her response is classically Dantesque, in terms of ‘‘poetic yield,’’ that is, the ratio of goals achieved (very great) to linguistic expenditure (very sparing). It introduces a new subtext, the romance Lancelot du Lac, to whose protagonists Francesca compares herself and Paolo. It brings the complicity of writing and literature ever more to the attention of the reader as a main theme of the canto, a theme that culminates in Francesca’s indictment of the Lancelot and its author as the ‘‘go-betweens’’ who brought her and Paolo to the point of surrendering to passion. And, most interesting for the present inquiry, Francesca responds to the implicit voyeurism of the pilgrim’s request by providing a more circumstantial and detailed window onto her affair. We could say that, in response to and in exchange for greater sympathy, she relaxes the


tightly scripted nature of the interview she has granted, perhaps even that she poses candidly for the cameras. The window that Francesca opens onto her life is a window onto Francesca as subject, as agent in the pursuit of pleasure. Reading together one day for pleasure, ‘‘per diletto,’’ the couple read of how love seized Lancelot: the reading constrained their eyes to meet and their faces to pale, and finally—but only when they read of how Lancelot kissed Guinevere—Paolo kissed her. This account is brought up short by two densely suggestive consecutive statements. The first, ‘‘Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse’’ (A Gallehaut was the book and he who wrote it), states that the Old French romance and its author occupied the same role—the role of go-between—in the lives of Francesca and Paolo that the knight Gallehaut occupied in the lives of Guinevere and Lancelot. Thus, the Lancelot romance and its author—‘‘ ’l libro e chi lo scrisse’’—are responsible for bringing together Francesca and Paolo, a formula that seems to leave little room for the agency of the text’s readers. And yet Francesca’s next declaration, ‘‘quel giorno piu` non vi leggemmo avante’’ (that day we read no further in it), powerfully concludes with their agency—Francesca’s and Paolo’s agency— both as readers, expressed with the active (not passive) ‘‘leggemmo,’’ and as readers who cease to read. The elliptical concluding verse is an assertion of control over the Commedia’s readers as well, who are left to grapple with a statement that suggests volumes but tells nothing. Ultimately, Francesca here uses language to impose silence, for, as though mirroring her recollection of reading no more, she now speaks no more. The artful opacity of her two last declarations—from the impressively allusive ‘‘Galeotto’’ to the tantalizing final ‘‘avante’’ that suggests forwardness while denying it—lapses into genuine silence. These verses are the genial seal to an interview that dynamically juxtaposes two views of the life-story: the life-story as reduced to abstract principles versus the life-story as reflected in circumstance and specificity. The task of assuaging our collective desire for the latter was assumed first by the Ottimo commento but especially by Boccaccio, who focused a floodlight of biographic and romantic detail onto Dante’s magisterially wrought obscurity. As I noted earlier, the Ottimo adds the dynastic frame, character sketches of the protagonists, and a servant who conveys the news of the adulterous liaison to Gianciotto. The character sketches are intriguing because they create an implicit motivation for Francesca’s infidelity on which Boccaccio later builds. The Ottimo commento marks the characters in such a way as to suggest


the inherent compatibility of one couple versus the equally inherent incompatibility of the other. Gianciotto is uncouth in his appearance, a brave warrior, and cruel (‘‘uomo dell’abito rustico, e del cuore franco, e armigero, e crudele’’); Francesca is very beautiful and lighthearted in her demeanor (‘‘donna bellissima del corpo, e gaia ne’ sembianti’’); Paolo is very beautiful, well mannered, and disposed more to leisure than to work (‘‘uomo molto bello del corpo, e ben costumato, e acconcio piu` a riposo, che a travaglio’’). Francesca and Paolo are congruent, in balance, while Gianciotto is incongruent, out of balance: if Francesca is ‘‘bellissima del corpo,’’ Paolo, too, is ‘‘molto bello del corpo’’; if Francesca is inclined toward gaiety, Paolo, too, is given to leisure pursuits. Gianciotto, on the other hand, is ‘‘dell’abito rustico’’—he sports not fine manners but arms. He is, finally, ‘‘crudele.’’ Despite this final adjective, it is not clear that the writer of the Ottimo commento prefers Paolo to Gianciotto. Rather, he codes the brothers as opposites, with Gianciotto the man of action and Paolo the lightweight dandy. Boccaccio maintains the previous commentator’s system of coded characters but adjusts the values so that Gianciotto is more repellent and Paolo less flighty. The result, in Boccaccio’s arrangement, is a marriage which, because of the perceived discrepancy of the partners, is viewed as potentially explosive even before it occurs. This manifest instability causes one of Guido da Polenta’s friends to alert him to the scandal that could arise from such a union, and to warn him that if Francesca sees Gianciotto before the marriage knot is tied, no one will be able to compel her to take him: Guardate come voi fate, per cio` che, se voi non prendete modo ad alcuna parte, che in questo parentado egli ve ne potra` seguire scandolo. Voi dovete sapere chi e` vostra figliuola, e quanto ell’e` d’altiero animo; e se ella vede Gian Ciotto avanti che ’l matrimonio sia perfetto, ne´ voi ne´ altri potra` mai fare che ella il voglia per marito. (Esposizioni, 315) Be careful how you proceed, for if you do not take precautions, this wedding may bring scandal. You know your daughter, and how high-spirited she can be. If she sees Gianciotto before the marriage is concluded, neither you nor anyone else can make her go through with it.

The friend further advises that one of Gianciotto’s brothers be sent to Ravenna to marry Francesca as his proxy, ‘‘come suo procuratore’’ (Esposizioni, 315). Guido da Polenta prefers Gianciotto to his brothers as his future son-in-law, despite his being ugly and crippled (‘‘sozo


della persona e sciancato’’), because he expects Gianciotto to become the next lord of Rimini: Era Gian Giotto uomo di gran sentimento e speravasi dover lui dopo la morte del padre rimanere signore; per la qual cosa, quantunque sozo della persona e sciancato fosse, il disiderava messer Guido per genero piu` tosto che alcuno de’ suoi fratelli. (Esposizioni, 315) Gianciotto was a very capable man, and everyone expected that he would become ruler when his father died. For this reason, though he was ugly and deformed, Messer Guido wanted him rather than one of his brothers as son-in-law. And so Paolo, whom Boccaccio describes, following the Ottimo commento, as ‘‘bello e piacevole uomo e costumato molto’’ (a handsome, pleasing, very courteous man) (Esposizioni, 315), comes to Ravenna to marry Francesca. Paolo’s symmetrical beauty makes Francesca, also beautiful, vulnerable to the trap that has been set for her. When a maid points to Paolo through a window, indicating him as Francesca’s future husband, Francesca immediately falls in love. Having dealt with the issues of moral responsibility raised by the arrangement of the marriage and resolved them resoundingly in Francesca’s favor, Boccaccio turns to the part of the story that can only run its preordained course; here, too, he finds ample opportunity to furnish the details lacking in Dante’s account. Francesca learns that she has been deceived when she awakens the morning after her wedding and finds Gianciotto by her side. She is angry, and continues steadfast in her love for Paolo: ‘‘vedendosi ingannata, isdegnasse, ne percio` rimovesse dell’animo suo l’amore gia postovi verso Paolo’’ (whereupon she realized she had been fooled, and, as can well be believed, she became furious. Nor did the love she had conceived for Paolo disappear) (Esposizioni, 316). Boccaccio’s Francesca is thus the initiator of the romance with her brother-in-law: Boccaccio’s desire to legitimize Francesca’s later behavior by having her fall in love with the man whom she fully expects to be her husband, before the marriage has taken place, causes him to reverse Dante’s story on this important point, in a move that secures for Francesca both more agency and less culpability. The Ottimo commento does not need to deviate from Dante in this way, since it is less committed to exculpating Francesca. While Boccaccio is clear that Francesca is the leader in this pas-de-deux, he leaves undisclosed the manner in which the dance first begins, distancing himself in this regard, too, from the author of the Ottimo


commento, who devotes nearly half of his commentary to describing the couple’s first erotic encounter: Finalmente stando l’uno con l’altro senza nulla sospecione siccome cognati, e leggendo nella camera della donna un libro della Tavola Ritonda, nel quale era scritto come Lancilotto innamoro` della reina Ginevra, e come per mezzana persona, cioe` Galeotto LoBruno, Signore dell’Isole lontane, elli si congiunse insieme a ragionare di loro amore, e come il detto Lancilotto per virtu` di quello ragionamento conosciuto l’amoroso fuoco, fu baciato dalla reina; al quale punto pervegnendo la detta Francesca, vinse la forza di questo trattato sı` lor due, che posto giu` il libro vennero all’atto della lussuria. (DDP) Finally they were together without suspicion as in-laws, reading in the lady’s room a book of the Round Table, in which was written how Lancelot fell in love with queen Guinevere, and how through an intermediary, that is Gallehaut, lord of the Far Islands, they came together to talk of their love, and how Lancelot by virtue of this discourse knew the amorous flame and was kissed by the queen. When Francesca reached this point the force of that story so overcame them that, putting down the book, they came to the act of lust.

From the crisply transparent ‘‘vennero all’atto della lussuria,’’ it is only a short distance to the conclusion of the Ottimo’s tale: news of the indiscretion leaks, a servant alerts Gianciotto, Gianciotto kills his wife and brother together ‘‘nella detta camera’’—in her room, the room in which they met to read. Boccaccio greatly amplifies the death scene, describing at length how Gianciotto traps the lovers in Francesca’s room, which is bolted from within. Francesca goes to open the door, thinking that Paolo has successfully fled through a trapdoor to a room below, not realizing that the fold of his jacket has caught on a piece of iron. Gianciotto runs at his brother with his rapier, but Francesca literally intervenes, placing herself between the two men. Gianciotto unintentionally kills his wife; he then kills Paolo. The complex story that Boccaccio invented—beginning with its high-spirited heroine and deformed intended, moving through the decision to deceive her through a proxy marriage and her undeception on being wed, and culminating with the double killing of interposed wife and brother—omits the emotional high point of the original episode in Inferno 5: the moment when the lovers, while reading from the Lancelot romance, come to realize that they love each other, the moment that Dante’s Francesca evokes with the greatest candor, the only


moment that Dante really portrays.27 Boccaccio omits this scene not clandestinely, but with great fanfare, inserting himself into the story to declare categorically that he cannot comment on this point since he has never heard anything on this subject other than what Dante wrote, and that while Dante’s account may be true, he thinks it more likely to be a fiction constructed on the basis of what might have happened: Col quale come ella poi si giugnesse, mai non udi’ dire se non quello che l’autore ne scrive; il che possibile e` che cosı` fosse: ma io credo quello essere piu` tosto fizione formata sopra quello che era possibile ad essere avvenuto, che io non credo che l’autore sapesse che cosı` fosse. (Esposizioni, 316) I have never heard tell how they then got together, other than what [Dante] writes; and it is possible that it did happen that way. But I believe that it is probably a fiction constructed upon what might possibly have happened; and that the author did not know what really took place.

What is at stake for Boccaccio here? What does his defiant and selective reticence—since on every other point he adds detail and texture to the Ottimo’s simple canvas—achieve? Boccaccio succeeds in an act of multiple distancing, which works to enhance the credibility of his version of Francesca’s story over against those of his rivals, Dante included. He thus creates himself— very successfully, as is attested by the immediate and continuing acceptance of his story, a story that has utterly contaminated the reception of canto 5—as the creator of the canonical romance of Francesca. He distances himself from Dante by excising the climax of Dante’s account, the scene inscribed most vividly into the collective memory; moreover, he castigates Dante for including it and openly impugns its credibility. He distances himself from the Ottimo and all previous commentators by implying that he learned the story firsthand and orally and not from a prior written source.28 He goes right to the threshold of the crucial scene, specifying that Francesca does not remove her love from Paolo when she realizes that she is married to Gianciotto. But as to how subsequently Francesca was first united with Paolo, Boccaccio refuses to comment. Where the Ottimo follows Dante in uniting the lovers through their reading together of Lancelot and Guinevere (and then makes explicit the ‘‘atto di lussuria’’ that Dante leaves unspoken), Boccaccio puts a marker, a red flag, and then picks up with the moment when Gianciotto leaves town.


The scene that Boccaccio omits is powerfully specular, a mise en abyme where our passions are engaged as we read of passionate readers reading about passion. Perhaps deciding that Dante’s version of that scene would always be the strongest, Boccaccio harnesses its power indirectly, by refusing to add to the only scene that Dante had previously portrayed. Boccaccio also harnesses the power of Dante’s text by opposing it; by taking his stand against all that reading and textuality—all that ‘‘fizione formata’’—he casts himself as the scrupulous historian who works from oral sources. The others, the ones who invent, are the writers of romances; he includes nothing in his account that he cannot verify. However, the salutary words that Boccaccio applies to Dante’s love scene—‘‘non credo che l’autore sapesse che cosı` fosse’’—must now be applied to his own account. The result of Boccaccio’s canny and aggressive move is to emerge as the shaper of the canonical and definitive—and definitively romanticized—Francesca. Boccaccio betrays a particular emotional investment in Francesca’s story. His use of the word ‘‘procuratore’’ (an important word in his lexicon) for Paolo points to the talismanic significance that Francesca’s story possessed for a writer who co-titled his great work ‘‘prencipe Galeotto,’’ referring to the same ‘‘prince Gallehaut’’ who served as Lancelot’s agent (procuratore) to Guinevere, and with whom Francesca identified the book that joined her to Paolo: ‘‘Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse.’’ As the author of ‘‘il libro chiamato Decameron cognominato prencipe Galeotto’’ (the book called Decameron also known as Prince Gallehaut), Boccaccio fashions himself into a procuratore of the word and alludes to the liberating power of language—that ultimate gobetween—in the lives of the disenfranchised, synecdochically the women to whom he addresses the Decameron, viewed as so many Francescas. The implicit strength of Dante’s Francesca, who speaks and does not weep, in marked contrast to her man, who weeps and does not speak, is unpacked by Boccaccio, who bestows on Francesca an ‘‘altiero animo’’ that makes her capable—like his own Ghismonda—of liberating but fatal choices.29 The appeal of such a character for Boccaccio, who created so many women capable of standing their ground in a male world, is evident. His addition to the Ottimo’s description of Francesca is telling, since it underscores Francesca’s identity, her selfhood—‘‘Voi dovete sapere chi è vostra figliuola, e quanto ell’e` d’altiero animo’’—and lets us know that the strength of this self is such as to withstand any form of coercion: ‘‘e se ella vede Gian Giotto avanti che ’l matrimonio sia perfetto, ne´ voi ne´ altri potra` mai fare


che ella il voglia per marito’’ (Esposizioni, 315; my italics). Moreover, Francesca’s appeal is now universalized, so that for the first time in the story’s transmission we learn that Gianciotto, too, adored his wife: ‘‘avvenne quello che egli non arebbe voluto’’ (And thus happened what he would not have wanted), writes Boccaccio of the moment when he accidentally kills her, adding that Gianciotto is ‘‘turbato . . . sı` come colui che piu` che se medesimo amava la donna’’ (distressed, as one who loved the woman more than his very self ) (Esposizioni, 317). With this, Francesca’s apotheosis as a fully romanticized icon is complete, leaving her only to be accorded the burial in one tomb with Paolo that awaits the Decameron’s star-crossed lovers. At the same time, however, that Boccaccio heightens the romantic element of the story, he does not neglect its quotient of realpolitik. He takes care to remind us that Gianciotto leaves Rimini for political reasons, writing that he went to a nearby town ‘‘per podesta`’’ (as mayor). And, as I noted earlier, Boccaccio raises the political stakes of this story by specifying that Francesca’s father chose the son-in-law whom he expected to become the next lord of Rimini. In other words, the commentators who most capitalized on the romance elements of Inferno 5, Boccaccio and the Ottimo, did not do so at the expense of the historical and political realities that undergird Francesca’s story. As their versions show, they understood her story as situated at the juncture of two opposed stresses: dynastic realpolitik, on the one hand, and the desire for romance, on the other. A woman who was bartered, deceitfully and without her consent, into a marriage that was a political transaction, and that she considered incapable of giving her personal fulfillment or happiness, desired more; the desire for more—the desire for love—killed her. The fact that her reasons for believing that she could not love Gianciotto, like her reasons for falling in love with Paolo— the ugliness of the former, the beauty of the latter—are superficial by today’s standards is not the point; these were culturally sanctioned reasons, coded norms that in themselves reflect a suspect view of women as externalized beings without interiority. Suspect as these norms are, however, they allow the commentators a code in which to express Francesca’s legitimate sense of outrage. By the same token, far from downplaying the political aspect of this narrative, Boccaccio underscores it in a bid for sympathy for his heroine, accentuating the brutality of Guido da Polenta’s political scheming and his conniving indifference to his daughter’s welfare. Her romantic inclinations are


viewed in a more sympathetic and less self-indulgent light against the backdrop of her father’s unvarnished cruelty. * * * Let us turn now to the latent presence of the historical Francesca in the Commedia. Inferno 5 reveals its sure grip of political realities through its cast of characters: the group of souls to which Francesca belongs includes three ruling queens. What Semiramis, empress of Assyria, Dido, founder and queen of Carthage, and Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, have in common is that each sooner or later ruled in her own right; each was a wielder of power. They are all, in this sense, masculine women. The name ‘‘Dido’’ was glossed by Servius as meaning ‘‘ ‘virago,’ a woman who has done something masculine.’’30 Dante calls Semiramis ‘‘empress of many tongues’’ and underlines that she was first Ninus’s wife and then became his successor, in which capacity she ‘‘held the land that the Sultan now commands’’: ‘‘succedette a Nino e fu sua sposa: / tenne la terra che ’l Soldan corregge’’ (Inf. 5.59–60). Semiramis is thus doubly manlike, first in being successor to her husband and second in holding the land now held by the sultan. Semiramis and Francesca are textually linked through the word ‘‘terra,’’ which recurs in this canto to describe the land of Francesca’s birth, the city whose political fortunes determined her destiny, not because she took power over it but simply because she was born there: ‘‘Siede la terra dove nata fui . . .’’ These are Francesca’s first words, words in which she identifies herself not by name, as so many characters in Dante’s poem do, but by the place that defines her. The different status of these two women is fully expressed in their relation to the word ‘‘terra’’: on the one hand, ‘‘tenne la terra’’ speaks of agency, power, and possession; on the other, Francesca’s sense of self is mediated through her position in a family dynasty that renders her powerless, possessed, and controlled. Dante was astute in taking the measure of the lords of Romagna, who were known throughout Europe for their murderous and treacherous quarrels.31 Among the lowest traitors in hell is Alberigo de’ Manfredi of Faenza, the ‘‘frate Alberigo’’ whom Dante calls the ‘‘worst spirit of Romagna’’ ([il] peggiore spirto di Romagna) (Inf. 33.154); he held the infamous dinner party at which the fruit course was the signal to kill his cousin and other guests. (As we shall see, dinner parties of this sort were a Romagnol trademark.) Another Romagnolo among the traitors is Tebaldello de’ Zambrasi, also of Faenza, who opened the gates of his town to Guelf enemy forces ‘‘while it slept’’ (ch’aprı` Faenza


324

quando si dormia) (Inf. 32.123). In The Lords of Romagna John Larner points out that Tebaldello ‘‘had married his daughter Zanbrasina [sic], to Tano di Ugolino di Fantolino, one of the Guelf leaders who entered the town, and his fellow citizens should have realised that his new family interests were hardly likely to be subordinated to abstract ideals of loyalty’’ (46). Tebaldello’s family interests are relevant to our story, since they eventually coincided with Malatesta interests: Zambrasina, after being widowed, married the recent widower Gianciotto Malatesta, and bore him five children, thus achieving the unique status of being wife of one traitor in Dante’s hell and daughter of another.32 The Romagnol dynasty most consistently linked by Dante to cruelty and treachery is the Malatesta clan.33 In Inferno 27’s catalogue of Romagnol tyrants Malatesta da Verucchio and his eldest son, Malatestino, the first and second lords of Rimini, are mastiffs who ‘‘make an auger of their teeth,’’ who use their teeth, in other words, to pierce their subjects’ flesh as a tool with a screw point might bore through wood. And, while in canto 27 the Malatesta are one of a group of castigated tiranni, in canto 28 Dante singles them out, describing at length one of Malatestino’s political murders achieved through the typical means: betrayal. Pier da Medicina tells the pilgrim to warn the ‘‘two best men of Fano’’ that they are to be killed ‘‘through the treachery of an evil tyrant’’ (per tradimento d’un tiranno fello) (Inf. 28.81);34 the tyrant is further described as ‘‘that traitor who sees with but one eye’’ (Quel traditor che vede pur con l’uno) (Inf. 28.85)—a reference to Malatestino, who had only one eye and was therefore known as Malatestino dall’Occhio. The men will be drowned, says Piero, after being summoned to a conference with Malatestino (‘‘fara` venirli a parlamento seco’’ [Inf. 28.88]); the parley is a particularly telling detail since the Malatesta specialized in traitorous invitations. Also noteworthy is the rhetoric that Dante employs for this crime. He invokes Neptune, who has seen nothing as heinous from one end of the Mediterranean to the other: ‘‘Tra l’isola di Cipri e di Maiolica / non vide mai sı` gran fallo Nettuno, / non da pirate, non da gente argolica’’ (Between the islands of Cyprus and Majorca Neptune never saw so great a crime, not by pirates nor by Argolic folk) (Inf. 28.82–84). Neptune’s horror here is a kind of infernal pendant to his amazement at the end of the Paradiso, in a passage where the earlier ‘‘gente argolica’’ are recalled through the ship, the Argo: ‘‘la ’mpresa / che fe’ Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’Argo’’ (the enterprise that made Neptune wonder at the shadow of the Argo) (Par. 33.95–96). The similarities between


these passages confer a striking importance on the treachery of Malatestino, which becomes a retrospective emblem for hell. The indictment of Romagna as the cradle of Italian tyranny is most comprehensive and historically precise in Inferno 27’s catalogue of the region’s principal towns, offered by the pilgrim as response to Guido da Montefeltro’s query ‘‘dimmi se Romagnuoli han pace o guerra’’ (Tell me if Romagnoles have peace or war) (Inf. 27.28). Romagna is not and has never been free of war in the hearts of its tyrants, Dante says—‘‘Romagna tua non e`, e non fu mai, / sanza guerra ne’ cuor de’ suoi tiranni’’ (Inf. 27.37–38)—alluding with the word ‘‘tiranni’’ to the process Larner describes as ‘‘the breakdown of the communes through factions, and the first stages in the slow emergence of the signorie, or single-person governments.’’35 P. J. Jones, in The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, calls Romagna ‘‘the province most early addicted to despots’’ and says that ‘‘its chronic war [Dante] rightly sees as the feuding of tyrants.’’36 The Inferno’s catalogue of Romagnol towns, or despotisms, begins with Francesca’s natal Ravenna and then lists the others, not as they follow the Via Emilia running along the Apennine foothills, but rather in the order Forlı`, Rimini, Faenza, Imola, and Cesena;37 the last’s fragile commune allows Dante to circle back from individual tyrants to tyranny as a generic curse with the verse ‘‘tra tirannia si vive e stato franco’’ ([Cesena] lives between tyranny and freedom) (Inf. 27.54). He conjures the towns through a combination of geographical, historical, dynastic, and heraldic references; the signorial families are figured by predatory animals associated with their coats of arms. The Polenta are represented by an eagle that broods over Ravenna and covers nearby Cervia, too, with its wings: ‘‘l’aguglia da Polenta la si cova, / si che Cervia ricuopre co’ suoi vanni’’ (Inf. 27.41–42). Benvenuto da Imola, who writes with particular authority about his home province, considers the eagle a symbol of the Polenta family’s beneficent rule and a compliment to Guido Novello da Polenta (Dante’s host during his final years), and it is true that the eagle’s wings are less ferocious—if no less restrictive—than the ‘‘green claws’’ of the Ordelaffi of Forlı` or the ‘‘young lion’’ who represents the lord of Faenza. It is also true, however, that the Polentani behaved much as the other despots in the region. Thus, Jones’s account of their rise to power: ‘‘Politically they rose first as clients of the Traversari, sharing a place by 1215 in the council of the commune with membership of the episcopal curia; and with the ‘pars Traversariorum’ they continued to long


collaborate after its fall in 1240, in opposition to the Ghibelline counts of Bagnacavallo. But eventually, in the way of all Italian faction, the party divided. In 1274 the Traversari were expelled; and the following year the Polenta, armed with outside help (from the Malatesta), seized power (dominium) forcibly in Ravenna, at the same time taking Comacchio’’ (The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 18). This bit of history is particularly relevant to our story, for the year in which the Polenta, with the help of the Malatesta, seized power in Ravenna was 1275, the same year in which the alliance of the two ambitious dynasties was further reinforced through the marriage of Francesca da Polenta to Gianciotto Malatesta.38 However we read Dante’s image of the Polenta eagle, there can be no doubt that he reserves his most sanguinary and menacing description for the Malatesta: ‘‘E ’l mastin vecchio e ’l nuovo da Verrucchio, / che fecer di Montagna il mal governo, / la dove soglion fan d’i denti succhio’’ (Inf. 27.46–48).39 And, while Ravenna is described as politically stable (‘‘Ravenna sta come stata e` molt’anni’’ [Ravenna is as it has been for many years] [Inf. 27.40]), a characterization that lends authority to Polenta rule, the tercet on Rimini fixes on the foundational act of treachery through which, in 1295, Malatesta da Verucchio consolidated his family’s power over the city. Essentially, the Malatesta seized dominion by becoming Guelf and defeating the family aligned with the Ghibellines,40 the Parcitadi, an old and powerful imperialist clan that Malatesta da Verucchio did not hesitate to crush despite his connection to it through his first wife.41 The leader of the Parcitadi faction was the Montagna de’ Parcitadi whom Dante’s mastiffs treat so evilly. In their quarrel with the Malatesta, the Parcitadi appealed for help to the great Ghibelline warlord and leader in Romagna, Guido da Montefeltro, who ‘‘had longstanding differences, personal and public,’’ with the Malatesta.42 According to the anonymous fourteenthcentury Cronaca malatestiana, the followers of both factions were barricaded in the streets of Rimini, while the Parcitadi awaited the arrival of Guido. Taking advantage of a disturbance caused by the attempt of two asses to mate, Malatesta made a false peace with his opponents, so that ‘‘miser Parcitado wrote to the Conte Guido thanking him and explaining that peace had been made so that for the present he need not come’’ (miser Parcitado rescrisse al conte Guido rengraziandolo e dicendo como aveva facto paxe, si che al presente la sua venuta non era de bisogno).43 Malatesta then hid a portion of his troops in his


house and left town with the remainder, but he went only three miles, returned that night, and killed his rivals as they sought to flee. The hybrid nature of what we call ‘‘history’’ is beautifully exemplified by the presence of Benvenuto’s commentary to Inferno 27 in historical reconstructions of the Malatesta takeover of Rimini: thus Jones’s account of the imprisonment and death of Montagna de’ Parcitadi relies on Benvenuto’s gloss to Dante’s verse ‘‘che fecer di Montagna il mal governo.’’44 And, at the same time that the contaminated nature of history comes into focus, we also see the remarkable and unexploited historical density of Dante’s poetry; the drama of Guido da Montefeltro’s false conversion in the latter part of canto 27, for instance, is ripe for a reexamination that reads his story against the canto’s earlier probing of Romagnol history. There is, to my knowledge, no reading of Dante’s Guido da Montefeltro that takes into account his crucial role in a historical process that Dante deplored: of Guide’s impact on Romagna, Jones writes that the ‘‘transformation of local into regional signoria was mainly the work of one man.’’45 By the same token, there is no reading that really confronts the fact that when the pilgrim, speaking to Guido da Montefeltro, refers to the ‘‘lunga prova’’ endured by Forlı` before it reduced the French to a ‘‘sanguinoso mucchio,’’ he is referring to events in which historians assign that same Guido da Montefeltro the central—indeed epic—role.46 But that is a different story from the one that I am tracing, albeit connected to it because of the connections between all the tyrants of Romagna: they were either allied, as were the Guelf Polentani with the Guelf Malatesta, or they were enemies, as were Malatesta da Verucchio and Guido da Montefeltro. This is the cultural backdrop against which Francesca da Polenta played a historically insignificant role. On this brutal stage, she was the smallest of bit players. Of the family from which she emerged Larner writes, ‘‘[T]he treacheries among the da Polenta family assume at times the scale and improbability of Victorian melodrama’’; of the family into which she married he continues, ‘‘The same murderous quarrels were to split the Malatesti family.’’47 If we follow the fortunes of the Malatesta in the years after Malatesta da Verucchio’s death in 1312, we find a clan riven by rivalries and addicted to the use of treachery for resolving problems of succession. Malatesta da Verucchio’s eldest son, Malatestino dall’Occhio, was second lord of Rimini, followed by his half-brother Pandolfo (a son of Malatesta da Verucchio’s second


marriage), who was third lord of Rimini. After Malatestino and Pandolfo, sole rule of Rimini was fiercely contested among Malatesta da Verucchio’s grandsons, the cousins Ferrantino (son of Malatestino dall’Occhio), Ramberto (son of Gianciotto), and Malatesta (son of Pandolfo). Following the sinister family etiquette of issuing invitations and then killing the relatives who show up, ascendancy was ultimately wrested by Pandolfo’s son Malatesta, who was given the name ‘‘Guastafamiglia’’ for his labors.48 History could not provide a more appropriate gloss to Francesca’s verse ‘‘Caina attende chi a vita ci spense’’ than the name of Malatesta Guastafamiglia, fifth lord of Rimini, whose ruthless willingness to destroy his family—guastare la famiglia—established the supremacy of his line. If Gianciotto is destined for Caina, named for the first fratricide, it is because his was a crime not of passion but of betrayal, not hot but cold. Francesca’s indictment of her husband has troubled readers, who have often taken it as an anomalous expression of deplorable vindictiveness on the part of an otherwise refined and ‘‘feminine’’ nature; some have claimed that Dante was unduly harsh toward Gianciotto, noting that the contemporary Italian penal code is sympathetic to wronged husbands and punishes uxoricide much more mildly than did Dante.49 However, rather than indicating Francesca’s vindictiveness, the statement ‘‘Caina attende chi a vita ci spense’’ can be seen as constituting a lucid and clear-sighted appraisal of entrenched Malatesta practice: this is a family in which family members killed each other with harrowing regularity. Again, Inferno 5 is telling us something about history, and the history of Malatesta da Verucchio’s grandsons provides the most compelling gloss to Dante’s words, for not only did Gianciotto kill Paolo, but Gianciotto’s son killed Paolo’s son. The struggle for power among the cousins was so fierce, and betrayal so customary, that Gianciotto’s son Ramberto would eventually invite Paolo’s son Uberto to dinner and there, in concert with other family members, have him killed.50 In this cultural context the murder of Francesca da Polenta in Malatesta was not a serious matter.51 As we have already seen, it did not prevent Gianciotto from remarrying and producing heirs. Francesca’s one child, her daughter Concordia, was of no political importance.52 In fact, Francesca’s death incurred fewer political consequences for the Malatesta than Paolo’s murder: Paolo’s heirs, the counts of Ghiaggiolo, remained politically hostile to the Malatesta of


Rimini,53 while the Polentani continued to ally and intermarry with the Malatesta.54 In Francesca’s own generation there was a double intermarriage between the Polentani and the Malatesta: her brother Bernardino da Polenta was married to Maddalena Malatesta, a daughter of Malatesta da Verucchio, and was a useful ally to the Malatesta, helping them to subdue the castle of Sogliano in 1312, long after Francesca’s death.55 Bernardino’s son, Ostasio, who took control of Ravenna from his cousin Guido Novello by force (both men were nephews of Francesca), was a strong ally of Malatesta Guastafamiglia; it was with the help of Ostasio da Polenta that Guastafamiglia was able to complete his work against the descendants of Malatestino dall’Occhio, imprisoning Ferrantino and murdering his son and grandson.56 My point about the insignificance of Francesca in this history is made indirectly but decisively by the chronicles. The ‘‘first and most authoritative chronicler of Rimini’’ is, as we have seen, the fourteenthcentury historian Marco Battagli, who composed ‘‘On the Origins of the Malatesta’’ (De origine dominorum de Malatestis) in 1352.57 Battagli alludes to the event in which Francesca died without naming her, indeed without acknowledging her existence, except as an implicit cause of Paolo’s death, which occurred ‘‘causa luxurie’’: ‘‘Paulus autem fuit mortuus per fratrem suum lohannem Zottum causa luxurie’’ (Paolo was killed by his brother Giovanni the Lame, on account of lust). Paolo’s death is registered because it affects the succession, and the sentence referring to it is sandwiched between other events of Malatesta dynastic succession: Dominus autem Malatesta vixit annis C et plus; cui successerunt Malatestinus et Pandolfus. Paulus autem fuit mortuus per fratrem suum lohannem Zottum causa luxurie. Qui Paulus habuit in dotem comitatum Glazoli. Mortuo Malatestino in dominio postea successit Pandulfus . . . Lord Malatesta lived one hundred years and more; to him succeeded Malatestino and Pandolfo. Paolo was killed by his brother Giovanni the Lame, on account of lust. The same Paolo received in dowry the county of Ghiaggiolo. On the death of Malatestino Pandolfo succeeded as lord . . .58 Like Battagli, the author of the Cronaca malatestiana refers to the killing of Paolo and Francesca in passing; while at least according Francesca a role in the drama, he, too, dispenses with her name, referring to her merely as wife, ‘‘la donna sua’’:


Fo facto el ditto Malatestino signore d’Arimino, et era tanto amato, che non se poria contare. Acadde caso cosı` facto, ch’el ditto Zanne sancado suo fratello trovo` Paulo so fratello con la donna sua et abelo morto subito, lui e la donna sua. The aforementioned Malatestino was made lord of Rimini, and he was more loved than one could recount. It happened that his brother, the aforementioned Gianni the lame, found Paolo his brother with his lady and immediately killed him, him and his lady.59

Francesca, then, was preserved by Dante, who records her name and saves her from consignment to historical oblivion. She became a cultural touchstone and reference point through the intervention of the fifth canto of the Inferno, a text that both conjures the history that we have been tracing and inverts it, giving to Francesca a dignity and a prominence—a celebrity—that in real life she did not possess. In real life her death was less important than that of Paolo, who was yet the least important of Malatesta da Verucchio’s sons, prompting Jones to note, ‘‘He was less active than the other members of his family,’’ and to comment thus on the difference between Paolo and his brothers: ‘‘The most resourceful and the most consistent allies of Malatesta da Verucchio were his other sons, Malatestino dall’Occhio (the Oneeyed) and Gianciotto, both of whom were warriors, ambitious, able and ruthless, as portrayed in the pages of Dante, and one or other of them was always present with him at the critical moments in his rise to power’’ (The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 37). Dante captures the lesser political profile of the historical Paolo in canto 5’s mute and ineffectual weeper; moreover, his story of lovers ambushed and murdered in a private and presumably safe place—‘‘soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto’’ (alone we were and without suspicion) (Inf. 5.129)—is a chilling evocation of the Malatesta habit of familial execution. But the energy and force of Dante’s Francesca are wholly incompatible with the low dynastic status and faint political resonance of the historical Francesca, who is named in family and contemporary documents only once, with respect to her dowry. The dynasty’s founding patriarch Malatesta da Verucchio, who died in 1312 at age one hundred, mentions Francesca’s dowry in his will of 1311, where he enjoins Concordia and her five half-siblings (the children of Gianciotto and Zambrasina) to resolve amicably any issues relating to the inheritance of Francesca’s dowry.60 This reference to Francesca, in which she exists only in function of her dowry—‘‘pro dotibus olim dominae


Francischae’’ (regarding the dowry of the late lady Francesca)—is the only historical document to record her name. Francesca’s name thus becomes the hallmark of Dante’s achievement, for the name that is missing from the local chronicles and contemporary histories is the only name connected to this story that Inferno 5 sees fit to register and preserve, inscribed for all time—all history—into the great poem: ‘‘Francesca, i tuoi martı`ri . . .’’ It is this disparity between real life and Dante’s poem—between absence in the former and presence in the latter—that allows a gendered view of canto 5 to come into focus, not the spuriously gendered reading whereby Francesca’s sex takes her off the moral hook, but a true gendered reading based on her: her historical existence, her identity, her name. Again, let me make perfectly clear that I am not arguing against the nongendered reading of the episode. Francesca signifies the nexus of desire and death for any reader, male or female. She raises issues of moral agency and responsibility for any reader, male or female. The male pilgrim faints at the canto’s end because he is like Francesca, not because he is unlike her. Textually, this identity is reinforced by Francesca’s use of language taken from love poetry that was read by— and even written by—Dante. As a representation of the Cavalcantian love that leads to death, as a figure whose ‘‘Amor condusse noi ad una morte’’ echoes Cavalcanti’s ‘‘Di sua potenza segue spesso morte,’’ Francesca is not gendered. Rather, she is the avatar of a persona that had been Dante’s own.61 And yet Francesca is not casually female; her story, as Dante delineates it, is profoundly gendered. The story is that of a woman trapped between the patriarchal constraints of an arranged dynastic marriage in which personal fulfillment is utterly irrelevant and her desires for romantic love, that is, for a love that she perceives as taking account of and responding to her unique personhood. The facts that Dante chose to tell Francesca’s story at all and that he chose to give it those particular contours are extraordinarily significant, since he thereby raises all the gendered and ideological issues connected to romance. Although Janice Radway, writing about contemporary romance novels, maintains that ‘‘all popular romantic fiction originates in the failure of patriarchal culture to satisfy its female members,’’ she is candid about the difficulty in ascertaining whether ‘‘the romance should be considered fundamentally conservative on the one hand or incipiently oppositional on the other.’’62 The Francesca story offers a version of the same


dilemma. On the one hand, the medieval romance is more truly oppositional than contemporary popular romances because the female heroine is engaging in an option not sanctioned by society; Francesca’s love affair with Paolo is not scripted by the patriarchy, and so reading about it cannot be viewed as a reinforcement of patriarchal ideology. On the other hand, the tragic ending ensures that Francesca is punished; in that she pays for her bid for freedom with her life, and in Dante’s text with damnation as well, the story can also be seen as ideologically conservative. Dante himself seems to be conflicted, and to present us with yet another version of the same dilemma, for, on the one hand, he gives Francesca (historical) life, and on the other, he condemns her to (eternal) death. But damnation and punishment must also be historicized and contextualized, and it is important to bear in mind that Dante’s treatment of lust is in fact highly unusual: he emphatically does not treat Francesca to the degrading and sexualized punishments that are common in vision literature.63 Rather, Dante’s treatment of lust is exquisitely psychological, and is centered on a story, the story of one woman and her desire for love. This is the story that attracts the commentators and to which they respond with voyeuristic fascination, enhancing both features of Dante’s Francesca, her vulnerability and her agency. Her vulnerability is inherent in her job description, while her agency transpires from her appropriation of language: she reads, she speaks. It matters little from this perspective if she reads poorly, as critics have held;64 what is important is the agency of those active verbs—‘‘Noi leggiavamo,’’ ‘‘leggemmo,’’ ‘‘leggemmo.’’ She reads, and by reading she imagines a life for herself different from the one her family assigned her. Nor is she confined to the vicarious pleasure of many female readers of romances, since she acts on what she reads. Whatever his own conflicts may have been, the cultural force of what Dante created was electrifying. For in Francesca, in her combustible mix of vulnerability and agency, Dante establishes a paradigm with a tenacious and enduring hold over our collective imagination: the female figure who is both powerless and strong, and who attracts our attention with her attempts—ultimately deadly—to negotiate that combination.

chapter 15

Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli)

D ante’s poetic apprenticeship, both formal and ideological, oc-

curred while he was a writer of lyric poems. The ninety or so lyrics that Dante wrote harbor the wellsprings of his ideological convictions,1 with the result that we must turn to these poems to analyze the paths that Dante took to becoming the poet of the Commedia. The lyrics contain implicit and at times explicit debates on cultural and societal issues of great immediacy for Dante’s mercantile audience: issues such as the nature of chivalry and nobility, the desire for wealth and its relationship to avarice, the limits and constraints of political loyalty, and—intertwined with everything else—the role of women and implicitly the construction of gender. I believe that the key to approaching the construction of gender in the authors of the early Italian tradition is the ambivalence they display in their treatments of love and desire.2 This ambivalence is manifested in the competing ideological systems to which they subscribe: on the one hand, they subscribe to the ideology of courtly love, and, on the other, to an often violently anti-courtly ideology that permeates their moralistic poetry. These two ideologies are both present in Dante’s lyrics, where they underwrite very different attitudes toward women and toward gender. Courtliness, the set of values associated with what Dante and his peers call cortesia, is by definition a gendered issue, since its logic is constructed around a male/female binary. In the courtly lyric, the male lover/poet voices his aspiration to possess the unattainable perfection that the lady represents. On the other side of this binary stands the courtly lady, who represents, embodies, serves as goal and point of reference, but does not, in the courtly lyric, do, act, or speak. Dante


started life as a courtly poet; he ended life as the author of the Commedia, a text in which women act, speak, and possess moral agency. How do we account for Dante’s development from a courtly poet into the poet of the Commedia, that is, into a poet who assigns moral agency to all human beings, including women? The traces of this evolution, I argue, are to be found in Dante’s lyrics. In this study I will sketch the development of Dante’s thinking about gender, using three poems as developmental signposts: an early sonnet, Sonar bracchetti, and two mature canzoni, Poscia ch’Amor and Doglia mi reca. We will proceed chronologically and begin with Sonar bracchetti, written most likely when Dante was in his early twenties. This sonnet interests me because it offers such a clear vision of the world as polarized and dichotomized by gender; indeed, female and male serve as the poles around which two totally divergent ideologies crystallize. Sonar bracchetti takes off with a verbal explosion of enormous vitality, presenting a male world of action through seven infinitives that evoke hunting as a swirl of activity: Sonar bracchetti, e cacciatori aizzare, lepri levare, ed isgridar le genti, e di guinzagli uscir veltri correnti, per belle piagge volgere e imboccare . . . (Sonar bracchetti, 1–4) Baying of hounds, hunters goading them on, hares leaping from cover, shouting people, swift greyhounds slipping the leash, dashing about through beautiful meadows and snatching prey . . .

All this—the baying hounds, pursuing hunters, leaping hares, screaming crowds, greyhounds slipping their leashes to turn and grasp their prey—all this, declares the poet, must delight a heart that is free and unburdened by love: ‘‘assai credo che deggia dilettare / libero core e van d’intendimenti!’’ (such things must greatly delight, I think, a heart that is free and empty of amorous understandings) (Sonar bracchetti, 5–6). Love and its stylized lexicon (‘‘core,’’ ‘‘intendimenti’’) enter this poem as that which the hunt is not, for the hunt and the world it stands for can be enjoyed only by one who possesses a ‘‘libero core’’—a free heart. Love is thus introduced in opposition to the male world of action that has been sketched in the opening verses. Love is that which could transform someone free and unburdened into someone unfree and

Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo 335

burdened, and thereby prevent one from taking delight in the baying hounds, pursuing hunters, leaping hares, and so forth. Love is on one side; freedom, the world out of doors, and maleness are on the other. Grammatically, the male domain is signified by verbs, by the seven successive infinitives that conjure the hunt, culminating in an eighth infinitive associated with the male poet, dilettare, expressing his belief that such things should be able to delight him. Boccaccio, perhaps influenced by Dante’s sonnet, uses infinitives that signify male freedom in the Proem of the Decameron, where we find the alignment of deeds and verbs with men. The pains of love are alleviated for men, because they have access to a host of distracting activities, expressed as nine successive infinitives: ‘‘per cio` che a loro, volendo essi, non manca l’andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare’’ (they are free, if they want, to walk abroad, see and hear many things, go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding and gambling, or attend to their business affairs) (Decameron, Proemio, 12). In the case of Sonar bracchetti, however, our male poet is unable to enjoy his birthright. Using the sonnet’s formal dichotomy as a template for presenting ideological dichotomy, the poem swerves in verse 7, slightly before the conclusion of the octave, to engage a different reality. With a telltale ‘‘And I’’ that sets the poet apart from the delights enumerated in the opening quatrain, we learn that one of his amorous thoughts has intruded onto his consciousness and speaks to him: ‘‘Ed io, fra gli amorosi pensamenti / d’uno sono schernito in tale affare, / e dicemi esto motto per usanza’’ (And I, among thoughts of love, find myself mocked in this affair by one of them who habitually speaks to me thus) (Sonar bracchetti, 7–9). And what does the mocking thought say? It upbraids him for abandoning the courtly world of women and love for the ‘‘selvaggia dilettanza’’ of the hunt (in ‘‘selvaggia’’ we catch overtones of both sylvan and savage): ‘‘Or ecco leggiadria di gentil core, / per una sı` selvaggia dilettanza / lasciar le donne e lor gaia sembianza!’’ (O here indeed is the gallantry of a noble heart! For so rustic a pleasure to leave the ladies and their happy ways!) (Sonar bracchetti, 10–12; my italics). As a result of love, he is now fearful, ashamed, emotionally and psychologically weighed down, quite the opposite of libero: ‘‘Allor, temendo non che senta Amore, / prendo vergogna, onde mi ven pesanza’’ (Then, fearing that Love may overhear, I grow ashamed, and thence comes heaviness) (Sonar bracchetti, 13–14).


