Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 years (Proceedings of the British Academy)

Introduction ONE OF THE OBJECTIVES behind the Petrarch conference at the British Academy in November 2004 was to organi...

Author: Martin L. McLaughlin | Peter Hainsworth | Letizia Panizza (Editors)

98 downloads 868 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Introduction ONE OF THE OBJECTIVES behind the Petrarch conference at the British Academy in November 2004 was to organise a gathering of British scholars on the seventh centenary of the poet’s birth that explored ‘Petrarch in Britain’, in the many meanings of that phrase, and not simply to duplicate discussions taking place at the many conferences in Italy and elsewhere during the centenary year of 2004. By coincidence there is a distance of exactly thirty years between the sixth centenary of Petrarch’s death (1974) and the seventh centenary of his birth, and this gap of three decades allows us to see how far Petrarch studies have progressed since the 1970s. In the mid-1970s the ﬁrst pioneering studies of Nicholas Mann appeared, often in Italian journals and conference proceedings (there was no British conference on the humanist in 1974), as did the ﬁrst complete English translation of the Canzoniere of the twentieth century, by Robert Durling (1976). Three decades later there is a substantial group of British academics and translators who have taken the discussion of Petrarch further, academics who are to be found not just in modern languages departments, as perhaps was the case in the 1970s, but also many in English (and also Scottish) literature departments — as is evident in Section V of this volume. Similarly, in terms of translations, considerable advances have been made: Durling’s was to remain the only complete version of the Canzoniere for twenty of those thirty years, but from 1995 to 2004 a further four complete translations were published, as well as three major selections of poems (discussed in the concluding chapter of this volume by Peter Hainsworth). Petrarch in Britain, then, both in the sense that the volume offers reﬂections on the poet by academics and critics working in Britain, and also in the more obvious sense of his legacy in British culture. The starting point of the volume is the keynote lecture, given by Piero Boitani, one of only two contributors who do not work in a university department in the UK. He is a major authority on fourteenth-century English as well as Italian literature, and is as often to be found in Britain and North America as in Italy. His is the opening chapter also because of its subject matter, a survey of Petrarch’s thoughts on the people he called ‘barbari Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 1–6. © The British Academy 2007.

2

Introduction

Britanni’. Boitani charts the humanist’s changing view of those whom he initially termed ‘timidissimi barbarorum’ and whom he criticised since Britain was the home of Aristotelian logic. The chapter brings out nuances in Petrarch’s views, especially his admiration for his bookish English contemporary and correspondent, Richard de Bury, and his growing admiration for English military superiority over the French. In fact, by the time of Petrarch’s death, the two worlds of Humanism and Aristotelianism were coming together, notably in the ﬁgure of Chaucer’s Clerk, who was from the home of Aristotelian logic in Britain, but who praises Petrarch the poet, and recounts the tale of Griselda largely based on Petrarch’s Latin version of the last story of Boccaccio’s Decameron. After this opening textual survey, the volume is divided into ﬁve further sections. Section II, ‘Petrarch and the Self’, groups three chapters dealing with an area where the humanist is credited with having taken a huge step towards modernity. The chapter by Jennifer Petrie, ‘Petrarch solitarius’, explores the tensions behind the poet’s praise of the solitary life, notably the criticisms of it voiced by Augustinus in the Secretum. As often, this opposition is left unresolved, and we are left with a more complex picture of the humanist’s self-portrayal as solitarius. Zygmunt Baran´ski’s ‘The Ethics of Ignorance: Petrarch’s Epicurus and Averroës and the Structures of the De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia’ links back to Boitani’s remarks on Petrarch’s detestation of logicians, and considers Petrarch’s views on Epicurus and Averroës in the invective on ignorance in order to reach an overall perspective on his mature views of the intellectual life. Jonathan Usher’s ‘Petrarch’s Second (and Third) Death’, which looks both backward to Petrie’s chapter on the solitary Petrarch and forward to Chapter 5 (on the Africa), notes that his theory of secular fame and the various stages of death, fame, time, and eternity are already present in nuce in the early Latin elegy on his mother’s death. Usher documents the way the Africa expands these reﬂections long before the Trionﬁ, and shows how his epic ‘contaminates’ unexpected sources such as Boethius and Sallust in exploring ideas of fame and the death of fame in monuments and books. In particular, what changes is the idea of a ‘second death’ which moves from its traditional Christian notion in Dante to Petrarch’s more secular formula regarding the ﬂeeting nature of fame. Section III, ‘Petrarch in Dialogue’, examines the way Petrarch interacted with some of his major sources in both key Latin works and in the vernacular poetry. Francesca Galligan’s ‘Poets and Heroes in Petrarch’s Africa: Classical and Medieval Sources’ brings to the fore the role of Dante’s epic in Petrarch’s poem. The prominence of poet characters such

Introduction

3

as Ennius and Homer, and the link between poet and hero parallel the role of poet characters such as Virgil and Statius in the Divina Commedia. Enrico Santangelo continues the analysis of Dante in Petrarch in his chapter, ‘Petrarch Reading Dante: The Ascent of Mont Ventoux (Familiares 4. 1)’: he argues for a series of textual echoes particularly of speciﬁc cantos of the Purgatorio in this highly allusive and important letter. One major difference that emerges, though, is that Petrarch’s journey up the mountain is circuitous, and culminates with the discovery of the self and its divisions, whereas Dante’s is vertical, and leads to the contemplation of the Deity beyond the self. On the vernacular front, John Took’s ‘Petrarch and Cino da Pistoia: A Moment in the Pre-history of the Canzoniere’ charts the emergence of the distinct tone of Petrarchan lyric from the dolce stil novo through the important ﬁlter of Cino da Pistoia: the consonances between the latter’s lyrics and Petrarch’s explain the warm homage to Cino at his death in Canzoniere 92, where the later poet deliberately echoes Cino’s manner. Section IV, ‘Petrarchism and Anti-Petrarchism in Italy’, is the ﬁrst of two sections dealing with Petrarch’s poetic legacy in the Renaissance, ﬁrst in Italy then in Britain. In ‘Petrarch and the Italian Reformation’, Abigail Brundin unearths the discreet Reformation content inside the deeply conformist structure of the Petrarchist sonnet, notably in the poems Vittoria Colonna collected for another sympathetic spirit, Michelangelo. Embracing the new spirit of salvation by faith alone, ‘sola ﬁde’, Colonna, the reformed Petrarchist, feels only joy at her spiritual powerlessness, unlike her predecessor. Her poems are seen to embody a gravitas unnoticed by modern readers. Hilary Gatti traces the more secular spirit of Giordano Bruno’s Petrarchism in her chapter, ‘Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno’. She sees Bruno’s originality residing in the fact that he brings his Italian experience of the Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan debate to Britain, confronting the principal English Petrarchan poet of the time, Sir Philip Sidney; and also in that Bruno considers the Petrarchan sonnet as a suitable vehicle for philosophical enquiry in the post-Copernican, inﬁnite universe. Going further than Colonna in the previous chapter, here we see Bruno portraying the Protestant Elizabeth as his spiritual sponsor, in harmony with his dedication of the Gli eroici furori to Sir Philip Sidney. Showing that Petrarch’s poems also lent themselves to lighter topics, Diego Zancani’s ‘Renaissance Misogyny and the Rejection of Petrarch’ seeks out the roots of Renaissance anti-Petrarchism, both in the Canzoniere itself and particularly in burlesque poets around 1500 as well as in the hilarious pseudo-erudite obscene commentaries of writers such

4

Introduction

as Doni. Letizia Panizza’s chapter, ‘Impersonations of Laura in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-century Italy’, continues this analysis of the way the original Petrarchan code and message could become distorted for other purposes. She examines commentaries and rewritings of Petrarch’s Canzoniere that gave Laura celebrity status, either by hyperbole or denigration or outright impersonation. These works which highlight the ambivalence of Laura’s identity are part of a general questioning of the nature of the love lyric, its remote language, and its moral codes in an era of reform. Section V, ‘Petrarchism: English and Scottish Connections’, explores the way Petrarch’s legacy was taken up in Britain, from the time of the ﬁrst Petrarchists, Wyatt and Surrey, to the early seventeenth century after the Union of the Crowns. In ‘Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England’, Michael Wyatt looks at some of the traces of Petrarch’s presence in England at this time, moving from Ascham’s attack on Petrarch, to his pupil Elizabeth Tudor’s translation of the ﬁrst ninety lines of the Trionfo dell’Eternità, to Harington’s rewriting of the Vita Solitaria. Once more, as in Italy at the time, it is Petrarch’s versatility, and indeed elusiveness, that allows so many different versions of the writer to circulate in the early modern period. In ‘Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia and European Petrarchism’, Stephen Clucas considers the Hekatompathia, the ﬁrst Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English, as a useful diagnostic text for investigating the status of imitation in late sixteenth-century Europe. Clucas is primarily concerned with the variety of ways in which Watson articulates the relationship between his poems and the originals, from faithful, line-by-line renderings to various kinds of partial translation, to centoni and paraphrase. Although nobody would dispute the importance of Sidney’s poetry, Watson is actually a more typical product of English Petrarchism, and worthy of further study. With John Roe’s ‘The Comedy of Astrophil: Petrarchan Motifs in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella’, we move to consideration of one of the major English exponents of Petrarch’s legacy. Despite his reputation as an anti-Petrarchan, much of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is positively inﬂuenced by Petrarch. However, one signiﬁcant difference between the two is Sidney’s sense of humour which underpins a number of the poems in the sequence. He expands Petrarchan antitheses beyond anything we ﬁnd in the Canzoniere, or in later Petrarchists, and in some poems he offers a witty critique of the Platonic interpretations of Petrarch commentators such as Gesualdo; and there is no final recantation on the part of Astrophil, as happens famously in the last poem of the Canzoniere. In ‘Sidney, Spenser, and Political Petrarchism’, Syrithe Pugh continues the discourse on Sidney and

Introduction

5

Spenser, arguing that the engagements of both poets with Petrarchism are more serious, and indeed more political than traditional readings have implied. In particular, the two poets follow Petrarch in condemning desire, but not to display their contemptus mundi, but to articulate their anxiety about the absolutist tendency of the Tudor monarchy, and its social consequences. Spenser’s interest in Petrarch, starting with his translation of Petrarch’s Rime 323, is more complex than Sidney’s, aware as he is of Petrarch’s authority, especially as a model for creating a national poetry. However, Spenser uses this model not to construct a sense of nationhood in thrall to a monarch, but to create a counter-national poetry whose authority is independent of political power. The ﬁnal chapter in this section, Ronnie Jack’s ‘Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet’, advances this discussion of poetry and nationhood by examining the Scottish Petrarchans both before and after 1603. In Scotland, Petrarch is initially resisted as a model, in a court which looks more to the (Petrarchist) poets of Scotland’s traditional ally, France. Once James VI of Scotland becomes King of England and Scotland, the Scottish sonnet becomes more anglicised, but also more Italianate, as the inﬂuence of the Pléiade wanes and Petrarchism becomes the dominant lyrical inﬂuence. Jack considers three Scottish poets who exemplify this development of the Petrarchan sonnet, culminating in William Drummond of Hawthornden who adopted a translation strategy that reﬂected his own concerns with solitude, death, transience, and decay, and thus expanded the topical range and stylistic invention of Scottish Petrarchism. The ﬁnal group of essays, in Section VI, ‘Petrarch and the Moderns: Italy and Britain’, brings the two strands of the book, the Petrarchan legacy in the two countries, up to the present time: two chapters are devoted to Italy, and two chapters to Britain. Pamela Williams, in ‘Leopardi and Petrarch’, underlines Leopardi’s major engagement with Petrarch, including his important commentary on the Canzoniere, and his own Petrarchan poems, notably Alla sua donna, whose similarities and differences with Petrarch’s Chiare, fresche e dolci acque (Canzoniere 126) are explored here. Perhaps the most striking similarity between the two poets is that they both are concerned with illusions without self-delusion. Emmanuela Tandello’s chapter, ‘Between Tradition and Transgression: Amelia Rosselli’s Petrarch’, brings the story of Petrarch and his Italian successors into the twentieth century, examining the poet’s ‘ghostly’ presence in an unlikely place, Amelia Rosselli’s poetry, and in a generally un-Petrarchan time, the twentieth century. Tandello sees Petrarch’s presence in lexical echoes, in the way the Canzoniere is allowed to dialogue

6

Introduction

with some of its later poetic paradigms, and in Rosselli’s use of classical mythologemes also present in her predecessor in constructing her own personal poetic myth. The last two chapters return to Britain. Martin McLaughlin’s ‘Nineteenth-century British Biographies of Petrarch’ documents the extraordinary enthusiasm for biographies of Petrarch in Britain in the three-quarters of a century between 1775 and 1850. In the late eighteenth century Petrarch was more popular in Britain than Dante, but the rise of Romanticism and the inﬂuential success of Cary’s translation of the Comedy meant that Dante soon eclipsed his successor as far as British taste was concerned. The chapter charts the growing critical sophistication in the biographies and works on Petrarch, notably in Foscolo’s four major essays on him in the 1820s, and in Walter Savage Landor’s acute analysis in the 1840s. In the end, though, there would be only two complete translations of the Canzoniere in the whole of the nineteenth century, whereas the number of English versions of the Comedy rose to ﬁfteen by 1900. In the ﬁnal chapter, ‘Translating Petrarch’, a recent translator of the poems, Peter Hainsworth, offers a survey of Petrarch in English from the early Renaissance versions of Wyatt and Surrey through to the twentieth century, when Durling’s 1976 translation—the ﬁrst complete English translation since 1859 — was ﬁnally complemented by several others, including Hainsworth’s own. He explains the rationale and problems behind his own versions and situates these within the broader context of the British preference for the more ‘concrete’ poetry of Dante, Michelangelo, and Montale. This last comment in a sense takes us back to our beginning, and mirrors a point made in the opening chapter by Boitani: in his Bucolicum Carmen, Petrarch notes that one of the major differences between the French and the English is that the former prefer words, the latter deeds; or, as Petrarch has Edward III say in his reply to the French King, ‘Tibi verba placent, michi facta relinque’. Despite that, the British engagement with Petrarch’s words is, if anything, stronger than ever. The Editors would like to thank Nicholas Mann and Joe Trapp for their generous support of this Conference as part of the British Academy’s programme of activities. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Joe Trapp. The paper Professor Trapp gave at the conference, entitled ‘Petrarch’s Canzoniere’, is now a chapter in a posthumous volume of his, entitled Illustrations of Petrarch: An Iconographic Survey (forthcoming). PETER HAINSWORTH, MARTIN MCLAUGHLIN, and LETIZIA PANIZZA

1

Petrarch and the ‘barbari Britanni’ PIERO BOITANI

THE MOST TIMID AMONG THE BARBARIANS, omnium barbarorum timidissimi: this is how Petrarch described the English in his letter of 27 February 1361 to Pierre Bersuire, Prior of Saint Eloi in Paris, encyclopaedist, moraliser-allegorist of Ovid and translator of Livy.1 Bersuire in fact died before the letter ever reached him but, had he managed to read it, he would have found a sorry account of changing fortune, with particular regard to the situation in France at the time. When he was a teenager, wrote Petrarch, the Britons, whom they call ‘Angli’ or ‘Anglici’, were the most timid among the barbarians: ‘now a ﬁercely warmongering people, they have defeated the Gauls, themselves renowned for war glories, with such unexpected successes that — although unable to conquer the vile Scots—not only have they treated the King of France shamefully and despicably—the thought of which does not fail to bring tears to my eyes—but they have also subjected the entire kingdom to steel and ﬁre’. Here Petrarch is alluding to the Hundred Years War, and in particular to the resounding English victories on French soil: in 1343, Edward III had landed in Normandy, advancing as far as Paris; in 1346, Philip VI of Valois had been defeated at Crécy, and the following year Edward III had conquered the Fort at Calais. While the English showed themselves to be unequal to the vile Scots (‘vilibus Scotis’)— losing the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 and thereby ensuring several hundred years of Scotland’s independence — in France they left behind the ‘sad traces’ and ‘horriﬁc scars’ of the French losses: in 1356, in Poitiers (the city of 1 Familiares 22. 14, 1–2. My own English versions of Petrarch’s letters are based on the texts of Francesco Petrarca, Opere (Florence, 1975), I; F. Petrarca, Epistole, ed. Ugo Dotti (Turin, 1978); Pétrarque, Lettres Familières (Paris, 2002); Seniles 1–9, in Pétrarque, Lettres de la vieillesse, critical edition by E. Nota (Paris, 2002); for the other books of the Seniles, Francisci Petrarchae Opera Omnia (Basle, 1554). For all the texts cited in the ﬁrst part of this chapter, and their place in Petrarch’s intellectual development, see the authoritative work by Francisco Rico, Vida u obra de Petrarca, vol. I: Lectura del Secretum (Padua, 1974).

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 9–25. © The British Academy 2007.

10

Piero Boitani

Bersuire’s birth), the son of Edward III, Edward the ‘Black Prince’, won a resounding victory over the French King John the Good, who was taken captive and held prisoner in London until France paid a huge ransom for his release. Petrarch was greatly disturbed by this unceasing conﬂict and by the devastation inﬂicted upon French soil by those who had once been the most timid among the barbarians: he had referred to them in a letter to Stefano Colonna in 1352,2 and was to do so again in another letter towards the end of 1367 or early in 1368 to Guido Sette.3 In the former he writes, echoing Solinus:4 The whole of France and that Britain which lies at the edge of our world, or rather beyond it, are destroying each other with heavy, reciprocal warfare [. . .] Who could have predicted that the King of France would live, and perhaps even die, in an English prison? But now we are certain of his imprisonment, and have a foreboding of his death. Who could have foreseen that the English army would reach the gates of Paris? But it did, although no one is so ignorant of human events as to be surprised by a king’s imprisonment or a siege upon a city.5

In his Seniles, on the other hand, he concentrates on the effects the English invasion has on culture, the academy, and scholarship. ‘Where’, he asks, is the Paris of the past which, although lesser than its reputation and clearly indebted to the falsehoods of its inhabitants, was nonetheless of considerable stature? Where are the battalions of students, the fervour of study, the riches of its citizens, the general joy? One no longer hears the din of its disputations, only the roar of battles; no longer visible are the heaps of books, only piles of weapons. No syllogisms, no discourses are to be heard, only the cry of sentinels.6

* * *

Yet Petrarch had likened Paris to England in barbarity. He could not bear the dialectics which ﬂourished at the Sorbonne and in Oxford, that empty argumentation which deals not with the real problems of humankind but only with words; relying on the mechanisms of mere logic, ignoring truth. These so-called philosophers, says Petrarch, have reduced even theology to dialectics, the highest speculations to problems of terms, formal dis2

Familiares 15. 7, 16–17, possibly revised in 1356. Seniles 10. 2, 33 ff. 4 Solinus, Collectanea 22. 1. 5 Familiares 15. 7, 17. 6 Seniles 10. 2, 33. 3

PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’

11

cussions: ‘those who usurped a most noble name and professed themselves masters of theology, see how lowly they have fallen: from theologians to logicians and alas sophists [ex theologis dyalectici atque utinam non sophiste]; since they neither love nor know God, neither do they want to know or love him; it is enough for them to appear to do so’.7 Later, in the Seniles, he calls dialectics the nauseating disease from Paris and Oxford which has already destroyed a thousand minds (stomachosum illud ‘ergo’ Parisiense et Oxoniense, quod mille iam destruxit ingenia).8 In a letter to Boccaccio, of 28 August, probably 1364, he declares in a ﬁt of anger and bad temper that in their day there had appeared ‘quibblers [dialecticuli], not only ignorant but demented who, like an army of black ants swarming forth from the entrails of some rotten oak, rush to destroy all those ﬁelds where superior learning ﬂourishes’. They, he adds, disparage Plato and Aristotle and laugh at Socrates and Pythagoras. He cannot even bring himself to give a name to such people, and indeed they have never received one by his works!9 It was Leonardo Bruni who later revealed their identity with crushing irony when he wrote that leading the attack against dialectics, the supposedly noble art of disputation, ‘is that barbarity which lives across the Ocean’. ‘What a people’, exclaims Bruni, ‘already so dreadful in name, Farabrich, Buser, Occam, and so forth, that they all seem to have emerged from the ranks of Radamanthus.’ He asks Coluccio Salutati: ‘What is there, Coluccio, in dialectics, that has been left unturned by the sophisms of the Britons?’10 At the end of the ﬁfteenth century, his ironic comment had become, according to Garin, a commonplace: quid cum Britannis, quorum nomina ipso sono horrenda sunt?, wrote Antonio Ferrari (Il Galateo) in a letter to Ermolao Barbaro.11 And the name ‘Swineshead’ certainly provided him with some justiﬁcation. Petrarch is never quite so harsh, but he deploys a similarly cutting irony when he wants to poke fun at the ‘barbarian Britons’, unrivalled masters of formal logic. In an epistle to Tommaso Caloiro da Messina, presumably of 12 March 1351, Petrarch refers to a letter from his friend 7 Familiares 16. 14, 12. See E. Garin, ‘La cultura ﬁorentina nella seconda metà del 300 e i “barbari britanni”’, in L’età nuova (Naples, 1969), pp. 141–66, here p. 151. Garin’s title and article provided the inspiration for the present chapter. 8 Seniles 12. 2, in Opera Omnia, p. 912. 9 Seniles 5. 2, 29–30. 10 Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. E. Garin (Milan–Naples, 1952), pp. 58–61. Some codices have Suiset (⫽Swineshead) in place of Occam. Buser stands for Entisber (⫽Heytesbury): see Garin, ‘La cultura ﬁorentina’, pp. 151–2. 11 Garin, ‘La cultura ﬁorentina’, p. 152. and see F. Rico, Nebrija frente a los bárbaros: El canon de gramáticos nefastos en las polémicas del humanismo (Salamanca, 1978).

12

Piero Boitani

about an ‘elderly logician’ who was threatening a violent attack upon his scholarly work.12 It is better to avoid quarrel with such people, he suggests, because they only wish to argue and not to discover truth. But of course the problem is how to save yourself from them ‘if not even the islands are safe’. Sicily seems rife with them, indeed the disease appears peculiar to islands ‘if to the ranks of Britain’s logicians is now added the new crowd of Cyclops from Aetna’. This, he says, may be why Pomponius Mela in his Cosmographia writes that Britain and Sicily are very similar. Petrarch believed that the similarity lay in the position of the land, in its triangular shape,13 and perhaps in the perpetual crashing of waves in the surrounding sea: it was certainly not the logicians he had in mind. ‘I heard ﬁrst of the Cyclops’, he declares, ‘then of the tyrants, both savage inhabitants; I did not know that a third type of monster had appeared, armed with double-edged enthymemes ﬁercer than the burning shores of Taormina itself.’ England likened to the Sicily of Polyphemus: this is Petrarch’s irony. The new Cyclops wear an Aristotelian cloak, claiming that Aristotle argued in a manner similar to theirs; but they do not see that he discussed and wrote about ‘matters of grave import’. They, on the other hand, limit themselves to conclusiunculae, trivial conclusions. It is said (by Aulus Gellius) that a logician insulted Diogenes with the sentence: ‘What I am, you are not.’ Diogenes conceded the point, upon which the logician replied: ‘I am a man’, and Diogenes accepted this too. The logician then concluded the syllogism: ‘Therefore you are not a man’ (‘Homo igitur tu non es’). Diogenes replied: ‘But this statement is false, and if you wish it to be true, start with me in your reasoning.’ Such are the disputations of Sicily and Britain! Petrarch himself does not condemn dialectics as such: he considers it an important rung in the ladder of the liberal arts, part of the long and difﬁcult path taken by each of us; but it is not an end in itself, and in any case it must come in the morning of life rather than in its evening: pars matutina, non serotina. He ends by citing Seneca and Chalcidius: ‘Tell the old fellow that I do not condemn the liberal arts, just old men who act like children; just as, following Seneca, nothing is more unseemly than an old man struggling with his alphabet, so nothing is more distasteful than an

12

Familiares 1. 7. A rather odd claim, as Nicholas Mann notes in ‘Dal moralista al poeta: appunti per la fortuna del Petrarca in Inghilterra’, in Francesco Petrarca, Atti dei Convegni Lincei (Rome, 1976), p. 59. 13

PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’

13

aging dialectician. And should he begin to gush with syllogisms, do as I suggest: run, and send him off to argue with Enceladus.’ Senes pueri, old men turned foolish, in Italian literally ‘vecchi rimbambiti’: this is Petrarch’s deﬁnition. And the expression, which turns upside down the positive value of the traditional topos, contains a double irony, for the passage from Chalcidius’ Timaeus Commentary from which he takes the expression not only describes those who, in the ﬁts of extreme dementia, are both ignorant and unaware of what they do not know, but also states that it is in fact Aristotle himself who calls them senes pueri!14 Petrarch’s diatribe against the logicians is relentless: for his is a cultural battle.15 What he cannot abide in these moderni is their superﬁciality and their irritation with the ancients. In Seniles 5. 2 to Boccaccio he mentions two good examples. He ﬁrst met a ‘scholastic’, a man from the schools, in a ﬁt of mad fury, who had it in for Virgil. ‘Why?’, asked Petrarch. ‘Nimius est in copulis’: for his abuse of the copula, of conjunctions, is the reply. ‘Well then go, Virgil’, concludes the poet, ‘and with the help of the Muses polish the poem that you received from the heavens only for it to fall into hands such as these!’16 The second case concerns one of those ‘modern philosophising types’ who entered his library and, at the poet’s citations of Holy Writ, ﬂew into a rage and retorted: ‘Keep your little church doctors to yourself: I know perfectly well who to follow and “I know whom I have believed.”’ ‘You use the words of the Apostle’, replies Petrarch,17 ‘may heaven allow that you also have his faith’. And the other: ‘Your Apostle was a sower of words and a madman.’ When the poet replies that these same accusations had already been brought against Paul by other philosophers and by the Governor of Syria, and that the Apostle’s words had on the contrary proved rather fruitful, for, irrigated with the blood of martyrs, they had produced harvests of faith in abundance, his interlocutor bursts out laughing: ‘Be the good Christian then, 14

Chalcidius, In Timaeum 248, p. 226, 7–15; Aristotle, Protrepticus, fr. 17 Ross. And see F. Rico, ‘Ubi puer, ibi senex: un libro de Hans Baron y el Secretum de 1353’, Quaderni Petrarcheschi, IX–X, Atti del Convegno Internazionale ‘Il Petrarca latino e le origini dell’Umanesimo’, Firenze, 20–3 maggio 1991 (1992–3), 166–238. For the traditional topos of ‘Boy and Old Man’, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Engl. trans. W. R. Trask (London, 1953), pp. 98–101. 15 See Familiares 1. 7; 10. 5; 16. 14; Seniles 5. 2; 12. 2; Invective 3. 68–82; 4. 467–78, etc. See K. Stierle, Francesco Petrarca: Ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts (Munich– Vienna, 2003), pp. 97–101; E. Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bari, 1975), pp. 71–88. 16 Seniles 5. 2, 31. 17 ‘Scio enim cui credidi’ is from 2 Timothy 1. 12.

14

Piero Boitani

but I believe nothing of what they say. Your Paul, your Augustine, all those you preach were great babblers. If only you could bear Averroës and see how much greater he is than your nugatores, your nonsense-tellers!’ Grabbing him by his cloak, Petrarch shows him the door, accusing him of heresy.18 The reason for Petrarch’s aversion for the logicians, therefore, is their scorn for classical poetry and for the Church Fathers. How could he, who had composed the Africa, accept a superﬁcially grammatical and syntactic critique of Virgil? How could he, author of the Secretum, put up with attacks against Paul and Augustine? Caught up in this was in fact the whole renewal of culture at which Petrarch was aiming: the return to antiquity as a leaning towards a beauty and wisdom that were not merely external; a return to Christian roots as a search for inner truth. Averroës had nothing to do with all this. The formalism and pseudoscientiﬁc disputes of the logicians at Paris and Oxford were to Petrarch a sign of decadence, not of progress. The ‘cinematics’ of Merton College, the Oxford ‘calculatores’, the ‘word algebra’ of Bradwardine, Heytesbury, and Swineshead, Dumbleton’s ‘latitude of forms’19— which certainly marked important developments in late medieval physics — were perhaps unfamiliar to the poet: they were in any case to remain alien to a man who looked only to philology as a tool for exploring the soul. The ‘two cultures’ were already beginning to split, and there is no doubt where Petrarch’s preference lay. * * *

‘Barbari Britanni’, therefore. One wonders what Petrarch might have said had he known that only a couple of decades later an Oxford clerk, albeit a ﬁctitious one, was to take from his writings the story of Griselda, claiming to have had it directly from him in Padua. How would Petrarch have reacted at the news that a poet had an Oxford student of logic — so enamoured of Aristotle and his philosophy that he spent all his money buying his books20—recite in vernacular English a tale derived from his Seniles?21 Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale presents us with a nice historical-cultural irony, 18

Seniles 5. 2, 34–5. See A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, 2nd edn (London, 1957), ch. 5, section 4; M. Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison, WI, 1959), ch. 4. 20 Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 285–6, 293–5, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L. D. Benson (Boston, MA, 1987). 21 De obedientia ac ﬁde uxoria, in which Petrarch draws on Decameron X, 10, is narrated in Seniles 17. 3. 19

PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’

15

which would be even more poignant if we could be sure that its author actually met Petrarch either in Lombardy in 1368 or in Tuscany in 1373. What is certain is that Chaucer’s Clerk calls Petrarch a ‘worthy clerk’, and confers upon him the brand new title of ‘lauriat poete’, adding that with his ‘rethorike sweete’ he has ‘enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ just as ‘Lynyan’, Giovanni da Legnano, did with philosophy, law, or ‘oother art particuler’.22 In short, Chaucer’s Clerk, whom Petrarch would have no qualms in placing among the ‘barbari Britanni’, recognises in Petrarch the very rhetorical-poetic accomplishment that the Italian poet himself would have wished. An Oxford dialectician sensitive to the humanist project and to Petrarch’s poetry! A lover of logic who praises the poetic laurel! European culture, in a matter of two decades, has taken a sensational leap. And it has done so thanks to Petrarch himself, whose personality and aura dominated the Continent at the time. It is also true that Chaucer’s Clerk proclaims that Petrarch is now dead, adding with a somewhat curious ‘sense of an ending’: ‘and nayled in his cheste’, nailed up inside his cofﬁn, as though he wanted not only to afﬁrm, as he openly declares, that in spite of laurels and glory Death kills us all, but also to insinuate that Petrarch’s poetic and cultural experience has come to a deﬁnitive end. Chaucer himself, however, seems to be of a different opinion: for, besides mistakenly attributing Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium to Petrarch,23 and perhaps having glanced at the Triumphus Fame and the De Remediis,24 he uses not only the story of Griselda, but also, sensationally, a Petrarchan sonnet (while claiming the author to be ‘Lollius’) in Troilus and Criseyde.25 Thus, in the last two decades of the fourteenth century, the Britons were no longer such — or only — barbarians. But how barbarian, beyond

22

Canterbury Tales IV, Clerk’s Prologue, 27–33. See P. Boitani, ‘The Monk’s Tale: Dante and Boccaccio’, Medium Aevum, XLV (1976), 50–69, and n. 35. 24 J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame (Oxford, 1968), p. 110. Bennett considers it likely that Chaucer knew this part of the Trionﬁ, but of course he might as well have read Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione for the House of Fame: see D. Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Woodbridge, 1985). A passage from De Remediis may be echoed in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale: see N. Mann, ‘La prima fortuna del Petrarca in Inghilterra’, in Il Petrarca ad Arquà (Padua, 1975), pp. 279–89; idem, ‘Il Petrarca e gli inizi del Rinascimento inglese’, La Cultura, XV (1977), 3–18. See also N. Mann, ‘Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, XVIII (1975), 139 ff. 25 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde I, 400–20: Petrarch, Canzoniere 132, ‘S’amor non è’. And see P. Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 56–74. 23

16

Piero Boitani

dialectics, had they really been during Petrarch’s time? In a letter to Pierre d’Auvergne (possibly of November, 1352) dedicated to what might be called ‘the writer’s disease’ — the ﬁrst, sensational ofﬁcial record of a widespread illness — Petrarch claims that he receives endless letters and poems daily. These are from people who want his opinion on their own poetic compositions, evidently because they consider him ‘arbiter of all minds’. He is bombarded with requests from every corner of the world, including requests from the Roman Curia. To reply to all of them would keep him very busy indeed; if he dared to criticise, he would be taken for a harsh censor; to praise them would lead to accusations of adulation and lies; if he remained silent he would be called arrogant and proud. All his own fault, of course, for he bears the burden of his own sin: it is he who set the bad example in the ﬁrst place, by insisting that the practice of poetry is the supreme activity of humankind, by accepting the laurel crown. In short, it was he who initiated the fashion of literature throughout Europe. He says that the requests arrive not only from Italy, but also from France, Greece, Germany, and England.26 Unless Petrarch is exaggerating, this means that even among the ‘barbari Britanni’ — and considerably before Chaucer and his friend Gower — there were people who attended passionately to Letters, in the Petrarchan manner. Something complementary is also true: that which is, so to speak, at the origin of that fashion and its ultimate cause. The famous Familiares 3. 18, addressed to the theologian and prior of Saint Mark’s in Florence, Giovanni dell’Incisa, describes Petrarch’s devouring passion for books, which he calls a ‘disease’ just as he calls ‘illness’ his passion for writing poetry.27 The unquenchable thirst for books, he says, is stranger than the desire for money, clothes, houses decorated with marble, well cultivated land, paintings, or horses. The latter provide a pleasure which is ‘silent and superﬁcial’: books delight to the depths of the soul, speaking to us, advising us, and uniting with us in live and lively familiarity. Books are living objects, people, human beings.28 There is not only the desire to possess them, although Petrarch knows that many people collect them ‘not to use them’, but to ‘adorn their rooms’. There is also the mechanism which books set off in someone like him, namely that of one author or

26

Familiares 13. 7, 11. Petrarch talks of this book obsession also in Familiares 18. 7, 4–6; Seniles 3. 9, 3–4 and 16. 1, 14 ff.; De Vita Solitaria 2. 14, 2. See also N. Mann’s excellent Pétrarque: Les voyages de l’esprit (Grenoble, 2004). 28 Similarly in De Vita Solitaria 2. 14, 2, and in Familiares 12. 8, 4–10. 27

PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’

17

title leading on to another. It was through reading Cicero’s Academica that he came across Varro. Florus had him searching for Livy. Seneca’s letters sent him browsing through libraries and discovering Cicero’s epistles in Verona. One writer leads to another, one book ushers us on to another. The ideal Library, and the real one, is for the best — or worst — of us, potentially inﬁnite. Hardened sinner that he is, Petrarch cannot resist the temptation and asks Giovanni at the end of his letter to unleash his friends in Tuscany, so that they might go searching in the ‘armouries’ of the religious orders and of other scholars to see if something might turn up ‘able to appease or whet my thirst’. He then adds a separate list of the books he most desires, and ends by claiming that he has sent similar requests to his friends in England, France, and Spain. * * *

Petrarch is thus aware that even in the libraries of barbarian Britain — perhaps in that same Oxford reviled on account of its logicians — hidden treasures may lie buried. Furthermore, he has met at least one Englishman whom he describes as ‘a man of lively mind and not ignorant of letters’—no small praise when pronounced by one such as Francis Petrarch. The Englishman in question is Richard de Bury, Chancellor of Edward III, and later his ambassador to the Papal Court at Avignon, and ﬁnally Bishop of Durham. In Familiares 3. 1, to Tommaso Caloiro da Messina, Petrarch explains, writing ‘from the very shore of the British Ocean’, that he has long searched for news of the island of Thule, which supposedly lay in those northerly seas. It is the farthest of lands, and everyone agrees that it lies to the West. But no one knows anything about it, while everyone has heard of Britain, Ireland, the Orkneys, and the Canaries (the ‘Happy Isles’).29 In this connection, Petrarch has had (in all probability at Avignon, around 1338) a ‘not altogether unhelpful conversation’ with Richard, who ‘from adolescence devoted himself to such curiosities’ and who was a man ‘of lively mind and not ignorant of letters’. Whether ashamed to confess his ignorance, or unwilling to reveal his secret, or actually wishing to do so, Richard replied that he would resolve Petrarch’s doubt once he had returned home ‘and had consulted his books, of which he had a great quantity’. From then on, however, the poet received no further news, and an ‘obstinate silence’ was the only reply to his frequent letters. 29

See V. Pacca, ‘De Thile insula (Fam. II. 1)’, in Motivi e forme delle Familiari di Francesco Petrarca, ed. Claudia Berra (VII Convegno di studi di Lingua e letteratura italiana. Gargnano del Garda, 2–5 ottobre 2002), Quaderni di Acme, LVII (Milan, 2003), pp. 591–610.

18

Piero Boitani

Richard was clearly untouched by Petrarch’s epistolary charms: or, as the poet himself suggests, he may have found nothing, or was absorbed in his duties as Bishop. The fact is, however, that Richard de Bury is the only man of culture from contemporary England mentioned by Petrarch. And, as chance would have it, back in England in 1344 Richard composed his Philobiblon, which is a hymn to research and to the possession of books. There is no way of being certain whether the work was in any way inﬂuenced by Petrarch’s ideas or by reading his works, but one may reasonably assume that the kind of conversation that took place between Richard and Petrarch in Avignon will have intensiﬁed the enthusiasm for books which Richard already felt. He tells us, for example, that he purchased and borrowed ancient (preferably) and modern books; accepted them as bribes; kept a staff of copyists, revisers, binders, and illustrators; sent agents round Europe in search of all sorts of books; held learned and helpful conversations with his protégés.30 He claims that in books he ﬁnds the dead alive; that, in the guise of Mercury, he has experienced an honest pleasure with books: ordered, governed by reason, for the greater glory of God.31 He recommends the study of Greek and perhaps knows some himself; he states that Virgil would not have got very far without plundering Homer, Theocritus, Pindar, Parthenius, and Lucretius, and in short that the Latin writers (including the Western Church Fathers) would not have been able to do much without the Greeks.32 He describes the inebriating experience of visiting that ‘paradise’ which is Paris, with its libraries and studies.33 And, almost mimicking Petrarch, he declares that Minerva, wisdom, came from the east to Athens, then to Rome, and then on to Paris, and has now happily arrived in Britain, ‘insularum insignissimam, quin potius microcosmum’, ‘ut se Grecis et barbaris debitricem ostendat’: Richard understood that in comparison with the Greeks all populations are barbarian.34 Richard de Bury is no Francis Petrarch. He is more traditionalist, much more closely linked than Petrarch to the Schools and to Aristotle. He appreciates the ‘solidity’ of Paris and English ‘perspicacity’ or subtlety. He praises logic and rhetoric.35 But the two men share ideals and passions: including their love of ‘the orthography of the grammarians of 30

Philobiblon, ed. A. Altamura (Naples, 1954), 8, 1–95. Ibid., 1, 32–7; 18, 48–52. 32 Ibid., 10, 36–50. 33 Ibid., 8, 59–75. 34 Ibid., 9, 102–10. 35 Ibid., 8, 117–20; 2, 7–10. 31

PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’

19

antiquity, prosody, etymology, syntax’, and above all — although for different reasons — poetry.36 Like Petrarch, de Bury cites Cicero, Ennius, and Livy. But there is more. Richard was an important patron of learning. Between 1334 and 1345 his entourage included intellectuals and theologians of the calibre of Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, Richard Fitzralph, and Robert Holcot. Bradwardine, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury, composed De Causa Dei, which became the fundamental treatise on predestination and in which he frequently cites the Latin classics.37 Fitzralph, Chancellor of Oxford and later Archbishop of Armagh, was a ﬁrst-class scholar and theologian.38 The Dominican friar Robert Holcot uses his own Commentary on the Book of Wisdom to explore and moralise ancient authors.39 Walter Burley, former tutor to the Black Prince and almoner to Queen Philippa, composed a De Vita et Moribus Philosophorum which is often recalled in connection with Petrarch’s Triumphus Fame, and which circulated widely throughout both France and Italy.40 They all moved between Avignon, Bologna, and Oxford.41 Some, like Holcot, belong to the group of ‘classicising friars’ devoted to the study of the authors of antiquity, which included Waleys, Ridevall, Ringstead and Lathbury.42 They all followed in the footsteps of John of Wales and Nicholas Trevet: the former being the staunch defender of the virtues of the pagans; the latter the commentator of the De Civitate Dei, the De Consolatione Philosophiae, and above all of Livy, of the Controversiae of the Elder, and the Tragedies of the Younger Seneca.

36

Ibid., 12, 1–14; 13, 1–5. See G. Leff, Bradwardine and the Pelagians (Cambridge, 1953); H. Oberman, Archbishop Thomas Bradwardine: A Fourteenth-century Augustinian (Utrecht, 1957); E. W. Dolnikowski, Thomas Bradwardine: A View of Time and a Vision of Eternity in Fourteenth-century Thought (Leiden, 1995). 38 See K. Walsh, A Fourteenth-century Scholar and Primate: Richard Fitzralph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford, 1981). 39 See B. Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960); A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge, 1982). 40 Petrarca, Trionﬁ, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli abbozzi, ed. V. Pacca and L. Paolino (Milan, 1996), TF III 77–8; IIa 37–9; TF III 43–5; TF III 88–90; TF II a, fr. 4–5; Smalley, English Friars, p. 74, n. 2. Francisco Rico is certain that Petrarch was acquainted with Burley’s work, ‘and that he probably used it, while carefully eliminating every trace of having consulted it, as he did in many similar cases’. Petrarch ‘could not have been unaware’ of Burley’s work ‘because it was fairly well-known’ and the poet could not have failed to become acquainted with ‘a book that was widely available’ (personal correspondence). 41 See W. J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-century England (Princeton, NJ, 1987), pp. 133–7. 42 Smalley, English Friars, pp. 75–239. 37

20

Piero Boitani

It is of course possible (though unlikely) that Petrarch had never heard of them. But whom in England would he have asked for manuscripts, except people like these, whom he might also have met in Avignon or in Bologna? Maybe the Britons were not all barbarians, maybe it was possible to have intellectual dealings with some of them. Richard de Bury and his circle, for example, cultivated the writings of John of Salisbury.43 Petrarch knows and cites the Policraticus, although he deﬁnes it as a work of ‘philosophicae nugae’. He quotes from it Pope Hadrian IV’s lament on the unhappiness of the Roman Pontiff and the burden he has to bear, using ‘almost the same words employed by him who heard them from his lips’ (namely, John himself).44 He recalls several times the sun falling from the sky upon Plato’s death and the so-called Epistola Plutarchi instruentis Traianum.45 John, the leading English exponent of what has been called the ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’,46 argues with the modern logicians of his day and claims — using a phrase not unlike Petrarch’s own — that they are growing old in childplay ( ﬁunt in puerilibus senes).47 ‘John of Salisbury and Petrarch’, writes Garin, ‘things come full circle’ (è un cerchio che si chiude).48 In the same ﬁrst letter of Familiares 3 in which he mentions Richard de Bury, Petrarch also talks about Giraldus Cambrensis, ‘courtier of the King of England, Henry II’, and his Topographia Hibernica: a work, he says, ‘of lightweight substance’, but ‘woven with a not rough verbal art’, which discusses the ‘ultima Thule’, thereby entering his library. Giraldus, writes Petrarch, uses Solinus, Isidore, and Orosius: he might also have mentioned Claudian! And, above all, he did not know Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. Pertrarch is always slightly diminishing when talking about the English (but not only about them): Richard de Bury is ‘non literarum inscius’, John of

43

Richard cites John of Salisbury in Philobiblon at least twice: explicitly at the end of Chapter 14; and again in Chapter 15, 33–8. Of Richard’s vast library only two codices survive, one of which contains Policraticus. 44 Familiares 9. 5, 28: Policraticus 8. 23, ed. C. C. I. Webb (Oxford, 1909), II, 410 ff. 45 Familiares 5. 1, 3; 15. 7 (which also refers to the war between the French and the English), 10; De Remediis 1. 107, 12; Rerum Memorandarum 3. 95, 1–2: Policraticus 7. 6, Webb II, 111 (the detail of the sun falling from the sky is absent from John’s sources on Plato’s death: Cicero, De Senectute 5. 13; Seneca, Epist. 58. 31); Familiares 11. 5, 4; 18. 6, 30; 24. 7, 10: Policraticus 5. 1, Webb I, 281–2. 46 C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1927). On John of Salisbury, see H. Liebeschütz, Mediaeval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury (London, 1950); The World of John of Salisbury, ed. M. Wilks (Oxford, 1984). 47 Metalogicon 2. 7 (in Patrologia Latina 199, 864 B): see Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni, pp. 25–6. 48 Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni, p. 26.

PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’

21

Salisbury’s writings are ‘philosophicae nugae’, Giraldus Cambrensis’ style is ‘non rudi verborum arte contextus’. If we then add the erudite comments heard above, it might seem that we are in the presence not of an Italian poet, but of an Oxbridge don of subtle British humour. * * *

Petrarch was in fact not in the least ignorant of English culture — which was simply an integral part of European culture — nor of the importance of England on the political scene of the day. The most timid among the barbarians had burst upon the scene with force even before the Hundred Years War, and when the poet hopes, after the promises of Philip VI and the meeting of the European rulers in the Sainte Chapelle in October 1333, for a new Crusade ‘per ﬁacchar le corna/ a Babilonia’,49 to bring down Babylon and the inﬁdels, he calls not only upon the French led by Charlemagne’s successor, but also upon the Spanish, the Aragonese, the Portuguese, the English, the Germans, and all the peoples of northern Europe. Interweaving echoes from Claudian, Dante, Virgil, and Lucan, Petrarch involves the whole of western Europe in his appeal in ‘O aspectata in ciel’: Chiunque alberga tra Garona e ’l monte e ’ntra ’l Rodano e ’l Reno et l’onde salse le ’nsegne cristianissime accompagna; et a cui mai di vero pregio calse, dal Pireneo a l’ultimo orizzonte, con Aragon lassarà vòta Hispagna; Inghilterra con l’isole che bagna l’Oceano intra ’l Carro et le Colonne, inﬁn là dove sona doctrina del sanctissimo Elicona, varie di lingue et d’arme, et de le gonne, a l’alta impresa caritate sprona. [. . .] Una parte del mondo è che si giace mai sempre in ghiaccio et in gelate nevi tutta lontana dal camin del sole: là sotto i giorni nubilosi et brevi, nemica natural-mente di pace, nasce una gente a cui il morir non dole. Questa se, più devota che non sòle, col tedesco furor la spada cigne,

49

Canzoniere 27, ‘Il successor di Karlo’, 3–4.

22

Piero Boitani turchi, arabi et caldei, con tutti quei che speran nelli dèi di qua dal mar che fa l’onde sanguigne, quanto sian da prezzar, conoscer dêi [. . .] (Whoever dwells between Garonne and the mountains, and between the Rhone and the Rhine and the salt waves, accompanies the most Christian standards; and all who ever cared for true worth from the Pyrenees to the farthest horizon, will leave Spain empty along with Aragon; England, with the islands that Ocean bathes between the Wain and the Pillars— as far as any knowledge sounds of sacred Helicon — differing in language and arms and costume, charity spurs all to the high undertaking. [. . .] There is a part of the world that always lies in ice and frozen snows, all distant from the path of the sun; there, beneath days cloudy and brief, is born a people naturally enemy of the rest, whom dying does not pain. If these, more devout than in the past, gird their swords in their Teutonic rage, you can learn how much to value Turks, Arabs, and Chaldeans, with all those who hope in gods on this side of the sea whose waves are blood-coloured.)50

Placed among the islands lapped by the Ocean, between the far north and the west, between the Pole and Gibraltar, England once again ﬁnds itself at the edge of the known world: together with Ireland and the Orkneys evoked in Familiares 3. 1, as if it were a ‘penultimate’ Thule.51 Yet fully

50

Canzoniere 28, ‘O aspectata in ciel’, 31–57, English translation by R. M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA, 1976). For Petrarch’s use of the classics in this passage, see the commentary in F. Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata, 2nd edn (Milan, 2004), pp. 146–9; and now R. Bettarini’s commentary in F. Petrarca, Canzoniere: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 2 vols (Turin, 2005), I, 144–54. 51 In that ﬁrst letter, however, Petrarch goes further than Gibraltar, mentioning also (3. 1, 3) the Happy Isles, the Canaries: even if the poet knew of their existence while composing Canzone 28, the Canaries could not have been cited because he was circumscribing the Christian world. On Petrarch and the Canaries, see G. Padoan, ‘Petrarca, Boccaccio e la scoperta delle Canarie’, Italia Medievale e Umanistica, VII (1964), 263–77; T. J. Cachey, Le isole Fortunate: Appunti di storia letteraria italiana (Rome, 1995); S. Peloso, Al di là delle Colonne d’Ercole (Viterbo, 2004), pp. 17–66.

PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’

23

within the Christian civitas: ‘as far as any knowledge sounds of sacred Helicon’. That this is for Petrarch much more than a geographical expression is borne out by the Bucolicum Carmen, in which Eclogue 12, entitled ‘Conﬂictatio’ (‘Conﬂict’), introduces two characters, Multivolus (Voluble, the inconstant people) and Volucer (Velox, the messenger).52 The latter, spurred on by Multivolus’ curiosity, tells of the confrontation between the shepherd Pan, the King of France locked in the arms of the Avignon Curia (Faustula), and Arthicus, the King of England. This is of course the Hundred Years War, to which we have often seen the poet refer in his works. Never before, however, has he set on the stage (Volucer’s role is minimal) the rulers of the two countries, Philip VI and John the Good of France, and Edward III of England, at the culminating moments of the battles of Crécy and Poitiers.53 The fact is that to Petrarch they represent two nations, two policies, and two differing ethical codes. I would like to emphasise this aspect, because it shows an extraordinary awareness deﬁnitely in keeping with reality, and in some respects a precursor of it. For it is not yet clear to many people in the middle of the fourteenth century that France and England each have distinct and separate identities, and in England itself this awareness is only slowly beginning to emerge.54 Petrarch, however, drawing on cultural traditions, on the mythical associations of the two contenders, fully appreciates the difference. When the two armies prepare for battle, each begins to invoke its own ‘gods’. The English call upon the 52

I use the Bucolicum Carmen, ed. M. François and P. Bachmann (Paris, 2001), comparing it with the editions by A. Avena (Padua, 1906) (which includes the commentaries by Benvenuto da Imola and Francesco Piendibeni, and the ‘arguments’ of the Este Codex), and by D. De Venuto (Pisa, 1990), and the English translation and comment by T. G. Bergin (New Haven, CT, 1974). See also N. Mann, A Concordance to Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen (Pisa, 1984); ‘The Making of Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, XX (1977); and ‘L’edizione critica del Bucolicum Carmen’, Annali della Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, 3rd series, XIX: 1 (1989). 53 The ﬁrst 150 lines of the poem seem to have been inspired by the Battle of Crécy (26 August 1346), whereas the remaining part cannot have been composed before 17 September 1356, the day of the Battle of Poitiers, which saw John the Good captured by the English. Thus the ﬁrst King of France alluded to in the Carmen must be Philip VI of Valois. See Bucolicum Carmen, ed. François and Bachmann, pp. 259–60. 54 The ofﬁcial language (at the royal court, in the lawcourts, etc.) in England was still French, and so it remained for the whole of the Trecento (Edward III even dictated the motto of the Order of the Garter in French); there was a ﬂourishing Anglo-Norman literature; and English culture was still ‘Channel Culture’. English national identity began to assert itself towards the end of the century, during and after the Hundred Years War (in 1349, three years after Crécy, English replaces Anglo-Norman in public records): see P. Boitani, La letteratura del Medioevo inglese (Rome, 1991), pp. 47–66.

24

Piero Boitani

walls of Troy and the name of Arthur, namely the acclaimed British descent from Aeneas, via Brutus, and from the great ruler of Anglo-Celtic legend. The French invoke Charlemagne and his paladins. Inaugurating commonplaces which continued right up to the twentieth century, the French even throw in the face of the English the tail supposedly hanging from their bodies.55 The two kings acrimoniously criticise in each other those aspects of their respective national characters which were to become codiﬁed in popular imagination: according to the French, the English are angry and proud (the English retort: courageous and ready when required to take up arms); the French boast that they are rich and supported by extensive alliances (the English reply: stingy, mollycoddled, destined to be abandoned by their allies).56 The next ﬁve centuries of European history ensure that these topoi are repeated endlessly. For Petrarch, different national characters also imply different ethical codes and behaviours. Whereas Pan (the French King) accuses Arthicus (the English King) of fraud, lack of wisdom, dishonesty, wickedness, and above all of the barbaric language, the stuttering tongue, the meaningless clatter that the Englishmen’s raucous gullet brings forth instead of words, Edward III replies, with thoroughly British overtones: ‘Tibi verba placent, michi facta relinque’ (You like words, leave deeds to me). He then lists the French vices: perjury, rapine, extortion, oppression, the abandonment of religion (‘elusa deorum numina’), the thirst for gold, love of luxury, food and wine (he even mentions their fondness for sea-urchins, turbot, ‘the shining scaled ﬁsh’).57 Edward is in short the ruler of an austere and active people, the French ruler that of a nation of cowardly babblers. Petrarch teaches the King of France a rather English moral lesson: ‘me vindice’, claims Edward, with me dispensing revenge, the French leader will now pay the penalty for all his crimes. Of course classical examples could not be absent from such a lesson. The King of England accuses his enemy of being a Crassus, who savoured ‘the taste of the wealth and the gold of Assyria’ together with the endless massacre of his men and himself being killed by the Parthians. The King of France replies by comparing Edward to Cyrus of Persia: thirsty for blood, Cyrus was defeated by Queen Thamyris whose son he 55

‘Nota quod infamis testetur fabula caude’, l. 62: see Bergin’s note to Bucolicum Carmen 12. 62; and François and Bachmann, p. 384, n. 18. V. Pacca’s recent Bologna paper on Englishmen’s tails, ‘L’infame coda degli Inglesi’, is now in Verso il Centenario, special issue of Quaderni petrarcheschi, XI (2001), 167–87. 56 Bucolicum Carmen 12. 17–25, 114–25. 57 Ibid., 12. 62–71, 114–19.

PETRARCH AND THE ‘BARBARI BRITANNI’

25

had slain, and ended up with his head cut off his corpse and thrown into a goatskin full of human blood.58 But behind the deﬁnition of the roots of identity, of national diversity, different moral behaviours, and classical models lies the vision of two different policies. What Edward criticises most of all in the French King — and there is no doubt that he is expressing Petrarch’s views at this point — is Paris’s foolhardy support of Avignon. The poet shows himself to be fully aware of the growing hostility of England towards the Papacy and the Church, which during the fourteenth century were increasingly perceived as aliens and exploiters.59 But, above all, Petrarch voices the scandal of Avignon itself and what it stands for, a Church which has turned from being universal to being French. Faustula in fact even offers Pan tithes (‘a tenth of her large ﬂock’), and Arthicus, calling her a ‘harlot’, accuses her of forgetting the groom (Christ) and allowing herself to be milked by the greedy adulterer, the King of France.60 Soon after, Edward criticises the French ruler for totally abandoning the old woman who, unhappy and miserable, with nothing left, sheds tears both night and day. The ‘unhappy widow’ is Jerusalem, taken in by French promises, ‘reduced to serving inﬁdel dogs’, not helped as she should be by the Christian Crusade. By now ‘conﬂict’ is rife, and it is not only verbal but real: in the Hundred Years War prior to which Petrarch had perceived the English as timidissimi barbarorum, Edward wades through ‘the pools of the marshes lying between them’, the Channel. The King of France withdraws in defence. Soon after, the sound of battle rises, ‘ingens per rura tumultus’. Bewildered and completely alone, Pan wanders in the meadows to which he has ﬂed. Later, Volucer sees him, ‘vanquished’ and ‘heavily fettered’, being dragged across the Channel. John the Good is imprisoned in England after the Battle of Poitiers.61 Meanwhile, Edward III emerges as a hero of destiny. Preparing for war, he declares to the ruler of France: ‘iudice fato/ Destituunt victum, victorem cuncta sequuntur’ (when Fate makes his decision, nothing is left to the vanquished and everything goes to the victor).62 The Britons are no longer barbarians: they rival the ancient Romans. 58 Ibid., 12. 90–100, 101–13: the source of the ﬁrst passage is Orosius, Histories 2. 7, 6; for the second, most commentators quote Dante, Purgatorio 20. 116–17. 59 See T. T. Mattucci, Il Bucolicum Carmen di Francesco Petrarca (Pisa, 1971), pp. 408–13; François and Bachmann, pp. 391–406. 60 Bucolicum Carmen 12. 45–53. 61 Ibid., 12. 147–59. It is clear that at this point Pan must be John the Good, captured after Poitiers. 62 Ibid., 12. 137–8. I am indebted to Francisco Rico for reading this chapter and providing a number of helpful comments.

2

Petrarch solitarius JENNIFER PETRIE

THE DE VITA SOLITARIA (1346–71) has not been one of the most widely read or studied of Petrarch’s works, and it is not too difﬁcult to see why.1 The work can seem rambling and diffuse, a compilation in large part — like the Rerum Memorandarum Libri or indeed the De Viris Illustribus— of examples of famous solitaries, pagan and Christian, added to gradually over time. Nevertheless, as well as being, together with its companion, the De Otio Religioso, the ﬁrst fully ﬂedged example of Petrarch’s Christian Humanism, it also, it could be argued, marks the virtual invention of a literary type that was to have considerable signiﬁcance in western European culture: the solitary artist or thinker, the literary lay hermit. It places Petrarch at the head of a long line which includes Montaigne in his tower, Marvell in his garden, Rousseau, Wordsworth, down to the Romantic and post-Romantic images of the solitary poet (and indeed one might be tempted to add the present-day taste for artistic rural downshifting). This is not to claim any direct inﬂuence. What Petrarch did was help to create a cultural ideal which involved solitude, the love of books, a reﬂective way of living, poetic sensibility, the desire for tranquillity, and a critical or even hostile attitude to one’s time. (While it is humanistic, it can be distinguished from ‘civic humanism’, although the two are not necessarily 1

All references to the De Vita Solitaria (henceforth DVS) are from the edition by G. Martellotti in Francesco Petrarca, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti et al. (Milan–Naples, 1955), pp. 286–603. References to the Secretum are from the edition by E. Carrara in the same volume, pp. 22–215. The extracts from the Epistole Metrice are from the selection by E. Bianchi in Francesco Petrarca, Rime, Trionﬁ e Poesie latine, ed. F. Neri et al. (Milan–Naples, 1961), pp. 706–805. Quotations from the Italian poetry (Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, abbreviated as RVF) are from Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata (Milan, 1996). All translations are my own. Interesting discussions of the DVS can be found in C. Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven, CT, and London, 1979) and in K. Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh, 1984). On the general topic of the active and contemplative lives, see B. Vickers (ed.), Arbeit, Musse, Meditation: Betrachtungen zur vita activa und vita contemplativa (Zurich, 1985, 1991). Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 29–38. © The British Academy 2007.

30

Jennifer Petrie

totally incompatible.)2 Nor is it of course to say that Petrarch invented the ideal ex nihilo; he is especially concerned in the De Vita Solitaria with ﬁnding predecessors: Christian hermits and classical and patristic writers who appreciated periods of reﬂective rusticatio. A major classical model could well be the Horace of the Odes, on his Sabine farm, as well as the Virgil of book 2 of the Georgics, while more generally Petrarch draws on ancient discussions of the relative merits of otium and negotium.3 Seneca, especially, is important here, in moral works such as the De Otio and the De Tranquillitate Animi, which contrast engagement in public affairs with a retirement dedicated to study, especially the study of philosophy. The De Vita Solitaria was begun in 1346, shortly after Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s letters which had had such an impact on him, making him favour the letter as an autobiographical literary form, which could later be edited and incorporated into larger collections. The De Vita Solitaria takes, signiﬁcantly, the form of an extended letter, addressed to Philippe de Cabassoles, who was the bishop in whose diocese Vaucluse (Petrarch’s transalpina solitudo) was to be found, and who was also the seigneur of the region: so Petrarch, as a cleric resident in Vaucluse, was doubly dependent on him, especially if he wished to be free, or at least relatively free, to live a life of solitude. However, typically, he chooses to address him as a friend and an equal. Philippe, it is assumed, shares with Petrarch the same values of reading, learning, reﬂection, and Humanism. And though, as it is admitted, he is a busy man, he has (of course) nothing in common with the ambitious, wealthy, corrupt, and anxiety-ridden occupatus who will be satirised in the early part of the treatise. Petrarch’s use of the letter form serves to link together the various elements of the work: the contrasting portraits of the solitarius and the occupatus, reflections on the value of solitude, the defence of the solitary life against criticism (whether from Philippe or from others — or indeed from himself), and the examples of lovers of solitude (from great men of antiquity to hermitsaints who befriended animals). And it also allows for personal reﬂection and comment. The theme of solitude appears in the Rerum Memorandarum Libri (1343–5) as the prerequisite for a virtuous life of study, and also in various early letters and Epistole Metrice, and so is not totally new in the De Vita 2

For a recent survey of the whole debate on ‘civic humanism’, see J. Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge, 2000). 3 On Georgics 2 and the DVS, see L. Panizza, ‘Active and Contemplative in Lorenzo Valla: The Fusion of Opposites’ in Vickers, Arbeit, pp. 181–223 (192–201).

PETRARCH SOLITARIUS

31

Solitaria (even granted the notorious difﬁculty of dating Petrarch’s early work with conﬁdence). The treatise, however, is Petrarch’s ﬁrst sustained thematisation of solitude, and his ﬁrst extended personal apologia. Petrarch’s cultivation of solitude is well known, of course. The biographical circumstances are there: his family in exile from Florence, his literary and humanistic studies clearly requiring time and leisure, his expressed dislike of Avignon, his travels and his various residences in exquisite rural settings: Vaucluse, Selvapiana, and Arquà. There was, however, plenty of city life as well (and with it often involvement in public affairs), in Avignon, and later Milan, Venice, and Padua. Moreover, he did his best to ensure that solitude did not mean obscurity, oblivion, or invisibility — or so at least it seems to us, who know Petrarch only through his writings. Again and again there are letters to friends, invitations to stay, attempts to share the solitary life with his readers by means of the many written evocations of it. Paradoxically, solitude becomes part of Petrarch’s public image. It needs also to be said that the independence Petrarch enjoyed was relative: his enjoyment of solitude was always something which had to be negotiated with his various patrons. This may have something to do with the frequency with which he anticipates or replies to criticisms of his favoured way of life. However, making assumptions about Petrarch’s life from his works is a notoriously treacherous task, and my emphasis here is mainly literary, on the thematisation of solitude. Even if Petrarch did not always live the solitary life which he professed, he created the role of the solitarius, repeatedly returned to it, and made immense literary use of it. His own version of Humanism served to shape it. One very personal, consciously autobiographical example of this literary treatment may be found in the following extract from Epistole Metrice 1. 6, describing his life in Vaucluse: Hic mecum exsilio reduces statione reposta Pyerides habitant; rarus superadvenit hospes nec nisi rara vocent noti miracula fontis. Vix mora nostra quidem, licet annua, bis ve semel ve congregat optatos Clausa sub Valle sodales. Sic pietas est victa locis; at crebra revisit litera; me longa solum sub nocte loquuntur ante ignem, gelidas me solum estate per umbras; sermo diurnus eis, idem sum fabula pernox. Nil coram conferre datum; dumeta nivesque exhorrent nostrasque dapes, iamque urbe magistra mollitiem didicere pati.

32

Jennifer Petrie (Here as refugees from exile, the Muses live with me in this secluded spot; only the rare guest arrives, unless the rare wonder of the famous spring attracts someone. During my stay here, although as long as a year, it is barely once or twice that Vaucluse has gathered together the friends I hoped for. This place asks too much of their kindness; but many letters come, and they talk to me as I sit alone by the ﬁre during the long nights, or in the cool shade in the summer. They talk to me day and night. But we cannot talk face to face; they are afraid of the brambles and the snow and my diet, now that the city has taught them to cultivate the easy life.)4

Letters still ensure that the poet is in touch with his friends and not forgotten. People still talk about him. Yet the few visitors and the long winter nights suggest an isolation and loneliness perhaps not wholly mitigated by the presence of the Muses. The De Vita Solitaria is, as I have already said, above all an apologia for the solitary life and Petrarch’s practice of it. It has a strongly polemical tone, which anticipates some of the later invectives. This is especially true of the early part of the work, with its ugly portrait of the occupatus, which seems to draw both on Roman satirists and the sermons of Fathers of the Church: the anxious wealthy man surrounded by clients, plotting oppression, torn by anxieties, living in unhealthy luxury described in language designed to revolt the senses (evocations of noise, darkness, bad odours, body ﬂuids, blood spilt on the kitchen ﬂoor, etc.).5 By contrast, the solitarius is out in the fresh, pure, clean air, beside equally pure waters, singing the praises of God to the accompaniment of birdsong. This idyllic account is one which recurs in Petrarch’s evocations of Vaucluse, although in Metrice 1. 6, where the polemical tone is absent, there is a greater emphasis on rural harshness. A similar opposition, though less extreme, can be found in Virgil’s Georgics 2. 458–89, where the simple life of the farmer is contrasted with unwholesome urban luxury. The poet as cultivator of the Muses opts for the rural life (though possibly not the heavy manual labour of the farmer that goes with it). What becomes very clear in the De Vita Solitaria is that the ideal of the solitary life is closely bound up with the pursuit of inner tranquillity, the stillness required for meditation, self-knowledge, and the knowledge of God. Meditation for Petrarch is not only a religious exercise (or, if it is, it is so in a very particular way): it is essential to the creative activity of 4 5

Metrice 1. 6, 164–75. DVS, p. 310.

PETRARCH SOLITARIUS

33

the humanist writer as he envisages it. The monastic sequence of lectio, meditatio, oratio becomes adapted into the process of reading ancient texts, meditating on them, and then engaging in one’s own creative writing. This, as is well known, is Petrarch’s way of conceiving literary imitation, but it may be more than that. His concern is with a personal and Christian appropriation of the insights of the ancient writers through meditation on their works, and he deems solitude and tranquillity essential for making this possible. Here the world of books, classical and patristic, is opposed to the company of all contemporaries but a few select and like-minded friends.6 This association of solitude, tranquillity, self-knowledge, prayer, reading, meditation, and literary activity is at the core of Petrarch’s defence of solitude, in the De Vita Solitaria (in its various drafts) and elsewhere. And he is acutely aware of criticisms. One of these, attributed to the doctor in book 4 of the Invective Contra Medicum (1353), involves Aristotle’s deﬁnition of man as a political animal: to seek a life of solitude would constitute misanthropy. Petrarch’s favourite example of this is Homer’s Bellerophon, as cited by Cicero.7 Petrarch rejects the charge of misanthropy and denies that his solitude might mean self-isolation: the solitarius as a scholar and writer is labouring on behalf of others. In the De Vita Solitaria, Petrarch’s self-defence (insofar as he is defensive in this work which is more concerned with a positive afﬁrmation of solitude) tends to emphasise the personal, individual nature of his option. He allows that it is theoretically possible that a person immersed in city life might be working for the common good, but doubts the possibility in practice of doing so while escaping spiritual corruption. He himself ﬁnds it hard enough to save his own soul, without concerning himself with that of other people.8 Most busy people, he says, anticipating Pascal, are incapable of being alone with themselves.9 This applies especially to his hyperactive critics. (Petrarch always ﬁnds attack a good form of defence.) A more difﬁcult criticism comes from Seneca’s assertion that tranquillity is an interior matter which does not depend on external circumstances. Up to a point, says Petrarch, but not altogether: both reason and external situation are gifts of God.10 Solitude 6

See, for example, DVS, p. 366. Francesco Petrarca, Invective Contra Medicum, ed. M. Schiavone (Milan, 1972), p. 129. The reference is to Cicero’s translation in Tusculan Disputations 3. 26. 63 of Homer, Iliad 6. 201. 8 DVS, pp. 322–8. 9 DVS, p. 294: ‘secum esse non possunt’. 10 DVS, p. 324–6. The reference is to Ad Lucilium 55. 8. In general, Seneca avoids too strong an opposition between civic virtue and solitary retirement: the two are both seen as ways of working 7

34

Jennifer Petrie

offers the best conditions for a life of tranquillity. Books are the best companions.11 The most severe criticisms, however, are Petrarch’s own as they appear not in the De Vita Solitaria but in the Secretum, and are not so easily answered—in fact they are not answered at all. The morally formidable Augustinus, the mentor and critic in this work, cannot be dismissed as a corrupt occupatus incapable of being alone with himself, and Franciscus, Petrarch’s persona as sinner, or as all too human, is too busy defending himself on other fronts to undertake the defence of the ideal of solitude (which he appears in any case to have abandoned, or at least failed to live up to). For the ﬁctional ‘Augustinus’, Petrarch’s solitude is simply a more devious way of pursuing the ambitions he once castigated in the occupati. In book 2, Franciscus wishes to deny the charge of ambition, but all in vain: Et quod fuga urbium silvarumque cupidine gloriaris, non excusationem sed culpe mutationem arguit. Multis namque viis ad unum terminum pervenitur; et tu, michi crede, licet calcatam vulgo deserueris viam, tamen ad eandem, quam sprevisse te dicis, ambitionem obliquo calle contendis; ad quam otium, solitudo, incuriositas tanta rerum humanarum, atque ista tua te perducunt studia quorum usque nunc ﬁnis est gloria. (And your glorying in your ﬂight from cities and desire for the woods is not an excuse but a shifting of the ground of your fault. One can arrive at a single goal by many roads, and you, believe me, even though you deserted the well trodden path, pursue the same ambition which you claim to despise by an oblique route, where you are led by your leisure, your solitude, your great indifference to all human concerns and these studies of yours, which up to now have had no other object than fame.)12

And in book 3, whose topic is love, Franciscus is told that solitude is one of the consequences of this love, and that it has indeed made him misanthropic, a Bellerophon, the very thing he denies in his defences elsewhere.13 Here, as in the Canzoniere and some of the Epistole Metrice, solitude and love go together: beautiful lonely places are invaded by the lady’s presence, real, remembered, or imagined. Indeed in the Italian poetry Laura herself comes to be portrayed as a solitaria, sitting or wandering on behalf of society. The De Tranquillitate Animi is more concerned with opposing purposeful activity to aimless restlessness. 11 DVS, p. 566. 12 Secretum 2, Prose, p. 96. 13 Secretum 3, Prose, p. 156.

PETRARCH SOLITARIUS

35

pensively.14 But of course it is certainly not as simple as the virtuous love of two solitary people. For the solitude of the Petrarchan poet-lover is so often incompatible with the peace of mind which, according to the De Vita Solitaria, is the purpose of the solitary life in the ﬁrst place. Flee solitude, Augustine advises Petrarch: it is the worst condition for a man in love: Tam diu cavendam tibi solitudinem scito, donec sentias morbi tui nullas superesse reliquias. Ubi enim rusticationes nichil tibi profuisse memorasti, minime mirari decuit. Quid remedii, queso, in rure solitario ac reposto reperire crederes? Fateor, sepe dum solus eo fugeres suspirans urbemque respectans, irrisi ex alto [. . .]. (Be sure to avoid solitude until such time as you feel that you have no more traces of your sickness [of love]. Indeed, when you said that your periods in the country did nothing to help you, there was little cause for surprise. What cure, I ask you, might you think you would ﬁnd in lonely and remote rural areas? I admit that often when I looked down on you from above, as you took your solitary ﬂight, sighing and looking back towards the city, I laughed.)15

The De Vita Solitaria is probably on the same side as Augustinus, but puts the case differently, in a lively piece of misogyny. The solitarius should not admit a female companion, as her demands, moods, and tantrums would destroy the tranquillity of the life: ‘raro sub eodem tecto habitant quies et mulier’ (rarely do peace and woman dwell under the same roof).16 (Shortly afterwards, in the De Vita Solitaria, perhaps as a palinode, there is a passage giving examples of virtuous solitary women, such as Paula, the friend of St Jerome.)17 Petrarch does in fact appear to have shared his solitude with a woman, the mother of his two children, at least for a time. She features hardly at all in his works (although he does refer to his sins of the ﬂesh). Unless the above quotation is intended to be read as the sad testimony of bitter experience, she is conveniently censored out of the De Vita Solitaria, as she is (probably) from the Italian poetry.18 Petrarch’s self-portrayal as solitarius, in this as in other respects, has undergone much literary and imaginative refashioning. In general, most of the disruptions of the tranquillity of Petrarch’s solitude tend to be female, or at least feminine. There are the Nymphs, for 14

See, for example, RVF 100. 5–6; 160. 13. Secretum 3, Prose, p. 172. 16 DVS, p. 434. 17 DVS, pp. 442–7. 18 For speculation on the possible identity of Petrarch’s mistress, and a possible reference in the Italian poetry, see F. J. Jones, ‘An Analysis of Petrarch’s Eleventh Canzone, “Mai non vo’ piú cantar—com’io solea” ’, Italian Studies, XLI (1986), 24–44. 15

36

Jennifer Petrie

example, who cause the Sorgue to ﬂood and damage the poet’s garden (Epistole Metrice 3. 1). They are jealous of the poet’s companions, the Muses (line 16), nine old ladies (too venerable to be troublemakers, perhaps). They are part of the wildness of nature, ready to disturb and disrupt the civilising work of the gardener-humanist. Love perhaps is similarly part of nature’s wildness. In Epistole Metrice 1. 8, Laura herself, or her prototype, is spoken of as a Nymph, whose enchanting song accompanies that of the birds. In 1. 6, she is a much more negative, disturbing force, constantly distracting the poet’s thoughts, making escape impossible (the similarity indeed of parts of this poem to late poems of the Canzoniere, such as 360, might indeed invite the suspicion of some revisions made later than the ostensibly early self-dating of the poem).19 Petrarch’s reading of Ovid no doubt sensitised him to this association of love and the feminine with the disruptive wildness and instability of nature. The Metamorphoses are set among the woods and streams and mountains, the haunts of solitary people as well as the gods and the nymphs. Yet these lovely spots are not places of tranquillity, but of disturbing transformations, in a world in a constant state of ﬂux. Ovid provided a mythology which in some ways challenged Petrarch’s ideal of tranquil withdrawal, of the life of the literary and humanistic lay hermit. The Latin poetry is responsive to this, and the Italian even more so. In the Canzoniere, solitude, often represented by Vaucluse, is very frequently a refuge or an escape rather than the mark of a virtuous life. The poet avoids others in order to be alone with his thoughts of love (RVF 35; 129). If, as Augustine claims in the Secretum, solitude is the worst possible condition for a man in love, the lyrics can provide ample support for this contention. Solitude in the Italian poetry provides space for the conﬂicting emotions to make themselves felt, and for the poet to explore their endless ﬂuctuations. Moreover, the poet can portray himself as every bit as unsuited to solitude as the occupatus who cannot remain alone with himself. Sometimes the poet even wants to escape from his solitude to the despised vulgus: e ’l vulgo a me nemico et odïoso (chi ’l pensò mai?) per mio refugio chero: tal paura ò di ritrovarmi solo. (RVF 234. 12–14)

19

For example, there are parallels between the motif of travels to escape love in Epistole Metrice 1. 6, 61–93 and RVF 360. 46–60.

PETRARCH SOLITARIUS

37

(And the crowd, hostile and hateful to me (whoever would have thought it?) I turn to for refuge: I am so afraid of ﬁnding myself alone.)

The poem with which I wish to conclude can be read as a subversion, or else perhaps as a sort of complement, or mirror image of all that is said in the De Vita Solitaria. It belongs to the second part of the Canzoniere, a poem purportedly written after Laura’s death. Here solitude corresponds to the poet’s mental state, and in his thoughts the lost Laura is actively sought: Quante fïate, al mio dolce ricetto fuggendo altrui et, s’esser pò, me stesso, vo con gli occhi bagnando l’erba e ’l petto rompendo co’ sospir’ l’aere da presso! Quante fïate sol, pien di sospetto, per luoghi ombrosi et foschi mi son messo, cercando col pensier l’alto diletto che Morte à tolto, ond’io la chiamo spesso! Or in forma di nimpha o d’altra diva che del più chiaro fondo di Sorga esca et pongasi a sedere in su la riva; or l’ò veduto su per l’erba fresca calcare i ﬁor’ com’una donna viva, mostrando in viso che di me le ’ncresca. (RVF 281) (How many times do I go to my sweet refuge, running away from others, and if possible from myself, moistening the grass and my chest with my tears, and piercing the air all around with my sighs! How many times alone, full of anxiety, have I gone into shady, dark places, in my thoughts searching for that high delight which Death has taken from me, so that I often call for death. Now I have seen her in the form of a nymph or other goddess who might emerge from the clearest depths of the Sorgue and come to sit on the bank; now I have seen her on the fresh grass, treading the ﬂowers like a living woman, looking in her face as if she pities me.)

The intense emotional expressiveness of the sonnet is characteristically contained by its careful construction. The two quatrains, linked by the repeated opening ‘quante f ïate’ are matched by the tercets with their similar and corresponding repetition of ‘or’, as the former describe the poet’s expressions of grief as he searches for the lost ‘high delight’ (‘alto diletto’), and the latter speak of her return (or the return of that ‘delight’) as nymph or goddess or living woman. The poet wants to escape from himself as well as from others. Vaucluse is a refuge, it is ‘dolce’, but in it

38

Jennifer Petrie

he goes alone into frightening dark places, corresponding to his mood. By contrast, the tercets suggest light, in the detail of the clarity and brightness of the river. The female presence, Laura, returned from the dead, far from disrupting the poet’s solitude becomes one who blesses it, a bestower of peace and perhaps tranquillity. Yet perhaps here it is not so much tranquillity that the poet is seeking but joy: ‘l’alto diletto’. She may indeed appear as a nymph of the Sorgue, but the image is a comforting, peaceful one: she does not seem likely to do much damage to the poet’s garden. Finally she appears as a living woman, as a companion as it were, not making demands, but showing compassion. There is a rehumanising of Laura. The poet, the nymph, the muse, and the living woman all coexist peacefully—at least for one poetic moment.

3

The Ethics of Ignorance: Petrarch’s Epicurus and Averroës and the Structures of the De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia ´ SKI ZYGMUNT G. BARAN

ONE MIGHT IMAGINE, from this chapter’s title, that its aim, in keeping with much Italian literary scholarship on the Middle Ages, especially of the kind practised by scholars of Dante, is to suggest that Petrarch, like other medievali, took advantage of the commonplace whereby the two philosophers, Epicurus and Averroës, were yoked together as a result of their overlapping views on the immortality of the soul. In truth, nothing could be further from its purpose, given that, despite the many assertions to the contrary, there is absolutely no documentary evidence — with one notable exception to which I shall shortly return — to support the contention that ‘il vocabolo “epicureo” è applicabile a qualsiasi posizione ﬁlosoﬁca che metta in dubbio l’immortalità dell’anima e, a maggior ragione, all’aristotelismo radicale che ha fra i suoi temi fondamentali quello, averroista in senso stretto, dell’esistenza di un intelletto universale e “perpetuo”, “sostanza separata”, con la conseguente negazione della sopravvivenza di un’anima individuale’,1 to cite the words of one of the most eminent supporters of the traditional view regarding the medieval synthesis of Epicureanism and Averroism. I have arrived at this conclusion after consulting a signiﬁcant and varied array of authors from Bonaventure to Thomas Aquinas, from Albertus Magnus to Ramon Llull, and from Brunetto Latini to Giles of Rome, as well as a host of others.2 Indeed, so

1

M. Corti, Dante a un nuovo crocevia (Florence, 1981), pp. 81–2. I am presently completing a study, ‘Notes on the Reception of Epicurus and Averroes in Medieval Culture and in Medieval Italian Literary Historiography’. See also I. Anzani, Cavalcanti in Boccaccio: per un’interpretazione critica di ‘Decameron’ VI, 9, Lizenziatsarbeit der 2

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 39–59. © The British Academy 2007.

40

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

far, I have come across only two passages where the names of Epicurus and Averroës are simply in close proximity to each other. In both these instances, the writers introduce the names of the two philosophers as part of a much longer list of thinkers who have contributed to the debate on the nature of the human intellect and soul; and they do this without establishing any particular links between Epicurus and Averroës. In the ﬁrst of these, Albert the Great’s De quindecim problematibus, the renowned Doctor carefully distinguishes between the ‘Graeci sapientes’ (wise Greeks) and the ‘Arabum philosophi’ (Arabic philosophers), highlighting their historical differences and dedicating a discrete sentence to each group.3 In the second, Petrarch, in book 2 of the Invective Contra Medicum, does something similar. Reproducing the secret irreligious musings of his opponent, he has his stultus catalogue those who have made differing and contradictory interventions on the soul. While ‘Epycurus’, who ‘mortalem animam [facit]’ (makes the soul mortal), is simply one among many holding — in Christian terms — eccentric views on the soul, Averroës is deliberately set apart from this larger group: ‘fuit et qui mirabilius quiddam dicere auderet, siquidem unitatem intellectus attulit dux noster Averrois’ (there was one who has even dared to say more amazing things. Thus, our master Averroës asserted the unity of the intellect).4 As I shall discuss, Petrarch’s ‘extreme’ presentation of the Arab

philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Zürich, May 2002, pp. 46–9; L. Bianchi, Il vescovo e i ﬁlosoﬁ: la condanna parigina del 1277 e l’evoluzione dell’aristotelismo scolastico (Bergamo, 1990), pp. 154–5; F. Bottin, Ricerca della felicità e piaceri dell’intelletto: Boezio di Dacia, ‘Il sommo bene’, Giacomo da Pistoia, ‘La felicità suprema’ (Florence, 1989), pp. 34–5; E. G. Parodi, ‘La miscredenza di Guido Cavalcanti e una fonte del Boccaccio’, Bullettino della Società dantesca italiana, n.s. XXII (1915), 37–47 (37–40). 3 Albertus Magnus, De XV problematibus, ed. B. Geyer, in Albertus Magnus, Opera omnia, 40 vols (Monasterii Westfalorum in aedibus Aschendorff, 1951–), XVII. i, 31–44 (p. 32, 55–74; p. 33, 1–2): ‘Hoc igitur omnium Peripateticorum antiqua est positio, secundum quod eam Alfarabius determinavit. Ex qua sequitur intellectum possibilem intelligibilium omnium esse speciem et non omnino potentiam esse materialem ad ipsa. Et quia ad philosophos loquimur, qui talibus perfecte debent esse instructi, his amplius non insistimus.// Post hos Graeci sapientes, Porphyrius scilicet et Eustratius, Aspasius et Michael Ephesius et quam plures alii venerunt praeter Alexandrum, qui Epicuro consentit, qui omnes intellectum hominis intellectum possessum et non de natura intelligentiae existentem esse dixerunt. Et quem Graeci sapientes possessum, eundem Arabum philosophi Avicenna, Averroes, Abubacher et quidam alii adeptum esse dicebant, quia id quod possessum est, aliud est et alterius naturae a possidente. Dicunt enim, quod cum anima intellectualis hominis sit imago totius orbis et sola omnis orbis capax et forma organico corpori deputata per naturae convenientiam, necessarium est ipsam esse imaginem intelligentiae illius quae est decimi orbis.’ 4 Francesco Petrarca, Invective Contra Medicum, in Francesco Petrarca, Opere latine, ed. A. Bufano, 2 vols (Turin, 1975), II, 818–980 (876–8). Citations from Petrarch’s other

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

41

commentator—he who ‘[Cristum] diffamavit impune’ (defamed [Christ] with impunity) (Invective, p. 878) — is driven by a highly personalised antipathy; yet, despite this, it can also serve to conﬁrm my general point that no special ties united Epicurus and Averroës in the Middle Ages. It is only Dante, speciﬁcally the Dante of the Commedia, who suggests that, among the many who have held dubious opinions regarding the individual soul, a privileged kinship marks the speculations of Epicurus and Averroës. It should immediately be stressed that Dante did no more than imply this afﬁnity, and that, in addition, he essentially restricted it to one, in his eyes, deeply problematic contemporary individual. That individual is, of course, Guido Cavalcanti, whom he ﬁrst tangentially numbered among Epicurus’ ‘seguaci,/ che l’anima col corpo morta fanno’ (disciples who kill the soul along with the body),5 and then, many cantos later, even more obliquely, through repeated allusions to ‘Donna me prega’ during Statius’ lecture on the immortality of the soul in Purgatorio 25, he associated with Averroës, the ‘savio’ who ‘fé disgiunto/ da l’anima il possibile intelletto’ (the wise man [. . .] who split the possible intellect from the soul) (ll. 63, 64–5).6 This is all we have to substantiate that now unquestioned truism that, in the Middle Ages, Epicurus and Averroës had become synonymous—the highly subjective, polemical, opportunistic insinuation of a poet keen to destroy a rival’s reputation as ‘un de’ miglior loici che avesse il mondo e ottimo ﬁlosofo naturale’ (one of the best logicians and natural philosophers in the world), as Boccaccio put it in the Decameron echoing

works refer to the following editions: Bucolicum Carmen, ed. L. Canali (San Cesario di Lecce, 2005); De Otio Religioso, in Petrarca, Opere latine, I, 568–808; De remediis utriusque fortune, ed. C. Carraud, 2 vols (Grenoble, 2002); De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, ed. E. Fenzi (Milan, 1999); De Vita Solitaria, in Petrarca, Opere latine, I, 262–564; Rerum familiarium libri, ed. V. Rossi and U. Bosco, 4 vols (Florence, 1933–42); Rerum memorandarum libri, ed. G. Billanovich (Florence, 1943); Seniles, in Opera quae extant omnia (Basle, 1554), 813–1070; Sine Titulo, in Opera; Secretum, ed. E. Fenzi (Milan, 1992); Trionﬁ, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli abbozzi, ed. V. Pacca and L. Paolino (Milan, 1996). English translation of Invective Contra Medicum and De Ignorantia from Francesco Petrarca Invectives, ed. and trans. into by English D. Marsh (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2003), here II §84. 5 Inf. 10. 14–15. All quotations from and references to Dante’s Commedia are taken from La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. G. Petrocchi, 4 vols, 2nd edn (Florence, 1994). 6 See Z. G. Baran´ski, ‘Guido Cavalcanti and His First Readers’, in Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori, ed. M. L. Ardizzone (Fiesole, 2003), pp. 149–75 (pp. 169–70, 172–5); ‘ “Per similitudine di abito scientiﬁco”: Dante, Cavalcanti, and the Sources of Medieval “Philosophical” Poetry’, in Science and Literature in Italian Culture: From Dante to Calvino. A Festschrift for Pat Boyde, ed. P. Antonello and S. Gilson (Oxford, 2004), pp. 14–52 (pp. 29–33).

42

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

a well established tradition.7 As is typical of him, Dante’s elusive rapprochement between past and present thinkers is more than well made: both pagan philosophers do deny the immortality of the individual soul, while Cavalcanti, regardless of how we interpret his great canzone, undoubtedly had good and public contacts with Bolognese and Tuscan Averroistic circles. Yet all this in no way changes the fact that Dante’s equation is not just idiosyncratic and self-serving, but is also no more than lightly, even slyly, adumbrated. That, over time, it should have become so canonical as to become assigned to a whole culture — despite the fact that it failed to register with any of Dante’s fourteenth-century readers, just as most of them failed to realise that the poet was accusing his primo amico of being a heretic and an Epicurean8 — is obvious testimony to the power and longevity of Dante’s ‘authority’. At the same time, we should not permit the equation’s modern, and so thoroughly anachronistic, canonicity to mask its status, in the Middle Ages, as a subtle, though eccentric smear. It goes without saying that a historically informed idea of the medieval reception of Epicurus and Averroës helps us better appreciate Petrarch’s attitude towards both philosophers, and hence their functions in his oeuvre, beginning with the De Ignorantia, which, composed in 1367, and hence less than ten years before his death in 1374, stands as the poet’s major summative statement of his ideological sympathies and aversions. Indeed, by using Epicurus and Averroës as my touchstones, I hope to be able to say something about the status, function, and character of Petrarch’s investigation of ‘ignorance’, as well as about his views on the intellectual life.9 The book’s title is an appropriate place to begin my analysis of the ‘libellus exiguus’ (slender booklet);10 and this shall be the ﬁrst of the work’s overarching structures that I shall brieﬂy assess during the course of this study. What is immediately striking about the title, De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia, is that the text does not explicitly deﬁne itself as a polemic — the genre to which a far from insigniﬁcant part of 7 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. V. Branca (Turin, 1987), vi. 9, 8. On Guido’s reputation in the Middle Ages as a major philosopher, see Baran´ski, ‘Guido Cavalcanti and His First Readers’, pp. 153, 160–6. 8 See Baran´ski, ‘Guido Cavalcanti and His First Readers’, pp. 159–60; ‘ “Alquanto tenea della oppinione degli epicuri”: The auctoritas of Boccaccio’s Cavalcanti (and Dante)’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie, XIII (2006), 280–325; Parodi, ‘La miscredenza di Guido Cavalcanti’. 9 The best general analysis of the De Ignorantia is E. Fenzi, ‘Introduzione’, in Petrarca, De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia, pp. 5–104. 10 De Ign. 6. 195. In the dedicatory epistle to Donato Albanzani, Petrarch describes his work as liber parvus (p. 172).

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

43

Petrarch scholarship would like to assign it. In fact, its titulus recalls nothing as much as that tradition of works which, from Roman times, had investigated a speciﬁc issue, and which, with the proliferation of quaestiones, had become especially popular in scholastic circles. It presents itself as a text ‘on ignorance’, a fact conﬁrmed not just by its evaluation of a rich variety of different forms of ignorantia from stultitia to inscitia and from sine literis to insania, but also by its investigation of ignorance’s equally multifaceted opposite — wisdom. In fact, Petrarch himself, towards the end of the book, nudges us in this direction, suggesting that his ‘libellus exiguus’ might serve as a ﬁrst tentative step towards a much grander work on ignorance, which, given the condition’s ubiquity, would be made up of ‘ingentes [. . .] libri’ (huge tomes) (6. 195). Petrarch goes further in these closing paragraphs. He explicitly, albeit partially, associates his title with Mark Anthony’s lost De sua ebrietate, which examined ebriositatis vitium: ‘Videri autem prima fronte potuerit De mei ipsius ignorantia, nisi aliud addidissem, novus libri titulus, non stupendus tamen ad memoriam revocanti ut de ebrietate sua librum scripsit Antonius triumvir’ (6. 196) (‘If I hadn’t added another phrase, my title would have read On My Own Ignorance. This title is strange but it would not surprise those who recall that the triumvir Mark Anthony wrote a book On My Own Drunkenness’, Marsh, VI §143). The association and contrast which Petrarch drew between his own book and the triumvir’s are instructive — not so much as regards their particular relationship but, more suggestively, as regards that between the De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia and the contemporary obsession with logically structured quaestiones on a wide and seemingly randomly chosen range of subjects. By introducing himself into the title, Petrarch acknowledged the subjective nature of his presentation in stark opposition to the pseudo-scientiﬁc investigations of his detested scholastics. At the same time, by transforming the original ﬁrst-person pronouns into third-person ones, he attempted to delimit somewhat the personalised thrust of his work, implying instead that ‘his own ignorance’ had more general, exemplary connotations; and Petrarch conﬁrmed this generalising ambition by associating himself with the ‘many others’ who share and have shared his same state. Indeed, against the abstracting and theorising analyses of the blinkered mass of the aristotelici, namely, against the ‘peregrinorum dogmatum ventoseque disputationis improbitas’ (4. 126) (‘depravity of their outlandish doctrines and windy disputes’, Marsh, IV §94), his assessment of ignorance makes it obvious that its focus is real people, beginning with himself. His work is born from experience and examines ignorance in history (and, simply by

44

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

taking this latter purview, Petrarch straight away lets us know that he is not sine literis).11 His book is the precise opposite of the useless prattlings of those who ‘tumentes inauditis ambagibus [. . .], quod cum nichil sciant, proﬁteri omnia et clamare de omnibus didicerunt’ (4. 124) (‘are puffed up with their outlandish fabrications [. . .] having learned the art of lecturing and declaiming about everything, when in fact they know nothing’, Marsh, IV § 93). More than anything, his liber, by concentrating on people’s lives, will take an ethical and not a ‘scientiﬁc’ approach to ignorance. The primary polemical intent of the De Ignorantia is here: in its opposition not so much to the four false friends — though, of course, in its pages, Petrarch also unmercilessly unmasks their perﬁdious stupidity and envy as he ‘confesses’ his own ignorance — but to a whole system and method of thought and to an ethics — or rather, a lack of ethics — of what it means to be an intellectual and more generally a human being.12 Just because Petrarch fails to term his work an invectiva, this does not mean that it has no controversial ambitions. Quite the contrary, in fact. Nevertheless, as its title so effectively reveals, the aim of the De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia is not so much to polemicise but to demonstrate an alternative mode of argumentation, and thus of life, to the empty, futile syllogising and sinfulness of the ‘ceci ac surdi’ (blind and deaf) (4. 116). As his choice of stupendus to talk about his titulus would seem to suggest, Petrarch, despite all the formulas of humility with which he circumscribed his text, was also keen to emphasise its ‘extraordinariness’, namely its ‘unusualness’ and ‘novelty,’ both attributes which can be appreciated only in terms of the typical argumentative forms of his contemporaries. Rejecting all pretensions to ‘scientiﬁcity’, the De Ignorantia’s ideological ‘uniqueness’ is to be sought in its reliance on both the particular — and speciﬁcally the subjective—and the general, on both the history of the individual and that of the community, and on the strains that arise and the bonds that are created between any two coupled elements and within each of them, as well as, naturally, all that might distinguish and unite ignorance and non-ignorance. As I shall go on to argue, Petrarch’s recourse both to relativised contrastive structures and to relational comparisons — closely complementary devices, among several such, emblematically captured in the tension and the ties between ‘sui ipsius’ and ‘multorum’ — is what most characteristi11

The primary overt stimulus for the De Ignorantia is the accusation made by four Aristotelian intellectuals, friends of the poet, that, despite his reputation as a man of culture, he is in fact ‘sine literis virum bonum’ (2. 32; and see 16, 38). One of the treatise’s main aims is to debunk the charge of ignorance while conﬁrming that its author is indeed ‘good’. 12 On Petrarch’s opinion of contemporary intellectual life, see De Ign. 2. 13–16, 22–38.

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

45

cally deﬁnes the De Ignorantia and formally distinguishes it from the bogus procedures of the ‘false philosophers’ (4. 137–8). And it is important to recognise the highly relativised character of what it means to be human in Petrarch’s ontology — a fact that the poet himself stresses frequently and explicitly, as occurs, for instance, in the Seniles: ‘siquidem actus idem, pro intentione agentis, nunc laudabilis, nunc infamis est’ (5. 2) (a person’s intention can make the same action praiseworthy at one time and blameworthy at another). Relativism is inescapable on account of the fundamental instability and limitations of the human, especially before the mysterious absoluteness of the divine, where ultimately all earthly relativism ﬁnds its resolution. It was the scholastics’ absurd behaviour in following a human auctoritas who was all-knowing and above error, and in trusting blindly in a philosophical method that presumed to be able to establish ‘truths,’ that Petrarch, with his profound faith in divine providence, found entirely unacceptable.13 He thus organised his own thinking in such a manner that it could constitute a candid declaration both that divergence and relativism are inescapable, and that no logical sleight of hand can ever hope to conceal this fact. Furthermore, by relying so heavily on something as potentially volatile as contrast and the duality of things, Petrarch was able to grant a distinctiveness to the style of his critical discourse which dramatically and iconically, and hence more than conveniently, distinguished his eloquence from the arid ‘scientiﬁc’ prose of his adversaries. Indeed, Petrarch’s recourse to contrast and binary structures stands in stark opposition to the scholastics’ reliance on the syllogism — the discrete structures of the former openly challenge the deceptive structural coherence of the latter.14 The functions and standing of Epicurus and Averroës — like those of every other historical personage mentioned in the De Ignorantia— are 13

On Petrarch’s attitude to contemporary scholastic culture, see O. Boulnois, ‘Scolastique et humanisme: Pétrarque et la croisée des ignorances’, in Pétrarque, Mon Ignorance et celle de tant d’autres, trans. J. Bertrand, rev. C. Carraud (Grenoble, 2000), pp. 5–43; E. Garin, ‘La cultura ﬁorentina nella seconda metà del ’300 e i “barbari britanni” ’, Rassegna della letteratura italiana, LXIV (1960), 181–95; ‘Petrarca e la polemica con i “moderni” ’, in Rinascite e rivoluzioni (Rome–Bari, 1975), pp. 71–88; P. P. Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano di Petrarca (Turin, 1966), pp. 181–223; R. E. Lerner, ‘Petrarch’s Coolness Toward Dante: A Conﬂict of “Humanisms” ’, in Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth Century Europe, ed. P. Boitani and A. Torti (Tübingen–Cambridge, 1986), pp. 204–25; G. Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC–London, 1993), passim; C. Vasoli, ‘Intorno al Petrarca ed ai logici “moderni” ’, in Antiqui und Moderni: Traditionsbewusstsein und Fortschrittsbewusstsein im späten Mittelalter, ed. A. Zimmermann (Berlin–New York, 1974), pp. 142–54; ‘Petrarca e i ﬁlosoﬁ del suo tempo’, Quaderni petrarcheschi, IX–X (1992–3), 75–92. 14 On Petrarch’s extremely negative attitude to the syllogism, see Invective, pp. 876, 880–2.

46

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

controlled by those broad structures and concerns which the book’s title so effectively, even if allusively, evokes. In addition, the philosophers’ status in the liber parvus is further circumscribed by the lineaments which both had acquired in Petrarch’s oeuvre and thought in the years before he penned his remarkably erudite, wide-ranging, and sophisticated contribution ‘on ignorance’ in 1367. The case of Epicurus is particularly indicative of this state of affairs. Another largely unsatisfactory critical commonplace has until recently distorted our understanding of Petrarch’s attititude to Epicurus. In keeping with his ‘proto-humanistic’ proﬁle, Petrarch’s treatment of the Greek philosopher was deemed to introduce, in opposition to medieval distortion, a new, better balanced, and historically more nuanced appreciation of Epicurus, which in subsequent centuries would become the norm.15 It is undoubtedly the case that Epicurus is a ﬁgure of some prominence in Petrarch’s writings and is present at some crucial junctures in his oeuvre,16 perhaps most notably, even if not acknowledged by name, in the Prologue of the Secretum, where he ﬁnds himself sharing a privileged stage with such luminaries as Virgil, Seneca, Augustine, Boethius, and Dante.17 At the same time, there is nothing in what Petrarch said about Epicurus or the kind of contexts into which he introduced him to distinguish the poet’s position from the ways in which the Middle Ages had long considered the philosopher.18 At most, what can be sustained is 15

See, for instance, G. Saitta, ‘La rivendicazione di Epicuro nell’Umanesimo’, in Filosoﬁa italiana e Umanesimo (Venice, 1928), pp. 55–82 (pp. 55–7). On Petrarch and Epicurus, see also Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, pp. 38–9, 43, 55, 89, 160; M. R. Pagnoni, ‘Prime note sulla tradizione medievale ed umanistica di Epicuro’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosoﬁa, III, 4 (1974), 1443–77 (1455–7). See note 20 below for a brief discussion of the likely sources of Petrarch’s knowledge of Epicurus. 16 For Petrarch’s references to Epicurus, see De Ign. 2. 18; 4. 113–14, 127–9; 6. 212; De Otio, pp. 776–8; De Rem. 1. 12. 22, 18. 10 and 18, 69. 38; 2. 10. 16, 40. 6, 53. 10, 114. 36; Fam. 1. 1. 20, 2. 17, 8. 3; 3. 6. 1 and 3–4; 4. 3. 6; 8. 4. 3, 7. 22; 9. 8. 3; 10. 3. 48–9; 12. 8. 8; 18. 9. 2; 24. 4. 3; Invective, pp. 876–8, 904; Rer. Mem. 3. 51. 1, 77, 79; 4. 22. 3; Sen. 2. 1; 14. 1; 15. 3; Tr. Fam. 3. 106–9; 2a. 34–6; Vita Solit. p. 324. In Bucolicum Carmen 6 and 7, we ﬁnd the character Epy who functions as a Petrarchan adaptation of the tradition which depicted Epicurus as a wanton seeker after pleasure. 17 On the complex web of references which structure the Prohemium to the Secretum, see E. Fenzi’s notes in Petrarca, Secretum, p. 287. 18 On medieval attitudes to Epicurus and Epicureanism, see Baran´ski, ‘Guido Cavalcanti and His First Readers’, pp. 172–5; idem, ‘ “Alquanto tenea della oppinione degli epicuri” ’; T. De Mauro, ‘Porci in Paradiso, un motivo epicureo in Dante, Par. XXVI, 124–38’, in L’occhio e la memoria: miscellanea di studi in onore di Natale Tedesco (Milan, 2004), pp. 59–70; E. Garin, ‘Ricerche sull’epicureismo nel Quattrocento’, in La cultura ﬁlosoﬁca del Rinascimento italiano: ricerche e documenti (Milan, 1994), pp. 72–92; H. Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London–New

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

47

that Petrarch’s oeuvre may serve as a handy summa of what the Middle Ages knew and thought about Epicurus. This is not surprising. On the one hand, Petrarch drew for his knowledge of the Greek from the same authors—Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Lactantius, Augustine, and John of Salisbury19 —as generations of intellectuals had done before him.20 On the other hand, he was also heir to popular perceptions of the philosopher. While such views were exclusively negative and largely restricted to Epicurus’ porcine wallowing in pleasure, the educated had frequently attempted to distinguish between the positive and the negative in the philosopher’s thought and behaviour, even if their academic sense of the negative was inescapably in part affected by popular clichés. Petrarch’s position was exactly the same, as is immediately obvious from the major assessment of Epicurus he undertook in book 3 of the Rerum Memorandarum. The Greek is both the proponent of that ‘Effeminatum dogma [. . .] et infame, inter hominem et pecudem nullum statuens discrimen’ (emasculated and vile doctrine that there is no difference between York, 1989); R. I. Jungkuntz, ‘Christian Approval of Epicureanism’, Church History, XXXI (1962), 279–93; V. Lucchesi, ‘Epicurus and Democritus: The Ciceronian Foundations of Dante’s Judgement’, Italian Studies, XLII (1987), 1–19; S. Marchesi, ‘ “Epicuri de grege porcus”: Ciacco, Epicurus and Isidore of Seville’, Dante Studies, CXVII (1999), 117–31; J. A. Mazzeo, ‘Dante and Epicurus: The Making of a Type’, in Medieval Cultural Traditions in Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (Ithaca, NY, 1960), pp. 174–204; A. Murray, ‘The Epicureans’, in Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenthcentury Europe, pp. 138–63; Pagnoni, ‘Prime note’; W. Schmid, Epicuro e l’epicureismo cristiano (Brescia, 1984). 19 The key role that John of Salisbury played in Petrarch’s career is clear evidence that the poet’s attack against the barbari britanni (see Garin, ‘La cultura ﬁorentina’) was not conditioned by their place of origin but by their intellectual sympathies and methods. Indeed, John’s critique of his world in the Policraticus has many points of contact with Petrarch’s similarly negative assessment of his own society in the De Ignorantia. See also Chapter 1 in this volume. 20 Although Fenzi has persuasively demonstrated the extensive inﬂuence of the De Natura Deorum on the De Ignorantia (E. Fenzi, ‘Nota al testo’, in Petrarca, De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia, pp. 121–7), and speciﬁcally on Petrarch’s presentation of Epicurus (notes to De Ign. pp. 423, 432, 530–1), Cicero’s work is far from being the poet’s only major source on the Greek philosopher either in the treatise or elsewhere. Indeed, in Petrarch’s oeuvre, the De Finibus probably exerted greater sway on his view of Epicurus than did the De Natura Deorum. In any case, Petrarch’s Epicurus is a composite ﬁgure made up of elements taken from Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, Horace’s poetry, Lactantius’ Institutions, a broad swathe of Augustine’s writings, Scriptural exegesis, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, and a wealth of other texts, given Epicurus’ ubiquity in late medieval culture. Considerable research still needs to be done to establish the texts that lie behind each of Petrarch’s explicit references to the classical philosopher. Furthermore, as in the Prologue to the Secretum, Petrarch alluded indirectly to Epicurus. In rewriting passages that mention the Greek, he eliminated his name while maintaining the substance of the original. As far as I am aware, almost no effort has been made to catalogue and study these instances of Petrarchan imitatio. The history of Petrarch’s relationship to Epicurus is far from being written: this study is no more than a minor contribution to such a project.

48

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

man and beast), and on the other hand the source of ‘tam multa [. . .] et consulta sapienter et dicta suaviter, ut eis Seneca, tantus vir, epystolas suas et farciat et exornet’ (so many wise decisions and elegantly expressed opinions that the great man Seneca ﬁlls and adorns his letters with them) (3. 77, 1 and 2). What is signiﬁcant, therefore, as regards Petrarch’s relationship to the Greek philosopher, is not so much what he says about him but the reasons why he chose to make such regular recourse to him. At the most basic level, he did this because two of his key intellectual mentors, Cicero and Seneca, had done this; equally, the ‘magniﬁce voces Epycuri’ (‘splendid words of Epicurus’, Rer. Mem. 3. 77, 18) which he could read in their texts served to amplify his knowledge of classical, and speciﬁcally Greek culture. However, I should like to suggest that the principal reason why Petrarch returned with such regularity to Epicurus was because he so emblematically and perfectly embodied that contrastive, relativised, and relational dualistic model which, I believe, the poet judged to be an especially efﬁcacious argumentative and rhetorical tool, because it so tellingly captured our human condition. Thus, the explicit of his analysis of Epicurus in the Rerum Memorandarum freezes the philosopher in just this state of ambivalence, as the incarnation — and the term Petrarch utilised is more than revelatory — as the incarnation of ‘una [. . .] regula’ (a rule): ‘sententia placet, auctor displicet. Quamvis enim “illum” ut ait Cicero, “et bonum virum et comem et humanum fuisse” nemo neget, bonum tamen philosophum nullus afﬁrmat’ (3. 77, 18) (I approve of the teaching, disapprove of the author, although nobody denies that, as Cicero says, the author was a good man, and sociable, and welleducated; nevertheless, nobody afﬁrms that he was a good philosopher). Although the De Ignorantia does not contain an appraisal of Epicurus on the lines of that presented in the Rerum Memorandarum, it is Petrarch’s work which, along its length, includes the most interesting and wide-ranging treatment of the Greek thinker. Within the ﬁrst few paragraphs, Petrarch ﬁxes him once again in his emblematic pose: ‘quod de Epycuro sentit Cicero, cuius cum multis in locis mores atque animum probet, ubique damnat ingenium ac doctrinam respuit’ (2. 18) (‘Cicero felt about Epicurus that although in many passages he commends his behaviour and courage, he always condemns his intellect and rejects his doctrine’, Marsh, I §13). The measured manner in which Petrarch approaches the philosopher is underscored not just by the equation he establishes between Cicero’s treatment of him and Augustine’s reaction to ‘his Ambrose’, whom he loved for his kindness more than for his learning (2. 18), but also by the fact that Epicurus stands as a kind of alter ego of

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

49

himself. Petrarch too has been deﬁned in a ‘brief and deﬁnitive’ antinomial distinction: ‘me sine literis virum bonum’ (a good man without learning) (2. 32; and see 16, 38). Therefore, just like the Greek in Cicero’s description in the De Finibus, which Petrarch had cited in the Rerum Memorandarum and paraphrased in the De Ignorantia, he was a ‘good man’ but a ‘bad philosopher’; and one, admittedly tightly focused, way of viewing the remainder of the treatise is in terms of the strategies Petrarch employed to prove that the opening equation between Epicurus and himself is, in fact, at best extremely partial if not actually misleading. Thus, while he went on to conﬁrm the Greek’s speculative inadequacies by recalling his ideas on creation, on God, on the plurality of worlds (4. 113–14, 127–9), as well as his philosophical arrogance and envy (6. 212), he equally endeavoured to rectify the mistaken judgement of his four accusers by revealing his own intellectual gifts and prowess, not least as these are reﬂected in the ‘stupendous’ De Ignorantia. If he is ‘ignorant’, it is not in the same way that Epicurus was so woefully inadequate as a philosopher. He is ‘ignorant’ according to a new, Christ-centred way of judging ‘ignorance’ which ends up by revealing both the humility of his wisdom and the morality of his behaviour — precisely the synthesis which Epicurus had failed to achieve in his own life. If, when compared with Petrarch (or equally with a Plato or with a Cicero), Epicurus ends up negatively marked — and it does not seem to be mere coincidence that his last appearance, right at the end of the book, is also his most unappealing: ‘Quis ergo in primis Epycurum intoleranda superbia, sive invidia, sive utraque detrahentem omnibus non audivit?’ (6. 212) (‘Who has not heard how Epicurus, in his intolerable pride or envy, maligned everyone, including Pythagoras [. . .]?’, Marsh, VI §153) —, he emerges much less badly scathed when matched against other thinkers. In particular, when measured against the mass of stupid modern philosophers, or even against Aristotle as regards matters relating to creation, the Epicurus of the De Ignorantia has undoubted merits. Indeed, he is granted an exemplary role in distinguishing between pagan and Christian possibilities of knowing, a distinction which, on account of contemporary arrogance, is entirely to the advantage of the ancients: ‘Fecit [. . .] Deus igitur mundum verbo illo, quod Epycurus et sui nosse non poterant, nostri vero philosophi non dignantur; eoque sunt priscis illis inexcusabiliores’ (5. 129) (‘God made the world by that Word which Epicurus and his followers would not know and which our philosophers do not deign to know, so that they are more culpable than those ancients’, Marsh, V §97). Epicurus’ shifting, refracted identities, like those

50

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

of any human being, though enhanced in his case because of the fundamental binarism of his established portrait, so that he almost acquires the traits of an Everyman, or at least of an ‘Every intellectual’, ﬁgure in the De Ignorantia, offer handy conﬁrmation of the dualistic argumentative structures of the libellus. Time and again, the book reafﬁrms that everything depends on the perspective from which something is evaluated in the light of something else, regardless of whether the elements being equated are regarded synchronically, in relation to an idea, a mode of behaviour, an event, or diachronically, from the point of view of history, which itself is far from stable.21 Such an approach cannot but ‘fragment’—and I use the term advisedly — the overall organisation of the argument. It draws attention to each individual self-contained equation and to the elements constituting it, underscoring, thanks to its comparative relativism, the pervasiveness of ethics in every single sphere of human life.22 Thus, each association is resolved in itself, though obviously also contributing to the larger effect of which it is a part; as a result, each rapprochement represents a rhetorical problem in its own right, permitting Petrarch to show off the range and efﬁcacy of his eloquence, hence the stylistic wealth of the De Ignorantia. Nothing could be further from the illusory rigour, coherence, and, yes, monotony of the logical prose of the scholastics. In Petrarch’s ethically centred sense of reality, each person, like Epicurus, can be assessed ex bono or ex malo — it all depends on who or what is also being evoked. Yet, there is one notable exception to this state of affairs. Though only rarely remembered in Petrarch’s oeuvre, Averroës, the ‘howling’ ‘enemy of Christ’, is irredeemably evil.23 ‘[T]emerarii virus Averrois ac venenata convitia et sputa ad celum putido ore transmissa’ (the virus of and poisoned insults of wild Averroës, and the spittle directed against the heavens from his infected mouth), as the poet declared with epigrammatic force in the De Otio Religioso (p. 622). Petrarch’s attack is in line with other similar condemnations of the great commentator circulating during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.24 It is certainly also sharpened by 21 On Petrarch’s view of history, see Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, pp. 14–35. Mazzotta writes that ‘history [is] where distinct individualities frankly oppose each other’ (p. 35). 22 On the centrality of ethics in the De Ignorantia, see Fenzi, ‘Introduzione’, pp. 34–56, 61–2. 23 For Petrarch’s allusions to Averroës, see De Ign. 4. 155–8; De Otio, p. 622; Invective, pp. 622–4, 842, 878–80; Rer. Mem. 1. 26. 5; Sen. 5. 2, 13. 6, 15. 6; Sine Titulo, p. 812. Averroës ‘howls’ (latrat and related forms) in a number of the preceding passages; he is described as ‘Christ’s enemy’ in Sen. 13. 6. 24 See, for instance, C. Burnett, ‘The “Sons of Averroës and the Emperor Frederick” and the Transmission of the Philosophical Works of Ibn Rushd’, in Averroës and the Aristotelian

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

51

his strong antipathy towards Arab culture.25 However, its extreme shock, its seeming ‘unreasonableness’ are primarily the effect of its absoluteness. Petrarch’s Averroës becomes the total embodiment of evil. Intriguingly, in Petrarch, he takes on the kind of extreme lineaments which the popular tradition had ascribed to Epicurus. He is a commonplace. Thus, the poet is not really interested in or even troubled by his ideas, as Albert or Thomas had been so profoundly a few decades earlier. For Petrarch, Averroës is an exemplary ﬁgure: the heretic, the blasphemer, the embodiment of the worst excesses of self-sufﬁcient intellectual arrogance. It is thus obvious why, as in the passages just cited, the poet should have described him according to the traditional imagery of sin.26 However, where we might have expected the assault to have been at its most violent, Petrarch’s treatment of Averroës is at its most muted in the De Ignorantia.27 Nonetheless, it is still negative: Averroës represents the ‘primary’ example of the excesses of the commentator—the ‘suspect’ intellectual who ‘ransacks’ the works of others, uncritically embracing an auctoritas.28 We should not allow ourselves, Tradition, ed. G. Endress and J. A. Aertsen (Leiden–Boston–Cologne, 1999), pp. 259–99 (esp. pp. 261–2); A. de Libera, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas d’Aquin, Contre Averroès, ed. A. de Libera (Paris, 1994), pp. 9–73; ‘Pétrarque et la Romanité’, in Figures italiennes de la rationalité, ed. C. Menasseyre and A. Tosel (Paris, 1997), pp. 7–35; E. H. Wéber, ‘Les Apports positives de la noétique d’Ibn Rushd à celle de Thomas d’Aquin’, in Multiple Averroès, ed. J. Lolivet and R. Arié (Paris, 1978), pp. 211–48 (pp. 211–12); Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano, p. 221. See also Fenzi, ‘Introduzione’, p. 94. 25 See N. Bisaha, ‘Petrarch’s Vision of the Muslim and Byzantine East’, Speculum, LXXVI (2001), 284–314; F. Gabrieli, ‘Petrarca e gli arabi’, Al–Andalus, XLII (1977), 241–8; Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano, p. 221. See also R. Lemay, ‘De l’Antiarabisme — ou rejet du style scolastique—comme inspiration première de l’humanisme italien du Trecento’, in Filosoﬁa, scienza e astrologia nel Trecento europeo, ed. G. F. Vescovini and F. Barocelli (Padua, 1992), pp. 105–20. 26 See G. F. Vescovini, ‘L’aristotelismo “secolare” in Italia. 4: La reazione di Francesco Petrarca alla ﬁlosoﬁa e alla teologia delle scuole: il suo ritratto del medico averroista’, in Storia della teologia nel Medioevo, ed. G. d’Onofrio, 3 vols (Casale Monferrato, 1996), III, 577–600 (597–9); C. Polito, ‘“Inter cuntas eminens obliqui causa iudicii livor”: Annotazioni in margine al De ignorantia petrarchesco’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, XLI (1990), 5–28. On Petrarch and Averroës, see also C. Burnett, ‘Petrarch and Averroës: An Episode in the History of Poetics’, in The Medieval Mind: Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, ed. I. Macpherson and R. Penny (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 49–56; Carraud’s notes in Pétrarque, Mon Ignorance, pp. 282–3; de Libera, ‘Pétrarque et la Romanité’, pp. 16–19, 24–35; Fenzi’s notes in Petrarca, De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia, pp. 330–1, 482; Garin, ‘La cultura ﬁorentina’, 184–6; Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano, pp. 221–3; Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, p. 42. 27 See Fenzi, ‘Introduzione’, pp. 8, 58, 94. 28 ‘Nam quod Averrois omnibus Aristotilem prefert, eo spectat, quod illius libros exponendos assumpserat et quodammodo suos fecerat; qui quanquam multa laude digni sint, suspectus tamen est laudator. [. . .] Quanta vero sit multitudo — aliena dicam exponentium, ad aliena vastantium?’ (De Ign. 4. 155, 157). On Petrarch’s critique of commentators, see Boulnois, ‘Scolastique et humanisme’, pp. 26–7.

52

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

however, to be duped by Petrarch’s measured tones. Within the economy of the De Ignorantia, to be an uncritical follower, especially of Aristotle,29 represents the worst of intellectual sins, as evidenced by the harshness of its treatment of the four Aristotelians and not, as has now been largely recognised, Averroists.30 And yet, the four are ‘Averroists’ — at least insofar as they take over that emblematic imagery of sin which elsewhere in Petrarch deﬁnes Averroës: ‘Cupide igitur et audacter, et importune, contra preceptorem [Cristum] contraque discipulos eius clamant, imo latrant et insultant’ (4. 121) (‘Thus they shout out, rather bark and howl keenly, boldly and rudely against our master [Christ] and his disciples’, Marsh, IV § 91). In the De Ignorantia, Averroës can take a back seat because his epigones—epigones of an epigone — are shown to be rabidly doing his work. Petrarch’s recourse to conventional religious language in describing his enemies points to another of the ‘little book’s’ vital structures: its heavy dependence on the conventions of popular religion. Yet, much work still needs to be done to clarify its debts to the traditions of the vices and virtues, of the ‘sins of the tongue’, and of imitatio Christi, all of which grow out of the text’s rich Scriptural substratum.31 Indeed, the principal point of reference for and the major structuring element behind the De Ignorantia’s ﬁrst two parts are to be found in a clearly delimited area of the medieval concern with sin. Although both the work’s title and the dedicatory letter declare that its topic is ignorance, this fact is far from apparent from its ﬁrst thirtyeight paragraphs. In the light of these, the De Ignorantia actually appears as a work about envy —invidia, livor. This is the sin that dominates the book’s opening pages; and it does this to the extent that these can be read as a compendium of many of the commonplaces which in the Middle Ages had come to characterise this most corrosive of sins.32 The ﬁrst two

29 On Petrarch’s attitude to Aristotle in the De Ignorantia, see Fenzi, ‘Introduzione’, pp. 7–17, 33–48. 30 See P. O. Kristeller, ‘Petrarch’s “Averroists”: A Note on the History of Aristotelianism in Venice, Padua, and Bologna’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, XIV (1952), 59–65. 31 See Polito, ‘Inter cuntas eminens obliqui causa iudicii livor’; in addition, see Fenzi’s notes to his edition of the De Ignorantia, which list and discuss a large number of Scriptural echoes. I do not have the space here to examine Petrarch’s recourse to the concept of imitatio Christi in the De Ignorantia. On its presence in Petrarch, see D. De Rentiis, ‘Sul ruolo di Petrarca nella storia dell’imitatio auctorum’, in Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle: Pétrarque en Europe XIVe–XXe siècle, ed. P. Blanc (Paris, 2001), pp. 63–74. 32 On envy in the Middle Ages, see C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali: Storia dei peccati nel Medioevo (Turin, 2000), pp. 36–53; L. Desbrus, ‘Envie’, in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, 18 vols (Paris, 1909–72), V. i, cols 131–4; E. Ranwez, ‘Envie’, in Dictionnaire de

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

53

paragraphs set the scene (and almost all the following thirty-six paragraphs make some reference to envy): ‘Quotidie amicorum laudibus, quotidie emulorum iurgiis respondendum erit? Nec invidiam aut latebre excluserint aut tempus extinxerit? [. . .] O venenum pertinax! Que me pridem rei publice [etas] excusasset, nondum excusat invidie, cumque illa cui multum debeo me absolvat, hec, cui nil debeo, me molestat’ (1. 1–2) (‘Must I reply to the praises of friends each day, and each day to the insults of foes? Will no refuge exclude envy, and no length of time extinguish it? O unrelenting poison! My age, which should have excused me long ago from servicing the state, does not excuse me from envy. And although I am absolved by the state, to which I owe so much, I am tormented by envy to which I owe nothing’, Marsh, I §5). Describing envy as a poison and stressing its tenaciousness are both traditional tropes;33 equally conventional is the reference to spiteful rivals and to loyal friends.34 Even the image of Petrarch seeking refuge in his hiding-place is connected to the contemporary discourse on envy. On the one hand, it points to envy’s ability to penetrate every corner of the world and every area of social existence;35 on the other, the poet’s recess, the just reward for his labours, stands in stark contrast to envy’s malevolent lurking in dark places.36 Petrarch immediately establishes himself both as a victim of invidia and as an expert on the sin. In unmasking and condemning envy, Petrarch’s voice is doubly ‘authoritative’ — his auctoritas stemming both from direct personal experience and from his scholarly knowledge of the subject. As he does throughout the rest of the treatise, Petrarch begins by bringing together ethica and scientia, while also calling into question the charge of ignorance that has been laid against him. At least as far as envy is concerned the poet is clearly a specialist. With consummate rhetorical skill, thereby preparing for the De Ignorantia’s subsequent celebration of

Spiritualité, Ascétique et Mystique, 17 vols (Paris, 1937–95), IV. i, cols 774–85; M. Vincent– Cassy, ‘L’envie au Moyen Age’, Annales E.S.C., XXXV (1980), 253–71. On envy in the De Ignorantia, see Polito, ‘Inter cuntas eminens obliqui causa iudicii livor’, pp. 9–25. See also note 48. 33 On envy and poison, see, for instance, John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. C. C. J. Webb, 2 vols (Oxford, 1909), 7. 24; Ovid, Met. 2. 777, 784, 800–1. On envy’s tenaciousness, see G. Peraldus, Summa virtutum ac vitiorum (Brescia, 1494), 2. 7. 1; see also Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, p. 37. 34 On envy as antithetical to friendship and as arising from rivalry, see C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio, I peccati della lingua: disciplina ed etica della parola nella cultura medievale (Rome, 1987), pp. 337–8, 347; Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, pp. 41, 45–9; Desbrus, ‘Envie’, cols 133–4; Fenzi’s notes in Petrarca, De Ignorantia, pp. 323–5, 328–9. 35 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, pp. 37, 44–5. 36 See Ovid’s hugely inﬂuential description of Envy’s cave in Met. 2. 760–4.

54

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

eloquentia, the poet traces in its ﬁrst few sentences some of the work’s key preoccupations and strategies;37 and, for the remainder of the treatise’s ﬁrst two parts, Petrarch presents overwhelming conﬁrmation of how sophisticated is his intellectual and moral understanding of envy. He thus pens a veritable treatise de invidia. He offers a rich selection of the images which in Christian writing had accrued around impius livor (1. 8): envy is a monster, blind and indiscriminate (1. 5); like a rabid dog, it barks, shows its tongue, and bites (1. 8 and 2. 10, 22); it lurks in the dark (1. 8) and remains hidden (2. 19), yet its noxiousness spreads forth;38 it is both crosseyed (2. 20) and blind (2. 22); it is a source of bitterness (1. 8) and a type of madness (2. 22, 23).39 As occurs in the tradition, Petrarch compares the behaviour of his four accusers to that of envious women (2. 35)40 and describes the workings of envy by having recourse to martial (1. 3, 5; 2. 10, 21)41 and sexual (1. 8) metaphors.42 Equally conventionally, he presents invidia as a vice that arises among people who are close to each other and that is particularly prevalent in intellectual circles (2. 11–12, 23–6, 37).43 In this regard, it is therefore not surprising that, as Petrarch stresses in line with many other thinkers, envy should destroy friendship and undermine charity (1. 3, 5, 8).44 Furthermore, to ensure that his treatment is as wide-ranging and balanced as possible, he even makes ﬂeeting refer37

In penning such an effective introduction to the De Ignorantia, Petrarch not only demonstrated his control over his text, but also revealed his mastery of rhetorical convention. According to medieval poetics, an author, in the opening of his work, was expected to offer a synthesis of its principal concerns; see E. Gallo, ‘Matthew of Vendôme: Introductory Treatise on the Art of Poetry’, American Philosophical Society Proceedings, CXVIII (1974), 51–92 (59–60); H. Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2 vols (Munich, 1960), I, 150–63. The way in which, as we saw earlier, the treatise’s title too provides valuable insight into its aims is also in keeping with medieval literary thinking; on the exegetical functions of the titulus, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd edn (Aldershot, 1988), pp. 19–20. 38 Petrarch refers to envy as both virus (1. 8; and see Ovid, Met. 2. 800) and pestis (2. 21). 39 On the imagery of envy, see, in particular, Vincent-Cassy, ‘L’envie au Moyen Age’, especially pp. 255–6. See also Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, pp. 38–9, 48; E. D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge, 1997), p. 149; Fenzi’s notes in Petrarca, De Ignorantia, pp. 323–9; Polito, ‘Inter cuntas eminens obliqui causa iudicii livor’, pp. 11–21. For a wide-ranging medieval discussion of envy, see A. Neckam, De Naturis Rerum, ed. T. Wright (London, 1863), II, 189. 40 See, for instance, A. Capellanus, On Love, ed. P. G. Walsh (London, 1982), III, 73–7. See also Ranwez, ‘Envie’, col. 776. 41 On the tradition of martial metaphors to describe envy, see Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, p. 342; I sette vizi capitali, pp. 36–7. 42 On envy and sexual imagery, see Dante, Inf. 13. 64–7. 43 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, pp. 43–9. 44 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, p. 338; I sette vizi capitali, pp. 44–5; Fenzi’s notes in Petrarca, Secretum, pp. 323–5.

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

55

ence to that type of envy for spiritual improvement, theorised in particular by Thomas Aquinas,45 which, as a form of zealous imitation, leads to an increase in virtue: ‘virtutem ipsam, optimam haud dubie, invidiosissimamque rerum omnium’ (2. 16) (‘they can’t envy me for virtue, which is doubtless the best and most enviable of all things’, Marsh, II §12) — though it goes without saying that the poet’s four false friends feel no envy for his virtue. In addition to describing envy, and in keeping especially with scholastic reﬂection on the sin, Petrarch explores the psychology of the envious, those who, on account of their own inadequacies and superbia, are deeply resentful of the successes of others. This passio is the source of considerable internal suffering, which the envious often mask behind a hypocritical façade, but which — and Petrarch once again draws on a traditional metaphor to describe its effects — furiously burns inside them, since it is an uncontrollable and irrational sentiment which causes tremendous harm to those who fall prey to it.46 Petrarch’s analysis, like the whole of his presentation, ﬁrmly follows mainstream opinion; and its erudite orthodoxy is deﬁnitively conﬁrmed by the emphasis it places on two elements which the Middle Ages deemed fundamental to any serious discussion of invidia. After a lengthy dramatic build-up, Petrarch reveals that what the four resent so profoundly is his fama — that fame which was universally judged to be the principal source of envy’s animosity,47 and which, it was just as widely believed, could be most effectively sullied by detractio, namely ‘denigratory words, frequent lies, which are spoken in envy about someone absent with the intention of injuring her reputation’.48 Unsurprisingly, detractio was the ‘sin of the tongue’ most intimately associated with invidia, so that the two sins were normally assessed together.49 Although Petrarch does not actually use the term detractio or

45

See Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, pp. 51–2. See De Ign. 2. 11–12, 16–17, 19, 23; and see Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, pp. 38–43; Ranwez, ‘Envie’, cols 778–80. 47 See De Ign. 2. 20–2, 26; and see C. Casagrande, ‘Fama e diffamazione nella letteratura teologica e pastorale del sec. XIII’, Ricerche storiche, XXVI (1996), 7–24; Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, pp. 332, 335, 339; I sette vizi capitali, p. 47; Polito, ‘Inter cuntas eminens obliqui causa iudicii livor’, pp. 21–3. 48 Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity, pp. 136–7. On detractio, see Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, pp. 331–51; T. Ortolan, ‘Diffamation’, in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, IV. i, cols 1300–7; A. Thouvenin, ‘Médisance’, in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, X. i, cols 487–94. 49 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, p. 336; Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity, pp. 136–7. 46

56

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

its cognate forms to deﬁne the four men’s offence against him,50 there is no doubt that this is the wrongdoing of which they are guilty. Thus, his accusers are quintessentially linguistic sinners — ‘nec internis pulsas stimulis linguas frenant’ (2. 19) (‘they can’t control their tongues, which are goaded by their inner impulses’, Marsh, II §14) — and, as the poet announces in the incipit of the second section, the section which establishes the four as ‘detractors’, their speciﬁc fault is murmur (2. 10), a sin with extremely close ties to detractio.51 Furthermore, and in line with the literal meaning of detrahere— ‘detraction’ was understood as a ‘taking away of a good’52 — , Petrarch employs the verbs eripere (2. 16, 34, 39) and auferre (2. 37), both of which signify ‘to take/snatch away’, in order to describe the effects of the four’s lies on his reputation; and, in the normal way of ‘detractors’, the four speak ill of Petrarch when he is not present (2. 10, 26–7).53 As mediocre yet arrogant studiosi (2. 23), and hence as emblematic incarnations of envy, they cannot stomach Petrarch’s fama as an intellectual, and so rail against his reputation. Consequent on the four’s behaviour, envy and ignorance, as they did in the tradition, come together, thereby ensuring that the De Ignorantia’s ﬁrst two parts are efﬁciently restored to the treatise’s argumentative mainstream. The four’s backbiting is clear proof of their limitations as ‘philosophers’ — a fact conﬁrmed by their predilection for knowledge as a form of ostentation rather than as a means of understanding the truth (2. 24–5), namely, our ‘naturam hominum, ad quod nati sumus, unde et quo pergimus, vel nescire vel spernere’ (2. 25) (‘to ignore or to neglect the purpose of our human nature, the purpose of our birth, or whence we come and whither we are bound’, Marsh, I §18).

50

Petrarch was of course more than familiar with the term and its technical meanings and connotations, not least its close association with envy; see De Ign. 6. 212. Interestingly, in this passage, Petrarch applied the word to Epicurus: ‘Quis ergo in primis Epycurum intoleranda superbia, sive invidia, sive utraque detrahentem omnibus non audivit?’ By associating the philosopher with his four enemies, Petrarch leaves no doubt that, despite superﬁcial similarities, little, in fact, unites him to the Greek. Indeed, the ﬁnal condemnation of Epicurus underscores that the parallels the poet had established between himself and the classical thinker were ﬁrst and foremost an elegant rhetorical and argumentative ploy — the comparison was, in fact, another type of contrastive device. 51 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, pp. 243–4, 247–9, 338; I sette vizi capitali, p. 50. 52 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, p. 332; Thouvenin, ‘Médisance’, cols 492–3. 53 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, pp. 331–3; Thouvenin, ‘Médisance’, col. 490.