The poet’s thought reproves him by feigning, sarcastically, to find in him the key courtly virtue leggiadria that in fact he lacks: ‘‘Or ecco leggiadria di gentil core’’ (Here indeed is the leggiadria of a noble heart!). The male lover is here denounced for lacking key courtly attributes, for lacking the leggiadria possessed by a gentil core; the sign of his defective nature is that he would abandon the world of ladies for the rustic pleasure of the hunt. How could he, the thought wants to know, ‘‘for so rustic a pleasure, abandon the ladies and their happy ways’’? In this way two spheres are delineated. The world of women and love is emphatically the sphere of courtliness by virtue of its unambiguous association with leggiadria, the courtly virtue par excellence. It is also emphatically an inner world, a passive world. Indeed, the sonnet’s second half—we could say its ‘‘female half ’’—is as replete with static nouns and adjectives as its first (male) half is replete with dynamic verbs. Moreover, whereas the lexicon of the poem’s opening section is realistic, specific, and concrete, the later lexicon is generic and coded. Just comparing nouns, we move from ‘‘hounds,’’ ‘‘hunters,’’ ‘‘hares,’’ ‘‘people,’’ ‘‘leashes,’’ ‘‘greyhounds,’’ ‘‘meadows’’ (bracchetti, cacciatori, lepri, genti, guinzagli, veltri, piagge) to ‘‘heart,’’ ‘‘amorous understandings,’’ ‘‘thoughts,’’ ‘‘gallantry,’’ ‘‘delight,’’ ‘‘ladies,’’ ‘‘appearance,’’ ‘‘[the god] Love,’’ ‘‘shame,’’ ‘‘heaviness’’ (core, intendimenti, pensamenti, leggiadria, dilettanza, donne, sembianza, Amore, vergogna, pesanza). If the male world is built with contagiously tumultuous verbs (‘‘to bay,’’ ‘‘to goad,’’ ‘‘to leap out,’’ ‘‘to shout,’’ ‘‘to slip,’’ ‘‘to dash,’’ ‘‘to snatch’’ [sonare, aizzare, levare, isgridare, uscire, volgere, imboccare]) and concrete nouns drawn from everyday life and the world as we know it (even if we don’t all go hunting, we all know about dogs, rabbits, and yelling onlookers), the female world is instead constructed with a generic and stylized vocabulary associated with the value system that we have come to label ‘‘courtly love.’’ These two worlds stand opposed; what works in one does not work in the other. This point is clearly made by the denunciation of the male lover for his lack of leggiadria; as we saw, the sign of his defective nature is that he would abandon the world of ladies for the rustic pleasure of the hunt. He stands accused (in fact, self-accused, by that part of himself associated with love, and therefore with the female sphere) of abandoning the world of women for the world of men. How could he ‘‘lasciar le donne e lor gaia sembianza’’? The oppositional nature of the male/female binary sketched by this sonnet is


summed up in this verse, in the thought of ‘‘leaving the women’’ (lasciar le donne). This is an either/or universe, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: you either take the donne or you leave them. The young Dante has here given an edgy, gendered spin to his version of courtly dualism. Now let’s put Sonar bracchetti’s oppositionally gendered world into context. Commentators routinely cite Folgore da San Gimignano’s sonnet cycle on the months of the year, and in particular February’s sonnet E di febbraio vi dono bella caccia, with regard to Sonar bracchetti. They then just as routinely note that, hunting thematics aside, the latter’s truer precursor is Cavalcanti’s Bilta` di donna e di saccente core, because of the similar build-up of juxtaposed elements in infinitive clauses—here in order to make the point that none of this beauty and grandeur can rival the beauty of the poet’s lady. Both Folgore and Cavalcanti are valid and obligatory references, but the point that needs to be made here (as so often with Dante’s lyric, a form in which experimentation is always on the agenda) is that Dante’s opening gambit fuses these diverse registers, combining the themes of Folgore’s socalled bourgeois realism with the stylistic recall of Cavalcanti’s idyllic paean to love. All this adds up to a sonnet that is a hybrid with respect to the conventions with which Dante was working; in fact, speaking thoughts, a thoroughly stilnovist convention, do not typically coexist with hunt scenes. This rhetorical hybridity is functional; it reinforces the gendered split that is at the core of Sonar bracchetti, and that is its most interesting feature. Another way to make this point is to consider another sonnet from this youthful period that is closely linked to Cavalcanti, the sonnet addressed to him: Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lippo ed io. Here we find not the dichotomous courtly realism of Sonar bracchetti but a homogeneous courtly idealism much more in line with Cavalcanti’s Bilta` di donna, the sonnet to which Sonar bracchetti is indebted. The courtly idealism of Guido, i’ vorrei offers not dichotomy, but homogeneity, a world in which all tensions and divides are lulled into a quiescent dream of oneness and delectation. By contrast (and, given the Cavalcantian pedigree of both, it is a contrast of which Dante would have been highly conscious), the delectation of Sonar bracchetti is not fused and unified but polarized and gendered, boasting the ‘‘selvaggia dilettanza’’ of the male sphere, on the one hand, and the ‘‘gaia sembianza’’ of the ladies, on the other. Dante is certainly aware of gender as a source of tension even in Guido, i’ vorrei, as the poem’s structure


makes clear: first the octave figures the harmony of the male poets and then, in a second act as it were, the tercets fold into this ethereal stilnovist souffle` the poets’ ladies, with the hope (one is tempted to say, the Freudian hope) that ‘‘ciascuna di lor fosse contenta’’ (each one of them would be happy). But this structural awareness of dichotomy only emphasizes this poem’s commitment to evade and transcend it. Guido, i’ vorrei is a dream of oneness; it is about floating beyond dichotomy, floating beyond the divisions that could sunder a man from a woman, or indeed—given the two male identities that frame its incipit—a man from a man. Sonar bracchetti, instead, is about dichotomy, and specifically about male/female dichotomy. Far from being a trivial bit of youthful froth, Sonar bracchetti is a forthright exposition of courtly society’s gendered fault line, noteworthy in particular for its clever deployment of the sonnet’s dichotomized form to make an argument about dichotomy. However, Sonar bracchetti never challenges the ideological legitimacy of the dichotomized courtly world that it so acutely renders. It is all the more interesting therefore to find Dante’s handling of gender evolve along the arc of his lyrics in a wholly other direction. He will ultimately, in the late canzone Doglia mi reca, configure gender within a context that is not just noncourtly but that is explosively anticourtly. The move away from a courtly ideology is significant, I argue, since it makes possible the construction of woman as a moral agent in her own right. The move from courtliness results in taking woman off the pedestal on which her sole occupation is to arbitrate man’s behavior, and allows a shift away from an exclusive focus on the man: his vergogna, his pesanza, his paura, and even—occasionally—his baldanza. Once this shift has occurred, the female can come into focus as a subject (albeit an errant subject), rather than serving solely as backdrop for male subjectivity and commentator on male behavior. Anticourtliness is the signature move of Doglia mi reca, and it makes possible a new approach to the construction of gender. But before reaching Dante’s anti-courtly apogee, our trajectory requires a stop at the canzone Poscia ch’Amor, dedicated to analyzing the courtly attribute leggiadria (we remember that the poet’s fall from courtliness in Sonar bracchetti was signalled precisely by his failure to demonstrate ‘‘leggiadria di gentil core’’). In this important canzone the more mature Dante, whose lyrics are now branching out into explicitly moral and ethical concerns, attempts to wed courtly values with moral and ethical values, and so to preserve courtliness. Dante was clearly


challenged by the project of how to balance morality and cortesia; in the short term he wrote Doglia mi reca, in which ethics trumps courtliness. But in the longer term, Poscia ch’Amor foretells the Commedia, where courtly values, morphed and reinvigorated, will resurface, as indicated by the presence in the Paradiso of two of Poscia ch’Amor’s quintessentially courtly terms, donneare and leggiadria. The verb donneare, ‘‘to pay court to a lady,’’ from the Provençal domnejar, which is used in Poscia ch’Amor to describe the correct form of interaction between the sexes, reappears in Paradiso 24 and 27, where it limns the interaction between Dante’s mind and God’s grace and between Dante’s mind and Beatrice (Dante manages to put his mind both in the female position, being courted by grace, and in the male, courting Beatrice).3 And leggiadria is the hallmark of the third canticle’s transfigured courtly mysticism, used to describe the angel Gabriel in Paradiso 32 (‘‘Baldezza e leggiadria / quant’esser puote in angelo e in alma, / tutto e` in lui’’ [Par. 32.109–11; my italics]).4 Poscia ch’Amor shows us Dante struggling to accommodate courtly values he cherishes within a moral system already clearly influenced by Aristotelian and Scholastic ethics. To this end he tackles the definition of leggiadria, first instructing us as to its misapplication and then turning to a positive definition. Despite what could seem like the rather severe obstacle of having to admit that leggiadria is not suitable to honorable men of a religious or philosophical disposition, and that therefore it is not an absolute virtue—since absolute virtue is suitable to everyone—he recovers well, arguing that it is a composite virtue.5 ‘‘Sara` mischiata,’’ he opines, ‘‘causata di piu cose’’ (Poscia ch’Amor, 84–85): Dunque, s’ell’e` in cavalier lodata sara` mischiata, causata di piu` cose; per che questa conven che di se´ vesta l’un bene e l’altro male, ma vertu` pura in ciascuno sta bene. (Poscia ch’Amor, 83–88) Therefore, if leggiadria is praised in a gentleman, it must be something mixed, caused by several factors: and this is why it must clothe one man well, another badly, whereas simple virtue is becoming in everybody.

This notion of a composite or mixed virtue—‘‘mischiata’’ is Dante’s word—provides the perfect emblem for Poscia ch’Amor, which


340

is itself ‘‘mischiata,’’ a ‘‘mixed’’ canzone, fully committed to courtly values yet already betraying the pressure that will ultimately lead to the anti-courtly stance of Doglia mi reca. This pressure to adopt a competing set of values manifests itself precisely around the issue of gender, where indeed Poscia ch’Amor is mixed to the point of confusion, both exalting women and castigating them. On the one hand, Poscia ch’Amor fulfills its courtly mandate by offering the type of the courtly lady. False knights, the poet tells us, are revealed in part by whom they choose to love: ‘‘non sono innamorati / mai di donna amorosa’’ (they are never in love with an amorous lady) (Poscia ch’Amor, 48–49). The unworthiness of false knights, who do not live up to the courtly ideal, is reflected in the unworthiness of the women they choose; they never love a ‘‘donna amorosa’’—that is, in this coded, stylized language, a lady who is refined, noble, inclined to love and worthy of love, the bearer of the courtly standard. By implication, then, there are some women who are worthy, who do conform to the type of the donna amorosa. In fact, the poet holds up a specific (but unnamed) woman as the embodiment of leggiadria and claims that, because he lives in a society in which leggiadria has gone astray, she was the sole means of his own familiarity with it. The exaltation of this lady, ‘‘una gentile / che la mostrava in tutti gli atti sui’’ (a gentle lady who revealed leggiadria in all her acts) (Poscia ch’Amor, 62–63), is striking because she is the only individual in a poem without contemporary interlocutors. Indeed, Dante goes so far as to deprive Poscia ch’Amor of the typical ending, or congedo, in which the poem is sent to a contemporary recipient. The point is that the canzone on leggiadria has no worthy recipients, since, as its last verse brusquely declares, ‘‘Color che vivon fanno tutti contra’’ (Those who are living all do the contrary)—that is, no one currently lives according to leggiadria’s precepts and standards. So far Poscia ch’Amor seems conventionally courtly in its gender configuration. But the section on the poor courtship skills of the knights of today leads in an unusual direction. It seems that these false knights are vile seducers who do not court ladies in the fashion of someone equipped with leggiadria. Rather, they entice the women into base delights; these are men who would not move a foot to court a woman in a graceful and civilized fashion, but rather, like a thief to his theft, they go after sensual pleasure. What follows is fascinating, because the moralizing Guittonian strain of the verse (we should not forget that Guittone’s canzone Altra fiata aggio gia`, donne, parlato, to


which we will turn later in this study, exhorts women to vigilance against male seduction) seems to cause Dante’s ideological bearings momentarily to slip. At the end of the third stanza, as he passionately pursues the theme of the vile seducers (eliciting from Contini the wry comment ‘‘Dante contro don Giovanni’’), and despite the fact that the fourth stanza will soon present the female epitome of courtliness ‘‘che [leggiadria] mostrava in tutti gli atti sui,’’ Dante violates courtly logic by entertaining the notion that women are part of the general moral turpitude, that they are not blameless. These are the verses that make Poscia ch’Amor truly ‘‘mixed’’—mischiata—not just a reaffirmation of courtly values in their pure form but a way station on the path toward the virulently anti-courtly Doglia mi reca: non moverieno il piede per donneare a guisa di leggiadro, ma, come al furto il ladro, cosı` vanno a pigliar villan diletto; e non pero` che ’n donne e sı` dispento leggiadro portamento, che paiono animai sanza intelletto. (Poscia ch’Amor, 51–57) Never would they stir themselves to court ladies in a graceful and civilized way, but like a thief to his theft they go after base sensual delight; and this not because courtly comportment has so completely been put out in women that they seem animals without intellect.

Dante’s less-than-transparent syntax requires us to pay close attention to construing the literal meaning of these verses. Let me be clear: Dante does not say in this passage that ladies are animals without intellect. What he does do is bring ladies into a discursive space in which it is held possible that they could potentially degrade to that degree. He says that false knights go to steal sensual pleasure from women, and that this is not because courtly behavior is so lacking in women that they have become animals without intellect. In other words, the false knights must take the blame for their own corrupt behavior, not seek to put the blame on the corruption of women. Technically, the sentence negates that women have degraded to the point of becoming animals, telling us that, yes, ‘‘leggiadro portamento’’ (courtly comportment) in women has been somewhat extinguished, but it is not ‘‘sı` dispento’’ (so extinguished) as to make them animals! Dante thus imports a line of defense that functions as an


offense, especially considering that there was no clear reason for it, no previous suspicion of an attack on the courtly integrity of the ‘‘donna amorosa.’’ Responding to an internal logic and pressure that are in conflict with the governing logic of the poem (but then again, the poem is in conflict with itself ), Dante introduces the possibility that donne can degrade, that in fact they could even—though they haven’t yet—degrade to the point of being ‘‘animai sanza intelletto.’’ So ends stanza 3 of Poscia ch’Amor, striking a note—humans degraded to the point that ‘‘they seem animals without intellect’’—that will be a major motif of Doglia mi reca. We have moved quite far in these canzoni from the courtly paradigm, a paradigm within whose purview I include the theologized courtly paradigm of the Vita nuova, the early book whose most famous canzone begins Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (Ladies who have intellect of love): the idea of ‘‘ladies who seem animals without intellect’’ (donne . . . che paiono animai sanza intelletto) is a long way from that of ‘‘ladies who have intellect of love’’ (Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore). The male narcissism of courtly lyric requires the sustaining presence of the lady, present as the backdrop and foil, even occasionally censurer of the man, but not as a subject with her own inner life and moral choices—in short, not with her own desires. Doglia mi reca, a late canzone written shortly before the transition to the Commedia and fully committed to moral themes, signals its aggressively anti-courtly posture at once, taking the moral critique of women that briefly surfaced in Poscia ch’Amor and making it programmatic. This poem, an expansive meditation on desire, opens with female desire, already anomalous as a focus of attention, and makes its anti-courtly agenda even more explicit by focusing on base female desire—‘‘il vil vostro disire’’ (Doglia mi reca, 6): Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire a voler ch’e` di veritate amico: pero`, donne, s’io dico parole quasi contra tutta gente, non vi maravigliate, ma conoscete il vil vostro disire . . . (Doglia mi reca, 1–6) Grief brings boldness to my heart on behalf of a will that is friend to truth. If then, ladies, I speak words against almost everyone, do not wonder at this, but recognize the baseness of your desires . . .


As truth’s friend, Dante tells us, he will utter ‘‘words against almost everyone’’; in other words, he views his program in this canzone as profoundly unconventional. Dante is here signalling that in Doglia mi reca he will stake out an anti-courtly position. He is letting us know that he is starting within the courtly framework and working against it, rather than operating within a different framework altogether. For, were Doglia mi reca operating within the set of conventions we associate with misogynistic writing, an attack on female desire would be utterly conventional. Thus, in the Corbaccio, where female desire is routinely construed as vile and base, Boccaccio is not worried that he will be perceived as antagonistic or unconventional, as Dante is in Doglia mi reca. Dante is not adopting misogynistic conventions in Doglia mi reca—which is not to say that he may not say some things that strike us as misogynistic—but rather exploding courtly conventions from within: he is following his own moral logic to a place that coexists ever more uneasily with his courtly point of departure. The development in his thinking could be described with the following analogy: if the conventional courtly framework is the ocean, and Poscia ch’Amor and Doglia mi reca are ships, then the lines about the ‘‘donne . . . che paiono animai sanza intelletto’’ are a ticking bomb which in Doglia mi reca finally explodes, threatening the integrity of the vessel and totally changing our perspective on the courtly mare magnum that still surrounds us. I have written previously about Dante’s radical treatment of male desire in Doglia mi reca.6 In the tradition of the Provençal sirventes, Dante frequently signifies the degradation of the courtly world through juxtapositions that carry shock value; we think of the Provençal poet Giraut de Borneil, who in Per solatz reveillar calls, ‘‘Shame on the knight who pays court to a lady [doneiar] after laying hands on bleating sheep and robbing churches and travelers!’’ (27–30). In Poscia ch’Amor Dante follows Giraut, deploring the retreat from courtly values and, like Giraut, comparing the corrupt courtship of false knights to thieves plying their trade.7 But in Doglia mi reca Dante goes further: by conflating courtship with lust, and lust with avarice, he endangers the courtly paradigm that privileges love over baser desires and illuminates the common ground of all concupiscence. Doglia mi reca’s juxtaposition of the desire experienced by a lover with the desire experienced by a miser serves not just to condemn false courtliness in the hope of a return to true courtliness, but as the springboard for an analysis of desire that is new to the lyric tradition. In his mature lyrics


Dante is elaborating an analysis of desire that anticipates the Commedia in its move away from the dualistic courtly paradigm toward a unified Aristotelian template.8 If Doglia mi reca explodes the courtly paradigm in the context of male desire, it also does so by allowing female desire to exist as a context, no longer holding women harmless as passive recipients of male love, but forging them as desirers and moral agents in their own right, and starting down a path that will lead eventually to Francesca and Piccarda. But at this point Dante is not yet incorporating courtly issues into a broader moral framework, as he does in Inferno 5, but rather importing all these moral issues into a constraining courtly framework, which is why his thinking sometimes appears contradictory and muddled. Thus, Doglia mi reca begins by bringing female agency to the fore, as we have seen, but then confuses the issue as the first stanza continues. Making female beauty the correlative of male virtue, and love the force that unifies the two—‘‘se vertute a noi / fu data, e belta` a voi, / e a costui di due poter un fare’’ (if virtue to us was given, and beauty to you, and to Love the power to make of two things one) (Doglia mi reca, 12–14)—Dante holds that it is a woman’s duty to deny her love to men who cannot match in virtue what she offers in beauty. He instructs women not to love, and to cover up their beauty, since virtue, which was beauty’s target, is no more: voi non dovreste amare, ma coprir quanto di bilta` v’e` dato, poi che non c’e` virtu`, ch’era suo segno . . . (Doglia mi reca, 15–17) you should love no more, but rather hide the beauty given you, since virtue, that was its goal, is found no more . . .9

By engaging a gendered duality that assigns beauty to women and virtue to men, and so associates women with exteriority and superficial values, and men with interiority and ethical values, the canzone’s implicit program of nondualistic gender construction seems to falter. Charting territory that is new to him, Dante does falter, but his attraction to the idea of female agency and responsibility is strong and manifests itself again before the stanza concludes. The first stanza of Doglia mi reca ends by declaring that it would be particularly laudable for a woman to bid farewell to her beauty of her own accord:

Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo 345 Dico che bel disdegno sarebbe in donna, di ragion laudato, partir belta` da se` per suo commiato. (Doglia mi reca, 19–21) I say it would be an act of fine scorn in a woman, and rightly praised, to sever beauty from herself—bidding it farewell of her own accord.

Dante here puzzles the English editors Foster and Boyde, who wonder, ‘‘[What is] the special point of adding ‘of her own accord’?’’ (Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 300). But precisely these words, ‘‘per suo commiato,’’ hold the key to Dante’s thought process. These words bring Dante back—perhaps he, too, was surprised at this—to her will, her agency. Moreover, his apparent need to go in this direction gets him all tangled up. Let us consider: if women should cover themselves of their own will, then women are to make a moral choice to hide their beauty from immoral men. So, though this passage began with the equation, virtue : men ⳱ beauty : women (se vertute a noi / fu data, e belta` a voi [Doglia mi reca, 12–13]), it soon gets severely confused, as Dante exhorts women to deploy the virtue that they theoretically lack against the men who theoretically possess it. Although Doglia mi reca never fully overcomes this initial confusion, it develops always in the direction of assigning more and more choice to women, and as a result takes an anomalous interest in communicating with them and instructing them. Whereas the courtly canzone frequently opens with a conventional address to ladies who then disappear as interlocutors from the poem (Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega, Dante’s Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore), the female addressees whom Dante enlists in the struggle against male vice in stanza one of Doglia mi reca do not disappear from view but are summoned again prior to the canzone’s midpoint and again at the conclusion. Dante comes back to his female audience halfway through the third stanza. The passage in question starts out in a metapoetic key, announcing a change in style toward greater clarity in order to best serve his female audience, and then reaffirms the poet’s role as moral guide, whose compensation will be his audience’s compliance: Ma perche` lo meo dire util vi sia, discendero` del tutto in parte ed in costrutto piu` lieve, sı` che men grave s’intenda:

Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 346 che rado sotto benda parola oscura giugne ad intelletto; per che parlar con voi si vole aperto: ma questo vo’ per merto, per voi, non per me certo, ch’abbiate a vil ciascuno e a dispetto . . . (Doglia mi reca, 53–62) But that my speech may be of use to you, I’ll come down from the general to the particular, and to a lighter form of expression, so that it may be less hard to understand; for rarely beneath the veil do obscure words reach the intellect, hence with you one must speak openly. But this I want in recompense (for your own good, certainly not for mine) that you hold every man as vile and an object of scorn . . .

One way to gauge the significance of this renewed interest in dialoguing with women at the heart of Doglia mi reca is to compare Poscia ch’Amor, where the moral focus is almost exclusively on men, and where the metapoetic core is not gender-specific.10 There is an interesting insecurity in the commentary tradition regarding ‘‘sotto benda’’ in verse 57: does Dante refer to the literal article of clothing (benda is the ‘‘strip of cloth or silk with which married women wrapped their cheeks, temples, and forehead for ornamentation and to hold their hair’’) and therefore, by synecdoche, to those who wear it—namely, women—or does he refer to an allegorical veil, a veil of language?11 In recent editions, the allegorical reading has taken precedence over the literal. While the Barbi-Pernicone commentary takes a no-nonsense literal approach, glossing ‘‘sotto benda’’ as ‘‘in cervello di donna’’ (in the brain of a lady) (Rime della maturita` e dell’esilio, 613), Contini gives primacy to the allegorical, citing the appropriate verses from the Commedia: ‘‘La benda e` la stessa imagine che il velame de li versi strani (Inf. ix 63) e il velo di Purg. viii 20. Attraente tuttavia la dichiarazione, di piu´ studiosi, che benda sia l’ornamento femminile, e s’abbia dunque allusione a una necessita` di chiarezza maggiore con donne’’ (The benda is the same image as ‘the veil of the strange verses’ of Inf. ix 63 and the ‘veil’ of Purg. viii 20. Attractive, nonetheless, is the declaration on the part of some scholars that benda refers to the female headdress, and that therefore we have an allusion to the need to speak with greater clarity to women) (Rime, 186). Foster and Boyde follow Contini, starting with the allegorical


and adding that ‘‘the other interpretation’’—i.e., the literal interpretation—‘‘is also attractive: this takes benda as the wimple worn by women’’ (Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 304). I submit that it is important to restore as primary the literal meaning of ‘‘sotto benda’’ in this passage in Doglia mi reca and, along with the literal meaning, to recuperate the gendered nature of Dante’s intervention. Only when we notice the existence of a specifically gendered moment in the poem will we be in a position to gauge the force and direction of Dante’s gendered intervention. Indeed, the result of focusing on the allegorical reading of ‘‘sotto benda’’ is to elide out of the text the gendered aspect of what Dante says. If we look at the entries for benda and velo in the Grande dizionario italiano we see that benda is much less given to metaphorical extrapolation than velo. Dante’s own usage corresponds to this perception: the noun velo and the verb velare are used frequently across the gamut of Dante’s works (Rime, Fiore, Vita nuova, Convivio, Commedia) and across a semantic range from literal to metaphorical. Moreover, even the literal velo has a more poetic quality than benda, so that in the stylized context of the Vita nuova we find two uses of velo as covering, but never the more socially attuned benda. Dante uses benda infrequently: first in our passage in Doglia mi reca, and then three times in the Commedia, where it is always a signifier of a woman’s marital status, either in the secular sphere (never married or widowed and remarried) or in the monastic. Thus, the remarriage of Beatrice d’Este is signified through the change in the color of her bende (‘‘che trasmuto` le bianche bende’’ [Purg. 8.74]), the nubile young lady of Bonagiunta’s prophecy ‘‘non porta ancor benda’’ (does not yet wear a veil [Purg. 24.43]), and ‘‘sacre bende’’ (sacred veils [Par. 3.114]) signify that Costanza is the bride of Christ. Benda is a word deployed by Dante univocally to refer to socially mandated and regulated female covering. The verses in Doglia mi reca indicating women through the synecdoche ‘‘sotto benda’’ elicited responses from two important contemporaries, the doctor and astrologer Cecco d’Ascoli (1269–1327) and Petrarch (1304–1374). Both interpret ‘‘sotto benda’’ literally as referring to women. In the conclusion to the political canzone O aspectata in ciel, Petrarch writes that love resides not only ‘‘sotto bende’’ (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 28.113) to make the point that a canzone inspired by a non-erotic form of love can nonetheless take its place with pride among its fellows.12 Cecco d’Ascoli cites the verses from Doglia mi reca in his encyclopedic Acerba, in the context of a misogynist capitolo


dedicated to his views on women. Dante is here treated as an auctoritas on female intellectual limitations: ‘‘Rare fıäte, como disse Dante, / s’intende sottil cosa sotto benna’’ (Rarely, as Dante said, are subtle thoughts understood [by those] beneath a veil) (Acerba 4.9.4397–98).13 Cecco thus understands Dante’s literal sense correctly, which he shows by taking ‘‘sotto benda’’ to refer to women, as Barbi-Pernicone point out. However, while correctly appropriating the letter of Dante’s poem, Cecco works considerable changes on its spirit. Whereas Dante voices concern that rarely will an obscure word (‘‘parola oscura’’) reach the intellect of one under the veil, Cecco changes ‘‘parola oscura’’ to ‘‘sottil cosa’’—a ‘‘subtle thought’’—and takes the passage from Doglia mi reca as a platform from which to pen a savage invective against women, beings without intellect and ‘‘fruit of all evil’’: ‘‘La femmina ha men fede che una fiera, / Radice, ramo e frutto d’ogni male, / Superba, avara, sciocca, matta e austera, / Veleno che avvelena il cuor del corpo, / Iniqua strada alla porta infernale’’ (Woman has less faith than a wild beast: root and branch and fruit of all evil, she is proud, miserly, foolish, mad, severe, the poison that poisons the heart of the body, the path of iniquity to the gate of hell) (Acerba 4.9.4403–7). Most interestingly, Cecco takes the citation from Doglia mi reca as an opportunity to launch into one of his indictments of Dante (most of which are focused on the Commedia). Here he paints Dante as a foolish naı¨f whose belief that women possess intellect is the equivalent of looking for the Virgin Mary in the streets of Ravenna: ‘‘Maria va cercando per Ravenna / chi crede che in donna sia intellecto’’ (He who believes that there is intellect in women is looking for Mary in Ravenna) (Acerba 4.9.4401–2). Cecco’s misogynist diatribe and passing dig at Dante offer us a valuable perspective from which to gauge Dante’s gendered intervention in Doglia mi reca. We remember that Dante interrupts his canzone to address the ladies. Because he desires his speech to be of use to them, he writes, he will descend from the general to the particular, and to a lighter form of expression, so that it will be less difficult to understand; seldom, he explains, does obscure language reach the intellect of a woman, hence with a woman it behooves him to speak openly. No doubt the patronizing tone of this passage is annoying. At the same time we do well to keep in mind that these verses testify to Dante’s genuine concern that the women to whom he writes understand him, that they be authentic comprehenders and recipients of his message—maybe even authentic interlocutors, given that this poem’s


congedo explicitly sends it to a woman. Most of all, as Cecco’s response helps us see, Dante’s intervention is founded in a belief in women’s intellect—an intellect whose existence is taken for granted and that he seeks to reach. In order to reach it, in order to communicate with women, he will change his discourse, lowering it to the level of their comprehension. Cecco, who dismisses as foolish the belief that women possess any intellect at all, gives us the vantage from which to see that Dante’s paternalism is an affirmation: women possess intellect, he is saying, and it is up to me as poet to figure out how to reach it. There can never be problems of communication in dealing with an idealized—or demonized—projection of our own desires; problems of communication arise only when we deal with an authentic other, like the women of this canzone. The women of Doglia mi reca are not the idealized stilnovist muses of Dante’s youth, who possess ‘‘intelletto d’amore’’ in the Vita nuova’s canzone Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore. Rather they have plain ‘‘intelletto’’—‘‘che rado sotto benda / parola oscura giugne ad intelletto’’—enough to receive the poet’s instruction, if not in its obscure form, ‘‘parola oscura,’’ then as ‘‘parlar . . . aperto.’’ Dante here combines a self-consciousness about rhetorical and poetic technique rooted in vernacular poetics (‘‘lieve,’’ ‘‘grave,’’ ‘‘oscura,’’ ‘‘aperto’’ echo Provençal categories such as trobar leu, trobar clus), with a pedagogic pragmatism that may well be a hallmark of texts addressed to women: the emphasis on the utility of discourse—‘‘perche` lo meo dire util vi sia’’—reminds us of the Decameron, another text addressed to women and determined to communicate with them.14 No attentive reading of this canzone, so genuinely and vigorously in dialogue with women, can bypass the literal meaning of these verses, which place women at the very heart of this poem addressed to them. Because the women of Doglia mi reca are genuine interlocutors, not vehicles for writing about the self, Dante must alter his rhetoric to be of use to them, for ‘‘rarely beneath the veil do obscure words reach the intellect; hence with you one must speak openly’’ (Doglia mi reca, 57–59). Dante then builds on the literal veiling of women to suggest the metaphorical veiling of their intellects that he is working to breach. The verse in stanza 1 enjoining women to cover their beauty—‘‘ma coprir quanto di bilta` v’e` dato’’ (Doglia mi reca, 16)—with its key word ‘‘coprir,’’ may be seen in retrospect to initiate the key trope of veiling/ unveiling. Thus ‘‘ma coprir quanto di bilta` v’e` dato’’ in stanza 1 will be echoed by ‘‘rado sotto benda’’ and ‘‘aperto’’ in stanza 3, indeed will be picked up and reversed—literally, as coprir gives way to aperto—by


the poet’s need to penetrate ‘‘beneath the veil’’ with his words, his ‘‘open speech’’ (parlar . . . aperto). The literal benda becomes ever more elaborately metaphorical: in a deliberate recall and inversion of the exhortation that women veil their physical beauty, the poet will throw the veil of obscurity off the text and speak openly, using the verb disvelare (a hapax in Dante’s rime that occurs only once in the Commedia) to ‘‘unveil’’ the truth for his female audience. ‘‘I have unveiled for you, ladies’’ (Disvelato v’ho, donne) (Doglia mi reca, 127), says the poet in his conclusion, to show that he has turned their literal bende into a trope of revelatio. Here the male poet does the work of unveiling for his veiled female audience; in the Commedia Beatrice will unveil first herself (in the poem’s only instance of disvelare) and then—through her speech, her parlar aperto—she will unveil the mysteries of the universe for her audience, both female and male.15 In the congedo Dante instructs his canzone to await the commands of its female recipient (we note the highlighted female pronouns in ‘‘a costei,’’ ‘‘prima con lei,’’ ‘‘prima a lei’’), who is not an idealized senhal but a specific ‘‘lady from our country: beautiful, wise and courteous’’ (donna / ch’e` del nostro paese: / bella, saggia e cortese [Doglia mi reca, 148–50]). She will dispose of the canzone: ‘‘prima con lei t’arresta, / prima a lei manifesta / quel che tu se’ e quel per ch’io ti mando; / poi seguirai secondo suo comando’’ (stay first with her, to her manifest what you are and why I send you; then continue as she commands) (Doglia mi reca, 155–58). Commentators show some surprise at the congedo’s praise of a woman: ‘‘a perhaps rather surprising conclusion to the stern exhortations preceding it’’ (Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 296), say Foster and Boyde. But it is all of a piece with Doglia mi reca’s treatment of women as moral agents who are held accountable for their desires and actions. As moral agents, they are individual subjects and, like the lady to whom the canzone is addressed, they even receive names: in this case she is ‘‘Bianca, Giovanna, Contessa’’ (Doglia mi reca, 153), later she will be Francesca, the only person named in her canto. At stake are discretion, choice, responsibility, agency. To the degree that a woman is saggia, she will make appropriate decisions—in this case the decisions regarding the canzone. If she is not saggia, she may make inappropriate decisions, and—despite the poet’s best efforts—she may perish. This strong sentiment from Doglia mi reca’s seventh and conclusive stanza anticipates the Commedia, in which a woman’s moral choices, like a man’s, may in fact cause her to perish.


Although at first it may seem counterintuitive to read the harsh paternalism of Doglia mi reca in a progressive light, Dante accomplishes quite a lot in this canzone. The ladies of Doglia mi reca are definitely off the courtly pedestal. They now have more to worry about than the behavior of their male lovers: they have their own selves, including their immortal souls, to take care of. They have acquired the status of moral agents and although they do not yet speak—an activity for which we have to await the Commedia16 —they are expected to be able students, fully receiving and intellectually digesting the poet’s message. Moreover, if we put Doglia mi reca into the context of options available to the courtly poet, we see that Dante here bypasses altogether the courtly paradigm, according to which a lady is conceived in negative terms not on moral grounds but on the basis of her perceived cruelty to her male lover (in Dante’s personal lyric constellation, this would be the stony lady of the rime petrose). In Doglia mi reca a woman possesses her own actions and her own desires and it is up to her whether she develops into ‘‘Bianca Giovanna Contessa’’ or someone else—someone like, say, Francesca. While the substance of Dante’s message to women in an anticourtly and moralizing poem like Doglia mi reca may be paternalistic, the fact that he addresses them directly, penetrating ‘‘under the veil’’ to speak to them clearly and intelligibly, is very significant: it means he construes them not as objects of desire but as subjects who desire and who must take responsibility for their desires. It also means that he, as poet, takes responsibility for instructing these women, and therefore for the utility of the discourse that he directs toward them. Dante’s assertion in the metapoetic verses of Doglia mi reca of a pragmatic poetics of utility, which will bend to its audience of women, gains in ideological importance when we consider that it is not in any obvious sense true: the style of the canzone is not noticeably lightened—in the sense of simplified—after the poet’s declaration, though it is in some places more dramatic. What is at stake for Dante here, then, is less a stylistic transition than an ideological commitment that highlights the degree to which he feels morally accountable for the utility of his poetic language. We should remember, too, that Dante shows an early interest in this question; he argues in the Vita nuova that the first vernacular love poets chose the vernacular so that they could be understood by women, who with difficulty would understand Latin.17


Dante’s precursor in this matter of women and the utility of poetic discourse—as in so many of his moves as a morally committed poet—is Guittone d’Arezzo. Guittone wrote a canzone in defense of women, Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi, and a didactic canzone on female chastity, Altra fiata aggio gia`, donne, parlato. These canzoni influenced Doglia mi reca: while Doglia mi reca is indebted to Guittone’s poetic manifesto, Ora parra`, for its anatomy of desire, a philosophy of desire that is nongendered and that indeed will be of great import for the Commedia, it is indebted to Ahi lasso and to Altra fiata for its gendered discourse to and about women. The importance in particular of Altra fiata as an intertext for the gendered issues of Doglia mi reca leads one to wonder if Guittone is a precursor also with respect to the signature move of Doglia mi reca, the anti-courtliness that allows Dante to attack women for their ‘‘vile desire,’’ rather than focusing exclusively on male desire. In other words, does Guittone’s didactic and paternalistic stance toward his female audience in Altra fiata open the door to their free agency, as Dante’s does in Doglia mi reca? To what degree does Guittone pave the way for Dante’s handling of gender in Doglia mi reca? Guittone’s Ahi lasso and Altra fiata have in common with Dante’s Poscia ch’Amor and Doglia mi reca a mixing of courtly and anti-courtly themes and registers. My suggestion is that Altra fiata does indeed offer an early model of the Doglia mi reca paradigm whereby paternalistic morality defeats courtliness and ironically enhances the status of women by conceiving them as moral agents. But let us look first at the canzone that Guittone wrote first, his defense of women, Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi. Being a defense, this canzone does not offer the stern critiques and moralizing exhortations that we find in Altra fiata, but focuses rather on the positive features of women in comparison to men. Addressing himself to his beloved,18 Guittone vigorously takes on the role of female advocate, claiming that all men, both good and evil, have agreed to disparage women (‘‘Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi / omini tutti hano preso acordanza / di mettere le donne in despregianza’’ [1–3]), whereas he will be a rebel against his sex, alone in coming to the defense of women, proving false what men have said and showing that women are good in their acts and their beliefs: ‘‘m’eo saro` lor ribello / e prendero` solo la defensione, / e aprovero` falso lor sermone, / e le donne bone in opera e in fede’’ (Ahi lasso, 7–10).


He goes on to say that only through evil custom, not through reason, have men taken lordship and dominion over women (‘‘Non per ragion, ma per malvagia usanza, / sovra le donne ha preso om signoria’’) (Ahi lasso, 13–14), and with great flourish poses this rhetorical question regarding the relative conduct of men and women: ‘‘Embola, robba, aucide, arde o desface, / periura, enganna, trade o falsa tanto / donna quant’om?’’ (Does a woman thieve, rob, kill, burn, or maim, lie, decieve, betray, or falsify as much as a man?) (Ahi lasso, 25–27). The answer is no. As for carnal desire, its power is equally felt by men and women (‘‘Carnal talento e` ’n loro d’un podere’’ [29]), but women deserve much more credit for having to resist the onslaught of men’s advances; indeed, asks Guittone, what hermit could restrain himself if importuned by a lovely woman as a woman is importuned by men?19 By seducing women, men sin and cause women to sin; what right, then, does he have to condemn her?20 After showing what woman is worth in and of herself (‘‘Vale per se´’’ [73]), Guittone moves on to show how she adds to a man’s worth: she gives him intelligence, bravery, daring, power, whereas he without her would not know how to do anything but sleep and eat.21 Altra fiata begins by making specific reference to Ahi lasso, which constitutes the ‘‘altra fiata’’ or ‘‘other occasion’’ on which the poet has spoken in defense of women: ‘‘Altra fiata aggio gia`, donne, parlato, / a defensione vostra ed a piacere’’ (On another occasion, ladies, I have already spoken in your defense and for your pleasure) (Altra fiata, 1–2). Guittone thus shows that he has a poetic program of writing to women and about what we could call ‘‘women’s issues.’’ But the tone now changes: the pleasure-giving discourse of Ahi lasso with its praises of women behind him, Guittone now interecedes to instruct and to correct in a straightforwardly moralistic sermon of a poem in which he is unsparing of women’s feelings and aggressive about noting their weaknesses and offering advice. Altra fiata begins by exposing the lies and deceit of the courtly world: the poet now repudiates his earlier self and will make amends for the debts he has incurred vis-a`-vis the ladies. As a former entrapper of women, he will now offer them advice on staying ‘‘free’’ and out of the snares of such as he once was (stanza 1). He then moves to the particularity of women’s relation to vice and virtue in stanza 2, where he does not hesitate to use collective female guilt as a way to exhort women to individual female virtue: ‘‘Donne, per donna, e donna e omo foe / sbandeggiato’’ (Ladies, through a woman, both women and men were cast into exile) (Altra fiata, 17–18).


Because it was through Eve, a woman, that all humans sinned, and through Mary, a woman, that all humans are saved, women must hate vice and love virtue more than men (stanza 2). From here Guittone moves to two generically moralizing stanzas that probe the vertical axis devil-humankind-God at the expense of the horizontal male-female axis: vice enlarged the vertical axis, making devils of angels (stanza 3); virtue has the capacity to collapse it, making humans and God one (stanza 4). In stanza 5 the horizontal male-female axis reasserts itself, and the general considerations of the preceding stanzas find a gender-specific focus that will not again be relinquished (and this lengthy canzone has not yet reached the halfway mark). Guittone now turns to a discussion of female virtue and specifically of chastity, which is the sine qua non for women. Without chastity a woman cannot be appreciated, even if she possesses all the other virtues: ma cio` che non vi vol nente fallire e` castita`, for cui donna gradire non, con tutt’altre vertu`, mai poria. (Altra fiata, 70–72) But that which can never fail you [women] is chastity, without which a woman can never be appreciated, even if she has all the other virtues.

If absolute chastity is not the goal, then chastity within marriage is acceptable (stanza 6); better that a woman should die than take a lover (stanza 7). Stanza 8 circles back to the persona of the lover-deceiver of the first stanza, informing the ladies that the men who most say they love them most deceive them: ‘‘Che´ bene vi poria giurare in fede / che qual piu` dice ch’ama e` ’nfingitore’’ (For I could swear to you in faith that he who most claims to love is feigning) (Altra fiata, 119–20). Stanza 9 touches on other traits besides chastity that become a woman, such as ‘‘umilta`, mansuetudo e pace’’ (humility, meekness, and peace) (Altra fiata, 132), and—in one of the standard topoi of writing for women—a courteous tongue: ‘‘lingua cortese e retta, / che pace d’amore metta / in casa e fore, aver la donna dia’’ (a woman should have a courteous and correct tongue that spreads the peace of love at home and outside) (Altra fiata, 136–38). Stanza 10 brings the moral matter to conclusion, cautioning women against adornment and advising them to hide their beauty in order to better preserve their chastity. There is one more stanza, the eleventh, the famous metapoetic coda


in which Guittone meditates on the difficulties encountered by a poet dealing with a ‘‘gran matera’’ (Altra fiata, 160). Much cited and anthologized, the concluding stanza of Altra fiata is completely divorced from its context by critics who never mention that the gran matera in question is the lives and conduct of women. Women are moral agents in Guittone’s canzone, albeit weakminded ones, who need to be prodded and pushed in the direction of virtue. Guittone’s anti-courtliness is quite different from Dante’s, and would repay study as a model that Dante both attended to and rejected. Guittone is more attuned to popular religiosity and less to philosophical models than Dante (for instance in his adoption in strophe 2 of an explicit Eve/Mary template for female behavior). And he differs from Dante in using an autobiographical stance that allows him to present himself as taking the women’s point of view and coming to their defense. As a former seducer who has now reformed, his words on the behavior of false men carry the special weight of an informant (the false knights and corrupters of women whom Dante castigates in the canzone Poscia ch’Amor may owe something to Guittone’s selfdescription here). Now that he has changed his ways, he will defend women from such as he was. As a former entrapper he owes a debt to women (‘‘ma debitor son voi, che` fabricate / ho rete mante e lacci a voi lacciando’’ [I am your debtor, for I have made many nets and snares for the purpose of trapping you] [Altra fiata, 10–11]), a debt that he plans to discharge by helping them to stay ‘‘free’’ (libere): ‘‘se libere star, piu` che lacciarvi, amate’’ (if you prefer to be free, rather than ensnared) (Altra fiata, 16). Guittone’s choice of adjective here— libere—seems to allude to the human faculty that is the prerequisite for moral behavior, namely libero arbitrio, or free will, as well as to conjure all the associations of sin with bondage and virtue with freedom. Guittone exhorts women to pursue all virtue but most especially chastity: he commends above all a woman who is chaste both in body and spirit (‘‘Oh, che molto io commendo / donna che tene casto corpo e core!’’ [Altra fiata, 75–76]). To live in the flesh without fleshly desire (‘‘Vivere in carne for voler carnale’’ [Altra fiata, 77]), he says, is better than angelic, since angels have chastity but without the temptations of the flesh (‘‘Angeli castitate hanno for carne’’ [Altra fiata, 79]). At the same time that he praises total chastity, however, Guittone is open to chastity within marriage for a woman who cannot or will not choose absolute chastity, a woman who has or desires a husband: ‘‘Chi non


pote o non vol castita` tale, / che ha marito overo aver desia’’ (Altra fiata, 83–84). A woman who lives chastely with a husband is considered virtuous; even more significantly, a woman can virtuously desire a husband she does not yet have. Noteworthy here are the verbs of volition ‘‘vol’’ and ‘‘desia’’ that allow females free will to participate in these crucial life decisions: it is important that Guittone allows that a woman may choose marital chastity over absolute chastity, and that he acknowledges a woman’s right to desire a husband. With respect to unchastity, Guittone is explicit about the double standard that applies to the sexes: carnal vice is bad in men, but much worse in women. Guittone here sets a precedent for Doglia mi reca’s argument regarding female unchastity leading to death. His view is that it is better for a woman to die than to take a lover: Ohi, quanto fo`rate, donna, men male, se l’amadore tuo morte te desse, che ben tal te volesse! Che` pregio vale ed aunor piu` che vita. Oi donna sopellita in brobio tanto ed in miseria, aviso che peggio d’onne morte e` vita tale. (Altra fiata, 108–14) Oh, how much it would be for you less evil, lady, if your lover were to give you death, than that he should love you thus! For worth and honor are more valuable than life. Oh, lady buried in such shame and misery, I consider such a life worse than any death.

While Doglia mi reca presents a complex Scholastic analysis of different kinds of desire and concludes with the idea that a woman who fails to discriminate between lovers deserves to perish (‘‘Oh cotal donna pera / che sua bilta` dischiera / da natural bonta` per tal cagione, / e crede amor fuor d’orto di ragione’’ [O let such a woman perish, who for such reasons sunders her beauty from natural goodness and believes that love exists outside the garden of reason!] [Doglia mi reca, 144–47]), Guittone simply exhorts women to remain chaste at all costs, for even death is better than unchastity. Altra fiata also anticipates Doglia mi reca in connecting a discourse on female chastity to the necessity for women to cover their beauty: Doglia mi reca’s ‘‘You should not love, but rather hide the beauty given you’’ (voi non dovreste amare, / ma coprir quanto di bilta` v’e` dato) (Doglia mi reca, 15–16) echoes Guittone’s ‘‘Ladies, if you like chastity,


let honor cover your beautiful face’’ (Donne, se castita` v’e` in piacimento, / covra onesta` vostra bella fazone) (Altra fiata, 157–58). The key word in both passages is coprire: rather than the elaborate metaphorical play around the trope of veiling/unveiling that we saw in Doglia mi reca, Guittone is matter-of-factly concerned with the importance of covering and protecting that which one treasures. The importance of cover is one of the topoi common to moralizing discourses on female conduct that we find in Altra fiata, along with the stress on appropriate speech and the caution against ornamentation. Female conduct is about respecting limits, staying within the accepted norms or constraints: as female speech is only appropriate within limits (‘‘garrendo’’ [Altra fiata, 140], or garrulous speech, is not acceptable), so ornamentation is perilous, since outward signs are an indication that a good is for sale. A horse that is not for sale will not carry a sign; a man who shows his treasure is not sufficiently protective of it. Similarly, if a woman is not for sale, she should not expose herself. If she values her chastity she should cover herself: Ben dona intendimento che vender vol chi sua roba for pone. Caval che non si vende alcun nol segna, ne` gia` mostra che tegna lo suo tesoro caro om ch’ ladroni lo mostri ed affazioni. Donne, se castita` v’e` ’n piacimento, covra onesta` vostra bella fazone. (Altra fiata, 151–58) He who puts his goods outside shows his intention to sell. A horse that is not for sale does not carry a sign, nor does he who shows and exposes his treasure to thieves demonstrate that he values it. Ladies, if you like chastity, let honor cover your beautiful face.

It is significant that the above instructions on not exposing a woman’s beauty are not directed to a male protector in charge of covering the woman, but, as in Doglia mi reca, are offered directly to the woman, who is thus placed in charge of covering herself. Again, we come back to the woman as a student and interlocutor who can benefit from the poet’s instructions, and thus also to the value and utility of the poet’s discourse. And the poet’s discourse is never more valuable or useful than when it is directed to a group—donne—so manifestly in need of instruction and support. As we saw, Dante makes this link


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between women and the utility of poetic discourse explicit in Doglia mi reca’s central metapoetic strophe, where the verse ‘‘Ma perche` lo meo dire util vi sia’’ connects the gender of his addressees to his need to find useful discourse. It is also present in Guittone: Dante may well have had the last strophe of Altra fiata in mind as he composed that central strophe of Doglia mi reca. Altra fiata ends with an eleventh strophe in which Guittone famously defends the length and difficulty of his poetry from detractors who say his writing is too hard and difficult to savor: ‘‘E dice alcun ch’e` duro / e aspro mio trovato a savorare’’ (Altra fiata, 163–64). They may be right, Guittone says, but the difficulty of his verse is the opposite of decorative, frivolous, and unmotivated. Rather, it is the direct result of how much material he needs to include, and how pressing is his need to communicate. Ditt’aggio manto e non troppo, se bono: non gran matera cape in picciol loco. Di gran cosa dir poco non dicese al mestieri o dice scuro. E dice alcun ch’e` duro e aspro mio trovato a savorare; e pote esser vero. Und’e` cagione? che m’abonda ragione, perch’eo gran canzon faccio e serro motti, e nulla fiata tutti locar loco li posso; und’eo rancuro, ch’un picciol motto pote un gran ben fare. (Altra fiata, 159–70) I have said much and not too much, if it is good: for a great topic cannot be contained in a small place. To say a little about a great topic is not appropriate to the task and results in obscurity. And some say that my poetry is hard and difficult to savor; and it could be true. What is the reason? That I abound in discourse, so that I make a great canzone and bind together words, and never can I find a place to place them all. Hence I regret, for a little word can do a great good.