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

57

Petrarch is careful to provide as much veriﬁable and culturally acceptable conﬁrmation as possible that his accusations against the four are well founded, and therefore are not a sign that he too is guilty of ‘detraction’—not naming his critics is the most obvious means of avoiding such a charge.54 In fact, his conduct is the precise opposite of detractio. By denouncing their faults, he practises correptio. Like any good Christian, whenever he recognises evil, he has the duty openly and truthfully to denounce it, thereby offering the wrongdoers the possibility of mending their ways.55 Petrarch further underscores his virtuousness by asserting that, as the literature on ‘detraction’ recommended, he does not intend to counter their lies (2. 16), but has decided to suffer in silence (3. 39).56 Although it is certainly the case that Petrarch does not directly challenge the opinion expressed by the four that he is ignorant, the De Ignorantia as a whole, as we have seen, is actually a sustained, albeit indirect, afﬁrmation of the unfairness of their allegations. Indeed, in a highly original and paradoxical move, Petrarch goes so far as to declare that he accepts and concurs with their assessment that he is ‘sine literis bonus’ (‘a good man without learning’) (2. 38; and see 32–3, 36–8). If, on the one hand, this permits him to underscore the importance he places on his relationship to God and on the role of humility and ethics in his life, on the other, it is a means to draw attention to his rhetorical and dialectical skills, as well as to the dangers inherent in language and disputation, whereby lies can be transformed into truths while still being lies, and ‘detractors’ metamorphose into speakers of truth whose truthfulness, however, remains open to question: ‘modo ne id [his goodness] quoque mentiti sint, et michi preriperent quod volebant, quod non erat dederint’ (2. 34) (‘unless they have lied about this too, and given me what was not mine, in order to deprive me of what they coveted’, Marsh, II §25).57 For all his dependence on the commonplaces of invidia and detractio, Petrarch, in a typical manoeuvre, brings his discussion to a close by introducing a highly personalised development into the tradition. In the same way, the extended legal metaphor that the poet employs to structure his treatment of the workings of envy (1. 3; 2. 26–32, 34), and which returns throughout the 54

Not revealing the names of his four accusers has, in fact, primarily negative implications. It is a particularly effective and radical form of condemnation and of damnatio memoriae. 55 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, pp. 334–5. 56 See Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, p. 341. 57 By highlighting the instability between truth and falsehood in human discourse, and hence its fundamental relativism, Petrarch conﬁrms that the truth and true knowledge reside only in God (2. 32, 35).

58

Zygmunt G. Baran´ski

treatise, constitutes an individual amplification of an image on the margins of discussions of invidia.58 Eloquence, ‘science’, and ethics coalesce in order to damn his ‘detractors’ and to present irrefutable proof of the reasons for his fame and their envy. Given its concern with salvation and with the relationship between God and humanity, it is entirely appropriate for the De Ignorantia to be run through with elements taken from both academic and popular Christianity. More interestingly, its reliance on religious tropes and on binary equations offers a revealing glimpse of that intellectual and stylistic eclecticism to which I have already referred. And let me stress that there is nothing arbitrary about Petrarch’s eclecticism.59 The control he exerted over his disparate material is a deﬁning mark of his sophistication and critical acumen. Thus, the De Ignorantia’s formal breadth, which, in keeping with its constantly changing materia, smoothly shifts between analogy, the full gamut of the ‘ﬂowers of rhetoric’, the learned quotation, laus and vituperatio, accumulation, variatio, repetition, dramatic shifts in tone, is testimony to Petrarch’s eloquence, discrimination, intelligence, and faith, determined as these are by his conﬁdence in and ‘imitation’ of the best of classical and Christian culture. The poet’s eclecticism is further apparent in other aspects of his great polemical treatise. Thus, by exploring the potential, the responsibilities, and the inanities of the human mind, Petrarch ensured that the libellus is both a major statement ‘on ignorance’ and a sort of ‘history’ of pagan and Christian philosophy, thereby afﬁrming its author’s intellectual prowess and erudition. Finally, by gathering together in one place his many, frequent, and scattered laments and fulminations about the state of the modern world, Petrarch was able to establish his moral and intellectual ‘uniqueness’. His is the lonely voice in the wilderness attempting to make itself heard amidst a storm of stupidity and malice. Yet, as so much else in the De Ignorantia, this last representation too is a rhetorical construct. Petrarch — we now know — was far from alone

58 To date I have found only one example of envy being coupled with the law: Policraticus 8, Prologue. There are other original elements in Petrarch’s presentation of envy: for instance, deliberately avoiding detrahere; the rich elaboration of martial imagery to describe the sin (Polito, ‘Inter cuntas eminens obliqui causa iudicii livor’, pp. 10–11); and the claim that, despite the four’s envious calumnies, he still considers them friends (see Fenzi’s note in Petrarca, De Ignorantia, pp. 323–4). 59 Petrarch himself points to the De Ignorantia’s eclecticism in the dedicatory epistle, whose functions as an accessus have been almost entirely ignored by scholars: ‘Nam que latior loquendi area, quis campus ingentior, quam humane tractatus ignorantie, et presertim mee?’ (p. 172)

THE ETHICS OF IGNORANCE

59

at the close of the Middle Ages in criticising Scholasticism and Aristotelianism. He was part of a major and well established tradition, which also included the Dante of the Commedia; a tradition whose arguments and language too are granted space in Petrarch’s richly layered book ‘on ignorance’.60 However, thanks to its historical range and moral ambition, to its erudition, to its ability stylistically to draw on a wide array of sources, to its powerful personal stamp, to its keenness to present itself as ‘other’, the De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia is a quintessentially Petrarchan work, a summa of so much that, throughout his life, caused the poet disquiet. As its title declares, it is a book that tells us much about both its author and ‘many others’; or, rather, about the former’s naturally ‘non-detractive’ views of ‘many others’, thereby further drawing attention to the self. Among these many ex bono and ex malo refractions of the self who populate his highly personalised drama, Petrarch assigned not entirely negligible roles to those two archetypal, though unrelated ‘baddies’ of the medieval world, Epicurus and Averroës. Note. I should like to thank Ted Cachey, Enrico Fenzi, Giulio Lepschy, and Giuseppe Mazzotta, as well as the editors of the present volume, for their comments on an earlier version of this study.

(‘Can there be any wider area or vaster ﬁeld for eloquence than a treatise on human ignorance, especially my own?’, Marsh, p. 223). 60 See L. Bianchi, ‘“Aristotile fu un uomo e poté errare”: sulle origini medievali della critica al “principio di autorità” ’, in Filosoﬁa e teologia nel Trecento: studi in ricordo di Eugenio Randi, ed. L. Bianchi (Louvain–La Neuve, 1994), pp. 509–33; Boulnois, ‘Scolastique et humanisme’, pp. 7–19, 36; Fenzi, ‘Introduzione’, pp. 20–2, 57; Gerosa, Umanesimo cristiano, pp. 201–5; E. P. Mahoney, ‘“The Worst Natural Philosopher” (pessimus naturalis) and “The Worst Metaphysician (pessimus metaphysicus)”: His Reputation among Some Franciscan Philosophers (Bonaventure, Francis of Meyronnes, Antonius Andreas, and Joannes Canonicus) and Later Reactions’, in Die Philosophie im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: in memoriam Konstanty Michalski, ed. O. Pluta (Amsterdam, 1988), pp. 261–73; F.-X. Putallaz, ‘La connaissance de soi au Moyen âge: Vital du Four’, Collectanea franciscana, XL (1990), 505–37. On Dante’s critique of Scholasticism, see Z. G. Baran´ski, Dante e i segni (Naples, 2000).

4

Petrarch’s Second (and Third) Death JONATHAN USHER

TOWARDS THE END OF THE FIRST CANTO of Inferno, Dante’s guide Virgil offers, as an encouragement to the still-hesitant pilgrim, an anticipation of the various realms of the after-world to be traversed. In the case of Hell, the ancient poet describes that eternal place where Dante will hear the ‘disperate strida’, where he will see ‘li antichi spiriti dolenti,/ che la seconda morte ciascun grida’ (ll. 114–17). This second death was an image from the Apocalypse (21.8) which St Francis, following a long line of religious writers, had also used in his ‘Laudes creaturarum’. Francis’s expression is ‘ka la morte secunda no ’l farrà male’ (line 31). The context makes it clear that the saint is thinking of the Last Judgement. It is this Franciscan usage itself, rather than its biblical source, which has been tentatively adduced as Dante’s model by Francesco Mazzoni.1 Despite relative unanimity about its origins, Dante commentators, from Boccaccio onwards (Esposizioni 1, litt., 151–3) have long struggled to trace the precise signiﬁcance of Dante’s borrowing because the status of the souls in Hell makes the phrase apparently redundant. Though, in this commentary tradition to the Comedy, interpretations of Dante’s phrase remain anchored within an essentially Apocalypsederived framework, outside these conﬁnes, the expression quickly acquired a different meaning. This second ‘second death’ represents a renewed Boethian–Ciceronian conception, with Sallustian–Senecan undertones, in the intense discussion of secular fame and posthumous glory, associated particularly with literary endeavour, which marks the incipient Renaissance change in sensibilities. It is this humanist slant, in Petrarch, which I wish to examine. Petrarch uses the idea, if not the precise expression, of an iterative mortality/vitality related to memory early in his career, in his Metrica on 1

F. Mazzoni, Saggio di un nuovo commento alla ‘Divina Commedia’: ‘Inferno Canti I–III’ (Florence, 1967), p. 143. Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 61–82. © The British Academy 2007.

62

Jonathan Usher

the death of his mother Eletta (1. 7). She died whilst Petrarch was a law student at Montpellier (1316–20), but though Petrarch’s actual bereavement occurred whilst he was in his teens, it is generally assumed that the panegyric was retouched, if not entirely written, in later years. The poem, whose line-total corresponds to the number of years his mother had lived, celebrates Eletta’s promotion to a better life. It also predicts the son joining his mother in the grave,2 material which has given rise to an enthusiastic Freudian reading by one French critic.3 However, following one’s parent into death also allows Petrarch to rehearse the concept of limited worldly survival through fame or memory, and to profess furthermore the delicate burden of posterity in general and not just of speciﬁc ﬁlial piety. Even at this early stage Petrarch sees himself in the poetic role of secular ‘immortaliser’, though it is a precarious privilege, constantly threatened by others’ subsequent forgetting: [. . .] tempusque per omne hac tua, ﬁda parens, resonabit gloria lingua,4 has longum exequias tribuam tibi; postque caduci corporis interitum, quod adhuc viget, optima, sub quo vivis adhuc, genetrix, cum iam compresserit urna hos etiam cineres, nisi me premat immemor etas,5 vivemus pariter, pariter memorabimur ambo. Sin aliter fors dura parat, morsque invida nostram extinctura venit fragili cum corpore famam, tu saltem, tu sola precor post busta superstes vive, nec immerite noceant oblivia Lethes. (1. 7, 24–34) (For all time, faithful mother, my tongue will sing your glory. I shall offer my obsequies to you for a long time. And after the death of my perishable body, so far still alive, dear mother, whence you too still live, when the grave will have weighed down on my ashes too, unless forgetful age presses down upon me, we shall live equally, equally we shall both be remembered. Should harsh fate have something else in store, and unwelcome

2

‘Nec stabis sola sepulcro’ (19); ‘Ipse ego iam saxo videor michi pressus eodem’ (22). See P. Blanc’s outline, via the Latin works, of what he deﬁnes as a Petrarchan psychopoetics: ‘Petrarca ou la poétique de l’Ego’, Revue des Etudes Italiennes, XXIX (1983), 122–69. 4 The pairing of ‘gloria’ and ‘lingua’ here recalls Purgatorio 11. 98: ‘la gloria della lingua’ passing from one Guido to another. It is almost certainly one of the earliest recorded examples of Petrarch’s Dantismo. 5 An elaborately rewritten echo of Boethius’ De Consolatione 2. 7 prose: ‘Sed quam multos clarissimos suis temporibus viros scriptorum inops delevit oblivio! Quamquam quid ipsa scripta proﬁciant, quae cum suis auctoribus premit longior atque obscura vetustas?’ Boethius is probably borrowing from Horace, Epist. 2. 2, 118: ‘nunc situs informis premit et deserta vetustas’. 3

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

63

death should come to extinguish my fame along with my frail body, then I pray that you at least live on after the grave, and Lethal oblivion not drown you.)

Already in this early composition key concepts of the later Trionﬁ surface, though not yet united into a coherent programme: the poet preserving another’s memory through language (‘hac tua, ﬁda parens, resonabit gloria lingua’); an eventual future age unmindful of the past (‘immemor etas’); the symmetrical pairing of the poet-immortaliser with the recipient of poetic celebration, later developed in the Scipio–Ennius pairing of the Africa (‘vivemus pariter, pariter memorabimur ambo’); the risk of dual extinction, both body and fame (‘fragili cum corpore famam’); the transience of funerary monuments (‘post busta’). Though concentrated as closely related images in this short passage in the panegyric to his mother, the ﬁnal construction of an articulated theory of secular fame would, however, require detailed attention to a number of closely related textual models which, as we shall see, Petrarch will manipulate with consummate skill and complete awareness of their interrelatedness. One of the crucial texts for understanding Petrarch’s theory of literature and its associated examination of fame is the Africa. In a dream sequence in the second book, clearly inspired, as is much of the ﬁrst book too, by Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis,6 the bloodied ghost of Publius Cornelius Scipio7 tells his son Scipio the Elder (soon to be Africanus) that fame itself, though a prolonging of ‘life’ after death, is ultimately transient, an illusory goal if it relies on social memory, word of mouth, or funerary monument alone. Material fame will perish, just like our physical bodies. Literature, however, with its ability to jump the generations, partly remedies this secondary mortality, provided the writer celebrating the deeds is sufﬁciently skilled to maintain the interest of posterity. Literary quality is vital. The Roman poet Ennius, Scipio Africanus’ ‘war correspondent’ in Petrarch’s epic, worries that his talents are insufﬁcient for the literary task of immortalisation ahead, and, in book 9 of the Africa, he will tell of being visited in a dream by Homer, who will indicate

6

Compared with the Somnium Scipionis, Petrarch operates an interesting generational shift in the Africa: Cicero’s dream has Scipio Africanus appearing to his grandson, whereas Petrarch has Scipio Africanus visited by his own father. The narrative reason for Petrarch’s modiﬁcation is obvious—Scipio Africanus is the living protagonist of Petrarch’s epic, and in such dream literature can only therefore be visited by an antecedent. 7 ‘[. . .] celoque emissa silenti/ umbra ingens faciesque patris per nubila raptim/ astitit ostendens caro precordia nato/ et latus et multa transﬁxum cuspide pectus’ (Africa 1. 161–4).

64

Jonathan Usher

how ‘rough’8 Ennius’ task, frustrated by history’s subsequent loss of the Annales, will be completed by a more accomplished Tuscan poet, Petrarch, many centuries later. In associating Homer and Ennius (and eventually himself) like this, Petrarch is appropriating a fragment of the incipit of Ennius’ own epic, in which the Roman implies his own Pythagorean metempsychosis, via a peacock, from Homer. It is no coincidence that Petrarch found one of the clearest references to this Homer–Ennius connection at the start of the Somnium, where the ghost of Scipio Africanus ﬁrst appears.9 Petrarch’s coy suggestion of poetic metempsychosis in book 9 of the Africa is a way of attaching himself to an ‘unbroken’ succession, despite glaring temporal discontinuity.10 It is, however, a discreet endorsement, unlike Boccaccio’s wholehearted adoption of the Ennian chain in the Trattatello,11 for elsewhere, indeed, Petrarch shows caution when discussing Pythagoras’ theory of rebirth.12 Already in book 2 of the Africa, Publius anticipates Petrarch as belated guarantor of secular fame for his son Scipio Africanus. The proleptic passage caps a long discussion of the nature and limitations of fame 8 There is clearly a play on words between ‘rudis’ (uncouth) and Ennius’ birthplace, ‘Rudiae’. Ovid makes use of it in Tristia 2. 424, calling Ennius ‘ingenio maximus, arte rudis’. In Familiares 10. 14, 34 Petrarch mentions that he had read of Ennius’ ‘ruditas’ in Valerius [Maximus]. The likely reference is Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium Libri IX, 8. 14, ‘De cupiditate glorie in Romanis’, 1: ‘[Scipio Africanus] vir Homerico, quam rudi atque impolito praeconio [Ennio], dignior’. 9 Cicero’s rather cautious formulation is ‘ﬁt enim fere ut cogitationes sermonesque nostri pariant aliquid in somno tale quale de Homero scribit Ennius, de quo videlicet saepissime vigilans solebat cogitare et loqui’ (De Re Publica (Somnium Scipionis) 6. 10). He is probably referring to what is now Ennian fragment 5.6: ‘visus Homerus adesse poeta’. 10 Petrarch is described by Publius Cornelius Scipio as ‘velut Ennius alter’, Africa 2. 443, just as Ennius himself is described by Horace, not entirely seriously, as ‘alter Homerus’ (Epist. 2. 1, 50). The succession formula was widespread: Livy for instance calls Hamilcar ‘Mars alter’ (21. 10). Virgil describes his own poetic ancestry this way: ‘fortunate puer, tu nunc eris alter ab illo’ (Ecl. 5. 49), where ‘ille’ stands for Theocritus. Jerome in turn uses a quizzical version of it to describe Virgil, whom he deﬁnes ‘poeta sublimis, non “Homerus alter”, ut Lucilius de Ennio suspicatur, sed primus Homerus apud Latinos’ (Comm. in Micheam 2. 7). Giovanni del Virgilio will use the formula in his response to Dante’s reply in the Eclogues: ‘Ha divine senex, ha sic eris alter ab illo/ alter es aut idem, Samio si credere vati/ sic liceat Mopso, sic et liceat Meliboeo’ (33–5). Dante is here being deﬁned as a second Virgil, by means of Pythagorean metempsychosis. 11 The strange allegorical dream of Dante’s mother, where her son dies whilst trying to reach for laurel berries, and is turned into a peacock, contains unmistakable elements from the Homer–peacock–Euphorbus–Pythagoras–Ennius chain. Perhaps understandably, Boccaccio does not make this bold borrowing explicit in his explanation of the allegory. But he uses a similar poetic metempsychosis in his life of Petrarch, though this time explicitly, having the poet of the Africa descend intellectually intact, via rebirth, from the poet of the Aeneid. 12 See De Otio Religioso 1. 2, ‘ridiculus ille circuitus animarum et vana metempsicosis’, and similarly dismissive utterances in Familiares 10. 3, 8 and De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia 4. 7.

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

65

itself. The discussion bears some resemblance, in its stepped argument and imagery, to the later sequences of the Trionﬁ. It is in this programmatic, and indeed problematic,13 treatment of fame in the Africa that we ﬁnd Petrarch apparently taking up, but in a fundamentally secular reading and classical re-sourcing, Dante’s reprise of John’s phrase from Revelations: Quod si falsa vagam delectat gloria mentem aspice quid cupias: transibunt tempora, corpus hoc cadet et cedent indigno membra sepulcro; mox ruet et bustum, titulusque in marmore sectus occidet: hinc mortem patieris,14 nate, secundam. (Africa 2. 338–42) (Because if false glory delights your ﬁckle mind, behold what you are actually desiring: time will pass, this body will fall, and your limbs will give way to an unworthy grave; eventually even your tombstone will collapse, and the inscription carved in marble will fall: in such a way, my son, you will suffer a second death.)

Temporal glory is not only illusory (‘falsa’) but short-lived, if it depends on material reminders. Petrarch’s rhetorically professed disdain for physical monuments and their inscriptions (vehement in the second book of the De Otio)15 is belied by his enthusiastic funerary epigraphy for Robert of Naples (Metrica 2. 8), his lyrical pseudo-inscription for Galathea (Bucolicum Carmen 11. 78 ff.), his genuine epitaph for Tommaso da Messina (Familiares 4. 10), and by his own self-penned commemoration.16 What marks the Africa passage above is that, after the death of the body, the second death is seen entirely in secular terms. Far from being the

13

K. Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 143–9, makes the crisis of secular achievement and fame in the face of mortality the main theme of the Africa. 14 The verb ‘patior’ makes it likely that Petrarch was also thinking of the Horatian play on ‘bis patiar mori’ (Carmina 3. 9, 15–16). 15 ‘Querite vero de istis ubi habitant. Ostenduntur vobis exigua sepulcra exornata ingeniis artiﬁcum, forte etiam gemmis auroque micantia, ut est ambitiosa non modo vita hominum, sed mors. Vivent in pario lapide imagines defunctorum secundum illud principis poete: “Vivos ducent de marmore vultus”; sed ipsi, queso, ubi sunt? Epygrammata quoque magniﬁca et tituli altisoni sed inanes, quos qui legis obstupeas; sed subsiste, obsecro, dum limen extreme domus panditur nova subeunt spectacula, novus stupor: heu quam vel cinis exiguus vel ingens copia seu verminum seu serpentium!’ (Francesco Petrarca, Opere latine, ed. and trans. Antonietta Bufano, 2 vols (Turin, 1975), II, 710). Petrarch may have been thinking of the passage towards the end of Cicero’s Pro Archia (12. 30), where statuary and sepulchral commemoration is purely for the body, whereas literary commemoration is for the soul or mind. 16 The inscription reads: ‘Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarce,/ Suscipe Virgo parens animam: Sate Virgine parce,/ Fessaque iam terris coeli requiescat in arce.’ It can be found in A. Solerti’s Le vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio (Milan, n.d. [1904?]), p. 280.

66

Jonathan Usher

annihilation of the soul, as the Evangelist indicates, it is the temporal collapse of material reminders of existence. The social construct of memory cannot depend upon inscriptions in fragile marble. Lasting survival, not transient glory, is what should be sought, though there are many pitfalls in achieving it, and even more misconceptions as to its nature. Even the present life, as Publius had announced in the ﬁrst book of the Africa, is actually to be considered as death.17 In the Africa, Publius’ comments on the second death come at the end of a compressed, anticipatory summary of Roman history, modelled in part on Anchises’ review of the imperial stirps in book 6 of the Aeneid. This Scipionic summary ends by touching upon the painful topic of Rome’s eventual decline, culminating in her ironically reassuring, empty appellation as ‘nudo vel nomine mundi/ regina’ (queen of the world in name only) (2. 316–17).18 The reason is not hard to seek: it is that universal rule of decay: ‘omnia nata quidem pereunt et adulta fatiscunt’ (all things born perish and mature things crumble) (Africa 2. 344). Petrarch is employing, with programmatic modiﬁcations, a phrase from Sallust’s Jugurtha, describing the decadence of things material, in contrast to the durability of the spirit.19 It is the signal for a switch from historical to 17

See Africa 1. 340: in a complex Petrarchan anachronism, Scipio Africanus’ father is paraphrasing in the Africa what in the Somnium Scipionis (De Re Publica 6. 14) Scipio Africanus, paraphrasing Plato, says to his grandson about the limitations and infelicities of terrestrial existence, namely that those who are departed are truly living, whereas this earthly life is to be considered as a kind of death, a prison. Petrarch had quoted this Somnium passage explicitly in Africa 1. 334–40, and would do so again, if somewhat more cautiously, to Boccaccio in his Senilis ‘De vaticinio morientium’ (1. 5), preferring a more anodyne alternative, purportedly from St Gregory: ‘Temporalis [. . .] vita, eterne vite comparata, mors est potius dicenda quam vita’ (The temporal life, compared with eternal life, should more correctly be called a death not a life). 18 In the De Remediis, Petrarch will warn against investing too much faith in the ongoing fortunes of cities, all of which will eventually become ‘pulvis, cinis, sparsi lapides, nudum nomen’ (dust, ashes, scattered tombstones, a bare name) (2. 129, 10). 19 ‘Igitur praeclara facies, magnae divitiae, ad hoc vis corporis et alia omnia huiuscemodi brevi dilabuntur; at ingeni egregia facinora sicuti anima immortalia sunt. Postremo corporis et fortunae bonorum, ut initium, sic ﬁnis est, omniaque orta occidunt et aucta senescunt’ (2. 3). Sallust’s moral counterweight to Cicero in the Africa deserves further attention. Petrarch freely adapts the phrase in the third book of the Secretum, in response to Augustinus’ questioning whether Franciscus has ever looked in a mirror and seen his white hair: ‘Ista vero comunia sunt omnibus qui nascuntur: adolescere, senescere, interire’ (Petrarca, Opere latine, II, 218). Petrarch again uses the Sallustian phrase in Familiares 9. 13, 3, when upbraiding Philippe de Vitry for not wishing to abandon Paris for Rome, and thereby foregoing the chance for glory: ‘ego et ratione simul et experientia magistra et illustri etiam historico attestante [i.e. Sallust] didiceram “orta omnia occidere et aucta senescere”’; as well as in Familiares 17. 3, 42, comparing Genoa’s tribulations with that of other cities which had fallen on hard times or been destroyed: ‘et urbibus et orbi senectus est sua, suum declivium, sua mors; ad ﬁnem cunta festinant, subeunda magno animo creatarum rerum omnium

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

67

philosophical mode. The fate of Rome is a metaphor for the fragile condition of Man.20 Addressing not just his son but the fate of humanity as a whole, and so changing to the generic plural, Publius declares, as if from the pulpit: [. . .] unde vir etenim sperare potest populusve quod alma Roma nequit? Facili labuntur secula passu: tempora diffugiunt; ad mortem curritis; umbra, umbra estis pulvisque levis vel in ethere fumus exiguus, quem ventus agat. [. . .] (1. 345–50) (Why can a mere man hope, or a people, for what bountiful Rome cannot achieve? Centuries ﬂow past with an easy step: ages are in ﬂight; you rush towards death; you are shadow, shadow you are and weightless dust or slight smoke in the air which the wind swirls.)

Not only is Man’s lifespan biblical dust or smoke,21 but even the habitable world, once uninhabitable zones have been excluded, has narrow conﬁnes indeed. Furthermore, the diversity of languages (‘linguarum dissona multum/ murmura’, 2. 394–5) and customs (‘diversi mores’) even within this restricted area means that the spread of renown is inevitably impeded. Yet renown remains Man’s ridiculous obsession, ‘ridenda insania’. Scipio Africanus’ father bellows: ‘eternum cupitis producere nomen’, but then what is renown worth? [. . .] libet ire per ora doctorum extinctos hominum, clausosque sepulcro liberiore via per mundi extrema vagari. Vivere post mortem, violentas spernere Parcas dulcia sunt, fateor, sed nomine vivere nil est. (1. 410–14) (The deceased are pleased to go upon the mouths of learned men, and to wander, once closed in their graves, on a freer path through the corners of the earth. To live after death, to scorn the violent Fates, these are sweet things, I confess, but to live only by renown is nothing.)

sors comunis; “omnia orta occidunt et aucta senescunt”. Id si Salustius non dixisset, scimus tamen [. . .]’. Petrarch cites the Sallustian maxim in Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (RVF) 91, traditionally addressed to Gherardo after the loss of his beloved, but full of unmistakable references to Rome. 20 Compare Boethius: ‘non modo fama hominum singulorum sed ne urbium quidem pervenire queat’ (2. 7, p. 29). 21 Petrarch is perhaps referring to Ecclesiastes 3. 20, which he quotes explicitly in Senilis 6. 7. Other biblical sources might include Psalms 102 and 103.

68

Jonathan Usher

The reference to ‘life’ continuing, after death, by being broadcast abroad, is a conscious paraphrase of Ennius’ own epitaph (as quoted in Cicero’s Tusculanae 1. 15, 34 ff.): ‘Nemo me lacrumis decoret nec funera ﬂetu/ Faxit. Cur? Volito vivus per ora virum’ (let none grace me with tears nor mourn my passing. Why? Because I soar aloft on the mouths of men).22 Virgil, too, had reused it in the same Georgic which Petrarch uses to illustrate his Collatio Laureationis.23 It was a phrase that Petrarch couldn’t get out of his mind. He uses a free version, for instance, in his metrical letter to Robert of Anjou sending his condolences for the death of Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro.24 The ideologically important adjectivisation ‘doctus’ in Publius’ Ennian paraphrase would seem to be Petrarch’s own personal addition, not a prior corruption of his source. Petrarch certainly uses ‘doctus’ elsewhere in versions of the epitaph, for instance in a letter to Homer (Familiaris 24. 12), and in a metrical letter to Boccaccio (3. 17), where it is obvious from the context that he means ‘accomplished poet’. On other occasions he omits it, as when writing to Tommaso da Messina (Familiaris 1. 9). Indeed, in the Contra Medicum he will even use the opposite of ‘doctus’ to describe the dismal fate of Aristotle, un-Ennianly carried abroad after death on the mouths of the ignorant.25 Where did 22

Cicero also paraphrases it ironically in the ﬁrst book of the De Re Publica, when talking about the narrow conﬁnes of fame: ‘quamque nos in exigua eius parte adﬁxi, plurimis ignotissimi gentibus, speremus tamen nostrum nomen volitare et vagari latissime?’ (when one sees that we who are conﬁned to a very small part of the earth, unknown to the majority of other peoples, still hope that our name can ﬂy and wander widely abroad?) (1. 17, 26). 23 Georgica 3. 8–9: ‘Temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim/ tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora’. Virgil carefully replaces the Ennian ‘vivus’ with the more auspicious ‘victor’. The related passage quoted in the Collatio is Georgica 3. 291–2: ‘sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis/ raptat amor’. 24 Metrica 1. 13, 8–14: ‘[. . .] Sibi fortior illum/ Fama sed eternum rapuit longumque per evum/ Vivere iussit eum et totum volitare per orbem./ Ille olim felix, modo felicissimus idem/ Carcere membrorum fugiens tenebrosa reliquit/ Claustra libens, nulla sequidem dulcedine vite/ Tangitur, instabiles quisquis bene computat annos.’ The prison metaphor, ultimately of Platonic origin (from the Phaedo, as Petrarch points out in the De Otio), is a deliberate amalgamation with a passage from the Somnium Scipionis (De Re Publica 6. 6). 25 If the original Ennian epitaph implies a kind of Elysian survival, which Petrarch speciﬁes as resulting from continued currency amongst learned men, here in the Invective Contra Medicum, Aristotle’s unenviable currency amongst the boorish is equated with damnation: ‘Ydiote procaces, in ore semper habetis Aristotelem, qui credo in ore vestro quam in inferno esse tristius ducat, et puto dextram suam oderit qua illa scripsit que, paucis intellecta, per ora multorum ignorantium volitarent’ (Foolish, arrogant people, you always have Aristotle in your mouths, but I believe he thinks it worse to be in your mouths than in Hell, and probably hates his right hand which wrote those works that are understood by so few, and yet are broadcast on the mouths of many ignorant people) (3. 2).

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

69

Petrarch obtain this adjectival addition? Perhaps, given the overwhelming inﬂuence of the Somnium on Petrarch’s theory of human achievement, Cicero’s remarks about the music of the spheres are pertinent.26 The exquisite celestial harmonies are inaudible to humanity, but ‘skilled’ (‘docti’) poets and musicians strive to imitate them with plucked instruments and with song. Cicero is probably alluding to Orpheus and Amphion. Such artistic efforts of the mind, and associated musical and literary pursuits, are rewarded with immortality as privileged as that accorded to great statesmen: these artists will return to their place of origin, to the stars which generate the music in the ﬁrst place: quod docti homines nervis imitati atque cantibus, aperuere sibi reditum in huc locum: sicut alii qui praestantibus ingeniis in vita humana studia coluerunt. (De Re Publica 6. 18) (which learned men have imitated with strings and voices, opening up this place for their return, and the same goes for others who during their lifetime have cherished human studies with exceptional minds.)

Cicero’s inclusion of artistico-intellectual as well as politico-military achievements will, as we shall see, allow Petrarch, in the Secretum, to indulge in a piece of Sallustian–Senecan apologetics, to proclaim the equal worth of those who do and those who write, and to describe life without letters as mere brutish existence. But let us return to Publius in the Africa. It may be a cause for pleasure (‘libet’) that the dead live on, carried by the mouths of learned men, but by this concessionary formula Petrarch is placing in the hero’s father’s mouth the idea that living purely as memory of the name (as with the empty reputation of Rome as queen of the world) 27 is an insufﬁcient goal. He declares dismissively: ‘nomine vivere nil est’. Other, more reliable forms of survival are to be preferred, based on virtue itself. For it is only through the exercise of virtue, and ﬁnal escape into the eternal reward of the blessed, that the ravages of time can be avoided. Here, the implicitly Christianised deﬁnition of ‘virtus’ is subtly grafted onto the classical concept, that heroic quality of statesmanship, justice (or exceptional intellectual or artistic talent), for which Cicero promises an Elysian reward. Petrarch’s subsequent description of the 26

It is a passage he ﬁrst paraphrases and then parodies, in both cases speciﬁcally making a point about fame, in his homily to Cola di Rienzo about currying popular favour (Familiares 7. 7). 27 In the chapter entitled ‘De Scriptorum Fama’ (De Remediis 1. 44), Petrarch’s alter ego rashly states, ‘Scripsi multa et scribo’, to which the reply comes immediately: ‘si poteris profuturus nichil satius; si tibi nudum nomen quesiturus, nichil vanius’.

70

Jonathan Usher

serene afterlife of the immortals, not taken from the Somnium, though constructed from stock classical ‘golden age’ components, is likewise clearly meant to be read as Christian: Vivite sed melius, sed certius: ardua celi scandite felices, miserasque relinquite terras. Hic vos vita manet, quam secula nulla movebunt, quam nec tristis hiems, nec noxia torqueat estas, anxia solicitam quam non opulentia reddet, querula non mestam paupertas, pallida non mors28 obruet, haud nocuo vexabunt sidere morbi corporis atque animi. Sine tempore vivite [. . .] (2. 415–22) (You live on, but better, but more securely: you happily ascend the steep slopes of heaven, whilst leaving the wretched earth behind. Here a life awaits you which no ages shall displace, which neither gloomy winter nor suffocating heat can sway, which care-charged wealth does not turn to worry, nor needy poverty to misery, which pale death does not trample, and diseases of body or soul shall not vex by a baleful star. You shall live without time.)

Like Ovid’s description of the Golden Age in book 1 of the Metamorphoses, Publius’ list is constructed by litotes: it is the absence of named terrestrial travails, including Time itself. Though superﬁcially Christian, its ataraxy is fundamentally Stoic. These futile cares are to be read, alongside the belittling of earthly dimensions and ambitions, as a counterpoint to changeless imperturbability. Such talk of secular transience compared with the lasting ‘realities’ and pleasures of eternity has a familiar ring, a precise textual origin, but it is a bold anachronism. Scipio Africanus’ father is faithfully paraphrasing, indeed amplifying, an important discussion in the second book of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae. In the prose and metrical sections of the seventh chapter, Boethius measures the value and especially the limitations of fame. In order to diminish the scale of Man’s achievement, the prose carries a discussion of the climatic restrictions on the habitable world, and of the cultural division of humanity into separate, mutually unintelligible language groups.

28

Given the copresence of wealth and poverty, and death as an equaliser, Petrarch is here almost certainly borrowing from Horace, Carmina 1. 4: ‘pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas/ regumque turris. O beate Sesti,/ vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam;/ iam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes/ et domus exilis Plutonia [. . .]’.

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

71

Fame can never, therefore, be widespread. It is an argument which is identical to the one Petrarch has Publius deliver. The ideas Boethius puts forward here are, as is well known, derived in large measure from what Cicero writes in the Somnium (De Re Publica 6. 9–29), almost certainly coupled with the well known commentary to the dream by Macrobius,29 and it is likely that Petrarch, aware of the derivation, was consciously conﬂating the two texts in this Africa passage. However, the Ciceronian and Boethian discussions, whilst closely related, each contain details not carried in the other, and Petrarch makes full use of such partial overlap in his gap-ﬁlling exercise. For example, Petrarch’s division of the world into climatic zones is common to both Cicero and Boethius, but only Boethius refers to the precise culturo-linguistic inhibitions to fame’s spread (‘plures incolunt nationes, lingua, moribus, totius vitae ratione distantes’, 2. 7, prose).30 Conversely, the recommendation of virtue as sole guarantor of lasting survival follows more closely Cicero’s argument in the Somnium of preferring virtue to facile glory as a strategy for obtaining immortality,31 even though the same idea is presented, albeit very much more brieﬂy, in the relevant chapter of the De Consolatione. But Boethius, though brief on virtue, throws in a further, crucial comment, almost as an afterthought: Sed quam multos clarissimos suis temporibus viros scriptorum inops delevit oblivio! Quamquam quid ipsa scripta proﬁciant, quae cum suis auctoribus premit longior atque obscura vetustas? (How many men who were very famous in their own times did forgetfulness delete for want of writers? But are such writings themselves of any use, when very long and dark time weighs down on them along with their authors?)

Boethius slyly pairs two partially contradictory notions here — writing as preservation, and writing as ultimately perishable. The ﬁrst, that reputations perish for want of writers, is a fairly standard expression of the topos of the immortalising role of poets. The second, of age pressing down, is one which Petrarch had already adopted in his valedictory to his mother. Cicero does not develop the concept of mortality through want of writers in the Somnium, but he celebrates it notably in the Pro Archia, 29

On the interplay in Boethius between the Ciceronian text and the Macrobian commentary, see P. Courcelle, La consolation de la philosophie dans la tradition littéraire (Paris, 1967), pp. 113–27. 30 Petrarch would also have come across the concept of ‘linguarum diversitas’ in Augustine, Civ. Dei 19. 17. 31 De Re Publica 6. 16 and 23.

72

Jonathan Usher

a text which Petrarch, having rediscovered, used repeatedly in his own works. The Pro Archia eloquently defends the role of culture and poetry as celebratory reinforcers of fame, and therefore of edifying example. The link between arms and letters, or between national interest and literature, is the key argument in this strangely unforensic oration, and will be a point of contact with the Sallustian–Senecan strand we shall discuss later. In Cicero’s peroration in the Pro Archia, predictably, Ennius is mentioned in relation to the deeds of Scipio Africanus. Despite Cicero’s unreserved paean, Archias himself was a second-rater. Some heroes have indeed been fortunate in their respective bards and others less so. Petrarch declares in the De Viris Illustribus, for instance, that Africanus deserved a Homer or a Virgil, but had to content himself with an Ennius.32 This conceit also surfaces in the Africa, when Ennius apologises to Scipio for not being up to the Homeric standards deserved by a hero: At tibi, summe ducum, claro quo nullus Homero est dignior, in reliquiis blanda inque hoc durior uno me solum Fortuna dedit. [. . .] (9. 58–60) (But to you, greatest of generals, than whom none is more worthy of a famous Homer, Fate, for the rest merciful, but in this one thing harsher, has granted me alone.)

The passage about Ennius in the De Viris deserves a moment’s attention. Petrarch is outlining what drove Scipio Africanus onwards in his exploits. One of the primary motivations was a desire for glory, and not just in this life: desiderium glorie ultra vite tempus extendi, maximamque eius partem non tam presentis evi populum respicere quam opinionem ac memoriam posterorum, ideoque naturaliter inesse magnis et excellentibus animis, ut non modo cum coevis sed cum omnium seculorum viris se comparent, cum omnibus de claritate contendant. (11. 11) ([Scipio claimed that] the desire for glory extended beyond the span of life, and that the greatest part of it was concerned not so much with the people of the present age but rather with the opinion and memory of our descendants, and that it is for that reason that this desire is naturally present in great and outstanding spirits, so that they don’t just compare themselves with their contemporaries but with the men of all centuries, and compete with everybody for fame.)

32 See Francesco Petrarca, De Viris Illustribus, ed. G. Martellotti (Florence, 1964), p. 295. Compare Valerius Maximus, Dict. Fact. Mem. 8. 14, 1: ‘vir Homerico, quam rudi atque impolito praeconio, dignior’.

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

73

It is an explicitly competitive model — great ﬁgures measure themselves not only with their contemporaries but also with their potential comparators past and present. It follows therefore that they must choose poetic commemorators who themselves stand comparison with their artistic rivals past and present. As Petrarch adds in the De Viris, one can choose notionally for the past and for the future, but the present has to put up with what it is offered.33 This is why Ennius’ eventual coronation triumph on the Capitoline Hill alongside Scipio Africanus is a paradoxical ‘alta sors humilis poete’ (De Viris 11. 14). Ennius, for his dogged devotion, will end up as a statue in the Scipio family tomb. But as Publius announces in the Africa, ‘mox ruet et bustum’. Time is the effacer both of deeds and what celebrates them, especially if the means of immortalisation are paltry. Paradoxically, stone proves less durable than paper,34 a point that Petrarch will make forcibly in the third book of the Secretum, but even this longevity is precarious.35 This is exactly the second point that Boethius makes in the seventh prose of the second book of the De Consolatione: ‘Quamquam quid ipsa scripta proﬁciant, quae cum suis auctoribus premit longior atque obscura vetustas?’ Even the best preservational efforts of writers, Boethius writes, and even the reputations of the writers themselves, are subject to the wear and tear of time. He then makes it even clearer in the metrum: Signat superstes fama tenuis pauculis inane nomen litteris. Sed quod decora novimus vocabula num scire consumptos datur? (2. 7 metr. 17–19) (What slender Fame as may survive signs its empty name with few letters. Because we learn elegant words do we get to know the deceased?)

33

‘preterita ac futura optari possunt, sed presentibus uti oportet’. Petrarch is thinking of Horace, Odes 3. 30: ‘exegi monumentum aere perennius’. See also Odes 4. 8. Both odes contain explicit references to the immortalising role of literature, e.g. 4. 8, 28–9: ‘Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori,/ caelo Musa beat [. . .]’. 35 Africa 2. 433: ‘Clara quidem libris felicibus insita vivet/ fama diu, tamen ipsa suas passura tenebras’. In the Secretum, the equivalent comment follows immediately after Augustinus’ quotation of the ‘mors secunda’ passage from the Africa: the saint warns Petrarch that even though the downfall of books carrying one’s name, either as author or subject, is later (‘serior’) than that of grave-inscriptions, nevertheless it is inevitable ‘propter innumerabiles pestes nature fortuneque pariter, quibus, ut cetera, sic et libri subiacent’ (on account of the endless plagues of nature and fortune to which books too, just like everything else, are subject); even if they escape these perils, they nevertheless grow old and die. 34

74

Jonathan Usher

Not even literary quality (‘decora [. . .] vocabula’) is a guarantee, death erases regardless. This briefest of sententiae in Boethius is ampliﬁed, in Publius’ Africa speech, into a cheeky reappropriation of the concept of the ‘third death’.36 After celebrating the future efforts of Petrarch in securing the fame of his son, Scipio Africanus, the ghost blurts out: [. . .] Sed quid tamen omnia prosunt? Iam sua mors libris aderit;37 mortalia namque esse decet quecumque labor mortalis inani edidit ingenio. Quos si tamen illa nepotum progenies servare velit, senioque nocenti vim facere ac rapido vigilans obsistere seclo, non valeat, tam multa vetant; fatalia terris diluvia et populos violentior estus adurens, et pestes rerum varie celique marisque, bellorumque furor toto nichil orbe quietum stare sinens, libris autem morientibus ipse occumbes etiam; sic mors tibi tertia restat. (2. 454–65) (But what use is all of this? Already books shall have their death, for it is proper that all things which mortal toil has produced with vain intelligence should themselves be mortal. Even if the eventual offspring of grandchildren wished to keep them, and do violence to nasty old age and resist alert the swift march of time, it would be no use. There are many things which prevent it. Floods fatal to the land and heat burning peoples very harshly, all manner of disasters of the sky and sea, and the madness of wars which leaves nothing calm in the whole globe: when books die off, then you too die with them. Thus a third death awaits you.)

Though the precise phrase ‘mors tertia’ is Ambrosian, the textual derivation for the overall argument is not hard to ﬁnd. It is still the seventh chapter of the De Consolatio Philosophiae. Boethius’ rhetorical question ‘Quid proﬁciant’ in the prose becomes Petrarch’s ‘quid prosunt’ in the Africa. Here the Boethian sub-text leaches through in the deliberate, imitatioimposed transposition of terms: Boethius had written in the metrical seventh chapter ‘iam vos secunda mors manet’ (2. 7, 26).38 Petrarch’s end-of36

The expression is not new, but its previous usage was resolutely theological. St Ambrose uses the expression ‘mors tertia/ tertia mors’ in a highly technical sense, with elaborate distinctions from the ﬁrst and second deaths, in Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam 7, and in De Bono Mortis 2. 3. 37 Petrarch may be thinking of the dictum of Terentianus Maurus: ‘Habent sua fata libelli’. 38 The Boethian clausula with ‘manet’ had, however, already been used by Petrarch to describe the abode of the blessed, cunningly and antithetically substituting Boethian ‘mors’ with Petrarchan ‘vita’: ‘Hic vos vita manet, quam secula nulla movebunt’ (Africa 2. 417).

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

75

line formula about the third death matches Boethius’ phrase positioning for the second. Petrarch, for his bold extension, changes the secondperson pronoun from generic plural to singular (for a father to son exchange), and substitutes the near synonym ‘resto’ (taking the dative) for ‘maneo’ (taking the accusative). Though it is a programmatic reuse of Boethius, the Africa passage relies, as we have stated, on more than the De Consolatione. Books, too, die; they are human constructs, produced merely by ‘inani [. . .] ingenio’. For this reason, therefore, they are perishable and especially vulnerable to calamities (‘pestes’). Such accidents can be the result of Nature, or caused by human iniquity. Publius mentions ﬂoods and conﬂagrations, the two great forces which memorably bring nascent civilisation back to its starting point in Ovid’s cosmology. Though the lexical signal ‘pestes’ (Africa 2. 462) indicates that Petrarch is still attentive to the De Consolatione,39 the speciﬁc reference to ﬁre and water is a precious signal that Petrarch is consciously amplifying Boethius40 by means of inserts from Boethius’ original model, the Somnium. This is classic Petrarchan imitatio in action. Cicero writes: Quin etiam si cupiat proles illa futurorum hominum deinceps laudes unius cuiusque nostrum a patribus acceptas posteris prodere, tamen propter eluviones exustionesque terrarum, quas accidere tempore certo necesse est, non modo aeternam, sed ne diuturnam quidam gloriam adsequi possumus. (De Re Publica 6. 21)41 (Even if such offspring of men to come were to desire henceforth to transmit to their descendants the praises of any of us handed down from their forebears, nevertheless because of ﬂoods and conﬂagrations of the earth, which inevitably happen at intervals, we cannot attain any daily glory, let alone eternal.)

The debt to the Somnium is not just a question of imagery but extends to phrasing. Cicero’s ‘proles illa futurorum hominum’ explains for instance Petrarch’s ‘illa nepotum progenies’. Yet again we observe Petrarch using

39

De Consolatione 1 p 4.42; 3 p 5.41; 4 m 3.20. Boethius makes no such mention in 2. 7, though there is a passing, inappropriate reference to both phenomena in chapter 6. In the third book of the Secretum, Augustinus alludes, somewhat dismissively, to the theories on ﬁres and ﬂoods in both Plato and Cicero: ‘Non ego te ad opiniones illas veterum revoco, qui crebra terris incendia diluviaque denuntiant, quibus et platonicus Thimeus et ciceronianus Reipublice sextus liber refertus est. Ea enim, quanquam multis probabilia videantur, vere tamen religioni, cui initiatus es, aliena sunt profecto’ (Petrarca, Opere latine, II, 246). 41 The Macrobian commentary also makes a point of mentioning the theory of regular ﬁres and ﬂoods: ‘cum modo exustione, modo eluvione terrarum diurnitati rerum intercedat occasus’. 40

76

Jonathan Usher

an essentially Boethian structure (the fate of writing was not part of the Somnium paradigm), but padding it out with material from its original Ciceronian model. With the death of the book ﬁnal annihilation of renown occurs. This is the ‘third death’. How, in the traditional context of a ‘second death’, based on Revelations and reinforced by Inferno 1. 117, has Petrarch managed to resecularise the expression, even in its daring extension? He has ably avoided the spiritual problem of alluding to the death of the soul by substantially reinforcing, through accurate recourse to the Somnium, Boethius’ brief message about immortality through the exercise of virtue. True reward and immortality in the eschatological sense is thus to be obtained elsewhere, leaving ample literary space for secular simulacra of immortality in the cultural–secular sphere. Boethius’ conception of a virtuous afterlife, though capable of a Christian interpretation, is essentially the same pagan reward for heroes presented in Cicero’s Somnium. However, given the subsequent semantic development of the term ‘virtus’ during the Middle Ages, Petrarch is able to compose, as we have seen, a passable likeness of the Christian abode of the blessed. ‘Christian’ virtue receives its due reward in ‘heaven’, therefore, leaving the way open for other, non-religious post-mortem arguments to continue. Purely secular survival, renown, can as a result be safely treated apart. Petrarch’s secular, Boethian deﬁnition of the second (and third) death in the Africa is not an unicum, however. In the ‘Triumphus Temporis’, there is another reference to multiple mortality. Petrarch has just announced that he has seen all our glory like snow melting beneath the sun’s rays (129). Long lives are no better, in terms of reputation or moral worth, than prematurely curtailed ones. He concludes, condemning vulgar opinion: Ma per la turba, a’ grandi errori avezza, dopo la lunga età sia il nome chiaro: che è questo però che sí s’apprezza? Tanto vince e ritoglie il Tempo avaro; chiamasi Fama, ed è morir secondo, né più che contra ’l primo è alcun riparo; così il Tempo triunfa i nomi e ’l mondo. (139–45)

In other words, even in a strongly Dante-inspired work like the Trionﬁ, Petrarch consistently adopts the Boethian ‘second death’ formula, associating it ﬁrmly and secularly with the ﬂeeting nature of fame, and not with an Apocalypse death of the spirit. It was clearly something he was quite content to remember, for in the third book of the Secretum, relating the

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

77

continuing hold of ‘amor et gloria’ upon Franciscus, Augustinus returns to the formula from the Africa, couched in exactly the same Boethian context of De Consolatione Philosophiae 2. 7. The saint ﬁrst rehearses the arguments about the length of time itself. Franciscus replies, mischievously quoting the ‘veterem et tritam iam inter philosophos fabellam’ about the length of the ‘great year’, discussed by both Cicero and Boethius, but with differing calculations on the cycle’s length. Augustinus then moves on to the climate zones, and their constraints on human habitation, declaring that he too had written on the subject of the antipodes in the De Civitate Dei. Then, predictably, he mentions the clearly Boethian ‘diversos vivendi mores, adversosque religionis ritus, dissonas linguas dissimilesque habitus’ (different ways of living, the conﬂicting rites of religion, the clashing languages and incompatible behaviours) which ‘propagandi late nominis preripit facultatem’ (forcibly prevent the possibility of spreading fame far and wide). In addition to such involuntary hindrances, there is also human ambition itself, with its unrelenting ‘novorum laus hominum’ (praise of new men), which supplants one reputation with another.42 In a ﬂourish of praeteritio, Augustinus leaves aside Virgil and Cicero (though he tellingly avoids mentioning Boethius, the actual source of the model of linguistic division) and turns to Petrarch’s own writings on the subject. The saint immediately quotes, from the Africa, Publius’ line to his son about the ‘second death’, ﬁrstly as a brief and wry allusion, the destruction of funerary monuments is that ‘quam non ineleganter in Africa tua “secundam mortem” vocas’ (which you not inelegantly call ‘second death’ in your Africa), and secondly as a full quotation: mox ruet et bustum, titulusque in marmore sectus occidet: hinc mortem patieris, nate, secundam. (Soon the tomb too will collapse, and the inscription carved in marble will fall down: then, my son, you will suffer the second death.)

Is the saint’s litotic ‘non ineleganter’ a signal that Petrarch is aware of his Boethian departure from the spiritual, Apocalypse-based acceptance of the expression ‘second death’? Why, if Augustinus is able to quote Petrarch at nearly a millennium’s interval, does the saint not refer to the use of the expression in Boethius, a near contemporary at just a century’s separation? More seriously, why does Augustinus not reveal that he had 42

The passage would seem to be a highly concentrated paraphrase of the discussion of artistic glory and impermanence in Purgatorio 11.

78

Jonathan Usher

used the formula repeatedly (but with quite a different meaning) in the De Civitate Dei, particularly in books 19–21? Maybe Petrarch is hinting, via ‘tu non ineleganter vocas’, that he was very well aware of the Augustinian usage. Augustinus’ irony about human presumption knows no bounds. Is this indeed ‘preclara et immortalis gloria’, he asks, if it can be laid low by the fall of a single headstone? He moves straight on to the fate of books, the next line of defence, which also have their old age and death, for they are produced by ‘inani [. . .] ingenio’ (vain intelligence). Suddenly it is the occasion to quote the passage about the ‘third death’: [. . .] libris equidem morientibus ipse occumbes etiam; sic mors tibi tertia restat. (As the books die away, you yourself will fall too; so the third death awaits you.)

It is a cunning piece of self-quotation which requires a careful reading, for in the Africa itself Publius is warning his son that even his belated celebration by Petrarch will one day suffer inevitable closure. With the death of Petrarch’s book announced in the Africa, in other words, it is Scipio Africanus who will undergo the ‘third death’ of reputation. Here in the Secretum, however, the position is not so altruistic. With the death of Petrarch’s books, Augustinus is implicitly saying, it is Petrarch’s own glory as writer which will ﬁnally decay. The self-centredness displayed here will become more understandable when we examine another, unacknowledged textual overlay. Excepting this surreptitious change from recipient of encomium to author, the discussion in the Secretum looks identical to the one in the Africa. Indeed the argument has been put forward that the two passages were written at a closer chronological interval than previously thought.43 But one interesting detail or further development marks the Secretum version, and that is the discussion of whether or not to abandon the quest for glory. By glory, it is clear that Petrarch means literary recognition. Franciscus asks Augustinus: iubeas ne ut, omissis studiis meis omnibus, inglorius degam, an vero medium aliquod tibi sit consilium?

43

See H. Baron, Petrarch’s Secretum: Its Making and its Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 117–53.

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

79

(Do you ask me to pass away insigniﬁcantly, having abandoned all my studies, or are you proposing some kind of compromise?)

It is a characteristic ploy: the placing of an impossibly stark, polarised choice, and then the insinuation of a possible ‘third way’. Augustinus, in view of the Ciceronian–Boethian tenor of the Africa quotations, predictably replies that Franciscus should instead seek virtue, and that glory follows virtue like a shadow.44 He then illustrates this maxim: Quisquis igitur veram gloriam tollit, virtutem ipsam sustulerit necesse est; qua sublata, relinquitur vita hominum nuda et mutis animantibus simillima vocantemque sequi preceps appetitum, qui unus belvis amor est. (Whosoever removes real glory, then, does away with virtue itself, and if virtue is removed, the life of men is left bare and just like that of dumb beasts, quick to follow the call of appetite, which is the sole instinct of beasts.)

The presence of ‘animantibus’ makes one think initially of Cicero, De Legibus: cum ceteros animantes abiecisset [subj. ‘natura’] ad pastum, solum hominem erexit et ad caeli, quasi cognationis domiciliique pristini, conspectum excitavit. (1. 9, 26) (Whereas nature had cast down other living beings to eat, she raised only man and encouraged his gaze heavenwards, as if in memory of his ﬁrst origin and dwelling.)

Even ‘belvis’ has a Ciceronian antecedent.45 But the presence of speechlessness (‘mutis’), appetite (‘appetitum’), and brutishness (‘belvis’) alerts us to the real underlying text. It is an interesting deformation. As Francisco Rico has noted but not pursued,46 there is here a strong echo of Sallust’s famous introduction to the De Bello Catilinae: Omneis homines qui sese student praestare ceteris animalibus47 summa ope niti decet ne vitam silentio transeant veluti pecora, quae natura prona atque ventri oboedientia ﬁnxit. Sed nostra omnis vis in animo et corpore sita est; animi imperio, corporis servitio magis utimur; alterum nobis cum dis, alterum cum belvis commune est. Quo mihi rectius videtur ingeni quam virium opibus gloriam quaerere et, quoniam vita ipsa qua fruimur brevis est, memoriam nostri quam

44

A Ciceronian dictum: ‘Gloria [. . .] tamen virtutem tamquam umbra sequitur’ (Tusc. Disp. 1. 45, 109) 45 De Ofﬁciis 1. 30, 105: ‘quantum natura hominis pecudibus reliquisque belvis antecedat’. 46 F. Rico, Vida u obra de Petrarca, vol. I: Lectura del Secretum (Chapel Hill, NC, 1974), p. 412, n. 548. 47 The textual tradition of Sallust also has ‘animantibus’ as a variant of ‘animalibus’.

80

Jonathan Usher maxume longam efﬁcere. Nam divitiarum et formae gloria ﬂuxa atque fragilis est, virtus clara aeternaque habetur. (All men who strive to be more than other animals must try as hard as they can not to pass their life in silence just like beasts, whom nature has crafted to be downwards facing and obedient to the belly. But all our energy is situated in the mind and the body: we use the mind for rule and the body for service, the one makes us partake of the gods, the other of the beasts. So it seems to me more appropriate to seek glory with the mind than with bodily exertions, and since our life itself is short, we should make the memory of ourselves as long as possible. For the glory of riches and beauty is ﬂeeting and frail, but virtue is deemed resplendent and eternal.)

Petrarch uses a version of this Sallustian passage in the De Vita Solitaria, using the very same, strongly Ciceronian adjective ‘inglorius’ which Franciscus had used in presenting the stark choice to Augustinus in the Secretum:48 Ita pars magna mortalium, seu volens seu coacta, belvarum moribus procurva in terram et corpori obsequens, animi negligens, sine virtutis illecebra, sine ulla notitia suimet spiritum trahit inglorium atque anxium. (1. 8, 3) (Thus a great part of humanity, either willingly or by obligation, bent to the ground in the manner of beasts, mindful of the body, neglecting the mind, without the charm of virtue, without any celebrity, drag their spirit along ingloriously and worriedly.)

Petrarch, through Augustinus, has taken advantage of the last phrase to reverse the general polarity of Sallust’s virtue–glory pairing, for the general Sallustian gist was that heroism, rather than beauty or riches, was a better guarantee of fame. The inversion is clearly part of Petrarch’s agenda in resemanticising ‘virtus’ towards a contemporary Christian usage. But why did Petrarch, who already had plenty of quotatory matter from Boethius and Cicero, including memorable paraphrases of his own from the Africa, include this entirely unacknowledged Sallustian passage at a key point in the Secretum? There are two reasons: one thematic and the other contextual. Thematically, Petrarch is talking about the quest for glory through literature, and historical literature at that, precisely the topic that Sallust

48

And which Boccaccio will duly pick up in his letter to Pizzinga (Ep. 19) about his own intellectual and artistic cowardice, in a highly Sallustian–Senecan context: ‘inglorius nomen una cum cadavere commendabo sepulcro’. See also G. Padoan, L’ultima opera di Giovanni Boccaccio (Padua, 1959), pp. 49–50.

PETRARCH’S SECOND (AND THIRD) DEATH

81

sets out in his proem.49 Petrarch will end the Secretum with an admission that he will continue to work, regardless of the saint’s arguments in favour of an active pursuit of Christian virtue, on the secular ‘magnaque, quamvis adhuc mortalia, negotia’ (presumably the Africa and the De Viris). Contextually, the quotation is apt because Sallust goes on to make a pronouncement, subsequently taken up by Seneca in the Ad Lucilium, about the nature of life without literary study (the activity Augustinus had been saying was a waste of time): Sed multi mortales dediti ventri atque somno indocti incultique vitam sicuti peregrinantes transiere; quibus profecto contra naturam corpus voluptati, anima oneri fuit. Eorum ego vitam mortemque iuxta aestumo, quoniam de utraque siletur. (De Bello Catilinae 2. 8) (But many mortals, given over to the belly and sleep, have passed through life unlearned and uncultivated as if they were just passing through, for whom against nature the body was a pleasure and the soul a burden. I judge their life to be close to death since neither are talked about.)

It was a Sallustian passage Petrarch knew well: he uses its opening in the incipit of RVF 7, ‘La gola e ’l sonno e l’oziose piume/ hanno del mondo ogni vertù sbandita’, when discussing how to maintain his quest for poetic achievement and recognition in the face of universal cultural apathy. The same message, and the same Sallustian quotation, resurfaces in Metrica 2. 10, 66–7: ‘Ventris amor, studiumque gule, somnusque, quiesque/ esse solet potior sacre quam cura poesis?’ (Love of belly, pursuit of gullet, sleep, quiet, are these now more sacred than the care for poetry?) In other words, Petrarch linked this Sallustian passage directly with his ‘vaghezza di lauro’. But he also saw here yet another version of the idea of living or dying via reputation, an analogue to the Boethian concept of death repeated he had reworked in the Africa. Almost certainly, however, the trigger for including the Sallustian proem at this point in the discussion of the ‘second and third death’ in the Secretum is Seneca’s memorable reworking of the passage in the sixtieth of the letters to Lucilius. The topic of the letter is human greed, and after a brief outburst on physical appetites, Seneca turns to their mental counterpart:

49

‘Pulchrum est bene facere rei publicae, etiam bene dicere haud absurdum est; vel pace vel bello clarum ﬁeri licet. Et qui fecere et qui facta aliorum scripsere, multi laudantur. Ac mihi quidem, tametsi haud quaquam par gloria sequitur scriptorem et actorem rerum, tamen in primis arduum videtur res gestas scribere’ (3. 1–2).

82

Jonathan Usher Non fames nobis ventris nostri magno constat, sed ambitio. Hos itaque, ut ait Sallustius, ‘ventri oboedientes’ animalium loco numeremus, non hominum, quosdam vero ne animalium quidem, sed mortuorum. Vivit is, qui multis usui est, vivit is, qui se utitur; qui vero latitant et torpent, sic in domo sunt, quomodo in conditivo. Horum licet in limine ipso nomen marmori inscribas, mortem suam antecesserunt. (Epistulae Morales 60. 3–4) (It is not the hunger of my belly which is the obstacle but rather ambition. Those, therefore, that Sallust called ‘obedient to the belly’, we will number amongst the animals, not amongst men, or rather not even amongst the animals but amongst the dead. He is alive who is useful to many, he is alive who is useful to himself; those who malinger and grow lazy are at home in the tomb. It would be ﬁtting to carve over their doorway the marble inscription: they have predeceased their own death.)

There, in one last phrase, is the same idea of death via loss of intellectual stimulus, but its impact is even greater than Boethius’ pronouncement in the De Consolatione. Boethius, and subsequently Petrarch in the Africa, had been concerned with an eventual death of renown after the physical death of the body. Seneca instead speaks of a death of identity before physical dissolution. Petrarch in the closing pages of the Secretum seems to have been hinting, via his unacknowledged echoes of Sallust and Seneca, at the awful prospect of just such a living death for himself, should he take Augustinus’ advice and abandon his literary ambitions. The ﬁrst, terrible death of the soul would already have happened in life, and the ‘second death’ in that case would have been the common physical fate of mortals. Thus the progression of deaths, already practised in previous works, in the Secretum reaches a terrifying and secretly programmatic climax with a ‘living death’, the life without books. It is a secret Petrarch shared with nobody but Augustinus, the alter ego of Franciscus.

5

Poets and Heroes in Petrarch’s Africa: Classical and Medieval Sources FRANCESCA GALLIGAN

THE FRONTISPIECE TO PETRARCH’S MANUSCRIPT of the works of Virgil, commissioned by Simone Martini, shows Virgil in the top right-hand corner, reclining against a tree, with a laurel crown on his head, and pen in hand. The manuscript was stolen in 1326, but was recovered by 1338, and, to celebrate its return, Petrarch commissioned the frontispiece.1 The Virgil manuscript was clearly something on which he placed great value. But, in addition to illustrating his regard for the Roman poet, the frontispiece also relates to Petrarch’s own poetic aspirations. In book 9 of the Africa, we ﬁnd a description of the future poet Petrarch, prophesied in a dream: ‘teneras inter consistere lauros/ Et viridante comas meditantem incingere ramo’ (stopping among the tender laurels, and as he meditates garlanding his hair with their green spray) (9. 218–19).2 In other words, he presents himself in a similar pose to the Virgil portrait that he commissioned. The connection is particularly striking when we note that the date of the frontispiece — around 1338 — coincides with the time that Petrarch started work on the Africa. In writing his own Latin epic, Petrarch pictured himself as a Virgil ﬁgure, and, in so doing, he sets out his classical allegiance, and a standard by which he is to be judged. Virgil is not the only classical epic poet that Petrarch has ﬁrmly in mind as he writes his poem, as two others, Homer and Ennius, appear as characters within the narrative. Petrarch wrote a letter to Homer in which he shows his admiration for the Greek poet, and sees himself as the last of a line stemming from Homer: ‘tu, primi semper certus loci, cum ego, ultimus hominum’ (you are always sure of your ﬁrst place, while I am the 1

Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS. S.P. 10/27, fo.1v. See J. B. Trapp, The Iconography of Petrarch in the Age of Humanism (Florence, 1996); C. De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (London, 1994), pp. 232–4. 2 Africa, ed. N. Festa (Florence, 1926; repr. Florence, 1998). Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 85–93. © The British Academy 2007.

86

Francesca Galligan

last of men) (Familiares 24. 12).3 Ennius’ Latin epic, the Annales, on the Second Punic War, serves as an important precedent for Petrarch, and Petrarch fashions himself as an ‘Ennius alter’ (another Ennius) (2. 443) in the Africa. Both Ennius and Homer were lost to Petrarch as direct sources: Petrarch could not read Homer’s Greek, and the Annales had long since become fragmentary.4 To compensate for the lack of their texts, Petrarch includes the two poets as characters within his narrative. The Africa models itself on classical epic in a number of ways: it is a long narrative poem in hexameters, its language is Latin, and it is divided into separate books. There are clear classical sources for much of its subject matter: overall, its account of the Second Punic War follows Livy; then within that general frame, books 1 and 2, which recount a dream Scipio has whilst on the coast of Africa, are modelled on Cicero’s socalled Dream of Scipio, in De Re Publica, book 6; and key episodes, such as the relationship between Massinissa and Sophonisba in Africa 5 (recalling the relationship between Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid 4), show a classical inspiration. But within this classical outline, the presence of the poets Ennius and Homer reveals a more complex process of literary inﬂuence that involves post-classical literature. The Africa is concerned also with the writing of poetry. Petrarch allows greater scope to his own voice as poet at the beginning and end of the poem than is usual for a classical epic. The poem opens with the words ‘Et michi’ (To me too), and while it is of course common for an epic to start with the ﬁrst person (for instance, the Aeneid’s ‘cano’ (I sing), the opening of Homer’s Odyssey, which Petrarch knew in Latin from Horace — ‘dic mihi Musa’ (Tell me Muse) — Petrarch’s ‘Et’ seems more emphatic, and perhaps slightly more desperate, as he sees himself in the last of a long line of epic poets. And the space that he gives to his own authorial voice at the beginning and end of the poem, longer than any in his main epic models, ensures that the presence of the poet and the theme of poetry are ﬁrmly in the mind of the reader. In addition to this, in Africa 9, the ﬁnal book, which narrates the culmination of the war, we ﬁnd that, alongside a brief description of Scipio’s military triumph, the book is almost entirely given over to a discussion of poetry between Scipio and Ennius, the latter of whom, we are told, has been at Scipio’s side throughout. And, as well as the lengthy discussion of poetry, 3

Le Familiari, ed. V. Rossi and U. Bosco, 4 vols (Florence, 1933–42). See P. De Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 2 vols (Paris, 1907); Otto Skutsch, The Annals of Q. Ennius (Oxford, 1985). 4

POETS AND HEROES IN PETRARCH’S AFRICA

87

and the extended voice of the author at start and ﬁnish, we have three poet characters: Ennius, Homer, and Petrarch. Although Petrarch and Homer appear only in dreams, all three inﬂuence the course of the poem. What I want to suggest here is that Petrarch gives the theme of poetry such presence because of the inﬂuence exerted on him by medieval epic. In particular, Petrarch’s use of poet characters and the link he forges between poet and hero parallel the poet characters in Dante’s Divina Commedia. Dante, rejecting the classical warrior hero represented by Ulysses, posits a contemporary poet (that is, himself) as the hero of his Commedia, as a solution to the challenge of creating an epic hero suited to a medieval Christian audience. The Africa, I suggest, parallels this development by also including poets as characters and by connecting the roles of poet and hero. There is a common perception, borne out by a general lack of studies on this topic, that Petrarch had a low opinion of the Middle Ages, and was unlikely to have been inﬂuenced by writers of the period.5 Petrarch talks about Dante in a way that does suggest difference: he mentions Dante’s style as being ‘in suo genere optimus’ (best in its language) (Familiares 21. 15), and says ‘uir uulgari eloquio clarissimus fuit’ (in the vernacular he was a man of great fame) (Rerum Memorandarum Libri).6 But Petrarch’s assertion that he did not read Dante until the 1350s is generally accepted as false, and some more recent critics have produced excellent studies on medieval inﬂuences on the Africa.7 Above all it is the text itself — the similar handling of poets and heroes — that suggests the inﬂuence of the one on the other. First of all, Petrarch presents himself as a character within the narrative, as does Dante; secondly, he links himself to two other epic poet characters, Homer and Ennius, thereby echoing the Dante, Virgil, and Statius grouping of the Commedia; thirdly, he joins himself to his hero Scipio by suggesting their joint triumph, following Dante’s joining of poet and hero in the character of himself.

5

T. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages” ’, Speculum, XVII (1942), 226–42; F. De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan, 1940), p. 246; J. Everson, The Italian Romance Epic in the Age of Humanism (Oxford, 2001), p. 97. 6 Francisci Petrarchae Florentini [. . .] Opera [. . .] (Basel, 1581), p. 427. 7 F. Rico, ‘Petrarca e il medioevo’, La cultura letteraria italiana e l’identità europea (Rome, 2001), pp. 39–50; E. Fenzi, ‘Di alcuni palazzi, cupole e planetari nella letteratura classica e medioevale e nell’Africa del Petrarca’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, CLIII (1976), 186–229; G. Velli, ‘Petrarca, Boccaccio e la grande poesia latina’, Retorica e poetica tra i secoli XII e XIV, ed. C. Leonardi, E. Menestò (Perugia, 1988), pp. 239–56.

88

Francesca Galligan

The relationship between Petrarch, Ennius, and Homer in the Africa echoes that of Dante, Statius, and Virgil in the Commedia. In addition to the obvious sense in which in each case they form a trio of epic poets (classical and medieval) who appear alongside each other, suggesting a continuity between an archaic poet, his follower and the modern poet, there are also speciﬁc echoes. In Africa 9, before recounting the dream in which Homer (and later Petrarch) appeared to him, Ennius expresses admiration for Homer, ‘Milibus ex tantis unus michi summus Homerus/ Unus habet quod suspiciam, quod mirer amemque’ (Out of so many thousands, Homer is the supreme poet for me, the one who has what I look up to, what I admire and love) (Africa 9. 144–5), echoing the words of Dante’s Statius to Virgil: Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville, che mi scaldar, de la divina ﬁamma onde sono allumati piú di mille [. . .]. (Purgatorio 21. 94–6) (The sparks that kindled the ﬁre in me were from the divine ﬂame from which more than a thousand have been lit [. . .].)8

There may even be a verbal echo here between ‘mille’ and ‘Milibus’. Ennius says that he has always had Homer with him, in his thoughts: ‘Presentemque animo ﬁcta sub ymagine feci./ Hoc sine nulla dies abiit, nox nulla sine illo’ (I had him with me in my thoughts, under a made-up image. No day or night went by without him) (Africa 9. 151–2). Ennius represents Petrarch the author’s own admiration for Homer, and for classical poets in general, just as Dante’s Statius stands in some sense for Dante’s enthusiasm for Virgil. Just as Statius’ fondness for Virgil as auctoritas leads to his enthusiasm for the character Virgil in the Commedia, so Petrarch transposes the idea of Homer as auctoritas in Ennius’ work into emotional admiration in Ennius the character. In both cases the sense of authority is central: Dante was able to use Virgil’s text directly, so could claim him as an outright inﬂuence; Petrarch, without access to Homer, creates the admiring ﬁgure of Ennius as the go-between, the author who knows Greek, who can bring him closer to Homer. The issue of language is one that Petrarch raises in the Africa, with Ennius referring speciﬁcally to Homer talking Greek — ‘Graioque hec more profatur’ (he says these things in the Greek manner) (9. 172). Ennius recounts his

8

Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. N. Sapegno (Florence, 1955; repr. 1999). All translations of the Commedia are from J. D. Sinclair, The ‘Divine Comedy’ of Dante Alighieri (Oxford, 1939; repr. 1961).

POETS AND HEROES IN PETRARCH’S AFRICA

89

attempts within the dream to embrace the elder poet’s feet: ‘Procubui voluique pedes contingere pronus:/ Umbra fuit nudeque heserunt oscula terre’ (I lay ﬂat out and wanted to touch his feet: he was a shade, and my kisses clung to bare earth) (9. 178–9), echoing Statius’ reaction to Virgil in Purgatorio, ‘Già s’inchinava ad abbracciar li piedi/ al mio dottor’ (Already he was bending to embrace my teacher’s feet) (Purgatorio 21. 130–1), and Dante’s encounter between himself and Casella: Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto! Tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi, e tante mi tornai con esse al petto. (Purgatorio 2. 79–81) (O empty shades, except in semblance! Three times I clasped my hands behind him and as often brought them back to my breast.)

In turn these also echo Aeneas’ attempts to embrace the shades of both Creusa and Anchises: ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, par leuibus uentis uolucrique simillima somno. (Aeneid 2. 792–4)9 (Three times I tried there to embrace her; three times the likeness, grasped in vain, ﬂed my hands, like light breezes or winged sleep.) ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago. (Aeneid 6. 700–1) (Three times I tried to embrace him; three times the likeness, grasped in vain, ﬂed my hands.)

Petrarch and Dante here both place poets in the roles traditionally occupied by epic heroes. With his use of Virgil and Statius as characters, Dante had already transformed the classical epic appearance of the dead hero in a dream (Hector in Aeneid 2. 270 ff.; Anchises in Aeneid 5. 722 ff.) into the ﬁgure of the dead poet appearing to another living or dead poet, swapping heroes for poets, thus Dante appears to be behind Petrarch’s inspiration here. Traces of Dante’s text continue throughout the encounter, with Ennius addressing Homer as ‘Dux o carissime’ (Dearest leader) (9. 217): Dante calls Virgil ‘duca’ (leader) in Inferno 2. 140, and, from then on, duca and poeta become his standard address for him. 9

Aeneid, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969).

90

Francesca Galligan

In both texts, the older poet functions as guide, by providing a literary model. The latter is suggested by the way in which Ennius and Homer echo each other’s words in this dream. For example, Ennius’ ‘nisi fallor’ (unless I am mistaken) (9. 220) is picked up in the next line by Homer’s ‘Non falleris’ (You are not mistaken) (221), and the former’s ‘Aspexi iuvenem’ (I saw a young man) (217) is echoed in the same metrical position by Homer’s ‘Agnosco iuvenem’ (I recognise a young man) (222). And when Ennius says of Petrarch ‘Iam michi carus erat’ (He was already dear to me) (272), he is echoing the words of both Scipio’s father in book 2 — ‘multo michi carior ille est’ (he is much dearer to me) (2. 449) — and, more recently, Homer’s ‘Iste [. . .]/ Carior’ (9. 246–7). So how, then, does Petrarch the poet ﬁt into this poetic grouping, and how does he echo the Dante character of the Commedia? He is not on a journey; he has only some eighty lines dedicated to him in the text; and he appears at second hand, in the prophetic dreams. In the ﬁrst of these dreams (2. 441 ff.) he is nameless, and the only signiﬁcant information that we are given is that he will follow Ennius as poet: ‘veniat velut Ennius alter’ (he comes as another Ennius) (2. 443). Ennius and Homer are crucial here: not only do they form the poetic trio that echoes the poetic grouping of the Commedia, but they also enable Petrarch to link the ﬁgures of poet and hero, as Dante does through having a poet as his hero. Petrarch, with his historical (and ancient) subject is less at liberty than Dante to include himself as a character alongside his chosen hero for obvious chronological reasons, and this is why he connects himself with Ennius in particular. By creating a (mostly ﬁctitious) relationship between Ennius and Scipio, and suggesting an initial connection between poetcharacter and hero, he forges his own link with his hero. I want now to illustrate the relationship between Scipio and Ennius (i.e. hero and poet) that preﬁgures, and leads to, that of Scipio and Petrarch. The friendship that Petrarch portrays between Scipio and Ennius appears to have no basis in history, although Petrarch himself was perhaps unaware of this. Livy, his main historical source, certainly makes no mention of Ennius in his history of Scipio, though Petrarch would have found the idea of Ennius’ dream-vision of Homer in Cicero’s De Re Publica 6. 10, otherwise known as the Somnium Scipionis.10 Ennius’ interaction with Scipio within the literal level of the narrative illuminates a more general theory of poetry that Petrarch applies to his own relation-

10

See also Tusculanae Disputationes 1. 2, 3.

POETS AND HEROES IN PETRARCH’S AFRICA

91

ship with his hero: namely, that of a close circular relationship between poet and hero. The closeness between Ennius and Scipio is reﬂected by Scipio’s description of the poet’s words as ‘solamen dulce’ (sweet solace) (9. 14), and he encourages him to speak when he falls silent: ‘Ergo age!’ (Go on!) (9. 127). This suggests a close bond between the two, created by poetry. Scipio considers Ennius to be the greatest of poets, in spite of the poet’s own doubts, and the description of his muses as ‘rudes’ (unpolished) (2. 445). This praise makes Scipio’s later interest in Petrarch the more poignant: Scipio will abandon his beloved Ennius (whom he considers to be greater than Homer) for another even greater poet. Scipio’s wish to know about poetry again suggests an empathy with Ennius, and he acknowledges the connection between poets and heroes in their sharing of the laurel. And it is the laurel that suggests their closest connection. Scipio and Ennius are joined in triumph, ﬁrst in Homer’s description in the dream of ‘Capitolia vestra’ (your Capitoline) (9. 238), where ‘vestra’ must refer to them both, then in Petrarch’s account of the actual event, when Ennius walks at Scipio’s side: Ipse coronatus lauro frondente per urbem Letus iit totam Tarpeia rupe reversus. Ennius ad dextram victoris, tempora fronde Substringens parili, studiorum almeque Poesis Egit honoratum sub tanto auctore triumphum. Post alii atque alii studio certante secuti. Ipse ego ter centum labentibus ordine lustris Dumosam tentare viam et vestigia rara Viribus imparibus ﬁdens utcumque peregi, Frondibus atque loco simul et cognomine claro Heroum veterum tantos imitatus honores, Irrita ne Grai ﬁerent presagia vatis. (Africa 9. 398–409) (Scipio, crowned with the leafy laurel, went in joy through the whole city, having returned from the Tarpeian rock. Ennius at the right hand of the victor, binding his temples with the same foliage, fulfilled an honoured triumph of learning and nourishing Poetry under such a great authority. After these, many others have followed in eager rivalry. I myself, when ﬁfteen hundred years had slipped past as allotted, strove as best I could to take on the thorny path and scattered traces, trusting in an unequal strength, and with like crown, place, and famous name, I have imitated such great honours of ancient heroes, lest the prophecies of the Greek poet prove empty.)

Ennius’ ‘fronde’ picks up the ‘lauro frondente’ with which Scipio is ‘coronatus’ (398). Thus poet is joined to hero in a shared triumph. But the poet

92

Francesca Galligan

in question is not the author of the Africa, and thereby is less immediately a parallel of Dante’s union of the poet and the hero. However, Petrarch uses the occasion of the triumph to link himself to Scipio. The passage begins with ‘Ipse coronatus’ (9. 398), with reference to Scipio. Ennius is then named in the same position two lines later, similarly garlanded, as quoted above. Then after four more lines, Petrarch appears at the start of a line as ‘Ipse ego’ (9. 404), which balances the ‘Ipse coronatus’ used of Scipio. The shared ‘Ipse’ links them (and indeed the emphatic ‘ego’ is required to clarify the different subject), and ‘ter’, although part of a numerical description, is at ﬁrst sight a further link between Scipio, Ennius, and Petrarch, who is the third in this collective triumph.11 The ‘frondente’ and ‘fronde’ used to describe the coronations of Scipio and Ennius become ‘frondibus’ (407) for Petrarch’s own triumph, and ‘loco simul’ (407) emphasises the connection. The ‘cognomine claro’ (407) that Petrarch will gain echoes ‘cognomine solo’ (391) used of Scipio a few lines earlier. Scipio’s reaction to Ennius’ account of Petrarch — ‘Seu sunt, seu talia ﬁngis,/ Dulcia sunt’ (whether true or made-up, these things you say are sweet) (9. 302–3) — echoes his words on Ennius’ own poetry as ‘dulce’ (9. 14). He shows fondness for the future Petrarch, much as his relationship with Ennius is shown to be an emotional bond — ‘Complector’ (I embrace [him]) (9. 305), and ‘Diligo, quisquis erit; si nullus, diligo nullum’ (I delight in him, whoever he will be; if no-one, I delight in nothing) (9. 307); he is the ﬁrst to call him ‘poetam’ (9. 304); and both Petrarch and Scipio are described in the poem as ‘iuvenis’ (young man) (9. 24, 304). Petrarch presents the triumph of poet and hero, in place of Dante’s poet-hero. His historical subject requires him to separate the two, but in bringing poet and hero together ﬁrst through the relationship between Scipio and Ennius, and then through that of himself and Scipio, Petrarch reveals an allegiance with Dante’s reformulation of the hero as poet. I conclude by considering Petrarch’s reasons for choosing Ennius and Homer as characters over his beloved Virgil. It is partly for the reasons I mentioned at the start: that Homer represents the greatest of Greek poets (think of the place that Dante gives him as ‘poeta sovrano’ (Inferno 4. 88)), and Ennius, in addition to the relevance of his Annales for Petrarch’s enterprise, is a poet who introduces epic to the Latin language, starting a line of poets of whom Petrarch considers himself to be the last. Petrarch 11

Compare Inferno 4, where Dante joins the ‘bella scola’ — ‘io fui sesto tra cotanto senno’ (I was the sixth among those high intelligences) (Inferno 4. 102).

POETS AND HEROES IN PETRARCH’S AFRICA

93

can set himself up as inheritor to and rival of Ennius and Homer, as their texts were at the time inaccessible to almost all. Taking on Virgil would have been a much harder task, and we know from the Familiares the care Petrarch took to keep obvious Virgilian reminiscences to a minimum.12 Choosing to have Virgil as a character would have made the parallel between the Africa and the Commedia, in terms of its poet characters, unmistakable. And, while we can see that the Commedia serves as an important precedent for the Africa, it is a precedent that Petrarch, with his clear classical aspiration, was perhaps hoping we would not notice.

12 See Familiares 23. 19, and M. L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford, 1995), pp. 29–31.

6

Petrarch Reading Dante: The Ascent of Mont Ventoux (Familiares 4. 1) ENRICO SANTANGELO

PETRARCH’S LIFE AND WORKS are the subject of appropriations, disparate interpretations, and translations throughout the centuries, as the other chapters in this volume clearly show. Petrarch’s attitude towards the literature he had at his disposal was that of the reader who often used and rewrote the texts of other authors through a complex technique of ars imitandi, ultimately resulting in the aemulatio of his models. This contributed to a new poetics, and therefore it too may be considered the result of appropriations, various interpretations of the sources, and even translations of earlier texts. Petrarch is, in this case, the active agent, not the subject, of such a process of transformation. I have chosen to limit the focus of this chapter to a particularly signiﬁcant text, the celebrated Ventoux letter (Familiares 4. 1), and attempt a reading of it in the light of what seems a new subtext, Dante’s Purgatorio, making the letter a remarkable example of appropriation and transformation of classical and medieval traditions together with the sundry intertextual allusions to other texts. 1 1

All translations of the passages from the Ventoux letter are mine, except paragraphs 22–4, for which I used J. H. Robinson’s translation (New York, 1898), with a few slight changes and updates. In what follows Dante’s works are quoted from the following editions: La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. G. Petrocchi (Milan, 1966–7); The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. C. S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ, 1973). Petrarch’s Latin works are quoted from the following editions: Petrarca, De Otio Religioso, ed. G. Rotondi (Città del Vaticano, 1958); the Secretum (De secreto conﬂictu curarum mearum) is quoted from F. Petrarca, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara, E. Bianchi (Milan–Naples, 1955), pp. 200–14; the Familiares from Petrarca, Opere: Canzoniere, Trionﬁ, Familiarium Rerum Libri, trans. E. Bianchi (Florence, 1992); the Metricae (Epystule metrice) from the Poesie minori del Petrarca, ed. D. Rossetti, 3 vols (Milan, 1829–34); the Seniles from Francisci Petrarchae opera quae extant omnia (Basle, 1581), II, Epistularum de rebus senilibus, libri XVI. As for the vernacular works, I quote from F. Petrarca, Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 95–111. © The British Academy 2007.

96

Enrico Santangelo

Scholars have emphasised throughout the ages different aspects of this multireferentiality, and given exhaustive explanations of that real and symbolic ascent, but what really matters as far as this contribution is concerned, is what was not said, or rather, what has never been explicitly stated about Petrarch’s clear knowledge of Dante at the time of the writing of the Ventoux letter.2 An appropriate introduction to such an important occasion as the seventh centenary of Petrarch’s birth (and 630 years after his death), for someone who was too young for the celebrations of the sixth centenary of Petrarch’s death (1974), is an episode that occurred 100 years ago, at the Petrarch Conference held in Arezzo in July 1904, 600 years after Petrarch’s birth. An enthusiastic young scholar named Lorenzo Mascetta-Caracci put forward an excerpt of his systematic lexicography on Dantean echoes and syntagmata present in Petrarch’s Latin and vernacular works. This aroused controversy and a generally hostile attitude from scholars towards their impassioned colleague. Mascetta’s ultimate purpose was, according to the ‘political’ views of the time, to demonstrate Petrarch’s lack of originality and independent style, in other words, his early propensity for plagiarism. Dante was thus seen as the victim of this improper attitude, a fertile literary quarry to plunder with no acknowledgement. Nowadays,

Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere), ed. G. Contini (Turin, 1964) and F. Petrarca, Triumphi, ed. F. Neri (Milan–Naples, 1951). 2 Scholars have focused their attention mainly on generic echoes of Dante’s presence in the works of Petrarch or explored the network of Dantean borrowings easily detectable in Petrarch’s vernacular works. See, for example, U. Foscolo’s, ‘A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch’, in his Essays on Petrarch (London, 1821), pp. 163–208. The ﬁrst systematic list, a genuine lexicography, of echoes and syntagmata of Dante in Petrarch’s Latin and vernacular works is, to my knowledge, L. Mascetta-Caracci, Dante e il dedalo petrarchesco: con uno studio sulle malattie di F. P. (Lanciano, 1910), pp. 151–236. This bulky volume is to be considered as a precious quarry of Dantean syntagmata and themes within Petrarch’s vernacular and Latin works, as suggested by Henri Cochin at the end of his negative review: ‘Une belle lexicographie [. . .] qui s’offre aux jeunes érudits d’Italie et d’autres pays que tente un travail minutieux et utile’ (Romania, XXXIX (1910), 604). For an inventory of Dantean syntagmata only in the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, see P. Trovato, Dante in Petrarca: per un inventario dei dantismi nei ‘Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta’ (Florence, 1979). The presence of Dante in the vernacular works of Petrarch is partially dealt with in M. Santagata, Per moderne carte: la biblioteca volgare di Petrarca (Bologna, 1990), and in his edition and commentary of the Canzoniere (Milan, 1996). A speciﬁc and quite exhaustive bibliography on the presence of Dante’s vernacular and Latin works in Petrarch’s Latin prose, in the Metricae and in the Bucolicum Carmen, is in M. Baglio, ‘Presenze dantesche nel Petrarca latino’, Studi sul Petrarca, n.s. IX (1992), 77–136. I am indebted for these references to my close friend, Dr Paola Capra. Recently, an interesting interpretation of Petrarch’s rewriting of Dante has been put forward in M. Pastore Stocchi, ‘Petrarca e Dante’, Rivista di Studi Danteschi, IV (2004), 184–204: I owe this reference to the courtesy of Professor Enrico Malato.

PETRARCH READING DANTE

97

we probably share all the reservations expressed at the time by Henri Cochin in his review of Mascetta’s book, and would add that the title itself, Dante e il Dedalo petrarchesco: con uno studio sulle malattie di Francesco Petrarca, indeed looks a little naive, and may reveal the biased viewpoint of the scholar. However, ‘La véhémence un peu inquiétante du jeune professeur Abruzzais’,3 placed in the context of the early twentiethcentury debate about Petrarch’s attitude towards Dante, has to be taken here as a useful starting point for throwing light on the presence of Dante even within utterly ‘Petrarchan’ works (in terms of topics, style, and modernity of the narrative ‘I’). The Ventoux letter certainly belongs in this league. Before crossing the threshold of textual analysis, I must start with a state-of-the-question outline of critical views on the Ventoux letter as a whole. In brief, ﬁve general interpretations were put forward throughout the twentieth century, as summarised by Georges Güntert in his recent contribution.4 Together with the old-fashioned reading of Petrarch climbing up Mont Ventoux only to satisfy his ‘cupiditas videndi’, like a medieval mountaineer, that ascent may also be read as: a Franciscan ‘itinerarium mentis in Deum’; or as the need to achieve an Augustinian ‘cognitio sui’; or else as the crisis of allegory, that is a ‘mise en abîme’ of the allegorical device unveiling itself; or, ﬁnally, as a Jungian ‘participation mystique’ in the universe — or the abyss—of the unconscious.5 These interpretations may be considered 3

The review appeared in Romania, XXXIX (1910), 597–604. The quotation is on p. 597. ‘Petrarca e il Ventoso: dalla Cupiditas videndi al desiderio scribendi. L’epistola familiare IV, 1 come autoritratto letterario-morale’, in Petrarca e i suoi lettori, ed. V. Caratozzolo and G. Güntert (Ravenna, 2000), pp. 143–56. 5 A complete critical bibliography on this letter, especially for the last two interpretations, may be found in F. Petrarca, La lettera del Ventoso, ed. M. Formica and M. Jakob (Verbania, 1996). And see note 4 above. Speciﬁc reference to the disparate interpretations of the Ventoux letter is made throughout these footnotes. A Jungian perspective was taken by Jean Gebser in reading this letter in terms of appropriation/individuation: see J. Gebser, The Ever-present Origin (Athens, OH, 1984), and by Formica and Jakob (F. Petrarca, La lettera del Ventoso) in explaining the outcome of the journey up Mont Ventoux in terms of participation mystique and experience of the sublime. Jung himself, although not directly quoting Petrarch, provides an example of participation mystique and process of individuation drawn from Augustine’s Confessions, actually the most prominent intertext in Petrarch’s Secretum and the Ventoux letter. In Jung’s words, the participation mystique is described as ‘The moment when a mythological situation reappears [. . .] always characterised by a peculiar emotional intensity; it is as though chords in us were struck that had never resounded before, or as though forces whose existence we never suspected were unloosed’, and the process is exempliﬁed through the following reference: ‘St. Augustine says: “And higher still we soared, thinking in our minds and speaking and marvelling at Your works: and so we came to our own souls, and went beyond them to reach at last that region of richness unending, where You feed Israel forever with the food of truth” (Confessions, trans. Sheed, 4

98

Enrico Santangelo

equally valid, and taken all together, or separately, to explain Petrarch’s real, symbolic, autobiographical, and metaliterary ascent. Furthermore, they are all supported by literary sources which may be traced in what remains of Petrarch’s library. Nevertheless, the passage from unconsciousness to self-consciousness, and from there to the unconscious again, that is, in Petrarch’s words, ‘a corporeis ad incorporea’ (12) and ‘a locis ad tempora’ (19), is unexpectedly intertwined with borrowings from several cantos of the Commedia: thus to add to the literary analysis of this renowned letter a sixth ‘Dantean’ reading is suggested here. Let us start with chronology. The sixth decade of the fourteenth century emerges as a very productive period in the life of Petrarch. He reads (or rereads, thanks to Boccaccio’s gift) Dante’s Commedia, composes Familiares 4. 1 (1351–3) and 21. 15 (1359), devises the structure of the Triumphi, enlarges the three collections of letters (Familiares, Seniles, and the Metrice), and completes the Secretum. Furthermore, he is studying Livy and Pomponius Mela’s De Chorographia, a very important work for his geographical interests in this period.6 In the manuscript of Pomponius we can read a marginal note in which Petrarch casts some doubt upon Mela’s opinion concerning the height of Mount Haemus. He turns instead to a different tradition drawn from Livy, making the same remark that will be included in Familiares 4. 1. Even more signiﬁcantly for my discussion, the same manuscript of Pomponius is marked by another marginal note directly refuting Dante’s opinion about the exact location of Typhoeus’ cave (Paradiso 8. 70). We cannot be sure about the precise date when these two notes were inserted by the author as a commentary, but the latter constitutes further evidence of the presence of Dante in Petrarch’s readings (and writings) throughout those ten years. Dante’s ascent of the mountain of Purgatory starts in Purgatorio, cantos 4 and 5. The calla where ‘convien ch’om voli’ (4. 27) leads Dante and Virgil to the top of the primo balzo. After an initial feeling of astonishment at the sight of such an outstanding height, Dante, stimulated by Virgil’s summons, eventually reaches the top, and joins his master: p. 158)’; see C. G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler, 20 vols (London, 1953–79), XV (1966), 81, 95. 6 The date and primary sources of the Ventoux letter were presented by G. Billanovich, ‘Petrarca e il Ventoso’, Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, IX (1966), 389–401. At that time Petrarch had already learnt Livy’s opinions on Greek geography by carrying out his collatio on the three decades of Livy by the years 1328–9. Petrarch’s philological work is visible in the manuscript now in the British Library (Harleian 2493): see G. Billanovich, ‘Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XIV (1951), 137–208. For the De Chorographia and the three decades of Livy, see also L. Reynolds and N. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (Oxford, 1968), pp. 129–30.

PETRARCH READING DANTE

99

Noi salavam per entro’l sasso rotto, e d’ogne lato ne stringea lo stremo, e piedi e man volea il suol di sotto [. . .] Ed elli a me: ‘Nessun tuo passo caggia; pur su al monte dietro a me acquista [. . .] inﬁn quivi ti tira’ [. . .]. Lo sommo er’ alto che vincea la vista, e la costa superba piú assai [. . .]. (Purg. 4. 31–3, 37–8, 46, 40–1)

In Familiares 4. 1, Petrarch similarly recalls the hard enterprise of climbing a mountain, Mont Ventoux: Altissimum regionis huius montem, quem non immerito Ventosum vocant, hodierno die, sola videndi insignem loci altitudinem cupiditate ductus, ascendi. [. . .] mons autem hic late undique conspectus, fere semper in oculis est. [. . .] Hodie tandem cum singulis famulis montem ascendimus non sine multa difﬁcultate: est enim prerupta et pene inaccessibilis saxose telluris moles; sed bene a poeta dictum est: ‘labor omnia vincit/ improbus’. (Fam. 4. 1, 6) (Today I climbed that very high mountain of this region which is aptly called ‘Ventosus’, for the simple reason that I wanted to see the great height of the place [. . .] this mountain, which is visible in fact from all sides, was ever before my eyes. [. . .] Finally we made the ascent this morning with two servants only, and a most difﬁcult task it was: the mountain is in fact a very steep and almost inaccessible mass of rocks; but the poet rightly said: ‘persistent work conquers all’.)

In the incipit of the two climbs one may easily note a certain number of syntagmata undoubtedly belonging to the lexis of mountain-climbs as narrated in classical and medieval literature: a mountain is usually ‘high’ or ‘very high’; its top is not visible from beneath or otherwise stands out due to its imposing height; the mountain rocks are broken and difﬁcult to climb. Nevertheless, whilst approaching the mountain, one may also notice a set of generic allusions and similarities to Dante’s ascent of mount Purgatory: the mountain is an ‘altissimum montem’ (Dante’s is a ‘monte [. . .] alto’); ‘fere semper in oculis est’ (Dante’s mountain, by contrast, ‘vincea la vista’); ﬁnally Petrarch’s ‘prerupta [. . .] saxose telluris moles’ may recall Dante’s ‘sasso rotto’ and, more generically, Petrarch’s ‘non sine multa difﬁcultate [. . .] pene inaccessibilis [. . .]’ may echo Dante’s ‘e d’ogne lato [. . .]/ e piedi e man [. . .]’. Yet this way of alluding without acknowledging his sources — Dante in the ﬁrst place — is a signiﬁcant characteristic of the multireferential network of borrowings and allusions featured in Petrarch’s Latin works.7 Here Petrarch rather disguises his Dantean 7

As argued in my doctoral thesis, E. Santangelo, ‘Reading and Writing, Writing through Reading: A Study on “Imitatio” in Petrarch and Boccaccio’, Ph.D. thesis (University of London,

100

Enrico Santangelo

borrowings in a classical garb: the ﬁnal remark is a quotation from Virgil’s Georgics. In fact, having cited, and immediately set aside, the autobiographical reasons for that climb (‘sola videndi insignem loci altitudinem cupiditate ductus’) he hurries to quote the two classical authors who, to some extent, effectively inspired him: Livy and Pomponius Mela. In discussing the choice of a suitable companion for the climb — ‘Sed de sotio cogitanti [. . .] vix amicorum quisquam omni ex parte ydoneus videbatur: adeo etiam inter caros exactissima illa voluntatum omnium morumque concordia rara est’ (3) (When I came to look about for a companion I found [. . .] that hardly one among my friends seemed entirely suitable, so rare is the agreement on all decisions and the harmony of personal characteristics, even among those who are dearest to us) — he also had in mind Cicero’s De Amicitia (6. 20).8 Having opted for the company of his brother Gherardo, and determined to carry out the difﬁcult endeavour, he starts climbing, comforted by Virgil’s statement (‘labor omnia vincit/ improbus’). Everything is ready, the weather and the vigour of the mountaineers are ﬁne. On their way up the slopes, the two brothers come across an old shepherd, who tries to deter them from starting their climb. In the end, he is unsuccessful: they are determined to go on and the writer, drawing on Ovid (Amores 3. 4, 31), states: Hec illo vociferante, nobis, ut sunt animi iuvenum monitoribus increduli, crescebat ex prohibitione cupiditas. Itaque senex, ubi animadvertit se nequicquam niti, aliquantulum progressus inter rupes, arduum callem digito nobis ostendit, multa monens multaque iam digressis a tergo ingeminans. (8) (His admonitions increased rather than diminished our desire to proceed, since youth is doubtful about warnings. So the old man, ﬁnding that his efforts were

2006), chs 2, 3, 4, and see note 10 below. In the lines quoted above we may also note that allusions and similarities to Dante’s vocabulary, made through a technique of transformation, fragmentation, and dispersion of Dante’s syntagmata into new Latin works merging classical and medieval traditions, are usual in Petrarch. For a set of examples of this process and some convincing critical conclusions on Petrarch’s technique, see M. Baglio, ‘Presenze dantesche nel Petrarca latino’, 77–136; G. Velli, ‘Il Dante di Francesco Petrarca’, Studi sul Petrarca, II (1985), 185–200; and M. Feo, ‘Petrarca, Francesco’, in Enciclopedia Dantesca, 6 vols (Rome, 1970–8), IV (1973), 450–58. In particular, the clear link between some of Petrarch’s Metricae and Dante’s letter to the Italian cardinals (Ep. 11. 10) was explained by Velli in the light of a technique of fragmentation and recomposition of sources which is peculiar to Petrarch: ‘[. . .] lo stesso nucleo formale classico può, nel fruitore Petrarca, essere sentito scomposto nelle sue molteplici dimensioni (lessico, sintassi, strutturazione metrica [. . .]) e queste, isolate o in combinazione, essere assunte quali meccanismi generativi del nuovo’ (p. 187). 8 All quotations from the classics are drawn from the ‘Loeb Classical Library’ collection.

PETRARCH READING DANTE

101

in vain, went a little way with us, and pointed out a rough path among the rocks, uttering many admonitions, which he continued to send even after we had left him behind.)

The ﬁgure of the old shepherd, unexpectedly met ‘inter convexa montis’ (in one of the mountain vales), owes something to the hieratic apparition of Cato in Purg. 1. Obviously, this ‘Cato’ does not retain the same meaning and the same function as Dante’s Cato, but in this severe ‘senex multa monens’ who ‘arduum callem digito ostendit’ (where again, the Dantism calle, translated into Latin, is worth noting) we can recognise that ‘veglio solo’ of Purg. 1. 31: ‘vidi presso di me un veglio solo,/ degno di tanta reverenza in vista’. Moreover, after an initial rough reception of the two pilgrims (‘Chi siete voi che contro al cieco ﬁume/ fuggita avete la pregione etterna?/ [. . .] chi v’ha guidati, o che vi fu lucerna?’), Dante’s Cato similarly shows them the path to take (‘Poscia non sia di qua vostra reddita;/ lo sol vi mosterrà, che surge omai,/ prendere il monte a piú lieve salita’, Purg. 1. 106–8); and, at the end of canto 2, harshly interrupts the meeting with Casella shouting, like Petrarch’s unheeded shepherd (‘Hec illo vociferante [. . .] multa monens [. . .]’), a severe admonition: ‘[. . .] ed ecco il veglio onesto/ gridando: “Che è ciò spiriti lenti?/ qual negligenza, quale stare è questo?”’ (Purg. 2. 119–21).9 Despite a multireferentiality in which, consistently with Petrarch’s technique of ars imitandi, certain sources seem to be hidden behind obvious classical references,10 several Dantean patterns and syntagmata constantly appear in this Familiaris. In particular, some cantos of the Purgatorio seem to recur (cantos 4, 1, 2 in sequence). The weary-footed Francesco needs to be encouraged, because he is burdened by the human

9 The memory of Dante’s Cato and the ascent of Mont Ventoux as a conquest of the self through Augustinian guidance, overshadowing the hieratic but sterile position of Cato, was brought to light by Guglielminetti, who, although deducing the link, nonetheless steers clear of a direct comparison between the old shepherd and Dante’s Cato. His words in this sense are revealing, ‘Ai severi e rigorosi pensieri suscitati dalla memoria di Catone si sostituisce la ﬂebile e pia compassione provocata da Agostino, nella ricerca, da parte di Petrarca, della forma d’animo più afﬁne alla sua’: see M. Guglielminetti, Memoria e scrittura: l’autobiograﬁa da Dante a Cellini (Turin, 1977), p. 104; pp. 101–10 of the same chapter exhaustively explore the opposite patterns represented by Dante/Cato and Augustine in Petrarch’s literary autobiography, for which the Ventoux letter is certainly a crucial turning point. 10 Petrarch’s ‘multireferentiality’ is explained and exempliﬁed in my doctoral thesis through the use of Jungian terminology applied to Petrarch’s ars imitandi: see Santangelo, ‘Reading and Writing, Writing through Reading’, chs 1 and 2. In the signiﬁcant case of Fam. 21. 15, discussed in its complex network of Dantean borrowings in ch. 3, the reluctance to mention Dante directly is considered in the thesis as part of Petrarch’s ‘autonomous complex’ (Introduction, p. 34).

102

Enrico Santangelo

condition. By contrast, his brother Gherardo, who is free from the tasks of an ordinary life, takes the ‘compendiaria via’ (Dante’s ‘piú lieve salita’, 1. 108, at least judging from the results). Similarly Dante the pilgrim ‘al montar sú, contra sua voglia, è parco’ (Purg. 11. 45), whereas, if free from human sins, he could have followed an easier path. However, he tries to do his best: ‘Sí mi spronaron le parole sue,/ ch’i’ mi sforzai carpando appresso lui,/ tanto che il cinghio sotto i piè mi fue’ (Purg. 4. 49–51). We can compare this with Petrarch: [. . .] soli duntaxat ascensui accingimur alacresque conscendimus. [. . .] et presertim ego montanum iter gressu iam modestiore carpebam, et frater compendiaria quidem via per ipsius iuga montis ad altiora tendebat; ego mollior ad ima vergebam [. . .] aliisque iam excelsa tenentibus, per valles errabam, cum nichilo mitior aliunde pateret accessus. [. . .] Interea, cum iam tedio confectum perplexi pigeret erroris, penitus alta petere disposui [. . .]. (8–10) (We girded ourselves solely for the ascent, and started to climb at a good pace. And whilst I myself was taking the rocky path at a slower pace, and my brother taking the direct path headed for the heights straight up the ridge, I weakly took a route downwards [. . .] the others had already reached a considerable height, I was wandering through the vales, as no easier path was available on the other side. [. . .] In the meantime, tired and ashamed of that wandering route, I ﬁrmly resolved to go up.)

It is worth noting that Petrarch, in featuring his difﬁcult climb, uses a borrowing from Dante translated into Latin, the verb carpare (literally ‘to take the path and walk on all fours’ in Dante; lat.⫽carpere, ‘to choose/take the path’). And, ﬁnally, spurred on by the bravery of Gherardo, he states: ‘penitus alta petere disposui’. This Familiaris, it has been said, is ‘both anticipation and corollary of the entire sub-group’ of the ‘Gherardine letters’ (the Familiares addressed to Gherardo, or mentioning Gherardo), and also of paramount importance in the whole collection of the Familiares, hinting at issues such as the body/soul dichotomy, the exploration of the self and of natural landscapes, the relationship with Gherardo and reﬂections upon poetics. It is also the ﬁftieth letter in the corpus.11 We have just witnessed Francesco’s and Gherardo’s different approaches to the slope, while their opposite

11 R. Lokaj, ‘Narrative Technique in Petrarch’s Familiares’, Linguistica e Letteratura, XXIV (1999), 63–6. Lokaj stresses the importance of this letter in many respects, not least for its ‘numerical and perhaps even numerological’ position within the corpus of the Familiares, offering several clues for a numerological exploration of Petrarch’s prose and metrical letters also in the light of his ars imitandi and reuse of his sources.

PETRARCH READING DANTE

103

climbing-styles deﬁnitely hint at an allegorical interpretation of that ascent.12 Francesco, after having joined his brother for a while — ‘aliquandiu equis passibus incessimus’ (we walked along together for a while) — shortly has to stop again and sit in a valley: ‘Vixdum collem illum reliqueramus, et ecce prioris anfractus oblitus, iterum ad inferiora deicior, atque iterum peragratis vallibus dum viarum facilem longitudinem sector, in longam difﬁcultatem incido [. . .]. Sic sepe delusus quadam in valle consedi’ (We had just left that cliff, when I forgot about the circuitous route taken before, and took a lower one again. And once more while following an easy, roundabout path through winding valleys, I ran into my old difﬁculty [. . .]. Finally, after being frequently disappointed, I sat down in a valley). Here he starts questioning his weariness with the words of three special advisers: Seneca, Augustine, and Ovid.13 The access ad beatam vitam is gained through the Augustinian velle and the Ovidian cupire: Quod totiens hodie in ascensu montis huius expertus es, id scito et tibi accidere et multis, accedentibus ad beatam vitam [. . .]. Equidem vita, quam beatam dicimus, celso loco sita est; arcta, ut aiunt, ad illam ducit via. Multi quoque

12

Besides the cumulative series of parallels echoing the Purgatorio, a fundamental metaphor behind Petrarch’s climb is the Pythagorean letter Y, in which the right part of the fork goes straight up, and the left bends down. It was associated with the moral life and given an allegorical meaning by Lactantius (Div. Inst. 6. 3), whom Petrarch was the ﬁrst to use extensively. The metaphor is inserted in the Secretum, book 3, p. 150. I owe this reference to Dr Letizia Panizza, whom I gratefully thank. An allegorical reading was undertaken by Billanovich (‘Petrarca e il Ventoso’, 397); Martinelli (B. Martinelli, Petrarca e il Ventoso (Bergamo, 1977), pp. 149–215); and Mercuri (R. Mercuri, Letteratura italiana: storia e geograﬁa, 1: L’età medievale (Turin, 1987), pp. 344–9). According to Mercuri, the climb is ‘altamente simbolica’, and related to Dante’s Inferno (cantos 1 and 5). For the ascent as an itinerarium mentis in Deum, to use St Bonaventure’s phrase, see again Martinelli (pp. 201–8), and also R. Lokaj, ‘Petrarca-alter Franciscus, un’ascesa francescana al Monte Ventoso’, Il Veltro, XLII (1998), 465–79. Realistic and allegorical interpretations of the letter have been questioned by M. O’Connell, ‘Authority and the Truth of Experience in Petrarch’s Ascent of Mont Ventoux’, Philological Quarterly, LXII (1983), 507–20, and R. Durling, ‘The Ascent of Mont Ventoux and the Crisis of Allegory’, Italian Quarterly, XVIII (1974), 7–28, although the latter is the only scholar who clearly indicates the Purgatorio as ‘the most familiar example of the mountain-of-moral-ascent’ also for Petrarch (p. 25), but without providing any precise textual comparison. 13 Enrico Carrara noticed that the presence of Ovid here ‘tratto a fare da auctoritas ad una riflessione spirituale’ appears quite peculiar: see E. Carrara, Altera musa: epistole di Dante e del Petrarca e carmi di poeti umanisti (Naples, 1928), p. 49. The various sources that Petrarch has reused here, as often in his intertextual writing, are merged regardless of their origin, author, or literary genre. Senecan, rather than Augustinian, is the phrase ‘accessus ad beatam vitam’. Augustinian is the ‘velle’, to be practised jointly with the ‘posse’ and the ‘nosse’. Ovid’s quote comes from the Epistulae ex Ponto (3. 1, 35).

104

Enrico Santangelo colles intereminent et de virtute in virtutem preclaris gradibus ambulandum est; in summo ﬁnis est omnium et vie terminus ad quem peregrinatio nostra disponitur. Eo pervenire volunt omnes, sed, ut ait Naso, ‘Velle parum est; cupias, ut re potiaris, oportet.’ (12–13) (Be aware that what you have so many times experienced today during the ascent of this mountain happened to you as it happens to many people who approach the happy life [. . .]. Certainly, the life which we call blessed is situated on a high eminence, and narrow, it is said, is the way that leads to it. Many, also, are the hills that lie between, and we must ascend, by a glorious stairway, from virtue to virtue. At the top is the end of our struggles and the goal for which we are bound. All wish to reach this goal, but, as Ovid says, ‘To wish is little; you must eagerly long for it, in order to obtain your goal.’)

Again, right next to a quotation from the Gospel according to St Matthew, and cunningly disguised under another scriptural quotation,14 a clear echo of the Commedia may be found: the densely doctrinal (but also, signiﬁcantly, ethically oriented) Paradiso 4, where Dante, to illustrate the human ascent up to truth and bliss, had used this very metaphor of the hills. We note some unmistakable lexical similarities and an analogous syntactic construction. Nasce per quello [i.e. human mind], a guisa di rampollo, a piè del vero il dubbio; ed è natura ch’al sommo pinge noi di collo in collo. (Par. 4. 130–2)

The periphrastic clause ‘ambulandum est; in summo [. . .] de virtute in virtutem’ is Dante’s sequence ‘[. . .] è natura/ Ch’al sommo [. . .] di collo in collo’, fragmented and reconﬁgured, i.e. rewritten, within Petrarch’s allegorical image.15 Francesco’s thoughts, turning into a self-examination, in the end follow the advice of the spiritual guide of the ascent, St Augustine, literally quoted (and thus clearly acknowledged as a source) everywhere in the text; but again, the self-examination is expressed through several Dantean syntagmata.16 14

Gospel according to St Matthew 7. 13–14; Psalms 84. 6–8. The Dantean image used here by Petrarch was ﬁrst pointed out by Carrara (Altera musa, p. 49), who, constrained by having to produce an anthology of Latin epistles and bucolic poetry from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, could not set it in the context of the whole network of borrowings from Dante, detectable in this and other Familiares. In Fam. 1. 1, for example, Petrarch had used the ﬁrst half of this same terzina in the syntagm ‘ut cogitationes e cogitationibus erumpunt’ (as thoughts sprung from other thoughts): see Santangelo, ‘Reading and Writing, Writing through Reading’, pp. 46–7. 16 The terminology of this self-examination (paras 12–14), with the insertion of the same Ovidian quote (‘Velle parum est; cupias, ut re potiaris, oportet’), is used as a real formula in other 15

PETRARCH READING DANTE

105

‘Tu certe — nisi, ut in multis, in hoc quoque te fallis—non solum vis sed etiam cupis. Quid ergo te retinet? Nimirum nichil aliud, nisi per terrenas et inﬁmas voluptates planior et ut prima fronte videtur, expeditior via; veruntamen, ubi multum erraveris, aut sub pondere male dilati laboris ad ipsius te beate vite culmen oportet ascendere aut in convallibus peccatorum tuorum segnem procumbere; et si — quod ominari horreo —ibi te tenebre et umbra mortis invenerint, eternam noctem in perpetuis cruciatibus agere.’ Hec michi cogitatio incredibile dictu est quantum ad ea que restabant et animum et corpus erexerit. (14–15) (‘You certainly wish and even desire this, unless you want to deceive yourself in this matter, as in so many others. What holds you back, then? Nothing, except that the path that leads through low and worldly pleasures, seems, at ﬁrst sight, easier and faster. However, after long wanderings, you must in the end either go up to the top, that is to the happy life, under the burden of ill-deferred labour, or lie down torpidly in the valley of your sins, and—I shudder to think of it!— if the shadows of death overtake you there, spend an eternal night amidst constant torments.’ It is surprising how these thoughts braced my body and my mind for facing the difﬁculties which yet remained.)

The direct question ‘Quid ergo te retinet?’, which introduces a note of bitter self-reproach, features the typical Dantean apostrophe, as in ‘Dunque: che è? Perché, perché restai?’ (Inf. 2. 121), and the following lines contain a dense series of quotations from Dante’s Purgatorio.17 The ‘inﬁmas voluptates’ echoing Seneca (De Vita Beata 7. 2–3) acquire very soon the meaning of valley of sins. The sinner must choose between the way burdened by ‘ill-deferred’ labour, but still leading to the blessed summit, and the way down towards the valley of his sins, obscured by the eternal darkness of torment.18 Although the Psalms provide an unquestionable source for ‘tenebre et umbra mortis’ (Psalms 106. 10–14), Petrarch’s ‘terrenas et inﬁmas voluptates’ conjure up the sin of Dante’s ‘superbi cristian, miseri lassi’ (Purg. 10. 121), who are condemned to bear the full burden of their pride: ‘Quell’ombre orando, andavan sotto’l pondo’ (Purg. 11. 26–30), and that Dantean ‘sotto’l pondo’ is rendered with Petrarch’s translation ‘sub pondere’. works of Petrarch dating from the same years, 1347–53 (Secretum; Ep. Metr. 3. 24); moreover, Petrarch’s literary memory, once he is looking down towards Italy (para. 18) is echoed in Bucolicum Carmen 8 (1347). All this, acutely pointed out by Billanovich (‘Petrarca e il Ventoso’, 397–8), and Mercuri (pp. 349–50), in my opinion conﬁrms a fully literary origin of this letter, and shows, as we have seen above, that Dante’s presence within Petrarch’s works is generally displayed in the middle of a rich multireferential network. 17 The same lines of Inf. 2 are used by Petrarch in Ep. Metr. 2. 5, 175–8. 18 I paraphrase from the English translation given by Aldo S. Bernardo in F. Petrarca, Rerum familiarium libri I–VIII (Albany, NY, 1975), p. 175.

106

Enrico Santangelo

However, Dante and Virgil succeeded in ﬂeeing from the eternal prison, as Cato exclaims at the opening of Purgatorio.19 In this letter, as well as in other works, Petrarch’s vocabulary (‘pondere’, ‘tenebre’, ‘valles’, ‘convallibus’, ‘eternam noctem’), together with numerous syntagmata, is thus linked to Dante’s Inferno (especially the ﬁrst ﬁve cantos), Purgatorio (cantos 4, 1, 2, 11), and even Paradiso (4. 130–2, and, at least indirectly, 8. 70). In other words, this vocabulary has to be related to a speciﬁc Dantean lexis rather than to a ‘technical’ vocabulary applicable to any (literary) ‘climber’. A further conﬁrmation of the broad use of Dante’s Purgatorio is to be found in the following passage, where one of the cantos of the Proud, canto 11, is again quoted: Atque utinam vel sic animo peragam iter illud, cui diebus et noctibus suspiro, sicut, superatis tandem difﬁcultatibus, hodiernum iter corporeis pedibus peregi! Ac nescio annon longe facilius esse debeat quod per ipsum animum agilem et immortalem sine ullo locali motu in ictu trepidantis oculi ﬁeri potest, quam quod successu temporis per moribundi et caduci corporis obsequium ac sub gravi membrorum fasce gerendum est. (15) (Oh, that I might go in spirit along that path for which I long day and night, as I did today, after eventually overcoming the difﬁculties, with my feet! And I am inclined to think that it should be far easier to do what can be done by the swift immortal soul itself, with no movement whatsoever, in the twinkling of an eye, than what has to be achieved through the passing of time by a failing mortal body and under the heavy burden of its limbs.)

The wish to gain for his soul what, during the climb, he is gaining through his feet, moves the climber to consider the dialectical relationship between body and soul, time and eternity, earthly fame and the good life leading to eternal bliss. This dualism is famously expressed in the summons which Oderisi addresses to the human race: Non è il mondan romore altro ch’un ﬁato di vento, ch’or vien quinci e or vien quindi, e muta nome perché muta lato. Che voce avrai tu piú, se vecchia scindi da te la carne, che se fossi morto anzi che tu lasciassi il ‘pappo’ e’l ‘dindi’? pria che passin mill’anni? ch’è piú corto

19

Purg. 1. 40–5: ‘Chi siete voi che contro al cieco ﬁume/ fuggita avete la pregione etterna?/ [. . .] chi v’ha guidati, o che vi fu lucerna,/ uscendo fuor della profonda notte/ che sempre nera fa la valle inferna?’

PETRARCH READING DANTE

107

spazio a l’etterno, ch’un muover di ciglia al cerchio che piú tardi in cielo è torto. (Purg. 11. 100–8)20

Oderisi’s focus is on fame in human life: no matter whether we are young or elderly, earthly fame (‘il mondan romore’) is nothing but ‘un ﬁato/ di vento, ch’or vien quinci e or vien quindi,/ e muta nome perché muta lato’. Any human effort in pursuing fame on earth is unworthy, because a thousand years, compared to eternity, are a length of time shorter than the blinking of an eye compared to the movement of the sphere which turns most slowly in the heavens. According to Oderisi, given that earthly fame is ‘naught but a breath of wind’ and has nothing to do with true virtue, there is no difference between a long life, dragged on into old age and a short one, even ending in childhood. Petrarch does not seem directly concerned with fame and human life at ﬁrst, but rather with the opposition ‘corporei pedes/animus’: no matter what the body manages to achieve (the conquest of the mountain top), the soul, ‘agilem et immortalem’, can easily reach ‘sine ullo locali motu in ictu trepidantis oculi’ what the body struggles to obtain ‘successu temporis [. . .] ac sub gravi membrorum fasce’. Immediately after this (para. 22), Petrarch returns to the topic, mingling it with a passage from Seneca, and eventually raising the issue of fame/virtue/bliss, from the perspective of Seneca and St Augustine: Nondum michi tertius annus efﬂuxit, ex quo voluntas illa perversa et nequam, que me totum habebat et in aula cordis mei sola sine contradictore regnabat, cepit aliam habere rebellem et reluctantem sibi [. . .] et querebam ex me ipse: ‘Si tibi forte contingeret per alia duo lustra volatilem hanc vitam producere, tantumque pro rata temporis ad virtutem accedere quantum hoc biennio, per congressum nove contra veterem voluntatis, ab obstinatione pristina recessisti, nonne tunc posses, etsi non certus at saltem sperans, quadragesimo etatis anno mortem oppetere et illud residuum vite in senium abeuntis equa mente negligere?’ (22–4) (Three years have not yet passed since that perverse and wicked passion which had a ﬁrm grasp upon me and held undisputed sway in my heart began to

20

In the ﬁction of the canto, Oderisi addresses his apostrophe to Dante and Virgil. Fame seen as a Dantean ‘breath of wind’ is a recurring theme in Petrarch’s works. In the Secretum, according to St Augustine, it is nothing but gossip circulating by word of mouth of the populace, and also a breath of a changeable breeze (book 3, p. 190). Fame is also featured as a useless ephemeral wind in three Familiares (1. 2, 29; 10. 6, 1; 22. 14, 7). Breaths of the ephemeral wind of fame, together with the blast of other malicious winds (Fam. 21. 15, 3, quoted above, note 10), can thus show us that Petrarch might have in mind Purg. 5. 13–15, and 11. 100–2 while writing some of his familiar letters.

108

Enrico Santangelo discover a rebellious opponent, no longer obedient to her [. . .] and I asked myself: ‘if, perchance, you should prolong your uncertain life for yet two lustres, and should make an advance towards virtue proportionate to the distance to which you have departed from your original infatuation during the past two years, since the new longing ﬁrst encountered the old, could you not face death in your fortieth year, if not with complete assurance, at least with hopefulness, and calmly dismiss the rest of your life as it fades into old age?’)

From the Secretum we learn that ‘voluntas illa perversa et nequam’ is the pursuit of fame, which is a ‘breath of wind’ also for Petrarch in several of his Familiares.21 With regard to old age, Seneca had stated that for the wise man there is no difference between a long life and a short one, but, if nothing hinders him, he carries on and peacefully lives in health even in old age (Epist. 21. 1). Petrarch’s conclusion though is utterly different: if virtue is so difﬁcult to achieve, a long peaceful old age is not desirable in place of a premature death, just as for Oderisi, who had established the equation of death in old age and in childhood. A fragmentation and reconstruction of Dante’s wording is therefore taking place in the syntagmata ‘in ictu trepidantis oculi’ (Dante: ‘un muover di ciglia’); ‘sub gravi membrorum fasce’ and ‘illud residuum vite in senium abeuntis’ (Dante: ‘vecchia [. . .] la carne’); and ‘quadragesimo etatis anno mortem oppetere’ (Dante: ‘morto [. . .] anzi che tu [. . .]’). Finally, the direct question addressed by Petrarch to himself echoes Oderisi’s discourse on earthly fame as opposed to virtue/bliss, as shown by the syntagmata ‘ad virtutem accedere’ and ‘ab obstinatione pristina recessisti’ (i.e. ‘you walked away from the yearning for earthly fame’). The body/soul dichotomy is thus overcome by the three stages of earthly fame/virtue/bliss, through a Dantean medium.22 In other words, the two passages ‘a corporeis [‘pedibus’⫽feet⫽things related to his body] ad incorporea [⫽things related to his soul]’ (para. 12), and ‘a locis [⫽mountain top⫽fame] ad tempora [⫽Petrarch’s recent life, committed to the pursuit of virtue⫽bliss]’ (para. 19) are both sanctioned by a Dantean presence. Unlike Dante’s, the final outcome of Petrarch’s quest will end in the achievement of virtue as a conquest of self-knowledge (i.e. the introverted dimension of Everyman as an individual).

21

See note 20 above. Interesting and useful observations on this oscillating attitude of Petrarch, also found in Bucolicum Carmen 1 and Fam. 10. 4, are made by A. S. Bernardo in ‘Petrarch’s Autobiography: Circularity Revisited’, Annali d’Italianistica, IV (1986), 60–1. 22

PETRARCH READING DANTE

109

However, before returning to this at the end of the chapter, I think it is worth at this stage seeking and discussing other possible sources for the phrase ‘in ictu trepidantis oculi’. It can be found, for example, in a letter of S. Pier Damiani (Patrologia Latina CXLV. 480). The syntagma has also been traced back to biblical and early patristic sources: 1 Corinthians (15. 52); St Augustine (Confessiones 7. 17, 23) and Boethius (De Cons. 5. 2).23 From such sources Petrarch indeed borrowed the statements regarding his life, and the life of the human race, and conﬂated them into his own personal reﬂections in the Secretum (book 3, pp. 150, 180). Given this, direct borrowing from Dante in this passage could be questioned (Petrarch and Dante could have looked at their sources independently), had it been the only one clearly emerging from the Ventoux letter. On the other hand, and coherently with the cumulative series of direct or implicit parallels detected so far in the letter, it seems to have been inserted on purpose into a highly allusive network of Dantean quotations, and reused by Petrarch in other works, as well as the same terzine of Purg. 11.24 The conquest of the mountain top — ‘Illius [i.e. collis] in vertice planities parva est; illic demum fessi conquievimus’ (16) (On the mountain top there is a little plain, and here at last we rested our tired bodies) — marks the end of the endeavour, and closes the ﬁrst part of the letter, noticeably characterised by a multitude of semantically signiﬁcant Dantean borrowings. The following paragraphs (17–36), may therefore be considered as a proper Augustinian examination ‘de curis propriis’, according to the 23

The ﬁrst two references appear in Petrarch’s Selected Letters, ed. C. Kallendorf (Bryn Mawr, 1986), p. 60. The ‘ictus oculi’ also describes the speed of God’s mind, which can see all things in a blink taking in past, present, and future (Boethius, De Cons. 5. 2). For this last reference I am again indebted to Dr Letizia Panizza. These biblical and early patristic sources are nonetheless fairly distant from Petrarch’s context, which is focused on the body: soul⫽earthly fame: eternal bliss dichotomy. The closest reference remains St Augustine’s reﬂection on human conscience. 24 I can report that the same phrase ‘in ictu trepidantis oculi’ (or a very similar one) is used by Petrarch in other Familiares (4. 12, 20; 19. 16, 14; and 20. 12, 3). For this, see the comprehensive Concordance to the Familiares of Francesco Petrarca, ed. A. and R. Bernardo, 2 vols (Padua, 1994), I, 1003. It may also be found in the important epistle in hexameters addressed to Pope Clement VI in 1342, used there as a conclusive formula (Metr. 2. 5, 249–50). M. Baglio, ‘Presenze dantesche nel Petrarca latino’, 133, n. 46, quotes two Dantean borrowings already pointed out by Zingarelli: see N. Zingarelli, ‘L’invidia per Dante’, in F. Petrarca, Rime (Bologna, 1963), pp. 224–41, clearly detectable in Sen. 10. 4. Similar expressions are also to be found in Sen. 8. 2 and 12. 1; Fam. 23. 5, 12; RVF. 357; Triumphus Mortis 2. 55–7; and De Otio Religioso 1. 15, and 26. Petrarch, consciously or unconsciously merging the Dantean pattern with biblical and early patristic sources, has thus fragmented the same purgatorial terzine into several of his works. Lastly, a similar expression to ‘un muover di ciglia’ (Petrarch’s ‘ictus oculi’) is used by Dante in Par. 20: ‘[. . .] sì mi ricorda/ ch’io vidi le due luci benedette,/ pur come batter d’occhi si concorda,/ con le parole mover le ﬁammette’ (vv. 145–8).

110

Enrico Santangelo

rubrica and to the role of the dedicatee of the letter: ‘Tempus forsan veniet, quando eodem quo gesta sunt ordine universa percurram, prefatus illud Augustini tui: — Recordari volo transactas feditates meas [. . .]’ (20) (The time may come when I will go through all the experiences of the past in due order, saying with your Augustine, ‘I want to recall my past foul actions’). Hence the ‘apertio libri’ (opening of the book) and a conversio inspired by the ‘sortes augustinianae’ (prophecies obtained through St Augustine’s words).25 Dantean borrowings, as said, appear only in paragraphs 22–4. The ﬁrst sixteen paragraphs of the Ventoux letter may well be read as an ascent towards self-knowledge using lexical echoes from Dante, and still retain those allegorical elements featuring Dante’s ascent towards God. Only the second part of the epistle will prove the crisis of allegory, and the inadequacy of reading Petrarch’s ascent only in the allegorical mode. There, a metaliterary interpretation and Jungian ‘participation mystique’ (or, in modern terms, ‘esperienza del sublime’)26 will provide the only valid keys for interpreting the ascent. The approach to the slope, its motifs and features, and the encounter with other characters, it has been said, may remind the reader of Dante’s approach to the mountain, as expressed at the opening of Inferno, and the ‘apertio libri’ may be Paolo’s and Francesca’s apertio of the book ‘Galeotto’ (cantos 1 and 5). This is consistent with my ‘purgatorial’ reading of the ascent, and may well provide a preliminary framework for interpreting the letter in this light. Dante is undertaking his journey in the expectation of quickly reaching ‘il dilettoso monte’ (Inf. 1. 77), and Paolo and Francesca interrupt their reading of the Lancelot du Lac to start a real love-romance (‘quel giorno piú non vi leggemmo avante’, Inf. 5. 138); analogously, Petrarch is determined to climb Mont Ventoux straight away (‘alta petere disposui’, para. 10), and once he has reached the mountain top and opened St Augustine’s book, he resolves to follow the example of his master who, after reading his sors (prophecy) in a letter of St Paul, ‘ulterius 25

The title (rubrica) reads: ‘Ad Dyonisium de Burgo Sancti Sepulcri ordinis Sancti Augustini et sacre pagine professorem, de curis propriis’ (To Dionigi from Borgo San Sepolcro, member of the Augustinian Order and Professor of Sacred Scripture, about his pains). Consistent with this opening, in the second half of the letter several classics (e.g. Livy, Seneca, Virgil) and St Augustine are widely quoted. Dionigi was in fact a renowned scholar, well acquainted with classical literature and author of a commentary on Valerius Maximus which was carefully studied by Boccaccio. Petrarch’s self-examination starts with a literary and theological echo: ‘Tempus [. . .] quando [. . .] universa percurram [. . .] Recordari volo [. . .] feditates meas’ (20). And see Billanovich, ‘Petrarca e il Ventoso’, 392–3. 26 See note 5 above.

PETRARCH READING DANTE

111

non processit’ (he did not go any further). Dante’s perspective, however, is reversed: Petrarch can reach the mountain top without travelling across Hell, and there he ﬁnds in the book the answer he was seeking, whilst Paolo and Francesca ﬁnd in the book only the beginning of their cursed love leading to catastrophe. In this sense, the journeys of the two ‘pilgrims’ also differ. Petrarch’s journey is circular,27 and ends with the discovery of the self, whilst Dante’s is vertical, leading to the contemplation of the extra-self, that is God.28 A semantic–symbolic link connecting Inferno and Purgatorio is thus traced by Petrarch in the Ventoux letter: the imitatio of Dante is practised here through the retrieval and rewriting of syntagmata, vocabulary, and speciﬁc allegorical patterns, suggesting that the Purgatorio — and somehow the Inferno — are lurking beneath the letter as subtexts. Note. I wish to express my gratitude to Peter Hainsworth, Martin McLaughlin, and Letizia Panizza for their precious advice throughout the revision of this chapter.

27

For Petrarch’s rewriting of classical myths of circularity in the light of Augustinian and medieval views, see Bernardo, ‘Petrarch’s Autobiography: Circularity Revisited’, 45–69. 28 A reading of the Ventoux letter from the perspective of the ﬁrst ﬁve cantos of the Inferno is given by Mercuri (Letteratura italiana, p. 376), to whom I owe these conclusions, which in part correspond to mine. The identiﬁcation of the old shepherd with Virgil, put forward by the scholar (p. 346), is scarcely supported by textual evidence, and obviously in disagreement with mine, whereas Virgilian references may be interpreted, in this and other works of Petrarch, as the veil or garb under which some borrowings from Dante are hidden. Dante’s reaching of the extra-self may also be interpreted as the discovery of his ‘true’ self, again coinciding with God.

7

Petrarch and Cino da Pistoia: A Moment in the Pre-history of the Canzoniere JOHN TOOK

PETRARCH, GENERALLY SPEAKING, is present to the writer of commemorative essays as a point of departure, as archetypal in respect of what comes next in the history of European lyric poetry. What follows in these pages is a temporary check to this tendency, Petrarch, just for a moment, constituting the point of arrival, the reﬁned and indeed consummate expression of prior developments in the tradition within which he stands. The point is that Petrarch is a poet at work on the plane of the horizontal, his, typically, being a movement backwards and forwards along the corridor of time, and a movement contemplated, therefore, in terms preeminently of hope and anticipation, of nostalgia and melancholy. It is also a movement to and fro in the order of space, and to this extent a movement contemplated in terms of far-offness, yearning, and bereftness, these between them, therefore, — memory and expectation, distance and desiring—constituting the parameters of his discourse and the context for its steady rhythm of introspection and anxiety; so, for example, — but the choice is random, Petrarch’s being a constant reﬂection or turning back on a customary set of concerns — the sonnet ‘Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo’ (Canz. 15) with its thoughtful account of temporal and spatial remotion, and beneath this, of the self-remotion whereby the poet is somehow lost to himself and to the substance of his proper happiness: Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo col corpo stancho ch’a gran pena porto, et prendo allor del vostr’aere conforto che ’l fa gir oltra dicendo: ‘Oimè lasso!’ Poi ripensando al dolce ben ch’io lasso, al camin lungo et al mio viver corto,

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 113–128. © The British Academy 2007.