Guittone ends Altra fiata, a poem that addresses women and ‘‘women’s issues’’ throughout, with one of his strongest and most personal poetic statements: the declaration of his poetics of plenitude. He has said much, but not, if it is good, too much, for his is a great subject matter—a ‘‘gran matera’’—and a matter of this sort cannot be put in a small container, a ‘‘picciol loco.’’ It is inappropriate to say


little about a ‘‘gran cosa,’’ a great topic. In this way Guittone dignifies both his poem and its subject matter: the concerns relating to women that are the gran matera treated by Altra fiata and, before that, by Ahi lasso. Moreover, this topic is so important, it offers so much material— and in fact this is his second canzone to treat the matera of women— that even though he has made a ‘‘gran canzon,’’ he cannot fit in everything he wants to say: his argument runs over (‘‘m’abonda ragione’’) and his form is not sufficiently capacious for his content. (He needed to come up with the idea of stringing his great canzoni together into a narrative that could treat complex moral issues, but he was not Dante and did not invent the Commedia.) Guittone’s moral commitment to the utility of poetic discourse leads him to confess his frustration—‘‘und’eo rancuro’’—in a remarkable statement of regret: he regrets that he cannot fit in everything he would like to say. Although Guittone is candid about the difficulties and frustrations inherent in communication in his conclusion to Altra fiata, his last word reaffirms the value of his attempt: he ends by saying that even a small word can do a great good—‘‘ch’un picciol motto pote un gran ben fare’’—thus emphasizing the moral agenda of his writing and reaffirming its value and utility. Guittone’s pragmatic concern with the utility of his writing for women leads directly to Dante’s Doglia mi reca, which in turn paves the way for the Commedia, whose female figures are not courtly icons but live and breathe the air of history. These authors are, in different ways, committed to the idea that their language should penetrate ‘‘sotto benda.’’ They are committed to lifting the veil.

chapter 16

Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax

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his paper sketches a paradigm for evaluating the treatment of women in early Italian literature. I will consider that well-worn trajectory—Italian literature from its lyric origins to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—from a less worn perspective, that of gender, and propose a framework for thinking about what we see. Let me begin by explaining, because I think there is heuristic value in the explanation, how a critic with a long track record of working on these authors from a nongendered perspective arrived at this particular intellectual crossroads. The issue of gender is central in early Italian literature and is clearly posed by the texts themselves: Italian literary texts of this period feature male lover-poets and the female figures that they love. The difficulty, for me, was in figuring out how to approach this issue in a way that is integrated with and emerges from the complex reality of the texts rather than being superimposed onto them from above and outside. I could see the issue: because much of the early Italian tradition deals with desire that is filtered through a cultural system we know as ‘‘courtly love,’’ in which the male lover aspires to the love of a lady worshiped as an ennobling ideal, attention to issues of gender seems a transparently useful critical move. I could see the need: there is an absence of sustained analysis of gender in medieval Italian literature, which in turn must be viewed within a broader intellectual context in which the word ‘‘gender’’ in the sense of ‘‘gender studies’’ is not even easily translated into Italian. What I could not see was a satisfying avenue—which at this stage in our critical enterprise must mean an avenue that goes beyond ‘‘women in x, y, or z’’—by which to approach the issue of gender in these authors.1

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I reached the paradigm that I will put forth here slowly, and by working backward in historical time from Boccaccio, the Italian author who most explicitly places the category ‘‘woman’’ (rather than just a particular woman) at the core of his opus. As I tried to show in ‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron,’’ included in this volume, Boccaccio, in a fashion that is contradictory, nuanced, and anything but ideologically doctrinaire, shines a light on the disenfranchisement of women, using them as emblematic for all those who are oppressed, disenfranchised, cloistered away from society, and stripped of agency. Female agency came into focus for me again in ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini,’’ in which, through a historicist reconstruction of Inferno 5, I uncovered a submerged ‘‘feminist’’ agenda embedded in Dante’s damned dynastic wife.2 From Francesca I worked backward again to look at the issue of gender as it developed before the Commedia, in Dante’s lyrics and then in the poems of Guittone d’Arezzo, drawing in this way nearer to the courtly origins of the Italian tradition. My goal here is to suggest how we could connect the dots: how we could approach a gendered history of early Italian literature. To tell this story we have to follow the trajectory of the nongendered history, starting before Dante, in the lyric prehistory to the Commedia, and including both of the key forgers of the aftermath to the Commedia— the period that sets the stage for the rest of Italian literary history— namely Petrarch and Boccaccio. In this essay I advance a framework for evaluating the treatment of women in this tradition, which involves looking at Italian literature from its lyric origins to Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch through the lens of the competing ideological systems to which these authors subscribe: on the one hand, they subscribe to the ideology of courtly love, which permeates the beautiful love poetry for which the tradition is so well known, and, on the other, to an often violently anti-courtly ideology that permeates their moralistic poetry. These two ideologies underwrite very different attitudes toward women and toward gender. The dialectic between courtly and anti-courtly ideologies is a historical constant in the early Italian tradition: it is present not only in Dante, but in poets before Dante, like Guittone d’Arezzo, and it is a major feature of Boccaccio’s work as well. For this reason, the ideological shifts manifested by these authors lend themselves to the construction of a historical overview of gender in this tradition, allowing us to


frame a gendered history of early Italian literature in terms of the dialectic between a courtly ideology and a competing set of values. Courtliness, the set of values associated with what Dante and his peers call cortesia, is by definition a gendered issue, since its logic is constructed around a male/female binary. In the courtly lyric, the male lover-poet voices his aspiration to possess the unattainable perfection that the lady represents. On the other side of this binary stands the courtly lady, who represents, embodies, serves as goal and point of reference, but does not, in the courtly lyric, do, act, or speak. Dante started life as a courtly poet; he ended life as the author of the Commedia, a text in which women act, speak, and possess moral agency. The question that arose for me, the question that offered me the means to get beyond the ‘‘women-in-the-Commedia’’ approach to gender issues in Dante and to think in terms of a larger historical paradigm, diachronically, was thus the following: how do we account for Dante’s development from a courtly poet into the poet of the Commedia, that is, into a poet who assigns moral agency to all human beings, including women? In other words, how do we account for Dante’s development into the poet who gave Francesca da Rimini, forgotten by contemporary chroniclers and dynastically unimportant, a voice and a name, indeed the only contemporary historical name recorded in Inferno 5? How did Dante become the poet who wrote Francesca’s story, who inscribed Francesca’s existence into our collective memory, our history? Poetry based in a courtly logic is always fundamentally narcissistic and centered on the male lover/poet; the female object of desire serves as a screen on which he projects questions and concerns about himself. Whether we are speaking of the early courtly poetry of the Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini or the later theologized courtliness of Dante and his fellow stilnovisti, the fundamental logic of the courtly poem remains narcissistic, as Dante acknowledges in the Vita nuova when he sets himself the task of breaking from it. The didactic works of writers like Guittone d’Arezzo, Dante in his late moral canzoni, and Boccaccio, on the other hand, are marked by a utilitarian stamp: women are supposed to use this literature, to be instructed by it, to learn from it. These texts, precisely by virtue of their moralistic and even paternalistic programs, demonstrate a need to communicate with women, to treat them as subjects who can learn, rather than as objects to be desired.


Whereas the early Sicilian poets keep their focus on the poet and his conflicts, Guittone d’Arezzo, unlike Giacomo da Lentini, writes not only love poetry in the courtly style but also moralistic poems like his didactic poem on female chastity, Altra fiata aggio gia`, donne, parlato. This canzone offers an early model of a paradigm that Dante will adopt in a moral canzone like Doglia mi reca nello core ardire, whereby paternalistic morality defeats courtliness and ironically enhances the status of women by conceiving them as moral agents.3 In Dante’s work we can see the tension between the courtly approach to women, in which the female figure serves to arbitrate male behavior and exists functionally only as a predicate to the male loverpoet, and a moralizing approach in which women are arbiters of themselves and exist in the poem as potential users of poetry in their own right. His early poetry is entirely within the courtly tradition, in which the poet projects his own fears and desires, without exploring the subjectivity of the lady. In the theologized variant of courtly love Dante calls stil novo poetry, the poet learns to ask no reward of the lady and to find in the act of praising her its own reward. But still there is no exploration of her subjectivity or assignment to her of moral agency. The ladies of Dante’s early lyrics—whose names include Violetta, Fioretta, Lisetta, and the stony cold donna petra as well as Beatrice—have in common that they do not speak. By contrast, the Beatrice of the Commedia is loquacious; she is a veritable Beatrix loquax. Starting with this anomaly—a lyric lady (not a shepherdess, as in the Provençal pastorela) who speaks—we will now turn to exploring Dante’s construction of the figure of Beatrice. * * * In teaching the Commedia over the last thirty years, I have found that there is no figure more difficult to make interesting, appealing—or indeed comprehensible—than Beatrice. For the average naı¨ve reader, characters like Francesca and Farinata come into immediate focus, while the figure of Beatrice remains blurry. Perusing the critical literature, we see that this abstracted quality is reified and codified: here we find Beatrice as an allegory for teologia, for illuminating grace, for the church, for whatever abstraction the critic finds most worthy and compelling. Dante, a poet whose miraculous economy can conjure a cohesive character with a few strokes of his pen, seems to have failed to create such a character with Beatrice. While I have watched reader after


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reader fall in love with Vergil and mourn his loss, I have never witnessed a similar affective response to Beatrice: either to her spectacular arrival or to her eventual departure and replacement by Bernard of Clairvaux. Eager to establish Beatrice’s personality traits, critics pounce on the occasions when the text seems to offer suggestions of such traits, and end up making foolish ad feminam comments that are, in any case, less indices of a particular personality than of behaviors categorized by type—indeed, by gender. Thus, for instance, we hear about what has been dubbed the ‘‘typically female’’ jealousy displayed by Beatrice when she reproves the pilgrim for his past straying when they meet in the earthly paradise. Much more than Beatrice, Dante’s Vergil seems to operate polysemously: he can signify classical culture and its limitations, he can signify the tragedy of human history and the lacrimae rerum of human existence, while at the same time functioning as a character in the diegesis (‘‘Virgilio’’), who comes to exist through time in the text’s virtual reality and to whom one becomes—similarly through the passage of time—attached. A great similarity between Vergil and Beatrice as textual constructs is the duration of textual time they inhabit. The poem’s three major characters are textually disposed in a decreasing scale, whereby the pilgrim inhabits the whole text, Vergil two-thirds, and Beatrice approximately one-third. In Vergil’s case, this textual presence translates into a powerful affect, which we could even call love, and which is experienced not just by the pilgrim, but also by the reader. A great dissimilarity between Vergil and Beatrice as textual constructs is in the reader’s response; as I noted, the reader does not respond to Beatrice with the warmth shown to Vergil. While the pilgrim’s progress functions in most respects as a template on which the reader subconsciously models her- or himself, in this respect pilgrim and reader sharply diverge: for the pilgrim, of course, never fails to evince his passion for Beatrice, a passion that the reader never seems to share. Even as the long dureé of their textual existences and their dramatically intertwined importance to the pilgrim bind Vergil and Beatrice, they are separated by great gulfs. Of these gulfs—the salvation of the one versus the damnation of the other, the contemporaneity of the one versus the antiquity of the other, the youth of the one versus the venerable maturity of the other—perhaps the most salient from a purely diegetic perspective is the disparity of gender: the femaleness of the one versus the maleness of the other. Especially in combination


with her youth, Beatrice’s gender poses an interesting set of narrative challenges for Dante. Beatrice’s gender is central to her primary role in the Commedia: as the object of the pilgrim’s passionate love, however we choose to construe that love, she is a catalyst for much of the lexicon of desire that is the Commedia’s basic linguistic engine. At the same time, this youthful female figure is invested with an authority that is rarely associated with females in narratives, unless they be allegorical figures like Boethius’s Lady Philosophy. The pilgrim’s feelings for Beatrice—unlike the reader’s—are a given that exist undeterred by the confusing multiplicity of codes and signifying systems that embody her. In constructing our affective response to Vergil, on the other hand, and in drawing us into the space of that relationship, Dante draws consistently on one code, that of the older authority figure, undifferentiated by gender, who at first functions as teacher and then modulates completely into parent. He draws on a primary and universal human love: the love of the child for the parent. In the past I have shown how the Vergil plot is written into the Commedia as two distinct but tightly coordinated storylines: as one maps the progressive undermining of Vergil’s authority, the other records the simultaneous growth in the pilgrim’s love for him, the parent whom we love despite the fallibility and the limitations that we come to recognize as we pass out of childhood. In concrete narrative terms, these dual storylines mean that Dante insinuates affective language into the narrative at moments of greatest intellective stress, forcing us, with the pilgrim, into the dilemma of loving and respecting that which is fallible, corruptible, and transitory—into the human experience par excellence.4 In constructing our response to Vergil, Dante draws upon the love that an adult child feels for an aging parent: the parent who used to be, for each of us, as Vergil was for Dante, the one ‘‘who knew everything’’ (che tutto seppe) (Inf. 7.3) and ‘‘the sea of all wisdom’’ (il mar di tutto ’l senno) (Inf. 8.7), but who inevitably—as we gain our own perspective on life—no longer is. Ultimately, the character ‘‘Virgilio’’ taps into our universal human experience of loss, our universal human experience of the Vergilian lacrimae rerum:5 Vergil—not Beatrice—is the Commedia’s great contribution to the annals of love and loss. With Beatrice, Dante cannot draw in the same way upon the experience of loss, for Beatrice remains for all eternity in heaven; nor can he wholly model the interaction between the pilgrim and Beatrice on a parentchild template. While there are powerfully arresting and important


images of Beatrice as mother in the Paradiso, the affective language that dominates in the representation of Beatrice is erotic, not maternal. It is interesting to note that the maternal Beatrice of the Paradiso is drawn from a very different moment on the arc of the parent-child dynamic than the one on which Dante draws for his figuration of Vergil: she is the mother of an infant, not an adult. By figuring Beatrice as the mother of an infant—for instance, as a mother bird feeding her young in the opening simile of Paradiso 23—Dante draws on the aspect of maternal love that is most easily blended with eros.6 Writing on the maternal imagery used for Beatrice, Rachel Jacoff comments that ‘‘at the apex of this imagery, the extraordinary opening bird simile of Paradiso xxiii, Dante blends the language of desire and of maternal tenderness in perfect fusion.’’7 Joan Ferrante’s Woman as Image in Medieval Literature is noteworthy for the author’s clear understanding that Dante does not reject human love while aspiring to divine love: ‘‘What is unusual in Dante’s view of love, particularly after the thirteenth century, is that human love between man and woman is not just a figure for the love of man and God, but a necessary step towards that love’’ (130). In Woman Earthly and Divine in the ‘‘Comedy’’ of Dante, Marianne Shapiro castigates Dante for his masculine and medieval prejudices against women rather than being alert to his radical departures from the dualist stereotypes of both his tradition and ours. Shapiro holds that Dante divests his ‘‘good’’ women of sexuality in the Commedia, finding a ‘‘solution to the problem of woman which was a return to the sublimation of the mother.’’8 While it is certainly true that Dante invests his Beatrice with maternal energy, we must not lose sight of the fact that the dominant register in Dante’s portrayal of Beatrice is erotic. The interpretive challenge is that she is both ‘‘good’’ and not desexualized. A critic who has accepted this challenge is F. Regina Psaki, who in a series of articles argues against what she correctly sees as the prevailing tenet of Dante criticism, according to which ‘‘human love has been subsumed or corrected by divine love,’’ in favor of a ‘‘redeemed or even redemptive eroticism which makes a place for human sexual love not only in earthly life but in beatitude.’’9 There is probably no more radically alien construct in the Commedia than the figure of Beatrice. In unraveling some of the textual skein that is Beatrice, I will focus on Beatrice’s original identity as a courtly lady, a lady celebrated by Dante in courtly lyrics. A first step toward understanding this figure is clarity with respect to how alien Beatrice


really is. She is culturally alien to us precisely by virtue of her original identity as a courtly lady, since courtliness—for all that its aftereffects are still visible in aspects of our popular culture—is hard for us to swallow without cultural condescension. But more important is the point, not sufficiently acknowledged, that Beatrice was radically alien in her own time, and for her first readers: for what were they to make of a courtly lady who speaks—who indeed speaks like a man? As I noted previously, in Dante’s work we can see the tension between the courtly approach to women that we find in his youthful lyrics, in which the female figure serves to arbitrate male behavior and exists functionally only as a predicate to the male lover-poet, and the moralizing approach we find in late poems like Doglia mi reca, in which women are arbiters of themselves and exist in the poem as potential users of poetry in their own right. Beatrice reflects that tension, for she is a hybrid figure: a composite whose elements come both from the courtly tradition and the moralizing allegorical and didactic tradition in which female abstractions like Boethius’s Lady Philosophy speak with authority and vigor. Moreover, Beatrice’s hybrid nature is emblematic of the complex and anything but homogeneous portrait of women’s lives and desires that emerges from the Commedia: if all its diverse figures and varied perspectives were synthesized, we would see, I believe, a text that is neither fundamentally misogynist nor free of misogynist elements.10 To get some purchase on Dante’s Beatrice we must follow the path of Dante’s own development, a path that has its origins in the lyric courtly poetry of Dante’s youth. This path, which in my opinion is the prime access route for understanding the Beatrice of the Commedia, has been critically undervalued in the American critical tradition, which has shown more interest in the biblical/typological/allegorical tradition and in the classical intertextuality of the Commedia than in its vernacular counterpart.11 It is precisely the vernacular tradition of courtly romance, and especially courtly lyric, that I believe provides the single greatest impetus for Dante’s creation. The Beatrice of the Commedia conserves many of the erotic markers of the lady in the courtly lyric and, like the lady in the courtly lyric, her poetic existence is predicated on the needs of her lover-poet. Beatrice’s behavior in the Commedia is always centered on Dante. Although the poet’s use of a young Florentine woman as his vehicle to God is indeed an affirmative representation of the role of women, we must also acknowledge the fundamental limitation—from a feminist


perspective—that is inherent to the figure of Beatrice: she exists for Dante, whose needs she serves throughout the Commedia. In a profound sense, she does not exist for herself in this poem; her historicity, while figuratively and conceptually essential, is not accessed, as is Francesca’s. As Jacoff and Stephany note, ‘‘Beatrice’s historicity in the Commedia is largely confined to the history of her relationship to Dante and to Dante’s earlier poetry.’’12 Nor does she have made available to her, for instance, the options implicitly available to the ladies whom Dante addresses in his (anti-courtly) moralizing canzone Doglia mi reca. Beatrice does not have the option of erring, of sinning, or for that matter of fully living. The limitations imposed on the figure of Beatrice are the limitations imposed on the courtly lady; they are culturally derived from the same matrix, the courtly ideology that exalts the lady as a Platonic ideal, rather than viewing her as a human agent with her own inner life and subjectivity. She is supreme, but within a context in which the frame of reference is entirely determined by the needs of the lover-poet. On the other hand—and this is why Dante’s Beatrice is an anomalous hybrid—within the Commedia she possesses an absolutely unprecedented and masculine authority. Most importantly, she exerts this authority in language, in speech: she develops from the silent icon of stilnovist courtly verse to the talkative figure I once labeled ‘‘Beatrix loquax.’’13 And her speech is not restricted to the private, courtly, or erotic codes; it inhabits many different discursive domains, and all authoritatively. The hybridity—or, as Victoria Kirkham puts it, ‘‘androgyny’’14 —of the Commedia’s Beatrice finds its emblem in Paradiso 7, where, in the space of two verses, she both rays her lover with a smile ‘‘such that it would make a man happy in the flames,’’ and then—in the very next verse—uses that same mouth to begin a speech (on providential history, Adam’s sin, and Christ’s redemption) with the words ‘‘according to my infallible judgment’’ (secondo mio infallibile avviso [Par. 7.19]). The use of the word ‘‘infallibile’’ for female speech is in itself stunning, given the long and documented tradition of female speech as the special focus and target of misogyny. Moreover, this is the Commedia’s only use of ‘‘infallibile’’ for human speech of any sort, male or female.15 Beatrice’s speechifying has put off the historically mostly male commentators of the Commedia. We note one critic’s claim that the ‘‘Beatrice [of the Vita nuova] appears far more persuasive, enigmatic,


explosive, than the recreated and cantankerous figure’’ of the Purgatorio.16 To this we must reply that the ‘‘explosive’’ Beatrice of the Vita nuova is silent, while the ‘‘cantankerous’’ Beatrice of the Commedia speaks. Ferrante illuminates Dante’s unorthodox handling of Beatrice in the Commedia, explaining that Dante puts her ‘‘in a role which is specifically forbidden to women by major theologians, as priest, as confessor and teacher of theology.’’17 Ferrante continues: ‘‘It is a curious anomaly of Dante criticism that Beatrice is accepted as a symbol of theology by most critics, even as a Christ figure by some, and that she is also recognized by most as a real historical woman Dante knew, yet no one has questioned Dante’s use of a real woman, rather than an abstraction, to teach theology, in flagrant defiance of Paul’s injunction, frequently echoed in the thirteenth century, against women teaching’’ (‘‘Dante’s Beatrice,’’ 4). ‘‘Beatrix loquax’’ is an attempt to distill the fundamental binary that goes into constituting Dante’s hybrid Beatrice: to the extent that she is a beatifier, Beatrice may be seen as a theologized variant of a courtly lady, a figure created to dispense beatitude on those with whom she comes into contact, in a tradition of theologized courtliness that Dante inherits from Guido Guinizzelli and thereafter expands. In this respect, Beatrice’s gender is the residue of her original textual identity as a courtly lady—the quintessential courtly donna. However, by making his Beatrice so talkative, and so authoritative, Dante subverts the icon of the courtly lady. He creates a radically new construct: while the traditions Dante inherits boast female abstractions like Boethius’s Lady Philosophy who speak authoritatively, in a voice that is coded as non-gender-specific—that is, masculine—and female nonabstractions who either do not speak or speak within the province of the gender-specific, in Beatrice Dante creates a historicized object of desire, not a personification, who yet speaks. Indeed, in the Paradiso she speaks like a man, free from the content or modality normatively assigned to female discourse. There is a history to this trajectory, of course, stepping-stones on the way to the Commedia. This hybrid model of authoritative speech wedded to courtly conventions has its roots in that paradigmatically hybrid text, the Vita nuova. One stepping-stone, frequently noted, is the unelaborated but nonetheless suggestive last verse of the sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa. According to this verse, the process of love being awakened in a noble heart that occurs in men occurs analogously in women: ‘‘E simil face in donna omo valente’’ (And a


worthy man has the same effect on a lady) (14). Another steppingstone is the episode in which Dante is sharply questioned by unnamed but quick-witted Florentine ladies in a way that shakes him from his complacent self-indulgence and alerts him to his true quest: not to write about himself but to praise Beatrice (Vita nuova XIX, 10). The complex role assigned these ladies is emblematic of the Vita nuova itself, a text in which Dante embeds his early lyrics into a prose frame that ideologically repositions and reconceptualizes them. These ladies, who belong to the prose narration, not to the lyrics, are given the work of cutting through the rhetorical stance of the courtly lover and pointing out the narcissism in his work. They do this work by speaking, and they speak in a way that certainly is novel with respect to Dante’s lyrics. Lyric conventions also contribute to this episode, and add another dimension to its hybridity by crossing the Florentine ladies with a lowly shepherdess: Dante has borrowed here from the most noncourtly of lyric genres, the pastorela, where the shepherdess’s words serve as a reality principle for the knight. The barbed and insightinducing words of the Florentine ladies—not Beatrice’s, we note, for she remains in the silent space of the lyric grande dame—affect Dante as the shepherdess’s affect the knight. These ladies certainly speak. However, they speak about him—his moral state, his behavior—which makes them functionally still courtly ladies. All of these strands—from the Boethian allegorical model to the sharp-tongued shepherdess of the Provençal lyric tradition—make their way into the Beatrice of the Commedia. Dante’s starting point for this figure is the theologized courtliness of the Vita nuova, now made explicit, indeed made literal: in Inferno 2 Beatrice is one of ‘‘three blessed ladies’’ who ‘‘care’’ for Dante ‘‘in the court of heaven’’ (tre donne benedette / curan di te ne la corte del cielo) (Inf. 2.124–25). This Beatrice has thus modulated from the aloof lady of the lyrics into a literal ‘‘care-taker’’: Dante accomplishes this transformation by grafting romance elements onto the lyric template he is working with in Inferno 2 (as he will do also in the case of Francesca). Then, to the lyric/romance mix, Dante adds the theological/biblical dimension. Inferno 2 both invokes the Vita nuova, whose theologized courtliness it emulates, and it moves beyond the Vita nuova into what for Dante is new terrain: where the Vita nuova theologized the lyric tradition, in Inferno 2 Dante theologizes a courtly composite made up of both lyric and romance elements. In this way he arrives at a Beatrice who cares for Dante as one of the blessed ladies in the court of heaven.


The portrait of Beatrice in Inferno 2 seems fully consonant with her courtly, and specifically, lyric past: the verses with which Vergil describes her—eyes more shining than a star, smooth, soft diction emanating from an ‘‘angelic voice’’—have clear stilnovist antecedents, as has often been noted.18 But the interesting point for me here is one that has been less remarked, and it is that, while couching his description of Beatrice in the language of the lyric tradition from which she derives, Dante just as surely breaks with that tradition.19 He ruptures the connection of the Commedia’s Beatrice to her lyric past by having this Beatrice use her angelica voce—by having her speak. Because we are in hell, and Beatrice does not enter hell, her speech is reported by Vergil, but it is her speech nonetheless; it is reported verbatim and it takes up most of the canto. The fact that she speaks is central, just as central as the impulse that moves her to speak: she is moved by love, and the same force that moves her to leave heaven on Dante’s behalf also causes her to speak. The famous verse in which Beatrice states the cause of her motion and her purpose makes it equally clear that her purpose is intimately bound up with her speech: ‘‘amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare’’ (love moved me, which makes me speak) (Inf. 2.72). In this declaration that love moved her and makes her speak, Dante both conjures Beatrice’s past and scripts for her a radically new future. This future, which will unfold in the Commedia, is contained in the verb parlare, a verb betokening an activity utterly alien from the agenda of the lyric lady. To be sure, as a lyric lady, Beatrice is much less monolithic a construct than readers of the Commedia suspect. For instance, she is far from universally benign. In one of Dante’s early canzoni, Lo doloroso amor, she is so fearsome—and so far from beatific—that she provokes the lover’s anguished cry: ‘‘Per quella moro c’ha nome Beatrice’’ (I die for her whose name is Beatrice) (14). For all the lyric Beatrice’s power of life or death over the lover, however, it is the conventional power of the lyric lady: it exists solely in the private sphere, the sphere of eros. In another early canzone, E’m’incresce di me, she is equipped with a full arsenal of Cavalcantian erotic weaponry, including homicidal eyes. These she lifts as she vanquishes the lover’s soul with a cry of cruel triumph: ed alza gli occhi micidiali, e grida sovra colei che piange il suo partire: ‘‘Vanne, misera, fuor, vattene omai!’’ (E’ m’incresce di me, 49–51)


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And she lifts her homicidal eyes, and screams over her [the lover’s soul] which laments at departing: ‘‘Go away, wretch, get out, away with you now!’’

The words that Beatrice speaks here belong to the stylized and conventional diction of the erotic battle zone, and are similar to phrases put elsewhere in the mouth of a triumphantly cruel Love. Again, there is no public dimension to the words she speaks, no resonance for any life—or death—beyond that of the singular lover. Although the lyric Beatrice does not yet inhabit a public dimension through her speech, Dante does begin to construct the rudiments of such a dimension in these early canzoni, in the sense that he sets her existence against a historical, and indeed even eschatological, framework. In E’ m’incresce di me, the birth of the lady who possesses ‘‘homicidal eyes’’ is described in language resonant of the Vita nuova: Lo giorno che costei nel mondo venne, secondo che si truova nel libro della mente che vien meno, la mia persona pargola sostenne una passıön nova, tal ch’io rimasi di paura pieno . . . (E’ m’incresce di me, 57–62) The day that she came into the world, according to what is found in the book of my mind that is passing away, my childish body sustained a new emotion, such that I remained full of fear . . .

Dante here fuses elements—miraculous birth and Cavalcantian fear— that in the more canonical texts, Vita nuova and Commedia, are kept rigorously separate. From the point of view of the incremental construction of the Beatrice of the Commedia, it is important to note in this early Cavalcantian canzone the treatment of Beatrice’s presence, in this case her birth, as a historically and cosmically miraculous event as well as his juvenile susceptibility to a ‘‘passıön’’ defined as ‘‘nova,’’ that is, miraculous, unexpected, totally new. In the canzone Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, Beatrice is the object of universal praise. God himself, speaking in direct discourse to his angelic choirs, praises her. In Inferno 2 she is praise incarnate, defined as ‘‘loda di Dio vera’’ (true praise of God) (Inf. 2.103); in other words, her being testifies to God’s greatness—she praises him ontologically, merely by existing. In this respect, as in so many others, critics have read Inferno 2 as a continuation of the Vita nuova, where the


lover-poet learns to find his happiness ‘‘In quelle parole che lodano la donna mia’’ (In those words that praise my lady) (VN 18.6). The poet does the praising in this model; his is the active voice. She is praised, in the passive, or she is praise incarnate, by existing—not by speaking. Inferno 2 both continues and breaks with this model inherited from the stil novo and the Vita nuova, in that Dante both continues the ‘‘praise style’’ of the Vita nuova and starts something new, which he does by putting Beatrice in the active role. Having first assigned her the verb parlare in ‘‘amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare’’ (Inf. 2.72), Dante immediately follows up by assigning her—the erstwhile beneficiary of the praise-style—the verb lodare as well, with the result that the long-time object of praise becomes the active giver of praise. Thus, Beatrice follows her great statement ‘‘amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare’’ by telling Vergil that she will praise him to her lord for having helped the pilgrim on her behalf: ‘‘Quando saro` dinanzi al segnor mio, / di te mi lodero` sovente a lui’’ (When I am before my lord, I will frequently praise you to him) (Inf. 2.73–74; italics mine). These are verses that have captured critical attention, including mine, in the context of the drama of Vergil; we have wondered if Beatrice can legitimately promise to praise a damned soul.20 In the same way that I have thought about verse 72, ‘‘amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare,’’ within the economy of the Commedia’s extraordinary emphasis on speech without focusing on the significance of a courtly female speaker, so I did not notice the signficance of the verb lodare being placed in the mouth of the stilnovist lady. With ‘‘di te mi lodero`’’ Beatrice takes on a new mantle and a new role: rather than passively being praised, she is actively doing the praising (note the heightened reflexive forms, ‘‘mi lodero`’’), and so becoming Dante’s Beatrix loquax. * * * The figure of Beatrice is a complex hybrid, a mosaic constructed out of the tesserae of many different traditions, who conserves many of her courtly traits while simultaneously demonstrating a mature reconfiguration of the gender paradigm inherited from the courtly lyric. Dante also acts as the historian of record for women in the Commedia, as he does in the case of Francesca da Rimini—and for many other women as well. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the courtly poetry of his youth, Dante’s portraits of women in the Commedia, however brief, explore their subjectivity and assign moral agency. He seems particularly drawn to cases of marital and family abuse: we think of Pia in Purgatorio 3 and Piccarda in Paradiso 3. I predict that a historicized


unpacking of Dante’s representation of Piccarda, analagous to what I did with Francesca, will prove very fruitful, for Dante signposts the connection of Piccarda to Francesca and to issues of compulsion and the will through his use of the Nicomachean Ethics in forging his contrapasso for Inferno 5.21 Aristotle’s examples of compulsion—‘‘if he were to be carried somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power’’—resonate not only for Inferno 5 but also for Piccarda in Paradiso 3: Piccarda narrates a story according to which ‘‘men had her in their power’’ and precipitates a lengthy meditation on compulsion, not in its more rarified ‘‘Desire-compelled-me’’ variant, but in the brutally stark forms of the physical coercion imposed upon her. While there are famous women in the Commedia, such as Clare of Assisi and the Empress Constance, the text engages more fully with women otherwise consigned to historical oblivion; even Beatrice Portinari falls into this category.22 Any serious assessment of Dante’s role in the history of women will have to take the measure of this engagement. In the Commedia women explode the courtly code by becoming speakers, in the case of Beatrice a veritable Beatrix loquax, and in Boccaccio’s texts as well women are endowed with language. Boccaccio’s works range from early courtly works in the vernacular to the misogyny of the later Corbaccio, also in the vernacular, and the Latin encyclopedic De mulieribus claris. At the center of this great womanoriented literary production stands the Decameron, in which Boccaccio defends his targeting of female readers precisely on the basis of their greater need and his greater utility. Women are cloistered and enclosed, constrained by the wishes of their families and immured in their rooms, while men have access to a host of distracting activities: ‘‘men, if they want, are able to walk abroad, see and hear many things, go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding and gambling, or attend to their business affairs’’ (Decameron, Proemio, 12). This dichotomy between the relative access of men and women to the benefits of human and social intercourse—including sexual—is the ethical template on which Boccaccio constructs his masterpiece. As we saw in ‘‘Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo,’’ the previous essay in this volume, there is a direct line from the conclusion of Guittone’s canzone Altra fiata, with its concern for and commitment to language that will be of moral and practical utility, to the central passage in Dante’s Doglia mi reca, in which Dante says that he will now write more clearly in order to be of


greater use to his female audience: ‘‘perche` lo meo dire util vi sia.’’ Utility is a key feature of this tradition, clearly articulated in Boccaccio’s Decameron, another text addressed, not just once or twice but consistently and indefatigably, to women. Boccaccio defends his targeting of female readers precisely on the basis of their greater need. Women are cloistered and enclosed: ‘‘ristrette da’ voleri, da’ piaceri, da’ comandamenti de’ padri, delle madri, de’ fratelli e de’ mariti, il piu´ del tempo nel piccolo circuito delle loro camere racchiuse dimorano’’ (constrained by the wishes, the pleasure, and the commandments of their fathers, their mothers, their brothers and their husbands, most of the time they remain enclosed in the small compass of their rooms) (Decameron, Proemio, 10). Therefore, argues Boccaccio, women have most need of what he has to offer; indeed, his discourse will be of greatest utility to them: E quantunque il mio sostentamento, o conforto che vogliam dire, possa essere e sia a’ bisognosi assai poco, nondimeno parmi quello doversi piu` tosto porgere dove il bisogno apparisce maggiore, sı` perche` piu` utilita` vi fara` e sı` ancora perche` piu` vi fia caro avuto. (Decameron, Proemio, 8) And though my nourishment, or comfort if we want to call it such, may seem to the needy to be rather slight, nonetheless it seems to me that it should be offered more readily where the need seems greatest, both because it will be of greater utility in that quarter and because it will be more appreciated.

As he embarks on his book Boccaccio states that the ladies who read it will be able to derive from it both delight and useful counsel: ‘‘utile consiglio’’ (Decameron, Proemio, 14). And he ends the Decameron on the same note, turning again to his female audience and asking us to remember him, if what we have read has proven of any service: ‘‘E voi, piacevoli donne, con la sua grazia in pace vi rimanete, di me ricordandovi, se a alcuna forse alcuna cosa giova l’averle lette’’ (And you, sweet ladies, with His grace remain in peace and remember me, if some benefit has come to some of you from reading these) (Decameron, Conclusione dell’Autore, 29). In ‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron,’’ chapter 13 in this volume, I endeavored to show that, for all its programmatic ambiguity, the Decameron does


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indeed offer benefits to its female readers. Boccaccio uses verbs to signify male freedom in the Proem of the Decameron, where we find the alignment of deeds and verbs with men. The pains of love are alleviated for men, says Boccaccio, because, while women are forced into immobility that increases melancholy, men have access to a host of distracting activities, expressed as nine successive infinitives: ‘‘per cio` che a loro, volendo essi, non manca l’andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare’’ (so that men, if they want, are able to walk abroad, see and hear many things, go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding and gambling, or attend to their business affairs) (Decameron, Proemio, 12). These same activities are used throughout the Decameron to generate metaphors for sex, with the result that the text is hard-wired, through the metaphors that equate sex with various masculine activities, to contaminate the world of women and the world of men, allowing women access to the male world of mobility, deeds, and accomplishment. The Decameron’s sexual metaphors are literal bridges between two gendered activities that are accorded different status and worth along gender lines: the metaphors serve to transfer or carry over some of the worth accorded men’s work to women’s work, thus transferring to women some of the symbolic worth accorded to men. My point here is that the Decameron can be inscribed within a specific tradition, which, if not in itself feminist, is arguably the tradition in which feminism could later take root. This is the tradition in which female interlocutors are not just tropes, not just part of the poet’s self-construction, as they are for courtly poets. Standing between courtliness, on the one hand, and misogyny, on the other, this is the tradition that is moralizing, didactic (to the point of frequently being paternalistic and obnoxious), utilitarian, pragmatic—and that truly addresses issues of women in society. This is the tradition whose hallmark is a stress on the utility of discourse, a feature of the Decameron that has not typically been connected to its protofeminism but that I would firmly connect to a certain kind of writing to and about women. This current of Italian letters—pragmatic, moralizing, and fully committed to the utility of poetic discourse—culminates in Boccaccio, an author for whom the issues of women and their place in society are never peripheral. I am suggesting that we can identify the moralizing, utilitarian, pragmatic strand of Italian letters—starting with Guittone d’Arezzo


and going forward to Boccaccio—as the more open and progressive toward women. It is extremely interesting, from this perspective, that Petrarch did not write such poems. His vernacular output does not include poems like Altra fiata and Doglia mi reca; his moral poems, political poems, and poems of friendship engage men rather than women. Moreover, when Petrarch turns Boccaccio’s programmatically ambiguous Griselda story, the last story of the Decameron (10.10), into an exemplum of exceptional wifely obedience with the prefatory words De insigni obedientia et fide uxoria, he also translates it into Latin, indicating that his target audience is not female. He is not trying to be useful to women, but to participate in a cultural discussion over the heads of women23 —not sotto benda but sopra benda. While Boccaccio, a master of verisimilitude, eschews the verisimilar in his vernacular tale, and thus makes it harder for even a misogynist to see silent Griselda as a good wife in any normative, nongrotesque sense, let alone for a female reader to identify with her (and he widens the available hermeneutic spectrum by adding Dioneo’s strong critiques of both Griselda and her husband), Petrarch goes to great lengths to make Griselda’s circumstances less offensive, not stripping her naked in public, allowing her opportunities for speech, and working ‘‘to soften the harshness of the marquis’s actions,’’ so that Griselda can serve more readily as the type of an obedient wife.24 The next chapter in a gendered history of Italian literature will have to deal with the significance and influence of Petrarch’s remarkable—and in my opinion remarkably regressive—traslatio. Put very succinctly, I would take my analysis here as yet one more demonstration—this time in the area of gender roles—of what it means that Petrarch triumphed over Dante as the model for subsequent generations of Italian poets. Petrarch forged his identity against Dante’s by going back to the courtly paradigm that Dante abandoned, thus institutionalizing a model of gender relations that endured for centuries and that, through the extraordinary internet that was European literary Petrarchism, became a cultural trope. To go back to the case of Francesca, we could say that the reading of Inferno 5 that ultimately emerged—depoliticized and stripped of much of Dante’s agenda—is precisely a Petrarchan reading. Dante took on the task of being the historian of record with respect to Francesca’s story, and whether or not his treatment of her can be classified as ‘‘feminist,’’ it is certainly culturally anomalous in the respect and dignity accorded


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the personhood of the dynastic wife, a dignity that derives from the text’s commitment to her historicity, her identity, her self. The commitment to female historicity and selfhood is not a feature that we associate with Petrarch, however, and it is Petrarch who set the agenda for the subsequent Italian literary tradition.

Notes

n ot es to in tr od uc ti on m us in gs ag ai ns t t he gr ai n: mu si ng s o f a n i ta li an is t, f ro m t he as t r al to th e a rt is an al

1. Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); trans. into Italian by Paolo Barlera, Il miglior fabbro: Dante e i poeti della Commedia (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993). The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), trans. into Italian by Roberta Antognini, La Commedia senza Dio: Dante e la creazione di una realta` virtuale (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2003). 2. The Commedia is cited throughout this volume in the edition of Giorgio Petrocchi, ‘‘La Commedia’’ secondo l’antica vulgata, 4 vols. (Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 3. Dante accomplishes the insertion of the name ‘‘Malebolge’’ in a fashion that is if anything even more narratologically manipulative, since he implies the speech acts of the denizens of hell. ‘‘Luogo e` in inferno detto Malebolge’’ (There is a place in hell called Malebolge [Inf. 18.1]) leaves unanswered (and usually unasked) the question ‘‘by whom, and in what conversations, is this place ‘detto Malebolge?’ ’’ 4. Giosue` Carducci and Severino Ferrari, eds., Le Rime (1899; rpt. Firenze: Sansoni, 1957), xxiii. 5. Il Gattopardo (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1980) 29; translation mine. 6. See the online preface to the Italian translation of The Undivine Comedy at the Feltrinelli Web site, www.feltrinelli.it/SchedaTesti?id _testo⳱1198&id_speclibro⳱1013. 7. Italo Calvino, Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio (Milano: Garzanti, 1988) chapter 1, ‘‘Leggerezza’’: ‘‘Se volessi scegliere

Notes to Pages 6–12 380

un simbolo augurale per l’affacciarsi al nuovo millennio, sceglierei questo: l’agile salto improvviso del poeta-filosofo che si solleva sulla pesantezza del mondo’’ (If I wanted to choose an inaugural symbol for the arrival of the next millennium, I would choose this: the agile sudden leap of the poet-philosopher who lifts himself above the heaviness of the world [13; trans. mine]). Calvino is somewhat reluctant—the fault I believe of the reception history I have been discussing—to allow Dante his share of leggerezza, acknowledging a bit defensively that ‘‘quando Dante vuole esprimere leggerezza, anche nella Divina Commedia, nessuno sa farlo meglio di lui’’ (when Dante wants to express lightness, even in the Divine Comedy, no one can do it better than he [16]). 8. Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. 6 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1951): ‘‘Quest’interna dilaniante contraddizione costituisce l’essenza dell’inferno e provoca nel dannato il frenetico moto della disperazione, che Dante ha potentemente sceneggiato nelle terzine, ove descrive il rumoreggiare incomposto della ‘perduta gente’ (Inf. 3.22–30)’’ (This lacerating internal contradiction constitutes the essence of hell and provokes in the damned soul a frenetic movement of desperation, which Dante has powerfully dramatized in the tercets where he describes the meaningless clamor of the ‘lost people’ ’’ [1946; trans. mine]). 9. The Papal Encyclicals, 1903–1939, trans. Claudia Carlen Ihm (Raleigh: Edwards, 1981), 214, 216. 10. My interest in Dante’s lyrics goes back to Dante’s Poets (see chapter 1). Three of the cappelli introduttivi for my commentary appear in the new journal Dante: Rivista internazionale di studi danteschi 1 (2004): 21– 38, as ‘‘Saggio di un nuovo commento alle Rime di Dante. 1. La dispietata mente che pur mira: l’io al crocevia di memoria e disio; 2. Sonar bracchetti e cacciatori aizzare: l’io diviso tra mondo maschile e mondo femminile; 3. Guido, i’vorrei che tu e Lippo ed io: l’io e l’incanto della non-differenza.’’ 11. Sylvia Tomasch, ‘‘Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew,’’ in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 247–67. 12. Another interesting use of my work in this context is Kathleen Biddick’s ‘‘Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient(alism) Express,’’ American Historical Review 105.4 (2000): 1234–49. 13. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). For a strong position


against dualism within Dante studies, see Christian Moeus, The Metaphysics of Dante’s ‘‘Comedy’’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 14. For a discussion of these philosophers in the context of time and narrative, see chapter 8 of The Undivine Comedy. 15. Two forthcoming essays are part of this ongoing book project, Petrarch, Metaphysical Poet. One is an overview, ‘‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: The Self in the Labyrinth of Time’’ in The Panoptical Petrarch, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); the other is a ‘‘metaphysical’’ reading of the first twenty-one poems of the collection, ‘‘Metaphysical Markers at the Beginning of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,’’ in Petrarch and Dante, ed. Zygmunt Baran´ski and Theodore Cachey (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming). 16. The work on Dante’s tenzone with Forese Donati by Susan Noakes is an important example of scholarship moving in this direction; see her ‘‘Virility, Nobility, and Banking: The Crossing of Discourses in the Tenzone with Forese,’’ in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 241–258. 17. Giovanni di Paolo’s 61 illustrations to the Paradiso are in the British Library’s Yates Thompson codex, created around 1445 for the library of the king of Naples; the illustration to Paradiso 33 is British Library Yates Thompson 36, folio 190. Giovanni di Paolo’s extraordinary illustrations may be easily viewed in John Pope-Hennessy, Paradiso: The Illuminations to Dante’s ‘‘Divine Comedy’’ by Giovanni di Paolo (New York: Random House, 1993). n ot es to ch ap te r 1 d an te an d t he ly ri c p as t

This essay originally appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14–33. 1. Throughout this volume thirteenth-century Italian lyric poets are cited from the edition of Gianfranco Contini, Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1960) with three exceptions. Guittone d’Arezzo is cited from both Poeti del Duecento (Ora parra`; Gente noiosa; Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi) and from Le Rime di Guittone d’Arezzo, ed. Francesco Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940). For Guido Cavalcanti, I have used the edition of Domenico De Robertis, Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, con le


rime di Iacopo Cavalcanti (Torino: Einaudi, 1986). For editions of Dante’s lyrics, see note 5, below. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2. Christopher Kleinhenz provides a thorough review of the cultivators of the early sonnet in The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (Lecce: Milella, 1986). 3. The Vita nuova is cited from the edition of Domenico De Robertis (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1980) throughout this volume. I use the traditional Vita nuova, in Italian, because I have not been convinced by the arguments put forward by Guglielmo Gorni for changing to Vita Nova, in Latin; see Vita Nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni (Torino: Einaudi, 1996). In his edition Guglielmo Gorni also makes new chapter divisions; in current work, such as my Rizzoli commentary to Dante’s lyrics, I use both the traditional (Barbian) chapter divisions and Gorni’s chapter divisions in referring to the Vita nuova. I have not added the Gorni chapter divisions to these essays, written before Gorni’s edition came out. 4. For the ‘‘authorized view of Dante’s lyric past’’ as recounted in the Vita nuova and the Commedia, and in general for the Commedia’s handling of the vernacular tradition, see Dante’s Poets, chapters 1 and 2, of which I give a condensed version here. 5. The twentieth century produced three great editions of Dante’s lyrics, each magisterial in its own way. The fruits of Michele Barbi’s long philological and historical labors are to be found in two volumes published after his death: Michele Barbi and Francesco Maggini, eds., Rime della ‘‘Vita Nuova’’ e della giovinezza (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1956); Michele Barbi and Vincenzo Pernicone, eds., Rime della maturita` e dell’esilio (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1969). Gianfranco Contini’s Rime (1946; 2d ed., Torino: Einaudi, 1965) remains unsurpassed for the pithiness and elegance of its formulations. (The same can be said for Contini’s introductions to the various poets represented in his anthology, Poeti del Duecento, cited above.) Most useful for its comprehensiveness and for the clarity of the portrait that emerges of the early Italian lyric schools is the edition of Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). This editorial enterprise culminated with the publication in 2002 of Domenico De Robertis’s monumental five-volume edition of Dante lyrics. For a full description and critique of De Robertis’s edition, as well as a comparative analysis of all these editions, their choices, and the hermeneutical and cultural implications thereof, see the essay ‘‘Editing Dante’s Lyrics and Italian Cultural History’’ in this volume. Citations of the Rime are from Barbi-Maggini and Barbi-Pernicone throughout this volume, except for ‘‘Editing Dante’s Lyrics and Italian