114

John Took fermo le piante sbigottito e smorto, et gli occhi in terra lagrimando abasso. Talor m’assale in mezzo a’ tristi pianti un dubbio: come posson queste membra da lo spirito lor viver lontane? Ma rispondemi Amor: ‘Non ti rimembra che questo è privilegio degli amanti, sciolti da tutte qualitati humane?’ (I turn back at each step with my weary body which with great effort I carry forward, and I take then some comfort from your sky, which enables my body to go onward, saying ‘Alas, woe is me!’ Then, thinking back on the sweet good I leave behind, on the length of the road and the shortness of my life, I stand in my tracks dismayed and pale and lower my eyes weeping to the ground. At times in the midst of my sad laments a doubt assails me: How can these members live far from their spirit? But love replies to me: ‘Do you not remember that this is a privilege of lovers, released from all human qualities?’)1

The coordinates of the poet’s existence are eloquently enunciated, and it is within these coordinates — those, pre-eminently, of time and space — that a discourse turning upon presence, absence, memory, and misgiving is dexterously woven in the Canzoniere. But — and this now is the point — it was not always like that among poets in the high style of Italian vernacular verse-making. On the contrary, characteristic of the stilnovisti, or at least of the Cavalcantian and Dantean versions of the stil nuovo, is their engagement on the plane, not so much of the horizontal, of time and space as principles of well-nigh endless suffering, as on that of the vertical, of prior and abiding signiﬁcance.2 What matters here is not so 1 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere: testo critico e introduzione di Gianfranco Contini, annotated by D. Ponchiroli (Turin, 1966). Translations from Petrarch are by R. M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA,–London, 1976). Except where indicated, all other translations are my own. 2 De Robertis on the ‘verticality’ apt to distinguish the Cavalcantian from the Cinian utterance, ‘Cino e Cavalcanti o le due rive della poesia’, Studi medioevali, n.s. XVIII (1952), 55–107: ‘Cino tende a realizzare la poesia nell’estensione del discorso, per continue variazioni e sviluppi, in una distesa modulazione, nella dimensione del tempo. Guido tende a consumarsi tutto in un punto, verticalmente, a colmare in un solo attimo tutto lo spazio della poesia’ (p. 58) — a reworking of Carducci’s formula relative to Cino’s ‘passaggio dall’ontologismo, per così dire, sublimemente lirico dell’Alighieri al psicologismo squisitamente elegiaco del Petrarca’ (Rime di M. Cino da Pistoia e d’altri del sec. XIV (Florence, 1862), preface). Generally on the stil nuovo (but the bibliography is vast; for details of the earlier studies of Vossler, De Lollis, Bertoni, Rossi, Parodi,

PETRARCH AND CINO DA PISTOIA

115

much the event itself as the meaning both generating and generated by the event, the ‘sentenzia’ (as Dante puts it on the threshold of the Vita Nova) tending from within to shape and to commend it as an object of contemplation. Take, for example, Cavalcanti’s exquisite ‘Chi è questa che ven, ch’ogn’om la mira’, a sonnet moving comfortably enough within a tradition of praise poetry going back over the generations but engaged at the point, not of material circumstance, of the before and after of the moment or of the here and there of place, but of pure consciousness, of the unqualiﬁed substance of intellection: Chi è questa che ven, ch’ogn’om la mira, e fa tremar di claritate l’âre e mena seco Amor, sì che parlare null’om non può, ma ciascun ne sospira? Deo, che rasembra quando li occhi gira! Dical Amor, ch’i’ nol savria contare: cotanto d’umiltà donna mi pare, ch’ogn’altra ver’ di lei i’ la chiam’ira. Non si poria contar la sua piagenza, ch’a lle’ s’inchin’ogni gentil Vertute, e la Beltate per sua dea la mostra. Non fu sì alta già la mente nostra e non si pose ’n noi tanta salute che propriamente n’aviàn canoscenza.3 (Who is this that, coming among us with none other than Love himself, and causing the very air to tremble in its brightness, every man should look upon her, daring not to speak, but fetching instead a sigh? My God, what she seems as she glances about her let Love declare, for I know not how. A woman of such grace she seems that every other, by

Salvadori, Sapegno, Casella, Battaglia, Bonnes, and Nardi, see E. Pasquini and A. E. Quaglio, Lo stil novo e la poesia religiosa, 2nd edn (Bari, 1975), pp. 141–8), D. De Robertis, ‘Deﬁnizione dello stil novo’, L’Approdo, III (1954), 59–64; E. Bigi, ‘Genesi di un concetto storiograﬁco: “Dolce stil novo”’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, CXXXII (1955), 333–71; G. Favati, ‘Contributo alla determinazione del problema dello stil novo’, Studi mediolatini e volgari, IV (1956), 57–70; idem, Inchiesta sul dolce stil nuovo (Florence, 1975); U. Bosco, ‘Il nuovo stile della poesia dugentesca secondo Dante’, in Dante vicino: contributi e letture (Caltanissetta–Rome, 1966), pp. 29–54 (originally in Medioevo e Rinascimento (Florence, 1955), I, 77–101); M. Marti, Con Dante fra i poeti del suo tempo (Lecce, 1966); idem, Storia dello stil nuovo (Lecce, 1974); F. Suitner, ‘“Colui che fore trasse le nove rime” ’, Lettere italiane, XXVIII (1976), 339–45; E. Pasquini, ‘Il “Dolce stil novo” ’, in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. E. Malato (Rome, 1995), pp. 653–66. 3 Guido Cavalcanti: Rime, ed. L. Cassata (Anzio, 1993), IV.

116

John Took comparison, calls forth disdain. There is no reckoning her beauty, for in her presence every noble virtue bends the knee and beauty itself takes her for sovereign. Our mind is not so exalted nor our being so gifted that we may know her for what she is.)

This, strictly, is the poetry of epistemic possibility, the circumstances of the poet’s meditation being taken up entirely in its content, in the transparency and resplendence of the idea as a pure determination of the mind. True, there are forces at work in Cavalcanti too apt to disrupt the unqualiﬁed movement of the spirit and to bring it to the brink of catastrophe, but, as we see from the canzone ‘Donna me prega’, this is catastrophe open to analysis in terms, not of happenstance or eventuality, but of the structure and dynamics of being itself — by which we mean specifically human being — in its uniquely hylomorphic complexity. With the exception, perhaps, of the occasional ballad, Cavalcanti’s is in this sense a steady commitment to the poetics of verticality, to the triumph and tragedy of intellection pure and simple as man’s high calling.4 And what applies to Cavalcanti applies also to Dante, for his too — if in a manner reﬂecting his more properly moral–philosophical than natural–philosophical temperament — is a taking up of the eventual in the essential, of circumstance in a preoccupation with meaning. Take, for example, the praise poem par excellence of the Vita Nova, ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’, exemplary in respect, not only of its gentle oscillation between the objective and subjective poles of consciousness (between 4

See, in addition to the items listed in note 2 above (especially Favati, ‘Contributo alla determinazione del problema dello stil novo’; idem, Inchiesta sul dolce stil nuovo; and Marti, Storia dello stil nuovo), B. Nardi, ‘Filosoﬁa dell’amore nei rimatori italiani del Duecento e in Dante’, in Dante e la cultura medievale: nuovi saggi di ﬁlosoﬁa dantesca (Bari, 1949), pp. 1–92; M. Marti, ‘Arte e poesia nelle rime di Guido Cavalcanti’, Convivium, XVIII (1949), 178–95; M. Corti, ‘La ﬁsionomia stilistica di Guido Cavalcanti’, in Rendiconti della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, series 8, V (1950), 530–52; G. Favati, ‘Tecnica e arte nella poesia di Guido Cavalcanti’, Studi petrarcheschi, III (1950), 117–41; A. Livi, ‘Saggio su Guido Cavalcanti’, Inventario, VII (1952), 81–201. For ‘Donna me prega’ in particular, see G. Favati, ‘Sul testo di “Donna me prega”’, Cultura neolatina, VIII (1948), 251–4; idem, ‘La canzone d’amore del Cavalcanti’, Letterature moderne, III (1952), 422–53; idem, ‘La glossa latina di Dino del Garbo a “Donna me prega” del Cavalcanti’, in Annali della Reale Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, XXI (1952), 70–103; and, over against Nardi’s Averroistic interpretation of the canzone, idem, ‘Guido Cavalcanti, Dino del Garbo e l’averroismo di Bruno Nardi’, Filologia romanza, II (1955), 67–83. For Nardi himself, ‘L’averroismo del primo amico di Dante’, Studi danteschi, XXV (1940), 43–80; ‘Di un nuovo commento alla canzone del Cavalcanti sull’amore’, Cultura neolatina, VI–VII (1946–7), 123–35; Dante e la cultura medievale, pp. 93–129 and 130–52; ‘Noterella polemica sull’averroismo di Guido Cavalcanti’, Rassegna di ﬁlosoﬁa, III (1954), 47–71; M. Corti, La felicità mentale: nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante (Turin, 1983), pp. 3–37.

PETRARCH AND CINO DA PISTOIA

117

madonna herself as epiphany and the sweet resolution of selfhood contingent on that epiphany), but of its proposal of the Beatrice-event in terms of the incarnational, of an order of truth, that is to say, transcendent in respect of the historical but revealed and made known through it. Thus to stand in the presence of Beatrice is to stand in the presence of ‘gentilezza’ and of ‘onestade’ in their pure form, this, to judge by the prolepsis with which the poem begins, being the leading object of Dante’s meditation, the focal point of concern: 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’umiltà vestuta; e par che sia una cosa venuta da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare. Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira, che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core, che ’ntender no la può chi no la prova: e par che de la sua labbia si mova un spirito soave pien d’amore, che va dicendo a l’anima: Sospira. (VN 26. 5–7)5 (So noble and so full of dignity my lady appears when she greets anyone that all tongues tremble and fall silent, and eyes dare not look at her. She goes on her way, hearing herself praised, graciously clothed with humility, and seems a creature come down from heaven to earth to make the miraculous known. She appears so beautiful to those who gaze at her that through the eyes she sends a sweetness into the heart such that none can understand it but he who experiences it; and from her lips seems to come a spirit, gentle and full of love, that says to the soul: ‘Sigh.’)

This, then, is the poetry and the poetics of ascent, of enhanced intellection. What matters over and above the event itself as particularity is its transparency to meaning, to the truth which, upon reﬂection, is understood to transcend the circumstances of its showing-forth. Now the stil nuovo thus conceived, as a dwelling of the attentive spirit on the plane of signiﬁcance, exercised by dint of personality (Cavalcanti 5

Vita Nuova, ed. D. De Robertis (Milan–Naples, 1980). Translation (slightly modiﬁed) by K. Foster and P. Boyde, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2 vols (Oxford, 1967), I, 77–9.

118

John Took

on the one hand and Dante on the other) a powerful sway in the mind of its adherents, and nowhere more so than in Dante’s fellow exile and correspondent Cino da Pistoia;6 for Cino, in the event his own man in fashioning from the stilnovistic repertoire his own voice as a lyric poet, was at the same time the most obedient servant of the project, the most assiduous of them all in implementing its various requirements. We need only recall by way of documentation the somewhat intimidated sonnet (Cino is in correspondence with Cavalcanti) ‘Qua’ sone le cose vostre ch’io vi tolgo’ to appreciate his essentially quiescent stance as a stilnovista, his readiness to toe the ofﬁcial line: Qua’ son le cose vostre ch’io vi tolgo, Guido, che fate di me sì vil ladro? Certo bel motto volentier ricolgo: ma funne vostro mai nessun leggiadro?

6

The extensive literature on Cino has a twofold, ancient and modern, aspect. The ancient or antique phase, often enough extratextual or positivistic in its sense of the usefulness of the poem for a reconstruction of Cino’s biography, begins with Ciampi’s edition of Vita e poesie di messer Cino da Pistoia (Pisa, 1813), and comes down by way of Carducci, Corbellini, Bertoni, Pellegrini, and Casella to those of Zaccagnini, Le rime di Cino da Pistoia (Geneva, 1925), and Di Benedetto, Rimatori del dolce stil novo (Bari, 1939). More speciﬁcally intertextual in kind is the Continian and post-Continian phase represented by De Robertis, Corti, Favati, Marti, and others similarly attuned to the dynamics of the literary phenomenon in and for itself. Key texts — often deﬁnitive in their formulation of the ‘caso ciniano’ — include De Robertis, ‘Cino e le “imitazioni” dalle rime di Dante’, Studi danteschi, XXIX (1950), 103–77; idem, ‘Cino e i poeti bolognesi’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, CXXVIII (1951), 272–312; idem, ‘Cino e la crisi del linguaggio poetico’, Convivium, XXI (1952), 1–35; idem, ‘Cino e Cavalcanti o le due rive della poesia’; idem, ‘Per la storia del testo della canzone “La dolce vista”, Studi di ﬁlologia italiana, X (1952), 5–24; idem, ‘Il Canzoniere Escorialense e la tradizione “veneziana” delle rime dello Stil Novo’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, suppl. XXVII (1954); M. Corti, ‘Il linguaggio poetico di Cino da Pistoia’, Cultura neolatina, XII: 3 (1952), 185–223; G. Favati, ‘Cino de’ Sinibuldi da Pistoia poeta’, in Letteratura e critica: studi in onore di Natalino Sapegno, ed. W. Binni, 5 vols (Rome, 1974), I, 149–78; A. Roncaglia, ‘Cino tra Dante e Petrarca’, in Colloquio Cino da Pistoia (Roma, 25 ottobre 1975), in Atti dei Convegni Lincei, XVIII (Rome, 1976), pp. 7–31; R. Hollander, ‘Dante and Cino da Pistoia’, Dante Studies, CX (1992), 201–31; F. Brugnolo, ‘Cino (e Onesto) dentro e fuori la “Commedia” ’, in Omaggio a Gianfranco Folena, 3 vols (Padua, 1993), I, 369–86; E. Graziosi, ‘Dante a Cino: sul cuore di un giurista’, in Letture classensi, XXVI (1997), 55–91; J. Took, ‘The Still Centre of Concern and Communicability: Dante, Cino and their Non-correspondence’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, VI (1998), 43–59; idem, ‘Cino da Pistoia and the Poetics of Sweet Subversion’, in Reﬂexivity: Critical Themes in the Italian Cultural Tradition, ed. P. Shaw and J. Took (Ravenna, 2000), pp. 183–201. More especially on Cino’s inconstancy (Dante to Cino in the sonnet ‘Io mi credea del tutto esser partito’), A. Pézard, ‘Les sonnets de l’inconstance et de la ﬁdélité’, Revue des etudes italiennes, I (1936), 397–415; idem, ‘De passione in passionem’, L’Alighieri, I (1960), 14–26.

PETRARCH AND CINO DA PISTOIA

119

Guardate ben, chéd ogni carta volgo; se dite il vero, i’ non sarò bugiadro. Queste cosette mie, dov’io le sciolgo, ben le sa Amor, innanzi a cui le squadro. Ciò è palese: ch’io non sono artista, né cuopro mia ignoranza con disdegno, ancor che ’l mondo guardi pur la vista; ma sono un uom cotal di basso ’ngegno che vo piangendo, tant’ho l’alma trista, per un cor, lasso, ch’è fuor d’esto regno. (131)7 (What of yours do I make off with, Guido, that you make of me a thief ? The occasional elegant quip I’m happy to employ, but are not all your quips elegant? Have a care, for I scour every page of my text; if it’s true what you say, then I shall not lie about it. Love — before whom I set them out—knows well enough where I ﬁnd these triﬂes of mine. I am, to be sure, no artist, and neither (though the world sees only superﬁcially) do I cover my ignorance by disdain. Rather, I am a man of lowly wit, and one who — such is the sadness of my soul—weeps for a heart, alas, far from this realm.)

The position is typically Cinian. Ill at ease when it comes to theory and anxious not to tangle with the chief strategist of stilnovistic thinking, Cino contents himself with an acknowledgement of the eminent borrowability of the Cavalcantian solution (the ‘Certo bel motto volentier ricolgo’ of l. 3), with a gentle reiteration of stilnovistic obedience to the dictates of love (the ‘ben le sa Amor, innanzi a cui le squadro’ of l. 8), and with a timely disclaimer on the technical front (the ‘io non sono artista’ of l. 9). Mildly remonstrative, it is true, in the quatrains, he carefully sidesteps confrontation, happy in the round to subscribe to the central topoi of stilnovistic sensibility, including, in this case, obedience to Amore as master of his melancholy existence. Cino’s, then, is a steady implementation of the stilnovistic idea, a faithful reworking of its leading emphases in respect both of substance and of style. In neither of these senses an innovator, his is a set of variations on a theme, a constant manipulation of thought and form in keeping with the exigencies of a literary conscience. Consider, for example, the—in an ideal chronology, early — sonnet ‘Tutto mi salva il dolce 7 Poeti del dolce stil novo, ed. M. Marti (Florence, 1969), pp. 746–7. Marti follows Contini for those poems included in Poeti del duecento, ed. G. Contini, 2 vols (Milan–Naples, 1960), II, 629–90, and Di Benedetto, Rimatori del dolce stil novo for the rest.

120

John Took

salutare’, a nothing if not diligent reworking of ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ as the paradigmatic instance of praise poetry: Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare che vèn da quella ch’è somma salute, in cui le grazie son tutte compiute: con lei va Amor che con lei nato pare. E fa rinovellar la terra e l’âre, e rallegrar lo ciel la sua vertute; giammai non fuor tai novità vedute quali ci face Dio per lei mostrare. Quando va fuor adorna, par che ’l mondo sia tutto pien di spiriti d’amore, sì ch’ogni gentil cor deven giocondo. E lo villan domanda: ‘Ove m’ascondo?’; per tema di morir vòl fuggir fòre; ch’abbassi li occhi l’omo allor, rispondo. (2) (With the sweet greeting of her who is salvation itself, and in whom every grace is consummate, my own salvation is complete. With her is Love, born, it would seem, in the selfsame instant. Earth and air alike are refreshed by her and her virtue causes the heavens themselves to rejoice. Never was there such novelty as that whereby God makes her known to us. As she makes her elegant way, the whole world, it seems, is quickened by love, such that every noble heart is cheered, the wretch, for his part, asking nothing but ‘where can I hide?’ Fearful of death, all he wants is to be off. Let him lower his eyes in shame is what I say.)

Everything is present and correct. The theology is correct (the ‘quali ci face Dio per lei mostrare’ of l. 8, for Dante’s ‘da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare./ Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira’), the lexis is correct (‘salva [. . .] salute [. . .] mostrare [. . .] gentil cor’, for Dante’s ‘saluta [. . .] mostrare [. . .] mostrasi [. . .] gentile’), and even the details of phraseology are correct (the ‘par che ’l mondo/ sia [. . .]’ of ll. 9–10, for Dante’s ‘e par che sia [. . .] e par che’ at ll. 7 and 12), the whole thing testifying, therefore, to the eagerness with which Cino had contemplated the Dantean model and, more fundamentally, to the susceptibility of his poetic temperament, to his interpretation of the poetic enterprise in terms of allegiance and good faith. But — and this, now, is the point — to read over the sonnet in the light of ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ is straightaway to register its ‘horizontality’, its realignment of axes: the ‘tutto mi salva il dolce salutare/ che vèn da quella ch’è somma salute’ of ll. 1–2, for exam-

PETRARCH AND CINO DA PISTOIA

121

ple, with their free, cumulative, and essentially melodic reiteration of the salviﬁc idea; the ‘dolce salutare’ itself of l. 1 with its melliﬂuous rendering of—among the classical stilnovisti — a pre-eminently ontological motif; the ‘in cui le grazie son tutte compiute’ of l. 3 with its aestheticising, not to say rococo, manner, quite remote from anything in the original; the ‘quali ci face Dio per lei mostrare’ of l. 8, punctilious in respect of the archetype but bereft of its epiphanous, indeed incarnational intensity. And what are we to say of the festive ‘sì ch’ogni gentil cor deven giocondo’ of l. 11 as a response to Dante’s ‘che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core,/ che ’ntender no la può chi no la prova’ with its rapt sense of interiority and religious unspeakability? Everything, formally, is in order, but what is going on here is, in truth, a radical demystiﬁcation of the Beatrician idea in Dante, and, with it, the constraining of his terminology to an essentially fresh problematic — to the problematics, in short, of eventuality. But for all its ‘realignment of axes’, the case of ‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’ is but a mild instance of Cino’s subversive disposition as a stilnovista. A further variation on the praise style, namely the sonnet ‘Veduto han gli occhi miei sì bella cosa’, is less tactful: Veduto han gli occhi miei sì bella cosa, che dentro dal mio cor dipinta l’hanno, e se per veder lei tuttor no stanno, inﬁn che non la trovan non han posa, e fatt’han l’alma mia sì amorosa, che tutto corro in amoroso affanno, e quando col suo sguardo scontro fanno, toccan lo cor che sovra ’l ciel gir osa. Fanno li occhi a lo mio core scorta, fermandol ne la fé d’amor più forte, quando risguardan lo su’ novo viso; e tanto passa in su’ desiar ﬁso, che ’l dolce imaginar li daria morte, sed e’ non fosse Amor che lo conforta. (1) (Such beauty have I seen that my eyes have imprinted it on my heart, and if for an instant they see it not, they know no peace until it be found once more. Such is the love they have kindled in my soul that I am all of a flurry, and when my eyes meet hers, then my heart, stirred afresh, soars to the skies. For my eyes are my heart’s companions, there to fix it in faith as they look upon her heavenly face; and so completely is it caught up

122

John Took in desire, that — were it not for Love’s own assurance—its sweet imagining would be the end of it.)

True, tradition is never far away, and to this extent Cino remains as deferential as ever; so, for example, the nicely archaic ‘dentro dal mio cor dipinta l’hanno’ of l. 2, the ‘lo cor che sovra ’l ciel gir osa’ and ‘lo su’ novo viso’ of ll. 8 and 11, and the ‘sed e’ non fosse Amor che lo conforta’ of l. 14, all of Siculo-Tuscan and stilnovistic provenance. Add to this the faintly esoteric tone of some at least of the poem’s components, and once again we are in a position to afﬁrm Cino’s obedience to the received idea, to the programmatics of the high stil nuovo. But neither is there any mistaking the sui generis complexion of ‘Veduto han gli occhi miei sì bella cosa’ as an expression of stilnovistic spirituality or its restiveness in respect of the model; for it is a question now, not of ascent or of abstractedness, of madonna as the in-and-through-which of pure consciousness, but of the more or less fraught psychology of the encounter, of sight and sound as conducive in the amorous spirit to a state of mild to medium perturbation (the ‘fatt’han l’alma mia sì amorosa’ of l. 5 and the ‘che tutto corro in amoroso affanno’ of l. 6). At the level of expression, moreover, it is a question now, not of the taut responsiveness of the word (by which we mean the entire panoply of expressive means at the disposal of the poet) to the inner movement of thought and feeling (the ‘dittar dentro’ of Purg. 24), but of the kind of free elaboration whereby, within the economy of the period as a whole, everything relates to everything else by way of a pattern of reprise and anticipation veriﬁable on the plane of the horizontal, of the before and after of the lexical or syntactic event. So, for example, the ‘veduto [. . .] veder’ of ll. 1 and 3, the ‘cor [. . .] cor [. . .] core’ of ll. 2, 8, and 9, the ‘amorosa [. . .] amoroso’ of ll. 5 and 6, the ‘sguardo [. . .] risguardan’ of ll. 7 and 11, and the ‘fermandol [. . .] ﬁso’ of ll. 10 and 12, all bound together by a syntax as ample as it is ﬂuid (‘sì [. . .] che [. . .] e se [. . .] e [. . .] che [. . .] e quando’ in the quatrains, and similarly in the tercets). Again, everything, technically, is in order, Cino, as always, having made sure of that; but the result of what he himself calls his ‘sweet imagining’ (the ‘dolce imaginar’ of line 13) — a formula decisive for the substance and shape of his aesthetic generally8 — is something entirely new, a 8

See too the ‘Lo imaginar dolente che m’ancide’ of ‘Io non posso celar lo mio dolore’ (l. 14), the ‘ma se lo imaginar serà ben ﬁso’ of ‘Fa’ de la mente tua specchio sovente’ (l. 7), and, above all, the ‘e imaginando intelligibilmente’ of ‘Ciò ch’i’ veggio di qua m’è mortal duolo’ (l. 7), where the elegiac and discursive content of the ‘imaginar’ element of the formula stands sharply over against the pre-eminently epistemic and dialectical ‘imaginar nol pote hom che nol prova’ of

PETRARCH AND CINO DA PISTOIA

123

discourse turning, not on the transhistorical what of his experience as a poet-lover, but on its historical how and when (‘sì bella cosa [. . .] sì amorosa [. . .] quando col suo sguardo [. . .] quando risguardan’), on questions, not of quiddity, but of quality. The point is worth developing, for here, in what amounts to a promotion in Cino of the syntactical over the sacramental, lies the most intriguing aspect of his, in truth, extraordinary administration of the stilnovistic idea. A sacrament, theologically, is an outward sign of an inward movement of grace,9 and, by dint of a slight but, I think, legitimate legerdemain, we may speak of it rhetorically as the outward sign of an inward movement of thought and sensation. This at any rate is Dante’s meaning in the ‘dittar dentro’ passage of Purgatorio 24, a passage tending to preclude any kind of freeﬂoating expressivity, any kind of licence in respect of sound and syntax. Typically, therefore, the Dantean line (and in this Dante was Cavalcanti’s principal beneﬁciary) is taut, economic, and disciplined in point of expressive means, each lexical and even phonemic element within it bearing about it a strict accountability to what is being said—indeed, entering into what is being said as its intelligible form, its rhetorical entelechy; so, for example, — to take again our paradigmatic instance—the sonnet ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ with its exquisite deployment of prolepsis, anaphora, epanaphora, conversio, and emphasis (not to mention the various moments of consonantal and vocalic clustering tending to determine the aural complexion of this or that member of the whole) as, between them, the means of spiritual signiﬁcation. Every technical inﬂexion is in the highest degree functional, deeply and inalienably liable in the tribunal of poetic conscience. Not so in Cino, however, where the sacramentalism of the word, its depth-liability and analytical acumen, gives way, typically, to the melismatic, to the freely elaborative as a means of articulating a state of mind. Something of this we have already seen in the sonnets ‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’ and ‘Veduto

Cavalcanti in ‘Donna me prega’ at l. 53. Signiﬁcant, possibly, for Cino in this respect, with its careful separating out of psychological processes, is the ‘e poscia imaginando,/ di caunoscenza e di verità fora,/ visi di donne m’apparver crucciati,/ che mi dicean pur: “Morra’ti, morra’ti” ’ of Dante’s ‘Donna pietosa e di novella etate’ (ll. 39–42, in VN 23. 20). Restive as ever in Cino’s regard, Onesto da Bologna: ‘Non so chi ’l vi fa fare, o vita o morte,/ ché, per lo vostro andar ﬁlosofando,/ avete stanco qualunqu’ è ’l più forte/ ch’ ode vostro bel dire imaginando’, in ‘“Mente” ed “umìle” e più di mille sporte’ (ll. 5–8), in Poeti del dolce stil nuovo, ed. Marti, p. 752. 9 Aquinas, ST IIIa. 60 (‘De sacramentis’), ScG IV. 56 (‘De necessitate sacramentorum’), etc.

124

John Took

han gli occhi miei sì bella cosa’, but one more example — the nicely plaintive ‘Ell’è tanto gentile ed alta cosa’ — will clinch the argument: Ell’è tanto gentile ed alta cosa la donna che sentir mi face amore, che l’anima, pensando come posa la vertù ch’esce di lei nel mio core, isbigottisce e diven paurosa; e sempre ne dimora in tal tremore, che batter l’ali nessun spirit’osa, che dica a lei: ‘Madonna, costui more’. Oi lasso me, come v’andrà Pietanza, e chi le conterà la morte mia, celato, in guisa tal ch’ella ’l credesse? Non so, ch’Amor medesmo n’ha dottanza, ed ella già mai creder non poria che sua vertù nel cor mi discendesse. (58) (So noble and elevated a creature is the woman who ﬁlls me with love that my soul, pondering the respite, if any, of her power within me, is ﬁlled with dismay and fearfulness; and long it lingers in such trembling, that nothing within it, taking wing, dares to address her with a ‘My lady, this man perishes’. Oh wretched soul that I am, how will Pity approach her, and who will recount my hidden death such that she will believe it? I know not, for Love himself is seized by dread, and she, for her part, would never credit the possibility of strengthening me from within.)

Dante, clearly, is not far away, this poem too testifying to the strength of Cino’s discipleship; so, for example, in addition to the ‘tanto gentile’ of l. 1, the ‘vertù [. . .] nel mio core’ of l. 4 (Dante’s ‘dolcezza al core’), the ‘diven paurosa’ and the ‘tal tremore’ of ll. 5 and 6 (Dante’s ‘deven tremando’), the ‘batter l’ali nessun spirit’osa’ of l. 7 (Dante’s ‘li occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare’), and the ‘vertù nel cor mi discendesse’ of l. 14 (Dante’s ‘che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core’), each alike a sign of good faith. But, for all that, there is no mistaking Cino’s deconstruction and re-elaboration of the stilnovistic model, no passing over his transition from the essential to the elegiac and from signiﬁcation to articulation as a means of pursuing the poetic project. For the word, attentive as it still is to the substance of selfhood, to the ‘dittar dentro’ of thought and feeling, functions now by way principally of the conﬁgurative, of the disposition

PETRARCH AND CINO DA PISTOIA

125

of cognate elements within the economy of the period as a whole; thus, at the level of vocabulary, the grouping and near-synonymy of lexical items (‘isbigottisce [. . .] paurosa [. . .] dottanza’; ‘tremore [. . .] more [. . .] morte’; ‘pensando [. . .] credesse [. . .] creder’), while, at the level of syntax, the kind of consequentialism (nicely post-glossatorial in character) designed, less to deﬁne, than to develop, to sustain a line of argument and to facilitate discourse (‘che l’anima [. . .] e sempre ne dimora [. . .] che batter l’ali [. . .] che dica a lei [. . .] e chi le conterà [. . .] ed ella già mai’). The word (again meaning by this the aggregate of expressive means) becomes as ﬂuid and indeterminate as the situation it addresses. Operative now in the context of an existence immune to resolution, it functions by way of ampliﬁcation as the correlative of restlessness, of expatiation as the inand-through-which of a new kind of psychologism. It is, I think, in this sense — in his taking up of the sacramental in the syntactical—that Cino, the most proliﬁc of the stilnovisti (signiﬁcant in itself), prepares the way for the post-stilnovistic initiative of Petrarch. But this preparation is not to be regarded merely as a failure to cope on Cino’s part, as a congenital inadequacy to the rigours of the classical stil nuovo. True, Cino, often enough, is little more than a pale administrator of the stilnovistic idea, an amiable operative. Often enough, the special combination in his canzoniere of the literary and the legal is productive merely of discourse, of a reiteration or summing up of what has already been said with greater power and persuasiveness, at which point the stilnovistic ideal, exquisitely focused and deeply suspicious of the word as its own ﬁnality, all of a sudden evaporates. But this is by no means always the case, for wherever Cino asserts himself over himself and listens more carefully to the substance and rhythm of his unsettled existence as a poet-lover, then the results are not only impressive but far-reaching in consequence. Take, for example, the sonnet ‘Omè! ch’io sono all’amoroso nodo’ with its nicely pre-Petrarchan sense of the phantasm as productive of crisis, of a restive and troubled selfhood in the grip of its own leading preoccupations: Omè! ch’io sono all’amoroso nodo legato con due belle trecce bionde, e strettamente ritenuto, a modo d’uccel ch’è preso al vischio fra le fronde; onde mi veggio morto, s’io non odo l’umile voce ch’a Pietà risponde, ché come più, battendo, istringe il nodo, così credo ch’Amor più mi confonde.

126

John Took Confondemi crescendo tutte volte, sì come crescon nell’aureo colore le belle trecce ch’al cor tengo avvolte. Aiutami, Pietà, che n’hai valore; ché sanza l’altre gran bellezze molte, solo coi be’ capei m’uccide Amore. (75) (Alas! I am bound in love’s knot, and held fast there, like a bird belimed in the branches, by two gracious tresses, whence, unless I hear the sweet voice of Pity responding, I feel myself to be dying; for the more I beat my wings the tighter the knot becomes that binds me — that, I believe, being Love’s way of confounding me all the more. Indeed with every golden glint of the locks by which my heart is set about Love taxes me more painfully. Help me, Pity, as only you can; for all her other many beauties apart, her glorious tresses are enough for Love to slay me.)

True, the forces of poetic inertia — amost everywhere veriﬁable even in the most authentically Cinian of Cino’s utterances — are discernible here, thoughts of Pietà tending to conﬁrm the poem as a product of the antique manner, of a way of conceiving and articulating the love-issue now about to be superseded once and for all. But that for the moment is neither here nor there, Cino’s recasting of the ideological in terms of the experiential, and of the analytical in terms of the melodic, very deﬁnitely looking in the direction of things to come. Witness, then, as a ﬁnal example, these lines from the canzone ‘Oimè, lasso, quelle trezze bionde’, a further study in the crisis of discrete intentionality (the ‘trezze bionde’, ‘bella ciera’, ‘begli occhi’, and ‘dolce riso’ of ll. 1, 4, 6, and 9). Everything, again, is anticipatory: the insistent rhythm of interjection (‘Oimè [. . .] oimè [. . .] oimè’), the ample but nicely graduated pattern of adjectivisation (‘bella [. . .] dolce’, ‘fresco ed adorno/ e rilucente’), the essentially cumulative structure of the period generally, and its mood of more or less lightly ﬁgured anxiety and introspection: Oimè, lasso, quelle trezze bionde da le quai riluciéno d’aureo color li poggi d’ogni intorno; oimè, la bella ciera e le dolci onde, che nel cor mi fediéno, di quei begli occhi, al ben segnato giorno; oimè, ’l fresco ed adorno e rilucente viso, oimè, lo dolce riso per lo qual si vedea la bianca neve

PETRARCH AND CINO DA PISTOIA

127

fra le rose vermiglie d’ogni tempo; oimè, senza meve, Morte, perché togliesti sì per tempo? (123. 1–13) (Alas, wretch that I am, those golden tresses whereby the hills all about are bathed in golden hue!; alas, the beautiful countenance and sweet glances whereby those eyes took possession of my heart on that fateful day!; alas, the youthful, comely and radiant face, alas the sweet smile whereby the white snow was glimpsed among the red red roses! Alas, Death, why took you so quickly her without me?)

The problematics of the Petrarchan Canzoniere, its turning on the incompatibilities of an at once Ciceronian and Christian conscience, are, it is true, nowhere to be seen, and Cino’s is in this sense a Petrarchism in waiting, a form in anticipation of substance. But Petrarch, like Cino his own man in mapping out a fresh literary landscape, was poet’s poet enough to appreciate how things stood between him and his tradition, and, surveying the scene generally, he could not but have been impressed by the sweet imaginings of his Pistoian predecessor, advocate avant la lettre of his own leading preferences. Conﬁrmation of this general situation — were conﬁrmation necessary — is furnished in a particularly eloquent fashion by Petrarch’s notice of Cino’s death in 1336 (Canz. 92), his tone being at once plaintive and celebratory, an invocation to grief on earth and to rejoicing in heaven: Piangete, donne, et con voi pianga Amore; piangete, amanti, per ciascun paese, poi ch’è morto collui che tutto intese in farvi, mentre visse, al mondo honore. Io per me prego il mio acerbo dolore, non sian da lui le lagrime contese, et mi sia di sospir’ tanto cortese, quanto bisogna a disfogare il core. Piangan le rime anchor, piangano i versi, perché ’l nostro amoroso messer Cino novellamente s’è da noi partito. Pianga Pistoia, e i cittadin perversi che perduto ànno sì dolce vicino; et rallegresi il cielo, ov’ello è gito. (Weep, Ladies, and let Love weep with you; weep, Lovers, in every land, since he is dead who was all intent to do you honour while he lived in the world. For myself, I pray my cruel sorrow that it not prevent my tears and that it be so courteous as to let

128

John Took me sigh as much as is needful to unburden my heart. Let rhymes weep also, let verses weep, for our loving Messer Cino has recently departed from us. Let Pistoia weep and her wicked citizens, who have lost so sweet a neighbour; and let Heaven be glad, where he has gone.)

The gesture is exquisite, for not only does the event — in this case Cino’s death—become once more the point-about-which of a nicely turned meditation on, in this case, prestigiousness and perversity, but the meditation itself is unfolded in a manner neatly conformable to Cino’s own, quintessentially spacious sense of the poetic line (its steady commitment to accumulation, reiteration, and syntactic generosity as the way forward in poetry). Petrarch, as always, knew exactly what he was doing, and his homage to Cino, nothing if not discriminating in point both of substance and of style, is as complete in death as it was in life.

8

Petrarch and the Italian Reformation ABIGAIL BRUNDIN

IN HIS ESSAY ‘La letteratura italiana nell’età del concilio di Trento’, Carlo Dionisotti famously alluded to the link between the growing canon of vernacular literature in Italy in the sixteenth century and the increasingly wide reach and appeal of reformed spirituality.1 A number of scholars have subsequently traced this connection in a variety of forms and genres. Much work has been done, for example, on the primary evangelical text of the period, the Beneﬁcio di Cristo (ﬁrst published in 1542 or 1543) which, according to Pier Paolo Vergerio the Younger’s no doubt biased testimony, sold 40,000 copies in Venice alone in the ﬁrst six years of its circulation before it found itself on Della Casa’s 1549 Index.2 Further evidence of the close link between literature and reform in the period is furnished by Anne Schutte’s valuable work on Renaissance letter books, demonstrating the evangelising potential of collections of lettere volgari which enjoyed wide circulation and great popularity in the 1540s, and included letters on spiritual subjects by prominent Italian reformers.3 Evidently the evangelising power of such vernacular texts was sensed and feared by the religious authorities, as is demonstrated most clearly by the vigorous suppression of the Beneﬁcio di Cristo by the Catholic Church

1

C. Dionisotti, ‘La letteratura italiana nell’età del concilio di Trento’, in Geograﬁa e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin, 1967), pp. 183–204. In this chapter I have used a variety of terms to refer to the reformed spirituality that existed in Italy prior to the Council of Trent, including references to evangelism and to the Italian Reformation. Although ‘evangelismo’ is now the widely accepted term in use in Italian, there appears to be no consensus in the English-speaking world regarding the best way of describing the phenomenon. See, for a summary of the debate, E. Gleason, ‘On the Nature of Sixteenth-century Italian Evangelism: Scholarship, 1953–1978’, Sixteenth Century Journal, IX (1978), 3–26. 2 Vergerio’s comments are cited in D. Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge, 1972), p. 74. 3 A. Jacobson Schutte, ‘The Lettere Volgari and the Crisis of Evangelism in Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, XXVIII (1975), 639–88. Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 131–148. © The British Academy 2007.

132

Abigail Brundin

which recognised the dangerous potential of its poetically charged and uplifting call to arms.4 The present chapter investigates a further manifestation of the link between vernacular literature and reformed spirituality in Italy in the sixteenth century, and the potential evangelising role of the former, in an examination of the genre of Petrarchism, long considered a ‘closed’ and insular genre, impervious to the inﬂuence of the wide world beyond the courtly environment that spawned it.5 How is it that this unlikely genre, famously dismissed by Arturo Graf in the nineteenth century as ‘una malattia cronica della letteratura italiana’ (a chronic illness of Italian literature), dry, repetitive, and wholly lacking in soul, could come to be directly and seemingly deeply engaged with some of the most signiﬁcant theological and ideological debates of the period?6 Most crucially, I consider what particular features of the Petrarchan lyric and the canzoniere format offer themselves to this engagement. In conclusion, I turn to the lyrics of Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), whose mature poetry can be considered to be the clearest manifestation in the period of the kind of literary evangelism outlined above.7 The fact that there were individuals in the sixteenth century who were simultaneously interested in both reform thought and lyric poetry has been noted by other critics before today. Stephen Bowd, in his book on the Venetian patrician and reformer Vincenzo Querini (1478–1514), alludes to the involvement in vernacular poetic production of a number of the early reformers in and around Padua and Venice, among them, crucially, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), godfather of Petrarchism in the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century, and questions the role played by a seemingly 4

For details of the suppression of the text, see B. da Mantova, Il Beneﬁcio di Cristo con le versioni del secolo XVI, documenti e testimonianze, ed. S. Caponetto (Florence, 1972), especially the ‘Nota critica’ (pp. 469–98), and the full text of Ambrogio Catharino’s response, the Compendio d’errori et inganni Luterani [. . .] (pp. 345–422). 5 For a discussion of Petrarchism as a ‘closed’ genre, see T. M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), pp. 174–6. See, in addition, the comments by L. Martines, who sees the genre as creating ‘mini-utopias’ into which the courtier can escape from problematic realities, in Power and Imagination: City-states in Renaissance Italy, 3rd edn (London, 2002), pp. 323–8 (p. 325). 6 A. Graf, Attraverso il Cinquecento (Turin, 1926), II, 3. Cited in K. W. Hempfer, ‘Per una deﬁnizione del Petrarchismo’, in Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle: Pétrarque en Europe XIVe–XXe siècle, Actes du XXVIe congrès international du CEFI, Turin et Chambéry, 11–15 décembre 1995, ed. Pierre Blanc, Bibliothèque Franco Simone, XXX (Paris, 2001), pp. 23–52 (p. 24). 7 An initial investigation of the evangelical ﬂavour of Vittoria Colonna’s poetry is provided in A. Brundin, ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Poetry of Reform’, Italian Studies, LVII (2002), 61–74.

PETRARCH AND THE ITALIAN REFORMATION

133

frivolous genre in the spiritual programme of such men.8 Thomas Mayer makes a similar observation in his recent book on Reginald Pole (1500–58), in referring to what he terms ‘the unstable mix of poetry and piety’ characterising the ecclesia viterbiensis that formed around Pole in the late 1530s and early 1540s, which included poets such as Vittoria Colonna and Marcantonio Flaminio (1498–1550) among its number.9 Mayer demonstrates the keen awareness that Pole himself shows of the potency of the literary gift if turned to the wrong ends, when he congratulates himself on ‘saving’ Marcantonio Flaminio from the heretics, ‘among whom he could have done much damage through the easy and beautiful style which he had of writing Latin and the vernacular’.10 It is notable too that the Beneﬁcio di Cristo, the primary evangelical vernacular text of this era, is a highly lyrical work and that the poet Flaminio is now widely held to have been at least partially responsible for its authorship.11 Pietro Bembo is a signiﬁcant ﬁgure in any discussion of the particular links between poetry and reform in sixteenth-century Italy. He was of course instrumental in deﬁning the linguistic and thematic goals of the Petrarchan genre in the period and illustrated his theories on language and imitatio through the example of his own lyrics, widely circulated scribally and published in a printed collection for the ﬁrst time in 1530.12 In addition, Bembo was well known by many of the key reformers in Italy before Trent, and was frequently referred to as an associate of the members of the ecclesia viterbiensis, but also, from 1539 when he was made a cardinal, closely tied to the Catholic authorities in Rome.13 Bembo’s election as a cardinal after a less than pious secular life can be considered to represent a concerted attempt by the church to embrace and absorb the new grandmasters of vernacular literature and culture, so that in the

8 S. D. Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions: History, Culture, Religion, Ideas, LXXXVII (Leiden, 2002), pp. 32–45. See also A. Gnocchi, ‘Tommaso Giustiniani, Ludovico Ariosto e la Compagnia degli Amici’, Studi di ﬁlologia italiana, LVII (1999), 277–93. 9 T. F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000), p. 123. 10 Mayer, Reginald Pole, p. 118. 11 On the hypothesis concerning Flaminio’s authorship of the Beneﬁcio, see Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 69–88. 12 Rime di M. Pietro Bembo (Venice, 1530). On the scribal and print publication of Bembo’s lyric poetry, see B. Richardson, ‘From Scribal Publication to Print Publication: Pietro Bembo’s Rime, 1529–1535’, Modern Language Review, XCV (2000), 684–95. 13 On Bembo’s links to Pole and his group, see P. Simoncelli, ‘Pietro Bembo e l’evangelismo italiano’, Critica storica, XV (1978), 1–63.

134

Abigail Brundin

ﬁgure of Bembo we ﬁnd a celebration of the vernacular language and indeed its lyric at the very heart of the religious establishment.14 The preceding brief summary seeks simply to restate and draw together what has already been amply illustrated by scholarship before now: that the movement for reform in Italy can be characterised as a vernacular movement, which seeks to harness the power of the new printing presses and the reach and appeal of vernacular literature in order to spread its message to the largest possible audience; and, more crucially for my purposes, that poetry and piety have an intimate relationship in this period. All of which is signiﬁcant when we now come to think about the role played by the Petrarchan genre in the context of the Reformation in Italy. Petrarchan anthologies and individually authored collections of Rime, much like the books of lettere volgari examined by Anne Schutte in her study, were among the vernacular best sellers of the new printing industry in sixteenth-century Italy. Small cheap editions of Petrarchan lyrics circulated widely across the peninsula to meet the reading public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the genre: particularly popular were the anthologies of poems by groups of authors brought together by geographical region or even on occasion by gender.15 The great appeal of the genre during the Renaissance suggests that we need to readdress the fundamental disregard for the majority of Petrarchists that was displayed by Graf and others in earlier periods and that still lingers on today. More speciﬁcally for the purposes of the present study, Petrarchism’s great popularity can clearly be seen to contribute to its potential effectiveness as a means of evangelising a message of reformed spirituality to the largest possible audience reading vernacular literature in the period. We should now turn to a consideration of the crucial question posed above (on page 132) concerning the formal properties of Petrarchism. Which of its particular features can be held to contribute to its suitability as a forum for the transmission of a reformed spirituality? As Roland Greene has pointed out, such formal analysis must precede any attempt to understand the ideological properties of poetry: ‘reading for ideology 14

On this phenomenon, in relation to its inﬂuence on the ambitions of the poet Giovanni Della Casa, see G. della Casa, Le Rime, ed. Roberto Fedi, 2 vols (Rome, 1978), I, xvi–xviii. 15 An example would be the Rime diverse di alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne (Lucca, 1559). More generally on the circulation of books of lyric poems in the period, see W. Ll. Bullock, ‘Some Notes on the Circulation of Lyric Poems in Sixteenth-century Italy’, in Essays and Studies in Honour of Carleton Brown (London, 1940), pp. 220–41; R. Fedi, La memoria della poesia: canzonieri, lirici e libri di rime nel Rinascimento (Rome, 1990); M. Santagata and A. Quondam (eds), Il libro di poesia dal copista al tipografo (Modena, 1989).

PETRARCH AND THE ITALIAN REFORMATION

135

in lyric without attending to the genre’s elementary modes of expression risks a fundamental incompleteness’.16 Two aspects of Petrarchism require speciﬁc consideration here: the structure and properties of the individual sonnet, a poetic form that beneﬁts already from a large body of criticism and study; and the properties and qualities of the canzoniere, the uniﬁed collection of sonnets into a coherent and, on occasion, authorially controlled whole, equally important as an intrinsic element of the Petrarchan project in this reformed spiritual context.17 The sonnet has been aptly described as a prescribed form of poetry, that is to say, before the poet ever begins to write, certain properties of his ﬁnished product have already been decided, its duration and structure are predetermined.18 But, far from inhibiting the poet, this very prescriptiveness appears to act as a positive support, a formula by which he is able to order and express his experience during composition.19 Unable to stray beyond the tight, fourteen-line limits of the sonnet and bound by its particular exigencies of rhyme and rhythm, the poet suffers the difﬁculties imposed by the form yet also beneﬁts from its provision of a kind of security, a safe place from which to write. We can see, I believe, how these qualities of the sonnet, its limited space and controlled freedom, offer an ideal starting point from which to commence an exploration of new and challenging ideas.20 In the context of the present chapter, of course, such new and challenging ideas would be the speciﬁc doctrines of a reformed faith and the ways in which they relate to the individual writer and her own faith. The security and structure provided by the formal containment of the sonnet can fruitfully be compared to the structured nature of courtly society in which Petrarchism ﬁrst took root in the early modern period. While such a context can be seen to give rise to carefully coded 16

R. Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ, 1991), p. 6. 17 Brian Richardson has commented on the fact that the ordering of individual sonnets into a uniﬁed canzoniere was not universally understood or appreciated as a vital facet of Petrarchan production in the sixteenth century, a misunderstanding that led to some editors of Petrarch failing to respect the poet’s original, careful ordering of his oeuvre: see ‘From Scribal Publication to Print Publication’, 687–8. 18 For an initial discussion of this poetic prescription, see M. R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London, 1992), pp. 1–10. 19 See A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford, 1982), p. 31. 20 An early example of the form’s potential for experimentation would be the group of ‘comicrealist’ poets of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, who turned the sonnet to entirely new ends in both style and themes: see C. Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321) (Lecce, 1986), pp. 159–200, and Chapter 10 by Diego Zancani in this volume.

136

Abigail Brundin

and stylised literary forms, it is also possible to ﬁnd scope within this arena for a more unexpected mode of creativity. We could in fact argue, in direct opposition to Lauro Martines’s contention that the court acted as an escapist ‘alternate world’, a kind of ‘buffer zone of ideal forms’ protecting the courtier from uncomfortable truths, that the carefully orchestrated and wholly predictable structure of courtly society allowed its members a particular kind of constrained freedom to push beyond boundaries and move towards new realisations and identities.21 The very fact that the case study to be employed later in this chapter, that of Vittoria Colonna, offers us the example of an aristocrat and a woman who, despite the constraints of status and sex, appears able to move into entirely new literary territory in her own Petrarchan endeavours, amply illustrates the surprising freedoms that such a context seems to offer. The progress that is made towards understanding and illumination within the context of any individual sonnet is necessarily circumscribed by the poem’s tight and unforgiving structure, and thus the poet’s forward motion is gradual and cumulative, relying on the repetitive nature of the greater canzoniere into which each individual sonnet is placed. Roland Greene describes this repetitive quality, one that has frequently been compared to prayer or liturgy, as an aspect of the lyric’s ‘ritual dimension’, its status as script or performance to be vocalised and adopted by the speaker in an act almost of coercion, or submission by the auditor to the poem’s expressive power.22 The involvement of an audience in the act of repetition performs a unifying function, drawing together a congregation of auditors who are potentially changed by the lyric experience. Once again, the clear possibility presents itself for an exploration of new and challenging spiritual material in such a poetic context. As well as embodying a natural impulse towards repetition, the Petrarchan canzoniere is by its nature both cyclical and intimate, beginning and ending in the consciousness of the individual poet and a process of examining and lamenting the state of his soul. The exclusively personal focus, the unremitting interiority and univocality of much Petrarchan production, have contributed to its dismissal in the past by the critical establishment as a self-indulgent frivolity, and yet such a reading over21

Martines, Power and Imagination, pp. 322, 323. A parallel could be drawn with the situation at the court of Frederick II in Sicily in the ﬁrst half of the thirteenth century, where the particular courtly environment gave rise to new developments including the ﬂourishing of the Sicilian school and the establishment of the sonnet as a poetic form: see Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet, pp. 10–16. Many thanks to Zyg Baran´ski for pointing this out to me. 22 Greene, Post-Petrarchism, p. 6.

PETRARCH AND THE ITALIAN REFORMATION

137

looks or underestimates a very important aspect of this tendency, especially in the context that interests us. While it is in any case reductive to claim that the genre does not also fulﬁl a markedly social and public function that has often been ignored, through epistolary sonnet exchanges between contemporaries for example, even the seemingly personal focus of a sonnet sequence can disguise a more far-reaching project.23 By tying the process of questioning to the particular circumstances of the individual poet, the path-breaking potential of any new understanding is contained and disguised, and yet, as the comparison to liturgy makes clear, the poetry itself embodies the potential for a collective act of illumination and change. This universalising of personal experience and understanding, which was the governing principle of Petrarch’s own corpus of poems, is of course at the heart of any act of evangelism. The circularity of the canzoniere, in the context of Petrarch’s own sequence in particular, represents the poet’s frustrations and limitations as he does battle with the overpowering force of love that combats his reason and will, so that as the cycle ends it threatens to begin again, and the poet can only plead with the Virgin Mary to release him from the bonds of love that alone he cannot undo.24 In the context of a reformed Petrarchism, however, this cyclical quality in particular takes on new meaning and can be turned to new and wholly positive ends. The entrapment of the poet in the bonds of love becomes a cause for celebration if that love is spiritual rather than earthly, and this is heightened further if one reads the cyclical quality of the sequence in the light of the Lutheran doctrine of sola ﬁde or justiﬁcation by faith. According to this doctrine, the individual no longer seeks to control his fate but abandons himself to the action of God’s grace on his soul, so that his acceptance of his powerlessness to instigate change provides testament to the depth of his faith in his status as one of the elect.25 The joyful embracing of a loss of autonomy that the doctrine of sola ﬁde confers upon the Petrarchan sequence can in fact be linked to the notion of prescribed freedom that we have already found is inherent in the sonnet’s structure. Luther’s doctrine 23

Brian Richardson notes the social function of Petrarchan lyrics evident in the common practice of scribally publishing single lyric poems rather than uniﬁed collections, in ‘From Scribal Publication to Print Publication’, 688–90. 24 See the closing canzone, 366, ‘Vergine bella, che di sol vestita’, in Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. M. Santagata (Milan, 1996), pp. 1397–416. 25 On Luther’s doctrine of justiﬁcation by faith and its implications for the individual Christian, see J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols (Chicago, IL, 1984), IV, 128–55.

138

Abigail Brundin

appears to embody a paradox, as the individual Christian is handed responsibility for developing an active faith through study and contemplation of the word of God, yet at the same time is deprived of the efﬁcacy of good works and instead accepts that his faith has been preordained, his salvation already enacted before his birth. By embracing this paradox in the context of the Petrarchan canzoniere, the poet is offered the freedom to seek for understanding and yet is simultaneously liberated from the responsibility for his actions. Thus, while his human limitations might frustrate the poet, they allow him at all times to point beyond his own frailties to the wonder of salvation by faith alone. Where Petrarch’s weakness affords him anguish, the reformed Petrarchist should feel only joy. A consideration of Lutheran sola ﬁde as it effects the Petrarchan sequence leads us naturally to the next important subject for consideration, and that is the intimate marriage of Petrarchism with courtly neoPlatonism in the sixteenth century, more speciﬁcally neo-Platonism according to the Bemban model as expressed in a work such as Gli Asolani (1505), for example, or in Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528), specifically in the monologue given to the character of Bembo in book 4.26 There remains much work to be done on this important topic, but the clear indication is that the Ficinian neo-Platonism that developed in the courtly environment in Italy in the ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries shares numerous expressive characteristics with reformed spirituality as it is expressed in the writings of various key reformers. As neo-Platonism is also a governing principle of Petrarchist production, it could be considered to constitute the ‘missing link’ between Petrarchism and reformed spirituality in this period, accounting for the development of protoreformist sentiment in this particular genre of literary work. It is perhaps not surprising, as Roy Battenhouse argued back in 1948, that we should ﬁnd a consonance of language and terminology in the writings of a reformer such as Calvin and Renaissance neo-Platonists. Calvin, like many of his contemporaries, was well schooled in the pagan classics, and, although he testiﬁes to a conversion to true piety and a rejection of pagan philosophy that is ignorant of the true God, the ﬂavour of his early learning cannot help but colour the manner in which he synthesises and expresses his new faith even as he seeks to move away

26

P. Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, Gli Asolani, Rime, ed. C. Dionisotti (Milan, 1997); B. Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. E. Bonora (Milan, 1972).

PETRARCH AND THE ITALIAN REFORMATION

139

from such philosophy.27 Despite the clear contrast between a neoPlatonist conception of the dignity of man and a Calvinist insistence on his irreversible depravity, Battenhouse convincingly argues for an actual synthesis of views on a number of fronts, including a belief in salvation through progress in knowledge (‘knowledge’ as synonymous with ‘faith’), a stress on the role of choice in directing the will towards God, and an overriding concern with man’s formlessness and his gradual progression towards a restoration of his divine image by slow ascent towards God. (The gradual and slow nature of this regeneration is a feature that Calvin stresses in particular, and that can immediately be seen to ally with the quality of the Petrarchan canzoniere already discussed above, that is the inch-by-inch progress towards knowledge that each sonnet in a sequence allows.)28 Such stress on interiority and individual responsibility for nurturing an active faith ﬁnds clear resonance in the Petrarchan programme. Battenhouse points out a further striking consonance of expression, this time in relation to Luther, in citing a passage from Ficino’s De religione christiana, 37, in which the term ‘by faith alone’ is clearly employed, leading the author to question whether the doctrine might have its roots in Platonic philosophy.29 Ficino is seemingly drawing on Proclus in this passage, rather than Plato, in the former’s reclaiming of faith as one of the fundamental virtues along with truth and love, and allying this with the Aristotelian understanding of faith as pistis, the intuitive (but not rational) apprehension of the ﬁrst principles of a discipline.30 Certainly he seems to be far from any Lutheran understanding of justiﬁcation by faith alone, and Luther himself clearly rejected Platonism in his own approach to salvation.31 Similarly, while the language of a work such as Calvin’s

27

R. W. Battenhouse, ‘The Doctrine of Man in Calvin and in Renaissance Platonism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, IX (1948), 447–71. As testament to his Latin learning, Calvin wrote a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia in 1532: see Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s ‘De Clementia’, ed. and trans. F. L. Battles and A. M. Hugo (Leiden, 1969). 28 See Battenhouse, ‘The Doctrine of Man’, 457–8. 29 ‘Fides, ut vult Aristoteles, est scientie fundamentum, ﬁde sola, ut Platonici probant, ad Deum accedimus’ (Faith, according to Aristotle, is the foundation of knowledge, by faith alone, as the Platonists recommend, we arrive at God): M. Ficino, De religione christiana, et ﬁdei pietate opusculum ([Parrhisiis], [1510]), p. LXro. The passage is cited in abbreviated form in Battenhouse, ‘The Doctrine of Man’, 467–8. 30 Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1997), p. 595 with references. I am very grateful to Dilwyn Knox for his invaluable help in understanding this passage. 31 On Luther’s position, see A. Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. P. S. Watson (New York, 1969).

140

Abigail Brundin

Institutes may have resonated with neo-Platonic ﬂavours, his ofﬁcial position in relation to pagan philosophy, like Luther’s, was condemnatory. Those reformers who were open to the employment of Platonic philosophy in expressing their views on salvation and individual illumination all too often found themselves in opposition to orthodoxy on both sides of the Reformation divide, exciting the condemnation of Protestants and Catholics alike.32 For the purposes of the present argument, however, it is perhaps less important that reformers such as Luther and Calvin held themselves apart from Platonic philosophy, and more signiﬁcant only that in spite of this the language and ﬂavour of that philosophy coloured their works, as scholarship has effectively demonstrated.33 That the individuals who saw neo-Platonic language as an effective means of expressing a reformed spirituality were misunderstanding or muddying the theology that really underpinned the Reformation was perhaps not surprising, in a climate in which theological certainties evaded even those highest placed in the church hierarchies.34 On a literary level, given that Platonic philosophy itself had been bastardised and adapted to suit the requirements of particular literary genres and social groupings, theological clarity becomes even more of a remote possibility. Thus it seems justiﬁable to argue that neo-Platonic modes of thought, in the particular manner in which they found literary expression in this period, could be well suited to the needs of a writer who sought to express her understanding of the new faith, and furthermore, that the Petrarchan genre, built around an aspiration

32

The fate of Michael Servetus (1511–53), the Spanish theologian and physician, is symptomatic: condemned by the Inquisition, he was eventually put to death in Geneva by the Protestant authorities with Calvin’s approval. See R. H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511–1553 (Boston, MA, 1953); E. F. Hirsch, ‘Michael Servetus and the Neoplatonic Tradition: God, Christ and Man’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, XXXXII (1980), 561–75. 33 Meredith Gill has recently argued for the importance of St Augustine as a conduit for Platonic ideas and language in the Renaissance period: M. J. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge, 2005). 34 The uncertainty about the status of sola ﬁde in Italy before the ﬁrst convocation of the Council of Trent is a clear illustration of the extent of this doctrinal ‘zona d’ombra’ in the early years of the sixteenth century. (The phrase belongs to Concetta Ranieri, applied to doctrinal uncertainty in the thought of Vittoria Colonna: C. Ranieri, ‘Vittoria Colonna e la riforma: alcune osservazioni critiche’, Studi latini e italiani, VI (1992), 87–96.) More generally on pre-Tridentine doctrinal ambiguity in Italy, see D. Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento (Florence, 1939), pp. 24–35.

PETRARCH AND THE ITALIAN REFORMATION

141

towards neo-Platonic ascent and illumination, would occupy a primary position in this endeavour.35 One ﬁnal aspect of Petrarchan production must be brought brieﬂy into play before we move on, in the concluding part of this chapter, to examine a small sample of ‘reformed’ lyrics by Colonna, and that is the practice of literary imitatio, underpinning any Petrarchan endeavour but so little understood by subsequent critics of the genre.36 It was of course Bembo who won the day in the period in advocating a rigidly Ciceronian model of imitatio, despite the criticism of worthy opponents such as Castiglione.37 In adopting this approach, in which a ‘divine’ precedent is chosen as the model for all subsequent literary production because it is unsurpassable in its beauty and integrity, Bembo is in line with Petrarch himself, who, as has been argued recently by Dina de Rentiis, draws not only on classical texts but also on the practice of imitatio Christi so successfully disseminated by the Franciscans.38 If we take into account the important presence of an ethical and religious dimension to the practice of imitating literary models that is conferred by imitatio Christi, then the genre of Petrarchism, so wholly faithful to the model of ‘perfect and divine’ vernacular poetic production, is afforded a gravitas that has completely eluded many modern readers. It is notable that the quality of gravitas was one that Bembo sought in particular in the Petrarchism of his contemporaries as the key to the best and most beautiful lyrics, and found in abundance in the work of Vittoria Colonna.39 We should now ﬁnally turn to an illustration of the preceding points through the example of the aforementioned Colonna, the individual who in this period most closely marries her reformed spirituality with her literary enterprise, and produces poetry that encapsulates the mood and concerns of the Italian reform movement in a highly compelling manner.

35

Signiﬁcantly, Petrarch himself was read as a proto-Protestant in sixteenth-century commentaries by Fausto da Longiano, Antonio Brucioli, and Ludovico Castelvetro: see W. J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994), pp. 67–81. 36 See the useful synthesis of previous criticism, including some striking misunderstandings of the practice of imitatio, in Hempfer, ‘Per una deﬁnizione del Petrarchismo’, pp. 23–52. 37 Castiglione’s humorous mocking of Bembo’s position is given in Il cortegiano, book 1, xxvi, in which a fawning courtier imitates King Ferdinand II of Naples’ facial tick without realising that it was caused by illness. 38 See D. de Rentiis, ‘Sul ruolo di Petrarca nella storia dell’imitatio auctorum’, in Blanc (ed.), Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle, pp. 63–74. 39 On Bembo’s judgement of Colonna’s verses as suitably ‘grave’, see C. Dionisotti, ‘Appunti sul Bembo e su Vittoria Colonna’, in Miscellanea Augusto Campana, ed. R. Avesani et al., 2 vols (Padua, 1981), I, 257–86 (pp. 262–5).

142

Abigail Brundin

Colonna’s close involvement with reformers in Naples and Rome, and most crucially her friendship with Reginald Pole and membership of the socalled ecclesia viterbiensis in Viterbo in the early 1540s, have been well established, and her mature poetry and prose both testify clearly to her interest in various of the doctrines of reform, most signiﬁcantly justiﬁcation by faith and predestination.40 In addition, Colonna was one of the most respected and published Petrarchist poets of the sixteenth century. Her work went through numerous editions and she was famed above all for her piety, her devotion in her early verses to the cherished memory of her dead consort, Francesco D’Avalos, and her subsequent composition of ‘sonetti spirituali’ dedicated to Christ, which were advertised on the title pages of the many published editions of her Rime as an important departure for the poet from the more traditional amorous Petrarchan subject matter.41 It is in Colonna’s mature oeuvre that the notion of a reformed Petrarchism ﬁnds its clearest expression and the surprisingly ‘unPetrarchan’ ends to which the genre can be turned are effectively demonstrated. This new direction to her poetry is best illustrated in one particular manuscript that she prepared in around 1540, when she was at the height of her poetic powers and deeply involved with the group of spirituali who gathered around Reginald Pole in Rome and Viterbo. The collection was presented as a personal gift to Colonna’s close friend Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), who was also drawn to the ideas of reform, in a rare instance of the poet sanctioning, and even participating in the dissemination of her verses, albeit to one very speciﬁc (and sympathetic) reader.42 The manuscript is presented as a uniﬁed and authorially controlled canzoniere, in the sense that the arrangement of individual sonnets into a collection has been carefully managed, and the development of the poet’s thought and spirituality is charted in the inch-by-inch progression from poem to poem. The collection conforms to the model described earlier, in that there is no sense of the poet’s desire to escape from the circularity of her sonnet sequence or the ties of an earthly love, but rather 40

For a summary of Colonna’s involvement with reform groups in Italy before Trent, see Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, ed. and trans. A. Brundin (Chicago, IL, 2005), pp. 13–43. 41 Full details of Colonna’s publication history are provided in Vittoria Colonna, Rime, ed. A. Bullock (Rome, 1982), pp. 223–462. 42 Vittoria Colonna only rarely consented to the circulation of her verses, and appears to have sanctioned the presentation of a manuscript containing unpublished sonnets only twice in her lifetime, once to Michelangelo and once to Marguerite de Navarre. On Marguerite’s manuscript, see Brundin, ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary’, Modern Language Review, XCVI (2001), 61–81.