Cultural History,’’ ‘‘Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo,’’ and ‘‘Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature,’’ which follow De Robertis. References to Contini, Rime, and to Foster-Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, are to the editions cited above. 6. The transition from contraction to expansion is well documented by Patrick Boyde, Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 7. On the rime petrose, in themselves and in relation to the Commedia, see Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s ‘‘Rime Petrose’’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 8. Fabian Alfie puts to rest the question of the attribution in ‘‘For Want of a Nail: The Guerri-Lanza-Cursietti Argument regarding the Tenzone,’’ Dante Studies 116 (1998): 141–59. For an important new reading of the tenzone, see Susan Noakes, ‘‘Virility, Nobility, and Banking: The Crossing of Discourses in the Tenzone with Forese,’’ in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 241–58. 9. The translation is from Foster-Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 1:153. 10. See ibid., 2:305. n ot es to ch ap te r 2 g ui tt on e’ s ora parra` , da nt e’ s doglia mi reca , an d t he commedia ’ s a na to my of de si re

This essay originally appeared in Seminario Dantesco Internazionale: International Dante Seminar 1, ed. Zygmunt Baran´ski (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1997), 3–23. 1. The references to Guittone’s poems in this essay follow the numbering of the edition of Francesco Egidi, Le Rime di Guittone d’Arezzo (Bari: Laterza, 1940), although Ora parra` is cited from Contini, Poeti del Duecento. 2. Note Guittone’s fondness for this kind of coinage—for example, ‘‘disragion’’ in stanza 3 of this canzone. Even more interesting, since it reveals Guittone’s awareness of the implications of ‘‘disvoglio,’’ is the statement from canzone 27: ‘‘ch’eo trovai / de disamor, ch’amai’’ (26–27). 3. See Dante’s Poets: ‘‘Dante’s verses pick up and recombine two specific textual elements: Guittone’s first word, ‘Ora,’ reappears in the injunction to the Muses, ‘or m’aiutate,’ with the same purpose of marking a new poetic beginning; Guittone’s second word, the striking verb ‘parra`,’


reappears in ‘qui si parra` la tua nobilitate’ (the only time this form of the verb parere appears in the Inferno), bearing the same semantic weight of a newly achieved poetic destiny articulated in the moment of its first manifestation’’ (122). 4. The contest between reason and desire continues through the poem: stanza 5 elaborates on the ‘‘descrezion’’ that was given to mankind, while the congedo finds Guittone despairing of his ability to counter ‘‘talento folle’’ (78) with his teaching. 5. Foster-Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2:297. With regard to the provenance of the metaphors in Doglia mi reca, Contini cites Guittone for the servant metaphor: ‘‘un ‘sormanco servo’ che regge un re chiamandolo ‘vil servo’ era in una comparazione di Guittone (xlviii 183–85); vil servo era, anzi, tipica formula guittoniana, che figura anche in due dei sonetti sui vizi capitali (178 e 184)’’ (Rime, 464). The passage indicated by Contini from Guittone’s canzone 48, Onne vogliosa d’omo infermitate, is worth citing in full: ‘‘Non ben regno si regge, / somer re cavalcando: / servire esso e orrare / regi e` nulla pregiare. / Ma, for comparazione, / voglia sovra ragione, / corpo sor spirto e` via piggior, sormanco / servo in se´ regger franco / e regie regger vil servo appellando’’ (177–85). Particularly interesting is Guittone’s explanation that, taken out of metaphor (‘‘for comparizione’’), his king and servant refer to reason and desire, ‘‘voglia’’ and ‘‘ragione.’’ The need to wed reason to desire is Dante’s theme in Doglia mi reca. 6. Patrick Boyde, ‘‘Style and Structure in Doglia mi reca,’’ in Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 321. 7. For an in-depth discussion of Altra fiata, see ‘‘Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli)’’ in this volume. While Doglia mi reca is not indebted to Altra fiata for its philosophy of desire, which hearkens back rather to Ora parra`, it is deeply indebted to Altra fiata for its gendered discourse to and about women, as I show in ‘‘Sotto benda.’’ 8. Boyde writes of Altra fiata: ‘‘Up to and including the seventh stanza . . . the structure of this canzone is not unlike that of Doglia mi reca, inasmuch as it is addressed to women, and passes from vituperation of vice and praise of virtue in general to the praise of a particular virtue and the denunciation of a particular vice’’ (Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry, 324). 9. More precisely, Doglia mi reca is labeled ‘‘la canzone della liberalita`,’’ with the caveat that ‘‘finalmente la canzone della liberalita` si converte nella canzone dell’avarizia’’ (Contini, Rime, 182). The reason for this label


is the canzone’s presumed destination in the Convivio: ‘‘From Con. l.viii.18 we know that Dante intended in the fifteenth and last section of that work (which in fact he never wrote) to discuss the virtue of liberality, and it is commonly and plausibly assumed that the discussion would have taken the form of a commentary on the present canzone, Doglia mi reca. Only indirectly, however, is this poem about liberality; directly it is mainly an onslaught on the vice opposed to it, avarice’’ (Foster-Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2:295). The label ‘‘canzone della liberalita`,’’ then, is a kind of shorthand for Dante scholars which has less to do with glossing the poem in question than with building imaginary symmetries between Dante’s existing lyrics and nonexistent sections of the Convivio. It is dismaying to find these baseless formulae thoughtlessly relayed to new generations of readers; thus, Piero Cudini’s paperback edition of 1979 simply repeats Contini’s formulation from 1946, informing us that the poem ‘‘Si svolge, da canzone della liberalita`, a canzone dell’avarizia’’ (Le rime, edited by P. Cudini [Milano: Garzanti, 1979], 246). I should mention that I, too, have called Doglia mi reca Dante’s ‘‘poem on avarice’’ (Dante’s Poets, 108). 10. Even as a lyric poet Dante likes the persona of writing against sinners and wrongdoers, going so far as to refer to Le dolci rime, another moral canzone, as ‘‘Contra-li-erranti mia’’ (141). As Foster-Boyde notes, ‘‘so Dante names his canzone after the Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas’’ (Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 227). 11. There are traces of these verses in Purgatorio 16’s description of the newborn soul as a young female child setting forth on the path of life: ‘‘Esce di mano a lui che la vagheggia / prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla / che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia, / l’anima semplicetta che sa nulla, / salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore, / volontier torna a cio` che la trastulla’’ (Purg. 16.85–90). At least one commentary to Doglia mi reca seems to pick up this trace, glossing ‘‘torna’’ as follows: ‘‘ma torna significa anche ‘si volge,’ come in Purg. xvi, v. 96. detto dell’anima: ‘Volentier torna a cio` che la trastulla’ ’’; see Barbi-Pernicone, Rime della maturita` e dell’esilio, 610. The canzone continues to be felt in the description of the soul running after the goods of life: ‘‘Di picciol bene in pria sente sapore; / quivi s’inganna, e dietro ad esso corre, / se guida o fren non torce suo amore’’ (Purg. 16.91–93). The latent presence of Doglia mi reca in this passage is not surprising: there is, as we shall see, enormous overlap between Doglia mi reca and Convivio 4.12, and the latter is, as I have argued previously, ‘‘translated into verse at the very heart of the Purgatorio,’’ that is, precisely in the above verses (The Undivine Comedy, 104). 12. See The Undivine Comedy, especially 99–101 and the rest of chapter 5, which elaborates on the interconnectedness of the sins of excess


desire as treated by Dante in the second half of the Purgatorio and previously in the Convivio, including the relation between the textual presence of Ulysses in Purgatorio 19 and the subsequent terraces (105–8). In this essay I have attempted to illuminate the development of Dante’s anatomy of desire by bringing in material that predates the material treated in my book. 13. The Convivio is cited throughout this volume in the edition of Cesare Vasoli, in Dante Alighieri, Opere minori, vol. 5, tomo 1, part 2, La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1988). 14. The implication is that Dante as social analyst is capable of seeing women not in the idealized fashion we associate with his poetry but as his society sees them. One notes the transition from the definite article, ‘‘lo cavallo,’’ to the indefinite, ‘‘una donna’’: does la donna smack too much of the reified abstractions of the courtly lyric? But is una donna any improvement? Or does the indefinite article more obviously point to a commodity? It could be argued that woman is as much a commodity when she serves as a man’s beatifier as when she satisfies his desire more than a horse but less than wealth. That lo cavallo and una donna continue to exert a contiguous hold over the male imagination is suggested by a recent reading of the debate on woman in the Orlando furioso; Ariosto is paraphrased to the effect that ‘‘only when knights learn to distinguish between women and horses, can they begin to be happy’’ (see Pamela J. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992], 122). 15. I was tempted to read the list’s concluding ‘‘e poi piu`’’ as a generic reference to limitless unspecified desire, in which case there would be only two specific references to wealth per se (‘‘ricchezza non grande, e poi grande’’), followed by an all-encompassing undifferentiated desire. Richard Lansing has, however, dissuaded me from this reading, pointing out the unanimity of the Convivio’s editors in agreeing that Dante here presents a gradation with respect to ‘‘ricchezza.’’ Indeed, Busnelli and Vandelli note the ‘‘gradazione che qui Dante fa’’ (Il Convivio, ed. G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli, 2 vols, 2d ed. [Firenze: Le Monnier, 1964], 2: 146); their comment is picked up by Vasoli, in Dante Alighieri, Opere minori, 669. Upon further reflection the traditional reading does seem also to capture the sense of open-endedness that is conveyed by ‘‘e poi piu`’’ since desire for wealth is—of all forms of desire—by definition limitless, open-ended, and undifferentiated. 16. Dante’s implication that the temptations, and the corresponding sins into which one could fall, become greater as one grows older is belied by the traditional order of the seven cardinal sins, the order that he follows


in the Purgatorio. In other words, if one extrapolated an order for the sins of excess desire from the Convivio list, one would arrive not at the order of the Purgatorio—avarice, gluttony, lust—but at an inversion in the positions of gluttony and lust: while avarice (‘‘ricchezza’’) is the most serious sin in both orders, in the Convivio it is preceded not by gluttony (the juvenile ‘‘pomo’’) but by lust (‘‘una donna’’). 17. Chapter 15 is the conclusive chapter of book 3. I call it the ‘‘chapter on desire’’ because it offers the most succinct definition of desire found in the treatise: ‘‘lo desiderio [e`] cosa defettiva; che´ nullo desidera quello che ha, ma quello che non ha, che e` manifesto difetto’’ (3.15.3). The discussion of desire in Convivio 3.15 is anticipated in 3.6 and echoed in the chapters cited in the preceding paragraph, 4.12 and 4.13. 18. Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry, 326. 19. ‘‘Promettono le false traditrici sempre, in certo numero adunate, rendere lo raunatore pieno d’ogni appagamento: e con questa promissione conducono l’umana volontade in vizio d’avarizia’’ (4.12.4); and ‘‘e pongasi mente, per avere oculata fede, pur a la vita di coloro che dietro a esse vanno, come vivono sicuri quando di quelle hanno raunate, come s’appagano, come si riposano. E che altro cotidianamente pericola e uccide le cittadi, le contrade, le singulari persone, tanto quanto lo nuovo raunamento d’avere appo alcuno? Lo quale raunamento nuovi desiderii discuopre, a lo fine de li quali sanza ingiuria d’alcuno venire non si puo`. E che altro intende di meditare l’una e l’altra Ragione, Canonica dico e Civile, tanto quanto a riparare a la cupiditade che, raunando ricchezze, cresce?’’ (4.12.8–9, my italics in both quotations). By choosing language that stresses the root uno Dante anticipates his argument regarding the defectiveness of wealth as an object of desire. It is defective precisely because of its homogeneity, its oneness: ‘‘Quello [desiderio] veramente de la ricchezza e` propriamente crescere, che è sempre pur uno, sı` che nulla successione quivi si vede, e per nullo termine e per nulla perfezione’’ (4.13.2; my italics). 20. Rhetorically, this feature is a trademark of our poet; we think, for instance, of the extended dialogue in the final ecphrasis of Purgatorio 10, describing the encounter of Trajan and the widow. 21. Discussing Doglia mi reca as a companion piece to Tre donne, Foster-Boyde comment perceptively: ‘‘It was fitting that these two poems should close the series of Dante’s ethical canzoni: their respective themes—justice in Tre donne, avarice in Doglia mi reca—are those that lay closest to his heart as a moralist. Indeed, if we understand avarice in a broad sense as equivalent to cupiditas or cupidigia (and that certainly is its sense in Doglia mi reca) we shall see that the two themes are really one—


are the positive and negative sides of that one fundamental insight which was to find its clearest didactic expression in the chapter on justice in the Monarchia’’ (2:296). 22. The last stanza’s ‘‘appetito di fera’’ echoes the canzone’s earlier imputations of bestiality, beginning with ‘‘omo no, mala bestia ch’om simiglia’’ in stanza 2, followed by ‘‘falsi animali’’ in stanza 5. 23. Note how this briefest of personification allegories achieves its vigor, as in the case of the implicit dialogue between the poet and the miser in stanza 4, through the use of direct discourse. Direct discourse will be one of the mature Dante’s most effective rhetorical strategies for achieving verisimilitude; see The Undivine Comedy, especially the treatment of the engravings of the terrace of pride in chapter 6. 24. The similarity between Purgatorio 14.145–51 and Purgatorio 19.62–69 includes the reprise of the rhyme words tira, gira, and mira. n ot es to ch ap te r 3 d an te an d c av al ca nt i ( on ma ki ng di st in ct io ns in m at te rs of lo ve ): in fe rno 5 in it s l yr ic an d a ut ob io gr ap hi ca l c on te xt

This essay was first published in Dante Studies 116 (1998): 31–63. 1. Francesca’s precept is a conflation of two verses from Al cor gentil: onto the incipit, which formulates a causal relationship between love and inborn nobility, is grafted the first verse of the second stanza, ‘‘Foco d’amore in gentil cor s’aprende,’’ which introduces the element of love as a kindling fire. For more on the background to Francesca’s verses, see my Dante’s Poets, 4–7. 2. The one exception of which I am aware is Grandgent, who comments as follows: ‘‘In some previous tales of hell a wind torments evildoers, notably in the Visio Alberici, xiv, where souls are driven by the fiery breath of a dog and a lion. Dante divests the torment of all grotesqueness, and, indeed, treats the sinners of this class with special consideration. This may be due in part to sympathy, and partly, no doubt, to a sense that their fault is the result of a mistaken following of love, the noblest of human emotions.’’ See La Divina Commedia, comm. C. H. Grandgent, rev. Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), xx. 3. The quotation is from Eileen Gardiner’s introduction to her edition, Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1989), xvii. Citations from the visions will be from this edition.


4. Under cauda, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Lipsia: Teubner, 1906–1912), vol. 3, offers an entry ‘‘latiore sensu hominum’’ and gives references to Cicero’s Epistles and Horace’s Satires (627). Illustrations of Minos in Inferno 5 may be found in Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, and Charles Singleton, Illuminated Manuscripts of the ‘‘Divine Comedy’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 2:79–90. Minos’s tail appears phallically from between his legs in plate a on page 82 (London B.M. Additional 19587), plate b on page 87 (Madrid B.N. 10057), plate a on page 88 (Paris B.N. it. 74), plate a on page 89 (Paris B.N. it. 2017), and plate a on page 90 (Paris B.N. it. 78). My thanks to Karl Fugelso for his expert guidance in deciphering these illustrations. 5. While this essay reads canto 5 in a nongendered way (as is indeed not only canonical but hermeneutically fundamental), I believe that a gendered reading can supplement our understanding of what is at stake for Dante in this canto. I attempt such a reading in ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender,’’ included in this volume. When I say, then, that Dante’s treatment of lust is desexualized and even, by contrast with the visions, degendered, I do not mean to suggest that his choice of a female protagonist is casual or unimportant. 6. See Aeneid 6.441–42, where we read of the ‘‘lugentes campi’’ where dwell those ‘‘quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit.’’ The translation of Vergil’s verse is that of Allen Mandelbaum, The Aeneid of Vergil (New York: Bantam, 1972). 7. Castelvetro notes that the judge should be situated in the area preceding limbo, so that no soul remains outside the purview of justice: ‘‘dovendosi ragionevolmente far il giudicio in luogo separato, e non solamente in luogo separato, ma per aventura nell’anzilimbo, accioche` niuna anima restasse, che non avesse il suo luogo assegnato e certo per dirittura di giudicio.’’ See Sposizione di Lodovico Castelvetro a xxix Canti dell’‘Inferno’ dantesco (Modena: Societa` tipografica, 1886), 73. 8. This symmetry has not, to the best of my knowledge, been picked up by the commentators. Padoan comments on the ‘‘lugentes campi’’ as a gloss for ‘‘molto pianto’’ in verse 27: ‘‘Sono i virgiliani ‘Campi lugentes’ (Aen. vi.441), in cui l’esegesi medievale dell’Eneide riconosceva gli ‘errores luxuriae,’ collocandovi appunto, con Didone, le anime dei lussuriosi.’’ See La Divina Commedia: Inferno i–viii, ed. Giorgio Padoan (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1967). 9. For more on this feature, see ‘‘Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431–33 and Inferno 5.1–24)’’ in this volume. 10. In Boccaccio’s tale Francesca is effectively innocent of any misdeed, since her father deceives her into wedlock with the ugly Gianciotto


through the use of the handsome Paolo as a proxy for his brother. Picked up by subsequent commentators, Boccaccio’s melodramatic tale has achieved canonical status and has utterly contaminated the reception of Francesca’s story. See ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’’ in this volume for further discussion of and bibliography regarding Boccaccio’s Francesca. 11. See the gloss on sommettere offered in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, 6 vols. (Roma; Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–1978): ‘‘Piu` che nel senso oggi vulgato di ‘sottomettere,’ ‘soggiogare,’ il verbo era usato nell’italiano dell’epoca di Dante come contrario di ‘sovrapporre,’ ‘preferire’ (in senso traslato); dunque ‘mettere in secondo piano,’ ‘subordinare,’ ‘considerare di minore importanza’ rispetto a qualcosa, cioe` con insita l’idea di paragone; e` questo il caso di If v39’’ (5:314). 12. The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (1925; rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Aristotle’s examples of compulsion—‘‘if he were to be carried somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power’’—resonate not only for Inferno 5 but also for Piccarda in Paradiso 3. Her story, according to which ‘‘men had her in their power,’’ precipitates a lengthy meditation on the will and compulsion. 13. Guido da Pisa, Expositiones et Glose super ‘‘Comediam’’ Dantis or Commentary on Dante’s ‘‘Inferno,’’ ed. Vincenzo Cioffari (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 101. 14. Of course, Augustine’s terminology is redolent with that of previous thinkers. Speaking of the term pace and its significance in Dante’s canzone Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire, Antonio Gagliardi derives it from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics: ‘‘Pace e` termine strategico e porta con se´ un sistema concettuale. Soltanto con la pace, con la fine del desiderio, c’e` felicita`. Non puo` esserci sommo bene e felicita` nel desiderio senza fine e senza pace. Il testo aristotelico per la definizione del sommo bene (Etica Nicomachea . . .) e` presente nel suo termine piu` significativo’’; see Guido Cavalcanti e Dante: una questione d’amore (Catanzaro: Pullano, 1997), 80. 15. Menare defines the effects of the bufera on the souls of canto 5; not only ‘‘mena li spirti con la sua rapina’’ (32), but ‘‘di qua, di la`, di giu`, di su` li mena’’ (43). Later in the canto the allegory that applies menare to a physical bufera rather than to a metaphysical force is breached, and menare applies—as in Guido delle Colonne—explicitly to amor and disio: ‘‘per quello amor che i mena’’ (78), ‘‘quanto disio / meno` costoro al doloroso passo’’ (113–14). The noun posa appears in verse 45, ‘‘non che di posa, ma di minor pena,’’ while pace is used by Francesca twice, in verses 92 and 99.


16. While Foster-Boyde follow Barbi-Maggini in taking ‘‘ad ogni vento’’ to mean ‘‘whatever wind may blow’’ (193), I prefer Contini’s ‘‘vasel che viaggia con ogni vento’’ (35). As the sonnet goes on to say, tempests and foul weather will provide no impediment; the winds will be consonant with their desires, which are temperate, amicable, benign. Guglielmo Gorni notes the presence in Inferno 5 of these verses from Guido, i’ vorrei in ‘‘Francesca, o la cognizione del dolore: riscritture nel quinto dell’Inferno,’’ Anticomoderno, vol. 1 (Roma: Viella, 1997). 17. ‘‘Dopo Dante, il Petrarca: ‘Che sommettete la ragione ai sensi.’ Ma innanzi ad entrambi questi nostri grandi poeti, Folgore da San Gimignano, che fiorı` nel 1260, avea scritto in un sonetto: ‘Che sommette ragione a volontate.’ Nel fango dei versi di questo rimatore, l’Alighieri razzolo`, dice il Monti, qualche granello d’oro’’ (‘‘Commedia’’ di Dante Alighieri con note di Gregorio di Siena: ‘‘Inferno’’ [Napoli: Perrotti, 1867–1870]; cited from the Dartmouth Dante Project). In 1921 Carlo Steiner offers more: ‘‘Chi sommette rason a volontate–E segue senza freno suo volere: Folgore da San Gimignano, Son.: Quando la voglia’’ (‘‘La Divina Commedia’’ commentata di Carlo Steiner [Torino: G. B. Paravia, 1921], 47). Also in 1921 Casini-Barbi include the reference: ‘‘Il Torraca cita opportunamente parecchi riscontri di scrittori medievali; tra gli altri, questi della Tavola ritonda, cap. 75: ‘Io non voglio sottomettere la ragione alla volonta`,’ e di Folgore, son. xxx: ‘Chi sommette rason a volontade’ ’’ (‘‘La Divina Commedia’’ di Dante Alighieri con il commento di Tommaso Casini, rinnovata e accresciuta per cura di S. A. Barbi [Firenze: Sansoni, 1921; rpt. 1965], 41). 18. I Sonetti, ed. Ferdinando Neri (Torino: UTET, 1925); my italics. In the introduction Neri refers to the same study by Monti that had caught Di Siena’s eye: ‘‘Quanto ai riscontri tra Folgore e Dante, asseriti dal Monti, essi si limitano pur sempre al verso ‘chi la ragion sommette a volontade’ (Inf. v, 39 ‘che la ragion . . .’), d’un sonetto che puo` essere, o no, di Folgore’’ (15n1). 19. Torraca is quoted according to the Dartmouth Dante Project, La Tavola Ritonda, from the edition of Di Filippo-Luigi Polidori (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1864), 276. 20. Poeti del Duecento, 1:337. 21. Tresor 2.20.6: ‘‘On doit contrester au desirier de delit; car ki se laisse vaincre, la raisons remaint sous le desirier’’ (ed. Francis J. Carmody [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948], 191). 22. Domenico De Robertis glosses la ’ntenzione as follows: ‘‘il desiderio (‘intendanza’ vale, nel linguaggio della poesia amorosa, sia ‘amore,’ sia per metonimia, l’oggetto amato): cfr. Conv., iii xv 8–9, dove a ‘desiderio naturale’ corrisponde e equivale ‘intenzione naturale’; o anche l’ ‘intentio formae,’ ossia la rappresentazione sensibile dell’oggetto amato (l’ ‘intentio


individui’ di Averroe` nel suo commento al De anima, ii, t.c., 65), l’immagine che l’amante se ne fa. Ma il verso e` evidentemente ‘ispirato’ dalla clausola di Giovenale, Sat., vi 223, ‘sit pro ratione voluntas’ (Contini, Lett. d. Or.), del resto probabilmente presente anche a Guittone del son. Franchezza, segnoria . . . , 9, ‘ma franco e` quei la cui voglia e` ragione’ ’’ (102). See De Robertis’s edition of Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, con le rime di Iacopo Cavalcanti (Torino: Einaudi, 1986); all citations of Cavalcanti in this essay are from this text. Mario Marti, in Poeti del Dolce stil nuovo (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1969), glosses: ‘‘ ’ntenzione’ e` qui l’atto e la condizione dell’intendere; dunque, appetito’’ (187). Ferdinando Pappalardo paraphrases thus: ‘‘L’amore dunque, in quanto appetito, procede dalla virtu` sensitiva dell’anima, o meglio dalla conoscenza sensibile: e la sua essenza e` tale da offuscare il retto giudizio della ragione, distogliendola dal suo fine naturale e benefico (for di salute–giudicar mantene), perche` all’esercizio di questa facolta` si sostituisce l’impulso cieco del desiderio sensibile (che` la ’ntenzione–per ragione vale). . . . intenzione sta infatti qui a significare la rappresentazione che si ricava dalla conoscenza delle qualita` sensibili, e che costituisce l’oggetto dell’appetito sensitivo’’ (64); see ‘‘Per una rilettura della canzone d’amore del Cavalcanti,’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale 13 (1976): 47–76. 23. It is worth noting that the congedo of Donna me prega juxtaposes ragione and talento, referring to the canzone’s argument (‘‘ragione’’) and its lack of desire (‘‘talento’’) to consort with ‘‘persone’’ who do not possess ‘‘intendimento.’’ Although ragione and talento do not here possess the moral significance that they have in ‘‘che la ragion sommettono al talento,’’ it is intriguing to see them together: Tu puoi sicuramente gir, canzone, la` ’ve ti piace, ch’io t’ho sı` adornata ch’assai laudata–sara` tua ragione da le persone–c’hanno intendimento: di star con l’altre tu non hai talento.

They appear together in the canzone’s first stanza as well: Ed a presente–conoscente–chero, perch’io no spero–ch’om di basso core a tal ragione porti canoscenza: che´ senza–natural dimostramento non ho talento–di voler provare . . .

(Donna me prega, 5–9; my italics, here and above)

24. Interestingly, Corrado Bologna notes the recurrence of words from these verses of Donna me prega in Inferno 1, including ‘‘morte,’’ ‘‘forte,’’ ‘‘impedita,’’ and ‘‘contraria via’’: ‘‘i rimanti–chiave danteschi con


cui s’inizia il poema sono gia` determinati, si vorrebbe dire ideologicamente e contrario, dalla Reimbildung di Cavalcanti’’; see Il ritorno di Beatrice: simmetrie dantesche fra ‘‘Vita Nova,’’ ‘‘Petrose’’ e ‘‘Commedia’’ (Roma: Salerno, 1998), 32. 25. My formulation could be taken as an elaboration of the memorable conclusion of Gianfranco Contini’s classic essay, ‘‘Cavalcanti in Dante,’’ where he writes ‘‘Cavalcanti aveva salato il sangue a Dante’’; see Un’idea di Dante (Torino: Einaudi, 1970), 143–57. Contini offers one Cavalcantian intertext for Inferno 5: ‘‘Se Merce´ fosse amica a’ miei disiri ispira a Francesca ‘Se fosse amico il re de l’universo’ ’’ (155). On the intertextual presence of Cavalcanti in the Commedia, see Dante’s Poets, especially 123–53, and now the lexically rich but hermeneutically scarce contribution of Nievo Del Sal, ‘‘Cavalcanti in Dante ‘comico,’ ’’ Rivista di letteratura italiana 9 (1991): 9–52. Much attention has been devoted recently to the Cavalcanti-Dante node, mostly to the relationship between the Vita nuova and Donna me prega, for which see the Bibliographical Note in conclusion to this essay. 26. On the Commedia’s Ulyssean thematics, see The Undivine Comedy, chapter 3 and passim; see also ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire’’ in this volume. 27. This is my understanding of these verses, for which I have argued in Dante’s Poets: ‘‘My interpretation of line 63 is, of course, apparent from my translation, in which I have rendered ‘‘cui’’ not as ‘‘quem’’ (i.e., Vergil), but as ‘‘ad eum quem,’’ or, if we follow Dante in historicizing the Signifier as a woman, ‘‘ad eam quam’’ (the argument as to whether Beatrice or God is intended is a spurious one, since they amount to the same thing; however, in that Dante and Guido share a past as love poets, and Beatrice is that localized version of the divine that Dante chose and Guido refused to discover within love poetry, she would seem the more appropriate choice)’’ (146n66). 28. In her gloss of these verses Maria Corti discusses the contaminatio between philosophical and lyric discourses in Donna me prega: ‘‘Nell’Anonimo Giele si legge che l’anima sensitiva, in preda all’appetitus e al desiderium ‘movet corpus . . . nec est illo motu mota per se, sed per accidens,’ cioe` se e` ‘alterata a sensibilibus extra.’ Si noti la coincidenza con ‘Move, cangiando–color, riso in pianto’ del v. 46, dove il cambiamento di colore o il passaggio dal riso al pianto sono postille poetiche e della tradizione lirica al movet corpus del filosofo (con questo non si vuol ignorare l’esistenza del verbo ‘muovere’ nella lingua della poesia, la` dove si descrivono gli effetti di amore, ma solo fare presente il caricarsi di significato dei termini dovuto all’incontro della tradizione con il nuovo pensiero filosofico).’’ See La felicita` mentale (Torino: Einaudi, 1983), 30.


29. Robert M. Durling and Ronald D. Martinez argue convincingly for the reference to orgasm in this verse (see Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s ‘‘Rime Petrose’’ [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 102). I see no reason, however, to restrict morte to only one meaning here. 30. The uniqueness of this congedo, the only one in which Dante addresses ‘‘Morte,’’ seems to have escaped the commentators, although Foster-Boyde do note that ‘‘the apostrophe to death is a nice variation on the traditional congedo, in which the poet addresses his song’’ (2:76). Foster-Boyde argue against a Cavalcantian presence in this canzone: ‘‘despite the insistence on love as male, dolore, morte, and in spite of the account of the departure of the soul from the body (as again in E’ m’incresce), the poem is not specifically Cavalcantian: there are no spirits, no mind, no personified sighs, no dramatization of the psyche, no dialogue, no scientific subtlety, and above all there is no dolcezza in the style’’ (2:72–73). I heartily disagree with this assessment: while the style of Lo doloroso amor is not Cavalcantian, the ideology most certainly is. 31. See ‘‘Dalla canzone ‘Lo doloroso amor’ a Francesca da Rimini,’’ in L’esperienza poetica di Dante, 2d ed. (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1968), 207– 26, quotation from 214. Foster-Boyde also note the parallel: ‘‘It is worth remarking that the situation imagined here is, in one significant respect, very similar to that of Paolo and Francesca: as the poet’s soul will be in hell forever accompanied by the love he has felt on earth, so the souls of the two damned lovers are forever accompanied by their love (Inf. v, 103–5)—with the difference of course that the latter are each really, not merely in imagination, present to one another (ibid., 135); and also that they are nevertheless suffering (ibid. 44–45); whereas for the young Dante—not, as yet, much concerned with theological consistency—the state of damnation could be imagined as painless’’ (2:75). 32. Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s ‘‘Rime Petrose,’’ 224. 33. Epistole, ed. Arsenio Frugoni and Giorgio Brugnoli, in Dante Alighieri, Opere minori, vol. 5, tomo ii, La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi (Milano: Ricciardi, 1979). 34. The relevant verses are interesting also for language that Dante will draw on in Inferno 5: Chi s’innamora sı` come voi fate, or qua or la`, e se´ lega e dissolve, mostra ch’Amor leggermente il saetti. Pero`, se leggier cor cosı` vi volve, priego che con vertu` il correggiate, sı` che s’accordi i fatti a’ dolci detti. (Io mi credea del tutto esser partito, 9–14; my italics)


‘‘Or qua or la`’’ will be echoed in ‘‘di qua, di la`, di giu`, di su` li mena,’’ while the characterization of the lover as ‘‘light’’ surfaces in the description of Paolo and Francesca, who ‘‘paion sı` al vento esser leggieri’’ (Inf. 5.75). 35. Foster-Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2:323. They comment further: ‘‘This is the more remarkable in that Dante is now about forty years old and has behind him not only the Vita nuova with its story of an entirely sublimated ‘heavenly’ love, but also the series of canzoni that more or less directly celebrated a love that had its seat in the mind or intellect’’ (323). 36. Foster-Boyde comment that the ‘‘consiglio’’ of the sonnet is ‘‘the act of ‘la virtu` che consiglia’ ’’ in Purgatorio 18.62. I agree with their statement that a comparison of Io sono stato with Purgatorio 18 ‘‘strongly suggests that the carefully reasoned affirmation of free will in the latter text was made with the [sonnet’s] denial of free will (where erotic stimuli at least are concerned) in mind’’ (2:324). 37. It is perhaps worth noting that the verb cavalcare, whose past participle cavalcati is but one consonant short of the name Cavalcanti, appears in the Commedia only here and in Purgatorio 24, the canto in which Dante coins the name of and defines for posterity the ultimately anti-Cavalcantian dolce stil novo. The verb appears in the simile used to describe Forese’s departure: ‘‘Qual esce alcuna volta di gualoppo / lo cavalier di schiera che cavalchi . . .’’ (94–95). 38. This discussion draws on my 1997 reading of Doglia mi reca as a meditation on desire that deliberately, following Guittone’s lead, conflates lust (carnal desire) with avarice (material desire); see ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire’’ in this volume. Also in 1997 appeared Antonio Gagliardi’s book, Guido Cavalcanti e Dante: una questione d’amore, noteworthy for the importance it gives to Doglia mi reca and for the similarity of our perspectives (but not of our subsequent readings): Gagliardi believes that ‘‘Doglia mi reca si puo` ritenere la risposta di Dante alla canzone di Guido’’ (72), and holds— correctly—that in Doglia mi reca ‘‘Dante costituisce un’ermeneutica parallela tra l’amore e l’avarizia’’ (78). However, in accord with his view of Dante as a dualist, a ‘‘negatore dell’amore’’ (32), Gagliardi profoundly misreads the canzone as denying all value to human love, establishing ‘‘un’ermeneutica negativa di qualsiasi desiderio funzionale all’eros’’ (73). I will return to this point further on. 39. In his reading of canto 5 Francesco Torraca offers the following opportune citation from Re Enzo: ‘‘Cosı` mi stringe amore / ed hammi cosı` priso, / in tal guisa conquiso, / ch’en altra parte non ha pensamento’’; see ‘‘Il canto 5 dell’Inferno,’’ 1902, rpt. Studi danteschi (Napoli: Francesco Perrella, 1912), 424.


40. For a fuller treatment of the impact of Guittone’s canzone on Doglia mi reca, see ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire’’ in this volume, where I argue that Dante learns from Guittone the key move of conflating lust with avarice. 41. Gagliardi, Guido Cavalcanti e Dante, 74. Precisely because there is much that is admirable in Gagliardi’s book, such as bringing the overlooked Doglia mi reca into the discussion, it is important to point out that he misconstrues Dante’s text. See my ‘‘Beyond (Courtly) Dualism: Thinking about Gender in Dante’s Lyrics,’’ in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 65–89: ‘‘Starting from the position that Dante is a cultivator of intellectual love only, Gagliardi profoundly misreads the canzone [Doglia mi reca] as denying all value to human love, viewing it as ‘desiderio animalesco’ (‘animal desire’) and the canzone as establishing ‘un’ermeneutica negativa di qualsiasi desiderio funzionale all’eros’ (‘a negative hermeneutic with respect to all erotic desire’) (73). He misconstrues the literal meaning of the text, as when he writes that ‘Il desiderio di per se´ e` vile’ (‘Desire in and of itself is vile’) (74), sustaining that for Dante ‘la virtu` non si colloca nella medieta` del desiderio erotico, come sarebbe possibile in Aristotele, ma mira alla sua negazione radicale. . . . Oltre ad ‘amore appetito di fera’ non c’e` altro’ (‘virtue is not located at the median with respect to erotic desire, as would be possible in Aristotle, but aims for its radical negation. . . . Other than ‘love that is bestial appetite’ there is nothing’) (86)’’ (85). Throughout this volume, and most explicitly in the essays included under the rubric ‘‘A Philosophy of Desire,’’ my goal is to affirm that Dante was not a dualist, and that he did indeed construe desire, including erotic desire, according to an Aristotelian and Thomistic paradigm. 42. Contini writes that ‘‘ ‘paura di novi tormenti’ si riflette nei ‘Novi tormenti e novi tormentati’ del canto di Cerbero (con cui, nella prima bolgia, ‘novo tormento e novi frustatori’)’’; see Un’idea di Dante, 155. 43. Although a Bibliographical Note runs a greater risk of obsolescence than an essay, I have decided not to jettison this note, which in my opinion has retained value and relevance for a variety of reasons: the Vita nuova and Donna me prega continue to be tormented texts, stylistic features continue to take the place of hard philological evidence, chronology continues to be deduced from assumptions presented as evidence, and the Italian philological scene continues to remain vulnerable to what I describe here as ‘‘the spectacle of philology degrading into pseudo-philology.’’ Indeed, the cultural purview of the essay ‘‘Editing Dante’s Lyrics


and Italian Cultural History,’’ also in this volume, finds its precursor in this note. n ot es to ch ap te r 4 m ed ie va l m ul ti cu lt ur al is m a nd d an te ’s th eo lo gy of he ll

This essay originally appeared in The Craft and the Fury: Essays in Honor of Glauco Cambon, ed. Jospeh Francese, Italiana 9 (2000): 82–102. 1. See Enciclopedia Dantesca, 6 vols. (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–1978), 3:432–35; the author of the entry is Marcello Aurigemma. 2. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972), 21–23. For Origen and Augustine on hell, see Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 306–33. Hereafter cited in the text. 3. These texts are conveniently accessed through the translation of Eileen Gardiner, Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica, 1989). 4. See my The Undivine Comedy, 173: ‘‘I prefer to think in terms of paradox and tension deriving from Dante’s double allegiance: his desire to synthesize Aristotelian sympathy for difference with the Neoplatonic One. Or, in the terms of Isaiah Berlin’s essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, I am suggesting that Dante is less an archetypal hedgehog—less a monist—than is commonly assumed.’’ 5. See Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 55: ‘‘A number of the earlier visionaries came across individuals in the other world who were still alive.’’ Hereafter cited in the text. 6. Morgan, however, does not deal with Bonvesino, for whom see Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 7. I deliberately use ‘‘multicultural’’ in a medieval Christian context to suggest the degree to which Dante’s ‘‘vertical’’ syncretism is as radical as the ‘‘horizontal syncretism’’ we practice today. 8. Edward Moore’s essay may be found in his volume Studies in Dante: Second Series (1899; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); the quotation appears at 158.


9. See ‘‘The Classification of Sins in the Inferno and Purgatorio,’’ 203. With his customary thoroughness, Moore also offers a compendium of views on the capital sins from Cassian in the fifth century to Chaucer and Gower in the fourteenth, a compendium that would eventually be greatly expanded by Morton Bloomfield in The Seven Deadly Sins (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1952). 10. Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi’s commentary is typically uninterested in what is at stake in Dante’s apparently absurd declaration: ‘‘Se qui vale per tutto il purgatorio, e si tratta dunque di una norma generale, come appare probabile, essa resta poi astratta e non applicata se non in questo luogo, perche´ mai altrove si parla di vizi opposti a quello capitale, a cui son sempre riferiti esempi e beatitudini,’’ in Dante Alighieri, Commedia, vol. 2, Purgatorio (Milano: Mondadori, 1994), 647. 11. ‘‘The immersion motif occurs in most versions of the Vision of Paul and in seven of the popular visions from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries’’ (Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World, 31). For other examples of earlier motifs picked up by Dante, see Morgan’s first chapter, ‘‘Topographical Motifs of the Other World.’’ 12. Gardiner, Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante, 162. 13. In The Undivine Comedy, 143–44, I argue for factoring the visionary tradition into our reading of Dante; see also ‘‘Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition’’ in this volume. 14. See Marc Cogan, The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the ‘‘Divine Comedy’’ and Its Meaning (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 99. 15. Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, trans. J. F. Shaw (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1961), chap. 111. 16. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 5.6.9–11. The Latin text is cited in the Loeb Classical Library edition, H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936). The following discussion is based on book 5, prose 6 and is an elaboration of The Undivine Comedy, 167–71. 17. Summa Theologiae 1a.10.3. The Summa Theologiae is cited in the Blackfriars edition and translation, 61 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–81); this citation is from volume 2:143. All volume and page numbers in subsequent citations from the Summa are from this edition and will be indicated by ST. 18. De passionibus animae in generali, found in ST, Blackfriars 1967, vol. 19. 19. See the Chiavacci Leonardi commentary to the Purgatorio, 506.


20. The Latin and the English translation are from the Loeb Classical Library edition, The City of God against the Pagans, 7 vols., trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 4:291. On the Augustinian basis of Dante’s understanding of desire, as it permeates his Purgatorio, see my The Undivine Comedy, especially chap. 5; as it permeates his lyrics and Inferno 5, see ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context’’ in this volume. n ot es to ch ap te r 5 w hy di d d an te wr it e t he commed ia ? d an te an d t he vi si on ar y t ra di ti on

This essay first appeared in Dante Studies 111 (1993): 1–8. 1. The translations are from Eileen Gardiner, Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1989). 2. The Undivine Comedy; see in particular chapter 7. 3. Peter Dronke, Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 127. 4. Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 90. 5. And now see Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 6. For the grotesque physicality that characterizes the treatment of lust in visions of hell, see ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyrical and Autobiographical Context’’ in this volume. 7. On the motifs that Dante may have borrowed from visionary authors, see Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially the first chapter, ‘‘Topographical Motifs of the Other World’’; on the significance of the use of Aristotle for conceptualizing hell, see ‘‘Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell’’ in this volume. 8. See Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (1981; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 9. There is an intriguing analogy here with Dante’s handling of his poetic precursors; in the poetic sphere, too, he acknowledges his debts to ancient authors more freely than to moderns.

Notes to Pages 133–136 400 n ot es to ch ap te r 6 m in os ’s ta il : t he la bo r o f d ev is in g h el l ( aeneid 6. 43 1– 33 a nd Inferno 5 .1 –2 4)

This essay originally appeared in Romanic Review 87 (1996): 437–54. 1. The translations from the Commedia added to these essays are, with a few exceptions, from the translation of Robert M. Durling, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, Inferno, comms. Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and vol. 2, Purgatorio (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. Boccaccio divides the canto into six parts: 1–3, 4–24, 25–51, 52–69, 70–133, 139–42. See Esposizioni sopra la ‘‘Commedia’’ di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan (Milano: Mondadori, 1965), 230. Benvenuto divides the canto into five parts: 1–24, 25–45, 46–69, 70–114, 115–42. See Comentum super Dantis Aldigherij ‘‘Comoediam’’, ed. J. P. Lacaita, 5 vols. (Firenze: Barbe`ra, 1887), 1:184. Buti offers the more cogent analysis, noting that ‘‘questo canto si divide in due parti principalmente, perche´ prima descrive il descendimento nel secondo cerchio, lo cerchio, lo giudice, e le pene, e le persone che vide antiche, delle quali e` fama per li autori; nella seconda fa menzione di quelle di nuovo tempo che non e` fama per li autori’’; see Commento di Francesco da Buti sopra la ‘‘Divina Commedia’’ di Dante Alighieri, ed. Crescentino Giannini (Pisa: Fratelli Nistri, 1858–62), 148. Lanfranco Caretti, ‘‘Il canto v dell’Inferno,’’ Nuove letture dantesche (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1968), provides an elegant reading of what he calls this canto’s ‘‘struttura perfetta’’: he divides the canto into two equal halves mediated by a transitional tercet, and notes that the first half ‘‘si articola, a sua volta, in tre parti minori perfettamente simmetriche: Minosse (ventiquattro versi: 1–24), la bufera infernale (ventuno versi: 25–45), la rassegna delle anime peccatrici (ventiquattro versi: 46–69)’’ (106). 3. See my The Undivine Comedy, chapter 2, ‘‘Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New.’’ 4. La Divina Commedia, comm. Daniele Mattalia (Milano: Rizzoli, 1960). 5. A striking recent example is provided by the commentators Pietro Cataldi and Romano Luperini, who deny that the souls of limbo are damned: ‘‘Le anime dei dannati subiscono qui questo veloce e sicuro ‘processo,’ all’inizio del secondo cerchio, perche´ qui inizia il vero e proprio Inferno: gli ignavi sono infatti in una zona a se stante, e le anime del Limbo, nel primo cerchio, non sono anime dannate, ma solo escluse dalla visione di Dio, e quindi dal Paradiso’’ (La Divina Commedia [Firenze: Le Monnier, 1989], 45; my italics).


6. I do not agree with Francesco Mazzoni’s contention that the ending of canto 4 should be read as a return to that part of limbo that is outside of the noble castle, rather than as a movement forward to the second circle. See ‘‘Saggio di un nuovo commento alla Commedia: il canto iv dell’Inferno,’’ Studi danteschi 42 (1965): 29–206, where Mazzoni writes of the ending of canto 4 that ‘‘non sara` da considerarsi prolettico rispetto alla atmosfera del canto seguente’’ (203). The proleptic nature of canto 4’s final verses is confirmed by canto 5’s first words. 7. The linked use of piu` and meno will turn out to be of great significance for the Commedia: as a marker of difference, it comes into its own in the Paradiso, where difference is no longer supposed to exist (see chapter 8 of my The Undivine Comedy). In the Inferno we are introduced to degree and gradation—the notions summed up by piu` and meno— through Minos’s determinations and assignments. Minos’s language, which institutionalizes difference by assigning each soul to its precise location, will be picked up in the canto devoted to institutionalizing difference in the Inferno as a whole, namely, canto 11. ‘‘First’’ and ‘‘second’’ were linked once previously, in Inf. 4.15, where Vergil says ‘‘Io saro` primo, e tu sarai secondo’’; the differentiating function of primo and secondo in 4.15 is enhanced by the correlation with piu` and meno in 5.1–3. 8. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 24. Hereafter cited in text. 9. For a discussion of textual misprision vis-a`-vis the Aeneid, see Robert Hollander, Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella ‘‘Commedia’’ (Firenze: Olschki, 1983). For a reading of the Commedia’s intertwined Vergil-narrative that looks at Vergil both as author of the Aeneid and as a character within Dante’s poem, see my Dante’s Poets, chapter 3. See also the essays contained in the The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘‘Commedia’’, ed. Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), and Dante e la ‘‘bella scola’’ della poesia: autorita` e sfida poetica, ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci (Ravenna: Longo, 1993). 10. This is the translation of these verses offered in the notes of The Aeneid of Virgil, Books i–vi, ed. T. E. Page (London: Macmillan, 1964), 480. If ‘‘castigat’’ does indeed refer to flogging, as this translation holds, then the nature of Rhadamanthus with his whip may have suggested Minos’s coiling tail to Dante’s imagination. The figure encountered right after Rhadamanthus is even more suggestive: ‘‘avenging Tisiphone, girt with a lash’’—‘‘accinta flagello’’ (Aen. 6.570). 11. Enciclopedia Dantesca, 6 vols. (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–78), 3:963. 12. Page explains urnam movet thus: ‘‘the names were placed on tablets, and the urn shaken until one ‘leapt out’ ’’ (473).