PETRARCH AND THE ITALIAN REFORMATION

143

she addresses from the outset a divine relationship with Christ, and seeks to celebrate her absolute conﬁnement within the dominating ethos of spiritual love.43 There is an abiding sense of cumulative progression towards a better understanding of the nature of this love (as well as a profound realisation of the limits of understanding), as the sonnets circle repeatedly around the crucial question of the adequacy of the poet’s faith and she contemplates the example of various saints who have come closer to Christ than she can hope to.44 Although doubts present themselves constantly, including doubts about the validity of her poetic project as a means of expressing her faith, the ﬁnal sonnet of the collection sees the poet turning directly to God, bypassing all intermediaries and boldly rejecting all doubt in claiming, in a reformed spirit, that he will look to her faith and not her works (the poor and inadequate verses that she writes): Temo che ’l laccio, ov’io molt’anni presi Tenni li spirti, ordisca or la mia rima Sol per usanza, e non per quella prima Cagion d’averli in Dio volti e accesi. Temo che sian lacciuoli intorno tesi Di colui ch’opra mal con sorda lima, E mi faccia parer da falsa stima Utili i giorni forse indarno spesi. Di giovar poca, ma di nocer molta Ragion vi scorgo, ond’io prego ’l mio foco Ch’entro in silenzio il petto abbracci ed arda. Interrotto da duol, dal pianger roco Esser dee il canto vèr colui ch’ascolta Dal cielo, e al cor non a lo stil riguarda. (I am afraid that the knot, with which for many years I have kept my soul bound up, now orders my verses only through long habit, and not for the primary reason that they are turned towards God and inﬂamed by him. I am afraid that they are knots tied tightly by one who works badly with a dull ﬁle, so that, ﬁred with false esteem, I believe

43

A parallel text translation of, and introduction to, Michelangelo’s manuscript gift of sonnets from Colonna is provided in Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo. 44 See, for example, the various sonnets addressed to Saint Francis of Assisi, the Virgin Mary, Saint John the Baptist, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, among others, in Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo.

144

Abigail Brundin that my days are useful when in fact I waste them. I perceive little reason why they should be of use, but much evidence that they do harm, so I pray that this internal ﬁre may embrace and scald my heart in silence. The song I sing to God, who listens from above, should be interrupted by pain and hoarse cries, for he values my heart and not my style.)45

Whilst recognising that on some level the poet’s expressions of doubt in the closing sonnet serve only to reafﬁrm subtly her supreme poetic skill, nonetheless the crucial recognition of God’s attention to the ‘cor’ and not the ‘stil’ is in many ways the key to understanding the rest of this collection of sonnets, encapsulating as it does the freedom from fear and doubt inherent in embracing the doctrine of sola ﬁde. Individual sonnets in the sequence reinforce this reading, testifying clearly to the poet’s sustained interest in reform and revealing the manner in which each Petrarchan sonnet is able to encapsulate a reformed programme, as the brief examination of only two poems will illustrate. ‘Tra gelo e nebbia corro a Dio sovente’ is a poem that clearly demonstrates the inﬂuence of Petrarch’s Rime sparse upon Colonna, and can thus be used to good effect to demonstrate the distance that Colonna has moved in this mature poetry from her poetic source: Tra gelo e nebbia corro a Dio sovente Per foco e lume, ond’i ghiacci disciolti Siano e gli ombrosi veli aperti e tolti Con la divina luce e ﬁamma ardente; E se fredda ed oscura è ancor la mente, Pur son tutti i pensieri al ciel rivolti, E par che dentro in gran silenzio ascolti Un suon che sol ne l’anima si sente, E dice, ‘Non temer, che venne al mondo Giesù, d’eterno ben largo ampio mare, Per far leggiero ogni gravoso pondo; Sempre son l’onde sue più dolci e chiare A chi con humil barca in quel gran fondo De l’alta sua bontà si lascia andare.’ (I often run through cold and mist towards God’s heat and light, which melt away the ice

45 Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo, Sonnet 103, pp. 138–9 (page references encompass both the original version and the facing-page translation).

PETRARCH AND THE ITALIAN REFORMATION

145

and tear apart the shadowy veils through the power of holy light and ardent ﬂames; and if my mind remains chilly and dark, yet all my thoughts are turned to heaven, and deep within myself in a profound silence I seem to hear a sound that can only be heard within my soul, and it tells me, ‘Do not be afraid, for Jesus came into the world, wide and ample sea of eternal good, to relieve us of our heavy burdens; his waves are always smaller and more gentle for those who, in a bark of humility upon the great ocean of his divine grace, freely abandon themselves.’) (Sonnets for Michelangelo, Sonnet 22, pp. 72–5)

The Petrarchan source text is Rime sparse 189, ‘Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio’, Petrarch’s sonnet alluding to the amatory frustrations of the poet that prevent him from reaching port, representing satisfaction or resolution.46 Colonna’s rewriting of this nautical metaphor (which occurs repeatedly in her oeuvre)47 is far more radical than we might at ﬁrst realise, and the key here is found in the ﬁnal lines of her sonnet: ‘con humil barca in quel gran fondo/ de l’alta sua bontà si lascia andare’ (my italics). Christ is the sea upon which the elected soul, certain of the joyful outcome of the act of faith, launches herself with abandon and optimism. The port, towards which Petrarch aspires but that he fails always to reach, has ceased to be signiﬁcant at all in the new reformed context to which Colonna turns the metaphor. The ocean is the poet’s end, and she is happy to drift upon it without direction or aim, guided by Christ’s will. While the clear Petrarchan echo lulls a reader into a sense of security as they recognise the apparent poetic terrain, the poet is in fact able to progress in a quite different direction, subtly and steadily rewriting and overturning her source. This highly evangelical reading is conﬁrmed by an examination of the preceding poem in Michelangelo’s collection, an uplifting and powerful sonnet that reconﬁrms the joyful rewriting of Petrarch in a reformed vein that Colonna performs in her mature poetry: Debile e ’nferma a la salute vera Ricorro, e cieca il sol cui solo adoro

46

Canzoniere, pp. 820–3. It is signiﬁcant that sixteenth-century commentators of Petrarch found in this sonnet a proto-Protestant religious schema: see Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch, p. 133. 47 William Kennedy has looked at the inﬂuence of this Petrarchan source on an earlier, amorous sonnet by Colonna, in Authorizing Petrarch, pp. 131–4.

146

Abigail Brundin Invoco, e nuda bramo il celest’oro E vo al suo foco fredda in pura cera; E quanto in sé disﬁda, tanto spera L’alma in quel d’ogni ben vivo tesoro, Che la può far con largo ampio ristoro Sana, ricca, al suo caldo arder sincera. Onde con questi doni e questo ardire Lo veggia non col mio ma col suo lume, L’ami e ringratii col suo stesso amore. Non saranno alor mie l’opre e ’l desire, Ma lieve andrò con le celesti piume Ove mi spinge e tira il santo ardore. (Weak and inﬁrm I run towards true salvation, and blindly I call out to the sun, which alone of all things I worship, and naked I burn for his heavenly gold and approach his ﬂames fashioned in pure, cold wax; and however much I distrust myself, so much more then does my soul trust in his wondrous gift, which has the great healing power to make me healthy, enriched, and whole in his loving ﬁres. Thus, once armed with these gifts and this burning ardour, I may behold him not through my own powers of vision but through his, and may love and worship him through the power of his love for me. Thus my deeds and my desires will no longer be my own, but lightly I will move upon celestial wings wherever the force of his holy love might ﬂing me. (Sonnets for Michelangelo, Sonnet 21, pp. 72–3)

This sonnet contains a striking reference to the myth of Danae, seduced by Jupiter who descended in a shower of gold.48 Danae’s myth included in this poetic context, as symbolic of chastity and of conception by a virgin through divine intervention, boldly allies the poet with the Virgin Mary as she longs for the spiritually and sensually fulﬁlling intimacy of an experience of Christ.49 Quite unlike anything one might expect from a writer famed for her pious widowhood, she describes herself in an act of abandon, naked and longing for her lord. Once again the key to a reformed reading of the sonnet lies in the poet’s wilful act of selfabandonment in surrendering herself to the will of God, a gesture that is 48

From the Middle Ages, Danae’s myth was interpreted as a preﬁgurement of the Annunciation to Mary: see J. Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, revd edn (London, 1987), p. 90. 49 Colonna frequently uses Mary as a model in her poetry and prose. For a discussion of this, see Brundin, ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary’.

PETRARCH AND THE ITALIAN REFORMATION

147

rendered concrete in the closing tercet: ‘Non saranno alor mie l’opre e ’l desire,/ Ma lieve andrò con le celesti piume/ Ove mi spinge e tira il santo ardore.’ The clear Petrarchan resonance to the ﬁnal line (recalling the antithetical structure of Rime sparse 211, ‘Voglia mi sprona’, in particular) sets up a relationship with the source text which is then complicated by Colonna’s rejection of any trace of Petrarch’s disappointment at the failure to arrive at an end point in her journey, her celebration of her lack of direction highlighted in these closing lines. The use of Danae’s myth adds a further feature to this particular sonnet, in underlining how adept Colonna is at attuning the reformed poetic experience to the particular sensibilities of a woman writer, whose loving and intimate relationship with Christ is well adapted to the Petrarchan context. The overt sensuality of Colonna’s reformed self-abandonment, while theologically entirely appropriate, also suggests the surprising ease with which this particular Lutheran doctrine was able to accommodate the female perspective and the striking ends to which it could be turned. This examination of three of Colonna’s sonnets in the context of her reformed canzoniere for Michelangelo has served, I hope, to illustrate the manner in which the Petrarchan format was ripe for harnessing to the new spirituality, and how successful this marriage between poetry and reform was in Colonna’s mature oeuvre. Despite the private and intimate context of her gift manuscript for Michelangelo, what is more, Colonna’s evangelical Petrarchism does appear to have had a wider reach and appeal beyond the elite circles of reformers in Viterbo and Rome, taking advantage of the reading public’s unquenchable appetite for the genre. In particular, two published editions of an unprecedented commentary on the sonnets, composed by Rinaldo Corso (1525–82) under the patronage of Veronica Gambara and issued in 1543 and 1558, contain this young scholar’s strikingly astute reading of the poems, including his own analysis of their spiritual content from the perspective of an individual who was himself sympathetic to the Reformation.50 Thanks to Corso’s commentary, we can

50 Full publication details of the two editions are: Dichiaratione fatta sopra la Seconda Parte delle Rime della Divina Vittoria Collonna [sic] Marchesana di Pescara: Da Rinaldo Corso [. . .] (Bologna, 1543); Tutte le rime della Illustriss. et Eccellentiss. Signora Vittoria Colonna, Marchesana di Pescara. Con l’espositione del Signor Rinaldo Corso, nuovamente mandato in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli [. . .] (Venice, 1558). For secondary work on the commentary, see M. Bianco, ‘Le due redazioni del commento di Rinaldo Corso alle rime di Vittoria Colonna’, Studi di ﬁlologia italiana, LVI (1998), 271–95; ibid., ‘Rinaldo Corso e il “Canzoniere” di Vittoria Colonna’, Italique, I (1998), 37–45; C. Cinquini, ‘Rinaldo Corso editore e commentatore delle

148

Abigail Brundin

assume that a wide readership, interested in the currents of vernacular literature if not in reform, was made aware of at least some aspects of the sonnets’ particular spiritual content, a hypothesis which is given credence by the fact that in the later, 1558 edition, edited by Girolamo Ruscelli, the commentary has undergone a careful process of censorship in order to expunge all overt references to the context of the pre-Tridentine Italian reform movement.51 What is undeniable is that, in her mature verses, where Petrarchism and reformed spirituality meet and intertwine so fruitfully, Colonna’s poetic voice takes on a resonance that is intensely beautiful and compelling, in a manner that seems to place her apart from her Petrarchist contemporaries in Italy. The sheer volume of editions of her Rime in the sixteenth century (twenty-two in total) testiﬁes to the reading public’s appreciation of her particular lyric voice. The fact that Colonna’s literary model of spiritual Petrarchism spawned an outpouring of spiritual lyrics in the latter part of the sixteenth century, as Amedeo Quondam has demonstrated, provides further testament to her potency as a lyric path-breaker, as well as to the genre’s general adaptability to the religious currents of this particularly turbulent period in Italian history.52

Rime di Vittoria Colonna’, Aevum, LXXIII (1999), 669–96; G. Moro, ‘Le commentaire de Rinaldo Corso sur les Rime de Vittoria Colonna: une encyclopédie pour les “très nobles Dames”’, in Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire, ed. G. Mathieu-Castellani and M. Plaisance (Paris, 1990), pp. 195–202. 51 Details can be found in Bianco, ‘Le due redazioni’. 52 A. Quondam, Il naso di Laura: lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del classicismo (Ferrara, 1991), pp. 263–89.

9

Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno HILARY GATTI

E per mia fede, se io voglio adattarmi a defendere per nobile l’ingegno di quel tosco poeta che si mostrò tanto spasimare alle rive di Sorga per una di Valclusa, e non voglio dire che sia stato un pazzo da catene, donarommi a credere, e forzarommi di persuader ad altri, che lui per non aver ingegno atto a cose megliori, volse studiosamente nodrir quella melancholia, per celebrar non meno il proprio ingegno su quella matassa, con esplicar gli affetti d’un ostinato amor volgare, animale e bestiale, ch’abbiano fatto gli altri ch’han parlato delle lodi della mosca, del scarafone, de l’asino, de Sileno, de Priapo, scimmie de quali son coloro ch’han poetato a’ nostri tempi delle lodi de gli orinali, de la piva, della fava, del letto, delle bugie, del disonore, del forno, del martello, della caristia, de la peste; le quali non meno forse sen denno gir altere e superbe per la celebre bocca de canzonieri suoi, che debbano e possano le prefate et altre dame per gli suoi.1 (And, in truth, if I wish to assume the defence of the noble spirit of that Tuscan poet who displayed so much anguish on the banks of the Sorgue in adoration of a woman from Vaucluse, and if I want to refrain from saying that he was as mad as a hatter, then you must allow me to believe, and oblige me to persuade others, that, because he had no ability to cultivate better things, he wished studiously to nourish such melancholy in order to celebrate his own wit with respect to this quandary. So what he did was to explain the effects caused by an obstinate and vulgar love of an animal and bestial kind, just as others have done by praising ﬂies, beetles, asses, Silenus or Priapus. Slavishly imitating such things, some poets of our own times have sung the praises of urinals, peas, beans, beds, lies, dishonour, the oven, the hammer, famine and plagues. And indeed, perhaps those things have as much right to move proudly and disdainfully through the verses of their celebrated poets as the afore-mentioned and other ladies do in his.)

THESE WORDS ARE FROM one of the ﬁnal pages of Giordano Bruno’s dedicatory letter of his Heroici furori to Sir Philip Sidney. The Furori, comprising a Petrarchan sonnet sequence interspersed with long passages 1 G. Bruno, Opere italiane, ed. G. Aquilecchia and N. Ordine (Turin, 2002), II, 498. For the ‘Argomento del Nolano sopra Gli eroici furori scritto al Molto Illustre Signor Filippo Sidneo’, discussed in the following pages, see II, 487–521.

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 149–160. © The British Academy 2007.

150

Hilary Gatti

of philosophical commentary in prose, was the last of the six dialogues in Italian written by Bruno in London and published by the printer John Charlewood between 1584 and 1585. The words quoted come towards the end of the long and complex dedicatory letter to Sir Philip Sidney.2 This remarkable document is noteworthy for many reasons. Here I am above all concerned with its deﬁnition of a critical stance towards not only Petrarch but also Sidney himself. It has earned Bruno words of harsh criticism, such as those of Thomas P. Roche, Jr, in his chapter on ‘Annotators, Spritualisers, and Giordano Bruno’ in his otherwise useful volume of 1989 on Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences.3 Roche considers Bruno’s letter ‘an act of presumption’, ﬁnding nothing in the Furori to distinguish him from other contributors to the Petrarchan debate which had already developed during the sixteenth century, and even Gordon Braden, in a more recent and far more sympathetic comment on the passage quoted above, considers it ‘rude’.4 Both these judgements ignore the scintillating linguistic construction of the verse and the prose of the Furori, unequalled in virtuosity and brilliance by both the Petrarchan and the anti-Petrarchan poets of his age. As for the conceptual content of Bruno’s work, I argue, on the contrary, that his contribution to the Petrarchan discussion is original for two reasons: ﬁrst, because he brings a long Italian experience of Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan debate to the banks of the River Thames, developing it in terms of a direct confrontation with the principal English Petrarchan poet of his time, Sir Philip Sidney; and, second, because Bruno proposes to maintain the Petrarchan sonnet as a valid form of expression in the early modern world by developing it as a linguistic instrument in philosophical debate. This is coherent with the position already deﬁned by Bruno in one of his earlier Latin works, which claimed that the quests of the artist, the poet, and the philosopher are intimately linked insofar as they are all involved in a unique pursuit of truth: ‘philosophers are in some ways painters and 2

Bruno’s relationship to Sidney and the circle of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, was an important part of his experience in London between the spring of 1583 and the autumn of 1585. The relationship is discussed in G. Aquilecchia, Le opere italiane di Giordano Bruno: critica testuale e oltre (Naples, 1991); M. Ciliberto, ‘L’esperienza inglese’, in Giordano Bruno (Bari–Rome, 1991), pp. 29–195, and the pages on Bruno’s stay in England in S. Ricci, Giordano Bruno nell’Europa del cinquecento (Rome, 2000). For a discussion of this letter, see D. Farley-Hills, ‘The Argomento of Bruno’s De gli eroici furori and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella’, in Modern Language Review, LXXXVII (1992), 1–17. 3 T. P. Roche, Jr, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (Brooklyn, NY, 1989). 4 G. Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven, CT–London, 1999), pp. 102–4.

PETRARCH, SIDNEY, BRUNO

151

poets; poets are painters and philosophers; painters are philosophers and poets. So true poets, true painters, and true philosophers recognise and admire one another’.5 This claim has far-reaching implications: it proposes an important collaboration, rather than a conﬂictual opposition, between imagination and reason, between intuition and logic, between magic and science. In the light of these preliminary considerations, I now return to the quotation with which I started this chapter, in an attempt to understand what Bruno was trying to say about Petrarch. In my opinion, Bruno is saying that there is no essential difference between Petrarch, the Petrarchans, and the sixteenth-century antiPetrarchans: all of whom are in error with respect to the objects praised in their sonnets. All of them are rejected. Bruno’s own strategy is not to deride Petrarch by reducing to its minimal dimensions the physical object of adoration, but rather to adapt the Petrarchan linguistic and metrical code to a far larger subject, which Bruno himself calls ‘the contemplation of divinity’. The dialogue will reveal that by this Bruno means something quite different from a quest for a Christian vision of God, such as that famously proposed to Petrarch’s ghost by the Franciscan friar Hieronimo Malipiero in his Il Petrarca spirituale of 1536.6 It is probable, nevertheless, that Bruno knew Malipiero’s work, of which at least six editions were published before the end of the sixteenth century. In it Malipiero makes a pilgrimage to the tomb of Petrarch in Arquà and in a neighbouring forest meets Petrarch’s ghost, which has remained in the purgatory of a spiritual body because of his ‘youthful error’ in loving Laura. They converse together. Malipiero assures Petrarch that his poetry is fundamentally chaste. Petrarch himself, however, sees his poetry as a confession of the anguished passion of a sinful lover. Malipiero proposes to resolve Petrarch’s dilemma by rewriting his sonnet sequence as virtuous praise of God and the Virgin Mary, so that it will not incite the young to follow in Petrarch’s footsteps. As far as Petrarch himself is concerned, this reformulation of his poetry, according to Malipiero, will act as a liberation from his earthly sins and a support in the journey of his soul towards Paradise and celestial love. During the conversation, in which Petrarch’s ghost approves of Malipiero’s intention of rewriting his poems, he is

5

This claim is put forward in one of Bruno’s earlier Latin works, the Explicatio triginta sigillorum. See Opere latine conscripta, ed. F. Fiorentino et al., 3 vols (Naples–Florence, 1879–91), II, ii, 133. 6 Frate Hieronimo Marepetro [Malipiero] Venetiano del Sacro Ordine de’ Minori, Il Petrarca spirituale (Venice, 1536).

152

Hilary Gatti

informed by Malipiero of the sensual satire of the sixteenth-century Tuscan anti-Petrarchans: Malipiero names no names, but is probably thinking above all of Berni. This reduction of the Petrarchan tradition of Italian love-poetry to what Malipiero calls ‘vain and dishonest praise’, or ‘impudent’ poems of carnal lust, is rejected by Malipiero with pious horror. His own solution of purifying Petrarch from his carnal love is situated at exactly the opposite extreme of the sixteenth-century anti-Petrarchan spectrum. Although using some of Malipiero’s vocabulary, Bruno himself is putting forward something quite different from Malipiero, and indeed from Petrarch himself. He is proposing a philosophical quest for truth within a natural world which, in the ﬁnal canzone of the Furori, will culminate in an ecstatic vision of an inﬁnite universe conceived of in its essential inﬁnity and ordered unity. The Petrarchan sonnet is conserved by Bruno, but only insofar as it is adapted to the deﬁnition of a natural philosophy, becoming, in the process, less of an artiﬁcial mode of expression in which the poet ‘celebrates his own wit’, and more of what Bruno himself calls a ‘true and natural form of discourse’. A major problem raised by this line of approach, which Bruno himself comments on in the ﬁnal part of his letter to Sidney, is whether there is any room left in his neo-Petrarchan work for the presence of the ﬁgure of the woman. Bruno claims at once that the feminine ﬁgure will not be eliminated, although she can only appear in his poetical scheme at two precise levels of expression. Both of them are rigorously distinguished from what Bruno thinks of as Petrarch’s exaggerated attitude of adoration of Laura. One of these levels is what Bruno calls ‘love of an ordinary kind’. Bruno insists that this has nothing to do with a vulgar, venereal exercise in sexual intercourse, which he condemns as a form of ‘disorder’. What he is thinking of is rather an ordinary falling in love, such as he himself had experienced in his youth in his native Nola with his own Laura, who appears brieﬂy at the end of the Furori with the name of Giulia. She seems to have been a cousin; and the dialogue tells us that she repudiated him.7 This, however, as she and her companion Laodomia agree in the ﬁnal lines of the Furori, is not to be thought of as food for tragedy. In spite of the precedent represented by Petrarch and his followers, this unrequited love turns out to have been beneﬁcent. It is what initially set Giulia’s rejected Nolan suitor on his philosophical quest, which throughout the work has been at the centre of 7

The possible family relationship was ﬁrst discussed by Vincenzo Spampanato in his still essential biography, Vita di Giordano Bruno con documenti editi e inediti (Messina, 1921).

PETRARCH, SIDNEY, BRUNO

153

attention in what Bruno evidently thinks of as a new phase in the fortunes of the Petrarchan tradition: the sonnet used as a vehicle for philosophical enquiry and debate. The second level at which the feminine ﬁgure is admitted into Bruno’s neo-Petrarchan discourse is that of myth. Bruno is drawing here on the already well established Renaissance use of classical myth as part of a discourse seen, with clearly Platonic echoes, as a quest for philosophical truth. The mythical ﬁgure who dominates Bruno’s Heroici furori is that of the moon-goddess Diana. In the earlier part of the work she is seen in relation to Actaeon, who stands here for the solitary hunter, or intensely mystical neo-Platonic philosopher. His impetuous intellectual quest for truth permits him to glimpse the goddess in her nakedness, bathing in a pool in the midst of a thickly wooded forest in central Italy, where he is immediately devoured by the hounds of his own thoughts.8 At the end of the work, however, Bruno centres his reader’s attention on a group of nine more tried and experienced philosophers, who, in the course of a long journey through sixteenth-century Europe, have (at the other end of the philosophical spectrum) been blinded by the natural magic of Circe: that is, by their adherence to a crass materialism. They ﬁnally arrive on the banks of the River Thames where they are liberated from their blindness by the chief nymph of the gently ﬂowing river, who is explicitly praised as an English Diana. It is she who pours healing waters on their eyes, initiating them into a vision of the inﬁnite universe which is no longer enervating, no longer an endless wandering through a blind labyrinth (a ‘lungo error in cieco laberinto’, as Petrarch famously expressed his own plight in sonnet 224). Rather, in Bruno, the new experience ushered in by the English Diana is seen as energising. It opens up for the nine philosophers (who are also poets, nine being the number of the muses) an entirely new world composed both of a lower sphere symbolised by Father Ocean and of a higher, celestial sphere, which is that of Jove.9 This composite, inﬁnite, and inﬁnitely vital universe is open both to poetical and musical celebration of its intimate harmonies, magically conceived, and to a more rational or scientiﬁc deﬁnition through a methodical enquiry into the laws which regulate its inﬁnite vicissitudes. This complex image of his 8

A great deal of attention has been dedicated in recent years to Bruno’s use of the Actaeon myth in the Furori. See, for example, the relevant pages in M. Ciliberto, L’occhio di Atteone: nuovi studi su Giordano Bruno (Rome, 2002). 9 On Bruno’s use of apocalyptic imagery in the ﬁnal sequence of the Furori, see H. Gatti, ‘The Sense of an Ending in Giordano Bruno’s Heroici furori’, Nouvelles de la république des lettres, II (2006), 77–90.

154

Hilary Gatti

inﬁnite universe is the subject of the ﬁnal canzone of Bruno’s Furori, which he calls the Song of the Enlightened (La canzone degli illuminati). It is clearly an act of homage to England’s Virgin Queen, written in contrast to Petrarch’s ﬁnal canzone which resolves his long years of despair caused by his all too human love for Laura by celebrating a now purely spiritual love for the Virgin Mary. On the contrary, in Bruno’s Heroici furori, history, both natural and political, is never abandoned for a celestial realm beyond this world. Rather, an inﬁnite universe, thought of as the habitat of an immanent divinity, becomes the proper object of Bruno’s philosophical quest for truth. The earthly realm reﬂects the celestial, absorbing within itself both its inﬁnity and its spiritual potencies. It is the English Diana who grants the nine philosophers this vision of the ‘sommo bene in terra’ (the greatest good on earth). So we may say that Bruno, at a very early stage, understood and appreciated the British empirical mode.10 Sidney too elaborates his Petrarchan sonnet sequence in a strictly terrestial dimension, refusing, in a clearly Protestant stand, to follow Petrarch in his ﬁnal metamorphosis of his earthly Madonna into a heavenly one. Nevertheless, Bruno’s ﬁnal joyous Song of the Enlightened can be equally well contrasted to the English nobleman’s ﬁnal sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, with its leaden sorrow, its ‘most rude dispaire’, its lament for the physical ‘annoy’ which no prayers sufﬁce to eliminate, thus forbidding the poet to enjoy undisturbed the illuminating vision of Stella’s perfect beauty.11 Bruno’s strategy in the ﬁnal pages of the Dedicatory Letter of the Heroici furori thus becomes clear. Sidney, no less than Petrarch, is evidently being chided for having adored in his sonnet sequence a mere woman such as Stella, or Penelope Rich, rather than the true Astraea or mythical English Diana, to whom Bruno thus pays his political as well as philosophical homage.12 Yet, precisely because this letter culminates in such fulsome praise of Sidney’s own queen, of which he was one of the principal and most celebrated courtiers, he could hardly have refused to associate himself with Bruno’s neo-Petrarchan work. It should not be forgotten that Bruno covered in London a diplomatic posi10

On this subject, see H. Gatti, ‘Bruno and the Protestant Ethic’, in Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance, ed. H. Gatti (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 145–66. 11 For the sonnets from Astrophil to Stella, see Sir Philip Sidney, Poems, ed. W. A. Ringler, Jr (Oxford, 1962). 12 For the mythical images which surrounded the ﬁgure of Queen Elizabeth I, and especially that of Astraea, see F. Yates, ‘Queen Elizabeth as Astraea’, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, X (1947), 27–82, now in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975).

PETRARCH, SIDNEY, BRUNO

155

tion as a gentleman attendant to the French ambassador, Mauvissière, which took him frequently to the English court. He was by no means the obscure upstart which English and American commentators so often depict him as. Furthermore, his printer, John Charlewood, is known to have had close ties with Sidney and his circle.13 It is unthinkable that Sidney should not have known about, and allowed, Bruno’s dedication; although whether he actually read it is perhaps another matter. French inﬂuences are clearly at play in Bruno’s considerations concerning both Petrarch and Sidney, as well as Italian ones. Bruno had arrived directly in London from Paris, where he had moved in the courtly circles surrounding Henri III, and would surely have known and read the poets of the Pléiade. Ronsard, it may be remembered, died in 1585, the year of publication of the Heroici furori. His beautiful Sonnets pour Hélène, ﬁrst published in 1578, are more faithful than Bruno is to the Petrarchan ending by dissolving the physical object of adoration into a vision of a heavenly fountain of Christian truth.14 Nevertheless, they may well have inﬂuenced Bruno in his ﬁnal multiplication of the lovers from one into many, as well as in the introduction of a courtly element by appealing to a princely sponsor of his ultimate spiritual apeotheosis: in Ronsard’s case, the militantly Catholic King Charles IX of France. Charles IX had died in 1574 after authorising the anti-Protestant massacres of Saint Bartholomew’s night together with his mother, Caterina de’ Medici. Bruno’s portrayal of the moderately Protestant Elizabeth as his spiritual sponsor must surely have been made as a conscious choice against the orthodox Catholic resolutions of their sonnet sequences by both Petrarch and Ronsard. The dedication of the Furori to Sir Philip Sidney would be consistent with such a choice. It is not, however, the historical–religious implications of Elizabeth I’s presence as the presiding spirit over the ending of Bruno’s Furori that I wish to enquire into here. Nor do I intend to look further into the French inﬂuence on Bruno’s reference to the Petrarchan tradition, although it is probable that he knew, besides Ronsard’s sonnets, also Du Bellay’s Olive (1549–50), which has some interesting cosmological imagery in it. Nor shall I comment any further on Bruno’s lively spirit of anti-Petrarchism. 13

On this subject, see T. Provvidera, ‘John Charlewood, Printer of Giordano Bruno’s Italian Dialogues, and his Book Production’, in Gatti (ed.), Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance, pp. 167–86. 14 On the sixteenth-century French Petrarchans, see L. Sozzi, ‘Presenza del Petrarca nella Letteratura Francese’, in Petrarca e la cultura europea, ed. L. Rotondi Secchi Tarugi (Milan, 1997), pp. 243–62.

156

Hilary Gatti

Rather, what I wish to underline in the concluding remarks of my contribution is Bruno’s ultimate faithfulness to the Petrarchan poetical code. For, when all is said and done, the Heroici furori remains, formally, a Petrarchan sonnet sequence which, in its way, does ‘assume the defence’ of the Tuscan poet by reproposing his metrical mode of expression in Italian as a valid linguistic tool for philosophical enquiry within the early modern world. It is true that in order to do this (in order to direct his poetical discourse to this end) Bruno feels the need to call on numerous external forms of support: the more metaphysical sonnets of Luigi Tansillo, who ﬁgures as one of the speakers in his dialogue, the poetical jokes of the modern strambottisti such as Seraﬁno, the Renaissance emblem books which are used as sources for highly wrought imagery in certain parts of the Furori, the Biblical Song of Songs which was such a favourite source for the Renaissance theorists of love.15 All these, as well as other more or less important ﬁgures, whom Bruno calls to his aid, have been the subject of recent study; so that it can now be claimed that the extraordinary complexity of Bruno’s text, at the poetical and linguistic as well as the conceptual level, is satisfactorily established.16 What remains surprising (in spite of a now classic essay by Frances Yates ﬁrst published in 1943) is how little attention has been paid to his use of Petrarch as his ultimate source, and to his sonnets as deriving directly from the Canzoniere.17 In my remaining remarks, I attempt to remedy this situation by comparing Petrarch’s sonnet 19 with the penultimate sonnet of Dialogue I, Part I, of the Heroici furori, extending the comment brieﬂy to include a reference to Sidney’s ﬁnal sonnet in Astrophil and Stella. This particular sonnet of Bruno has been chosen because in the Metrical Table included in the recent edition of Bruno’s Opere italiane, edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia and Nuccio Ordine, it appears as the only strictly regular Petrarchan sonnet in the Furori, assuming as regular Petrarch’s favourite rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDE CDE.18 The few 15

On these subjects, see I. Rowland, ‘Giordano Bruno and Vernacular Poetry’ in Bruniana & Campanelliana, IX:1 (2003), 141–55, and ‘Giordano Bruno e Luigi Tansillo’, in Bruniana & Campanelliana, IX:2 (2003), 345–55; A. Maggi, ‘L’uomo astratto: Filosoﬁa e retorica emblematica negli Eroici furori’, in Bruniana & Campanelliana, IX:2 (2003), 319–44; and, for the Song of Songs, the ‘Introduzione’ in Gli eroici furori, ed. N. Tirinnanzi (Milan, 1999). 16 A major study of the theoretical sources of the Furori remains J. C. Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s Heroici furori (New York–London, 1958). 17 See F. Yates, ‘The Emblematic Conceit in Giordano Bruno’s De gli eroici furori and in the Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences’, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VI (1943), 81–101. 18 The ‘Tavola metrica’, prepared by Zaira Sorrenti, is in Bruno, Opere italiane, II, 777–81.

PETRARCH, SIDNEY, BRUNO

157

pages dedicated by Pasquale Sabbatino, and later by Aquilecchia himself, to Bruno’s metrical schemes have demonstrated the remarkable poetical self-consciousness with which he experiments in anomalous sonnet forms; so that when he produces just one entirely regular sonnet it can surely be assumed that he does so deliberately.19 That this sonnet was an important one for Bruno is further demonstrated by the fact that he had already used it, albeit with some minor differences, as the introductory poem to the most metaphysical of his Italian dialogues in prose, the De la causa, principio et uno:20 Amor per cui tant’alto il ver discerno, ch’apre le porte di diamante nere, per gli occhi entra il mio nume, e per vedere nasce, vive, si nutre, ha regno eterno; fa scorger quant’ha ’l ciel, terr’, et inferno; fa presenti d’absenti efﬁgie vere, repiglia forze, e col trar diritto, fere; e impiaga sempr’ il cor, scopre l’interno. O dumque volgo vile, al vero attendi, porgi l’orecchio al mio dir non fallace, apri, apri, se puoi, gli occhi, insano e bieco: fanciullo il credi perché poco intendi, perché ratto ti cangi ei par fugace, per esser orbo tu lo chiami cieco.21 (A) Love, which bids me see the truth on high (B) Opens doors of black diamond, making them bright, (B) Through my eyes it enters my mind, and by sight, (A) Is born, lives, eats: its kingdom is ever nigh. (A) It shows me the earth and hell, and the sky; (B) True images gives of things absent from sight, (B) Gathers strength, and gains ever in might, (A) Wounding the heart, where the inmost thoughts do lie. (C) Lend your ears to these truths, you ignorant crowd, (D) And mind the not unworthy things I say, (E) Open your eyes, obtuse and foolish, with all your kind.

19

P. Sabbatino, Giordano Bruno e la ‘mutazione’ del Rinascimento (Florence, 1993), pp. 94–104; and G. Aquilecchia, ‘Sonetti bruniani e sonetti elisabettiani (per una comparazione metricotematica)’, in Filologia antica e moderna, XI (1996), 27–34. 20 For a recent English translation of this work, see Cause, Principle and Unity and Texts on Magic, ed. R. J. Blackwell (Cambridge, 1998). 21 For this sonnet, see Bruno, Opere italiane, II, 539.

158

Hilary Gatti (C) You think love a boy because you’re ignorant and proud, (D) You ﬁnd him inconstant because you change each day, (E) Because you yourselves cannot see, you call him blind.22

Not surprisingly, Bruno’s regular sonnet takes the form of an orthodox Petrarchan exhortation to the classical ﬁgure of Love as Cupid. Its regularity appears strictly related to the fact that Bruno’s Cupid has nothing to do with love of any Laura, but only with a philosophical love of truth. It is the philosopher’s attempt to raise his mind to a higher level of truth than a purely animal one that opens for him, with Cupid’s aid, the doors of black diamond which had previously impeded his vision, allowing his intellect to expand into new regions of both external and internal experience. In the ﬁnal sestet, the poet turns from his celebration of philosophical truth to expostulate with the reader, who traditionally blames Cupid for all his ills. On the contrary, according to Bruno’s poem, the reader’s blindness is his own fault; for Cupid would become his ally if only his mind were directed towards love of the highest kind: which for Bruno means a philosophical search for truth. If we compare Bruno’s sonnet to no. 19 in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, we ﬁnd that it too is concerned with an attempt to move beyond a purely animal vision of truth, which the poem proposes to achieve in its adoration of the lady: Son animali al mondo de sì altera vista che ’ncontra ’l sol pur si difende; altri, però che ’l gran lume gli offende, non escon fuor se non verso la sera; et altri, col desio folle che spera gioir forse nel foco, perché splende, provan l’altra vertù, quella che ’ncende: lasso, e ’l mio loco è ’n questa ultima schera. Ch’i’ non son forte ad aspectar la luce di questa donna, et non so fare schermi di luoghi tenebrosi, o d’ore tarde: però con gli occhi lagrimosi e ’nfermi mio destino a vederla mi conduce; et so ben ch’i’ vo dietro a quel che m’arde.23

22

The translations of this sonnet and, further down, of Petrarch’s sonnet 19 are mine, made in an attempt to keep to the original rhyme schemes. 23 Petrarch’s sonnet is in Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. M. Santagata (Milan, 2004), p. 79.

PETRARCH, SIDNEY, BRUNO

159

(A) There are beasts in this world with powerful sight, (B) Whose gaze can meet the sun. (B) Others go out when the day is done, (A) For their eyes are wounded by the light; (A) Others again, with a fool’s delight, (B) Wish to bask in the ﬁre and burn; (B) And I, alas, of these am one, (A) Drawn by the power which sets alight. (C) I am not strong enough to gaze (D) On this woman’s light, nor know how to use (E) The cooling shade, or the hours of night. (D) So now my eyes with tears do ooze. (C) My desire to see her will never wane, (E) But draws me into the ﬂames so bright.

The image of the truth which the lady represents here is expressed in terms which will later on be used for the image of the highest truth by Bruno: a liberating and splendid light. The problem Petrarch’s sonnet poses is that the poet’s physicality makes him too weak to allow him to approach unwounded such a pure and ethereal ﬁre, and so he ﬁnally envisages himself as tearfully following a lady whose unsullied splendour can only destroy him. Petrarch’s sonnet is slightly irregular in the rhyme scheme of the ﬁnal sestet: CDE DCE rather than CDE CDE. The effect produced is that of a sob, which is actually the ﬁnal image conjured up by the poem. It is precisely that sob which Bruno’s sonnet aims at eliminating, both metrically and conceptually: Bruno’s sonnet, placed near the end of the ﬁrst dialogue of the Furori, thus announces the theme of the work, and the sense of its joyous ending in the illuminating vision of his inﬁnite universe, conceived of as the ultimate good on earth. Sidney, on the other hand, tends to exasperate Petrarch’s tragic vision in sonnet 19, even in his ending. He uses almost the same image as Bruno for the impediment to his vision, although his are iron doors rather than black diamond ones: the image is in any case of Petrarchan origin: When sorrow (using mine owne ﬁers might) Melts down his lead into my boyling breast, Through that darke fornace to my hart opprest, There shines a joy from thee my onely light; But soone as thought of thee breeds my delight, And my young soule ﬂutters to thee his nest, Most rude dispaire, my daily unbidden guest, Clips streight my wings, streight wraps me in his night,

160

Hilary Gatti And makes me then bow downe my head, and say, Ah what doth Phoebus gold that wretch availe, Whom iron doores do keepe from use of day? So strangely (alas) thy works in me prevaile, That in my woes for thee thou art my joy, And in my joyes for thee my only annoy.

As in both Petrarch and Bruno, the closed doors must be opened if Phoebus’ golden light is to penetrate his heart. But, in the Protestant Sidney, that remains an impossibility up to the end, and the whole poem—indeed the whole collection of Astrophil’s sonnets to Stella — bears down on that ﬁnal word of his volume, the physical weakness or ‘annoy’ which impedes his ﬁnal joy. The emphatic rhythmical irregularity of Sidney’s last line (‘And in my joyes for thee my only annoy’) indicates how self-consciously he too was referring to Petrarch as his model. So, although there are anti-Petrarchan elements in both Sidney and Bruno, it would be an over-simpliﬁcation to enclose the Petrarch–Sidney–Bruno connection I have been following in this chapter entirely within the schemes of sixteenth-century anti-Petrarchism. What both Sidney and Bruno are doing, but perhaps Bruno in particular, is to propose the Petrarchan sonnet as a still valid form of expression in the early modern world. For Sidney it can narrate a more dramatically realistic and naturalistic love-story. For Bruno it can do more than that: it can transmute the idea of love into a search for order and truth within a post-Copernican, inﬁnite universe, making the rigorous linguistic discipline of metrical order and form into a form of philosophical discourse. Bruno’s proposal of a natural philosophy written in songs and sonnets is not one which many modern philosophers have taken up. But then few philosophers have been poets of the calibre of Giordano Bruno. Note. The original draft of this chapter was read again as a lecture in the Italian Department of the University of Yale on 17 February 2005, and has greatly beneﬁted from discussion on that occasion. I am grateful to Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta for the invitation to lecture at Yale.

10

Renaissance Misogyny and the Rejection of Petrarch DIEGO ZANCANI

FOR A PERIOD AFTER PETRARCH’S DEATH it seemed inconceivable for anybody to use the words of the Master in any other way than to celebrate his glory, to imitate his style, his vocabulary, to admire his rareﬁed world, with its apparent torment, which may be deeply felt but which must also have appeared, to a large number of readers, rather superﬁcial, abstract, difﬁcult to believe — in one word, remote — and largely modelled on classical sources. And yet for quite a long period Petrarch’s vocabulary from the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta supplies the words for rejected lovers, for the writing of sonnets, and for passionate or tender expressions in most of the discourses involving lyric poetry as well as occasional prose. In what follows I investigate some aspects of a reaction against the Petrarchan poetic clichés, especially in the late ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries among Italian writers, but with some reference to a few English Elizabethan texts. It is my intention to show how a model which depicts an idealised view of one woman, representing an unattainable but constantly yearned for object, and which underlines an orderly, almost religious, approach to literature, can be used to create a negative, basically chaotic, and even scurrilous image, in a period in which parody and mocking texts abound.1

1

In a recent novel entitled L’amore in sé (Parma, 2006) by Marco Santagata, the editor of the recent edition of the Canzoniere (Milan, 1996), the notion that Laura is the name given by Petrarch to desire itself is clearly expressed: ‘Laura è il nome che Petrarca dà al desiderio’ (p. 32). For further discussion of ‘desire’ in medieval literature and especially in Dante, see L. Pertile, La punta del disio: semantica del desiderio nella Commedia (Fiesole, 2005), and, on Petrarch, A. Noferi, ‘Il Canzoniere del Petrarca: scrittura del desiderio e desiderio della scrittura’, in Il gioco delle tracce (Florence, 1979), pp. 43–67, with reference to an epistle written by Petrarch to the bishop of Lombez, Giacomo Colonna (Familiares 2. 9).

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 161–175. © The British Academy 2007.

162

Diego Zancani

At the time when the Ciceronian concept of imitatio seemed at its peak,2 we encounter the ﬁrst dissenting voices, who show impatience at dealing with an enclosed and conﬁned poetic world in which words and concepts are limited. It is no exaggeration to maintain that a number of writers felt imprisoned in the peremptory dictates of the arbiter of linguistic and literary taste, and this feeling fostered a desire for rebellion and liberation. The seriousness of Petrarch, and the fact, noted by a twentiethcentury poet like Vittorio Sereni, that there is not in the whole Canzoniere one single line of real love poetry, the equivalent of that uttered by Dante’s Francesca (Inferno 5. 136), ‘La bocca mi basciò tutto tremante’ (he kissed my mouth all trembling),3 gives way, in some quarters, to parody, and sometimes to open antagonism to Petrarch’s toned-down forms of expression, and maybe to his superior sense of control over his poetic and linguistic matter, which is by now seen as an extenuated and otherworldly exercise.4 The point is, as Contini stated, that the vernacular, for Petrarch, cannot have any practical use;5 apart from the Canzoniere and Trionﬁ he may have written a short letter in Italian, but everything else of a practical nature or involving philosophical discussion or literary experimentation he wrote in Latin. While it is customary to say that Dante thought in Italian tercets, one might assume that Petrarch actually thought in Latin. But if we limit ourselves to the RVF, we ﬁnd that, unlike Horace and Ovid, who praised several women, usually different courtesans, Petrarch’s apparent devotion to only one woman is absolute: as there is one God there can be only one Laura, and one language in which to praise her. This seems too 2 M. L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford, 1995), p. 277: ‘The stylistic eclecticism typical of late Quattrocento Latin is paralleled both by Poliziano’s vernacular poetry and by the more extreme, Apuleian prose of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499); yet both trends are cut short by the triumph of Ciceronianism and Petrarchism in the early decades of the sixteenth century. No doubt Ciceronianism and Petrarchism emerged victorious partly because they responded to a need for order amidst the confused voices of Italian literature and the chaos wreaked by the invading armies from 1494 to 1527.’ See also W. T. Elwert, ‘Il petrarchismo cinquecentesco e la poesia latina degli umanisti’ and ‘Il Bembo imitatore’, in his Sprachwissenschaftliches und Literarhistorisches (Wiesbaden, 1979), pp. 15–54. 3 V. Sereni, ‘Petrarca, nella sua ﬁnzione la sua verità’, in Sentieri di gloria: note e ragionamenti sulla letteratura, ed. G. Strazzeri (Milan, 1996), pp. 127–46: ‘non c’è, in tutto il lungo Canzoniere, un verso, uno solo, che possa propriamente dirsi d’amore’ (p. 138), after quoting Umberto Saba’s statement that Laura, for the deep (childish) soul of the poet ‘was his mother’; she ‘was the woman that one cannot have’. 4 One of the sharpest analyses of Petrarch’s language was conducted by G. Contini, ‘Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca’, and was published as a preface to the Canzoniere (Turin, 1964), pp. xxvii–xxxviii. 5 Contini, ‘Preliminari’, p. xxxii.

RENAISSANCE MISOGYNY AND REJECTION OF PETRARCH

163

much in some quarters of literature, especially in the sixteenth century. Niccolò Franco, the ﬂamboyant polymath from Naples, in his Petrarchista (c. 1539) will go as far as to claim that Petrarch, according to a hoard of new documents (obviously invented), wrote different versions of his best known sonnets, and that the ‘original’ version of ‘Benedetto sia ’l giorno, e ’l mese et l’anno’ (Blessed be the day, the month and year) (RVF 61), was in fact ‘Maledetto sia ’l giorno [. . .]’. He also claims, in a more blasphemous vein, that the beginning of RVF 240, ‘I’ ho pregato Amor, e ’l ne riprego’ (I prayed Love and I pray him again), was, before it was erased, ‘Io n’ho ’ncacato amore, e gliene incaco’ (I’ve given Love a shit, and I still do), with a sense of otherworldly scatology,6 and adds a tone of frivolous comicity to the beginning of RVF 2, ‘Per fare una leggiadra sua vendetta’ ([Love] to carry out a dainty vengeance), which purportedly used to be ‘Per farmi amor nel buco una borsetta’ ([Love] to give me a blister in my hole),7 and to the scurrilous mutation of the famous canzone ‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’ (RVF 129) into ‘Di bordell’in bordel, di chiasso in chiasso,/ mi guida amor’ (Love leads me from brothel to brothel, from bawdy-house to bawdy-house).8 Franco, apart from reinventing the biography of the Tuscan poet, also adds that Petrarch wrote a letter to Boccaccio in praise of the latter’s violently misogynous, and extremely inﬂuential, work known as Laberinto d’amore or Corbaccio, in which he inveighs against his woman, in an attempt to prove that all that Petrarch said cannot be taken at face value, and that in fact he had a misogynous attitude, at least secretly.9 Quite different is the opinion of one of the most reﬁned critics of the early sixteenth century, Vincenzo Colli, better known as Il Calmeta: Il Petrarca, mirabile negli amorosi affetti, poi la morte della sua tanto diletta Laura, avengaché egli fosse d’anni grave, non cessò sua ardente affezione d’amore in versi esprimere. Ma perché lo stile alla età corrispondesse, non lo vedrai piangere effeminato né con mollicie, anzi tra quelli amorosi affetti tanta moralità e gravità inserisce, or biasimando la velocità del tempo, ora riprendendo se stesso de’ giovenili errori, che per uno specchio e ammaestramento della vita nostra si può tenere. Onde meritamente in quel sonetto che comincia

6

A short poem by Francesco Berni also begins ‘Amor, io te ne incaco’; see F. Berni, Rime burlesche, ed. G. Barberi Squarotti (Milan, 1991), p. 94. 7 John Florio translates borsetta as ‘a little purse. Also a bladder or blister. Also a glister.’ 8 John Florio, in his 1598 Italian–English Dictionary translates incacare ‘to beshite, to becacke. Also to bid a turd for one, to scorne.’ And chiasso which normally refers to a ‘narrow lane’ is, according to Florio, ‘Also a brothel or bawdie house.’ 9 N. Franco, Il Petrarchista [1539], ed. R. L. Bruni (Exeter, 1979), pp. 69–71.

164

Diego Zancani Mentre che ‘l cor da gli amorosi vermi [RVF 304], lo appella stile canuto, imperocché dilettazione e frutto ad un tratto se ne prende. E però facetamente suol dire Agapito Gerardino non essere stato mai poeta alcuno che abbia avuto ardir di castrare amore e farlo pudico se non Francesco Petrarca, tanto nelle amorose sue composizioni la modestia e la moralità con gli ardenti sospiri ha saputo mescolare. (Petrarch, wonderful in his love, after the death of his beloved Laura, although he was fairly old, never ceased to express his ardent love in verse. But in order that his style could suit his age, one will never see him cry in an effeminate or soft way; in fact he inserts so much gravitas and moral sense into his expressions of love, at times blaming the passing of time, at others rebuking himself for his youthful mistakes, that he can be considered as a mirror and a teacher for our lives. He rightly calls his style a ‘white-haired style’ in the sonnet beginning ‘While the heart [was consumed] by amorous worms’, since one draws both pleasure and fruit from it. And thus, jokingly, Agapito Gerardino used to say that there never was a poet bold enough to castrate Love and make him chaste except Francesco Petrarca, such is his skill in his love poetry in mixing modesty and morals with ardent sighs.) 10

It is of course true that in Petrarch’s Latin works, and particularly in De Remediis Utriusque Fortune, we ﬁnd numerous explicitly misogynous statements, which are part and parcel of Petrarch’s classical heritage (Juvenal, Seneca) and a witness to his reading of the Church Fathers and the medieval misogynistic tradition.11 Most such statements are really not much different from those propagated by Secundus of Athens: essentially they can be reduced to a praise of celibacy, and to a reiteration of the numerous and multifarious defects of women.12 None of these sentiments transpires in the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. But even earlier, towards the end of the ﬁfteenth century, among the ﬁrst poets to imitate Petrarch in an idiosyncratic vein, we can place, at least in Italy, the ‘bizarre wit’, as he was deﬁned by Francesco Berni, of Antonio Pistoia, traditionally believed to belong to a Cammelli family from Pistoia, who was employed as a tax collector in the states of the Este family, and who wrote a large collection of sonnets, the opening one dedi10 V. Calmeta, Prose e lettere edite e inedite, ed. C. Grayson (Bologna, 1959), pp. 33–4 (my translation). 11 L. Panizza, ‘Stoic Psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrarch’s De remediis’, in Atoms, ‘Pneuma’, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. M. Osler (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 39–65. 12 P. E. Perry, Secundus the Silent Philosopher (Ithaca, NY, 1964). The maxims derived from Secundus, who lived in the second century AD, can be found in numerous manuscripts throughout the ﬁfteenth century and they seem to be, among other canonical texts, such as those deriving from Aristotle and the Bible, at the basis of medieval misogyny.

RENAISSANCE MISOGYNY AND REJECTION OF PETRARCH

165

cated to ‘Madonna’, that is Isabella D’Este Gonzaga, probably in 1501 or 1502. The text of the sonetto caudato is as follows: Madonna poiché dal regno di Pluto Ritornò il spirito alla terrestre spoglia Ben che osservar quel ch’io prometto soglia Pur vo’ ubidir quanto in precetto ho avuto. E già serei al ﬁn, ma son tenuto Da una dignità contra mia voglia, La qual possedo cum sì extrema doglia, che fa s’io vo che ’l par ch’io sia venuto. Onde usarò quanto in me resta forza, che sol per questo la mia debil vita ritien di vivo la bollata scorza. E se quel masso bel di marcasita Che a partirmi di qua spesso mi sforza Per me non si tramuti in calamita, Forse verde e ﬁorita harai da me prima che maggio nasca Rinchiusa fra due asse ogni mia frasca. (My Lady, since the spirit returned from Pluto’s kingdom, and I am used to keep my word, I want to fulﬁl what I have been asked.// And I would be at the end, but I am kept, by some dignity against my will, which I hang on to with such extreme suffering, which makes it so that even if I’m going it looks as if I’ve come.// Therefore I shall use the strength I’ve left, since this is the only reason why my weak life keeps my plagued husk alive.// And if that boulder of marcasite which makes me move from here quite often does not become a magnet, maybe you’ll have from me, green and full of ﬂowers, before the month of May, all my boughs and branches shut up in a box.)

The tone here is deliberately non-Petrarchan. It is matter of fact; it avoids words which are immediately recognisable; there is no ‘sweetness’ or ‘smoothness’, on the contrary, harshness, unpleasantness, and eventually death are actually emphasised. But, if the tone is deliberately different from much of Petrarch’s, the vocabulary is not far from the distant model. Onde is frequently used by Petrarch at the beginning of a line, and although the phrase debil vita does not appear in the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, the adjective debil is fairly frequently employed, not to mention vita, which appears 141 times in the RVF. Virtually all the words in rhyming position have an equivalent in Petrarch ( forza is used forty-six times, and scorza six times). Some of them, like the ones in -oglia are

166

Diego Zancani

quite frequent, voglia and doglia twenty-three and twenty-one times, respectively. The only exception, the technical term for the mineral marcasita, rhymes with a Petrarchan word like calamita. Which means that the imitation of the model is present even when the poet intends to be seen, superﬁcially, as anti-Petrarchan. Even more markedly Petrarchan in inspiration, certainly not in tone, the second sonnet of Pistoia’s Canzoniere which also uses a considerable amount of vocabulary from the model (lauro is used thirty times in the RVF; acqua, fonte, pura, assentio, palma are all there), deliberately includes words not used in the RVF, such as falcon, giardino, rosmarino, ortica. The beginning of this sonetto caudato is a parodic take on the opening of the youthful canzone, RVF 23. 1, ‘Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade’: Nel tempo che ’l cervel regna in verdura E il miglior pasto al falcon peregrino, Termino, pianto, incalmo un mio giardino Cinto intorno di frasche e non di mura. Piantol di frutti che po’ dar natura: Nel mezzo il moro alla palma vicino, Salvia ci metto assentio e rosmarino Poi sotto il lauro un fonte d’acqua pura. A nome di qualcuno ogni herba pianto Chi crede che per lui sia qua l’ortica Lascila stare, o s’armi ben d’un guanto. Tolga la rosa ognun per men fatica E poi lasciata la spina da canto L’herba che pare al gusto suo più amica. Qui serà d’ogni spica Pur se alcun ci vedesse del suo grano, Diami una accusa e tenghi a sè la mano. (In the time that my brains are reigning in their greenery they are the best meal to a peregrine falcon; I lay out, plant and graft my garden surrounded all around by leaves13 and not by walls.// I plant all sorts of fruit that nature gives us: mulberry in the middle next to the palm, and I put sage, absinthe and rosemary, then under the bay tree a fountain with pure water.// I plant some herbs in the name of some people; those who believe that nettle is here for them, leave it alone, or get yourself a glove.// 13

‘Frasche’ also means ‘whims’, but it is difﬁcult to render the pun in English. John Florio, s.v. ‘frasca’, gives: ‘a twig, a bough, a sprig or bush, [. . .] also a knavish way, a knave, a craftie lad’.

RENAISSANCE MISOGYNY AND REJECTION OF PETRARCH

167

Let everybody pick the rose which is less work, and then leaving the thorn aside, let them pick the herb which seems to suit them most.// Here there will be all sorts of ears of corn, and if anybody saw some of his wheat, they can accuse me, but must keep their hands off me.)

The garden-Canzoniere is surrounded by unusual twigs, that is jokes and nonsense, the poet is bent on borrowing motifs from others, but also possibly writing on commission, and especially sonnets which are pungent, satirical, and biting or stinging, like the rose, which is however ambiguous, as the ﬂower is usually connected with female beauty, or with virginity. Antonio Pistoia included twelve poems against women in his own Canzoniere, and his attitude can be described as an ambiguous mixture of aggressive derision and light-hearted mocking. The sonnets are fashioned around well established tropes of the anti-female tradition: the alleged vanity of women, their affected manners and haughtiness, hypocrisy, greed, and lust. However, Pistoia’s poetry is far from having the full features of the misogynous vituperium. His sonnets are a far cry from the powerful invectives based on the alleged inferiority of women, ﬁrst mentioned by Aristotle, sanctioned by the Bible, and which found its most congenial authors in Juvenal, Tertullian, St Jerome, and in the Noie (based on the Provençal enueg) by the thirteenth-century vernacular poet from Cremona Gerard Pateg, as well as the anonymous Proverbia quae dicuntur super naturam feminarum, and, in the fourteenth century, in Boccaccio, Antonio Pucci, and others. Antonio Pistoia’s verse contains no phrase or image of the same intensity as those of Francesco Scambrilla, Giovanni Matteo di Meglio, and others;14 he does not savagely attack women and his jeering is more satirical than abusive.15 He simply uses Petrarch as a distant starting point, but does not attempt to destroy his model. This was carried out, in a more scurrilous way in an anonymous ﬁfteenth-century work, by a Francesco, possibly of the Lombard family Mangano, generally entitled Manganus or Il Manganello, with an obvious reference to the offensive weapon of the same name, mangle (catapult). The main point of this anti-feminist tirade, a copy of which is found 14

Works by Scambrilla and Giovanni Matteo di Meglio have been edited by A. Lanza, Lirici toscani del Quattrocento (Rome, 1975). As an example of the anti-feminist sonnets by di Meglio, the following (from www.bibliotecaitaliana.it) are particularly signiﬁcant: Vecchia azzimata, ricardata e vizza, O scalandrona, stregonizza errante, E corpi femminin son tutti chiocci, O falsa ladra, traditrice strana (nos 2, 4, 5, and 17 respectively). 15 See V. Olivastri, ‘Antonio Pistoia: The Poetic World of a Customs Collector’, Ph.D. thesis (University College London, 1999), pp. 254–5.

168

Diego Zancani

among the books owned by Leonardo da Vinci,16 is the blasphemous idea that God made a mistake in producing human beings through women; it would have been better for them to be born like fruit: ‘in arboro creati’, like peaches, or pears, created on trees! Women have all possible vices but they are notorious for their lust. It is hardly surprising, maintained the author of the Manganello, since science (anatomy) has found that they have seven testicles, and not merely two. Glands which were being discovered in the dissecting rooms of universities, were obviously mistaken, in a maledominated world, for testicles.17 The Manganello is an extreme example of a scurrilous work which was very probably printed in or around 1480,18 but of which only a few manuscripts survive and literally only two copies of sixteenth-century editions. The capitoli written in terza rima are real examples of vituperium, in which no class of women has been spared: from the age of ten until old age, whether they are single, or married, nuns or secular, they are all given to deceit, lust, and immorality, and are generally at the opposite extreme from the decency represented by Laura. The appropriation of Petrarch’s vocabulary, in many authors, is therefore directed in a quite different way from the original, and the seriousness, the religious sense of love and life that one ﬁnds in Petrarch, is now mocked and turned upside down, almost in a carnivalesque mode. But strangely in a way that an arch-serious poet like Dante had not really undergone. References to Dante are very frequently made in a mocking spirit in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, but never, I believe, in such a systematic way as with Petrarch, perhaps because Dante’s poem already contained obscene and parodic elements in it. Among the numerous authors who poke fun at Petrarch in the sixteenth century, Anton Francesco Doni, in the mock-serious context of examining the importance of the thematics of the key,19 comments on

16 A. Marinoni, ‘I libri di Leonardo’, in Leonardo da Vinci, Scritti letterari (Milan, 1974), pp. 239–57. 17 I. MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study of the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1980). 18 As I have mentioned in ‘Misoginia padana del Quattrocento e testi scurrili del Cinquecento: due nuovi testimoni del Manganus ovvero Manganello’, Schede umanistiche, n.s. I (1995), 19–43. 19 The image appears in Greek poetry (Orphic Hymns) where Love is indicated as pánton kleidas hekonta (who has the keys to everything), as well as in Provençal poetry Amor a pres de mi las claus (Arnaut of Marsille), and, of course, in a political context, Dante Inf. 13. 58, where Pier delle Vigne states: ‘I’ son colui che tenni ambo le chiavi/ del cor di Federigo.’ The reference to the key represents an obscene double entendre in Italian, in that one of the most vulgar verbs indicating sexual intercourse is derived from chiave: chiavare, which originally simply meant ‘to lock with a key’ or ‘to nail’, as in Dante, Inferno 33. 46.

RENAISSANCE MISOGYNY AND REJECTION OF PETRARCH

169

Petrarch’s innocent lines, ‘Del mio cor, donna, l’una e l’altra chiave/ Avete in mano’ (Lady, you have in your hands both keys to my heart) (RVF 63. 11–12), with a spurious obscene explanation: Questo so io di certo che molti comentatori s’avilluppano in questo caso, perché, avendo Laura una cassetta, v’avea due chiavature che vi si adoprava una sola chiave; e facendo agli amori col Petrarca, gli disse in un sonetto, a mostrargli ch’egli aveva ogni sua cosa in mano e mostrar che una buona chiave vale per mille: Basta al mio forzierin la vostra chiave. Quantunque di due toppe sia munito: Et in altro loco: Basta a due chiavature una sol chiave: Onde egli imitandola disse: [. . .] l’una e l’altra chiave Avete in mano.20 (I know for sure that many commentators become confused in this case, because the fact is that Laura had a small box with two locks which just one key opened, and while making love with Petrarch, she told him this in one sonnet, in order to show him that he had all things in his hands and that a good key was worth more than one thousand: Your key is sufﬁcient for my little treasure chest, Although it is supplied with two locks: And in another place: One key is sufﬁcient for two locks: Then he, imitating her, said: [. . .] You have both keys in your hands.)21

We may note that the word for ‘key’ (chiave, chiavi) is used twelve times in the Canzoniere. In RVF 29. 56 there is the phrase ‘dolce del mio cor chiave’, and in RVF 91. 5 the crucial ‘ambe le chiavi del tuo cor’, and some ambiguity can be found in some phrases, although it is unlikely to have been intentional. Besides, Doni invents some lines, since neither toppa (lock) nor chiavatura (locking), and not even the diminutive forzierin (small safe) could be found in Petrarch, and the sexual innuendoes in all these terms are obviously Doni’s addition. But metaphors, in particular, can be used for opposite purposes, and the debate about imitation in literature, which went on in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, was initiated by Petrarch. It may be relevant to mention 20 A. F. Doni, La chiave: scelta di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare dal secolo 13 al 19 (Bologna, 1862), I, 24. 21 Translation by D. O. Frantz, in Festum Voluptatis (Columbus, OH, 1989), pp. 28–9. Clearly, in Doni’s scurrilous interpretation, Laura’s two locks refer to her two oriﬁces.

170

Diego Zancani

that Petrarch expresses his ideas on literary imitation mainly in three of his Familiares letters (1. 8; 22. 2; 23. 19), using, as Martin McLaughlin has pointed out,22 the metaphor of the bee that he borrows from Seneca. But, while the latter was unsure as to the process by which bees produced honey, Petrarch has no doubt as to the contribution of the insect to melliﬁcation; honey is not collected from ﬂowers, but produced miriﬁca quadam permixtione (1. 8, 2) (by a miraculous blending process). The metaphor will go a long way, and in the Elizabethan erotic narrative Caltha Poetarum, attributed to Thomas Cutwode, it is part of what has been interpreted as a ‘pornographic political satire’.23 As a genre this goes against what is generally considered a type of ‘Petrarchan politics’. The courtiers are disguised as ﬂowers, but ‘The activities in which these courtiers engage is unashamedly sexual. The narrative teems with coital symbolism and with tales of erotic exploits. Honey is extracted from blooms in compromising circumstances’,24 and Caltha spreads herself before the bee who ‘begins to ﬁnd and stir his sting’ (st. 60) as In her circle up and downe he hops, And feeds apace and doth refresh his ﬂank, And with her wax he stores his spindle shank. (st. 61)25

It is obvious that much is made, in the same work, of the phrase ‘virgin wax’ as well. Indeed, as Hannah Betts points out, ‘virginity, even monarchal virginity, is an ambiguous, peculiarly sexualized condition within the poem’.26 The study of Elizabethan literature proves that many of the erotic metaphors are taken from religious, indeed biblical, texts: the architectural metaphor of the thighs as the pillars of the woman is in Solomon’s Song of Songs, though attributed to the bridegroom.27 Another Elizabethan poem which ‘ﬂamboyantly disrupts the careful boundaries imposed upon Petrarchism as a modus vivendi’ is The Metamorphosis of Pygmalions Image by John Marston, as shown by Hannah Betts in her essay on the ‘Pornographic Blazon 1588–1603’.28 22

McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 25–6. H. Betts, ‘“The Image of this Queene so quaynt.” The Pornographic Blazon 1588–1603’, in J. M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham and London, 1998), pp. 153–84 (p. 173). 24 Ibid., p. 173. 25 Ibid., pp. 173–4. 26 Ibid., p. 173. 27 Song of Solomon 5. 15: ‘His legs are as pillars of marble set upon sockets of ﬁne gold.’ 28 Betts, ‘The Image of this Queene so quaynt’, pp. 171–2, where Betts concludes that, in contrast to Lyly’s Endimion, ‘Marston invents a Petrarchan inﬂatable doll, to be viewed and fornicated with at the caprice of the poet-inventor’; see also S. Deats, ‘Thye Disarming of the Knight: Comic Parody in Lyly’s Endymion’, South Atlantic Bulletin, XL (1975), 67–75. 23

RENAISSANCE MISOGYNY AND REJECTION OF PETRARCH

171

Although it is clear that any text can be used for other purposes, the scurrilous use of Petrarch is not immediately obvious.29 It is in the Quattrocento that poetry in general takes a turn which is linked more to the so-called comic-realistic poetry of the thirteenth century than just to the ‘dolce stil novo’ of Dante, or to the neo-Platonism of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his circle. The ambiguity is in fact to be found within the Medicean circle itself: it is here that a character such as Luigi Pulci, a member of a brigata which included his brother Luca and other writers and composers of songs in Medici Florence, composes one of the ﬁrst mock-heroic poems, or mock epics in Italian literature, the Morgante (1483). Although the work respects the tradition of narrative poetry and is written in octaves, it contains passages which show considerable disrespect for received religious values, as well as traditional values concerning women.30 One could argue that Pulci is among the ﬁrst in Italy and possibly in Europe to show a concern for the position of the human being as the central ﬁgure in the humanistic universe, what became known as a microcosm. Man, as a human being, had been praised and his achievements had been extolled by people like Leon Battista Alberti and others, but Pulci seems more interested in looking at the values of two ‘not exactly human’ characters, namely a giant Morgante, and a ‘homunculus’ Margutte. It may be argued that Tuscan writers felt freer to use their language in a mocking vein. Misogyny had been thriving for centuries, ever since Aristotle declared the woman to be ‘a very imperfect animal’, and the proverbial maxims of a Greek philosopher known as Secundus the Silent Philosopher were copied and spread all over the civilised west, together with the acid tirades against women by the Fathers of the Church.31 Misogyny will appear openly in a poetic form which had already been used in the thirteenth century, that of the sonnet. Some scurrilous sonnets are found in manuscripts, in the ﬁfteenth century, written

29

The tirade against the followers of Petrarch and the censure of the poet himself, not mentioned by name, but just as ‘quel tosco poeta, che si mostrò tanto spasimare alle rive di Sorga per una di Valclusa’ (that Tuscan poet who showed himself pining so much for a woman from Vaucluse), by Giordano Bruno in his dialogue De gli eroici furori is also well known. See Chapter 9 by Hilary Gatti in this volume. 30 L. Pulci, Morgante 18. 115–42; see also M. Davie, Half-serious Rhymes: The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci (Dublin, 1998). 31 For a modern synthesis on medieval misogyny, see J. B. Percan, ‘Femina dulce malum’: la donna nella letteratura medievale Latina (secoli X–XIV) (Rome, 2003). On Secundus, see Perry, Secundus the Silent Philosopher.

172

Diego Zancani

in cryptography,32 and it is relatively easy to assume that many misogynous works which made it into print were later destroyed. It is obviously a way of reading Petrarch, a way of seeing his poetry’s negative implications, and of constructing around his sombre love, an aura of comic effects, which manage to throw a powerful acid on milder substances, something that corrodes them, and sometimes in so doing shows its threadbare skeleton. Apart from in Doni, anti-Laura ﬁgures are found, among others, in the works of Berni and Aretino.33 In a manuscript dating from the early sixteenth century, with additions from the 1530s, which is now in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville, among a series of scurrilous works, we ﬁnd at least two sonnets which recall the beginning of Petrarchan poems: the ﬁrst, ‘Che cossa è amore? L’è un fanciulin da gioco’, which can probably be attributed to Antonio Pistoia, even ends with a visual joke, not uncommon at the time, by showing the drawing of a membrum virile with a duke’s crown, and a little bell around the top, with paws and tail, resembling a mouse, or a rat.34 The other fragment in the same manuscript is just a scurrilous answer to the Petrarchan question ‘Se amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?’ (RVF 132), with the verbal equivalent of the drawing mentioned above (‘ma l’è un cazzo’). The theme will be expanded in the later discussions of supposedly erudite topics, such as those written by Annibale Caro as a commentary to a capitolo in praise of ‘ﬁgs’ by Francesco Molza.35 Poets will exercise their wit particularly by writing erudite commentaries which parody the ones on Petrarch in which some of his innocent phrases are turned into words full of sexual innuendoes.36 Not only does Caro reverse Petrarch’s argument to prove that the ‘ﬁg’ is much superior to the ‘laurel’, but when he 32 F. Di Benedetto, ‘Un sonetto crittograﬁco in dialetto veneto’, Studi di ﬁlologia italiana, XXXVI (1978), 315–19, in which the text beginning Stiando Adam et Eva apresso el fogo, on the invention of coitus, is represented by letter transposition as Snlidr ldle mt mxl lpomssr ma frgr. 33 P. Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto, 2005). 34 Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.1.51: the scurrilous sonnets are mentioned in Il Manganello, ed. D. Zancani (Exeter, 1982), pp. xxxix–xl. The visual representation here is reminiscent of some lead insignia from fourteenth-century Flanders: see ﬁg. A54-j, ‘Winged phallic animal with crown and bell’, in The Fascinating Faces of Flanders through Art and Society (Lisbon–Antwerp, 1998–9), pp. 163–200. 35 F. M. Molza, Capitoli erotici, ed. M. Masieri (Galatina, 1999). There is no need to recall that D. H. Lawrence in one of his Unrhyming Poems (1917–28), entitled ‘Figs’, writes: ‘The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part, the ﬁg-fruit:/ the ﬁssure, the yoni,/ the wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.’ See D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, ed. V. de Sola Pinto and W. Roberts (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 282. 36 Some preliminary but very interesting work on the use of parodic and jocular commentaries is to be found in Cum notibusse et comentaribusse: l’esegesi parodistica e giocosa del Cinquecento, ed. A. Corsaro and P. Procaccioli (Rome, 2002).

RENAISSANCE MISOGYNY AND REJECTION OF PETRARCH

173

interprets a line (27–8) in RVF 135, the canzone in which the woman is compared to a magnet, the phrase ‘Un sasso a trar più scarso/ carne che ferro’ (A stone more avid to draw ﬂesh than iron), he comments that this is an obvious reference to the ‘ﬁcotto sodo di Madonna Laura’ (to the hard ﬂesh of lady Laura’s sex (ﬁg)), ‘che era la Calamita tritacarne di quel poveretto del Petrarca’ (which was the real ﬂesh-tormenting magnet of wretched Petrarch) in a typical pseudo-scholarly remark which is addressed to the compilers of sixteenth-century commentaries and to the followers of Bembo, but does not spare Petrarch himself.37 Negative readings of Petrarch are not conﬁned to Italy. We have seen that in fact they are quite relevant to Tudor England. Given that the temptation to read Petrarch in a way which seems so diametrically opposite to his own way of writing about his love, his feelings, his approach to the image of Laura, we can ask whether there are in the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta the seeds for a scurrilous, potentially even pornographic reading of some poems? Or are the opposite readings an example of an intellectual debate which revolves mainly around the role and the signiﬁcance of imitation in a post-Bembian context? The answer is not simple, but I think that, given the high level of ambiguity and of interest by Petrarch in linguistic matters, in his Canzoniere, which has the apparent structure of a breviary, with one poem for every day of the year, plus one (as in a leap year), some of the sonnets show the possibility of at least some double meanings. The most obvious ones are concerned with bird imagery, and with the concept of dying.38 Not only because of a possible correspondence between suffering and pleasure, but because poets have frequently indicated sexual orgasm by the signiﬁer of death. In various European languages, including English, the penis is referred to using avian metaphors, which may originate in Roman times

37 M. Plaisance seemed to think otherwise: ‘Le texte burlesque équivoque est traité comme un texte sérieux et en obtient une parodie du commentaire pétrarquisant, sans que Pétrarque lui-même soit visé’; see ‘Réécriture et écriture dans les deux commentaires burlesques d’Antonfrancesco Grazzini’, in Réécritures, vol. I: Commentaires, parodies, variations dans la littérature italienne de la Renaissance (Paris, 1983), p. 206. An important recent contribution to the interpretation of Caro’s work is that by E. Garavelli, ‘Presenze burchiellesche (e altro) nel Comento di Ser Agresto di Annibal Caro’, in La fantasia fuor de’ conﬁni: Burchiello e dintorni a 550 anni dalla morte (1449–1999), ed. M. Zaccarello (Rome, 2002), pp. 195–239, in particular pp. 217–20. 38 According to the Concordanze del Canzoniere di Francesco Petrarca, prepared by the Accademia della Crusca (Florence, 1971), morir has a frequency of eighteen and morire four, but individual forms of the verb should also be taken into account, e.g. morendo ﬁve, more eight, and morte 137 times.

174

Diego Zancani

when the membrum was frequently represented with wings (and indeed Lesbia’s sparrow in Catullus’ poetry has been interpreted in an ambiguous sense), or in the symbolism attached to birds such as the dove, referring to both carnal and divine love. Much of Petrarch’s poetry could also be seen as highly euphemistic. While, as noted by Gianfranco Contini, Petrarch never dares to mention anything above the ‘bel pié’ (lovely foot) of the beloved, and the word ‘gamba’ (leg) is ugly and would be going too far for Petrarch, one can read not only the strong sense of sexual desire in his verse but frequently also sensuality. It is barely disguised in the reference to the woman bathing, for instance, in RVF 23 (‘Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade’) when In una fonte ignuda si stava, quando ’l sol più forte ardea. Io, perché d’altra vista non m’appago, stetti a mirarla, ond’ella ebbe vergogna; e per farne vendetta, o per celarse l’acqua nel viso con le man mi sparse. (She was naked in a fountain, when the sun was at its hottest. I lingered to watch her, since no other sight satisﬁes me, whence she was ashamed, and to vindicate herself or to hide, she sprinkled water in my face with her hands.)

The spontaneous gesture of Laura (revisited, no doubt through classical sources, through Ovid in particular) will transform the poet from hunter into a stag, pursued by his own hounds.39 There is no need to invoke psychoanalysis, the poet tells us that he never managed to fulﬁl his desire: he was never like the golden rain into which Jupiter transformed himself, but he was a ﬂame ( ﬁamma), ‘lit by a lovely gaze’, and he was l’uccel, an eagle in this case, and there are certainly references to further transformations of Zeus, but one should not forget that the god always used the disguises for clearly sexual purposes. The ﬁnal section of the canzone introduces the vision of the nakedness of the beloved, bathing on a summer’s day, a powerful image for the reader-voyeur. Petrarch’s seriousness and apparent restraint in dealing with love and personal experience, can be turned upside down and read in a totally different vein. This proves the continuing, mutable, powerful effect of the 39

The Actaeon episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 3. 173–252, is particularly relevant. Some analysis is provided by L. Enterline, ‘Embodied Voices: Petrarch Reading (Himself Reading) Ovid’, in Desire in the Renaissance, ed. V. Finucci and R. Schwartz (Princeton, NJ, 1994), pp. 120–45.

RENAISSANCE MISOGYNY AND REJECTION OF PETRARCH

175

word, and of the ways in which it can be organised. Not only Philosophia can go around naked and without adornment — ‘povera et nuda vai, Filosoﬁa’, as it says in RVF 7. 10 — but, it would seem, Rhetorica, as well. It is therefore left to the more spirited reader to interpret images and references in the poetic artiﬁce, and see beyond the letter, but the seeds may have been put there by the author himself.

11

Impersonations of Laura in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-century Italy LETIZIA PANIZZA

WITH THE ENTHUSIASTIC ENDORSEMENT of the Petrarchan love lyric by Pietro Bembo in the early Italian 1500s, and of Petrarch, the protagonist of his own love story, it was inevitable that his beloved Muse, Laura, would also be showered with increasing attention.1 But who was Laura? Was she a ‘real’ person? If Petrarch was a known historical ﬁgure, with hundreds of letters in Latin to people all over Europe, then surely the woman who stirred so many emotions in him during her short life and after her death must have a history as well. Otherwise the narrative of falling in love and repeated repentance, of moral struggle and spiritual regeneration over Petrarch’s lifetime, would have little meaning.2 We know more about Petrarch himself than about any other person of his age because of his acute powers of self-reﬂection and self-fashioning. What we know about Laura is what he chooses to tell us, and that is very little and not always consistent. The ﬁrmest evidence for her existence is

1

Pietro Bembo prepared the ﬁrst ‘critical edition’ of Petrarch for Aldo Manuzio (Venice, 1501); and composed his dialogues on love, Gli asolani, drawing Petrarchan verse closer to neo-Platonic currents, also for Manuzio (Venice, 1505). His later dialogue of 1525, Prose della volgar lingua (Venice: G. Tacuino) laid down the rules for the use of vernacular in literary compositions, singling out Petrarch as the model for lyric poetry, and Boccaccio as the model for prose. 2 For modern studies of Petrarch and Laura, see K. Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh, 1984); N. Mann, Petrarch (Oxford, 1984); U. Dotti, Vita di Petrarca (Bari, 1987); P. Hainsworth, Petrarch the Poet: An Introduction to the ‘Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta’ (London, 1988); and entries by V. Branca in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, 3 vols. (Turin, 1974), II, 419–32, and C. Kleinhenz in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, 6 vols (New York, 1999), IV, 451–8. Italian quotations from Petrarch, Canzoniere, ed. G. Contini (Turin, 1982); English translations—unless otherwise speciﬁed — by R. M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA, 1976). Although Petrarch’s lyrics were known throughout the Renaissance as the Canzoniere, or simply Rime, the title Petrarch gave was Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, abbreviated by many critics to RVF. I shall use Canzoniere, along with the simpler title, Rime, following Renaissance interpreters. Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 177–200. © The British Academy 2007.

178

Letizia Panizza

found in Petrarch’s Nota on the ﬂyleaves of his precious Virgil manuscript (Milan, Ambrosiana, S. P. 10/27). Written shortly after her death, probably in 1351, he recalls meeting Laura in an Avignon church, Sainte Claire, on Good Friday, 6 April 1327, and learning that she had died on 6 April 1348 in Avignon during the plague that ravaged Europe, while he was away in Verona. She was buried in the Franciscan church in Avignon. With her death, he confesses that ‘there is nothing further left to please me in this life’ (nihil esse debere quod amplius mihi placeat in hac vita).3 His Letter to Posterity refers to a single love that consumed him from his adolescence and ended with this beloved’s death. He calls it ‘honestus’, meaning it was never consummated.4 Petrarch was to some extent still under the sway of the medieval ‘courtly love’ code, used by the troubadours, in not revealing much about his adored senhal (usually unattainable because married and of a superior social class), except for her impact on his imagination and emotions. The confessional Secretum is further evidence of a ‘real’ attachment to Laura over many years that dragged Petrarch down morally and spiritually in the opinion of his resurrected interlocutor, St Augustine. He calls Petrarch’s infatuation ‘insanus’ (mad), and reminds him that Laura, like any other woman, has grown old, and is worn out by childbearing.5 Petrarch, it should be remembered, was a cleric in minor orders (not a priest), a state that brought him beneﬁces but excluded marriage. Following a usual practice of clerics of convenience, however, he had unnamed concubines and fathered two children, Giovanni and Francesca.6 But the Bucolicum Carmen, also known as the Eclogues, on the other hand, were grist to interpreters who favoured an allegorical Laura.7 Authoritative modern critics, like Vittore Branca, while not wishing to reduce Laura to a symbol, regard the search for biographical details as futile. Granted Petrarch may have taken inspiration

3 Full text of this Nota and a deﬁnitive account of Laura’s image in biographies of Petrarch and commentaries are in J. B. Trapp, ‘Petrarch’s Laura: The Portraiture of an Imaginary Beloved’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LXIV (2001), 55–192 (58–9). 4 See Posteritati in Prose del Petrarca, ed. G. Martellotti et al. (Milan–Naples, 1955), p. 4. 5 See Secretum, ed. with Latin and facing Italian trans. by E. Carrara (Turin, 1977), book 3, pp. 118–19. Laura changes and ‘corpus illud egregium, morbis ac crebris partubus exhaustum, multum pristini vigoris amisit’ (that splendid body, exhausted by illness and frequent childbirth, has lost much of its youthful vigour). This passage is seen as the clearest evidence for Laura being a married woman with children. 6 For an illuminating and sympathetic analysis of the Secretum, see Foster, Petrarch, pp. 161–85; for Laura in particular, pp. 174–9. 7 See Familiares 2. 9, in Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari: scelta, ed. E. Bianchi (Turin, 1977), pp. 8–21 (pp. 16–17).

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

179

from a woman he knew and loved, ‘Laura è viva soltanto nelle sue rime’ (Laura is alive only in his poetry).8 In the Canzoniere, Petrarch gives Laura the gift of speech in varying degrees. Along with her other features, her words are a delight to him, but we seldom have any inkling of what she says.9 One sonnet, 262, between an older woman and a younger one, often but not always interpreted as Laura, has her defending chastity as the supreme virtue for a woman: ‘Cara la vita, et dopo lei mi pare vera honestà che ’n bella donna sia.’ ‘L’ordine volgi: e’ non fur, madre mia, senza honestà mai cose belle o care; Et qual si lascia di suo honor privare, né donna è più né viva; et se qual pria appare in vista, è tal vita aspra et ria via più che morte, et di più pene amare.’ (vv 1–8) (‘Life is most dear, it seems to me, and after that/ true virtue in a beautiful woman.’/ ‘Reverse the order! There never were, mother,/ things lovely or dear without virtue;// and whoever lets herself be deprived of honour/ is no longer a lady and no longer alive; and if she appears the same to sight,/ her life is much more harsh and cruel than death, and more bitter with sorrow.’)

Foster has pointed out that after Laura’s death, Petrarch presents her speaking in imaginary discourse more frequently than in life. In sonnet 279, she urges him not to mourn for her; she is alive and at peace, beyond suffering. In sonnet 285, she returns time and again like a loving mother to her son, or a bride to a beloved husband to comfort and encourage him: [. . .] et nel parlar mi mostra quel che in questo viaggio fugga o segua, Contando i casi de la vita nostra, pregando ch’a levar l’alma non tarde: et sol quant’ella parla, ò pace o tregua. ([. . .] and in her speech she shows me/ what in this journey I must avoid or pursue,/ Telling over the events of our life,/

8

Branca, Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana. For example, sonnet 261, where he calls on all women to gaze on Laura as their model: ‘Ivi ’l parlar che nullo stile aguaglia,/ e ’l bel tacere’ (vv 9–10) (there the speech that no style can equal, and the lovely silences); and also 299, written after her death, where he asks rhetorically ‘Ov’ è ’l valor, la conoscenza e ’l senno?/ L’accorta, honesta, humil, dolce favella?’ (vv 5–6) (Where are her worth, her knowledge, her wisdom? Her skilful, virtuous, humble, sweet speech?). 9

180

Letizia Panizza begging me not to delay in lifting up my soul;/ and only when she speaks do I have peace — or at least a truce.)

When Petrarch does lift up his heart and soul to where she is, as in sonnet 302, he experiences an ecstatic vision. Laura takes him by the hand, and promises that he, too, will be with her: ‘te solo aspetto, et quel che tanto amasti/ e là giuso è rimaso, il mio bel velo’ (vv 10–11) (I wait only for you, and for that which you loved so much/ and which remained down there—my lovely veil).10 * * *

Renaissance readers wanted a livelier Laura to ﬁll the gaps left by these subtle but scanty utterances of Petrarch’s chaste donna. Printed editions with commentaries and introductions that gave Petrarch’s Life and Works, and nearly always said something about Laura, too, were aimed at ﬁlling them. The information and evaluation provided were unfortunately all too often discordant. The truth was, Petrarch had presented us with a monotone donna, who raised more questions than she answered. Was Laura married or not? If she was, what was Petrarch doing courting a married woman? Even if she was unmarried, how could Petrarch, a cleric in minor orders, justify writing about an ambiguous, if not erotic relationship with any woman? Curiosity about Laura touched on her virtue, too. Was she as demure and chaste as Petrarch presented her? Were she and Petrarch neo-Platonic lovers after all? And what if she could be given a proper voice, what would be her side of the story? The temptations to embroider Petrarchan remarks about her looks, her movements, and, after her death, her heavenly epiphanies and conversations, were too much to resist; and resulted, as we shall see, not only in the discovery of ‘lost’ letters of Laura to Petrarch, but also in the recovery of Laura’s entire ‘lost’ Canzoniere of 366 poems, the exact number of Petrarch’s own! In other words, Laura became a celebrity in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, with the heated debates, delusions, and deliriums that celebrity status brings in its train. Trapp notes that the image of Laura was ‘solidiﬁed [. . .] in Italian woodcuts and engravings during the second quarter of the sixteenth century, at just about the time when the search for her person in Provence was at its height’.11

10

Although in Paradise, Laura expresses orthodox doctrine in wishing to be united with her body, when she will experience even greater happiness. 11 Trapp, ‘Petrarch’s Laura’, 58.

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

181

Commentators and Impersonators In this chapter, a few key ﬁgures will be considered: Alessandro Vellutello, Fausto da Longiano, Girolamo Malipiero, Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, Niccolò Franco, and the impersonator of ‘Laura’, Stefano Colonna — with a few allusions to minor ﬁgures. As chronology is all-important in understanding how the cult of Laura built up, I keep to dates of publication as my guides in the narrative. When Francesco Filelfo’s commentary, joined with that of Antonio da Tempo and N. Peranzone, was ﬁrst printed with the poetry (Li sonetti et canzone: Li triumphi, Milan: I. A. Scinzenzeler, 1507),12 we are told that Petrarch met Laura in the church of Sainte Claire in Avignon, and that her name was ‘Loretta’. (The name LAURETA can be decoded from sonnet 5.) This follows the Nota and what Petrarch makes known in sonnet 2 about falling in love on Good Friday: ‘Era il giorno che al sol si scoloraro/ Per la pietà del suo fattor i rai,/ Che io fui preso’ (It was the day when the sun’s rays darkened/ out of sorrow for its Maker/ that I was taken prisoner’). While not overly concerned with Laura’s biography, he pours scorn on earlier commentators who treat her as a mere symbol of poetry (like Boccaccio). But Filelfo also turns Petrarch into a pimp by declaring that the poet had a sister whom the Pope at Avignon fell in love with, wanted as a concubine, and obtained through the good graces of Gherardo, Petrarch’s saintly brother! This hardly ennobles Petrarch’s love for Laura. The vogue for Laura as object of quasi-sacred pilgrimage was given substance by Alessandro Vellutello of Lucca (Il Petrarca, Venice: G. A. & fratelli da Sabbio, editio princeps, 1525) who professes to have gone to Provence on a fact-ﬁnding mission, looking for the exact locations where Petrarch recalled meeting Laura. Vellutello considers himself a far superior historian to Filelfo, whose ‘ﬁndings’ he dismisses as ‘cose del tutto lunghe da ogni verità’ (stories very far from any kind of truth).13 Such a severe approach to earlier commentators is meant to lend credence to his own account of Petrarch’s and Laura’s lives, especially as he devotes more space to the ‘facts’ about Laura than to the ones about Petrarch.14 He 12

Filelfo’s commentary goes back to the 1440s, and was ﬁrst printed separately in 1476. I have used the 1507 ‘bumper’ edition precisely because it contains so much additional material. 13 I quote from a 1552 edition (Venice: Domenico Giglio), signature *2ro. There were more editions of Vellutello’s biography and commentary than any other in the Cinquecento. 14 Vellutello offers ‘Vita e Costumi del Poeta’ (Life and Personality of the Poet), *2ro–*5ro, followed by ‘Origine di Madonna Laura con la Descrittione di Valclusa del luogo ove il Poeta a principio di lei s’innamorò’ (The Birthplace of Madonna Laura, with a Description of Vaucluse,

182

Letizia Panizza

denies that she was descended from the noble line of de Sade, and that she was born just outside Avignon. Rather, her family, of noble blood, came from an ‘umile e basso luogo’ (a plain and low-lying place), the village of Cabrières (present-day Cabrières d’Avignon); she lived with her father, Henri Chabod, and family in the village chateau.15 She was baptised in 1314, which would make her thirteen when Petrarch, ten years older, met her in 1327.16 Vellutello is equally certain that she never married: ‘per cosa certa habbiamo da tenere che ella non fusse mai maritata’. The reasoning here is somewhat tortuous, winding its way from the evidence of Petrarch’s own poems to speculation about her father’s aristocratic class prejudices: Chiaramente si comprende ella esser nata, vivuta e ultimamente morta, non solamente in una medesima terra ma in uno medesimo albergo, ché quando fusse stata maritata perché a Cabrières non vi potea essere chi al grado suo fusse eguale, di necessità sarebbe bisognato che di quel luogo fusse partita; e la cagion perch’ella non fusse maritata fu forse per l’impossibilità del padre, e ’l non volersi oltre a la sua nobilità abbassare — a la qual cosa in quel paese molto avertiscono.17 (One can clearly infer that she was born, lived and ﬁnally died not only in the same area but in the same dwelling-place. If she were to have married, it would have been necesssary for her to leave because there could not be anybody at Cabrières equal in rank; and the reason for her not marrying was perhaps that it was impossible for her father, as he did not want to lower his noble status, about which the villagers are very critical.)

For Vellutello, Laura was buried at ‘Lille’ (L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue), in the church of the Franciscans, and not, as Filelfo had advanced, in the church of Sainte Claire at Avignon. If Vellutello had hoped to settle the crucial questions of Laura’s birthplace, genealogy, and state in life, he was soon disillusioned. In 1532,

the place where the Poet ﬁrst fell in love with her), *5ro–*8vo: six-and-a-half pages for Petrarch; seven-and-a-half for Laura! 15 There is still both a chateau and parish church in the village, but no commemorative plaque or sign near either about whether Petrarch’s Laura was born or lived in the village. On the other hand, the chapel of Sainte Claire, destroyed during the French Revolution, and now a garden with only a few walls remaining, does have a plaque stating the meeting of Petrarch and Laura in this church. 16 Vellutello, ‘Origine di Madonna Laura’, signatures *6ro, *7vo. 17 Ibid., *8ro. The speculation that Laura was a de Sade was ﬁrst put in writing by a Luigi Peruzzi; it was a view favoured by French admirers and scholars. See Trapp, ‘Petrarch’s Laura’, 62. Vellutello claims to have met a supposed descendant of Laura’s family, an aged Gabriel de Sade, but dismisses his evidence.

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

183

Fausto da Longiano came out with his commentary, rejecting Vellutello’s certain ﬁndings about Laura with just as much conviction (Il Petrarca, col commento di M. Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano, Venice: Francesco di Alessandro Bindoni). Like Vellutello, he has a Life of Petrarch followed by a separate Life of Laura.18 Fausto disdains the reports of self-styled eyewitnesses like merchants who travel to Avignon and visit places associated with her memory. Their reports are contradictory about Laura’s family, her birthplace, and whether she was married or not. His originality, he asserts, lies in looking for what Petrarch says ﬁrst and foremost in his Latin works. Thus, in the letter Petrarch wrote to his friend and patron, Bishop Giacomo Colonna, she is ‘mulier clarissima’ (an illustrious woman), meaning she is no country girl but an aristocratic blue-stocking.19 Furthermore, says Fausto, ‘lo tengo per ferma credenza che Laura fusse d’Avignone’ (it is my strong belief that Laura came from Avignon). And she was buried there, in the Church of Sainte Claire. Another decisive testimony for Fausto is Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary on Petrarch’s Latin Eclogue 10, in his Bucolicum Carmen.20 Far from remaining a sheltered spinster in her father’s house, she was married and had children! The Canzoniere poems Fausto examines support his cause.21 But his trump card is the Secretum, with its confessional intimacies about Petrarch’s guilty love/lust for Laura, disapproved of by his mentor in the dialogue, St Augustine. Laura’s reputation remains unsullied, though she is reduced to an obstacle; on the other hand, a dark moral cloud hangs over Petrarch’s adulterous pursuit of a wife and mother. Within a year, there were two very different answers to this ‘scandalous’ interpretation of Petrarch’s and Laura’s relationship. Girolamo Malipiero rewrites — yes, rewrites — the Canzoniere in the key of spiritual love for God, unceremoniously writing Laura out (Il Petrarca spirituale, Venice: F. Marcolini, 1532). The next year, Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (Il Petrarca, Venice: Giovanni Antonio di Nicolini, 1533) exalts Petrarch and Laura as the perfect ‘romantic’ couple for courtiers to imitate. In both cases, we have left the solid ground of history far behind and are well into ﬁction’s slippery territory.

18

For ‘Vita del Poeta’, see signatures a ii ro–a iii vo; for ‘Vita di Laura’, a iii ro–vo. See Familiares 2. 9 to Giacomo Colonna, in Bianchi, Le familiari, p. 17. 20 Benvenuto da Imola wrote the most comprehensive commentary on Dante’s Divina Commedia. Petrarch’s Eclogues were usually interpreted allegorically; see p. 178 above. 21 Fausto quotes sonnet 190, ‘Una candida cerva’, and sonnet 222, ‘Liete e pensose’; it is not clear why Fausto chose these sonnets. 19

184

Letizia Panizza

Malipiero invents an encounter with Petrarch. On pilgrimage to the poet’s residence at Arquà, near Padua, he says, he came across a ﬁgure who identiﬁes himself as Petrarch to an amazed Malipiero. The ﬁgure explains: ‘Son qui rilegato dalla divina giustizia inﬁno attanto che sia ritrattata l’opera de gli amorosi miei sonetti e canzoni’ (I’m consigned here by Divine Justice until the time when my Canzoniere of love sonnets and canzoni has been rewritten).22 Since Petrarch died in 1374, rewriting clearly poses a problem. Who should do it, and why? The full title just above the introductory sonnet 1 indicates Malipiero’s intentions: SONETTI DI MESSER FRANCESCO PETRARCA DIVENUTO THEOLOGO ET SPIRITUALE PER GRATIA DI DIO, ET STUDIO DI FRATE HIERONYMO MARIPETRO MINORITANO (fol. 10ro) (The sonnets of Messer Francesco Petrarca, become theological and spiritual by the grace of God, and the application of Friar Girolamo Malipiero, a Franciscan)

Malipiero takes various steps before trying his hand at improving on Petrarch. At ﬁrst he feigns ignorance: under the cover of Lady Laura, wasn’t Petrarch representing Wisdom, whose Beauty inspires a man to become a worthy lover of virtue, which pleases God above all things? Petrarch ﬂatly rejects this allegorical solution. Paraphrasing his sonnet 1, he insists on his ‘giovenil errore’ (youthful error), the ‘cieco vaneggiare’ (aimless raving) that brought him shame and repentance, and the realisation that ‘quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno’ (what pleases the world is a brief dream). Passages like ‘Omai son stanco e mia vita riprendo/ Di tanto error’ (364. 4) (By now I’m weary, and reproach my life for so many faults), and 365, ‘I’ vo piangendo i miei perduti tempi’ (I go weeping for times gone by) would have no sense if he were speaking of Wisdom and Virtue (fol. 3ro). The poet leaves it to Malipiero to decide whether the subject matter of the poetry is ‘sana sapienza o più tosto insana concupiscenza’ (sound wisdom or insane lust). This gives Malipiero the opportunity to press Petrarch on why he wrote so much and, even worse, in Italian, enabling everybody to read it, and worst of all, enabling everyone to imitate it: wherever he goes, Malipiero hears ‘le tue vanità essere più lette, commentate e studiate, che il Vangelo di Cristo!’ (fol. 4ro) (your triﬂes are more read, commentated and pored over than Christ’s Gospel!). Petrarch meekly agrees.

22

I quote from Il Petrarca spirituale (Venice: [F. Marcolini], 1545). This quote, fol. 2vo.

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

185

Petrarch’s love poetry, and his dwelling on a feverish love for Laura, censorious Malipiero judges, are leading men and women away from Christ. Indeed, Petrarch is made responsible for the ﬂood of obscene poetry in the vernacular pouring out of the presses — all of it lascivious, sensual, sordid, ﬁlthy, and preoccupied with adultery — or worse! The ‘worse’ may be referring to the large vein of bawdy poetry about the god of woodlands, Priapus, and about sodomy.23 The solution is now clear. Malipiero will ‘correct’ Petrarch’s Canzoniere, giving Wisdom and Virtue a chance to prosper, and, of course, procuring Petrarch’s salvation. He will keep the same number of poems, the same rhyme-scheme for each poem and sometimes preserve entire verses. And Laura? At the end of Malipiero’s introduction, in some editions, a sonnet in the form of a dialogue between Petrarch and a Critic gives a clue: CRITIC. Dunque, la tua soave et dolce lyra/ più Laura non risona? (And so, your melliﬂuous and pleasing lyre will sing no more of Laura?) PETRARCH. Non già certo. (Deﬁnitely no more.) CRITIC. Che poi? (What next?) PETRARCH. Il sommo ben, che mi dà vita. (The highest good, that gives me life.)24

Malipiero has deleted Laura from Petrarch’s Canzoniere; she is banished because she led Petrarch astray, and must not be allowed to tempt imitators of Petrarch’s lyrics to sensual adulterous lusts. Removing sin means removing the causes of sin. But denial of the feminine in the love lyric is the denial of its very nature; and the love lyric was too entrenched in Italian vernacular culture to be so easily jettisoned. Rewriting the Canzoniere with an absent Laura was nevertheless no easy task, as a few examples will show In sonnet 262 (224 in Malipiero), where Petrarch presents a dialogue between a Laura ﬁgure and an older women (see above, p. 179), in which chastity is praised above all values, Malipiero eliminates the dialogue and has Petrarch hold up charity as the supreme virtue above life, a virtue that ‘dolci fa tutte le pene amare’ (makes all bitter sufferings sweet). In fact, there is no mention of chastity, but of martyrs who when they had to lay down their lives, were ‘constanti per questo amor solo’ (faithful to this love alone). In the sonnets after Laura’s death, there are similar

23 24

See Chapter 10 in this volume. This sonnet (exceptionally) comes from the 1534 edition.

186

Letizia Panizza

distortions. In sonnet 279 (238 in Malipiero), where the sounds of birds, the soft breeze, and the river remind Petrarch of Laura’s voice, whom he then sees and hears comforting him, Malipiero has Petrarch wonder if these natural sounds delight him, ‘Che sia nel ciel, di cui non è chi scriva?’ (What [delight] will there be in heaven, of which no one is able to write?). Delight associated with Laura and earthly love cannot be entertained. And in sonnet 285 (244 in Malipiero), a tender sonnet in which a visionary Laura compared to an affectionate mother or a loving wife comes to counsel the poet (see above, p. 179), the Franciscan allows a feminine touch by changing Laura to Mary, Queen of Heaven: Madre è di bello amor, & però m’arde d’onesto foco; & nel parlar mi mostra quel ch’in questo viaggio fugga o segua. Et ben m’avisa la Regina nostra Ch’ unir con Dio lo spirito homai non tarde, Et col Mondo né pace abbia né tregua. (She is the Mother of fair love, and thus she ﬁres me/ with a virtuous ﬂame; and her words show me/ what to shun and what to follow on this journey.// And our Queen advises me above all/ not to delay uniting my spirit with God/ and not to ﬁnd peace or even a truce with the World.)

Malipiero justiﬁes his opus magnum by providing a poetics of Franciscan spiritual poetry before the section collecting the canzoni in their reformed state (fols 90ro–114ro). His ambition is evidently to take advantage of and compete with the tidal wave of Petrarch enthusiasm by relaunching a vogue for mystical poetry drawing on the doctrines of St Bernard and St Bonaventure. After all, there existed a ﬂourishing tradition of vernacular mystical poetry going back to Jacopone da Todi and his followers.25 At the other end of the commentary spectrum is Messer Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo’s Il Petrarca, ﬁrst printed in 1533.26 If Malipiero viliﬁes Laura and the poet’s love for her, Gesualdo gloriﬁes both. If, in 25

The founder of the Franciscans, Francis of Assisi, was a poet; and Jacopone, a Franciscan, composed collections of laude, printed beginning 1490, then 1495, 1514, 1558 (see British Library Catalogue). Malipiero in a sense is ‘upgrading’ this popular genre by using a Petrarchan frame and lexis. 26 The edition I use is Venice: Giovan’ Antonio di Nicolini, 1541. See entry by R. De Rosa in Dizionario biograﬁco degli Italiani (1999), LIII, 505–6. Gesualdo was associated with the Academy of Giovanni Pontano in Naples, and enjoyed a humanist education. Together with his

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

187

Malipiero, Laura is shamefully absent, in Gesualdo she is splendidly present. His commentary is dedicated to a noble lady, Donna Maria di Cardona, la Signora Marchesana de la Palude, and contains an adoring ‘Vita di Madonna Laura’. The Dedicatory Letter to Donna Maria, written by Gesualdo himself, makes of her a living Laura. She is therefore the perfect person to receive Gesualdo’s gift as she will ﬁnd in Petrarch’s poetry, as in a mirror, sentiments she approves of and embodies herself. Like Petrarch with Laura, Gesualdo is in thrall to her: ‘havendo io, gran tempo è, di lontano preso ad adorare la bellezza & il valore di Vostra Signoria Illustrissima’ (signature a iii ro) (having begun, some time ago, and from afar, to adore the beauty and merit of Your Illustrious Ladyship). Although there is nothing in this world worthy of her, he will offer his commentary ‘al suo leggiardro & alto ingegno, come quello ch’è di celeste lume adorno; e così di mirabil giudicio come d’ogni ornamento pieno’ (ibid.) (to your gracious and sublime mind that is endowed with a heavenly light, and abundant with wondrous judgement as with every gift). Her very voice, he says, using Petrarch’s adjectives for Laura, is ‘chiara, soave, angelica, divina’(sig. a iv vo) (bright, pleasant, angelic, divine)! The high tone of the commentary takes its cue from the dedication. Gesualdo also means to complement Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, in that Petrarch and Laura are the embodiments of the neoPlatonic code of love typical of courtiers and ladies at Castiglione’s court. Petrarch’s lyrics, full of instruction and feeling, provide the discourse of this reﬁned love: In lui è tanta dottrina, ch’ogni scienza ne’ suoi versi ha qualche luogo [. . .] E chi può dire quanti e quali sentimenti de la divina e de l’humana philosophia si stanno tra quei soavi e leggiadri ﬁoretti accolti? E perché il viver gentile e bello, quale si conviene a gli animi cortesi et humani, e spetialmente a i cortigiani, non può essere senza amore, non è philosopho, né poeta da cui meglio apparar si possa la via d’ honestamente amare, e d’ acquistare amando laude.27 (There is so much learning in him that every discipline ﬁnds a place in his poetry [. . .] And who is able to tell how many and what kinds of thoughts about human and divine philosophy are to be found gathered among those pleasing

mentor, Bishop Antonio Sebastiano, il Minturno, author of Latin and Italian poetry, he heldthe commentary of Fausto da Longiano in contempt. 27 The quotation comes from the last section, on the beneﬁts of reading Petrarch’s poetry, of Gesualdo’s Life of Petrarch, signatures a iii to c iiii.

188

Letizia Panizza and elegant distillations? And because a reﬁned and pleasant life—such as is ﬁtting for kind and urbane spirits — cannot exist without love, there is no philosopher or poet from whom one can better learn the way of right loving, and by loving, gain praise [than Petrarch].)

Gesualdo’s ‘Life of Petrarch’ contains other sections relevant here besides the ‘Life of Madonna Laura’: a description of Petrarch’s physique and his aim in loving Laura. Gesualdo sees no conﬂict between the Latin humanist Petrarch and the vernacular love poet: Egli era non pur sommo et oratore e poeta, ma nobilissimo philosopho anchora e Theologo riputato. Nella Thoscana sua lingua ne la quale scritti veggiamo I Sonetti e le Canzoni [. . .] al giudicio di tutti i migliori ingegni tanto valse, che quel grado tiene tra dicitori in Rima che Virgilio tra Latini poeti et Homero tra Greci. (sig. b v ro) (He was not only the best prose-writer and poet in Latin, but was also esteemed an excellent philosopher and theologian. As for his native Tuscan tongue in which he composed sonnets and canzoni, the best minds have pronounced that he ranks among vernacular poets as Virgil among the Latins and Homer among the Greeks.)

Neither is there conﬂict between Petrarch the lover and Petrarch the scholar. Indeed, he was the perfect lover: handsome, with an attractive personality and in excellent health until he was over 60. His physician, Master Tommaso del Garbo, the best of his age, swore in the presence of many gentlemen that he had never seen a healthier, ﬁrmer body than Petrarch’s or one of a better constitution! Like any celebrity, Petrarch was vain, to the point of denying his age and losing his temper with anyone who declared it.28 Gesualdo ﬁnds nothing but Horatian pleasure and instruction in Petrarch’s vernacular poetry. Every verse is full of hidden doctrine. And who can tell, Gesualdo asks, how many and what kind of thoughts coming from divine and human philosophy lie gathered in those pleasant and graceful verses? Loving Laura certainly gave him the inspiration ‘per dire le meravigliose e rare lodi di lei, et isfogare col canto l’acerbe passioni de lo innamorato suo cuore’ (sig. v i ro) (to speak of her marvellous and special praises, and give vent by his song to the bitter passions of a heart in love). Gesualdo is sure their love could not have happened without a heavenly design or divine plan (ibid.). The poet always describes her in the most glowing terms: ‘gentile, saggia, leggiadra, honesta e bella’ (reﬁned,

28

Fol. B 7vo. Tommaso del Garbo corresponded with Petrarch on a variety of issues.

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

189

wise, graceful, chaste, and beautiful), which, even if hyperbolic, must have foundation (sig. c i vo). Was she married? Gesualdo inclines to the negative side, ﬁrst because of what Petrarch says in his poems, and then for a somewhat opaque reason: ‘nelle scritture di lui sempre in una terra la troviamo; il che non avviene alle maritate, quando elle sono massimamente, qual’ella era, in una picciola Villa le principali’ (ibid.) (in his writings we always ﬁnd her in the one place, which is not the case for married women, especially when they are— as she was — among the leading ladies of a small village). Is the inference that if she were married she would have left Vaucluse for her husband’s estates elsewhere? Whatever the case, Gesualdo never allows a breath of sin or scandal or indecorum to blemish her reputation.29 From damnation to apotheosis — where can one go to next? After the delirium and the delusion, a restorative is found in parody, the ﬁnest example of which is Niccolò Franco’s hilarious Il Petrarchista (Venice: G. Gioliti da Ferrara, 1539), a mocking witty pastiche of Petrarch mania, somewhere in tone between Private Eye and Hello! magazine. There is much debunking of the cult of Laura, with plenty of gossip, scandal, and vulgarity thrown in. Franco did not invent parodies of Petrarch; as Diego Zancani’s contribution in this volume shows,30 Petrarch’s persistent highmindedness and lofty archaic lexical register already nearly two centuries old, lent themselves to comic rewriting and lampooning. Franco appeals to readers’ voyeurism from his racy subtitle:

29

In the 1541 copy I used (British Library London, 11427.g.6), a handwritten note inside the front cover from one male friend to another shows that Petrarch with Gesualdo’s commentary was indeed used as a solace to lovers absent from their beloved ladies. A Tito Toscanelli writes to a John Millar about a passion that borders on the blasphemous: ‘Qual più adattato dono può farsi da un Innamorato a un Amico che pure è Innamorato se non che le immortali rime di Petrarcha che tutte spirano amore per la Bella Laura? Sicuro Tito Toscanelli che John Millar si pasce di sì bella passione, che più da vicino ci unisce alla divinità, a che nei suoi piaceri non ci fa desiderare il Paradiso. Dona il presente codice giunto ﬁno a noi non con le ali della Fama, ma con l’ali dello stesso Amore, onde Egli in quei momenti che ai begli occhi non trovasi appresso, prenda sollievo in questo.’ (What more suitable gift can be given from one Lover to a friend who is also a Lover than Petrarch’s immortal poems that all breathe love for Laura the Beautiful? For sure, Tito Toscanelli as well as John Millar is nourished by such a beautiful passion that binds us to our divinity more when we are close, and that in the pleasures it gives removes a desire for Paradise. [Toscanelli] gives the present book that has reached us not on the wings of Fame but on those of Love itself so that [Millar] may ﬁnd consolation in it at those times when those beautiful eyes are far away.) 30 See Chapter10.

190

Letizia Panizza Dialogo [. . .] nel quale si scuoprono nuovi secreti sopra il Petrarcha, e si danno a leggere molte lettere che il medemo Petrarca, in lingua Toscana, scrisse a diverse persone. Cose rare, né mai più date a luce. (A dialogue [. . .] in which new secrets about Petrarch are revealed, and many letters in Tuscan that the same Petrarch wrote to various persons are presented to the reader. Precious items, never published before.)31

In the dialogue Franco gives the role of ‘Petrarchist’ to Sannio, a credulous fan of Petrarch and Laura legends (that is, earlier commentators) who has just returned from Avignon and is bursting to tell his friend Coccio about his ‘pilgrimage’. His speeches mimic those of a gullible believer visiting a shrine in search of miraculous relics. (In fact, he resembles the buffoon Calandrino in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the gullible small-town congregation listening to Fra Cipolla’s ﬂummery with false relics.)32 The ﬁrst thing Sannio does on his arrival is rush to the tomb of Laura in the church of Sainte Claire, where he sees her bones gathered in a most beautiful urn. Mercifully, he says he won’t subject Coccio to ‘la divotissima orazione, che io per la prova d’una tal maraviglia, ginocchioni alor feci dinanzi a quella cenere sempiterna’ (the fervent prayer that I then offered on my knees in front of those everlasting ashes in gratitude for such a marvel).33 Sannio is diligent in speaking to other merchants, men of letters, and scholars about Laura’s biography, but never found any two who agreed. Fed up, he decides on a quick sortie to Vaucluse, where he visits Petrarch’s house with its ‘sweet little kitchen’, and the ‘sweet little bedroom’ with Laura’s name carved all over the wooden frame of the bed. If only he had brought pen and paper along, he could have written a sack of books just like Petrarch!34 Back in Avignon, Sannio comes across two old friends (mockers of Petrarch and Laura, known for their practical jokes) who take him to the house of a rich and learned townsman of Avignon, Messer Roberto. After recognising Sannio as ‘un devoto servo de la dolce memoria del Petrarca’ (a devout slave of Petrarch’s sweet

31

From the modern critical edition with notes by R. L. Bruni (Exeter, 1979). All references to this edition. Franco was Pietro Aretino’s secretary for a while, and wrote satirical dialogues in the manner of Lucian da Samosata, printed several times. He was put to death by the Inquisition for blasphemy. 32 For the comic adventures of Calandrino, see Decameron Day 9.3 (he’s made to believe he’s pregnant), and especially Day 8.3 (his friends convince him he’s found the magic heliotrope, a stone that makes him invisible). For Fra Cipolla, who has two friends who try to steal his ‘best’ relic, a feather from the Angel Gabriel’s wing, but fail to defeat his ingenuity, see Day 6.10. 33 Il Petrarchista, p. 9. 34 Ibid., pp. 14–15. Bruni’s notes indicate precise parodies of Fausto da Longiano and Gesualdo.

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

191

memory), and the two friends as ‘veri dispreggiatori del nome suo’ (ones who truly hold his name in contempt), Roberto begins the task of stretching everyone’s credulity except Sannio’s.35 He quotes verse after verse of Petrarch in which every feature of Laura is associated with beauty, with paradise, and with singing and playing divinely. A high point comes when Roberto conﬁdes to Sannio alone that he will show him ‘la vera e naturale efﬁge di Laura, e senza dubio quella istessa che il Petrarca portava seco dovunque andava’ (Laura’s true likeness, taken from life, and without doubt the very one Petrarch used to carry with him wherever he went).36 Interrupting Sannio’s ﬂow, Coccio wants to know more about the portrait. Sannio has to confess he was disappointed: she looked just like any other woman, and was all made up like a tart — none of those miracles, that snow, those roses Petrarch said he saw. True, she was blonde, but nowhere near the ﬁne gold of the poet’s vision. And her hands were not snow-white, or like ivory. Sannio’s gullibility does not baulk at Roberto’s display of unethereal relics of Laura: a pair of nail scissors, a nightcap, a pair of eyebrow tweezers, a container for cosmetics, a toothcleaner, and many fragments from her chamber pot. He’s even more impressed by Petrarch’s own inkwell, decorated with Laura’s portrait on a shield, and laurel leaves all over.37 Dropping his critical stance for a belief in magic, at least temporarily, Coccio wonders why Sannio didn’t steal a couple of Petrarch’s pens, or at least ﬁnd out just what kind they were, so that ‘noi altri ancora ce ne potessimo servire, e veder di scrivere come il Petrarca’ (we too could make use of them, and try to write just like Petrarch)!38 Manuscripts of Petrarch that no one has ever seen are put before Sannio’s eyes, with corrections to known poems and new ones. Petrarch did not bless the circumstances of his meeting Laura; he cursed them! He wrote obscenities about his ‘beloved’; for example, instead of starting his canzone 129 about Love guiding him ‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’ (From thought to thought, from mountain to mountain), he had originally written, ‘Di bordello in bordel, di chiasso in chiasso’ (From brothel to brothel, from stew to stew), perhaps, Sannio explains, in order to move icy Laura to compassion, or to vent his sexual frustration.39 35

Ibid., pp. 20–30. Messer Roberto’s eulogies of Petrarch and Laura plagiarise Gesualdo in particular, says Bruni. 36 Ibid., p. 37. Petrarch refers to a portrait in sonnets 77 and 78. 37 Ibid., p. 41. The inkwell is made into the inspiration for a multitude of sonnets. 38 Ibid., p. 45. 39 Ibid., p. 48.

192

Letizia Panizza

Franco’s discrediting of the nonsense written by commentators about Petrarch’s love, and his debunking of a chaste Laura, is completed by the ‘discovery’ of letters proving in lurid detail that Laura was married and had children. Sannio is shown more than twenty letters in which Petrarch made manifest that his greatest suffering was jealousy of Laura’s husband. The poet even left Vaucluse when Laura was about to give birth, as he wanted to avoid being asked by her husband to be the godfather. On the question of Laura’s married state, Sannio shows good sense. How could one imagine that a beautiful, noble, and rich woman who died at thirty-ﬁve remained unmarried? ‘Cosa impossibile pur a pensare!’ (It’s impossible even to imagine!) Like all lovers, Sannio ﬁnds out, Petrarch and Laura had their quarrels and misunderstandings. In anger, Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio praising his invective against women, Corbaccio, and condemning his own love for Laura as nothing more than raving and madness. But then he also wrote a letter to Laura, lamenting her hard heart; it is crammed with genuine Petrarchan phrases of sorrow and grief. The parody places Petrarch and Laura in melodramatic roles. Here’s an example, full of typical parallelisms and antitheses, and ending with a chiasmus: Andrò dunque, poiché così vi piace, con la compagnia dei tormenti, solo e peregrino nel mondo. Andrò [. . .] gridando vendetta al cielo, e noiando le ﬁere e gli uomini con le lagrime e con i sospiri, ﬁnché mi verrà incontro la morte [. . .] E così voi cruda, che ora de l’altrui mal vi ridete, nel sentire la sentenza de la mia morte, son certo, che pietosa ne piagnerete. E perciò temprate per Dio l’inumane tempre, rallentate la corda a l’arco, onde sono uscite tante saette, e concedetemi che [. . .] veggia tanta pietate in voi, quanta ho vista beltate, talché [. . .] la mia morte sia contenta di quello, di cui sempre fu scontenta la vita.40 (I shall go then, since it thus pleases you, alone and a wanderer in the world, in the company of my sufferings. I shall go [. . .] crying out to heaven for vengeance, causing grief to wild beasts and men with my weeping and sighing, until death comes forth to meet me [. . .] And so, savage woman, you laugh at present at another’s woe, but when you hear the news of my death, I’m certain that turned compassionate, you’ll weep for me. And so, for God’s sake, temper your inhuman temperament, slacken your bow’s cord, whence you have shot so many arrows, and grant I may see as much pity in you as I’ve seen beauty, so that [. . .] my death may be satisﬁed by what always dissatisﬁed my life.)

Were there letters from Laura? Coccio wants to know, before surmising that Laura probably didn’t understand Petrarch’s Tuscan anyway, as she 40

Il Petrarchista, pp. 68–9. The ﬁnal chiasmus brings to mind the famous ending of Petrarch’s canzone 264, ‘E vedo il meglio, ed al peggior m’appiglio’ (I see the best, and the worst I grasp).

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

193

was French. No doubt, she must have spoken to him, since he records discussions, Coccio muses, but he probably kept her words in his heart. In an otherwise unexceptional commentary, the Florentine Antonio Brucioli, (Sonetti, canzoni et triumphi [. . .] con breve dichiaratione et annotationi, Venice: Alessandro Brucioli, 1548) also dedicated his brief commentary to another Laura-ﬁgure, this time the ‘illustrissima et eccellentissima Signora, la Signora Lucretia d’Este’, the daughter of Borgia Pope Alexander VI. As wife of Alfonso d’Este, Lord of Ferrara, she became known for her reﬁned tastes and piety. Pietro Bembo wrote lyrics in her honour. It may be ﬂattery, as Gesualdo’s dedication surely was, but it indicates how Laura was kept ‘alive’ in the persons of contemporary sixteenth-century individuals.41 Brucioli is sure that: Tanto più a Lei si converrebbe che un sì fatto huomo la celebrasse, quanto più chiaramente veggiamo le sue egregie virtù et rare bellezze; et quelle di Madonna Laura le crediamo per quello che altri ne dice. [. . .] in vostra illustrissima si vedrà veramente ritornata in vita alla età nostra più bella e più mirabile che mai fusse! (It would be all the more appropriate for a man like Petrarch to celebrate you as we see your outstanding virtues and unusual beauty shining in front of us, whereas those of Madonna Laura we believe only by what another person says. [. . .] In your illustrious [Ladyship] we will see Laura come back to life among us more radiant and marvellous than she ever was!)

No doubt provoked by Franco and the excesses of commentators, Laura does return triumphantly from the dead in 1552, rediviva, to clear her name by presenting her version of the Canzoniere: I Sonetti, Le Canzoni, et I Triomphi di M. Laura, in risposta di Francesco Petrarcha per le sue Rime in vita e dopo la morte di lei pervenuti alle mani del Magniﬁco M. Stephano Colonna, gentil’huomo Romano, non per l’adietro dati in luce (Venice: Comin da Trino di Monferrato) (The Sonnets, the Canzoni, and the Triumphs of Madonna Laura in answer to Petrarch’s Rime during her life and after her death. They have come into the hands of the magniﬁcent Messer Stefano Colonna, a Roman gentleman, and have not hitherto been published). Not without reason do we suspect that this member of the Colonna family, so involved with Petrarch in his lifetime, wishes to

41

Brucioli belonged to Evangelical/Lutheran circles in Florence at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He wrote moral dialogues, commentaries on the Old Testament Book of Proverbs and other devotional works, and pro-republican political dialogues. He lived most of his life in exile, ﬁrst because of his anti-Medici leanings, and then because of his religious views. He died in 1566.

194

Letizia Panizza

preserve a noble memory of Petrarch and Laura, and defeat aspersions cast on their honour. Malipiero may be a principal target. As he had banished Laura and impersonated a Petrarch without her, so now Colonna impersonates a Laura who is chastity and virtue itself.42 She addresses other ladies in her heavenly circle, not Petrarch, and her enemy is the world with its vanities, including sensuality. But, like Malipiero, Colonna keeps Petrarch’s rhyme schemes, and the same number of lyrics. Part of Petrarch’s ﬁrst verse is given as a title to each sonnet or canzone, so the reader can ﬁnd the original poem ‘Laura’ responds to. Franco’s comic desecration of Laura is undoubtedly another principal target, and it might be worth mentioning Lettere di molte valorose donne (Venice: G. Giolito, 1548). Here is an anonymous collection of letters in prose, attributed to Ortensio Lando, in which he impersonates a number of living women, some of whom discuss poetry and literature with one another. One woman debunks Petrarch and his love, another believes the lyrics have some value.43 As in Gesualdo and Brucioli, a male writer, Pierantonio Miero, stands outside the ﬁction to dedicate the work to an outstanding woman who is a living image of Laura: ‘la signora Vittoria, moglie diletta dello eccellentissimo Signore, il Signor Guidobaldo della Rovere, Duca d’Urbino’. Her excellent reputation has given him the courage to offer this work to a woman full of that kind of modesty and exceptional virtue suitable for such a great Lady. There is no mention of Stefano Colonna. It is left to ‘Laura’ herself to explain just how her Canzoniere arrived among us. Particularly puzzling is how ‘Laura’ would respond to poems written after her own death. In answer to Petrarch’s sonnet 294, ‘Soleasi nel mio cor’, she provides some clues: Se mai fui bella, or più che bella, e viva, Di mortal fatta alma immortal, e diva.

42

The (unsigned) Letter to the Reader of the 1711 reprint (Venice: Pietro Bassaglia) gives a few particulars about Colonna: he was a member of the Roman aristocracy, and well known poet, whose rewriting of the Canzoniere was a ‘fatica incredibile’ (an amazing labour). His aim was ediﬁcation. ‘Laura’s’ Canzoniere, ‘nel quale con sentimenti morali e di cristiana pietà ripieni, non solo la qualità del pio e religioso suo animo ne dimostra, ma il carattere ancora dipinge al vivo di quella Donna’ (in which with moral attitudes full of Christian piety, not only does it show forth her devout and religious spirit, but also draws from life the character of that Lady) whom Petrarch thought was above all other women, ‘santa, saggia, leggiadra, onesta e bella’. I follow the page numbering of the 1711 edition for my quotations. 43 Ortensio Lando achieved fame as the author of Paradossi, ﬁrst published in 1543, now edited by A. Corsaro (Rome, 2000). He, too, was persecuted by the Inquisition.

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

195

[. . .] Lasciato ho ’l corpo sotto un freddo sasso, Per cui convien che l’ altrui mano scriva. (If ever I were beautiful, now I’m even more so, and alive./ From a mortal being, I have become an immortal spirit, and a goddess!/ [. . .] I’ve left my body under a cold stone/ and that’s why another hand must do my writing.)

The sonnet 262 we have been tracking in different commentators, offering a dialogue between Laura, exalting chastity, and an older woman, now becomes a monologue. The ﬁrst two verses simply reverse the order of values the older woman presented in Petrarch’s original (see above, p. 179), ‘Più l’onestà che vita assai mi pare/ Ch’in valorosa Donna in pregio sia’ (p. 181) (Chastity far more than life, it seems to me,/ Is prized in a worthy woman). In the ﬁnal tercet, Petrarch had called on philosophers to learn from his Laura about ethics. Now ‘Laura’ prays to the Lord: ‘mai/ Fien stanche di gridar mie voci basse,/ “Levami, Signor mio, ch’ è tempo, a volo” ’ (May my lowly voice never grow weary of proclaiming, ‘Now is the hour to raise me on high, O Lord’). This last request raises an eyebrow, for isn’t Laura supposed to be already in heaven? In the original sonnet, Petrarch was hoping to see her raised on high in the future, presumably after her death. The strains of an impersonation keeping Petrarch’s original rhyme scheme are evident in the other ‘dialogue’ poems we have considered. Sonnet 279, ‘Se lamentar augelli’, is a lyric of mourning and consolation, in which everything beautiful and delicate in nature reminds Petrarch of Laura so vividly, he conjures up her comforting presence. Now, ‘Laura’ imagines herself going to meet Petrarch still on earth: ‘mi rappresento ma qual donna viva/ Ch’ al spesso richiamar d’altrui risponde’ (p. 198) (I portray myself, but as a woman alive/ who answers to the frequent calling of another). Parroting the original almost word for word, Laura reminds Petrarch that there is no reason for weeping. By dying, she becomes immortal: ‘Di me non pianger tu, ch’ e’ miei dí fersi/ morendo, eterni’ becomes ‘Questi miei dí, per morte eterni fersi’ (ibid.). The sonnet about Laura comforting Petrarch like a mother or bride (285) is drastically changed: ‘Laura’ addresses the ladies around her, urging them to turn to the Virgin Mary; she is the mother and bride who gives ‘fedel consiglio’ (trustworthy advice) to all mankind! (p. 201). It is the Virgin who causes every ‘spirito gentil’ (noble spirit) to burn with her love, ‘e via li mostra/ Che per salir là si convien, che segua’ (and shows them the way/ they must

196

Letizia Panizza

take to rise up there, and that they must follow). In Petrarch’s sonnets of remorse, where he is tormented by inner conﬂicts, as in 35, ‘Solo e pensoso’, ‘Laura’ too wanders without repose, but she is not escaping Petrarch—as Petrarch was escaping her — she is ﬂeeing ‘dal periglioso viver delle genti’ (from the dangerous way people live), and begging the Lord ‘che travagliando sempre/ Meco non venga il mondo, ed io con lui’ (p. 26) (that in my continual anguish,/ the world may not accompany me, and I may not accompany the world). The interest aroused by Laura and her ‘reality’ — which means the ‘reality’ of love expressed by writers of ﬁction — reaches its heights at a time of general moral and religious questioning brought on by a desire for reform in Italy. The printing presses had brought about an immense dissemination and demand for works of all genres in the vernacular. Women were being included in writing poetry, as well as patrons whom writerclients needed to cultivate. The creation of a ‘Laura’ of such ambivalent values, from the sublime to the obscene, can be seen as part of the competing moral claims about the compatibility of love with a Christian life. Neo-Platonism had brought into circulation the notion of love as friendship between the sexes, particularly appealing for the court and secular society. Castiglione, Bembo, and Leone Ebreo, popularising the doctrines of Marsilio Ficino, gave this love a philosophical and religious— in a wide sense— underpinning. Church writers, on the other hand, felt expressions of fervent love were appropriate only when directed to God, Mary, or the saints. With the Council of Trent, any friendship between the sexes outside marriage was suspect, which damned neo-Platonic relationships as a cover for adultery. The attention to Petrarch and Laura shows also the force of local loyalties that demanded exemplary citizens, and also the pull of female patronage. What better way to win over a female patron than by comparing her to a ‘perfect’ Laura?

Epilogue Although editions of Petrarch with commentaries continue after 1552, the greatest commentary on Petrarch appears in 1582. This is Ludovico Castelvetro’s Le rime del Petrarca, in two volumes (edited by Giacomo Castelvetro, Basle: P. de Sedabonis [⫽P. Perna]).44 The most scholarly com44

Castelvetro, who died in 1571, was one of the most distinguished scholarly critics of the century, noted for his translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics. The Petrarch commentary

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

197

mentary on Petrarch to date, the ﬁrst ‘modern’ commentary, is still used as a reference because it substitutes the fantasy for solid philology that brings out the complex intertextual references to Latin and vernacular literature in the Rime.45 This 1756 volume is most useful for its annotated catalogue of all the editions of Petrarch’s Rime. From 1470 to 1497, thirty-two editions are listed; from 1500 to 1596, 126; and, from 1600 to 1700, only twelve. Laura receives scant attention compared to Petrarch, and only within his Life. Castelvetro accepts that Laura existed, but he has no intention of giving her a life she did not have. The 1899 edition of the poet and scholar by Giosuè Carducci and Severino Ferrari (on which they worked over decades) makes use of the sixteenth-century commentaries, giving pride of place to Castelvetro. It was reissued in 1957 with an introduction by Gianfranco Contini.46 The last edition I wish to recall, because it has an original perspective on Laura, is Giacomo Filippo Tomasini’s Petrarcha redivivus, accessit Laurae brevis historia (Petrarch brought back to life, accompanied by a brief biography of Laura) (Padua: Paolo Frambotti, 1635). Together with the text, it contains exquisite woodcuts of Laura and Petrarch who are the perfect neo-Platonic lovers. Tomasini was interested in emblems, where text and image explain one another. He accompanies Petrarch’s canzone 23, ‘Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade’ (During that pleasant time of my youth), about a series of metamorphoses, with illustrations. In some ways this work is a throwback to the heyday of emblems in the sixteenth century, when Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata set the trend. In others, it brings emblems down to a personal level and the interpretation of a single Petrarchan poem about Laura interwoven with allusions to Ovid’s myths of metamorphosis. Tomasini chooses three episodes in particular: ﬁrst, Petrarch turning into a laurel (lauro) in pursuing Laura, indicating the complementarity of their lives (see Figure 11.1); second, Laura grasping Petrarch’s heart with her hand, suggesting her control over his passion (see Figure 11.2); and, third, Petrarch gazing on a naked

was begun in 1545, but printed only after his death. Castelvetro came under the shadow of the Inquisition, and ﬂed to Switzerland, which explains why the commentary was published in Basle, and edited by a relative. 45 Castelvetro’s edition was honoured by a magniﬁcent reprint (Venice: Antonio Zatta, 1756), with numerous engravings, a new Life of Petrarch by Antonio Beccadelli, plus a Life of Castelvetro (showing he was no heretic) by the great historian and scholar, Lodovico Antonio Muratori. 46 Francesco Petrarca, Le Rime (Florence, 1957).

198

Letizia Panizza

Figure 11.1 According to Tomasini, Petrarca redivivus, there were four symbolic images in the upper room of Petrarch’s house in Vaucluse illustrating the ‘mythologies’ in canzone 23. Three concern Laura. Here, Tomasini quotes: ‘e i duo mi trasformaro in quel ch’ i’ sono,/ facendomi d’uom vivo un lauro verde,/ che per fredda stagion foglia non perde’ (38–40) (and those two [Amor and Laura] transformed me into what I am,/ making me of a living man a green laurel/ that loses no leaf for all the cold season). Note that Petrarch reverses the Apollo and Daphne myth (in which Daphne is turned into a laurel to escape a pursuing Apollo), perhaps to signify the power of Laura to turn him into a poet deserving the crown of laurel, and the constancy of his love that never fades. (© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (c.81.b.21), Tomasini, 1635, p. 150).