13. Antonio Cesari writes regarding conoscitor that ‘‘e` proprio voce tutta del foro, che vien dal Latino Cognoscere, in senso di Far il processo; come altresi Cognitio,’’ and concludes his gloss with an example from Cicero. See Bellezze della ‘‘Divina Commedia’’ di Dante Alighiere. Dialoghi d’Antonio Cesari P.d.O. (Verona: P. Libanti, 1824–26), 81. Padoan, too, notes that conoscitor ‘‘e` voce tecnica, del linguaggio forense’’; see La Divina Commedia:Inferno (i–viii) (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1967). 14. Guido da Pisa glosses Minos as ‘‘divina examinatio et sententia iudicalis executio’’; see Expositiones et Glose super ‘‘Comediam’’ Dantis, ed. Vincenzo Cioffari (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 99. 15. Minos is named in Inferno twice in canto 5 and on four other occasions, once in Purgatorio, and as part or a periphrasis for Ariadne in Paradiso. 16. The use of the adjective orribile with respect to the ‘‘orribili favelle’’ that the pilgrim hears in Inferno 3 does not undermine my point, but rather reminds us of what a privileged locus limbo is in Dante’s conception. Upon entering hell’s second circle the pilgrim finds himself in a place that is more like the vestibule than like limbo—despite the fact that one is nominally not hell at all and the other is explicitly hell’s first circle. 17. Fernando Salsano deflates the excessive puffery that had built up in the commentary tradition regarding a Minos whose office is viewed as ‘‘grave,’’ ‘‘solenne,’’ ‘‘elevato,’’ pointing to the tail as the key element ‘‘che rompe la tradizione, che imbestia la figura del re mitico’’; see ‘‘La coda di Minosse,’’ in La coda di Minosse e altri saggi danteschi (Milano: Marzorati, 1968), 11–19; quotation at 15. While I agree with Salsano regarding the importance of Minos’s bestiality, I think he is wrong to deny the judicial function that coexists with it, and that renders the bestiality more provocative and problematic. 18. Boccaccio’s snarling-dog interpretation (‘‘ ‘Ringhiare’ suole essere atto de’ cani, minaccianti alcuno che al suo albergo s’appressi’ ’’ [285]) became the canonical reading, in comparison to Buti’s ‘‘come fa il porco, o come il cavallo.’’ 19. Salsano divides critics into ‘‘lunghisti,’’ ‘‘cortisti,’’ ‘‘incerti,’’ and ‘‘agnostici,’’ commenting that modern interpreters ‘‘son quasi tutti dignitosamente agnostici’’ (‘‘La coda di Minosse,’’ 11). 20. For an extensive rehearsal of such strategies, let me refer the reader to my The Undivine Comedy. Critical discussion about Vergil also takes place as though we had information not provided by the text; see ‘‘Q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question’’ in this volume.


21. With respect to the undescribed ‘‘altra via’’ leading from limbo to the second circle, Grandgent notes that ‘‘we have no means of conjecturing the size or the steepness of the cliff,’’ and derives the larger principle: ‘‘The journey through Hell being physically impossible, Dante purposely refrains from furnishing particulars that might destroy the illusion, while abounding in such details as serve to heighten it’’; see La Divina Commedia, comm. C. H. Grandgent, rev. Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 45. Of course, the trick is to know which details serve to destroy the illusion and which to heighten it. 22. A discussion of tragedıà and comedıà for Dante, with bibliography, may be found in chapter 3 of my Dante’s Poets, and chapters 3 and 4 of my The Undivine Comedy. 23. As Salsano puts it, ‘‘il Minosse della Divina Commedia vive in grazia di coda’’ (‘‘La coda di Minosse,’’ 12). The Commedia’s illustrators developed an iconography for Minos that fills in the blanks left by the text. Minos emerges from the illustrations as a bearded man with horns (of varying shapes), frequently with spiky wings, in one case with rooster’s claws for feet. He always possesses a tail, which sometimes wraps around the sinner rather than around himself and that frequently appears phallicly from between his legs. It is worth noting that none of this iconography is present in the Vatican Virgilian illustration of Minos, where he appears as a pagan philosopher. My thanks to Karl Fugelso for helping me decipher depictions of Minos and providing me the Virgilius Vaticanus information. See chapter 3, note 4 for manuscript references. 24. Nuovo commento alla ‘‘Divina Commedia’’ di Dante Alighieri per Giacomo Belli (Roma: Tipografia Editrice Romana, 1894), 18. 25. It is worth noting that Styx, too, in verses that immediately follow Vergil’s presentation of Minos, ‘‘imprisons with his ninefold circles’’ (et noviens Styx interfusa coercet) (Aen. 6.439). 26. The only previous use of sempre is in Inf. 1: ‘‘sı` che ’l pie` fermo sempre era ’l piu` basso’’ (30). 27. Natalino Sapegno, comm. La Divina Commedia, 3 vols. (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1968), 1:37. 28. See Sposizione di Lodovico Castelvetro a xxix Canti dell’ ‘‘Inferno’’ dantesco (Modena: Societa` tipografica, 1886), 73: ‘‘dovendosi ragionevolmente far il giudicio in luogo separato, e non solamente in luogo separato, ma per aventura nell’anzilimbo, accioche` niuna anima restasse, che non avesse il suo luogo assegnato e certo per dirittura di giudicio’’ (justice should be administered in a separate place, and not only separate, but


indeed before limbo, so that there is no soul who has not been given an assigned and certain place by just judgment). 29. We know that Minos also speaks: Guido da Montefeltro reports that Minos wrapped his tail about himself eight times, indicating the eighth circle, and then specified ‘‘Questi e` d’i rei del foco furo’’ (Inf. 27.127), thus indicating the bolgia with the eighth circle to which Guido belongs. While Salsano takes Minos’s words as indicating the relative failure of the tail as signifier, referring to the ‘‘generale insufficienza pratica del sistema caudino’’ (‘‘La coda di Minosse,’’ 18), I would stress the richness of the different signifying systems to which Minos is given access. n ot es to ch ap te r 7 q : d oe s d an te ho pe fo r v er gi l’ s s al va ti on ? a : w hy do we ca re ? f or th e v er y r ea so n w e s ho ul d n ot as k t he qu es ti on

This essay originally appeared in MLN 105 (1990): 138–44, 147–49, and was originally written as a reply to Mowbray Allan’s article ‘‘Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation,’’ MLN 104 (1989): 193–205. 1. See Morton Bloomfield, ‘‘Authenticating Realism and the Realism of Chaucer,’’ Thought 39 (1964): 335–58. 2. Discussion of the collocation fallacy and other theoretical issues at stake in reading the Commedia may be found in my The Undivine Comedy, chapter 1. 3. For exploration of this principle in both the lyric and epic spheres, see my Dante’s Poets. 4. The Commedia’s three usages of incredibile suggest the text’s alignment of itself with truth and of its classical precursor with falsehood: used alone by Vergil in Inferno 13, with reference to the Aeneid, incredibile is paired with vera by Cacciaguida in Paradiso 16, who employs it again in Paradiso 17, with reference to Cangrande’s exploits. See my Dante’s Poets, 281, where Cacciaguida’s ‘‘cosa incredibile e vera’’ is linked to the unbelievable truths—‘‘mira vera’’—of Dante’s second eclogue. 5. In chapter 3 of Dante’s Poets, I document ‘‘how the Vergilian paradox operates at the level of narrative, resulting in two distinct but tightly coordinated storylines: as one maps the progressive undermining of Vergil’s authority, i.e., of his appeal to the intellect, the other records the simultaneous growth in the pilgrim’s love for him, i.e., in his appeal to the will’’ (200–201).


6. Allan, ‘‘Does Dante Hope for Virgil’s Salvation?’’, 195. (I have followed Gilbert Highet in using ‘‘Vergil’’ rather than ‘‘Virgil’’; for explanation, see my Dante’s Poets, 207n25.) 7. The words of the eagle in Paradiso 20 are Allan’s key text, since he takes them as providing hope, in the future, to those presently excluded from salvation. I take the eagle’s words as ultimately paradoxical, embracing both a divine obscurantism and a gleam of possibility (the pertugio through which Ugolino cannot pass, but that opens to the pilgrim in Inferno’s penultimate verse). 8. Although there was a doctrine of implicit grace, according to Kenelm Foster it tended to be ignored by theologians: ‘‘Catholic theory by and large did not much concern itself with the ultimate destiny, in God’s sight, of the pagan world whether before or since the coming of Christ. . . . The concept itself of fides implicita was not lacking . . . but it was hardly a central preoccupation of theologians, nor, in particular, do its implications for an assessment of the spiritual state of the world outside Christendom seem to have been taken very seriously’’ (The Two Dantes and Other Studies [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977], 171–72). It is against this background of neglect that the radical import of Dante’s ‘‘prehumanistic’’ concern can best be measured; it is important to actively remember, for instance, that there is no theological precedent for the presence of virtuous pagans in limbo. 9. Karla Taylor provides a less tenable nuancing of the same suggestion when she argues that, in Paradiso, Dante has learned a new humility that prevents him from judging absolutely, with the result that the presence of Ripheus reflects, vis-a`-vis Vergil, ‘‘the poet’s final reluctance to judge as firmly and surely as only God can’’ (‘‘From superbo Ilıöń to umile Italia: The Acrostic of Paradiso 19,’’ Stanford Italian Review 7 [1987]: 47–65; quotation at 64). Taylor’s argument is based not on what Dante has done (put Vergil in limbo), but on what she thinks he should do (show enough humility to refuse to judge Vergil absolutely). Keeping our eyes firmly focused on what the poet has actually done, we can compare his refusal to locate Guido Cavalcanti in his afterworld (a case where Dante’s textual actions support the thesis of an authentic reluctance to judge) with his explicit collocation of Vergil in the first circle of hell. More generally, the weakness of Taylor’s argument is that it is premised on a newfound authorial humility that Dante allegedly acquires in the Paradiso, a humility for which one can find support in the Commedia’s content (think of St. Thomas’ strictures against judging) but not in its form; the judgments and distributions of the third realm are in no way


more tentative than those of the earlier realms. Taylor’s procedure, frequent in Dante studies, is an example of extrapolating from the content— the need to be humble in paradise—to a conclusion for which there is no textual basis, namely that Dante-as-poet actually is more humble in writing Paradiso. Moreso even than with respect to hell and purgatory, because of the ineffable nature of the vision, the only real way to have practiced humility in writing Paradiso would have been not to write it. 10. ‘‘Potremo magari preoccuparci per i nostri figli, forse per i nipotini; ma al di la` di quanto possiamo sperare di accarezzare con queste mani non abbiamo obblighi’’ (Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo). That which cannot fail is what the protagonist of the Vita nuova learns to love, as a result of the failure of Beatrice’s greeting: ‘‘Ma poi che le piacque di negarlo a me, lo mio segnore Amore, la sua merzede, ha posto tutta la mia beatitudine in quello che non mi puote venire meno’’ (18.4). 11. ‘‘But the presence of Ripheus is not a salutary one for Vergil, since it implies that Vergil’s exile is not simply the result of an impartial dogma. Dante could have reduced the tension surrounding Vergil by tacitly excluding all pagans from heaven, or at least by including only those whose salvation, like Trajan’s, was buttressed by medieval legend’’ (Dante’s Poets, 254). 12. I hope with this essay to have better explained the principles that caused me to observe that it is ‘‘not so much theologically vain as poetically unrealistic to speculate about Vergil’s possible salvation, since it is an essential condition of his existence in the poem that he shall also cease to exist: his presence is predicated on his talent for absence’’ (Dante’s Poets, 200). n ot es to ch ap te r 8 a ra ch ne , a rg us , a nd st . j oh n: t ra ns gr es si ve ar t i n d an te an d o vi d

This essay originally appeared in Mediaevalia 13 (1989): 207–26. 1. For Dante’s handling of the Aeneid, see Robert Hollander, Il Virgilio dantesco: tragedia nella ‘‘Commedia’’ (Firenze: Olschki, 1983); for Dante’s handling of his Vergil-character, see my Dante’s Poets, chapter 3. Previous studies in this area were devoted to a fairly straightforward appraisal of the extent of Dante’s use of a given author (see Dante’s Poets, 188–99, for a survey of Dante’s indebtedness to his classical authors and for relevant bibliography). 2. See Dante’s Poets, 223–26, where I argue that ‘‘the superiority of Dante’s metamorphoses derives from that which they parody; as negative


versions of one of the greatest of Christian mysteries, the dual nature of Christ, they resonate with a power not available to their classical counterparts’’ (224). 3. Such swings are a feature of Dante studies: I am reminded of previous attempts to align all of Dante’s theology with that of St. Thomas. 4. Giorgio Padoan attests eloquently to Dante’s conscious and deliberate flouting of theological thought on limbo in ‘‘Il Limbo dantesco’’ [1969], rpt. in Il pio Enea, l’empio Ulisse (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), 103–24. 5. Padoan notes the added difficulty posed by the not entirely virtuous lives of some of the pagans—including Ovid—whom Dante chooses to celebrate: ‘‘anzi tra quelle addirittura accolte nel nobile castello, erano Lucrezia suicida, Cesare di cui nello stesso Purgatorio si ricordano gli atti contro natura, Ovidio la cui vita fu notoriamente tutt’altro che irreprensibile, e cosı` via’’ (ibid., 115). In Ovid’s case, the problem is further aggravated by the fact that he lived beyond the birth of Christ (see ibid., 106). 6. Mimesis (1946; trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 185. 7. ‘‘Problematical Virtuosity: Dante’s Depiction of the Thieves,’’ Dante Studies 91 (1973): 27–45; quotation at 42. 8. At the end of the ‘‘Farinata and Cavalcante’’ chapter in Mimesis, Auerbach writes: ‘‘And by virtue of this immediate and admiring sympathy with man, the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante’s work made man’s Christianfigural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it. The tremendous pattern was broken by the overwhelming power of the images it had to contain’’ (202). 9. ‘‘Virtuosity and Virtue: Poetic Self-Reflection in the Commedia,’’ Dante Studies 98 (1980): 1–18; quotations in this sentence are from pp. 9, 10, and 11, in the next sentence from pages 13, 14. 10. I argue that comedıà⳱‘‘ver c’ha faccia di menzogna’’ in Dante’s Poets, 213–14. 11. Quotations of the Eclogues are from the edition of Enzo Cecchini, in Dante Alighieri, Opere minore, tomo II, vol. 5 of La letteratura italiana: storia e testi (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1979). Translations are mine. The sequence begins with Giovanni del Virgilio’s first eclogue to Dante; hence Dante’s first eclogue is number 2 and his second eclogue is number 4. 12. Although Dante’s grotesque figures do not qualify as caryatids in the English sense of the word, which includes only the draped female figures of classical antiquity, Italian uses the word to encompass both


classical and medieval corbel figures. I use it here in conformity with scholarship on Purgatorio 10. 13. For my reading of Ulysses, see my The Undivine Comedy, chapter 3 and passim. 14. The self-conscious components of Arachne’s tale have been much discussed by students of Ovid; see especially Eleanor Winsor Leach, ‘‘Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,’’ Ramus, 3 (1974): 102–42, who comments that ecphrases ‘‘offer the artist an opportunity to speak in propria persona and to make us aware of the self-consciousness of his art through his attention to the fictional artistry of some other creator’’ (104). 15. Arachne’s story is told in Metamorphoses 6.1–145; as Leach points out, it is one of a series of contests between human artists and gods that occur in books 5 and 6. The Latin text is from the edition of W. S. Anderson (Leipzig: Brill, 1978). Translations are mine. 16. In response to W. S. Anderson’s suggestion that Ovid’s own art is like Arachne’s asymmetrical and ‘‘baroque’’ tapestry, as compared to Minerva’s balanced and ‘‘classicistic’’ work, Leach comments that ‘‘it is not Arachne’s tapestry alone, but the two scenes in combination that form a mirror of the Metamorphoses’’ (‘‘Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,’’ 117); for Anderson, see his review to Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet, American Journal of Philology 89 (1968): 93–104. Ovid’s identification with Arachne is sustained also by Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 1–4. 17. Dante’s interest in crossing the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate goes back to the Vita nuova, where he discusses the propriety of having treated Love as an animate being, ‘‘come se fosse corpo’’ (25.2), and adduces as justification the behavior of classical poets, who ‘‘hanno parlato a le cose inanimate, si come se avessero senso e ragione’’ (25.8). He gives an example from the Aeneid, in which ‘‘parla la cosa che non e` animata a le cose animate’’ (25.9), an example from Lucan, in which ‘‘parla la cosa animata a la cosa inanimata’’ (25.9), an example from Horace, in which ‘‘parla l’uomo a la scienzia medesima sı` come ad altra persona’’ (25.9), and an example from Ovid (which, interestingly, corresponds to his own case, the handling of Amor), in which ‘‘parla Amore, sı` come se fosse persona umana’’ (25.9). The conceit of the singing flute also has roots in a longstanding interest in crossing the boundary between (‘‘inanimate’’) sounds and (‘‘animate’’) words: in the Convivio, Dante denies that the speech of magpies and parrots constitutes real speech, since it is based on imitation and not on reason (3.7.9). He makes


the same point in De vulgari eloquentia 1.2.7, where he cites as a source for speaking magpies none other than Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 18. See Leach’s insightful discussions in ‘‘Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’’ of Pygmalion, 123–25, and Midas, 130–32. 19. For the dating of the Eclogues, see Cecchini’s introduction, 648–49. 20. ‘‘Transfiguring the Text: Ovid, Scripture and the Dynamics of Allusion,’’ Stanford Italian Review, 5 (1985): 115–39; quotations are from pp. 118 and 127. For Hawkins, Dante’s interest in representing his own falling asleep is ‘‘a pointless (one might even say sterile) preoccupation’’ (‘‘Virtuosity and Virtue: Poetic Self-Reflection in the Commedia,’’ 126). 21. In Dante’s period the author of the Gospel and author of the Apocalypse were considered the same John: the ‘‘Vangelista’’ of Inferno 19, from a context informed by the same politicized apocalyptic imagery that we find in Purgatorio 32, and the author of Revelation are for Dante one and the same. For elaboration of this material, see The Undivine Comedy, chap. 7. 22. In De Genesi ad litteram 12 (his commentary to 2 Corinthians 12.2–4, the verses in which St. Paul announces his raptus), Augustine offers Peter, John, Ezekiel and Isaiah as visionary analogues to Paul: ‘‘Ac per hoc si paradisum Paulus ita vidit, ut apparuit Petro ille discus submissus e coelo (Act. x, ii), ut Joanni quidquid in Apocalypsi se vidisse conscripsit (Apoc. 1, 12, etc.), ut Ezechieli campus ille cum ossibus mortuorum et illa eorum resurrectio (Ezech. xxxvii, 1–10), ut Isaiae sedens Deus, et in conspectu ejus Seraphim, et ara unde carbo assumptus Prophetae labia mundavit (Isai. vi, 1–7); manifestum est eum ignorare potuisse utrum in corpore, an extra corpus ea viderit’’ (12.2.5; Patrologia Latina 34.455). In City of God 22.29, he brings together as visionaries Paul, John, and Elisha. While Paul receives less attention than John in the apocalyptic cantos at the end of the Purgatorio, he is a more explicit model throughout the Commedia, from Inferno 2.32 (‘‘Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono’’) to Paradiso 1.73–75, where Dante appropriates the verses from 2 Corinthians that were of such interest to Augustine. 23. Discussion of the verb assonnare leads to discussion of the Commedia as vision; see the Enciclopedia Dantesca, s.v. assonnare, which refers us to Michele Barbi’s thoughts on ‘‘perche´ ’l tempo fugge che t’assonna’’: ‘‘Non e` qui il luogo di trattare la questione se Dante voglia far credere d’essere andato pei cieli col corpo o senza . . . io credo ch’egli voglia far intendere d’esserci stato corporalmente. Certo e` che in tutta la Commedia da` a credere d’aver fatto un viaggio reale pei regni ultraterreni, non d’aver

Notes to Page 170 410

avuto una visione nel sonno’’ (Problemi di critica dantesca, Prima serie [Firenze, 1934], 294). Dante gives us contradictory information on this matter; nor is it impossible that he could both insist he had been where he says he was and think he was the recipient of a true and prophetic vision. As Nicolo` Mineo points out: ‘‘sia in un sogno che in una visione puo` accadere che il soggetto veda se stesso compiere azioni e niente esclude che possa vedersi compiente azioni in corpo’’ (Profetismo e apocalittica in Dante [Catania, 1968], 196). 24. The second chapter of De Genesi ad litteram 12 treats dreaming and ecstasy under the heading ‘‘Apostolum potuisse nescire an extra corpus paradisum viderit, si vidit in ecstasi.’’ With respect to dreams, Augustine notes that the soul is awake while the body sleeps (‘‘quamvis mirabiliter vigilans, anima dormientis’’ [3]); with respect to visions, he claims that the soul is removed from the senses of the body, more than in sleep but less than in death (12.26.53). Barbi suggestively relates ‘‘perche´ ’l tempo fugge che t’assonna’’ to St. John and to Augustine on St. Paul: ‘‘il poeta, rapito ormai nella contemplazione dei piu` profondi misteri, quasi dormiens vigilaret (son parole di S. Agostino a proposito del ratto di S. Paolo, e cfr. Purg. 29, 144, ove l’autore dell’Apocalisse si vide ‘venir dormendo con la faccia arguta’)’’ (Problemi di critica dantesca, 294). (Since neither Barbi nor the ED, which repeats Barbi, gives a more precise reference for ‘‘quasi dormiens vigilaret,’’ I will take this opportunity to note that if the reference is to De Genesi ad litteram 12.5.14, ‘‘et non quasi dormiens evigilaret,’’ the allusion is not, as Barbi suggests, to a waking sleep.) Dante’s sense of the interconnectedness of John and Paul is never more apparent than in Paradiso 26, where the pilgrim, blinded as a result of having gazed at John in an effort to ascertain whether he was raised to heaven in the flesh, is compared to Paul, blinded by the vision of God on the road to Damascus. Although the pilgrim learns that only Mary and Christ were so raised, his concern reminds us again of the crucial verses of 2 Corinthians, and of Dante’s rewriting of them in Paradiso 1: ‘‘S’i’ era sol di me quel che creasti / novellamente, amor che’l ciel governi, / tu ’l sai, che col tuo lume mi levasti’’ (73–75). 25. Dante refers to his ecstatic visions of Purgatorio 15 as ‘‘non falsi errori’’ (117), a telling phrase that I believe provides an insight into the larger vision constituted by the Commedia, linking it to the visionary paradox of wakeful sleep and to the debate regarding Paul’s method of attaining his raptus. On the Commedia as a vision, see The Undivine Comedy, especially chapters 1 and 7. As Augustine says of the Apostle, in words that I suggest should inform our discussion of Dante (especially considering Dante’s express alignment of himself with the Apostle’s uncertainty):


‘‘Apostolus certus se vidisse tertium coelum, incertus quomodo viderit’’ (De Genesi ad litteram 12.3). 26. See Dante’s Poets, 201. n ot es to ch ap te r 9 c om in ci an do mi da l p ri nc ip io in fi no a l a f in e : f or gi ng an ti -n ar ra ti ve in th e v it a n uo va

This essay originally appeared in La gloriosa donna della mente: A Commentary on the ‘‘Vita Nuova,’’ ed. Vincent Moleta (Firenze: Olschki, 1994): 119–40. As noted in chapter 1, all references to the Vita nuova are to the edition of Domenico De Robertis (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1980). 1. Augustine described memory as a great storehouse in Confessions 10.8, noting in 10.11 that memories that have been stored too long have to be thought out again as though they were new, ‘‘nova.’’ 2. See Summa Theologiae 1a.58.4: ‘‘Utrum angeli intelligant componendo et dividendo.’’ Also of interest is Augustine’s reference in De doctrina christiana to the ‘‘scientia definiendi, dividendi, atque partiendi’’ (2.35.53). 3. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1:3. This essay represents my attempt to extend to the Vita nuova considerations regarding time and narrative that I have applied to the Commedia and to Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta; see my The Undivine Comedy, especially the chapters on the Paradiso, and ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’’ in this volume. 4. It should be clear that I use ‘‘difference’’ as Dante himself uses it, much as Aquinas uses distinctio: ‘‘any type of non-identity between objects and things. Often called diversity or difference’’ (T. Gilby, ed., Summa Theologiae [Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1967], 3:164). On distinctio as an essential component of the scholastic forma mentis, see E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian, 1957), who comments: ‘‘In the Vita nuova the poet himself goes out of his way to analyze the tenor of each sonnet and canzone by ‘parts’ and ‘parts of parts’ in perfectly Scholastic fashion, whereas Petrarch, half a century later, was to conceive of the structure of his songs in terms of euphony rather than logic’’ (36–37). While there is little doubt that Petrarch would find a scholastic apparatus distasteful, there is just as little doubt that the structure of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is based not on euphony but on logic.


5. This passage offers a contemporary endorsement for my suggestion in ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’’ that ‘‘the canzone is the closest approximation to narrative in a lyric universe’’ (see p. 210 in this volume). 6. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 152. On questions of narrative versus lyric in the Vita nuova, see also Michelangelo Picone, ‘‘Strutture poetiche e strutture prosastiche nella Vita nuova,’’ Modern Language Notes 92 (1977): 117–29. Both authors treat the two categories more as discrete dichotomies than as sources of mutual and dialectical contaminatio. 7. Confessions 11.15, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961). 8. In fact, if, in Ricoeur’s formulation, ‘‘the major tendency of modern theory of narrative . . . is to ‘dechronologize’ narrative’’ (Time and Narrative, 1:30), then Dante’s Paradiso is very modern. 9. On the lack of descriptive detail, see Mark Musa, Dante’s ‘‘Vita nuova’’: A Translation and an Essay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 100–106. 10. The original use of ripigliare in ‘‘ripigliare matera nuova e piu` nobile che la passata’’ (VN 17.1) means only ‘‘prendere’’ rather than ‘‘riprendere’’; see the Enciclopedia Dantesca (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–1978), and De Robertis’s comments in his edition of the Vita nuova, 108. 11. Musa notes that the Vita nuova ends ‘‘in failure and in the recognition of failure’’ (Vita nuova, 168), while for Harrison, ‘‘[a] dramatic failure, an avowed authorial inadequacy, haunt the end of this work’’ (p. 11), so that ‘‘by the end of the work both narrator and protagonist are looking forward, not backward, in time, to an event that they hope will bring closure to the new life’’ (The Body of Beatrice, 12). 12. For an interesting meditation on beginnings in Dante’s works, which takes into consideration the new beginning discussed below, see Guglielmo Gorni, ‘‘La teoria del ‘cominciamento,’ ’’ in Il nodo della lingua e il verbo d’amore: Studi su Dante e altri duecentisti (Firenze: Olschki, 1981), 143–86. 13. Cominciare appears in Inferno 2 six times: in no other canto do combined uses of cominciare and incominciare exceed four appearances. A discussion of canto 2 as a meditation on beginning may be found in my The Undivine Comedy, chapter 2. There, too, the protagonist is on a treadmill, consigned by his ‘‘novi pensier’’ (38) to endless stops and starts, which keep him from truly beginning: ‘‘sı` che dal cominciar tutto si tolle’’ (39). Like Inferno 2, Vita nuova 18 is highly verbal, marked by repeated uses of dire, parlare, parola. Moreover, the use of ‘‘impresa’’ at chapter’s


end (‘‘pareami avere impresa troppo alta matera quanto a me’’), although a past participle, anticipates the nouns of Inferno 2: the ‘‘ ’mpresa / che fu nel cominciar cotanto tosta’’ of lines 41–42 and the ‘‘onrata impresa’’ of line 47. 14. For the significance of Donne ch’avete as an incipit within the Commedia, see my Dante’s Poets, 40–57. 15. For Petrarchan cominciamenti, see ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’’ in this volume. 16. I have qualified my assertion of Donne ch’avete’s atemporality in recognition of the fact that it is a canzone, the least atemporal of the lyric forms (see note 4, above). Although Dante makes it clear that Donne ch’avete is his ‘‘ideal lyric,’’ the poem most frequently analyzed as the embodiment of the praise-style is the sonnet Tanto gentile. See Harrison, who justifies his concentration on the sonnet by noting that ‘‘[t]he sign that forms its lyric circle of incorporation and that comes from Beatrice’s proximity is fundamentally different from the reflective and solitary ‘inspiration’ of the rationalistic canzone’’ (The Body of Beatrice, 46). Is the canzone rationalistic, or has it been apparently rationalized by the divisioni? 17. ‘‘Questa canzone, accio` che sia meglio intesa, la dividero` piu` artificiosamente che l’altre cose di sopra’’ (This canzone, so that it may be better understood, I will divide more artfully than the others above) (VN 19.15). 18. Prose is introduced as a premise in a syllogism arguing that vernacular poets should be granted the same license as Latin poets: since ‘‘maggiore licenza di parlare’’ is granted to poets than to ‘‘prosaici dittatori,’’ and since the vernacular ‘‘dicitori per rima’’ are in fact vernacular poets, it follows that they should be granted greater license than that granted to other vernacular writers, the same amount, in fact, granted to the Latin poets (VN 25.7). Given that the ‘‘licenza’’ under discussion is the prosopopoeia that has presented Love as a speaking person, it is worth noting that Dante’s theoretical remarks do not square with his practice: in practice his prose has taken quite as many liberties with regard to the personification of Amor as has his verse. 19. On the passato remoto, see Beatrice Garavelli, ‘‘Presenze di sintassi poetica nella prosa della Vita nuova,’’ Strumenti critici 49 (1982): 312–48: ‘‘Non si istituisce qui, con questi passati remoti, una sequenza narrativa, che implichi una progressione temporale della vicenda; viene in mente, invece, l’aoristo greco, con l’aspetto verbale dell’azione in se´ e per se´, astratta da ogni rapporto col tempo. Non progressivo, dunque, ma atemporale, rappresentativo, questo passato remoto’’ (329).


20. See Picone on the ‘‘Eliminazione dei dati,’’ and the ‘‘Trascrizione e analisi dei dati rilevanti’’ (‘‘Strutture poetiche e strutture prosastiche nella Vita nuova,’’ 125). 21. Marco Santagata, Dal sonetto al Canzoniere: ricerche sulla preistoria e la costituzione di un genere (Padova: Liviana, 1979). 22. See ibid., chapter 3. 23. See Thomas C. Stillinger, ‘‘The Form of Filostrato,’’ Stanford Italian Review 9 (1990): 191–200, who argues that both the Filostrato and the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta derive ‘‘a powerful new mode of writing from the divided form of the Vita nuova’’ (208). 24. C. S. Lewis, English Literature of the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 327. 25. Noting that the Vita nuova is ‘‘un testo eccentrico rispetto al genere [canzoniere]’’ (Dal sonetto al Canzoniere, 127–28), Santagata continues: ‘‘E` comunque un libro subdolo, che non si lascia afferrare per intero: in esso infatti confluisce una raggera di tradizioni e di influenze che rende quasi impossibile la sua ascrizione ad un genere individuato da criteri piu` interni rispetto alla esteriore nozione di prosimetrum. Romanzo, trattato, autobiografia letteraria e spirituale, allegoresi e, perche´ no, canzoniere; sono tutti aspetti presenti, ma nessuno di essi e` egemonico’’ (136). n ot es to ch ap te r 1 0 t he ma ki ng of a l yr ic se qu en ce : t im e a nd na rr at iv e i n p et ra rc h’ s r er um vu lgar iu m fra gm enta

This essay originally appeared in MLN 104 (1989): 1–38. The citation is from Familiari 24.1, which treats ‘‘de inextimabili fuga temporis,’’ in Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri xvii–xxiv, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 312. 1. This grammatical fragmentation was deemed sufficiently important by the author that, in the course of the transition from the Chigi form of the collection to the final version as preserved in Vatican manuscript 3195, the title was changed from one bearing the words fragmentorum liber to the current Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, thus moving from a singular to a plural noun; see Ernest Hatch Wilkins, The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951), 167. Although the Chigi ms. is not an autograph, Francisco Rico treats fragmentorum liber as likely to have been Petrarch’s designation; in ‘‘ ‘Rime sparse,’ ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’: para el titulo y el primer soneto del Canzoniere,’’ Medioevo romanzo 3 (1976): 101–38, he


suggests a lengthy ‘‘vacilacioń’’ between titles (121). Quotations are from Gianfranco Contini, ed., Canzoniere (Torino: Einaudi, 1964); italics in the text are mine throughout. Contini inserts a second title page, inscribed Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, after the prefatory material. A sampling of recent editions yields the following titles: Canzoniere, ed. Piero Cudini (Milano: Garzanti, 1974) (Cudini follows Contini in inserting the proper title prior to the text); Rime, ed. Guido Bezzola (Milano: Rizzoli, 1976); Rime sparse, ed. Giovanni Ponte (Milano: Mursia, 1979). Robert Durling uses Rime sparse in his translation, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). Since the publication of this essay two important new editions of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta have appeared (both include the proper title): Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata (Milano: Mondadori, 1996); Canzoniere, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed. Rosanna Bettarini, 2 vols. (Torino: Einaudi, 2005). 2. Natalino Sapegno comments that ‘‘l’ordinamento fu, in ogni caso, un fatto posteriore e sopraggiunto, inetto a trasformare la sostanza lirica delle singole composizioni, ciascuna delle quali vuol essere considerata esteticamente per se`’’ (Il Trecento, 3d ed. rev. [Milano: Vallardi, 1938], 241); see also Giuseppe De Robertis’s application to the Fragmenta of Mallarme´’s theory of ‘‘recommencements’’ (Studi [Firenze: Le Monnier, 1944], 42). Most influential has been Umberto Bosco’s dictum: ‘‘Il vero e` che non possiamo in alcun modo ravvisare una linea di sviluppo, uno svolgimento, non solo nel canzoniere, ma in tutto il Petrarca. Egli e` senza storia, se lo si considera, come si deve, nel concreto di tutta l’opera sua’’ (Francesco Petrarca [1946; 2d ed. rev. Bari: Laterza, 1968], 7). Bosco’s formulation of the Fragmenta’s poetics as ‘‘statica, senza sviluppi, senza un prima e un poi’’ (7) is, in my opinion, still valid as an essential half of the Petrarchan dialectic. 3. Marco Santagata, Dal sonetto al Canzoniere (Padova: Liviana, 1979), 146. Santagata responds to his own challenge in ‘‘Connessioni intertestuali nel Canzoniere del Petrarca’’ (chapter 1 of Dal sonetto al Canzoniere), in which he demonstrates the links that exist between individual poems. Adolfo Jenni, ‘‘Un sistema del Petrarca nell’ordinamento del Canzoniere,’’ in Studi in onore di Alberto Chiari (Brescia: Paideia, 1973), 2:721– 32, counters Wilkins’s emphasis on variety as a governing principle by pointing out all the instances of ‘‘raccostamento’’ (722) in the Fragmenta, thus emphasizing synchrony rather than diachrony. Ruth Shepard Phelps, too, had posited not only a principle of variety in form and content, endorsed by Wilkins, but also a ‘‘principle of association, which creates little groups and clusters of poems upon similar subjects’’ (The Earlier and Later Forms of Petrarch’s Canzoniere [Chicago: University of Chicago


Press, 1925], 172). Variatio as the structuring principle of the lyric sequence has recently been reproposed by Germaine Warkentin, ‘‘ ‘Love’s sweetest part, variety’: Petrarch and the Curious Frame of the Renaissance Sonnet Sequence,’’ in Renaissance and Reformation 2 (1975): 14–23. For Bortolo Martinelli, ‘‘L’ordinamento morale del Canzoniere del Petrarca,’’ in Petrarca e il Ventoso (Bergamo: Minerva Italica, 1977), 217–300, order is provided by a moral itinerary; his zealous replacement of the romantic ‘‘psychological’’ reading with an Augustinian autobiography runs the same risks of imposing a story-line onto the text incurred by his precursors. Kenelm Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 63–89, also sees a moral narrative, with the difference that he acknowledges a repudiation of Laura in certain penitential poems, notably the closing canzone, while Martinelli insists implausibly on her consistently Beatrician function. 4. The search for biography in the text is an offshoot of the desire for narrative; as C. S. Lewis points out with respect to biographical readings of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, readers move from the search for the ‘‘story’’ (narrative) to the search for the ‘‘real story’’ (biography), while ‘‘the sonnet sequence does not exist to tell a real, or even a feigned, story’’ (English Literature of the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama [Oxford: Clarendon, 1954], 328). Although I concur with the general thrust of Lewis’s argument, I see the matter as somewhat more resistant to solution than is suggested by his statement that the sequence does not exist to tell a story. It undoubtedly is intended to tease us with a story, if not to tell it; indeed, I would argue that its identity is premised on establishing a unique tension between lyric and narrative drives. This precise balance, whereby the poet hints at a submerged narrative that is never forthcoming, will be disrupted as the genre develops in favor of a more sustained narrative presence. 5. For general considerations on the lyric sequence, see Ge´rard Genot, ‘‘Strutture narrative della poesia lirica,’’ Paragone 18 (1967): 35–52, and the opening pages of Cesare Segre, ‘‘Sistema e strutture nelle Soledades di A. Machado,’’ Strumenti critici 2 (1968): 269–303; both Segre and Silvia Longhi’s study of Giovanni Della Casa (‘‘Il tutto e le parti nel sistema di un canzoniere,’’ Strumenti critici 13 [1979]: 265–300) are more thematically oriented than the analysis attempted here. Also interesting is Earl Miner, ‘‘Some Issues for Study of Integrated Collections,’’ in Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 18–43. 6. Santagata goes further, claiming that Petrarch’s is ‘‘il primo organico canzoniere della letteratura occidentale’’ (Dal sonetto al Canzoniere,


145). The question of the ancient poetry book is much discussed; see Matthew S. Santirocco, Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Santagata, in chapter 3 of Dal sonetto al Canzoniere treats Petrarch’s medieval antecedents. 7. Although the verse in question is probably Guillem de Saint-Gregori’s, according to Contini, Petrarch certainly attributed it to Arnaut. 8. Simplifying somewhat, Lewis comments ‘‘The difference between the Vita Nuova and Petrarch’s Rime is that Petrarch abandoned the prose links; and it was they that carried the narrative’’ (English Literature of the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, 327). The Vita nuova’s narrative is not carried solely by the prose; Dante, too, had the idea of arranging previously unarranged lyrics to make them signify something they had not previously signified. At the same time, it is important that, of Dante’s two means for generating narrativity, Petrarch discards the more heavyhanded use of prose, and retains only the more supple use of order. 9. The reference is to the ‘‘unilinguismo’’ posited by Contini’s classic study, ‘‘Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca,’’ printed as the introduction to his edition; see also Adelia Noferi, L’esperienza poetica del Petrarca (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1962), who refers to Petrarchan ‘‘monotonia.’’ For the openness of the Fragmenta, see Aldo Scaglione, ‘‘La struttura del Canzoniere e il metodo di composizione del Petrarca,’’ Lettere Italiane 27 (1975): 129–39. 10. The table between pages 98 and 99 in Wilkins’s The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies shows the poems that were marked for transcription and the various abbreviations Petrarch used (one set of markings that Wilkins takes as ‘‘tr’ p me’’ is in fact ‘‘trs p me’’; see Domenico De Robertis, ‘‘Contiguita` e selezione nella costruzione del canzoniere petrarchesco,’’ in Studi di filologia italiana, Bollettino annuale dell’Accademia della Crusca [Firenze: presso l’Accademia della Crusca, 1985], 43:46n3). The fact that Petrarch used an analogous expression, ‘‘transcriptiones in ordine,’’ for his transcriptions of letters (see Carlo Calcaterra, Nella selva del Petrarca [Bologna: Cappelli, 1942], 393) implies analogous principles of construction for the Rerum familiarium libri and the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, an implication rendered more suggestive by the further similarity of their titles. On the kinship of the prologues of Familiares, Metricae, and Canzoniere, all proclaiming the fragmentary nature of the texts they introduce, see Rico, ‘‘ ‘Rime sparse,’ ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,’ ’’ 108–14. 11. Recent scholarship has begun to accord time its rightful place as the central and abiding concern of Petrarch’s oeuvre. As Gianfranco Folena observes in ‘‘L’orologio del Petrarca’’: ‘‘Il tempo e` non solo un riferimento continuo, ma anche la struttura portante della cultura e della


poesia del Petrarca, e stupisce che questa struttura non sia stata ancora analizzata partitamente, per quanto non manchino alcuni tentativi recenti’’ (Libri e Documenti 5.3 [1979]: 1–12; quotation at 5). See also the two contributions of Edoardo Taddeo, ‘‘Petrarca e il tempo: Il tempo come tema nelle opere latine,’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale 25 (1982): 53–76, and, on the Fragmenta, ‘‘Petrarca e il tempo,’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale 27 (1983): 69–108. After a brief section on ‘‘Il tempo come tema nelle Rime,’’ the latter article deals with ‘‘Il tempo come categoria formale nei sonetti,’’ showing how Petrarch employs tense to obtain ‘‘quello che e` il carattere specifico della poesia petrarchesca, la profondita` della prospettiva temporale’’ (75). More generally, see Bosco and Noferi, as well as Arnaud Tripet, Pe´trarque ou la conaissance de soi (Geneve: Droz, 1967), 75–87, and Giovanni Getto, ‘‘Triumphus Temporis: Il sentimento del tempo nell’opera di Francesco Petrarca,’’ in Letterature comparate: problemi e metodo. Studi in onore di Ettore Paratore (Bologna: Patron, 1981), 3:1243–72. 12. The link between narrative and time is affirmed in a text of supreme importance to Petrarch, the Confessions, where Augustine answers the question ‘‘What, then, is time?’’ by way of a narrative act, the recitation of a hymn (11.14; trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin [London: Penguin, 1961]). Although Augustine is seeking to define time rather than narrative, his discussion illustrates narrative’s intractably temporal nature, and is one to which modern theorists are still indebted. Paul Ricoeur not coincidentally begins his study Temps et recit (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983) with a chapter on book 11 of the Confessions. Noferi and Folena stress Confessions 11 as the basis for Petrarch’s ideas of time. 13. An example of such disruption operating thematically is provided by the placement of sonnets 60–63: the unity of 60, in which the poet curses the laurel, is compromised by 61, in which he blesses everything connected with Laura, while 61 is in its turn compromised by 62, a penitential poem, which is then undermined by 63, a love poem. On a syntactic level, Antonino Musumeci discusses Petrarch’s use of parenthesis as a means of mirroring psychological fragmentation; see ‘‘Tecniche frammentarie nei Fragmenta del Petrarca,’’ in Interrogativi sull’Umanesimo, ed. Giovannangiola Tarugi (Firenze: Olschki, 1976), 3:27–34. The poet’s sensitivity to the dialectic between the one and the many is expressed in this meditation on the value of time from the Familiari: ‘‘Thirty years ago— how time does fly! and yet if I cast a glance backward to consider them all together, those thirty years seem as so many days, so many hours, but when I consider them singly, disentangling the mass of my labors, they seem so many centuries’’ (Fam. 24.1; p. 308).


14. See Wilkins, The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies, 190–93, for a description of the codices and discussion of the bipartite division; regarding the portions of V. L. 3195 transcribed by Petrarch and those by his secretary, Giovanni Malpaghini, see p. 107. Wilkins took the blank pages as an indication that Petrarch intended to keep adding to part 1, therefore concluding that 366 does not represent the final number of poems (186–87). Most critics today would agree with Foster that ‘‘263 is manifestly a splendid conclusion to Part 1’’ and that the symbolic significance of the number 366 is intentional (96; but see Scaglione). Recent arguments for the calendrical structure of the Fragmenta depend on an intentional numerology; see Thomas Roche, ‘‘The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch’s Canzoniere,’’ Studies in Philology 71 (1974): 152–72, and, much less plausibly, Frederic J. Jones, ‘‘Laura’s Date of Birth and the Calendrical System Implicit in the Canzoniere,’’ Italianistica 12 (1983): 13–33. 15. See Phelps for an analysis of the Chigi form, the first extant collection of the Fragmenta. In the Chigi collection, which contains 215 poems (174 in part 1 and 41 in part 2), I’ vo pensando is distinguished by an ornamental initial; one blank page and a portion of another separate it from the last poem of part 1, which is Passa la nave mia (Phelps, The Earlier and Later Forms of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 189). Since the 41 poems that make up part 2 of the Chigi collection are arranged in the same order as the first 41 poems of part 2 of the final collection, Phelps’s discussion of the division is still useful. According to Wilkins, the Chigi belongs to 1359–1362, while work on V. L. 3195 begins circa 1366 and continues until the poet’s death. 16. A brief editorial history may be found in Martinelli, ‘‘L’ordinamento morale del Canzoniere del Petrarca,’’ 256–58, who points out that whereas the in vita/in morte headings derive from a fourteenth-century rubric added to the Vatican manuscript, and thus were present in the fifteenth century, the transposition from 264 to 267 occurs only in 1514. The tenacity of the tradition is such that, even after Mestica, Carducci and Ferrari begin part 2 of their edition with 267: ‘‘Non osammo seguirlo [Mestica], tenuti dal rispetto alla quasi religiosa consuetudine’’ (Giosue` Carducci and Severino Ferrari, eds. Le Rime [1899; rpt. Firenze: Sansoni, 1957], xxiii). A further editorial transgression, undertaken for the first time in 1525, is Vellutello’s separation of all non-Laura poems into a third independent group. The division continues to elicit editorial lapses, as witnessed by the fact that Cudini, Bezzola, and Durling fail to indicate its existence. Contini scrupulously leaves a blank page and uses the running headers ‘‘Prima parte’’ and ‘‘Seconda parte,’’ as do Bettarini and


Santagata (Santagata uses ‘‘Parte prima’’ and ‘‘Parte seconda’’ as his headers). 17. As Phelps notes, ‘‘The great objection to accepting the division into parts as indicated in Chigi L. V. 176, Laur. xli, 17, and V. L. 3195 is the fact that it throws into Part ii the two sonnets Aspro core and Signor mio caro, the one a complaint against Laura’s cruelty, in the old key of so many of the songs in Part i, and the other a tribute of love and friendship to Cardinal Colonna and to Laura’’ (The Earlier and Later Forms of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 193). Cesareo argues that Petrarch intended to transfer 265 and 266 to the end of part 1 (ibid., 194). 18. Wilkins suggests 1347 as the date for I’ vo pensando (The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies, 193); in Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), he moves the canzone even further back, to circa 1344. Rico’s arguments for the later date may be found in the article cited previously, and are paraphrased by Foster (Petrarch: Poet and Humanist, 103–5). In his attack on Wilkins and support for Rico (98–102), Foster, although not unprovoked—Wilkins’s argument is indeed specious when he infers from the position of 264 that it had to be placed where it is before Laura’s death in 1348—makes the mistake of continuing to pursue the red herring of chronology (and, in effect, allowing Wilkins to set the agenda). Thus, Foster’s efforts go into supporting Rico’s case for dating the bipartite division after Laura’s death and not into determining what the division is intended to signify; once more external biographical issues take precedence over internal textual matters. Moreover, the desire to discredit Wilkins’s chronology leads Foster to contradict himself: while on page 101 he notes that ‘‘the bipartite division of the Canzoniere, though related to, is not wholly determined by, the death of Laura’’ and ‘‘that Petrarch was free to arrange his poems exactly as he pleased,’’ on page 102 he forgets these sound precepts when he attempts to devalue 264 and the two sonnets that follow it. Although it is not clear how the date of I’ vo pensando would affect our reading of its position at the outset of part 2, it is symptomatic of the debate that so much attention has been paid to this issue. 19. Mestica writes that in his edition the two parts are divided ‘‘non per l’avvenimento esteriore e accidentale della morte di madonna Laura, ma per un fatto intimo al Poeta stesso: la sua conversione morale, che nel 1343 diede a lui occasione di comporre in latino il Secretum, e quindi in poesia volgare la Canzone I’ vo pensando, con cui appunto, nel Codice originale, la Parte seconda ha principio’’ (Wilkins, The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies, 191). Martinelli develops this


view to argue that the division signifies a conversion from vita vetus to vita nova (‘‘L’ordinamento morale del Canzoniere del Petrarca,’’ 252–53). These authors, like Iliescu and most recently Foster, posit an achieved conversion within the Fragmenta, an idea I do not share. 20. Petrarch’s notes provide the 1350 date for Aspro core ; see Phelps, The Earlier and Later Forms of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 157. 21. ‘‘A conceivable explanation of their position here is that they are a kind of corollary to that last line of I’ vo pensando, proving that although he sees ‘the better’ he still follows ‘the worse’ ’’ (Phelps, The Earlier and Later Forms of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 199–200). 22. Translations of verses from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, with occasional slight modifications, are those of Robert Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. 23. I should note that madrigal 54 is a penitential poem that expresses the poet’s desire to leave Love, and that the verse in question announces his defection. It is certainly legitimate to speak of conversion as a return to God; for examples from Augustine, see Iliescu, Il Canzoniere petrarchesco e Sant’Agostino, 52–53, 83. Nonetheless, Petrarch is here imitating the Commedia, where conversion is generally viewed as forward motion: besides the obvious recall of Dante’s first verse, Santagata points out that he is adapting the episode at the gates of Dis, and putting into effect the return that Dante-pilgrim merely fears (‘‘Presenze di Dante ‘comico’ nel Canzoniere del Petrarca,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 146 [1969]: 163–211; esp. 206). And in his pivotal conversion scene, Augustine, too, speaks of forward motion: earthly attachments are ‘‘voices’’ that ‘‘were stealthily plucking at my back, trying to make me turn my head when I wanted to go forward’’; on the other side of the barrier, Continence urges him ‘‘to cross over and to hesitate no more’’ (Confessions 8.11). My point is that resistance to forward motion is so ingrained in Petrarch that even conversion is figured as a turning back; moreover, what is only a trope in the last verse of 54 is concretized in the opening verses of 55, where he turns back indeed, to Laura: ‘‘Quel foco ch’i’ pensai che fosse spento / dal freddo tempo et da l’eta` men fresca, / fiamma et martir ne l’anima rinfresca.’’ 24. Petrarch’s awareness of this ploy is indicated by the rigidity with which he counters it elsewhere, most tellingly in Familiari 16.5, where he congratulates his correspondent upon recovering his health while at the same time exhorting him to remember ‘‘that one is always going toward death even while seemingly returning from it’’ (trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri ix–xvi [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982], 302).

Notes to Pages 200–201

422

25. The poet provides an accurate diagnosis of this condition in Familiari 21.12: ‘‘Those who pursue their lusts do not attain this goal [wellbeing in the present], for just as a useless or broken container is never full, so those who always begin afresh never reach an end, there being no end to something infinite; what is more, cupidity is ever vigorous and incipient, always attractive and infinite. Those, then, who follow her are undertaking an infinite journey, never resting nor able to find repose because their motivation, lust, knows no rest’’ (193, my italics). The clarity of the moral lesson expressed in this passage is problematized in the Fragmenta by the poet’s exploitation of the ‘‘positive’’ side of continual incipience: the illusion of infinity. 26. Elizabeth Wilson Poe addresses Bernart de Ventadorn’s ways of denying time in the chanso, commenting: ‘‘Though we may think that we are going forward, we always seem to end up where we were before; it is as if we were moving in circles, or, perhaps more accurately still, marking time’’ (From Poetry to Prose in Old Provençal [Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, 1984], 7). What Bernart aims to do within the chanso, Petrarch aims to do within the sequence as a whole. 27. In her study of Petrarchan poetics as a poetics of repetition, Noferi remarks that the sestina is ‘‘non per nulla la forma petrarchesca per eccellenza’’ (see ‘‘Il Canzoniere del Petrarca: scrittura del desiderio e desiderio della scrittura,’’ in many respects an updating of her book via Blanchot, Lacan, et al., in Il gioco delle tracce [Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1979], 59). Petrarch suggestively links repetition and the passing of time: ‘‘Scarcely did he [Vergil] seem able to express to his own satisfaction the flight of time and its irretrievable loss, except by constant repetition’’ (Fam. 24.1). 28. ‘‘The poems are not, however, pure sixes. Tornadas create a seventh entity, a half-strophe that transforms the sestina into a ‘seven.’ Thus in its completed form, the poem has an eschatological orientation and a unilateral direction of time’’ (Marianne Shapiro, Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980], 12). 29. Dante notes the relation of rhyme to time in the Convivio: ‘‘Per che sapere si conviene che ‘rima’ si puo` doppiamente considerare, cioe` largamente e strettamente: stretta[mente], s’intende pur per quella concordanza che ne l’ultima e penultima sillaba far si suole; quando largamente, s’intende per tutto quel parlare che ’n numeri e tempo regolato in rimate consonanze cade’’ (4.2.12, my italics; G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli, eds., 2d ed. rev. A. E. Quaglio [Firenze: Le Monnier,1964]).


30. Temporalized eros is more characteristic of the Fragmenta than its counterpart, as witnessed by that paradigmatic sonnet, Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi. 31. On Petrarch’s ‘‘narrative’’ sestine, see Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist, 111. 32. Mario Fubini comments ‘‘Col Petrarca abbiamo l’impressione che la sestina si disciolga’’ (Metrica e poesia [Milano: Feltrinelli, 1962], 305). In ‘‘Forma e significato della parola-rima nella sestina’’ (Teoria e prassi della versificazione [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976], 155–67), Costanzo Di Girolamo documents the ways in which Petrarch alters the form, noting that ‘‘pare anzi che il gioco principale consista nel ‘deformare’ semanticamente proprio le parole-rima piu` concrete’’ (162). On Petrarch’s mediation, in his choice of rhyme words, between Arnaut’s phonic values and Dante’s semantic values, see Maria Picchio Simonelli, ‘‘La sestina dantesca fra Arnaut Daniel e il Petrarca,’’ in Figure foniche dal Petrarca ai petrarchisti (Firenze: Licosa, 1978), 1–15. 33. The hope, announced here in 1989, to write a full-length study in which I unpack section by section the material in this essay is still alive in 2006; the book I hope to write is Petrarch, Metaphysical Poet: The Lyric Sequence as the Syllables of Time. I am proceeding through the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta in order and have not yet reached the sequence 125– 129, for which I offered the beginning of an analysis in this essay (see note 51, below). Rather, I have done the following: teased out the hermeneutic impact of the philological issues raised by Wilkins, in ‘‘Petrarch at the Crossroads of Hermeneutics and Philology,’’ for the volume Reading Petrarch at 700: The Textual Origins of Interpretation, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey, Columbia Series in the Classical Tradition, forthcoming; written an overview based on the reading espoused in this essay, ‘‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: The Self in the Labyrinth of Time for The Panoptical Petrarch, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); and begun an in-depth ‘‘metaphysical reading’’ of the text in the order in which it is presented to us in ‘‘Petrarch as the Metaphysical Poet Who Is Not Dante: Metaphysical Markers at the Beginning of the Rerum vulgarium fragementa,’’ for Petrarch and Dante, ed. Zygmunt Baran´ski and Theodore Cachey (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, forthcoming). 34. Similarly, Petrarch uses alliteration to obviate the effects of enjambment (see Simonelli, ‘‘Strutture foniche nei Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,’’ in Figure foniche, 52). What makes this move so characteristic is its duplicity: on the one hand, the poet wants enjambment, while on the other, he attenuates its impact.


35. The set has been studied by Dennis Dutschke, ‘‘The Anniversary Poems in Petrarch’s Canzoniere,’’ Italica 58 (1981): 83–101, who reads them thematically in terms of an achieved conversion: ‘‘They emphasize love as conflict in Part i, by depicting Petrarch’s continuously oscillating thoughts and moods. In Part ii, however, there is a change as the anniversary poems progressively point the way to a resolution of conflict’’ (88). 36. Raffaele Amaturo cites Propertius (‘‘Huius ero vivus, mortuus huius ero’’) as Petrarch’s source; see his Petrarca (Bari: Laterza, 1971), 306. 37. 118 refers to ‘‘il sestodecimo anno’’ and 122 to ‘‘Dicesette anni.’’ While the reference to ‘‘il mio sospir trilustre’’ in 145 is somewhat more vague, I agree with Wilkins that it provides ‘‘an impression of fifteenness’’ (The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies, 95). 38. Wilkins’s positivism has induced many to repeat him uncritically; in response Foster is correct to stress ‘‘Not one of the earlier ‘forms’ distinguished by Wilkins exists’’ (Petrarch: Poet and Humanist, 94). Although Wilkins tells us that the Chigi collection is the first extant form, the importance of this information is obscured by his confident assertions regarding earlier forms, especially the Pre-Chigi. I elaborate on this topic in my ‘‘Petrarch at the Crossroads of Hermeneutics and Philology,’’ forthcoming (see note 33 above). 39. Wilkins, The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies, 97. In the same way, he posits 292, Gli occhi di ch’io parlai si caldamente, as the last poem of the Pre-Chigi form because it ‘‘has a specific character of finality, and would in itself be excellently adapted to close a carefully ordered collection’’ (104). 40. Guglielmo Gorni unquestioningly treats 142 as the last poem of part 1 of a Pre-Chigi/Correggio form in ‘‘Metamorfosi e redenzione in Petrarca: il senso della forma Correggio del Canzoniere,’’ Lettere Italiane 30 (1978): 3–13. For a similar treatment of 292, see Amaturo, Petrarca, 328, who compounds the problem by mistakenly referring to 292 as the last poem of the Chigi (rather than Pre-Chigi) collection. In fact, the last poem of the Chigi collection is our current 304, Mentre che ’l cor dagli amorosi vermi, and the last poem of part 1 of the Chigi is our current 189, Passa la nave mia. It is regrettable that critical energy has been devoted to poems 142 and 292 as appropriate endings to their nonexistent collection and that no one, to my knowledge, has examined from this perspective the two poems that actually serve as endings in the existent Chigi collection. 41. The unbroken stretches of the second section of part 1 have routinely posed problems for commentators. Amaturo refers to the ‘‘lunga e diseguale serie 130–247’’ (Petrarca, 299), while Foster speaks of the ‘‘rather


425

random arrangement’’ of 135–263 (Petrarch: Poet and Humanist, 71), and vacillates between ending the first section of part 1 with 135 or 142. 42. Compare its straightforward ‘‘diciotto anni’’ to ‘‘sospir trilustre’’ in 145. The twenty-year anniversary poems are 212 (‘‘venti anni’’) and 221 (‘‘vigesimo anno’’). 43. By the same token, it will be apparent why this sestina could hardly have contained the time-stopping sequence found in A qualunque animal. 44. In Confessions 13.15, angels are able to look upon God’s face and read in it ‘‘sine syllabis temporum’’ (without the syllables of time). The syllabification of Laura’s name, by contrast, recalls Augustine’s syllabification of the hymn ‘‘Deus Creator omnium’’ as an analogue for time in Confessions 11.27. Robert Durling takes poem 5 more seriously than most commentators; see his introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 12–14. 45. On head-tailed rhyme and ideas of cyclicity, see Shapiro, Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina, 5. 46. De Sanctis refers to 71–73 as ‘‘quella specie di poemetto lirico sugli occhi di Laura che [Petrarca] ha diviso in tre canzoni,’’ while Ginguene´ remarks that the three poems ‘‘formano tutt’insieme come un piccolo poema in tre canti regolari’’ (Le Rime, ed. Carducci and Ferrari, 102). 47. The series of four canzoni constituted by poems 70–73 is second in length only to 125–129. The obvious unity of poems 71–73, the canzoni degli occhi, has distracted critical attention from the block as a whole. 48. The word istoria appears only twice in the Fragmenta, in canzone 127 and in sonnet 343, discussed later. 49. Durling comments that the difference in verse lengths is ‘‘stunningly effective in suggesting the overcoming of the halting inhibition of 125’’ (Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 23). 50. For the effect of the settenari in 125–126, see W. Theodor Elwert, ‘‘Rima e figure retoriche nelle ‘canzoni sorelle’ del Petrarca: ‘Chiare, fresche e dolci acque’ (126) e ‘Se ’l pensier che mi strugge’ (125),’’ Lettere Italiane 34 (1982): 309–27. Elwert points out that only six canzoni—71, 72, 73, 125, 126, 135—begin with settenari (319). He also notes that, besides 125–126, only 270 and 323 possess congedi of three verses (320). Elwert’s further essay on the metrical patterns of Petrarch’s canzoni, ‘‘La varieta` metrica e tematica delle canzoni del Petrarca in funzione della loro distribuzione nel Canzoniere’’ (in Dal Medioevo al Petrarca: Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittore Branca [Firenze: Olschki, 1983], 1:389–409), should be consulted with great care, since its metrical resume of the canzoni contains numerous errors. By my calculations, his rendering of the meter of the following canzoni is incorrect: 23, 37, 105, 135, 206, 270. Moreover, 73


contains six strophes, not five; the strophes of 270 contain 12 hendecasyllables and the strophes of 325 three settenari; the lady to whom the interlocutors of canzone 360 appeal for a settlement of their dispute is Reason, not Laura. Most unfortunately, Elwert labels 264 the last canzone ‘‘in vita’’ and 268 the first canzone ‘‘in morte,’’ a mistake that seriously compromises his attempts to synthesize his finding for the collection as a whole. A final note: the Rizzoli edition’s rhyme scheme for 125 is incorrect, as is Durling’s for 127 (Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 15). 51. The meter of 129 not only demonstrates a return to 125–126, but also, as noted above, a solidarity with 127, the darkest of the five canzoni: the sirma of 129 mediates between that of 125–126 (with which it shares the same rhyme scheme) and that of 127 (with which it shares a similar disposition of long and short verses, but for the substitution of the first hendecasyllable by a settenario). A more detailed reading of the five canzoni bears out the double allegiance of 129, to 125–126, on the one hand, and to 127–128, on the other. Briefly, 127 and 129 both function as glosses of 126; while the former disdains the oblio of 126, preferring an eternity of desire, the latter desires oblio, even rehearses it, but is devoted to showing why it is ultimately impossible to maintain. In the future I hope to elaborate this reading of 125–129 as a series. Despite the intriguing title, Fernando Figurelli’s ‘‘Le cinque canzoni centrali della prima parte del Canzoniere del Petrarca’’ (in Annali dell’lstituto Superiore di Scienze e Lettere ‘S. Chiara’ [Napoli: R. Monastero S. Chiara, 1957], 7:215–51) treats the canzoni individually. 52. Although I have omitted 247 and 253 because they do not overtly refer to Laura’s death, it would be easy to show that they are closely related to the others, with the result being an unbroken sequence from 246 to 254. Referring to poems 249–254 as ‘‘i sonetti del presentimento,’’ Amaturo comments that ‘‘costituiscono quasi una sorta di poemetto unitario e continuato’’ and that they create a situation ‘‘quasi piu` narrativa che lirica, di presagio di morte’’ (Petrarca, 319). 53. The impenetrability of canzone 23 is metrical as well: endowed with a twenty-verse strophe of nineteen hendecasyllables and only one settenario, the stanzaic pattern of Nel dolce tempo is the heaviest in the collection. Canzone 323, on the other hand, presents us with an easily handled twelve-verse strophe containing two settenari in the sirma. 54. As part of his review of tense in the Fragmenta (‘‘Petrarca e il tempo,’’ 1983), Taddeo analyzes what he calls the ‘‘sottosistema del discorso diretto’’ (102–5). He counts 47 sonnets that contain direct discourse. I count 70 poems that contain direct discourse, of which 18 are not sonnets (17 canzoni, 1 madrigal), leaving a total of 52 sonnets compared to


Taddeo’s 47 (because he does not give a list, I cannot compare our findings, except to say that I include the 21 sonnets from which he cites examples). Taddeo does not use the two parts of the collection as a criterion for analyzing his data. 55. In part 1 dialogue is found in four sonnets (84, 150, 222, 262) and one canzone (119). 56. For the use of direct discourse in Purgatorio 10, see chapter 6 of my The Undivine Comedy. 57. Late in his life Petrarch erased the ballata Donna mi vene spesso ne la mente from the position it occupied as number 121 in the Fragmenta and replaced it with the current madrigal, Or vedi, Amor. Wilkins suggests, ‘‘Petrarch’s dissatisfaction with Donna arose from the fact that it appears to speak of an interfering love’’ (The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies, 180). The care shown in removing references to another love from part 1 does not apply in part 2, where such references are found in poems 270 and 271. 58. Direct discourse is ascribed to Laura or her attributes more frequently in part 2 than in part 1: six times, or 2.28 percent, in part 1 (23, 87, 123, 240, 250, 262) versus nine times, or 8.73 percent, in part 2 (279, 302, 328, 330, 331, 341, 342, 359, 362). 59. The terminology is, of course, Augustinian. For Petrarch’s relation to Augustine, besides Martinelli and Foster, see Nicolae Iliescu, Il ‘‘Canzioniere’’ petrarchesco e Sant’Agostino (Roma: Societa` Accademica Romena, 1962); John Freccero, ‘‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,’’ Diacritics 5 (1975): 34–40; and, more recently, Sara Sturm-Maddox, Petrarchan Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the ‘‘Rime sparse’’ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), chapter 5. Sturm-Maddox’s reconstruction of an Augustinian subtext in the Fragmenta differs from the work of Iliescu, Martinelli, and Foster in its understanding that choosing Augustine as a model does not necessarily imply that Petrarch believes he succeeds in emulating his model: all we know is that he says that he wishes he could. 60. All represented heavens must exist in time. My point is that Petrarch once again does not exercise his option to limit the temporal constraints of language. Thus, Folena notes that in the Trionfo dell’eternita`, which he calls Petrarch’s Paradiso, ‘‘L’espressione dell’eternita` e` affidata nei punti culminanti alla negazione degli elementi grammaticali della deissi temporale’’ (‘‘L’orologio del Petrarca,’’ 9); he refers to such verses as ‘‘non avro` loco ‘fu’ ‘sara’ ne´ ‘era,’ / ma ‘e`’ solo in presente, ed ‘ora’ ed ‘oggi’ ’’ (67–68). Far from approximating eternity in this passage, Petrarch draws attention to the very temporality he says he wishes to escape. By


contrast, Dante’s Paradiso does succeed in finding ways to approximate eternity; see chapters 8–10 of The Undivine Comedy. 61. Petrarch’s use of prima and poi suggestively echoes the Convivio’s definition of time as ‘‘numero di movimento, secondo prima e poi.’’ On 34 as the original number 1, see Wilkins, The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies, 147. 62. Regarding Petrarch’s handling of Ovidian myth, P. R. J. Hainsworth notes that his ‘‘disregard of the temporal sequence necessarily involves a destruction of narrative: in its stead there is the recombination of the words denoting the constituent elements of the myth in such a way as to point to the presence of the timeless’’ (‘‘The Myth of Daphne in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,’’ Italian Studies 34 [1979]: 28–44; quotation at 38). Likewise, Sturm-Maddox comments that Petrarch’s ‘‘representation of his innamoramento as a reenactment of a mythological story is also a defense against temporality: the transformation of Daphne into the evergreen laurel symbolizes [the] evasion from the imperatives of linear time’’ (Petrarchan Metamorphoses, 129). 63. Thus, the comment to poem 1 in the Carducci-Ferrari edition: ‘‘Proemio; e dovrebb’essere epilogo’’ (Le Rime, 3). 64. With regard to the alleged conversion of the Fragmenta’s ending, I will give Augustine the last word. The saint is here commenting on the delays in his conversion, shortly to be achieved: ‘‘The reason, then, why the command is not obeyed is that it is not given with a full will. For if the will were full, it would not command itself to be full, since it would be so already. It is therefore no strange phenomenon partly to will to do something and partly to will not to do it’’ (Confessions 8.9; my italics). n ot es to ch ap te r 1 1 t he wh ee l o f t he de ca me ro n

This essay originally appeared in Romance Philology 36 (1983): 521–39. Translations of Decameron passages, with slight modifications, are those of G. H. McWilliam, The Decameron, 2d ed. rev. (London: Penguin, 1995). Quotations are from the edition by Vittore Branca in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 4, Decameron (Milano: Mondadori, 1976). 1. It will be apparent that the secular view of Boccaccio’s masterpiece here endorsed, and I believe supported by the notion of a circular frame structure (whose very shape invokes classical models), stands in contrast to the view expressed by Branca in his seminal study, Boccaccio medievale, 3d ed. rev. (Firenze: Sansoni, 1970), in much the same way that this ‘‘wheel’’ contrasts with Branca’s insistence on a linear frame structure, a


moral itinerary from vice to virtue. Branca’s precursor in outlining a linear scheme for the frame story was F. Neri. ‘‘Il disegno ideale del Decameron,’’ orig. 1934, rpt. in Storia e poesia (Torino: Chiantore, 1944), 73–82; other attempts to schematize the frame story, to be integrated with the model put forth here, are provided by: Pamela Stewart, ‘‘La novella di Madonna Oretta e le due parti del Decameron,’’ Yearbook of Italian Studies (1973–75): 27–39; Janet Levarie Smarr, ‘‘Symmetry and Balance in the Decameron,’’ Mediaevalia 2 (1976): 159–87; Joan M. Ferrante, ‘‘Narrative Patterns in the Decameron,’’ Romance Philology 31 (1978): 585–604. 2. A critic inclined to emphasize Boccaccio’s social and civic commitment in the Decameron is Raffaelo Ramat, who contends that the ‘‘idea centrale dell’opera e` la citta`’’ (19); see ‘‘Indicazioni per una lettura del Decameron,’’ in Scritti su Giovanni Boccaccio (Firenze: Olschki, 1964), 7–19. Franco Fido, ‘‘Il sorriso di Messer Torello,’’ Romance Philology 23 (1969): 154–71, defines the Decameron’s goal as ‘‘la restaurazione di una convivenza civile, il ricupero di un ordine sociale all’interno del quale ognuno possa—come Landolfo Rufolo educato dall’alterna fortuna— ‘onorevolmente vivere infino alla fine’ ’’ (155). 3. Fido compares this passage to the exemplary description of Messer Torello’s family in 10.9.27–28; see ‘‘Il sorriso di Messer Torello,’’ 162. 4. The degeneration of men into animals is explicit in the passage on burial, ‘‘che non altramenti si curava degli uomini che morivano, che ora si curerebbe di capre’’ (41), and implicit in the reversals depicted by the author, whereby animals contract the disease from humans (the description of the two pigs with the pauper’s rags [17–18]), and animals return home without the prodding of a shepherd, ‘‘quasi come razionali’ (46), which is more than can be said about most of the humans described in the Introduction to Day 1. 5. The brigata first enters the text in the author’s Proem, qualified from the start by the adjective that accompanies them throughout the Decameron: ‘‘una onesta brigata’’ (Proemio, 13). Pampinea’s opening discourse is structured rhetorically around the opposition onesto/disonesto (1.Intro.53–72), ending: ‘‘E ricordivi che egli non si disdice piu` a noi l’onestamente andare, che faccia a gran parte dell’altre lo star disonestamente’’ (72; my italics). 6. Ramat comments on the ladies thus: ‘‘Esse non sone fuggite, pur avendone la possibilita` economica; sono rimaste nella citta` stravolta, ciascuna individualmente resistendo alla sua dissoluzione’’ (‘‘Indicazioni per una lettura del Decameron,’’ 9). 7. Regarding the three young men, Branca states: ‘‘rappresentano in qualche modo tutti e tre l’autore stesso’’ (Decameron, 997). Panfilo has a


prehistory in the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta as the unfaithful lover; Filostrato is the betrayed lover Troilo in the Filostrato; Dioneo made an earlier appearance as the young man ‘‘di maravigliosa bellezza . . . in atto lascivo’’ of the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (26). The ladies bring a similar intertextual resonance to the Decameron: Pampinea appears in the Comedia, along with Emilia, who also figures in the Teseida and the Amorosa visione; Filomena is the lady to whom the Filostrato is dedicated. Fiammetta appears, of course, in all of Boccaccio’s early texts from the Filocolo to the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, as addressee or protagonist. The other three ladies are tributes to precursors: Elissa to Vergil, Lauretta to Petrarch, Neifile to Dante. For more precise references, as well as explanations of their names, see Decameron, ed. Branca, 993. 8. On the relationship of the city to the country as a Boccaccian narrative device, see Marga Cottino-Jones, ‘‘The City/Country Conflict in the Decameron,’’ Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1974): 147–84. 9. Salvatore Battaglia comments that the narrators of Day 1 ‘‘espongono situazioni nelle quali il protagonista riesce a dominare gli eventi e i propri interlocutori mediante il brillante acume del ragionamento, vero o simulato che sia’’; see ‘‘Giovanni Boccaccio,’’ in La letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Medioevo e Umanesimo (Firenze: Sansoni-Accademia, 1971), 250–51. In ‘‘Convergenze e divaricazioni tra la prima e la sesta giornata del Decameron,’’ Studi sul Boccaccio 11 (1979): 207–41, Cok Van Der Voort stresses the importance of the word in Day 1 (‘‘l’importanza della Parola, la quale costituisce il leitmotiv di questa giornata’’ [225]) as a means of correcting the misconduct of others. Branca characterizes Day 1 by the ‘‘riprensione aspra ed amara dei vizi dei grandi’’ (Boccaccio medioevale, 16). Ferrante discusses ‘‘the need to use words (exemplary stories or clever remarks) to correct the wrongs, a theme which will recur and dominate the sixth day’’ (‘‘Narrative Patterns in the Decameron,’’ 587). 10. Van Der Voort analyzes the similarities and differences between Day 1 and Day 6, distinguishing between them as follows: ‘‘Nella vi giornata il motteggiatore, pur pungendo l’avversario, ricorre al motto prima di tutto per riscuotere se stesso, mentre nella prima giornata la parola serve a mutare il comportamento vizioso dell’antagonista, mediante una ‘lezione’ implicita nel motto’’ (‘‘Convergenze e divaricazioni tra la prima e la sesta giornata del Decameron,’’ 227); thus, he concludes that the function of the word is ‘‘nella i giornata un’ars puniendi, nella vi giornata un’ars defendendi ’’ (ibid., 241). 11. Branca cites the note on this passage which Mannelli, the transcriber of the 1384 manuscript of the Decameron used by modern editors until the autography of the codex Hamilton 90 was established (and still


used for the portions of the text missing from the Hamilton 90), wrote in the margin: ‘‘Nota che questo medesimo prolago usa l’autore di sopra nella decima novella detta da Pampinea, il che pare vizioso molto’’ (Decameron, 1321). Branca’s view of Filomena, the narrator of 6.1, as a ‘‘pallida satellite di Pampinea’’ (ibid., 993), is in part based on this repetition. 12. Stewart argues that Day 6, thematically linked to Day 1, is intended to mark a new beginning, and that ‘‘La ripresa del preambolo di i 10 in quello di vi 1, sottolineata fortemente dal Boccaccio con la ripetizione delle stesse parole, indica, quindi, chiaramente, intenzionalmente, una ripresa dal punto di vista di tutta l’opera’’ (‘‘La novella di Madonna Oretta e le due parti del Decameron,’’ 36). 13. According to Giuseppe Mazzotta, ‘‘The Decameron: The Marginality of Literature,’’ University of Toronto Quarterly 42 (1972): 64–81, ‘‘the brigata and their servants mirror each other in the act of storytelling,’’ in a ‘‘self-reflection [that] implies a suspension of social hierarchy at the moment in which they are involved in the marginal world of books’’ (75). 14. See Y. Batard, ‘‘Le cosmopolitisme du Decameron,’’ Actes du iv Congre`s de l’Association internationale de Litte´rature compareé (The HagueParis: Mouton, 1966), 1:114–18. 15. Franco Fido recognizes the ‘‘pervasive ‘Florentinity’ of the sixth day’’ (229) and also that in Day 6 the ‘‘fictional time of the stories . . . is always close to the present of the narrators’’ (‘‘Boccaccio’s Ars Narrandi in the Sixth Day of the Decameron,’’ in Italian Literature: Roots and Branches, ed. G. Rimanelli and K. J. Atchity [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], 225–42; quotation at 230). Brian Richardson, ‘‘The ‘Ghibelline’ Narrator in the Decameron,’’ Italian Studies 33 (1978): 20–28, notes of Fiammetta (who in the first five Days shows her ‘‘devotion to the Kingdom of Naples and its French rulers’’ [24] by tending to set her stories in Naples) that in the next five Days ‘‘three of Fiammetta’s stories are set in Florence and another in Siena’’ (25); even Fiammetta, then, has been overcome by the mounting pressure of the return in the text’s second half. 16. In ‘‘Boccaccio as Illusionist: The Play of Frames in the Decameron,’’ Humanities Association Review 26 (1975): 327–45, Joy Hambuechen Potter notes that Dioneo’s reference to the plague in the Conclusion to Day 6 ‘‘breaks the rule that no one was to mention anything unpleasant from the outside world’’ (340), but not that this rule was already broken by Lauretta in 6.3. 17. The return to the church of Santa Maria Novella, which completes ‘‘the cyclical movement to the archetypal adventure’’ (354), is noted by Joseph Gibaldi, ‘‘The Decameron Cornice and the Responses to the


Disintegration of Civilization,’’ Kentucky Romance Quarterly 24 (1977): 340–57. 18. For a reading of this novella from the perspective of its Dantesque personnel, see Franco Fido, ‘‘Dante come personaggio mancato del Decameron,’’ in Boccaccio: Secoli di Vita, Atti del Congresso Internazionale, ed. M. Cottino-Jones and E. F. Tuttle (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), 177–89. And now see Kristina Olson, ‘‘The Afterlife of Dante’s Commedia in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Esposizioni’’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006). 19. On the Valley of the Ladies, see Edith G. Kern, ‘‘The Gardens of the Decameron Cornice,’’ PMLA 66 (1951): 505–23; Marshall Brown, ‘‘In the Valley of the Ladies,’’ Italian Quarterly 18 (1975): 33–52; Lucia Marino, The Decameron ‘‘Cornice’’: Allusion, Allegory, and Iconology (Ravenna: Longo, 1979); Tobias Foster Gittes, ‘‘Boccaccio’s ‘Valley of Women’: Fetishized Foreplay in Decameron,’’ Italica 76 (1999): 147–74. 20. Shirley S. Allen, ‘‘The Griselda Tale and the Portrayal of Women in the Decameron,’’ Philological Quarterly 56 (1977): 157–86, believes that the swim is a ‘‘symbolic shedding of social restraints’’ (7). Marshall Brown considers it a ‘‘slightly seditious act, undermining authority and order’’ (‘‘In the Valley of the Ladies,’’ 37). For a darker view, see Gittes. 21. Fido declares, a` propos of this authorial pronouncement: ‘‘Non si tratta, per loro [la brigata], di eludere indefinitamente la sorte di tutti, ma di ritrovare di fronte ad essa quella dignita` umana che gli altri fiorentini avevano perduta’’ (‘‘Il sorriso di Messer Torello,’’ 155). 22. There are other signs of Lauretta’s association with reality. Her song, although unhappy, is more realistic than the other sad songs, depicting a concrete situation: she loved her first husband, who has died, and repents having married a second husband, who is jealous (Conclusion to Day 3). This is the only song which elicits different exegetical approaches from the listeners: some take it ‘‘alla melanese,’’ according to a practical reality, whereby a bad living husband is better than a good dead one, while others give it a loftier esoteric meaning. There are only two stories in the Decameron where an unwanted pregnancy figures in the plot, and Lauretta tells both: the first in a comic vein (the story of Ferondo going to Purgatory, in 3.8), the second in a sentimental key (the trials of the lovers Teodoro and Violante, 5.7). Moreover, from the time that Lauretta first displaces Fiammetta and sings with Dioneo in the Introduction to Day 6, the realistic element is never again entirely absent: Dioneo is reunited with Fiammetta in the Conclusion to Day 7, but Tindaro also arrives with his instruments, to whose music the brigata dances; in the Conclusion to Day 10, where Fiammetta will sing her song of jealous


love, the author takes care to once more insert Lauretta, who leads a dance (‘‘e menando la Lauretta una danza, comando` il re alla Fiammetta che dicesse una canzone’’ [10.Concl.9]). 23. Giuseppe Billanovich writes of Elissa’s ‘‘accostamenti, per contrasto, a Dioneo’’; see Restauri boccacceschi (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1947), 139n1. Marshall Brown believes that Elissa is Dioneo’s antagonist (‘‘In the Valley of the Ladies,’’ 42). Another possible indicator of Elissa’s association with tragic love and death is that she tells the story of Guido Cavalcanti, 6.9, a poet known for his bleak view of love (also noteworthy in this regard, considering Boccaccio’s legendary description of Cavalcanti, is the fact the Elissa is first characterized—like Guido—as somewhat haughty and aloof, ‘‘la quale anzi acerbetta che no, non per malizia ma per antico costume’’ [3.5.2]). Besides Billanovich, possible definitions of the frame characters are provided by: Richardson, ‘‘The ‘Ghibelline’ Narrator in the Decameron,’’ who, using a political perspective, deduces that Emilia is the Ghibelline narrator, whose center of interest is Florence, while Fiammetta is the most Guelph of the characters, and is linked to Naples; Joan M. Ferrante, ‘‘The Frame Characters of the Decameron: A Progression of Virtues,’’ Romance Philology 19 (1965): 212–26, who approaches the question from a theological point of view; Angelo Lipari, ‘‘The Structure and Real Significance of the Decameron,’’ in Essays in Honor of Albert Feuillerat, ed. H. M. Peyre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943), 43–83, who sees the frame characters as representing different aspects of Boccaccio’s poetics. n ot es to ch ap te r 1 2 e di ti ng da nt e’ s r im e a nd it al ia n c ul tu ra l h is to ry : d an te , b oc ca cc io , p et ra rc a . . . ba rb i, co nt in i, f os te r- bo yd e, de ro be rt is

This essay originally appeared in Lettere Italiane 56 (2004): 409–42. Because it is a metacritical piece I have taken the step of translating in the notes the Italian of those critics whose work is discussed, especially De Robertis and Gorni. 1. This project is one that I am undertaking with the help of my former student Manuele Gragnolati, now Lecturer in Italian at Oxford University, who is providing the notes while I am writing introductory essays to each poem. The first volume, spanning the early poems and the poems that were included in the Vita nuova, will appear in 2008. Three of my cappelli introduttivi are in the new journal Dante: Rivista internazionale di studi danteschi 1 (2004): 21–38: ‘‘Saggio di un nuovo commento


alle Rime di Dante. 1. La dispietata mente che pur mira: l’io al crocevia di memoria e disio; 2. Sonar bracchetti e cacciatori aizzare: l’io diviso tra mondo maschile e mondo femminile; 3. Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lippo ed io: l’io e l’incanto della non–differenza.’’ I would like to take this opportunity to thank my students Daniela Castelli and Martin Eisner, the latter now Assistant Professor at Duke University, whose generosity as interlocutors proved invaluable to me throughout the incubation of this essay. 2. ‘‘To gather’’; ‘‘organic’’; ‘‘fragment’’; ‘‘wandering outsiders.’’ 3. Dante Alighieri: Rime, in Le Opere di Dante Alighieri, Edizione Nazionale a cura della Societa` Dantesca Italiana, ed. Domenico De Robertis, 5 vols. (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2002). The five volumes (technically, three volumi consisting of five tomi) are not paginated sequentially throughout. Rather, volume 1, I documenti, consists of two tomi comprising one unit; volume 2, Introduzione, consists of two tomi comprising a second unit; and volume 3, Testi, consists of one tomo comprising a third unit. Most of my citations come from tomo 2 of the Introduzione, where the critical material is located. 4. Rime, ed. Michele Barbi, in Le opere di Dante, testo critico della Societa` Dantesca Italiana (Firenze: Bemporad, 1921). 5. Rime della ‘‘Vita Nuova’’ e della giovinezza, ed. Michele Barbi and Francesco Maggini (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1956); Rime della maturita` e dell’esilio, ed. Michele Barbi and Vincenzo Pernicone (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1969). De Robertis gives us a chronological framework for Barbi’s long devotion to this field, remarking on ‘‘l’ingresso del giovane Barbi in questo che per una buona parte della sua vita sara` il campo in cui soprattutto si esercito`, con la pubblicazione della sua tesi di laurea Della fortuna di Dante nel secolo xvi, ‘Atti della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa,’ Filosofia e Filologia, vii, 1890’’ (Introduzione, 2:1140). 6. Rime, ed. Gianfranco Contini (1946; 2d ed., Torino: Einaudi, 1965). For the history of the edition, see Contini’s ‘‘Postilla del Curatore,’’ p. xxv. 7. Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 8. De Robertis notes that ‘‘La tradizione e` rappresentata da oltre 500 manoscritti’’ (I documenti 1:xviii). Michelangelo Picone described De Robertis’s task thus: ‘‘Nel suo Censimento dei manoscritti di rime di Dante D. De Robertis ha catalogato all’incirca 450 codici, contando sia le raccolte organiche sia quelle occasionali, sia le attribuzioni uniche sia le testimonianze frammentarie. Anche se sottraiamo a questa cifra i 113 manoscritti contenenti Rime apocrife di Dante (in particolare le Rime penitenziali composte verso la fine del Trecento, e attribuite a Dante per


uniformare il suo canzoniere a quello di Petrarca), rimane un numero sempre imponente di attestazioni, soprattutto se confrontato con quello delle altre opere minori (con l’ottantina di manoscritti della Vita nuova, o con la quarantina del Convivio).’’ See ‘‘Dante rimatore,’’ in Letture Classensi: Le ‘Rime’ di Dante, vol. 24, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 1995), 177–78. 9. ‘‘The history of the tradition of the poems we call Dante’s ‘estravaganti’ becomes the comparative study of ancient poetry collections and the genetic examination of the varia lectio of each individual lyric.’’ 10. De Robertis movingly describes this passing of the baton on the first page of his Prefazione to his five volumes: ‘‘Barbi vecchio, sperando che qualcuno delle nuove generazioni ne rilevasse e continuasse il lavoro, e che negli ultimi suoi anni vi si era associato l’allor verde Pernicone; questi, succedutogli alla sua scomparsa, che mi chiese al suo fianco dal 1957 e seguı` i miei progressi finche´, stanco, non lascio` tutto a me l’incarico’’ (I documenti 1:xiii). The task conferred upon De Robertis in 1957 thus came to fruition forty-five years later. 11. Boccaccio concludes the section of the Chigiano devoted to Dante’s canzoni with the phrase ‘‘finiscono le canzoni distese di Dante’’; see Il Codice Chigiano L.V. 176: autografo di Giovanni Boccaccio, edizione fototipica, introduction by Domenico De Robertis (Roma: Archivi Edizioni, 1974). De Robertis glosses ‘‘ ‘distese’ (ossia pluristrofiche)’’ (I documenti 1:xix). Incipits, and all textual citations, are from the De Robertis edition. The Chigiano has been studied by Martin Eisner, whose dissertation, ‘‘Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch: The Chigiano Codex, Terza Rima Trilogy, and the Shaping of Italian Literary History’’ (Columbia University, 2005), analyzes the codex as the site of a complex encounter, engineered by Boccaccio, between himself, Dante, and Petrarch. 12. See Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani, 2 vols., introduction by Domenico De Robertis (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1977). 13. ‘‘We can say that nothing has been done with respect to Dante’s lyrics up to now without taking the Giuntina into consideration’’; ‘‘the first attempt to systematize and order Dante’s lyrics.’’ 14. Book 2 is the least cohesive: its thirty poems consist mainly of sonnets and ballate, many no longer attributed to Dante (starting with Fresca rosa novella), and only two canzoni, of which one is no longer considered Dante’s and the other is the trilingual descort which De Robertis has returned to the canon. Dante’s exchange with Dante da Maiano appears (for the first time) in book 11 of the Giuntina, ‘‘Sonetti dei sopradetti autori mandati l’uno a l’altro.’’ 15. Patrick Boyde, Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).


16. ‘‘Either we trace the history of Dante’s poetic work, the history that the Vita Nova adumbrates and that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries worked to recover; or we propose the form that the manuscript tradition of Dante’s lyrics has gradually coagulated and seems to authorize . . . with the secret hope, perhaps, that the tradition reflects the history of the poet’s work and will restore (betray) an organizing hypothesis.’’ 17. This beautiful sentence is the ending of ‘‘Un’interpretazione di Dante,’’ 1965, rpt. Un’idea di Dante (Torino: Einaudi, 1970), 111: ‘‘Posterity’s genuine impression, upon meeting Dante, is not of bumping into a tenacious and well-preserved survivor, but of catching up with someone who arrived before we did.’’ 18. Even Petrarch, who left clear instructions for the handling of his poems in his autograph manuscript, has been mauled by an editorial tradition that has systematically misread him, preferring to impose its narrative rather than to follow the authorial signposts; see ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’’ in this volume. 19. ‘‘If this means to propose a ‘philological’ model of the collection of Dante’s lyrics (against, one supposes, the interpretation of an assumed authorial will, the rights of the philologist against the rights of the author), this is what is possible and legitimate to do’’; ‘‘Every historic rationalization analogous to the one proposed by Barbi, beyond the possible (and by now amply registered) counter-deductions, always includes a component of interpretation that has nothing to do with that which textual criticism must include.’’ 20. ‘‘At a minimum the new sequence, substituting interpretation for interpretation, would require concordance tables and coordination (as for example in the Foster-Boyde edition) with the preceding numbering or rather with the preceding interpretation.’’ 21. ‘‘Which has been the law since 1921.’’ 22. See Vita Nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni (Torino: Einaudi, 1996). 23. ‘‘In conclusion, we must propose an ordering or a perspective on these lyrics that follows the manuscript tradition, a tradition that, but for the canzoni, is not ordered.’’ 24. ‘‘The great preface of the canzoni’’; ‘‘scattered poems.’’ 25. ‘‘The rime sparse (‘scattered poems’), numbers 19–73, follow, editorially not individualized but for their ‘coming afterwards’ ’’; ‘‘what we may call the ‘narrative of the canzoni’ ’’; ‘‘the ‘secondary’ Dante, the one who ‘comes after the canzoni’ ’’; ‘‘correspondence or argument poems, conforming to a criterion that already existed in some medieval poetry collections.’’


437

26. De Robertis is inconsistent: while in general he follows the practice of including poems directed to Dante in his consecutive numbering (Fresca rosa novella receives its own number, 27, and so forth for all the correspondence poems), the three responses to number 26, A ciascun’alma, are numbered 26a, 26b, and 26c. See Introduzione 2:1199. 27. ‘‘In their pre–Vita Nova dress’’; ‘‘in a first redaction.’’ See the index, where De Robertis places ‘‘(1a redazione)’’ after thirteen of the fourteen Vita nuova poems he includes (the exception is A ciascun’alma). On this topic, see Introduzione, vol. 2, chapter 4, ‘‘La tradizione estravagante delle rime della ‘Vita Nova’.’’ Noteworthy comments may be found throughout the volume (e.g., Introduzione 2:758–59, 1162, 1169, 1175, 1181– 85, 1202). 28. ‘‘Even admitting that all the poems of the Vita Nova were born independently of their (successive) destination, we can (we should) only gather into an edition of the Rime those poems that possess traits that distinguish them from the Vita Nova and guarantee their independence from it (those compositions, of which there are many, that do not present these traits are irrelevant from a philological standpoint even if there is ample proof of their existence outside of the Vita Nova’s textual tradition, in as much as nothing guarantees that they do not represent an early installment of the Vita Nova).’’ 29. See Guglielmo Gorni, ‘‘Sulla nuova edizione delle Rime di Dante,’’ Lettere Italiane 54 (2002): 571–98. 30. ‘‘Why this resigned tone, almost as though hiding behind the ineluctable? More was required, once the decision was made to renovate accepted editorial practice in so traumatic a fashion. The principle that the critical edition is primarily in the service of history, not in the service of idealized organigrams superimposed onto historical documents, had to be defended energetically. On the one side are exegesis and chronology, reversible and always in need of perfecting; on the other is the sequence of texts as one reads them in the manuscripts, a sequence that must be respected as much as possible, because it is history.’’ 31. ‘‘In the absence of a collection made by the author, there has prevailed here (and may it always prevail) the history of the manuscript tradition, which is unanimous in presenting, in the oldest and most complete and most important codices, Dante’s canzoni distese as a group. The option chosen by De Robertis is supported by the ordering of the historic thirteenth-century poetry collections, in which canzoni always precede; but it is less in homage to that model than to the authentic manuscript tradition that De Robertis has proposed a sequence never seen in modern times. There is no need to apologize to the world of Dante scholars, who


would like to place first the poems for Beatrice or presumed to be for Beatrice, followed by those for the donna schermo (completely conjectural), and then by those for the donna gentile, for the donna petra, and finally in last place the canzone ‘montanina’ for the mysterious mountain lady of the Casentino region. . . . No, what comes out is a serial without end, in lyric installments. Enough with artificial reconstructions. Let us say frankly: this is not a recapitulation of Dante’s amours; this is a historic collection, founded on the ancient documents. I give you the lyric Dante as he was read by Boccaccio, by Antonio di Tuccio Manetti and by everyone until the end of the nineteenth century.’’ 32. ‘‘This piece, written upon first reception of De Robertis’s edition, stands militantly in favor of this new method of reading Dante.’’ 33. Boccaccio succeeded in utterly contaminating the reception of Inferno 5; see ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’’ in this volume. 34. ‘‘The use of Cosı` nel mio parlar vogli’esser aspro to inaugurate the series, separated from the compact triad of the other petrose (with which it belongs for its substance more than for its technique), more probably depends on its exemplary citation in Petrarch’s canzone Lasso me (a citation that would have served as an invitation for Boccaccio, with his inclination for the conciliation of traditions and of contradictions—if it were not that, we now recall, the ‘form’ predates Boccaccio’s edition), rather than Petrarch’s citation having been influenced by Boccaccio’s placement of the canzone at the head of his sequence.’’ 35. See my Dante’s Poets, chapter 1, ‘‘Autocitation and Autobiography.’’ 36. And so I do follow De Robertis for the text—even when I find it difficult, as with his substitution of Lippo for Lapo in the incipit Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lippo ed io. In this instance I do not find his arguments convincing; indeed, they seem to demonstrate the quotient of interpretation that is necessarily part of even De Robertis’s practice of philology: La situazione stemmatica, se per la formalita` dei nomi propri si potesse imporre lo stemma codicum, metterebbe senz’altro in minoranza Lippo rispetto a Lapo, vulgo Lapo Gianni, finora riconosciuto partecipe dell’invito e con cio` membro della societa` degli stilnovisti, menzionato anche (ma in lezione ricostruita: i testimoni hanno Lupum, T con la prima u modificata da altri in a) nel De vulgari eloquentia. Fatto sta che dopo la proposta di Gorni e della sua ripresa della questione nell’articolo Paralipomeni a Lippo, SFI xlvii (1989), in particolare pp. 13–15, diversi risultano i documenti segnalati di un’equivalenza Lippo-Lapo, piu` di una volta Lippus seu Lapus. Sicche´ a questo punto non si tratta piu` nemmeno di una provocazione (come in De Robertis Cavalcanti 148 e 149). Scrivere

Notes to Pages 261–265 439 Lapo e` come scrivere Lippo: e questa variante, assolutamente indifferente, qui decisamente adottata, significa semplicemente non Lapo Gianni; come non s’intende Lapo Gianni nel prossimo sonetto 39 Se vedi Amore pur ponendo a testo, secondo il consensus codicum e conforme all’uso, ben attestato, Lapo. (Testi, 306)

But I am not in a position to take one of De Robertis’s variants and not another; such decisions will have to await the consensus of philologists over time. 37. ‘‘Which cannot be published other than as it is in the Vita Nova, since there is no other version, and which we will produce only as an aid to memory. ’’ 38. Boccaccio thus ended up transmitting 20 of Dante’s canzoni: the 15 canzoni distese plus the five that are in the Vita nuova (the Vita nuova’s three great canzoni, Donne ch’avete, Donna pietosa and Li occhi dolenti, as well as its one monostrophic canzone, Sı` lungiamente, and the twostrophe Quantunque volte). Boccaccio does not transmit Dante’s other two monostrophic canzoni, Lo meo servente core and Madonna, quel signor che voi portate, or—most significantly—Lo doloroso amor. 39. ‘‘They do not belong here [in an edition of the rime] because of the dress in which they have come down to us, which designates only the Vita Nova.’’ 40. ‘‘Per quanto finalmente spetta all’ordine delle poesie certe, di Dante o dei corrispondenti, abbiamo pure accolto, ponendo in parentesi la sua numerazione, l’ordine del Barbi’’ (Contini, Rime, 302). 41. ‘‘Dante did not gather his lyrics into an organic whole.’’ 42. ‘‘Which of the two reconstructive hypotheses do we consider more sound?’’ ‘‘Having to choose between the two hypotheses, I would decisively take Contini’s side.’’ 43. ‘‘Barbi is thus right when he considers that a lyric read in the context of the Vita nuova or Convivio is essentially different from that same lyric read independently. A lyric that is accompanied by the author’s commentary is not received in the same way as one that is unaccompanied. As demonstrated by D. De Robertis, this divergence can also exist at the level of the text: a poem may have experienced small but significant textual variations when it passed from the outsider tradition to the organic tradition of the Vita nuova.’’ 44. The divergence between the poems and the prose is striking and understudied; systematic analysis of how the Vita nuova prose rewrites and conditions the poems it purports to gloss has yet to be done. Most illuminating and useful from this perspective is De Robertis’s commentary in his edition, Vita Nuova (Milano: Ricciardi, 1980). Carin McLain


is working on this topic in her Columbia University dissertation, ‘‘Prose and Poetry and the Making of Beatrice.’’ Recent suggestions that Dante ‘‘must have’’ written some poems appositely for the libello and attempts to guess at which ones they were are unconvincing; see, for instance, Stefano Carrai, ‘‘Critica genetica in assenza di autografo: per una protostoria della Vita Nova,’’ Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana 19 (2002): 9–17. 45. ‘‘On the other hand Contini is also right in respecting the independence and the specificity of works like the Vita nuova and Convivio, and in not considering the poems gathered within them to be extrapolatable, thus applying a hermeneutic of the fragment only to the outsider rime.’’ 46. On Petrarch’s invention of the genre of lyric sequence to confront temporal (not just thematic) issues, see my ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’’ in this volume. As to the question of whether Petrarch ‘‘invented’’ the canzoniere, history being the unmarked continuum that it is, our attempts to ‘‘discretize the continuum,’’ as scientists put it, are bound to be subject to endless pushings of the (invented) boundaries forward and backward. Olivia Holmes, in Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), hopes to ‘‘push backward in time the moment at which we consider the genre [of canzoniere] as emerging, both in order to give some poets traditionally considered ‘minor’ their due credit and to suggest how deeply the roots of subjectivity run’’ (23). Subjectivity is a word of great latitude, and ‘‘roots of subjectivity’’ brings us right back to our individual discretio as discretizers of the continuum: which are the roots, which the branches? I remain persuaded that one can fairly say that Petrarch invents the lyric sequence according to my definition in ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence’’: it is a genre used literally to manipulate time. And in fact the analyses offered by Holmes of earlier collections are purely thematic. 47. ‘‘I believe in fact that a lyric, once it has been included in the Vita nuova or Convivio, has lost its character of extemporary experiment and has entered into a literary totality and compositional mechanism from which alone it can receive its significance.’’ 48. ‘‘Le Rime comprendono quindi la produzione lirica di Dante che e` rimasta fuori dal giovanile libello amoroso e dal maturo trattato filosofico’’ (‘‘Dante rimatore,’’ 174–75). 49. ‘‘Per un ordinamento delle ‘Rime’ di Dante,’’ 23: ‘‘It does not seem legitimate, without explicit documentation of authorial will, that


the same text can function as an integral part of two works.’’ The heading of this section of the essay is ‘‘Le Rime e le ‘opere organiche.’ ’’ 50. Cappello writes that ‘‘testi definitivamente rimasti nello stato di liriche isolate sono citati nel De vulgari eloquentia allo stesso titolo di quelli del ‘libello’ e del trattato e quindi posti su un piede di parita` quanto all’autorizzazione a circolare’’ (‘‘Per un ordinamento delle ‘Rime’ di Dante,’’ 22). I have no quarrel with the observation per se, but I find suspect the logic that requires the testimony of the treatise to offset the implied negative judgment cast by Dante on the poems that he omits from the Vita nuova and Convivio. 51. For Guittone in Dante and Dante’s experience of anxiety of influence vis–a`–vis the Aretine, see Dante’s Poets, chapter 2. 52. ‘‘The codices for this canzone cannot be counted in the hundreds as for the others . . . but rather on the fingers of one hand.’’ 53. ‘‘Risks being poorly received because of its difficulty, especially abroad and by those who look at philology as a world apart.’’ 54. ‘‘In the ordering rather than in the text of the poems, in the form (in the technical sense) rather than in the content.’’ 55. Currently available to the Italian audience is an institutionalization of Contini’s choices and viewpoint, in the useful paperback edition of Piero Cudini, Le rime (Milano: Garzanti, 1979). Since the story of a given commentary is necessarily inscribed into the sequence one confers upon the poems, and the sequence is by definition a subjective enterprise for each commentator to undertake anew, my order is not identical to anyone else’s, although it is closest to Foster-Boyde because of my commitment to their innovative inclusion of the dispersed Vita nuova poems. One could go even further than Foster-Boyde in dismantling the structure constituted by the Vita nuova by not preserving its order; I considered this, but have not pursued it because the gain seems more ideological than historical, especially in that the Vita nuova itself adopts a chronological template. 56. As a result, I will devote particular attention to making connections between the rime and the Commedia. For examples of this kind of lectura, see in this volume ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire,’’ ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context,’’ and ‘‘Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli)’’; outside this volume, see the cappelli introduttivi to La dispietata mente, Sonar bracchetti, and Guido, i’ vorrei cited in note 1, above.

Notes to Pages 281–284 442 n ot es to ch ap te r 1 3 le parole son femmine e i fatti sono maschi : t ow ar d a se xu al po et ic s o f t he decame ro n ( de ca me ron 2 .9 , 2 .1 0, 5. 10 )

This essay was originally published in Studi sul Boccaccio 21 (1993): 175–97. For the proverb, see Dizionario comparato di proverbi e modi proverbiali, ed. Augusto Arthaber (Milano: Hoepli, 1972), 503. 1. Translations of the Decameron are those of G. H. McWilliam, The Decameron, 2d ed. rev. (London: Penguin, 1995); occasionally I modify the translations to remain closer to the literal meaning or to make better sense within my prose. The Italian text is cited from the edition of Vittore Branca (Torino: Einaudi, 1980). 2. Lauretta in Day 8 chooses a topic that explicitly plays off Dioneo’s topic for Day 7: ‘‘Dioneo volle ieri che oggi si ragionasse delle beffe che le donne fanno a’ mariti; e, se non fosse che io non voglio mostrare d’essere di schiatta di can botolo che incontanamente si vuol vendicare, io direi che domane si dovesse ragionare delle beffe che gli uomini fanno alle lor mogli’’ (Yesterday, Dioneo insisted that we should talk, today, about the tricks played upon husbands by their wives; and but for the fact that I do not wish it to be thought that I belong to that breed of snapping curs who immediately turn round and retaliate, I should oblige you, on the morrow, to talk about the tricks played on wives by their husbands) (7.Concl.3). 3. For the importance of this occurrence within the economy of the frame narrative, see ‘‘The Wheel of the Decameron’’ in this volume. 4. The lewd suggestions that are occasionally proffered by a male member of the brigata constitute another intriguing contamination between the frame-world and the world of the novelle. Significantly, these suggestions are expressed in metaphorical codes adopted from the novelle, as in Filostrato’s remarks at the end of Day 3: ‘‘Se mi fosse stato creduto, i lupi avrebbono alle pecore insegnato rimettere il diavolo in inferno non peggio che Rustico facesse a Alibech’’ (Had you listened to me, the wolves would have taught the sheep by now to put the devil back in hell, no less skillfully than Rustico taught Alibech) (3.Concl.2). As we shall see, the metaphors function as literal ‘‘bridges’’ between parola and fatto, between the world of women and the world of men, between the world of the frame and the world of the novelle. 5. Emma Grimaldi reads 2.10 as a subversive vindication of ‘‘l’eros, e l’eros femminile in particolare’’ and notes that the theme of the ‘‘malmaritata,’’ first introduced with Bartolomea, will be fully considered in the


stories of Day 7; see Il privilegio di Dioneo: L’eccezione e la regola nel sistema ‘‘Decameron’’ (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987), 41. 6. There are interesting implications here of an autobiographical nature, since ‘‘leggere e scrivere’’ are Boccaccio’s own occupations (we will have occasion to note, too, the Boccaccian resonance of the setting that opens 2.9), as well as for the whole question of female education. 7. It is worth keeping in mind that only male protagonists figure by name in the rubrics of 2.9 and 2.10: Bernabo` and Ambruogiuolo are named, as are Riccardo (Ricciardo in the rubric) and Paganino. And yet Boccaccio’s elaborations on the plots as outlined in the rubrics are such as to transform 2.9 into Zinevra’s story and 2.10 into Bartolomea’s story. 8. Dioneo so desires to respond to Filomena’s story and to illustrate Bernabo`’s stupidity that he alters his choice of novella: ‘‘una parte della novella della reina m’ha fatto mutar consiglio di dirne una, che all’animo m’era, a doverne un’altra dire: e questa e` la bestialita` di Bernabo`. . . .’’ (there is one feature of the queen’s story which has caused me to substitute another tale for the one I was intending to relate, and this is the stupidity of Bernabo`) (2.10.3). 9. In reading tracts on women, two overriding misogynist topoi stand out: women should be silent, and they should be kept occupied by means of the spindle (see, for instance, Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990]). Putting these topoi into the context of Dioneo’s comments, one could say that the spindle is the emblematic means for safeguarding a woman who is left home alone, almost a substitute for her husband’s penis. It is significant in this regard that Boccaccio specifically excludes from his audience women who are content with their spindles, explaining that his novelle are written ‘‘in soccorso e rifugio di quelle che amano, per cio` che all’altre e` assai l’ago e ’l fuso e l’arcolaio’’ (as succor and diversion for the ladies, but only for those who are in love, since the others can make do with their needles, their reels, and their spindles) (Proemio, 13). Women’s inferiority is connected to their lowly domestic activities, and compared to the superior activities of scholars, by Fiammetta, who (in the atmosphere of growing repression that builds in the Decameron’s later days, as though to counteract the freedom achieved by the brigata’s ladies in the Valley of the Ladies), says of herself and her comrades that ‘‘appena alla rocca e al fuso bastiamo’’ (we have quite enough to do in coping with our distaffs and our spindles) (10.6.3). 10. Ambruogiuolo here recounts his own novella, which—aside from the moral issue of its deceitfulness—is a different and legitimate story


from the one recounted by Filomena. The Decameron offers other fascinating examples of alternative tales, which taken together fashion a commentary of sorts on the birth of the novella. This genesis, a development from ‘‘news’’ or transmitted information into story, as well as the arbitrariness of the process and the potential garbling of the lines of transmission, is particularly clear in the case of messer Torello in 10.9. The mistaken news (‘‘novella’’) that messer Torello is dead becomes a full–fledged story (‘‘novella’’) when elaborated by ‘‘eyewitnesses’’ who claim to have been at his burial: ‘‘per la qual cosa, essendo messer Torel di Stra per la sua nobilta` per lo essercito conosciuto, chiunque udı` dire ‘Messer Torello e` morto’ credette di messer Torel di Stra e non di quel di Dignes; e il caso, che sopravenne, della presura non lascio sgannar gl’ingannati; per che molti italici tornaron con questa novella, tra’ quali furon de’ si presuntuosi che ardiron di dire se´ averlo veduto morto e essere stati alla sepoltura’’ (since messer Torello of Stra` was famed for his nobility throughout the whole of the army, whenever anyone heard, ‘‘Messer Torello is dead,’’ they at once assumed it was the latter of the two, and not the former, that was meant. Before they had a chance to perceive their mistake messer Torello was taken prisoner, so that many Italians returned with the news [novella] of his death, and there were those who had the audacity to assert that they had seen his corpse and attended his burial) (10.9.61–62). 11. ‘‘Veramente se per ogni volta che elle a queste cosı` fatte novelle attendono nascesse loro un corno nella fronte, il quale desse testimonianza di cio` che fatto avessero, io mi credo che poche sarebber quelle che v’atendessero; ma, non che il corno nasca, egli non se ne pare, a quelle che savie sono, ne´ pedata ne´ orma, e la vergogna e ’l guastamento dell’onore non consiste se non nelle cose palesi: per che, quando possono occultamente, il fanno, o per mattezza lasciano’’ (If, of course, a horn, bearing witness to their doings, were to sprout from their heads whenever they were unfaithful, then I think that the number of unfaithful women would be small. Not only do they not grow any horns, however, but the judicious ones leave no visible trace of their activities) (2.9.19). 12. Nella Giannetto comments that Bartolomea ‘‘produces one of those eloquent defenses of female rights, of which Boccaccio offers more than one example in the Decameron’’; her note indicates ‘‘the audacious discourse of Madonna Filippa, the ‘feminist’ of the Decameron’’ as a variant (‘‘Parody in the Decameron: A ‘Contented Captive’ and Dioneo,’’ The Italianist 1 [1981]: 7–23: citations at p. 10 and in n. 14). Pier Massimo Forni’s connection of Bartolomea to the very different figure of Ghismonda (‘‘L’orazione con cui la gagliarda giovane risponde al marito che tenta di convincerla a ritornare, preannuncia quella che Ghismonda rivolgera` al padre’’) highlights the importance of this somewhat neglected


story within the economy of the Decameron; see Forme complesse nel ‘‘Decameron’’ (Firenze: Olschki, 1992), 45. 13. Giannetto reads 2.10 as a parodic reversal of the Greek novel, culminating in the ‘‘perfect reversal of the expected ending,’’ that is, failed recognition and failed reunion (‘‘Parody in the Decameron,’’ 9). Alessandro Duranti adds to the roster of sexual metaphors in 2.10, commenting with respect to ‘‘la commedia del non riconoscimento’’ that ‘‘di conoscenza biblica ovviamente si metaforeggia’’ (12); see ‘‘Le novelle di Dioneo,’’ in Studi di filologia e critica offerti dagli allievi a Lanfranco Caretti (Roma: Salerno editrice, 1985), 1:1–38. 14. This important novella, as mathematically central within a structure of one hundred tales as the much more discussed tale of madonna Oretta (6.1), has been critically undervalued, noted mainly for its Apuleian antecedent. Grimaldi, for instance, focuses on sodomy as ‘‘il mezzo usato dal Boccaccio per circoscrivere in un sinistro alone di turpe bassezza un personaggio il cui originario corrispettivo ‘bonus alioquin vir et adprime modestus’ e` invece considerato da Apuleio figura positiva osservata con umana simpatia’’ (Il privilegio di Dioneo, 170). 15. The stress on Riccardo’s aptitude for study conjures up that other studious failure in love, the scholar of 8.7, and situates 2.10 at the center of a vast problematic—Boccaccio’s ‘‘sexual poetics,’’ stretching all the way to the Corbaccio—whose coordinates are scholars as lovers, on the one hand, and the status of women (‘‘le Muse son donne’’ versus ‘‘appena alla rocca e al fuso bastiamo’’; see note 9 above), on the other. 16. Branca stresses Riccardo’s juridical arguments in the Introduction to his edition, xxviii–xxix; see also Boccaccio medievale (Firenze: Sansoni, 1990), 365–68. 17. The same point is made by the English princess in 2.3, who pleads her case to the pope by noting that had she married ‘‘[i]l re di Scozia vecchissimo signore, essendo io giovane come voi mi vedete’’ (the King of Scotland, a very old man, whereas I myself am a young girl, as you can see) (37), as her father had intended, she would surely have been driven to dishonor. 18. It is most suggestive, in the context of my interpretation of 2.10, that the Decameron’s first use of sexually metaphoric language, ‘‘con che corno gli uomini cozzano’’ from the story of Alatiel (which also contains ‘‘santo cresci in man’’ [37] and ‘‘san Cresci in Valcava’’ [109]), should be immediately followed by a dichotomy between parole and fatti: ‘‘Il che poi che ella ebbe sentito, non avendo mai davanti saputo con che corno gli uomini cozzano, quasi pentuta del non avere alle lusinghe di Pericone assentito, senza attendere d’essere a cosı` dolci notti invitata, spesse volte


se stessa invitava non con le parole, che non si sapea fare intendere, ma co’ fatti’’ (She had no conception of the kind of horn that men do their butting with, and when she felt what was happening, it was almost as though she regretted having turned a deaf ear to Pericone’s flattery and could not see why she had waited for an invitation before spending her nights so agreeably. For it was she herself who was now issuing the invitation, and she did so several times over, not in so many words, since she was unable to make herself understood, but by way of deeds) (2.7.30; my italics). According to my reading, Boccaccio is here pointing to Alatiel not as a passive victim, an object, a ‘‘femmina,’’ but as one who actively desires in her own right, and knows how to move from parole to fatti in the pursuit of her desires. The parallelism between 2.7 and 2.10 includes the fact that Alatiel, too, ultimately uses words to secure the deeds/events that she wants. Giannetto notes that Alatiel is ‘‘in many respects, a ‘sister’ of Bartolomea,’’ but with these differences: ‘‘Alatiel, in fact, who is saved from scandal, maintains appearances, whereas Bartolomea totally defies scandal. Indeed, if Alatiel succeeds, thanks to a deception which hides the transgression, thereby cancelling out all its social effects, Bartolomea succeeds by actually obtaining the legitimization of the transgression itself ’’ (‘‘Parody in the Decameron,’’ 18). 19. Interesting comments on the procedure whereby Boccaccio builds a story around a metaphor, with specific references to 2.10 and 5.4, may be found in Francesco Bruni, Boccaccio: L’invenzione della letteratura mezzana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 363–67. Bruni suggests that Boccaccio’s judge may be the carnal embodiment of a scholarly joke: ‘‘Non s’intende proporre la lettera di Guido Faba come fonte della novella del Boccaccio, ma avanzare semplicemente la possibilita` che da un ac-co-stamento scherzoso degli studi di diritto all’attivita` erotica (circolante negli ambienti dell’ars dictandi), Boccaccio sia stato spinto a inventare un giudice in carne ed ossa, e a materializzare l’immagine scherzosa, trasformandola in azione novellistica’’ (364). Bruni further suggests that at the basis of 5.4 is ‘‘il processo contrario, e cioe` la metaforizzazione di una vicenda narrativa’’ (364). Similarly, Forni comments that ‘‘Piu` d’una novella del Decameron si presenta come il frutto di un’immaginazione linguistica,’’ and suggests Riccardo’s closing proverb as a point of departure for the author’s fantasy: ‘‘O non sara` invece da credere che il Boccaccio sia partito da quel detto, ‘Il mal furo non vuol festa,’ e su di esso abbia fondato la costruzione narrativa?’’ (Forme complesse nel ‘‘Decameron,’’ 53). This suggestion is particularly intriguing in the light of Boccaccio’s reprisal of ‘‘foro’’ in the Conclusione dell’Autore; see note 23, below.


20. Alessandro Duranti tabulates all the reactions to Dioneo’s stories in Le novelle di Dioneo, 9n17. 21. Branca takes ‘‘furo’’ as ‘‘foro’’ rendered with a Pisan accent and notes the way in which the phrase synthesizes the novella: ‘‘Il detto sentenzioso, quasi da codice, allude sinteticamente a tutta la vicenda matrimoniale del vecchio giudice: una sorta di paronomasia (‘denominatio’) complicata dalla pronuncia pisana’’ (Decameron, 314). McWilliam translates, ‘‘There’s never any rest for the bar,’’ and then in a note offers the literal translation, ‘‘The wicked hole refuses to take a holiday,’’ commenting: ‘‘The sexual pun of the original is made possible because furo, the [Pisan] equivalent of Florentine foro, can refer both to the vagina and to the bar, or legal profession’’ (Decameron, 819). 22. Bruni notes the lexical richness afforded by the sexual metaphors, and the process whereby ‘‘l’eufemismo e il doppio senso attraggono termini estranei in prima istanza (e cioe` per il loro significato di base) alla sfera sessuale’’ (Boccaccio: L’invenzione della letteratura mezzana, 361). 23. Boccaccio’s list of quotidian words whose scope he has enlarged through metaphor—‘‘ ‘foro’ e ‘caviglia’ e ‘mortaio’ e ‘pestello’ e ‘salsiccia’ e ‘mortadello’ ’’ (Concl. Aut.5)—begins by echoing Riccardo’s ‘‘Il mal furo non vuol festa’’ (2.10.42). The terms ‘‘mortaio’’ and ‘‘pestello’’ recall 2.10.37. The importance of the Author’s Conclusion for the topic I am treating is such as to require a further study. 24. Raccolta di proverbi toscani, rev. ed. Gino Capponi (Livorno: Edizioni Medicee, 1971), 126. n ot es to ch ap te r 1 4 d an te an d f ra nc es ca da ri mi ni : r ea lp ol it ik , r om an ce , g en de r

This essay first appeared in Speculum 75 (2000): 1–28. 1. Marco Battagli was born in Rimini in the first decade of the fourteenth century and died before 1376; his chronicle, Marcha (the title derives from the author’s Christian name), compiles events from Creation to 1354 and was written between 1350 and 1354. The last book contains the chapter ‘‘On the Origins of the Malatesta’’ (‘‘De origine dominorum de Malatestis’’), written, according to its editor, in 1352; see Marcha, ed. Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Rerum Italicorum Scriptores, vol. 16, part 3 (Citta` di Castello: S. Lapi, 1913), xxiii. Battagli’s sentence on Paolo’s death elicits from Masse`ra the following comment: ‘‘E` questa la notizia piu` antica della tragedia che ci rimanga, eccezion fatta dei commentatori dell’Inferno,


in fonti storiche’’ (This is the oldest reference to the tragedy that has come down to us from historical sources, with the exception of commentaries to the Inferno) (31). I would like to thank Benjamin Kohl for steering me toward Battagli and for providing valuable feedback as I worked on this essay. 2. According to Masse`ra, Battagli’s chapter on the Malatesta ‘‘costituisce la piu` antica ed autorevole fonte di storia malatestiana e municipale’’ (consitutes the oldest and most authoritative source of the history of Rimini and the Malatesta family) (Marcha, xlvii). For more on Battagli, see Masse`ra’s lengthy preface. 3. Regarding Battagli’s ‘‘assai vasta e varia cultura’’ (vast and varied culture), O. Banti notes that ‘‘in essa hanno larga parte (come appare spesso dalle espressioni e dai concetti) la Bibbia e le opere dell’Alighieri’’ (much of it is based, as appears frequently from expressions and concepts, on the Bible and the works of Dante); see Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1965), 7:208. 4. Indeed, we might well wonder how we can feel sure that the story as a whole is not Dante’s invention. While he obviously invented the material for which only one of the murdered protagonists could have vouched, the bare facts of Francesca’s adultery and murder must have occurred, given that the commentators who follow Dante fill in key details—like the protagonists’ names—that he omits from Inferno 5. Moreover, Francesca’s family, well acquainted with Dante and his poetry (Guido Novello da Polenta, Francesca’s nephew and Dante’s host in Ravenna, even tried his hand at Dante-inspired love lyrics), never denied his account. On Dante and the Polenta family, and for Guido da Polenta’s poetry, see Corrado Ricci, L’ultimo rifugio di Dante (1891; repr. Ravenna: Longo, 1965). 5. ‘‘Il canto v dell’Inferno,’’ originally published in Nuova antologia, 1902, repr. in Studi danteschi (Napoli: Perrella, 1912), 383–442: ‘‘Of this event, no contemporary chronicle, no document, has preserved a trace; its first, and only contemporary narrator, is Dante’’ (409). 6. Antonio Enzo Quaglio, ‘‘Francesca da Rimini,’’ in Enciclopedia Dantesca (hereafter cited as ED), 6 vols. (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–1978): ‘‘Dante’s account remains the only contemporary witness of the drama of adultery and death consummated at the Malatesta court, events forgotten by both contemporary and successive chronicles and local documents’’ (3:1). A dramatic account of the lacuna in two major chronicles of the late Duecento, those of Pietro Cantinelli and Salimbene da Parma, is offered by Nevio Matteini in Francesca da Rimini: Storia, mito, arte (Bologna: Cappelli, 1965):

Notes to Page 305 449 Il Chronicon di Pietro Cantinelli? Tace. Il Cantinelli, nato probabilmente a Faenza intorno al 1243 e morto, forse, nel 1306, ci porge l’illustrazione storica piu` autentica della Divina Commedia. ‘‘I personaggi danteschi’’—scrive il Torraca nella prefazione—‘‘sono qui una folla. . . . Per l’ultimo trentennio del secolo xiii Bologna e la Romagna non hanno un’altra cronaca propria altrettanto ampia, abbondante, ordinata ed esatta.’’ Fra i Polentani vi compaiono: Guido Minore, Bernardino, Lamberto, Ostasio, Guido Riccio, Alberico e Geremia. Fra i Malatesti: il ‘‘Mastin vecchio,’’ Gianciotto, Malatestino, Ramberto e il figlio Giovanni. Di Francesca e Paolo neppure i nomi sono ricordati. E Salimbene da Parma? Tace anch’egli. Fra’ Salimbene, che visse dal 1221 al 1289, assistette a diversi fatti notevolissimi ed avvicino` personalita` della Chiesa e della politica, uomini di toga e di armi. Soggiorno` in Romagna, soprattutto a Ravenna, per cinque anni. La prima data che ricorre nella sua Cronica e` il 21 luglio 1283; l’ultima l’8 settembre 1287. . . . Parla di Guido da Montefeltro e di Tebaldello Zambrasi, di Malatesta da Verucchio e dei Manfredi, dei Traversari e degli Accarisi, di Guido Minore e di Guido Riccio. Di Paolo e Francesca nulla. (Francesca da Rimini: Storia, mito, arte, 57–58) The Chronicon of Pietro Cantinelli? It is silent. Cantinelli, born probably in Faenza around 1243 and dead, probably, in 1306, offers us the most authentic historical illustration of the Divina Commedia. ‘‘Dante’s characters’’—writes Torraca in the preface—‘‘are here in droves. . . . For the last thirty years of the thirteenth century Bologna and Romagna do not have another chronicle as ample, abundant, ordered, and precise.’’ Among the Polentani appear: Guido Minore, Bernardino, Lamberto, Ostasio, Guido Riccio, Alberico and Geremia. Among the Malatesta: the ‘‘Old Mastiff,’’ Gianciotto, Malatestino, Ramberto and his son Giovanni. And yet, not even the names of Francesca and Paolo are remembered. And Salimbene of Parma? He too is silent. Fra Salimbene, who lived from 1221 to 1289, participated in many notable events and was close to personalities of the church and political life, men of peace and of war. He lived in Romagna, especially in Ravenna, for five years. The first date of his Cronica is July 21, 1283, and the last is September 8, 1287. . . . He speaks of Guido da Montefeltro and of Tebaldello Zambrasi, of Malatesta da Verucchio and of the Manfredi, the Traversari and the Accarisi, of Guido Minore and of Guido Riccio. Of Paolo and Francesca, nothing.

7. This point is clearly made by the distinguished Romagnol historian Augusto Vasina in his entry ‘‘Malatesta’’ in the Enciclopedia Dantesca: ‘‘Persino dietro il dramma di Paolo M[alatesta] e di Francesca da Polenta


(Inf. v 82–138) e` ben presente una rigida logica dinastica, tesa, mediante l’unione fra Giovanni (Gianciotto) M[alatesta] e Francesca, a fini di tirannide. In realta` tale politica matrimoniale, senza dubbio all’origine di quella tragedia, era destinata a rassodare un’alleanza familiare fra M[alatesta] e Polentani proprio nel momento piu` critico della loro ascesa al dominio signorile, rispettivamente su Rimini e su Ravenna’’ (Even behind the drama of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Polenta there is clearly present a rigid dynastic logic, whose goal, by way of the union of Giovanni [Gianciotto] Malatesta and Francesca, is the imposition of tyranny. Such matrimonial politics, undoubtedly at the root of the tragedy, was intended to strengthen the family alliance between the Malatesta and the Polentani precisely in the most critical moment of their respective rises to power over Rimini and over Ravenna) (ED 3:782). 8. Of course, we should expect from Dante the culturally unexpected; see, with respect to the unorthodox role he assigns Beatrice, Joan M. Ferrante, ‘‘Dante’s Beatrice: Priest of an Androgynous God,’’ in CEMERS Occasional Papers, 2 (Binghamton, N.Y.: CEMERS, 1992), 3–32. 9. Most scholars concur in putting the marriage at this time, although Torraca opts for a later date; see ‘‘Il canto v dell’Inferno,’’ esp. p. 420. After the death of Malatesta da Verucchio, power went first to Gianciotto’s older brother, Malatestino, second lord of Rimini, and then to his half-brother, Pandolfo, Malatesta da Verucchio’s son by his second wife. The Enciclopedia Dantesca entries by Vasina on the various members of the Malatesta clan are more helpful in reconstructing Francesca’s life than Quaglio’s entry on Francesca, whose first paragraph erroneously calls Gianciotto ‘‘signore di Rimini’’ (ED 3:1). It is worth noting, however, that this mistake is frequently made, and is perhaps due to the contamination of Boccaccio’s account; see, for instance, the commentary of Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, Inferno (Milano: Mondadori, 1991), 155. 10. L’Ottimo commento della ‘‘Divina Commedia,’’ cited from the Dartmouth Dante Project, http://dante.dartmouth.edu (hereafter cited as DDP). Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 11. Torraca corrects the Ottimo on this score: ‘‘Di una guerra combattuta in quel periodo tra Riminesi e Ravennati non resta nessuna menzione’’ (Of a war fought in this period between Rimini and Ravenna there is no historical record) (‘‘Il canto v dell’Inferno,’’ 412). 12. In fact, the decree relating to the dowry of Margherita de’ Paltenieri, Malatesta da Verucchio’s second wife, was drawn up in Guido da Polenta’s house, on 25 July 1266; see Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, ‘‘Note malatestiane,’’ Archivio storico italiano, 5th series, 47 (1911): 3–48, at p. 17. 13. Esposizioni sopra la ‘‘Comedia’’ di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan, vol. 6 of Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milano:


Mondadori, 1965), 315. The translation by Mario Domandi is in the commentary volume of The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 87. All translations of Boccaccio’s commentary, with minor changes, are from this translation. 14. ‘‘Egli e` da sapere che gran tempo fu guerra tra messer Guido da Polenta et messer Malatesta vecchio da Rimino. Ora, perche` era rincresciuta all’una parte et all’altra, di commune concordia feciono pace, et accio` che meglio s’osservasse, feciono parentado insieme’’ (It should be known that for a long time there was war between Messer Guido da Polenta and Messer Malatesta of Rimini. Now, since both sides were unhappy about the war, they decided together to make peace, and so that the peace would be better maintained, they arranged a marriage between them) (DDP). 15. The text is from La ‘‘Commedia’’ secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, 4 vols. (Milano: Mondadori, 1966–1967). 16. See Torraca, ‘‘Il canto v dell’Inferno,’’ 434. Torraca speculates that the seventeen-year-old Dante met Paolo Malatesta when he served as capitano del popolo in Florence in 1282 (433). 17. Torraca reconstructs as follows: ‘‘Morı` [Francesca] tra il 1283 e il 1286. Dopo il febbraio del 1283, non accade piu` di trovar nessuna traccia di Paolo; nel febbraio del 1287, a un atto di grande importanza politica, intervengono i suoi fratelli, non lui. Nel 1288, il vecchio Malatesta s’impegna alle future nozze di Malatestino, non suo figlio, quello, ‘che vedeva pur con l’uno’; ma un bambino, che Giovanni aveva avuto da Zambrasina, la seconda moglie: se anche il bambino non avesse superato un anno di eta`, il matrimonio di Zambrasina con Giovanni doveva essere avvenuto due anni innanzi, nel 1286’’ (Francesca died between 1283 and 1286. After February of 1283, there is no more trace of Paolo; in February of 1287, in an act of great political importance, his brothers are present, but he is not. In 1288, old Malatesta engages to be married Malatestino, not his son Malatestino, but the child of Giovanni and Zambrasina, Giovanni’s second wife. Therefore, even if this child was not more than a year old, the marriage of Zambrasina with Giovanni must have occurred two years before, in 1286) (‘‘Il canto v dell’Inferno,’’ 419). The gist of this information was originally put forth by Luigi Tonini in Della storia civile e sacra riminese, vol. 3 (Rimini: Malvolti ed Ercolani, 1862), 257–58. 18. For a re´sume´ of Francesca’s fortunes in drama, figurative art, and music, see Matteini, Francesca da Rimini: Storia, mito, arte, 96–143. 19. A perusal of twentieth-century commentaries on Inferno 5 will show that neither of the above guidelines is routine critical practice; commentators do not, first of all, explicitly indicate Dante’s historical role in


relating Francesca’s story, nor, secondly, do they keep clear the boundaries between Dante’s account and its elaborations. A separate study could be done of issues relating to the commentary tradition, which include the questions raised by Dante’s own reticence. For instance, what did Dante think a reader would make of the verse ‘‘Caina attende chi a vita ci spense’’? While suggestive of fratricide in its allusion to Cain, its precise significance can only be ascertained through a commentary or prior knowledge of the Inferno. By the same token, did Dante take for granted that commentators would furnish, in the case of Francesca for instance, at least the necessary names and a skeletal version of events? As it happens, commentators immediately began to fill in the gaps, so that the question of what reading of Inferno 5 emerges from an encounter unmediated by notes can be entertained only as a thought experiment. 20. Antonio Enzo Quaglio points out that ‘‘altre citta`, oltre a Ravenna, potrebbero teoricamente ambire, per la loro posizione geografica, compresa nell’allora estuario padano, a tale onore’’; see ‘‘Francesca da Rimini tra Dante e Boccaccio,’’ in Al di la` di Francesca e Laura (Padova: 1973), 10. 21. On loving Vergil and losing him, see my Dante’s Poets, chapter 3; on the dialectical and ‘‘living’’ nature of the Commedia’s textuality, see my The Undivine Comedy. 22. See ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context’’ in this volume, where I note that Francesca’s ‘‘Amor . . . non m’abbandona’’ echoes the ‘‘Amor . . . non m’abbandona’’ of Io son venuto, verses 23–25. 23. In thinking of how Francesca could actively construct her passivity, I found useful Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). According to Radway, ‘‘To qualify as a romance, the story must chronicle not merely the events of a courtship but what it feels like to be the object of one’’ (64). Further on, Radway writes, ‘‘Passivity is at the heart of the romance experience in the sense that the final goal of each narrative is the creation of that perfect union where the ideal male, who is masculine and strong yet nurturant too, finally recognizes the intrinsic worth of the heroine. Thereafter, she is required to do nothing more than exist as the center of this paragon’s attention. Romantic escape is, therefore, a temporary but literal denial of the demands women recognize as an integral part of their roles as nurturing wives and mothers. It is also a figurative journey to a utopian state of total receptiveness where the reader, as a result of her identification with the heroine, feels herself the object of someone else’s attention and solicitude. Ultimately, the romance


permits its reader the experience of feeling cared for and the sense of having been reconstituted affectively, even if both are lived only vicariously’’ (97). 24. While Francesco De Sanctis is voluble on Francesca’s feminine ‘‘delicatezza,’’ his romantic sensibility does not lead him to make the ultimate error—for which he castigates Pierre Ginguene´—of holding that she is not damned; see ‘‘Francesca da Rimini,’’ orig. 1869, repr. in Lezioni sulla ‘‘Divina Commedia,’’ ed. Michele Manfredi (Bari: Laterza, 1955), 137–47. 25. For a re´sume´ of interpretations of ‘‘e ’l modo ancor m’offende,’’ see the Chiavacci Leonardi commentary to the Inferno, 168–69. 26. For the allusion to Guido Guinizzelli in this tercet and to Andreas Capellanus in the next, see Dante’s Poets, 5–7. 27. Vittorio Russo points out that Boccaccio’s suppression of this point is part of his creation of a Francesca who is not surprised into loving but chooses to love; see ‘‘Nuclei e schemi narrativi nelle Esposizioni,’’ in ‘‘Con le Muse in Parnaso’’: Tre studi su Boccaccio (Napoli: 1983), 109–65, at p. 160. 28. I agree completely with Torraca’s statement that ‘‘Al racconto del Boccaccio si e` fatto troppo onore attribuendogli valore storico; e` una novella’’ (Boccaccio’s story has been accorded the honor of a historical document; it is a novella) (‘‘Il canto v dell’Inferno,’’ 416). He argues compellingly both for the impossibility of Boccaccio’s story (for instance, that it was impossible for Francesca not to have known who Paolo was, and to whom he was married when ‘‘Appunto per la contea di Ghiaggiolo, Paolo aveva avuto una lite con il Capitolo di Ravenna’’ [Paolo had quarrelled with Ravenna precisely over the county of Ghiaggiolo] [414]), and for the evident romance precedents for Boccaccio’s plot (e.g., Tristan, who marries Iseult as Mark’s proxy while Iseult believes she is genuinely marrying Tristan). Quaglio nonetheless views Boccaccio’s personal intrusion into the account as the caution of a scrupulous historian (‘‘Francesca da Rimini tra Dante e Boccaccio,’’ 18–19), this despite the fact that Boccaccio’s fictions are replete with similar rhetorical techniques. Both Vittorio Russo and Jonathan Usher speak to the novella-like strategies that Boccaccio carries over from previous fictions to his treatment of Francesca. Russo concentrates on parallels with the Decameron (see ‘‘Nuclei e schemi narrativi nelle Esposizioni,’’ 154–65), while Usher demonstrates links to the Filocolo (see ‘‘Paolo and Francesca in the Filocolo and the Esposizioni,’’ Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 10 [1992]: 22–33). 29. Russo makes the connection to Ghismonda, noting similarities of character that are reflected in identical descriptions: ‘‘[Francesca] e`


‘d’altiero animo’ cosı` come Ghismonda e d’‘animo altiero’ ’’ (‘‘Nuclei e schemi narrativi nelle Esposizioni,’’ 163). 30. Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval ‘‘Aeneid’’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 83. In her treatment of Dido in Inferno 5, Desmond claims that Dante allows Dido agency: ‘‘But Inferno 5 categorizes the sinners in the second circle for the fact that they allowed their reason to be overcome by desire, a context that assigns Dido the position of subject rather than object of desire’’ (96). The ‘‘intense engagement with Virgil’s text and Dido as its female protagonist’’ (97) that Desmond discerns in canto 5 is a key factor in dictating a female protagonist for the canto. In many respects Francesca, who comes to Dante from ‘‘la schiera ov’e` Dido’’ (Inf. 5.85), is a modern correlative of Dido, ‘‘che s’ancise amorosa’’ (Inf. 5.61): both figure the link between desire and death. The two differ most markedly in their relation to power; in this context Dido comes into play as what Francesca was not. 31. See John Larner, The Lords of Romagna: Romagnol Society and the Origins of the Signoria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), who writes: ‘‘A French legate of the fourteenth century did not scruple to compare them [the Romagnols] to the English: ‘so treacherous and extravagant, are they,’ he wrote, ‘that in feasting and falsehood they are little different from Englishmen. But they are much more cunning, and with no shadow of doubt more intelligent than the English, so that in reputation and performance, they hold the monarchy of perfidy among other Italians.’ ‘An old proverb,’ wrote Matteo Villani, ‘says that the Romagnol bears his faith in his breast. One should not be surprised that the tyrants of Romagna lack faith, since they are both tyrants and Romagnols’ ’’ (71–72). 32. Zambrasina’s first husband was Tano (Ottaviano) dei Fantolini, son of the Ugolino de’ Fantolini whom Guido del Duca apostrophizes in Purgatorio 14, calling him secure in his good name because of the deaths of his male heirs. He died, along with his father-in-law Tebaldello, in 1282, in the battle of Forlı` to which Dante refers in Inferno 27.43–44. Thus Tebaldello was no longer pursuing any interests when his daughter married Gianciotto circa 1286. See Torraca, ‘‘Le rimembranze di Guide del Duca,’’ in Studi danteschi, 137–71, esp. p. 168. 33. Ignazio Baldelli comments that ‘‘Dante, per altro, insiste spietatamente sui Malatesta (e su chi era con loro connesso) come naturalmente traditori’’; see ‘‘Dante, i Guidi e i Malatesta,’’ in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, series 3, vol. 18, part 3 (1988): 1067–70; and idem, Dante e Francesca (Firenze: Olschki, 1999). 34. Pier da Medicina has not been clearly identified; it is interesting to note that Benvenuto indirectly links him to Francesca. Depicting Piero


as a Romagnol troublemaker who used negotiations between the powerful as an opportunity to sow discord, Benvenuto offers an extended narrative of Piero’s warning Malatesta da Verucchio against Guido da Polenta and vice versa. 35. Larner, The Lords of Romagna, 1–2. As Larner describes Romagna: ‘‘The collapse of imperial power, which had never been strong, the failure of Bologna (1248–1278), and then of the papacy, to dominate the province, meant that there was no central authority to bring order in place of anarchy. By the end of the thirteenth century, leaders of the factions had obtained full control of their towns, and had begun to dominate them through their communal machinery. These men can be called ‘tyrants’ ’’ (77). 36. P. J. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State: A Political History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 11. 37. Ravenna is the only major town of Romagna not on the Via Emilia, the Roman road that runs from Rimini on the Adriatic along the line of the Apennine foothills toward Bologna. Dante’s geographical precision leads him to include three of the five rivers of which Larner writes: ‘‘To meet the towns upon the road, five rivers flowed from the mountains: the Marecchia, Savio, Montone, Lamone, and Santerno’’ (The Lords of Romagna, 2). 38. ‘‘It was probably at this time [1275], as a seal to the alliance of the da Polenta and the Malatesti, that Francesca, daughter of Guido da Polenta, married Giovanni Scianciotto, ‘the Lame,’ son of Malatesta da Verucchio’’ (Larner, The Lords of Romagna, 37). For a more detailed account of Guido Minore’s rise to power, see Augusto Torre, I Polentani fino al tempo di Dante (Firenze: Olschki, 1966), 73–76. 39. ‘‘And the old mastiff and the new of Verucchio, who dealt with Montagna so evilly, make their teeth into augers where they are wont.’’ The mastiffs alone among the animals in the catalogue seem not to be connected to the family’s coat of arms, making the choice on the part of the poet the more noteworthy. 40. One should bear in mind that in the context of Romagna ‘‘the Tuscan terms ‘Guelf ’ and ‘Ghibelline,’ with their ideological undertones, [were] later and adventitious’’ (Jones, The Matatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 14–15); ‘‘ ‘Ghibelline’ and ‘Guelf ’ were names without political or social significance’’ (ibid., 19). 41. Malatesta da Verucchio’s first wife (and mother of five of his children, including Malatestino, Gianciotto, and Paolo) was Concordia di Enrichetto, daughter of the imperial vicecomes of Romagna. On her mother’s side she was a Parcitade. See Masse`ra, ‘‘Note malatestiane,’’ esp.


456

pp. 3–20, ‘‘Le mogli di Malatesta da Verucchio.’’ Jones writes that, although ‘‘[Concordia’s] marriage with Malatesta da Verucchio [was designed] in order to prevent the defection of Malatesta to the Guelfs,’’ it was not successful in that regard and that ‘‘Concordia’s death about 1265 was soon to remove what frail restraint upon hostility she may have been’’ (The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 30). 42. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 38. 43. A translation of the chronicle’s account of 13 December 1295 is in Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 39; the original is in Cronaca malatestiana, ed. Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Rerum Italicorum Scriptores, vol. 15, part 2 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1922), 5–7; quotation at 6. 44. See Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 40; see also Larner, The Lords of Romagna, 53n53. 45. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 17. For the ‘‘long conflict between the Malatesta and Guido da Montefeltro, which was to continue intermittently until the end of the century,’’ see Jones, 33–34. Even the imagery of canto 27 can be contextualized with respect to contemporary politics: for instance, Jones mentions a Ghibelline poem that ‘‘sets out to contrast the two captains, Guido ‘leone’ and Malatesta da Verucchio ‘veltro’ ’’ (34): in Inferno 27 Malatesta is a mastiff, rather than a veltro, while Guido famously says that his deeds ‘‘non furon leonine, ma di volpe’’ (75). 46. Forlı` is ‘‘the city that already stood long trial and made of the French a bloody heap’’ (La terra che fe’ gia` la lunga prova / e di Franceschi sanguinoso mucchio [Inf. 27.43–44]). I am not suggesting that Dante views Guido da Montefeltro’s leadership at Forlı` negatively; rather, the historical context reveals to what degree Guido is a complexly ‘‘epic’’ figure, more like Ulysses, his companion in the bolgia of fraudulent counselors, than we realize. The most historically astute reading of canto 27 to my knowledge is Francesco Torraca’s; see ‘‘Il canto xxvii dell’Inferno,’’ in Studi danteschi, 305–46, and ‘‘Il sanguinoso mucchio,’’ also in Studi danteschi, 109–21. It is not coincidental that the two cantos to which Torraca, a student of Romagna, devotes in-depth readings are Inferno 5 and 27; these are, with Purgatorio 14 (see note 32, above), the cantos of Romagna. 47. Larner describes the quarrels for succession among the Polentani after Dante’s death, first the ousting of Dante’s patron, Guido Novello, by his cousin Ostasio, and then the fighting among Ostasio’s sons; see The Lords of Romagna, 68–69. 48. After telling Malatesta Guastafamiglia’s story, Masse`ra notes of his moniker: ‘‘Cosı` era meritamente soprannominato ‘communiter’ Malatesta’’ (see ‘‘Note malatestiane,’’ 48n2).


49. Corrado Ricci, writing in 1891, wonders why Gianciotto is not pitied rather than condemned, and notes that he would be absolved by ‘‘today’s tribunals’’: ‘‘Perche´ tanta pieta` per la coppia d’Arimino e nemmeno una scusa per la giusta vendetta di Gianciotto? Perche´ condannare questo disgraziato, che i tribunali d’oggi assolverebbero, con una frase cruda e spietata ad esser fitto nel duro gelo della Caina, mentre al fratello che l’oltraggio` nell’onore si concede anche nell’oltretomba di stare insieme a Francesca?’’ (L’ultimo rifugio di Dante, 119). As recently as 1965 Nevio Matteini claims indulgence for betrayed husbands and commends the contemporary Italian penal code, which, he says, would sentence Gianciotto to four years’ imprisonment: ‘‘La coscienza umana e le stesse leggi scritte riconoscono una certa indulgenza ai mariti quando, nel cospetto e nell’ira, lavano col sangue la gravissima ingiuria. Il codice italiano di oggi irrogherebbe a Gianciotto la pena della reclusione a quattro anni circa (art. 587 e art. 62 bis)’’ (Francesca da Rimini: Storia, mito, arte, 87). Matteini goes on to explain that the church, too, was less severe toward uxoricide than was Dante. 50. Larner describes the event: ‘‘Uberto, Count of Giaggiolo, son of Paolo Malatesta, came into conflict with Malatestino dell’Occhio over the possession of Cesena. In 1324, he was treating secretly with his cousin Ramberto, the son of Giancotto Malatesta, on means by which they might deprive Pandolfo of his rule in Rimini. But Uberto was foolish to trust the son of the man who had murdered his own father. On 21 January, Ramberto invited him to his castle at Ciolaradi, near Roncofreddo, and had him murdered as he dined, by three bastards of the family’’ (The Lords of Romagna, 69–70). 51. Francesca’s name here follows the traditional Italian usage, still current, of giving first the maiden name and then the husband’s name preceded by ‘‘in’’: for example, my mother is listed in Italian documents as ‘‘Helen Mollica in Barolini,’’ my sister as ‘‘Susanna Barolini in Mengacci.’’ 52. Tonini disputes the existence of a son named Francesco (included, however, by Vasina in the ED entry for Gianciotto), and in fact only Concordia is named in her grandfather’s will; see Della storia civile e sacra riminese, 3:256. Tonini also suggests that Concordia’s name is in honor of Malatesta da Verucchio’s first wife (3:259). 53. In 1269 Paolo married Orabile, the daughter and heir of the last count of Ghiaggiolo. As a result Paolo’s heirs were the counts of Ghiaggiolo, and, as Jones writes: ‘‘His premature death, and the manner of it, were to make his principal legacy to the Malatesta of Rimini the resentment and hostility of the neighbouring counts of Ghiaggiolo’’ (The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 37). During the Malatesta battles for


succession, Paolo’s son Uberto, count of Ghiaggiolo, allied himself with the Ghibellines. As we have seen (see note 50, above), he was killed by the Malatesta in the standard fashion. Jones notes that ‘‘he left a son, Ramberto, to carry on the feud’’ (56). 54. Historians pay lip service to the idea of a rupture between the Polentani and the Malatesta over Francesca’s death but offer no proof; one has the impression that they are projecting what they believe should have happened. Thus Torre, following the sixteenth-century historian of Ravenna Girolamo Rossi (who adhered, as was common, to the 1289 date of death for Francesca that we now know to be impossible), writes: ‘‘All’anno 1289 e precisamente alla seconda meta` . . . il Rossi assegna l’uccisione di Francesca da Rimini e quindi la rottura dell’amicizia fra i Polentani e i Malatesti, rottura che non poteva protrarsi molto, data la coincidenza degli interessi politici’’ (I Polentani fino ai tempo di Dante, 106). Larner, too, assumes the rupture and writes, providing no explanation, ‘‘In March 1290 Malatesta made peace with the da Polenta, on the issue of Francesca’s murder’’ (The Lords of Romagna, 53). 55. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 48. The grandson of Malatestino dall’Occhio was married to the daughter of Guido Novello. See Masse`ra, ‘‘Note malatestiane,’’ 30; Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini, 56n.; and Lamer, The Lords of Romagna, 70. 56. ‘‘At the beginning of June 1334 Malatesta Guastafamiglia, in concert with Ostasio da Polenta, suddenly seized Ferrantino, his son Malatestino and his grandson Guido, and confined them to the castle of Gradara. Ferrantino was later released in January 1336, but the others were removed to Fossombrone and there put to death’’ (Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State, 60). For a full and moving description of these events and the ongoing struggle of Ferrantino’s surviving grandson, Ferrantino Novello, see Masse`ra, ‘‘Note malatestiane,’’ esp. pp. 32–48, ‘‘La guerra malatestiana nel contado di Rimini degli anni 1334–1343.’’ 57. Masse`ra calls Battagli’s ‘‘la prima e piu` autorevole cronaca riminese’’ (‘‘Note malatestiane,’’ 3). 58. Marcha, 31. Benjamin Kohl’s assessment, as expressed to me in a letter, that Battagli here is ‘‘clearly reporting political anecdotes from the Romagna’’ seems fully justified. At the same time, one wonders whether Battagli’s choice of words, especially the technical reference to luxuria, might not be influenced by Dante’s placement of Paolo and Francesca in his Inferno. As discussed in note 1 above, Battagli’s reference in this passage to the death of Paolo elicits from his editor, Masse`ra, the following comment: ‘‘E` questa la notizia piu` antica della tragedia che ci rimanga, eccezion fatta dei commentatori dell’Inferno, in fonti storiche’’ (31).


59. The quotation is from page 8. It is worth noting that the author of the Cronaca malatestiana certainly knew Dante, whose verses on the treatment of Montagna he approvingly cites on page 7. 60. Augusto Vasina cites from Malatesta’s will in the entry ‘‘Concordia Malatesta’’ (ED 3:783). The section that names Francesca reads: ‘‘pro dotibus olim dominae Francischae ab eo receptis, uxoris olim lohannis dicti sui filii et matris dictae dominae Concordiae’’ (regarding the dowry of the late lady Francesca, wife of the late aforementioned John his son and mother of the aforementioned lady Concordia, that they have received from him). The entire will may be found in Tonini, Della storia civile e sacra riminese, vol. 4 (Rimini: Malvolti ed Ercolani, 1880), 21–35, appendix; discussion of the will is on pp. 277–79. 61. On the Cavalcantian issues embedded in Inferno 5, see ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context’’ in this volume. 62. Reading the Romance ; quotations from p. 151 and p. 209. 63. Dante’s treatment of lust is relatively desexualized in comparison with, say, Tundale’s Vision (Irish, 1149), where the punishment of both male and female fornicators takes the form of an obscene pregnancy, or Thurkill’s Vision (English, 1206), where the adulterers must fornicate publicly in an infernal amphitheater; see ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love) for a fuller discussion of this issue. 64. This commonplace of dantisti has been embraced by feminist scholars in other disciplines. Thus Mary-Kay Gamel writes: ‘‘Obviously Francesca is not a well-trained student of literature. She doesn’t finish the work, she misremembers an important detail (Guinevere kisses Lancelot, not vice versa), she is guilty of the intentional fallacy, and her interpretation is entirely too mimetic’’ (‘‘ ‘This Day We Read No Further’: Feminist Interpretation and the Study of Literature,’’ Pacific Coast Philology 22 [1987]: 7–14). Similarly, Helen Solterer argues: ‘‘Women are commonly typed as literalists—unable to pass beyond the letter of a text. From the scores of inscribed female readers in romance to Dante’s Francesca, they are presented as reading poorly, prone to misunderstanding’’ (The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], 4). n ot es to ch ap te r 1 5 g en de r i n t he ly ri cs of da nt e a nd gu it to ne d’ ar ez zo

This essay, not previously published in this form, draws on and elaborates ‘‘Beyond (Courtly) Dualism: Thinking about Gender in Dante’s


Lyrics,’’ in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 65–89. I have removed the philosophical material on dualism and added new material on the gendered discourse of Doglia mi reca, including the material on Cecco d’Ascoli’s response to Dante’s ‘‘sotto benda.’’ I have also added the discussion of Guittone’s Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi and Altra fiata aggio gia`, donne, parlato. Ahi lasso is cited from Gianfranco Contini, Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1960) and Altra fiata is cited from the edition of Francesco Egidi, Le Rime di Guittone d’Arezzo (Bari: Laterza, 1940). 1. Dante wrote ninety or so lyric poems of different genres (sonnets, ballads, canzoni), beginning when he was about eighteen and continuing right up to the threshold of the Commedia. Barbi—and thus Contini (Rime, ed. Gianfranco Contini [Torino: Einaudi, 1946; rpt. 1965] who follows Barbi—assigns eighty-eight certain poems to Dante (Rime, ed. Michele Barbi, in Le opere di Dante, testo critico della Societa` Dantesca Italiana [Firenze: Bemporad, 1921]). Foster and Boyde count eighty-nine because, in reversing the attributions in the exchange between Dante Alighieri and Dante da Maiano, they end up appropriating a further composition for Dante Alighieri (Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, 2 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967]). In his 2002 edition of the Rime (Dante Alighieri: Rime, in Le Opere di Dante Alighieri, Edizione Nazionale a cura della Societa` Dantesca Italiana, ed. Domenico De Robertis, 5 vols. [Firenze: Le Lettere, 2002]), Domenico De Robertis raises Dante’s total to ninety-six by moving to the certain category eight of the poems that Barbi had classified as dubious; I do not find his arguments for inclusion definitive. I cite from De Robertis; translations are my own. 2. This argument is laid out more fully in the next essay, ‘‘Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax.’’ 3. ‘‘La mente innamorata, che donnea / con la mia donna sempre’’ (Par. 27.88–89); ‘‘La grazia, che donnea / con la tua mente’’ (Par. 24.118–19). 4. Leggiadria, used only this once in the Commedia, occurs in five lyrics: Per una ghirlandetta, Sonar bracchetti, Morte villana, Due donne in cima, Poscia ch’Amor. 5. The gloss of Foster and Boyde on this passage is worth citing, since it hits on the key issue—the move from (courtly) dualism to (Aristotelian) nondualism: ‘‘Dante is not a dualist for whom levitas is bad because gravitas is good, or vice versa. He is an Aristotelian, for whom virtue resides in


461

the mean, and it is not difficult for him to distinguish and condemn excessive or misguided ‘lightness’ of behaviour, without condemning ‘lightness’ of behaviour as such’’ (Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 230). 6. See ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire’’ in this volume. As my work on this canzone proceeded I became progressively aware of its boldness and subtlety. Thus, in the 1997 essay I was dealing with Dante’s handling of desire in the canzone, tout court, and did not yet qualify it as his treatment of ‘‘male desire.’’ The gendered aspects of Doglia mi reca’s analysis became apparent to me only in a later stage of my work on this marvelously rich canzone. 7. Giraut’s Per solatz reveillar is an important and insufficiently studied intertext of Poscia ch’Amor. Although Contini notes the generic relationship between the two canzoni, commenting that Dante, ‘‘come Guiraut de Bornelh, lamenta la decadenza del Joi, del Pretz, del Solatz’’ (Rime, 98), he does not note Poscia ch’Amor’s close verbal dependence on Per solatz reveillar. I suggest that verses 51–54 of Poscia ch’Amor—‘‘non moverieno il piede / per donneare a guisa di leggiadro, / ma come al furto il ladro, / cosı` vanno a pigliar villan diletto’’—are modelled on verses 27–30 of Per solatz reveillar: ‘‘Cavalliers si’aunitz / Que䡠s met en doneiar, / Pois qe tocha dels mans moutons belanz / Ni qe rauba gleisas ne viandanz!’’ (italics mine). The text and translation of Giraut are from Ruth Verity Sharman, The Cansos and Sirventes of the Troubadour Giraut de Borneil: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 468 (text), 471 (translation). Both passages are marked by the presence of the verb donneare and in both corrupt lovers are compared to thieves. 8. See ‘‘Guittone’s Ora parra`, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire’’ and ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context,’’ in this volume, for the anticipation of the Commedia’s view of desire in the lyrics. 9. The context in no way supports Pe´zard’s thesis that this passage exhorts women to self–blinding, a thesis given undue credibility by Foster and Boyde in their commentary (Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 299–300). 10. Rather than make a point about gender, the metapoetic core of Poscia ch’Amor develops the theme of the poet’s lack of interlocutors: ‘‘per che da questo punto / con rima piu` sottile / trattero` il ver di lei, ma non so cui’’ (Hence, from this point on, with more subtle verse, I will treat the truth about it [leggiadria], but I know not for whom) (Poscia ch’ Amor, 67–69). This note of existential loneliness will also furnish the canzone’s disillusioned final verse, ‘‘Color che vivon fanno tutti contra.’’


11. The definition of benda is from the Glossary of Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale: Vesti e societa` dal xiii al xvi secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999): ‘‘striscia di tela o di seta con cui le donne sposate si avvolgevano guance, tempie e fronte per ornamento e per trattenere i capelli’’ (353). 12. In his commentary to Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Canzoniere (Milano: Mondadori, 1996), Marco Santagata cites Doglia mi reca as the source for ‘‘sotto bende’’ and notes that Petrarch evidently interprets the debated verses from Dante’s canzone in the same manner as Cecco d’Ascoli in Acerba (154). 13. Cecco d’Ascoli (Francesco Stabili), L’Acerba, ed. Achille Crespi (Ascoli Piceno: Cesari, 1927); translations are my own. 14. The metatextual passages employing the term velo in the Commedia are also about communication and transparency: ‘‘O voi ch’avete li ’ntelletti sani, / mirate la dottrina che s’asconde / sotto ’l velame de li versi strani’’ (Inf. 9.61–63); ‘‘Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero, / che´ ’l velo e` ora ben tanto sottile, / certo che ’l trapassar dentro e` leggero’’ (Purg. 8.19–21). Particularly analogous is the terzina from Inferno 9, given the presence of intelletti sani and the use of the same preposition, sotto, in ‘‘sotto ’l velame’’ that we find in ‘‘sotto benda.’’ The terzina from the Purgatorio treats the veil as sufficiently transparent—‘‘sottile’’—that it can now be penetrated. The desire to communicate that we find in the Commedia’s allegorical passages is present in Doglia mi reca as well; the poet was similarly motivated when the benda that required penetration was a literal one made of cloth. 15. In a moment charged with the memory of lyric eros, the theological virtues beg Beatrice to unveil and reveal her mouth for the pilgrim: ‘‘Per grazia fa noi grazia che disvele / a lui la bocca tua’’ (Purg. 31.136–37). The one use of svelare, in Purgatorio 3.33, carries no physical connotations. 16. It is true that the lady in E’ m’incresce di me utters a victorious cry over her defeated lover in language that could as well be Amor’s and that the Florentine ladies speak to Dante in the Vita nuova; both occurrences are discussed in the concluding study in this volume, ‘‘Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax.’’ 17. ‘‘E lo primo che comincio` a dire sı` come poeta volgare, si mosse pero` che volle fare intendere le sue parole a donna, a la quale era malagevole d’intendere i versi latini’’ (25.6). And see De vulgari eloquentia 1.1.3. 18. His beloved is called by her senhal ‘‘gioia gioiosa’’ (Ahi lasso, 12). The mixture of discourses, courtly with realistic, is typical of Guittone and one of the reasons he is so important a poet. In his canzone of exile,


Gente noiosa, Guittone goes so far as to script a dialogue between himself and his beloved, so that high rents and love coexist in one poem. 19. These verses—‘‘e qual armito e` quel che se tenesse / s’una plagente donna el richedesse / com’om fa lei’’ (Ahi lasso, 34–36)—seem like a distant precursor of the story of Alibech (Decameron 3.10)! 20. Ahi lasso, 44–45: ‘‘falla e fa donna fallare; / adonque che diritto ha ’n lei biasmare?’’ 21. Ahi lasso, 73–79: ‘‘Vale per se´: nent’ho detto a sembrante; /apresso val che´ fa l’omo valere: / che´ ’ngegno, forzo, ardimento, podere /e cor de tutto ben mettere avante / donali donna en su’ amorosa spera; /for che el non saveria quasi altro fare / che dormire e mangiare.’’ Note the stress on worth, valere: we saw a man’s worth—a poet’s worth, a lover’s worth—in Guittone’s signature canzone, Ora parra`, and now we see a woman’s worth in Ahi lasso. n ot es to ch ap te r 1 6 n ot es to wa rd a g en de re d h is to ry of it al ia n l it er at ur e, w it h a di sc us si on of da nt e’ s beatrix loqu ax

This essay, not previously published in this form, takes its framework material from ‘‘Lifting the Veil? Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature,’’ in Medieval Constructions in Gender and Identity: Essays in Honor of Joan M. Ferrante, ed. Teodolinda Barolini (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 169–90, and integrates it with new work on Beatrice. Condensed versions of this material are also available in my entries ‘‘Dante Alighieri’’ and ‘‘Italian Literature’’ in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). 1. We do well to bear in mind that Joan Ferrante’s pioneering volume, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), was published more than thirty years ago. 2. A historicist reading of this sort is a logical development once one has ‘‘detheologized’’ one’s reading of the Commedia, as I proposed doing in The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (1992). In the case of Inferno 5, detheologizing allows one to postulate interpretive categories more complex than ‘‘Dante places Francesca in hell, so his view of her is negative.’’ 3. For a full discussion of Guittone’s Altra fiata and Dante’s Doglia mi reca from this perspective, see in this volume ‘‘Sotto benda: Gender in


the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli).’’ 4. See my Dante’s Poets, 200, and the following chapter. 5. In treating the Commedia’s Vergilian problematic, it is useful for critical purposes to separate two sets that Dante intertwines: in one set we place Dante’s deformations and revisions of Vergilian texts, notably the Aeneid; in the second set we place his handling not of Vergil’s texts but of ‘‘Virgilio,’’ the character invented for the Commedia. See, in this volume, ‘‘Minos’s Tail: The Labor of Devising Hell (Aeneid 6.431–33 and Inferno 5.1–24).’’ 6. The bond between mother and infant possesses an almost erotic charge: ‘‘[T]wo people do not gaze into each other’s eyes without speech for over ten or so seconds unless they are going to fight or make love or already are. Not so with mother and infant. They can remain locked in mutual gaze for thirty seconds or more’’ (Daniel Stern, The First Relationship: Mother and Infant [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977]). 7. Rachel Jacoff, ‘‘The Tears of Beatrice: Inferno ii,’’ Dante Studies 100 (1982): 1–12; quotation at 8. 8. Marianne Shapiro, Woman Earthly and Divine in the ‘‘Comedy’’ of Dante (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 104. 9. See F. Regina Psaki, ‘‘The Sexual Body in Dante’s Celestial Paradise,’’ in Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages, ed. Jan S. Emerson and Hugh Feiss (New York: Garland, 2000), 47–61; quotations at 52, 58. See also eadem, ‘‘Dante’s Redeemed Eroticism,’’ Lectura Dantis 18–19 (1996): 12–19, and eadem, ‘‘The Sexualized Body in Dante and the Medieval Context,’’ Annali di storia dell’esegesi 13 (1996): 539–50. 10. It is hard to disagree with Victoria Kirkham when she notes, in ‘‘A Canon of Women in Dante’s Commedia,’’ Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 16–41, ‘‘a vein of misogyny that shoots beneath the surface of the entire poem’’ (34). I am less persuaded by Rachel Jacoff ’s view that the female is the figure of transgressive desire in the Commedia, that there is no ‘‘image of female desire that is not in and of itself transgressive’’ (142); see Jacoff, ‘‘Transgression and Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante’s Commedia,’’ Romanic Review 79 (1988): 129–42. 11. For instance, in ‘‘The Tears of Beatrice’’ Rachel Jacoff suggests three layers of interpretation for the weeping Beatrice: the traditional ‘‘sentimental’’ and ‘‘psychologizing’’ interpretation, an existing classicizing literary interpretation, and then the biblical intertext that she adds, thus offering us a Beatrice whose construction incorporates elements of psychological realism, classical intertexts, and finally a biblical/typological dimension.


12. Rachel Jacoff and William A. Stephany, Inferno 2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 25. They note further: ‘‘In the places where Beatrice comes closest to describing herself (Purgatorio xxx, 121–38, xxxi, 49ff.), she is still speaking of herself only in relation to Dante’’ (26). 13. The Undivine Comedy, 303n36. 14. ‘‘Beatrice’s androgyny, on the other hand, openly increases her power and enhances her being’’ (‘‘A Canon of Women,’’ 31). 15. The adjective appears otherwise only to qualify God’s ‘‘infallibil giustizia’’ (Inf. 29.56). 16. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 19. 17. See Joan M. Ferrante, ‘‘Dante’s Beatrice: Priest of an Androgynous God,’’ Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Occasional Papers 2 (Binghamton, N.Y.: CEMERS, 1992), 3–32. 18. On the stilnovist elements of Inferno 2, see Dante’s Poets, 8; for the grafting of lyric and romance elements in cantos 2 and 5, see ibid., 8–10. 19. Jacoff and Stephany comment: ‘‘Yet there are clear advances over the Vita Nuova’s version of Beatrice; Canto ii reveals a Beatrice who initiates action and who speaks, unlike the distant figure of Dante’s youthful ‘libello’ ’’ (Inferno 2, 38). 20. Dante’s Poets, 9. Jacoff and Stephany note that Beatrice’s promise ‘‘takes part of its meaning from the value of praise as a speech act as Dante had earlier defined it in the Vita Nuova’’ (Inferno 2, 16). 21. See in this volume ‘‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context’’ for Dante’s use of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in making the contrapasso of Inferno 5. 22. Of course, Beatrice’s full—historical—name comes to us from Boccaccio, not Dante, so the issues of our acritical reliance on Boccaccio as a source that are discussed elsewhere in this volume (see especially ‘‘Editing Dante’s Lyrics and Italian Cultural History’’ and ‘‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’’) apply here as well. 23. In ‘‘The Griselda Story in Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer,’’ in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 231–48, Robin Kirkpatrick inscribes the story into the tradition of ‘‘humanist antifeminism,’’ adding cogently that ‘‘Griselda would have made the perfect wife for a humanist’’ (232). 24. The citation is from the still-useful work of J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 13. Kirkpatrick comments on ‘‘the almost total silence’’


of Boccaccio’s Griselda: ‘‘In Petrarch and Chaucer, Griselda is allowed to speak with some eloquence about her position. But Boccaccio time and again emphasizes the brevity of her responses. Which is the more striking in that throughout the Decameron Boccaccio’s heroines have never been at a loss for words in their own defence, either the witty word of a Madonna Filippa or the tragically composed rhetoric of a Ghismonda. Though Griselda’s silence has occasionally a hieratic quality to it, it is also, in the context of the whole Decameron, somewhat sinister and perverse’’ (233).

Index

A qualunque animale allberga in terra (Petrarch), 201, 425n43 Aeneid, 72–73, 103–4, 138–41, 147, 149, 153, 158 Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi (Guittone), 352–53, 359 and story of Alibech, 463n19 Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra (Dante), 202, 248 Alatiel (character in Decameron), 229, 298, 445–46n18 Alberigo de’ Manfredi of Faenza, 323 Alfani, Gianni, 30 Alfie, Fabian, 383n8 Alibech (character in Decameron), 463n19 Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Alighieri, Jacopo, 308 Allan, Mowbray, 153–55 Altra fiata aggio gia`, donne, parlato (Guittone), 52–53, 352–59, 374, 384n8 Amaturo, Raffaele, 424n36, 424n40 Ambruogiuolo da Piagenza (character in Decameron), 286–89, 444n10 Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato (Guido delle Colonne), 75–76, 89 Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia (Dante; see also canzone montanina), 41, 64, 85, 90, 91

Amore e ’l cor genil sono una cosa (Dante), 369–70 Ancor che l’aigua (Guido delle Colonne), 75 Andreas Capellanus, 315 angels, 7, 32, 103, 175–76, 355 anniversary poems, 192, 202–5 Anonimo Fiorentino, 307 antinarrative mode, 178, 189, 202 Apocalypse of Paul, 107 Apocalypse of Peter, 104 Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas Arachne, 161, 164–65 Argo, 19, 170–71, 324 Argus, 167–68, 170 Aristotle, 74, 103, 105–7, 109–10, 121 Auerbach, Erich, 160, 407n8 Augustine, St., 14, 16, 35, 102, 110, 112, 118–21, 127, 176, 409n22, 410n24 on memory, 411n1 avarice, 42, 50, 59–61, 66–67, 91, 333, 387n21 love and, 59 lust and, 53, 333, 386–87n16, 395n38, 396n40 prodigality and, 62, 104, 106 aversio ab incommutabili bono, see sin Baldelli, Ignazio, 454–55n33

Index 468 Barbi, Michele, 246, 249, 252, 254–55, 261–66, 271 Bartolomea (character in Decameron), 285, 289, 291–300, 444–45n12, 445–46n18 Battagli, Marco, 304, 329, 447n1 Beatrice (character), 19, 32–33, 86, 111, 117, 151, 155–56, 170, 393n27, 465n11 in the Commedia, 350, 363–70, 374 death of, 183–89 in Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, 372 in E’ m’incresce di me, 40, 371–72 in Inferno, 371–73 in Io sono stato, 40, 64, 89 in Lo doloroso amor, 39–40, 86, 371 in Vita nuova, 35–36, 39–40, 64–65, 183–89, 373 Beatrix loquax, 363, 368, 369, 373, 374 Belli, Giacomo, 144–46 benda, 346–47, 350, 462n11 Benedict XV, 7 Benson, Pamela J., 386n14 Benvenuto da Imola, 1, 133, 148, 307, 325, 327, 400n2, 455n34 Bernabo` (character in Decameron), 286, 287–89, 299, 443n7 Bernart de Ventadorn, 422n26 Bernstein, Alan E., 104, 397n2 Biddick, Kathleen, 380n12 Billanovich, Giuseppe, 433n24 Bilta` di donna e di saccente core (Guido Cavalcanti), 337 Bloomfield, Morton, 398n9, 404n1 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 144, 148, 224–27, 281, 306, 360, 374–77 Beatrice and, 465n22 Chigiano codex and, 248, 260, 435n11 as editor/copyist of Dante’s work, 247–48, 258–60 Griselda (character) and, 13, 229, 244, 377, 432n21, 466n24 his account of the story of Francesca da Rimini, 258, 309, 316–22, 453n28

Minos and, 148 as transmitter of Dante’s canzoni, 439n38 Boethius, 111 Bologna, Corrado, 392n24 Bonagiunta da Lucca, 23, 26, 29–30, 36, 37 Bosco, Umberto, 415n2 Boyde, Patrick, 52, 53, 60, 246, 249, 264 Branca, Vittore, 429n1, 431n11, 447n21 Brown, Marshall, 433n24 Bruni, Francesco, 446n19, 447n22 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 380n13 Caina, 2, 308, 309, 328 Calandrino (character in Decameron), 234–35 Calvino, Italo, 6, 379–80n7 Cantinelli, Pietro, 448–49n6 canzone montanina (Dante; see also Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia), 64, 90, 257 canzoni degli occhi (Petrarch), 207–11, 223 canzoni distese (Dante, label given by Boccaccio), 248, 253, 255, 259, 261, 437–38n31 Canzoniere (Petrarch), see Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Carrai, Stefano, 440n44 Castelvetro, Ludovico, 1, 149, 307, 389n7, 403n28 Cappello, Giovanni, 269–70 Cavalcanti, Guido, 27, 30, 34–35, 78–81, 92, 97–99, 337 Bilta` di donna e di saccente core, 337 Commedia and, 79–80, 119–20 in The Decameron, 235, 433n24 Cecchini, Enzo, 407n11 Cecco d’Ascoli, 3, 11, 347–49 chastity, 52–53, 216, 352, 354–57 Che fai? che pensi? che pur dietro guardi (Petrarch), 221 Chiare, fresche et dolci acque (Petrarch), 210, 212

Index Chiavacci Leonardi, Anna Maria, 398n10, 450n9 Chigi collection of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 196, 198, 204, 419n15, 424–25n40 Chigiano codex, 248, 260, 435n11 Cino da Pistoia, 30, 39, 40, 64, 89, 209 classical antiquity, 10, 18, 19, 158–59 coblas capcaudadas, 210 coda, 71, 73, 132, 142, 144, 149, 388n4 Cogan, Marc, 109 collocation fallacy, 152 Colonna, Cardinal Giovanni, 205 cominciare, 177, 179–82, 412n13 Commedia, 37, 45, 139, 145, 151, 155–56, 164. See also Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso Beatrice in the, 350, 363–70, 374 Christian/classical contaminatio in, 105–6, 120 commentary tradition and, 1–3, 17, 19, 77, 145, 147, 307–11, 327 Francesca in the, 307 Guido Cavalcanti and the, 79–80 humanist values of, 15, 18–19, 159, 405n8 compassione in the Decameron, 224–27, 229–31 compulsion, 73–74, 311, 374, 390n12 concetto diviso, 14, 25, 176–77 contaminatio Christian/classical, 105–6, 120 Decameron frame/novelle, 284 lyric/narrative, 14, 178, 182–83, 189–92 poets/prophets, 126 Contini, Gianfranco, 78, 99, 246–47, 249, 256, 263–66, 268, 271, 346, 440n45 contrapasso, 73–74, 104, 107–8, 110 conversion, 112, 117–18 inordinata conversio ad commutabile bono, see sin Petrarch and, 202, 221, 421n23 Vita nuova’s drama of protracted conversion, 190

469 conversion canzone. See Ora parra` Convivio, 13, 44, 55–58, 61–62, 67, 69, 114–17, 176, 246–49, 255, 261–70, 385n11 Correggio. See Pre-Chigi form of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Corti, Maria, 393n28 Cosı` nel mio parlar (Dante), 84, 88, 209, 248, 259 courtliness, 333, 336, 338–39, 341, 362–63, 376 anti-courtliness, 49, 338, 352, 355 false, 343 courtly love, 29, 34, 42, 49, 59, 315, 336, 360, 370 ideology of, 333, 361 theologized, 30, 33, 34, 363 credibility, authorial, 144, 152, 163 Cronaca malatestiana, 326, 329–30 Cudini, Piero, 385n9, 441n55 Daniel, Arnaut, 37, 190, 194, 208–9 Dante, 30, 37–38, 55–57, 81, 340–41. See also names of individual works credibility of text of, 152 as editor/copyist of self, 247 Guinizzelli, Guido and, 33 impact of value judgments of, 35–36, 270–71 role as visionary poet/prophet, 127–28 use of female-coded nouns by, 336 use of male-coded verbs by, 334 use of sestina form, 202 vision literature and, 70–71 Dante da Maiano, 264, 436n14 Davanzati, Chiaro, 29 De doctrina christiana (St. Augustine), 127 De passionibus (St. Augustine), 118, 120, 121 De Robertis, Domenico, 246, 248–61, 268, 270–71, 438–39n36, 439–40n43 death sequence in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 213–14

Index 470 death-in-life motif, 51, 57, 116 Decameron, 224–45, 282, 374; see also names of various characters contaminatio between frame and novelle in, 284 protofeminism of, 228, 376, sexual metaphors in, 301–2, 376, 442n4, 445n13, 447n22 topos of women with spindles and, 443n9 use of male-coded verbs in, 282, 285, 335, 376 desire, 25, 59, 333, 351 in Convivio, 55–57, 114–17 in Doglia mi reca, 342–44 for knowledge, 57–58, 67, 69 in Ora parra`, 48–50 Desmond, Marilynn, 454n30 Dico che, 144–46 Dido, 72, 88, 149, 323 Di Girolamo, Costanzo, 423n32 Dioneo (character in Decameron), 228– 29, 233, 239, 241–43, 282–88, 299 direct discourse, 61,157, 215–16, 219, 372, 388n23, 427n54, 427n58. See also verisimilitude disaventura, 34 dismisura, 62, 69 Divine Comedy. See Commedia divisioni, 176–79, 186–88 Doglia mi reca (Dante), 8, 11, 12, 13, 42– 44, 51–55, 59, 66, 91–97, 338–39, 342–50 gendered aspects of, 461n6 love in, 13, 62–64 Tre donne and, 387n21 dolce stil novo, 23, 26, 29–30, 33, 36–38 donna gentile, 437–38n31 Donna me prega (Guido Cavalcanti), 34, 78, 80, 89, 392n23 donna petra, 363, 437–38n31 Donne ch’avete (Dante), 36, 182–83, 372 doubles in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 216 dualism, 12–13, 96, 337, 460, 461n5

Duranti, Alessandro, 445n13 Durling, Robert M., 87, 394n29, 415n1, 425n44, 425n49 durare, 15–16 Dutschke, Dennis, 424n35 E’ m’incresce di me (Dante), 40, 98, 371– 72, 394n30 Eclogues, 162, 166 ecphrases, 163, 408n14 E di febbraio vi dono bella caccia (Folgore), 337 Eisner, Martin, 435n11 Elissa (character in Decameron), 235, 242–43, 433n24 Elwert, W. Theodor, 425n50 Enchiridion (St. Augustine), 110 endlessness, perpetual, 111–12 eternal lots, 110 Ezekiel, 131, 168–69 fama, 15, 241, 310 Farinata, 119–20 Ferrante, Joan, 366, 369, 429n1, 430n9, 433n24, 450n8, 463n1, 465n17 Fiammetta (character in Decameron), 229, 237, 241–42 fictional truth, 146 Fido, Franco, 429n2, 429n3, 431n15, 432n18, 432n22 Filostrato (character in Decameron), 229–31, 235, 239, 241–42 Fiore, 191 fixed lots, 110 flight imagery, 61, 68–69 Folena, Gianfranco, 418n11, 427n60 Folgore da San Gimignano, 77–8, 191, 337 E di febbraio vi dono bella caccia, 337 Quando la voglia segnoreggia tanto, 77 Forni, Pier Massimo, 444–45n12 Foster, Kenelm, 53, 246, 249, 264, 416n3, 420n18 Francesca da Rimini (character in Commedia), 2, 3, 4, 11, 13, 18, 42, 44,

Index 471 53–54, 65–66, 70–74, 82, 88, 90, 95, 97, 128, 133, 149–50, 304–32, 350–51, 362–63, 373–74, 377, 387n21, 463–64n2 Freccero, John, 427n59 Frescobaldi, Dino, 30 Fubini, Mario, 423n32 Gagliardi, Antonio, 95, 390, 395n38, 396n41 Gamel, Mary-Kay, 459n63 gender, construction of, 3, 11, 17, 18, 71, 96, 263, 272, 281, 285, 301–2, 305, 310, 313–14, 331, 333–34, 337–38, 340, 344, 347–48, 352, 354, 358, 360–65, 369, 376–78 generosity, 224, 236–37 as antithesis of avarice, 384n9 Genot, Ge´rard, 416n5 Geryon, 161–62 Giannetto, Nella, 444n12 Giovanni di Paolo, 19 Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro (Petrarch), 205 Giraut de Borneil, 37, 343 Per solatz reveillar, 343, 461n7 Gittes, Tobias Foster, 432n20, 432n21 Giuntina (Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani), 248–49, 253, 262–63 golden mean, doctrine of, 121 Gorni, Guglielmo, 256–58, 259–60, 271, 382n3, 391n16, 424n40 Gragnolati, Manuele, 397n6, 399n5, 434n1 Griffolino d’Arezzo, 140 Grimaldi, Emma, 443n5 Griselda (character in Decameron), 13, 229, 244, 377, 432n21, 466n24 as used by Petrarch, 13, 377, 466n23 Guido, ´ı’ vorrei che tu e Lippo ed io (Dante), 337–38, 438n36 Guido da Pisa, 74 Guido da Montefeltro, 223, 325, 327, 404n29, 456n45, 456n46

Guido delle Colonne, 23, 75, 76–77, 89 Guido Minore da Polenta (Guido il Vecchio da Polenta, Guido da Polenta), 305–8, 317, 322 Guido Novello da Polenta (Guido da Polenta), 329, 448n4, 456n47 Guinizzelli, Guido, 29–32, 37, 70 Guittone d’Arezzo, 26–29, 37, 42, 77, 93, 96–97, 352–58 Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi, 352–53 Altra fiata aggio gia`, donne, parlato, 52–53 on courtly love, 51 Ora parra`, 27, 42, 47–50, 53, 62, 77, 93, 352, 463n21 Hainsworth, P. R. J., 428n62 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 412n6, 412n11, 413n16 Hawkins, Peter, 160, 167 hell, 102–8, 129, 133–35, 325 as alienation from God, 112–13 Holmes, Olivia, 440n46 Iliescu, Nicolae, 427n59 imagery, 54–55, 61, 67–69, 75–76, 114 In quella parte dove Amor mi sprona (Petrarch), 211 incontinence, sins of, 67, 70, 104, 105 incredibility, of text, 152 infallibility, 140 Inferno, 79, 109 visions of hell in, 106–7 Inferno. See also Commedia Inferno 2, 105, 180, 370–73 Inferno 4, 134, 136, 159 Inferno 5, 18, 41–42, 53, 65, 70–75, 86–99, 130, 133, 146–50, 304–5, 322–23, 330–31, 361–62, 454n30 Inferno 6, 97–99 Inferno 7, 62–63, 67, 92, 139 Inferno 10, 80, 119–20 Inferno 25, 71, 158, 160, 161 Inferno 27, 324–25, 327

Index 472 Inglese, Giorgio, 100 Io son venuto (Dante), 38, 87–88, 313 Io sono stato (Dante), 40–41, 44, 64–67, 89–91, 395 I’ vo pensando (Petrarch), 196, 205, 215, 223 Jacoff, Rachel, 366, 368, 464n10, 465n11, 465n12, 465n19, 465n20 Jacopo della Lana, 309 Jones, P. J., 325–26, 327, 330 Jordan, Constance, 443n9 Kirkham, Victoria, 368, 464n10 Kirkpatrick, Robin, 466n23, 466n24 Kleinhenz, Christopher, 382n2 knights, false, 340–41 knowledge, desire for, 57–58, 67, 69 Kohl, Benjamin, 458n58 Lady Philosophy (allegorical figure), 365, 367, 369 Lancelot du Lac, 315–16 Larner, John, 323–25, 327 Lasso me, ch’I’ non so in qual parte pieghi (Petrarch), 208–10 Laura (character in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), 199, 205, 206, 213–14, 216–20 Lauretta (character in Decameron), 233, 241–42, 432–33n23 Le Goff, Jacques, 129–30 leggiadria, 38, 336, 338–41, 460n4 Lentini, Giacomo da, 23–25, 29, 32, 75, 362, 363 Lewis, C. S., 191, 416n4, 417n8 Li occhi dolenti (Dante), 187, 188 Licisca (character in Decameron), 232, 243, 283, 284 limbo, 18–19, 136–37, 149, 159–60 Lo doloroso amor (Dante), 39–40, 86–87, 270–71, 371, 439n38 Longhi, Silvia, 416n5 love, 29–30, 119, 333. See also courtly love as agent of causality, 315

avarice and, 59 connection to sin and, 120 in Io sono stato, 89 power to make one out of two of, 13 reason and, 44, 93–97 in the work of Guido Cavalcanti, 34–35 ‘‘lugentes campi,’’ 73, 149 lust, 50, 70, 129 lyric sequence, 190, 191, 194–203, 440n46 Madonna, dir vo voglio (Giacomo da Lentini), 75 Maggini, Francesco, 246 Malatesta, Giovanni (Gianciotto), 305–8, 317, 326, 328–30 Malatesta, Paolo, 308, 317, 328–30 Malatesta clan, 324, 326–27, 450n9 Malatesta da Verucchio, first lord of Rimini, 305, 324, 326–27, 330 Francesca’s dowry in will of, 330 Malatesta Guastafamiglia, 328, 329 Malatestino dall’Occhio, second lord of Rimini, 324, 327 Malato, Enrico, 100–1 malice, sins of, 104, 105 Martinelli, Bortolo, 416n3 Martinez, Ronald L., 88, 394n29 Mattalia, Daniele, 135, 142 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 431n13 McLain, Carin, 440n44 Mestica, Enrico, 197, 420–21n19 metamorphosis, 159, 165, 215 Midas, 166 mimesis, 134, 165–66 Minerva, 164–65 Minos, 71, 73, 138, 149, 402n17 misogyny, 368, 376, 443n9 misura, concept of, 62, 92 Moevs, Christian, 380n13 Mohammed, 140 Montagna de’ Parcitadi, 326 Montanari, Fausto, 86–87 Moore, Edward, 104, 105, 398n9

Index 473 Morgan, Alison, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 397n6 Muzzarelli, Giuseppina, 462n11 narrative sequence, 183, 186, 206, 213–14, 225 narrative time, 177–78 Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade (Petrarch), 200, 209–10, 426 Neri, Ferdinando, 429n1 new style, 23, 26, 29–30, 33, 36–38 Nichomachean Ethics, The, 74, 103, 374 nine, number, 33, 184, 188–89 Noakes, Susan, 381n16, 383n8 Noferi, Adelia, 417n9 nouns/parole, 282, 336 novella, birth of, 444n10 O’Brien, T. C., 112–13 Oderisi, 160 Olson, Kristina, 432n18 Ora parra` (Guittone), 27, 42, 47–50, 53, 62, 77, 93, 352 Ottimo commento, 306, 309, 316–21, 450n11 Ovid, 10, 158–60, 164–67, 170, 408n16 Padoan, Giorgio, 138, 389n8, 407n4 Paganino (character in Decameron), 291– 96, 299 Page, T. E., 139, 401n12 Pampinea (character in Decameron), 227–31, 238, 239 Panfilo (character in Decameron), 236– 37, 239, 241 Paradiso, 14, 45, 80, 115, 128–29, 175, 178, 189, 190, 366, 405n9. See also Commedia Paradiso 1, 170 Paradiso 3, 373–74 Paradiso 7, 368 Paradiso 15, 119 Paradiso 16, 404n4 Paradiso 20, 9 Paradiso 23, 366

Paradiso 27, 339 Paradiso 24, 339 Paradiso 29, 175 Paradiso 32, 339 Paradiso 33, 19, 170 Pernicone, Vincenzo, 246, 247 Per solatz reveillar (Giraut de Borneil), 343, 461n7 Pertile, Lino, 404n2 Pasero, Nicolo`, 100, 101 Petrarch, 190–91, 251, 267–68, 347, 377, 411n4, 417n8 Griselda character in, 13, 377, 466n23 lyric sequence of, 194–223 petrose. See rime petrose Phelps, Ruth Shepard, 197–98, 204, 415– 16n3, 419n15, 420n17 Piccarda, 13, 344, 373–76, 390n12 Picone, Michelangelo, 256, 265–66, 268–69 Poe, Elizabeth Wilson, 422n26 Ponmi ove ’l sole occide i fiori et l’erba (Petrarch), 204–5 Poscia ch’Amor (Dante), 38, 101, 338–43, 352, 355, 461n7 Potter, Joy Hambuechen, 431n16 Pre-Chigi form of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 204, 424n39, 424n40. See also Correggio priority and sequence, 213 prodigality, 104, 106 Psaki, F. Regina, 366 Purgatorio, 129, 386–87n16. See also Commedia Purgatorio 1, 149 Purgatorio 10, 163, 216 Purgatorio 10–12, 164 Purgatorio 11, 160 Purgatorio 15, 130, 410n25 Purgatorio 16, 117 Purgatorio 17, 118–20 Purgatorio 18, 66, 69, 91, 92, 118 Purgatorio 19, 67–69 Purgatorio 20, 67 Purgatorio 24, 23, 36–37, 150, 160

Index 474 Purgatorio 26, 29–30, 37 Purgatorio 29, 169 Purgatorio 32, 167–68, 170 purgatory, 104–6, 111, 118–20, 129–30 Pygmalion, 165–66 Quaglio, Antonio Enzo, 448n6, 450n9, 452n20, 453n28 Quando io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi (Petrarch), 206–7 Quando la voglia segnoreggia tanto (Folgore), 77 Radway, Janice, 331, 452n23 Ramat, Raffaelo, 429n2, 430n6 reason and love, 44, 93–97 Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 190–93, 196–98, 210–12, 223, 267–68, 347; see also individual poems anniversary poems in, 202–5 beginning of, 206, 222–3 canzoni degli occhi in, 207–8, 210 Carducci-Ferrari edition of, 4, 197, 428n63 Canzoni in, 125–29, 210–12 death sequence in, 213–14 doubles in, 216 editions of, 415n1, 419–20n16 ending of, 196, 221, 223 governing strategies of parts 1 and 2 of, 222 Laura as failed Beatrice in, 221 ‘‘middle’’ of, 223 narrative elements in part 2 in, 215–20 sestine in, 200–3 ‘‘sotto bende’’ in, 347 title of, 193–94, 414–15n1 two parts of, 4, 196–98 Rhadamanthus, 138, 401n10 Riccardo di Chinzica (character in Decameron), 290–96 Rico, Francisco, 197, 414–15n1, 420n18 Ricoeur, Paul, 14, 16, 176, 178 Riffaterre, Michael, 137, 146

Rime (Petrarch), see Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Rime (Dante), 38–39, 190–91, 253–78 rime estravaganti (Dante), 245, 247, 267, 269, 271 rime petrose (Dante), 37–38, 87–89, 209, 259 romance, frame of, 312 Rushdie, Salman, 3, 126–27 Russo, Vittorio, 453n28 Salsano, Fernando, 402n17 Santa Maria Novella, 227, 234 Santagata, Marco, 190–91, 194, 415n3, 417n6, 421n23 Sapegno, Natalino, 147, 415n2 Scaglione, Aldo, 417n9 Segre, Cesare, 416n5 Semiramis, empress of Assyria, 311, 323 sestina form, 200–2, 210, 422n28 Se’ tu colui (Dante), 17 Severs, J. Burke, 466n24 sexual language and metaphors, 71, 73, 87–88, 233, 301–2, 376, 394n29, 442n4, 445n13, 447n22 Shapiro, Marianne, 366, 422n28, 425n45 Sı` lungiamente (Dante), 188, 439n38 Sicilian School, 23–24 Signor mio caro (Petrarch), 205, 420n17 Simonelli, Maria Picchio, 423n32 sin, 67, 70, 104–5, 112–13, 120 as aversio ab incommutabili bono, 112–14 classificaton of, 109 definition of, 112 as inordinata conversio ad commutabile bono, 112–18 Smarr, Janet Levarie, 429n1 Solterer, Helen, 459n64 Sonar bracchetti (Dante), 38, 334–38 Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani, see Giuntina 248–49, 262–63 souls, categories of, 108 spindles, 443n9

Index 475 Stephany, William A., 368, 465n12, 465n19, 465n20 Stewart, Pamela, 429n1, 431n12 Stillenger, Thomas C., 414n23 stil novo, 23, 26, 29–30, 33, 36–38 Sturm-Maddox, Sara, 427n59, 428n62 Taddeo, Edoardo, 418n11, 427n54 Tanturli, Giuliano, 99–101 Taylor, Karla, 405n9 Tebaldello de’ Zambrasi, 323–24 Terdiman, Richard, 160 Thomas Aquinas, 112, 120–21 on desire, 117 on the passions, 118 on sin and punishment, 112–14 Thurkill’s Vision, 11, 72, 128–29 time, 176–78, 193, 195–96, 200–3, 205 timelessness, eternal, 111 Tomasch, Sylvia, 9, 380n11 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 5, 406n10 Tonini, Luigi, 451n17, 457n52, 459n60 Torello (character in Decameron), 244, 444n10 Torraca, Francesco, 78, 304–5, 453n28 Torre, Augusto, 455n38 transcripsi in ordine (Petrarch), 15, 191, 195 troubadour poetry, 24, 32 Tundale’s Vision, 11, 71, 108–9, 126 Ulysses, 67, 157, 164, 404n2 Usher, Jonathan, 453n28 Valley of the Ladies, 239, 243, 282 Vasina, Augusto, 450n7, 450n9 verbs/fatti, 88, 99, 281–85, 292, 297, 299– 303, 332, 335–36, 356, 376 Vergil, 72, 118, 138–39, 140, 146, 152, 153– 54, 364 verisimilitude, 142–43, 146, 151, 163–65 vices. See sins Virgilio, 147–48, 154, 365

virtue, 43, 59, 62, 68–69, 89–92. See also chastity; leggiadria beauty and, 344–45 mixed, 339 social, 224, 236 women and, 52–53, 216, 352, 354–57 vision literature, 70–71, 104, 126, 332 Vision of Tundale. See Tundale’s Vision visionary sleep, 169 Vita nuova, 33, 99–100, 175, 178–81, 191– 92, 262–63, 267, 269 anniversary poem in, 192 Beatrice in, 35–36, 39–40, 64–65 in De Robertis edition of Dante’s Rime, 254–56 lyric/narrative contaminatio in, 178, 182–83, 189–92 prolepsis in, 184–85, 188 protracted drama of conversion in, 190 Voi che portate (Dante), 17 voyage imagery, 54–55, 61, 67–68, 114 wealth, desire for, 42–43, 50–53, 57–58, 91, 117, 272, 333, 386n15, 386n19 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, 197, 204, 222, 420n18 will, 73–74, 374 women, 352 defense of, by Guittone, 352 diatribe against, by Cecco d’Ascoli, 348–48 intellect of, 348–49 in Italian literary tradition, 376–78 language and, 281 as moral agents, 350–51, 355, 363 as portrayed in Poscia ch’Amor, 340–41 virtue and, 52–53, 216, 352, 354–57 worth, 48, 295, 463n21 Zaleski, Carol, 129 Zambrasina, 324, 330, 451n17, 454n32 Zinevra (character in Decameron), 285, 287

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The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question

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