Laura, who splashes him with water and then punishes him (see Figure 11.3). Gazing at the illustrations and considering Tomasini’s interpretations, my own conclusion is that Laura is far more powerful as a myth than as an ‘historical construction’.

LAURA IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

199

Figure 11.2 In traditional neo-Platonic love theory, the superior position of the beloved over the lover is signiﬁed by the symbolic gesture of stealing the heart. Here Laura steals Petrarch’s, and renders herself beyond human perception to him suggesting the spiritual quality of their love. Tomasini quotes from canzone 23: ‘Questa che sol mirar gli animi fura,/ m’aperse il petto, e ’l cor prese con mano,/ dicendo a me: Di ciò non far parola./ Poi la rividi in altro habito sola,/ tal ché non la conobbi, oh senso humano!’ (72–6) (She, who with her glance steals souls,/ opened my breast and took my heart with her hand,/ saying to me: Make no word of this./ Later I saw her alone in another garment/ such that I did not know her, oh human sense!). (© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (c.81.b.21), Tomasini, 1635, p. 157).

200

Letizia Panizza

Figure 11.3 Like the hunter Actaeon, Petrarch gazes on Laura; like Diana, she punishes him. The verses accompanying the image are: ‘Io, perché d’altra vista non m’appaga,/ stetti a mirarla: ond’ella ebbe vergogna;/ e per farne vendetta, o per celarse,/ l’acqua nel viso co le man mi sparse’ (152–5) (I, who am not appeased by any other sight,/ stood to gaze on her, whence she felt shame/ and, to take revenge or to hide herself/ sprinkled water on my face with her hand). (© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (c.81.b.21), Tomasini, 1635, p. 152).

12

Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England MICHAEL WYATT

IN THE SECOND EDITION of his Storia ecclesiastica della rivoluzion d’Inghilterra, published in Rome in 1594, the Florentine Dominican Girolamo Pollini relates the following incident from the very ﬁnal days of Thomas More’s life: E guardando in viso un amico, il quale per tenerezza, e per dolore il piangea, gli disse consolandolo questi tre versi del Petrarca, di cui egli era molto vago, e le sue poesie spesse volte lodava. Che più di un giorno, è la vita mortale, Nubile, brieve, freddo, e pien di noia, Che può bella parer, ma nulla vale. (Trionfo del Tempo 61–3) E questi altri: O nostra vita, ch’è si bella in vista, Com’perde agevolmente in un mattino, Quel ch’in molt’anni a gran pena s’acquista. (Canzoniere 269. 12–14) (Looking a friend in the face who in tenderness and pain was weeping for him, [More] recited as consolation this tercet from Petrarch, of whom he was very fond, and whose poetry he often praised: What more than a single day is a mortal life? Cloudy, brief, cold, and full of tribulation, It can seem lovely but is of no lasting worth. And also these: Oh life, so lovely to the eyes, How quickly it loses in a single morning All that in many years it has acquired.)1

In a marginal gloss, Pollini ascribes the anecdote to Ludovico Guicciardini’s Ore di ricreatione, and Piero Rebora suggests that Guicciardini might

1 G. Pollini, L’historia ecclesiastica della rivoluzion d’Inghilterra (Rome, 1594), pp. 107–8; all translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 203–216. © The British Academy 2007.

204

Michael Wyatt

have learned of it through Antonio Buonvisi, More’s close friend and the English-born son of a prominent Lucchese merchant family whose home in Louvain served as an important nexus for the exiled English Catholic community in northern Europe during the late Henrician and Edwardian period.2 Given the deeply moving letter More addressed to Buonvisi only several days before his execution, Pollini perhaps means that he was the unnamed visitor to More’s prison cell, though it is not at all clear that More would have been allowed such a visitor at that critical moment. It seems much more likely that Pollini’s addition of this anecdote is evidence of the literary tilt that the 1594 edition of his history takes — the episode is unrecorded in the ﬁrst edition, from 1591 — and the story does not appear in the most recent critical edition of Guicciardini’s text.3 The vogue for Petrarch was at the time of More’s death an imminent phenomenon in England but one in which it would be difﬁcult to argue that the English humanist played even a peripheral role. There may have been some remote inﬂuence of the Trionﬁ on More’s early Nyne Pageants,4 but Vittorio Gabrieli has argued that More almost certainly would not have known Italian and that ‘[he] never expressed any interest in the great Italian poetry from the Trecento to the Cinquecento’.5 If Pollini were to be taken seriously then, the Chancellor’s supposed passion for Petrarch’s vernacular poetry would have to be considered a well kept secret. I begin with this curious episode in order to draw attention to two matters: the uses to which Petrarch was put, in and with regard to sixteenthcentury England, uses which often reﬂect more about the agents of such cultural appropriation than about the material utilised; and, related to this, the protean character of the ‘meaning’ of Petrarch in the different contexts in which his inﬂuence operated. Pollini has clearly inserted into his narrative of More’s martyrdom a reading of Petrarch’s poetry consonant with the post-Tridentine Italian understanding of Petrarch as the poet not of love but of religious piety, while contemporaneously in England Petrarch’s vernacular and Latin works provided a malleable plat2 P. Rebora, ‘Uno scrittore toscano e lo scismo d’Inghilterra’, Archivio storico italiano, XCIII (1935), 231–54 (245–6). 3 L. Guicciardini, L’ore di ricreatione, ed. A.-M. van Passen (Rome, 1990). 4 See J. B. Trapp, ‘Petrarch’s Triumph of Death in Tapestry’, in Studies of Petrarch and His Inﬂuence (London, 2003), pp. 171–200 (pp. 171–4, 200), where he suggests that More’s knowledge of the Trionﬁ could have been had through French versions of them; and N. Mann, ‘Dal moralista al poeta’, in Atti [del] convegno internazionale Francesco Petrarca: Roma, Arezzo, Padova, Arquà Petrarca, 24–27 aprile 1974 (Rome, 1976) pp. 59–69 (p. 62). 5 V. Gabrieli, ‘L’elemento italiano nella vita e nell’opera di Thomas More: congetture e fatti’, La Cultura, XVII (1979), 235–70 (252–3, 258).

OTHER PETRARCHS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

205

form for the particular sort of individual subjectivity that increasingly characterised English Protestant culture in the period. Nicholas Mann and others have drawn attention to the fortunes of Petrarch in England through focusing on the principal conduits through which his vernacular poetry came to occupy the deﬁning position it enjoyed in the development of English poetics in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.6 But I would like to look brieﬂy here at some of the other traces of Petrarch’s presence in England apart from Petrarchist conventions in order to suggest that Petrarch’s signiﬁcance for English culture in the early modern period extended in other directions as well. Chaucer was the ﬁrst English voice to register Petrarch’s importance for English letters, and it was, signiﬁcantly, both the Latin humanist and vernacular Petrarchs who came to be refracted through his work.7 Though John Finlayson has recently argued compellingly that many elements of Boccaccio’s original Griselda novella at the end of the Decameron are notably more in evidence in the Clerk’s Tale than earlier scholarship had recognised, he also acknowledges that Petrarch’s Latin adaptation of Boccaccio’s tale remains Chaucer’s primary source.8 And it was indeed the Latin Petrarch whose legacy prevailed in England through the early sixteenth century,9 the ﬁrst substantive translation into English, of the Proem and book 1 of the Secretum, being found in a manuscript dating circa 1477–87.10 Chaucer’s clerk of Oxford names ‘Francys Petrake, the lauryat poete [. . .] whose rethoryk swete/ Enlumyned al Ytalle of poetrie’,11 and

6

See Mann, ‘Dal moralista’, and ‘Il Petrarca e gli inizi del rinascimento inglese’, La Cultura, XV (1977), 3–18 (this is a compressed and corrected version of material from the earlier article and two other studies: ‘La prima fortuna del Petrarca in Inghilterra’, in Il Petrarca ad Arquà, Atti del convegno di studi nel VI centenario, 1370–1374 (Padua, 1975), pp. 279–89; and Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles (Padua, 1975)); and G. Braden, ‘Wyatt and Petrarch: Italian Fashion at the Court of Henry VIII’, in Petrarch and the European Lyric Tradition, special issue of Annali d’Italianistica, XXII (2004), 237–63. The critical literature on Petrarchism and early modern English poetry is considerable, but I cite it in what follows only insofar as it is relevant to those other uses to which Petrarch’s work lent itself. 7 Mann, ‘Dal moralista’, 59–60, and ‘Il Petrarca’, 4. 8 J. Finlayson, ‘Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale’, Studies in Philology, XCVII:3 (2000), 255–75. 9 About which, see Mann, ‘Il Petrarca’, 4–8; Petrarch Manuscripts; and ‘La prima fortuna’. 10 BL, Additional MS 60577, fols 8–22; about which, see E. Wilson, ‘An Unrecorded Middle English Version of Petrarch’s Secretum: A Preliminary Report’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, XXV (1982), 389–90; and The Winchester Anthology: A Facsimile of British Library Additional Manuscript 60577, intro. Edward Wilson (Cambridge, 1981). 11 Geoffrey Chaucer, Clerk’s Tale (Florence, KY, 1992), p. 72.

206

Michael Wyatt

Petrarch’s authority as poet laureate was to ﬁnd a number of eager aspirants in early modern England, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser only the most conspicuous candidates among those who sought to adapt Petrarchan poetics to the English context. An earlier laureate, John Skelton, writing in his Colyn Clout in the early 1520s, describes the following scene: Hangynge aboute the walles Clothes of golde and palles, Arass of ryche aray, Freshe as ﬂours in May, With dame Dyana naked, Howe lusty Venus quaked And howe Cupid shaked His darte and bent his bowe For to shote a crowe At her tyrly tyrlowe; And how Parys of Troy Daunced a lege de moy, Made lusty sporte and joy With dame Helyn the quene; With such storyes by dene Their chambres well be sene, With triumphes of Cesar And of his Pompeyus war, Of renowne and of fame By them to get a name.12

Skelton is here attacking the series of tapestries based upon the Trionﬁ which Cardinal Wolsey had acquired for Hampton Court.13 Skelton does not like what he sees, sardonically suggesting that prelates would do far better to tend to their churches than waste their fortunes on such worldly frivolities. The passage should be taken with a grain of salt, however, given both Skelton’s own considerable employment of classical topoi in his Latin poetry and his hot and cold relationship with Wolsey; but it is interesting to note that a poet who was working in a vernacular form far from 12

J. Skelton, Here after foloweth a litel book called Colyn Clout compiled by master Skelton Poete Laureate (London, 1545), sigs C7ro–C7vo, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed 23 May 2007). 13 Trapp, ‘Petrarch’s Triumph of Death’, pp. 181–200, discusses the extant tapestries from the period based upon the Trionfi— now scattered in collections at Hampton Court, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco — though he notes that it is impossible to determine precisely which of these constituted Wolsey’s collection (p. 184).

OTHER PETRARCHS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

207

Petrarchan models should signal the reappearance of the vernacular Petrarch in the decade just preceding Thomas Wyatt’s translations and adaptations of Petrarch’s sonnets. Skelton was, not coincidentally, also involved in the polemical battle over the proper way to teach Latin and Greek in Tudor England. While modern vernacular languages were not taught in either English schools or universities at this time, grammar represents another area in which the ﬁgure of Petrarch stands in the wings just off stage in early modern England. For, without the instruments of Italian instruction developed and printed by William Thomas, and by Michelangelo and John Florio, it is difﬁcult to imagine the easy diffusion of Petrarch’s poetics in the second half of the sixteenth century in England.14 Indeed one of the most remarkable aspects of Wyatt’s and Henry Howard’s experimentation with Petrarchan poetics from the late 1520s through the 1540s is that they were working without any of the grammatical or lexical tools which their successors would have had at their disposal.15 Thomas’s Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar, with a Dictionarie for the better understandyng of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante, published in London in 1550, had been written in Italy several years before, evidently to meet the needs of a compatriot newly arrived in Padua. Its strictly pragmatic goal was to lay out in a clear and uncomplicated format the principles necessary for understanding and using the contemporary Italian vernacular as quickly as possible; and its word list, of roughly 8,000 entries, was intended primarily as an aid in reading the works of the three founding fathers of the Italian literary tradition. Thomas based his grammar and vocabulary on three recent Italian works: Alberto Accarisio’s Vocabolario, Grammatica, et Orthographia de la lingua volgare [. . .] con ispositioni di molti Luoghi di Dante, del Petrarca et del Boccaccio (Cento, 1543) and his Grammatica volgare (Bologna, 1536); and Francesco Alunno’s Le ricchezze della lingua volgare (Venice, 1543). The popularity of Accarisio’s grammar is attested by eight editions through 1561, and its straightforward presentation 14

Some of the material in this paragraph was published ﬁrst in M. Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge, 2005) and is reprinted here with permission. 15 See P. Thomson, ‘Wyatt and the Petrarchan Commentators’, The Review of English Studies, n.s. 10, XXXIX (1959), 225–33 (229). Wyatt’s experience in Italy was fundamental for his discovery of Petrarch’s poetry but, even if he was able to avail himself — as Thomson argues — of Vellutello’s commentary, and possibly also Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua, both published in 1525, these interpretive and theoretical instruments would not have resolved the differences between the spoken Italian Wyatt acquired in Italy and Petrarch’s not infrequently difﬁcult usage.

208

Michael Wyatt

served Thomas’s unpolemical objectives quite well. The Principal Rules are organised according to standard grammatical categories, schematising its sources’ narrative presentations, providing practically no commentary, and giving terse examples in Italian with English translations to illustrate each point, as for instance when explaining the doubling of the ﬁrst letter of pronouns or articles when they are attached to verbs: So that the verbe be hole without lackyng any lettre, and have (as I have saied) the accent of the last lettre sharpe, than shall the pronowne or article folowyng double his ﬁrst lettre. Trovòmmi amor del tutto disarmato. Love founde me cleane unarmed.16

Besides its didactic clarity, this example provides one of the earliest bits of Petrarch (Canzoniere 3. 7) published in English in the sixteenth century (the ﬁrst edition of Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes, in which Wyatt’s and Howards’s Petrarchan poems ﬁrst appeared, was not issued until 1557). Thomas’s grammar served as a concise presentation of Italian usage, and subsequent editions of The Principal Rules in 1560, 1562, and 1567 are evidence of its enduring value in the period preceding John Florio’s return to England. The Italian–English dialogue book Florio published in London in 1578, Firste Fruites, was far and away the most ambitious contribution to date in the promotion of vernacular language learning in England. The son of an exiled Italian Protestant pastor — born in London in 1553 but raised primarily in the Italian-speaking mountains of Switzerland, after Mary Tudor’s ascent to the English throne — the perspective that Florio brought with him back to England as a young man was marked both by a deeply moralising streak and a wide-ranging acquaintance with Italian written culture. Two examples from the Canzoniere (the ﬁnal tercet of 232, and the ﬁrst two lines of 272) employed in a chapter dealing with wrath, patience, and ﬂattery, reveal Florio’s incipient ﬂair for translation while they also presage Petrarch’s utility for English moral exemplarity: Ira è una certa perturbatione d’un crudel et dishonesto animo, la causa di ogni discordia, la compagna di calamnità, una confusione di richezze, et il principio di ogni

16

Ire is a certaine perturbation of a cruell and unhonest mynde, the cause of al discorde, a compagnion of calamity, a confusion of riches, the beginning of al destruction, ruine,

W. Thomas, Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar, with a Dictionarie for the better understandyng of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante (London, 1550), sig. C2ro, http://eebo.chadwyck.com.

OTHER PETRARCHS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

209

destrutione, ruina, fastidio, e confusione. E anche Petrarcha lo prova, dove dice parlando d’ira: Ira è brieve furor, & chi no ’l frena, E furor longho, che’l suo possessore, Spesso à vergogna, & tal’hor à morte.

care, and confusion. Also Petrarcha prooveth it, where he saith, speaking of anger: Anger is a furie short, And unto hym a furie long, That letteth her the bridle have Who now and then among, The angry man to shame she brings And sometymes unto death.

Dice il Petrarca: La vita fugge, & non s’aresta una hora, E la morte vien dietro, a gran giornate.

Petrarcha saith: Lyfe ﬂeeth away, And stayes not one houre, And death commeth after, journying apace.17

The position of Petrarch in the Italian debate over la questione della lingua was an issue that informed similar questions about the development of the English language in the sixteenth century. Pietro Bembo’s ideation of Petrarch’s vernacular language in the Prose della volgar lingua as pure and patrician, uncompromised by the mixed elements which characterise (and, for Bembo, compromise) the language of Dante, recommends an antique version of Italian, immune to the mutations of time, over against the language as it was continuing to develop. John Cheke, writing to Thomas Hoby with regard to his translation of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1561), notes that ‘I am of the opinion that our tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed of tijm, ever borrowing and never payeng, she shall fain to keep her house as bankrupt.’18 Cheke’s idea of an England free of foreign inﬂuence, even if something of a fantasy (and particularly in this period), is an ‘explicit declaration of patriotism [linked to] linguistic purity, associated in the period with a moral and religious puritanism typically difﬁdent toward things foreign and exotic [. . .] an index of an [emerging] national consciousness seeking to valorize itself in the face of other more advanced cultures’.19 Edmund Spenser’s subsequent advocacy 17 J. Florio, Florio His ﬁrste Fruites, which yeelde familiar speech, merie Proverbes, wittie Sentences, and golden Sayings. Also a perfect Introduction to the Italian, and English tongues (London, 1578), pp. 42vo and 43vo, http://eebo.chadwyck.com. Neither of these poems was translated in its entirety in the early modern period; see G. Watson, The English Petrarchists: A Critical Bibliography of the Canzoniere (London, 1967), for an invaluable resource regarding English versions of each of the poems in Petrarch’s cycle. 18 John Cheke, letter to Thomas Hoby, in The Courtier (London, 1928), p. 7. 19 C. Grayson, ‘Thomas Hoby e Castiglione in Inghilterra’, La Cultura, XXI (1983), 138–49 (147).

210

Michael Wyatt

in The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) of an archaic usage should be understood in the same light, a position nevertheless refuted by Philip Sidney, the poem’s dedicatee, in his The Defence of Poesie, for though Spenser’s poem ‘hath much Poetrie in [its] Eclogues, [and is] indeed woorthie the reading [. . .] that same framing of his style to an olde rusticke language, I dare not allow, since neither Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazaro in Italian, did affect it’.20 Roger Ascham advocates another kind of classicism in his Scholemaster (1570), promoting Greek and Latin quantitative metrics as more suitable and morally upright for imitation in modern vernacular languages than rhyme.21 Ascham’s noted critique of the Italian fashion in England in the ﬁrst part of his treatise consists in part of an attack on Petrarch, whose reliance on rhyme in his Italian poetry is considered both a betrayal of Petrarch’s profound acquaintance with Latin literature and an invitation to blasphemy; the Englishman under Italian sway, in Ascham’s view, has ‘more in reverence the triumphes of Petrarche than the Genesis of Moses’.22 Ascham’s most prominent pupil, Elizabeth Tudor, apparently ignored her tutor’s aversion to Italy, for her Italian skills were celebrated by all Italians in England who witnessed them in use, and among her varied translations from both classical and modern languages is a remarkable effort at rendering in English the ﬁrst ninety verses of the Trionfo dell’Eternità.23 The manifold lexical, grammatical, and interpretive problems of this last of Petrarch’s Trionﬁ are by no means entirely solved in Elizabeth’s version, but there is a more conﬁdent poetic voice expressed in this fragment than in Henry Parker’s earlier translation of the entire cycle (1554), and it demonstrates in its much closer approximation to the original text Elizabeth’s acquaintance with the tools available in England

20

See Edmund Spenser, The shepheardes calender conteyning tvvelue aeglogues proportionable to the twelue monethes. Entitled to the noble and vertuous gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and cheualrie M. Philip Sidney (London, 1579), sigs A2ro–A3vo; and Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London, 1595), sig. H3vo, http://eebo.chadwyck.com. 21 See C. Ginzburg, Nessuna isola è un’isola, quattro sguardi sulla letteratura inglese (Milan, 2000), pp. 46–50. 22 Roger Ascham, The scholemaster or plaine and perﬁte way of teachyng children, to understand, write, and speake, the Latin tong but specially purposed for the private brynging up of youth in gentlemen and noble mens houses, and commodious also for all such, as haue forgot the Latin tonge (London, 1570), p. 28ro; on Ascham’s confused critique of Italy and the Italian fashion in England, see Wyatt, The Italian Encounter, pp. 159–63. 23 For the identiﬁcation of Elizabeth as translator of this poem — the only extant copy is not in her hand—see The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed. R. Hughey, 2 vols (Columbus, OH, 1960), II, 456–7.

OTHER PETRARCHS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

211

for the study of Italian in the second half of the sixteenth century. The subject of Petrarch’s poem is the mutation of time into eternity, and if, as many critics have noted, the Trionfo dell’Eternità is Petrarch’s response to Dante’s Paradiso, ‘Petrarch ﬁnds himself in time, not, as Dante does, in its presence. Dante sees the river rushing by from its bank, Petrarch feels himself immersed and dragged along by the current.’24 Elizabeth’s translation is most compelling where Petrarch’s reconﬁguration of temporality ﬁnds its analogue in grammatical time: What meane so manie thoughts? One howre dothe reave that manye yeares gathered with muche a doe. To morrow, yesterdaye, morning and eve, that presse our sowle and it encombre soe, before hym passe shade like at ones awaye, for was or shalbe no place shall be fownde but for the tyme of is, now, and todaye, onlye eternitie knitt fast and sownde. Huge hills shalbe made plaine that stopped cleane our sight, ne shall there any thing remayne where on may hope or our remembrance leane, whose chaunge make other doe that is but vaine and life to seeme a sporte. Even with this thought, what shall I be? what was I heretofore? All shall be one, ne peese meale parted ought. Sommer shalbe, ne winter any more, but tyme shall dye, and place be chang’d with all [. . .]25

The death of time presents a problem, however, for the poet and his translator who effect their work through the means of language marked in every respect by time.26 Elizabeth’s translation evades the issue in breaking off just at the moment that Petrarch introduces Laura into the apocalyptic ﬁnale of the Trionﬁ, but it is difﬁcult to know whether or not this was a deliberate choice as the manuscript of sixteenth-century English verse in which the fragment is found leaves several blank folio pages after its termination and before the next poem begins. The occasion of this translation is equally elusive, but the tension in Petrarch’s ﬁrst eighty-six lines between a world in continual, Heraclitean ﬂux and that eternal point

24

G. Folena, ‘L’orologio del Petrarca’, in Textus testis: lingua e cultura poetica delle origini (Turin, 2002), pp. 266–89 (p. 277). 25 Petrarch, Trionfo dell’Eternità, trans. Elizabeth Tudor, in The Arundel Harington Manuscript, I, 362. 26 See T. Barolini, ‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta’, Modern Language Notes, CIV (1989), 1–38 (36–7).

212

Michael Wyatt

of stasis to which it is inexorably moving would seem to argue against Elizabeth’s authorship as queen but point rather toward an earlier moment. I would not want to argue for too strict a biographical motivation for this translation but, given its spiritual kinship with Elizabeth’s early translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s L’âme pecheresse and, most tellingly, in its complete refusal of all that ‘politics’ entails — eternity governed by an entirely different force — this English Triumphe evokes a situation quite different from that after Elizabeth’s unexpected ascent to the English throne in 1558. The publication of Tottel’s miscellany of poetry in the year prior to the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign signals a new phase in the English poetic tradition inspired by, if not always strictly tied to, the vernacular Petrarch, while a strong reaction against this species of poetics developed in the last decade of the sixteenth century for reasons quite different from Ascham’s. The last of Giordano Bruno’s six Italian dialogues (written and published in London in the mid-1580s), the Eroici furori, is among the earliest and most devastating attacks on Petrarchism conceived in England in this period, and, even if primarily directed against contemporary Italian poetry, the treatise is dedicated to Philip Sidney, about whom Bruno would inevitably have heard the praise of his contemporaries as the ‘new Petrarch’.27 An adaptation of the De Vita Solitaria by Sir John Harington, The Prayse of Private Life, is among the most idiosyncratic efforts at appropriating Petrarch’s work for early modern England. The date and original purpose of the translation are unknown, but a manuscript copy was prepared by Samuel Daniel for Lady Margaret Clifford sometime between 1605 and 1616.28 The Vita has much in common with the Trionfo dell’Eternità—in their respective ﬂights from the world, and in the

27

On Bruno’s anti-Petrarchism, apart from Chapter 9 by Hilary Gatti in this volume, see M. Wyatt, ‘Bruno’s Inﬁnite Worlds in Florio’s Worlds of Words’, in Giordano Bruno, Philosopher of the Renaissance, ed. Hilary Gatti (Ashgate, 2002), pp. 187–99 (pp. 196–8); and on Bruno and Sidney, see Wyatt, ‘Bruno and the “Eroico e Generoso” Philip Sidney’, Bruniana e Campanelliana (forthcoming). 28 The text is printed in The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, together with ‘The Prayse of Private Life’, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, PA, 1930), pp. 331–78, 428–32, from BL, Additional MS 30161, The Praise of Private Life, itself a transcription made from the Daniel manuscript originally at Skipton Castle in Yorkshire. An inquiry addressed there was answered by Dr Peter Beal at Sotheby’s London, who had recorded the Daniel manuscript in his 1980 Index of English Literary Manuscripts; Dr Beal directed me to Dr John Pitcher of St John’s College, Oxford, who has worked on the Clifford archive, but I have been unsuccessful in my efforts to reach him.

OTHER PETRARCHS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

213

ultimate impossibility of such renunciation for their author — but Harington’s very loose version of it is a world away from Elizabeth’s sober rendering of Petrarch’s poem. Harington’s approach to the Vita alternately contracts and expands the tightly controlled prose of Petrarch’s long-considered treatise — a practice liberally applied in Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1591) — as the following passage from Book I.ii, dealing with the dinner table of the man of action, shows: Coquine duces aule ducibus concurrent, ingens fragor exoritur, convehuntur terra marique conquisite epule et vina priscis calcata consulibus. Ardent rutilo in auro nostre Graieque vindemie, uno in scypho Gnosos et Meroe, Vesevus, Falernusque miscentur, Surrentinique colles et Calabri. Nec satis est, nisi Bachus Ausonius vel Hibleo melle vel Eoe suco medicatus harundinis baccisque nigrantibus odoratus naturam arte mutaverit.29 The cookes begin to playe thir partes, and sett fourth their service of fleshe and fishe, provided and fetched from Sea and Lande, from Mountains Playnes and Rivers. Which cates boyled, baked, roasted, fryed and changed in their nature, doe raise a marvelous savor. After these preparacions, thether is brought Ale, Beare, and Wyne, both sweete and sower, with other drinkes to please the pallett.30

Harington here substitutes straightforward English drink for Petrarch’s sophisticated display of oenological knowledge, but with regard to meat he goes on to extravagantly ﬁll in what Petrarch provides in merely general terms: Parte alia par diversi generis pompa conspicitur: fere horribiles, pisces incogniti, volucres inaudite, pulvere precioso oblite et oblite veteris patrie, quedam voce testantes originem nomenque iam solum de Phaside retinentes. (p. 50) Besides these he entertayneth his gueastes with rare sightes, as horrible Beastes, strange Fishes, Apes, Owles, Mermasetts, Munckeys, Babbions; out-landish Birdes, and Beastes, as Woolfes, Tigers, Beares, Cockes of Turkie and I[ce]land Doggs perfumed. (p. 330)

Petrarch’s contrasting description of the spartan gustatory habits of the contemplative man is largely rendered by Harington in terms closer to the original: Iste vero vel paucis vel uno vel nullo famulo contentus, hesterno sobrius vegetusque ieiunio, modesto sub lare mundam mensam nulla re magis quam sua presentia exornat, pro tumultu requiem, pro strepitu silentium habet, pro

29 30

Petrarch, De Vita Solitaria / La vie solitaire, trans. C. Carraud (Grenoble, 1999), p. 50. McClure (ed.), The Letters and Epigrams, p. 330.

214

Michael Wyatt multitudine se ipsum; ipse sibi comes, ipse sibi fabulator ac conviva est, nec metuit solus esse, dum secum est. (p. 52) The Solytarie Man contented with fewe meates (and few Servantes) haveinge the day before eaten moderately at his owne table and there meanly, yet cleanely furnished, orneﬁeth his Howse with no greater pompe then his owne presence. In steede of tumulte, he hath a small companie, in steede of noyes, he useth silence, for want of familiers he is accompanied with himself. He is his owne companion, with himselfe he enterteyneth himself, and so he and himselfe doe eate together. (p. 331)

Harington typically ends each of the chapters of his translation with a classical Latin citation not always to be found in Petrarch’s text, but at the end of this section he concludes in this way: He careth not where he ende his daies, but how and in what sorte. The some of his endeavor is not more, but having ﬁnished the fable of life, to close the same up with a commendable ende, as the Florentine poet said: ‘Un bel muorire tutta la Vita honora’. (p. 331)

Here the vernacular Petrarch is made to occupy an emblematic place within this English version of his Latin text, and Harington in so doing demonstrates his acquaintance with the Canzoniere (poem 207, the canzone from which this verse comes, was never translated into English in the early modern period). It would be quite interesting to know what led to Harington’s interest in Petrarch’s most hermetic, and in many respects least humanistic, treatise.31 A probably apocryphal anecdote describes Harington’s translation of the Orlando furioso as punishment from the queen for having circulated in Elizabeth’s court a translation of canto 28, the risqué episode of Jocondo, but at any rate Harington is so much associated with the carnivalesque that he is more easily situated in the company of Rabelais than with the world-weary Petrarch.32 That this version of the Vita Solitaria was never published in a period signiﬁcantly marked by translations from classical and modern languages in England might perhaps be read as a marker of its potentially limited appeal, though Petrarch’s examination of the semiotics of solitude in this treatise hardly 31

On the unusual position of the Vita Solitaria with regard to Petrarch’s other Latin works, see W. Scott Blanchard, ‘Petrarch and the Genealogy of Asceticism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, LXII (2001), 401–23, as well as Carraud’s introduction to his translation of the Vita, pp. 7–20; and, on the fundamental contradictions inherent in Petrarch’s efforts at achieving a coherent moral philosophy, see J. E. Siegel, ‘Ideals of Eloquence and Silence in Petrarch’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXVI (1965), 147–74. 32 See William Engel, ‘Was Sir John Harington the English Rabelais?’, in Rabelais in Context (Birmingham, AL, 1993), pp. 147–56.

OTHER PETRARCHS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

215

seems irrelevant to a culture still struggling to come to terms with a new form of religion and its attendant obligations in a rapidly changing and increasingly individualistic society. Samuel Daniel, Harington’s friend and John Florio’s brother-in-law, offers the most thorough valuation of Petrarch’s exemplary role for developing English culture in his Defence of Ryme (1603), published just at the liminal moment of James I’s arrival on the English throne. Daniel’s enthusiasm for medieval culture, unusual in England at this time, culminates in the Defence with the following affirmations: Is it not a most apparent ignorance, both of the succession of learning in Europe, and the general course of things, to say that all lay pittifully deformed in those lacke-learning times from the declining of the Roman Empire, till the light of the Latine tongue was revived by Rewcline, Erasmus, and Moore. When for three hundred yeeres before them [. . .] Franciscus Petrarca [. . .] shewed al the best notions of learning, in that degree of excellencie, both in Latine, Prose and Verse, and in the vulgare Italian, as all the wittes of posterity have not yet much over-matched him in all kindes to this day. His great Volumes written in Morall Philosophie shew his inﬁnite reading and most happy power of disposition; his twelve Aeglogues, his Africa containing nine Bookes of the last Punicke warre, with his three Bookes of Epistles in Latine verse, shew all the transformations of wit and invention that a Spirite naturally borne to the inheritance of Poetry and judicial knowledge could expresse. All which notwithstanding wrought him not that glory & fame with his owne Nation as did his poems in Italian, which they esteeme above all watsoever wit could have invented in any other forme then wherin it is, which questionlesse they will not change with the best measures Greekes or Latines can shewe them, howsoever our Adversary imagines.33

It is not incidental that Daniel’s treatise was published together with a panegyric for the new king, for, as Carlo Ginzburg has argued, the Defence is both a response to Thomas Campion’s claim for the superiority of quantitative poetics and a vigorous assertion of what François Bauduin describes as ‘the poem of our national history’.34 Amedeo Quondam argues in his provocative study, Petrarca l’italiano dimenticato, that the fundamental problem for emerging nations is how to deﬁne their relationship to the past, and he suggests that Petrarch has been punished by the modern Italian state — there is, for instance, as yet no national edition of 33

S. Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatorie Delivered to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty [. . .] also Certaine Epistles with a Defence of Ryme (London, 1603), sigs G1vo–G2ro, http://eebo. chadwyck.com. 34 See Ginzburg, Nessuna isola, pp. 65–7; and also E. MacKenzie, ‘What about Petrarch?’, The Review of English Studies, n.s. 34, CXXXVI (1983), 458–63.

216

Michael Wyatt

Petrarch’s works in Italy as there are for Dante and Boccaccio — for not having taken a sufﬁciently critical stance toward either the classical past or religious authority, and for having spent so much of his life abroad.35 But it is precisely Petrarch’s catholic position that Daniel acknowledges in the Defence, a broad range of accomplishment that can provide a fundamental point of reference for the new world ushered in with the advent of James I (himself a poet with a profound humanistic preparation) in England. In his introduction to the ﬁrst edition of his 1598 Italian–English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, John Florio notes that ‘Boccace is prettie hard, yet understood: Petrache harder, but explained: Dante hardest but commented’ and yet he feels obliged to add that ‘one says of Petrarche for all: a thousand strappadas could not compell him to confesse what some interpreters will make him saie he meant’.36 It is this elusiveness which has enabled so many different versions of Petrarch to circulate and compete with one another in the early modern period and beyond. Despite his foundational role in the elaboration of European humanism and his centrality for the development of the lyric poetry of so many diverse cultures, Petrarch has been and remains a chameleon in the hands of those who would use him for their own designs.

35

A. Quondam, Petrarca l’italiano dimenticato (Milan, 2004), pp. 229–41. John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598), sig. A4ro, http://eebo.chadwyck.com. 36

13

Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia and European Petrarchism STEPHEN CLUCAS

ALTHOUGH THERE ARE PROBABLY BETTER English Petrarchan poets than Thomas Watson, and better English Petrarchan sonnet sequences than his EJASOLPAHIA, or Passionate Centurie of Loue (published by John Wolfe in London in 1582), there are a number of compelling reasons for discussing this work in a study dedicated to the inﬂuence of Petrarch on English literary culture. First, the Hekatompathia is a particularly vivid witness to the way in which the late ﬂowering of Petrarchism in England in the 1580s represents a kind of ‘telescoped’ or compressed reception of the Petrarchan tradition, where poets of the English court experienced the Canzoniere at the same moment as they experienced the later Italian Petrarchisti —in all their dazzling and often hyperbolic forms — as well as the poet’s imitators of France (and other continental cultures), who often infused their Petrarchan verses with amorous themes drawn from the classical amorists (Ovid, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius) or their humanistic neo-Latin imitators (Pontanus, Marullus, etc.), together with what one could call the ‘meta-discourses’ of Petrarchism: courtly neo-Platonising commentaries and apologetics, aggressive (and not so aggressive) religious ‘spiritualisations’ which sought to reverse, or at least mitigate or reconﬁgure the amorous momentum of the rime sparse.1 Second, Watson’s attitudes towards imitation and translation are peculiarly instructive, and the Hekatompathia is a useful diagnostic text for investigating the status of imitation in late sixteenth-century European vernacular and neo-Latin 1 See A. Graf, ‘Petrarchismo e antipetrarchismo’, in his Attraverso il Cinquecento (Turin, 1888), pp. 3–86; M. Guglielminetti, ‘L’antipetrarchismo’ in P. Blanc (ed.), Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle: Pétrarque en Europe, XIVe–XXe siècle: actes du XXVIe congrès international du CEFI, Turin, Chambéry, 11–15 décembre 1995. A la mémoire de Franco Simone, Bibliothèque Franco Simone, XXX (Paris, 2001), pp. 75–83; and T. P. Roche, ‘Annotators, Spiritualizers and Giordano Bruno’, in his Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989), pp. 70–153.

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 217–227. © The British Academy 2007.

218

Stephen Clucas

literary culture. If for no other reason it is worthwhile re-examining Watson’s achievements as a Petrarchan poet because, whilst still in his twenties, he reputedly made a complete translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere into Latin. However, aside from two or three examples which he included in the Hekatompathia, this prodigious feat of vernacular–Latin translation (which reverses the conventional polarities of such translation projects) has been lost. Watson clearly saw himself as a humanist Latin poet, and this is borne out by the predominance of Latin in his surviving oeuvre, which includes a Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone (1581), a collection of ten 100line Latin pastoral elegies (or querelae), Amyntas (1585), a Latin treatise on the art of memory, the Compendium Memoriae Localis (1585), a Latin translation of a Greek epyllion by Coluthus, the Raptus Helenae (1586), a pastoral eclogue, Meliboeus (1590), and a set of eclogues and verse-letters, Amintae Gaudia (1592). The Hekatompathia was clearly a new departure for Watson, and not one with which he felt entirely conﬁdent. In an anonymous Latin poem to Watson included among the prefatory and dedicatory materials of his Antigone, a poet writes: Thuscanus Petrarcha tuo stat carmine dives: mundo utinam ﬁeret notior ille labor! (Tuscan Petrarch is enriched by your verses— Would that this work were better known to the world!)2

Although the unnamed commender of Watson’s Petrarchan skills may have been referring to his lost Latin translation, when Watson entered the lists of amorous poetry it was in English and not in Latin garb. That he was anxious about his vernacular debut can be seen from his selfconscious remarks about joining the ranks of English vernacular poets. In sonnet 6, for example, where Watson presents the ﬁrst of three of his Latin translations from Petrarch (Canzoniere 103, ‘S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’i sento?’), he says, ‘The Author when he translated it, was not then minded euer to haue imboldned him selfe so farre, as to thrust in foote amongst our English Poets.’3 In his Authoris ad Libellum suum Protrepticon, Watson anxiously imagines his book falling into the hands of

2

The Complete Works of Thomas Watson (1556–1592), ed. D. F. Sutton, 2 vols, Studies in Renaissance Literature, 13a–b (Lewiston, NY, 1996), I, 18–19. 3 Complete Works, I, 157.

HEKATOMPATHIA AND EUROPEAN PETRARCHISM

219

Sir Philip Sidney or Edward Dyer, the scions of English vernacular poetry, and invokes the aid of his aristocratic patron Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford: hic quoque seu subeas Sydnaei, sive Dyaeri scrinia, qua Musis area bina patet, dic te xenolium non divitis esse clientis, confectum Dryadis arte, rudique manu, et tamen exhibitum Vero, qui magna meretur virtute et vera nobilitate sua. inde serenato vultu te mitis uterque perleget, et naevos condet uterque tuos. (Also if you cross Sidney’s desk, or Dyer’s, two ﬁelds that lie open for the Muses, say that you are a small gift of a client who is scarce over-wealthy, composed with a Dryad’s skill and an unlettered hand, but that you have nevertheless been shown to Vere, a man who deserves great things for his virtue and true nobility. Then each of these gentlemen will remove the frown from his brow and read you kindly, both will ignore your blemishes.)4

Watson’s complaint of having only rude, unpolished literary skills is clearly disingenuous, but may well reﬂect his unease with the new vernacular idiom. He also has similar misgivings about the mode of amorous poetry itself which he asks his ‘frendly reader’ to excuse together with his putative lack of literary skill: I hope that thou wilt in respect of of my trauaile in penning these louepassions, or for pitie of my paines in suffering them (although but supposed) so suruey the faultes herein escaped, as eyther to winke at them, as ouersightes of a Blinde Louer; or to excuse them, as idel toyes proceeding from a youngling frenzie, or lastlie to defend them, by saying, it is nothing praeter decorum for a maiemed man to halt in his pase, where his wound enforceth him, or for a Poete to falter in his Poeme, when his matter requirith it. Homer in mentioning the swiftnes of the winde, maketh his verse to runne in posthaste all vpon Dactilus: and Virgill in expressing the striking downe of an oxe letteth the end of his hexameter fall, withall, procumbit humi bos. Therefore if I roughhewed my verse, where my sense was vnsetled, whether through the nature of the passion, which I felt, or by rule of art, which I had learned, it may seeme a happie faulte [. . .].5

Watson, then, parades his self-conscious use of the ‘rule of art’ even as he makes naturalistic claims to rudely express the ‘nature’ of amorous passion. The fact is that Watson’s art is as self-consciously wrought as the metrical ‘faltering’ of Homer and Virgil to which he appeals. Watson’s 4 5

Complete Works, I, 148–9. Complete Works, I, 145–6.

220

Stephen Clucas

collection does not seek to conceal, but rather foregrounds the extent to which it self-consciously imitates and translates a wide range of Italian and French poetry, both vernacular and Latin, and each one of the 100 sonnets which make up this ‘Passionate Centurie of Loue’ is accompanied by an ‘annotation’, many of which explicitly identify the source or — more frequently—sources of the poem.6 In this chapter I do not concern myself with identifying Watson’s sources (a task which has, in any case, been rendered superﬂuous by the exacting scholarship of Dana Sutton’s 1996 edition of Watson’s Complete Works),7 but rather I reﬂect upon the various ways in which Watson articulates the relationship between his poems and the poems upon which they are based, and consider what Watson’s sonnet-sequence has to tell us about the ways in which various currents of European Petrarchan poetry of the sixteenth century (in Italian, Latin, and French) were refracted in the early stages of the development of the Elizabethan Petrarchan sonnet.8 In a prefatory poem in his Latin Antigone, Watson refers to some early European travels, when, he says: dumque procul patria lustrum mediumque peregi discere diversis aedere verba sonis, tum satis Italiae linguas moresque notabam, et linguam, et mores, Gallia docta, tuos. ut potui, colui Musas, quocunque ferebar: charus et imprimis Iustinianus erat. (I spent seven or eight years far from my homeland, and learned to speak in diverse tongues. Then I became wellversed in Italy’s languages and manners, and also in your tongue and ways, learned Gaul. Wherever I was wafted, I cultivated the Muses as best I could, and Justinian was especially dear.)9

While documentary evidence is scarce, it is clear from these autobiographical references that he spent some time in France in the 1570s 6

Michael Spiller has drawn attention to the fact that Watson’s self-conscious identiﬁcation of his sources was virtually unique among the English Petrarchans of the late sixteenth century. See M. R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London and New York, 1992), p. 94. 7 For Sutton’s edition, see note 2 above. 8 For signiﬁcant new insights into the importance of translations from vernacular European languages for Elizabethan culture, see M. Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2005). 9 Complete Works, I, x–xi.

HEKATOMPATHIA AND EUROPEAN PETRARCHISM

221

studying law (he styles himself, on more than one title page, in fact, as a student of law),10 and that this period was clearly extremely inﬂuential on his literary career. This can be seen in Watson’s choice of sources: while he imitates from a number of classical sources (including the Greek of Sophocles), he also draws upon a wide range of Italian and French poets of the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among the French poets we ﬁnd Pierre Ronsard and the neo-Latin poets Stephanus Forcatulus (Étienne Forcadel) and Gervasius Sepinus (Gervase Sepin), while among the Italians we ﬁnd (in addition to Petrarch) the neo-Latin verse of Ercole Strozzi (d. 1508) (whom Watson considered to be ‘one of the best Poets in all his age’), Aeneas Silvius (Piccolomini), and Angelo Poliziano;11 and (in the vernacular) Agnolo Firenzuola, Girolamo Parabosco, and — above all—Seraﬁno Ciminelli, or Seraﬁno Aquilano (d. 1500), whose strambotti are the most frequently imitated of Watson’s modern sources.12 We also ﬁnd fragments of Ariosto, Marullo, and Pontano, as well as a quotation from an epigram by the Dutch poet Caspar Urcinus Velius.13 In this chapter I address the various ways in which Watson conceived of the relationship between his translations and imitations and the original sources, and the ways in which he utilised them. In his letter ‘To the frendly Reader’ Watson insists that ‘my birdes are al of mine own hatching’, although this of course, does not preclude the possibility that the eggs were taken from other birds’ nests.14 Watson clearly felt that translation was a valid — even admirable — form of literary invention. In his annotation to sonnet 55, for example, he says: ‘The whole inuention of all this Passion is deducted out of Seraphine, Sonnet 63, whose verses if you reade, you will iudge this Authors imitation the more praise worthy.’ Watson does indeed closely follow Seraﬁno’s eight-line strambotto, ‘Come alma assai bramosa e poco accorta’, with its imagery of the monstrous Minotaur sitting at the centre of the Labyrinth, in the ﬁrst ten lines of his sonnet, but goes on to develop a counter-movement in the following eight lines (Watson preferred eighteen lines to the standard fourteen), in which

10

On the title page of Antigone he refers to himself as ‘a student of both branches of the law’ (I. V. studioso), and on the title page of the Aminta Gaudia (1592) as ‘a student of the law’ (iuris studioso). See Complete Works, I, 16–17 and II, 198–9. 11 For Watson’s praise of Strozzi, see his ‘annotation’ to 85 in Complete Works, I, 221. 12 On Seraﬁno’s Petrarchism, see I. D. Rowland, ‘The Antipetrarchismo of Seraﬁno Ciminelli “Aquilano”’ in Blanc, Dynamique, 241–56. 13 Poem 53, where he cites six lines from Velius’ Amor Mellilegus printed in Poemata (Basel, 1522), fol. 2. See Complete Works, I, 195, 256. 14 Complete Works, I, 146.

222

Stephen Clucas

he invites his mistress to ‘play Ariadnaes part’ and, while Seraﬁno’s lover is left to wander the labyrinth, with his ‘thread of reason’ ( ﬁl de ragion) broken by love, Watson asks his mistress to ‘saue and set me free’.15 This tendency to use his sources in a ﬂexible and inventive way is typical of Watson, and I would like to spend a little bit of time looking at the various ways in which he talks about the act of translating. In the sonnet quoted here, for example, it is the ‘inuention’ which is ‘deducted’ from Seraﬁno’s poem — that is, the germinal concept (or conceit) is taken in order to stimulate Watson’s invention (in the rhetorical sense of that word). In the ﬁnal sonnet of the work (an ‘Epilogue’ appended after the hundredth ‘Passion’ of the ‘Centurie’) Watson presents us with one of the three examples of his Latin Canzoniere, ‘Lugeo iam querulus vitae tot lustra peractae’, a translation of Petrarch’s ‘I’ vò piangendo i miei passati tempi’ (Canzoniere 365), which, he says, is ‘faithfully translated out of Petrarch’.16 This is analogous to sonnet 5 which, Watson says, is ‘wholly translated out of Petrarch’. In the annotation to this sonnet which imitates Petrarch’s ‘S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento’, Watson marvels (with all the freshness of the Petrarchan neophyte) at ‘certain contrarieties’ in Petrarch’s verse ‘whiche are incident to him that loueth extreemelye’, and that are ‘liuely expressed by a Metaphore’.17 Watson is a very selfconscious translator and it is interesting to see him commenting here on what one would have imagined to be a very recondite source for Elizabethan Petrarchans, Geoffrey Chaucer: And it may be noted, that the Author in his ﬁrst halfe verse of this translation varieth from the sense, which Chawcer vseth in translating the selfe same [poem]: which he doth vpon no other warrant then his owne simple priuate opinions, which yet he will not greatly stand vpon.18

The following poem, sonnet 6, is — as Watson notes — ‘a translation into latine of the selfe same sonnet of Petrarch which you red lastly alleaged’. Interestingly, Watson suggests that the Latin, ‘commeth somwhat neerer vnto the Italian phrase then the English doth’.19 Certainly we can see what Watson means if we compare Petrarch’s ‘Se buona, ond’ 15

Complete Works, I, 196–7. Complete Works, I, 236. 17 Complete Works, I, 157. 18 Complete Works, I, 157. On Chaucer’s ‘inaccurate version’ of Rime 132 in Troilus and Criseyde (I. 400–20), ‘the only surviving mediaeval English version of any poem from the Canzoniere’, see G. Watson, The English Petrarchans: A Critical Bibliography of the Canzoniere, Warburg Institute Surveys, III (London, 1967), p. 1. 19 Complete Works, I, 157. 16

HEKATOMPATHIA AND EUROPEAN PETRARCHISM

223

è l’effetto aspro e mortale?’ to Watson’s Latin ‘Si bonus est, vnde effectus producit acerbos’ and his English rendering ‘If good, how chance he hurtes so many men?’, although this may say as much about Watson’s facility in Latin and his relative unfamiliarity with English prosody as anything else. Watson also produces faithful translations of Seraﬁno (as in sonnets 43, 47, 55, 61, 94, and 99) although even here he sometimes makes ﬁne distinctions about the closeness of his rendering. Watson says of sonnet 43, for example, a rendering of Seraﬁno’s strambotto ‘Se Salamandra in ﬁamma vive’, that ‘The sense or matter of this Passion is taken out of Seraphine’, whereas in sonnet 94, he says that he has ‘augmented the inuention of Seraphine’ (here by developing and extending Seraﬁno’s repetitive curses—‘Biastemo [. . .] Biastemo [. . .]’ with some additional curses of his own).20 Watson is also self-conscious, however, about the extent to which he departs from his source materials. He is not shy about altering Seraﬁno’s verses, for example, and in sonnet 22 (whose ‘substance’ is taken from Seraﬁno’s ‘Quando nascesti amor?’) he says that ‘the Author has in this translation inuerted the order of some verses [. . .] and added the two last of himselfe to make the rest to seeme the more patheticall’.21 In sonnet 77 he similarly stresses that while the ‘chiefe contentes’ of the poem are from Seraﬁno’s ‘Col tempo passan gli anni’, he has again inverted the order of the verses, ‘some times for his rimes sake, but for the most part, vpon some other more allowable consideration’. Watson emphasises, then, the plasticity of his sources, and, while he eschews changes which merely reﬂect an inability to ﬁnd suitable corresponding rhymes in English, he is perfectly happy to vary his sources for ‘more allowable’ considerations of invention or expressivity. He is also happy with partial translation: in sonnet 65 he imitates ﬁve lines from a sonnet by Girolamo Parabosco in ‘the last staffe’ (stave or stanza) of his poem, and in sonnet 56, he freely combines elements from two different strambotti by Seraﬁno: The ﬁrst Staffe of this Passion is much like vnto the inuention of Seraphine in his Strambotti, where he saith, Morte: che vuoi? te bramo: Eccomi appresso [. . .] The second Staffe somewhat imitateth an other of his Strambotti in the same leafe.22

20

Complete Works, I, 187, 229. Complete Works, I, 170. 22 Complete Works, I, 197, 205. 21

224

Stephen Clucas

While, in sonnet 24, Watson boasts of having drawn his conceits from several sources in Seraﬁno: Seraphine in his Strambotti hath many prettie inuentions concerning the Lookingglasse of his Mistres: whence many particulars of this passion are cunningly borrowed, part beeing out of one place, and part out of an other.23

This interleaving of texts from different sources corresponds — albeit in translation— to the popular sixteenth-century Italian fashion for centoni—poems fabricated like mosaics from fragments of other poems (works such as Giulio Bidelli’s Centoni di versi del Petrarca, published in Verona in 1588).24 This centonismo of Watson is amply illustrated by sonnet 89, which, he says, is ‘altogether sententiall’ in the ﬁrst two ‘staffes’ (i.e. sestets). By this Watson means that it is composed entirely of sententiae or pithy sayings translated out of various sources — which range from Jerome and Xenophon to Pontano and Marullo (which he duly lists, for the reader’s delectation).25 While Robert Burton would later ironically scoff at the practice of the centoni (along with other late-humanist literary vices) in the self-referential preface to his Anatomy of Melancholy, in the 1580s (in Italy as in England) there was a sophisticated appreciation of the ‘cunningly borrowed’ which made it a viable mode of translation and imitation.26 We can see this self-conscious delight in the fragmentation and reassembly of amorous poetry in Watson’s annotation to sonnet 7, ‘Harke you that list to heare what sainte I serue’: This passion of loue is liuely expressed by the Authour, in that he lauishlie praiseth the person and beautifull ornamentes of his loue, one after an other as they lie in order [i.e. after the fashion of the blason]. He partly imitateth herein Aeneas Siluius, who setteth downe the like in describing Lucretia the loue of Euryalus; and partly he followeth Ariosto cant[o] 7. where he describeth Alcina: and partly borroweth from some other where they describe the famous Helen of Greece: you may therefore, if you please, aptlie call this sonnet as a Scholler of good iudgement hath already Christened it aimg paqarisijg.27

23

Complete Works, I, 172. It should be noted, given Watson’s evident interest in Seraﬁno’s lookingglass motif, that the title of the manuscript version of the Hekatompathia was A Looking-glasse for Loouers (see British Library, Harleian MS 3277). 24 G. Bidelli, Centoni di versi del Petrarca raccolti da G. Bidelli (Verona, 1588). 25 Complete Works, I, 224. 26 For Burton’s self-conscious remarks about the cento form, see R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. T. C. Faulkner, N. K. Kiessling, and R. L. Blair, 6 vols (Oxford, 1989–2000), I, 11. 27 Complete Works, I, 158.

HEKATOMPATHIA AND EUROPEAN PETRARCHISM

225

Although Sutton translates aimg paqarisijg with the perfectly acceptable ‘ﬂattering praise’, I wonder whether she hasn’t lost here the sense of Watson’s deliberately witty self-deprecation, as one might also translate it as parasitical praise (in the sense of praise taken from the table of other poets).28 Like Petrarch’s Laura — and the many Petrarchan mistresses which succeeded her — Watson’s mistress is an artiﬁcial construct, parasitically dependent on the amorists of the past (both ancient and modern). This fragmented, discrete nature of Petrarchan discourse is reﬂected in Watson’s lapidary practices: in sonnet 21, for example, Watson blends together elements of Petrarch’s ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque può Natura’ (Rime 248) with a Seraﬁno sonnet on the same theme (‘Chi vuol veder gran cose altiere e nuove’), and in a marginal note appended to the ﬁnal couplet (which includes the line ‘No bird but Ioues can look against the sunne’) also refers his readers to Seraﬁno’s ‘L’aquila che col sguardo affisa el sole’.29 Watson often uses his models only for the ﬁrst octave or last sestet of his poems, and in sonnet 54 he says ‘in many choyse particulars of this Sonnet, he imitateth here and there a verse of Ronsardes, in a certain Elegie to Ianet peintre du Roy’.30 This intermittent translation from a longer poem in Ronsard’s Amours de Cassandre is consistent with Watson’s centonismo, which we can also see in sonnet 93, where the ﬁrst and sixth lines of the sonnet ‘alludeth to two sentencious verses in Sophocles’, that is two lines from Oedipus Coloneus and Trachiniae, imitated directly from the Greek, while in the sonnet as a whole he models himself on the sestina-like interlinking of lines ‘wherein hee imitateth some Italian poets, who more to trie their wits, then for any other conceite, haue written after the like manner’.31 This imitative composition by fragments can also be seen in his satirical attack on love, ‘Quid Amor?’, a thirty-nine-line Latin poem which is appended to sonnet 98, where he heaps up negative epithets from Petrarchan and other sources.32 Watson is also not averse to imitating himself — in sonnet 98, for example, the ‘most part of the particulars’ are drawn from ‘Quid Amor?’33 and in sonnet 79 he says the ‘sense’ of the poem is ‘very like vnto himselfe, where in a Theame diducted out of the bowelles of Antigone in Sophocles (which 28

Complete Works, I, 244. I wonder too, in the immediate context of ‘Helen of Greece’, whether there isn’t also a play on aimgkgmg (⫽Helen). 29 Complete Works, I, 169, 247–8. 30 Complete Works, I, 196, 256. 31 Complete Works, I, 228–9, 267. 32 Complete Works, I, 233–4. 33 Complete Works, I, 232.

226

Stephen Clucas

he lately translated into Latine and published in print) he writeth in very like manner as followeth’.34 In sonnet 75 he ‘borroweth from certaine Latin verses of his owne’, an Ovidian confection which had apparently formed part of a ‘certain peece of worke written in the commendation of women kinde’, but was later reworked to form part of his Amintae Gaudia.35 Watson also on occasions paraphrases rather than translates his sources: in sonnet 90 he says that his Latin rendering of Petrarch’s ‘Tennemi Amor anni vent’uno ardendo’, ‘translateth as it were paraphrastically’, and in sonnet 70 he says that he ‘some what a farre off imitateth an Ode in Gervasius Sepinus written to Cupid’.36 Watson, in sum, runs through the whole gamut of the possibilities of translation available to the late sixteenthcentury Petrarchan: from faithful, line-by-line renderings to various kinds of partial translation, to centone to paraphrase. Given the fact that Watson’s Hekatompathia is the ﬁrst Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English, and that it is so closely engaged with the Petrarchan tradition from the Canzoniere itself to the sixteenth-century imitators such as Seraﬁno and Parabosco, it is a pity that Watson has been undervalued, even by his promoters. In 1957, William Murphy (who had written a Harvard Ph.D. dissertation on Watson’s Hekatompathia during the war), whilst complaining loudly of Watson’s mishandling by Janet Scott and other critics, supplies some equally dismissive summations of his own. In his article ‘Thomas Watson’s Hecatompathia and the Elizabethan sonnet-sequence’, he characterised the Hekatompathia as ‘nothing but a mosaic of Petrarchan conventions, afﬁrmed and reafﬁrmed through almost eighteen hundred lines of precise but unilluminated verse’.37 Writing as he was in a period obsessed with the ‘genius’ of its literary heroes, Murphy made the unavoidable but uninstructive parallel with Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. ‘Sidney’s genius’, Murphy insisted, lay not in choosing Petrarchism but in transcending it. Watson transcended nothing. The Hecatompathia is a museum-piece that should have marked the end of an epoch.38

34

Complete Works, I, 216. Complete Works, I, 213, 261. 36 Complete Works, I, 209, 225, 260. The text cited at the head of sonnet 70 is from book 1 of Sepinus’ Erotopaegnion Libri III ad Apollinem (Paris, 1553). 37 W. M. Murphy ‘Thomas Watson’s Hecatompathia and the Elizabethan Sonnet-sequence’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LVI (1957), 418–28 (420). 38 Ibid., 428. 35

HEKATOMPATHIA AND EUROPEAN PETRARCHISM

227

Murphy seems inordinately troubled with the question of whether Watson’s work was inﬂuential — and he traces borrowings from Watson in a number of minor sonnet sequences of the 1590s, such as Bartholomew Grifﬁn’s Fidessa (1596), Giles Fletcher’s Licia (1593), R. L.’s Diella (1596), and J. C.’s Alcilia (1595), concluding that he was a second-rate poet imitated by third-rate poets.39 ‘In the Hecatompathia’, he added, ‘English Petrarchism had found its perfect epitaph and tomb.’ Paradoxically, since he had already emphasised the fact that Watson’s work was the ﬁrst Petrarchan sonnet sequence to be written as well as published in England, he makes a grave of a cradle. Equally paradoxically, whilst sacriﬁcing the Hekatompathia on the altar of Astrophil and Stella, he grudgingly (and even disdainfully) alludes to the fecundity of Watson’s style of Petrarchism in subsequent decades. ‘Except in rare and scattered instances’, he concluded, ‘the whole body of Elizabethan sonnets bears the impress not of the infertile glory of Astrophil and Stella, but of the inglorious fertility of the Hecatompathia.’40 Perhaps Murphy rather misses his own point here: while nobody would dispute the importance of Sidney’s poetry, Watson is in many ways a more typical product of English Petrarchism. In recent years, with works such as Thomas Roche’s Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences, we have seen a move away from studying Sidney as the centre of the Elizabethan literary universe, towards a more general assessment of the place of Petrarchism in English literary culture.41 With such a focus, perhaps Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia, with its omnivorous appetite for the Petrarchism of the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, and its fruitful synthesis of neo-Latin and vernacular literary forms, will come to assume its proper place in an account of England’s culture of Petrarchism in the 1580s and 1590s.

39

Ibid., 420–6. Ibid., 428. 41 It should be noted, however, that despite its wide coverage, Roche’s study makes only a few passing references to Watson’s work (Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences, pp. 155, 383, 386) and seems mainly concerned with the question of Watson’s claim to be the ﬁrst composer of an English sonnet sequence, and parallels with Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady sonnets’. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction, also largely neglects Watson’s Hekatompathia, referring to it only as part of the ‘legacy’ of Wyatt and Surrey or as a ‘pre-echo’ of some of Sidney’s themes (p. 106). 40

14

The Comedy of Astrophil: Petrarchan Motifs in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella JOHN ROE

ALTHOUGH THERE ARE TOUCHES OF HUMOUR in the Canzoniere, Petrarch is not known as an especially amusing poet. There is of course the Mark Twain-esque sonnet in which he complains that rumours of his death have been greatly exaggerated (Canzoniere 120, to Antonio da Ferrara). One might include also the black, savage satire of sonnets like ‘L’avara Babilonia’ (Canzoniere 137), attacking the corrupt papacy. Otherwise, what comedy there is belongs to the ruefully, self-reﬂective kind. Sidney, who shows himself to be an enthusiastically comic poet for much of Astrophil and Stella, especially the ﬁrst two-thirds of the sequence, does not derive any of this humour from the poet of the Canzoniere. Some have argued that, on the contrary, Sidney’s sense of fun is aimed at Petrarch, or at least at Petrarchism, citing as an example the line abjuring those poets who sing of ‘Poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes’ (AS 15).1 If such references establish Sidney as anti-Petrarchan in some readers’ eyes, then it must none the less be acknowledged that a good deal in Astrophil and Stella ﬁnds Petrarch to be a favourable inﬂuence, indeed a kindred spirit. Like Petrarch, Astrophil idealises the lady, is willing to go to the utmost lengths in her service, burns with love of her, and contemplates his absences from the beloved, especially at the end, in a state of desolation bordering on the spiritual. In many respects Astrophil does sing in such a way as to breathe new life into poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes. He is not altogether like Petrarch — that must be admitted. One signiﬁcant way in which he differs from him is precisely in his sense of humour which is

1

AS⫽Astrophil and Stella. All references to Astrophil and Stella are to the edition in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William Ringler, Jr (Oxford, 1962).

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 229–241. © The British Academy 2007.

230

John Roe

altogether more pronounced and expansive. What underpins it will in large part form the subject of this chapter. When Petrarch does wish to strike a humorous note, then it is invariably of a gently musing kind. I assume readers smile as I do at that little touch in Canzoniere 155, the ﬁrst of the ‘Laura piangendo’ sonnets, which gives an example of Love (‘il mio signor’) torturing the poet with the use of ‘ingenious’ devices (‘ingegnose chiavi’) as he presents him with an irresistible vision of the weeping lady. Responding to her distress, the poet is made to weep tears that are even greater than hers: Quel dolce pianto mi dipinse Amore, anzi scolpío, et que’ detti soavi mi scrisse entro un diamante in mezzo ’l core; ove con salde ed ingegnose chiavi ancor torna sovente a trarne fore lagrime rare et sospir’ lunghi et gravi. (Canzoniere 155. 9–14)2 (Such sweet weeping Love pictured for me, indeed sculpted, and wrote such lovely utterances on a diamond in the middle of my heart, where often he still returns with weighty and ingenious keys to draw forth precious tears and prolonged, heavy sighs.)3

Love seems to take sadistic delight in the enterprise. Incidentally, these four poems of Petrarch (155–8) may well have inspired Sidney to write ‘[t]hese four following Sonnets [. . .] made when his Ladie had paine in her face’, which William Ringler, Jr, collects under ‘Certain Sonnets’; that is, they are not part of Astrophil and Stella.4 Our business is with Astrophil and Stella, however, and so we have to look there for an equivalent of what Petrarch is doing with Love here, in no. 155. Take, then, the exuberant opening of AS Sonnet 20, which carries a very public accusation of Cupid. This contrasts markedly with the more intimate, personal reproach that Petrarch usually delivers to love. Whereas Petrarch retains Love’s name, ‘Amor’, or uses such periphrases as ‘il mio signor’ or ‘il nimico mio’, both occurring in a single line in the famous sonnet Canzoniere 189 (which Wyatt translated as ‘My galley charged with forgetfulness’), Sidney often uses the name Cupid or variants of Cupid, diminutives which lighten the tone. And so: 2

Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. M. Santagata (Milan, 1996), p. 725. All references to the Canzoniere are to this edition. 3 Except where otherwise indicated, I have used my own translation. 4 See Ringler, Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 140–2. For manuscript details, see ibid., pp. 423–6. Ringler does not mention any possible connection with Petrarch.

THE COMEDY OF ASTROPHIL

231

Flie, ﬂy, my friends, I have my death wound; ﬂy, See there, that boy, that murthring boy, I say, Who, like a theefe, hid in dark bush doth ly, Till bloudie bullet get him wrongfull pray. (AS 20. 1–4)5

The conceit turns on Cupid’s lying in wait in order to shoot his arrows into the lover’s heart, making use of the lady’s eyes as a vantage point; it may derive from another of the ‘Laura piangendo’ sonnets: Canzoniere 157, describing Laura’s face, has the words, ‘hebeno i cigli’ (‘hebeno’ being the modern ebano, or ‘ebony’). The eyebrows are black, and the whole line in which the words occur reads, ‘hebeno i cigli, et gli occhi eran due stelle’ (black eyebrows, while her eyes were two stars). As Italian editors note, Petrarch seems to have been the ﬁrst poet to describe eyebrows as being of ebony.6 Stella is the name of Astrophil’s beloved, and much play is made on black and white, or black and star-like, with regard to Stella’s eyes. Accordingly, an equivalent line in AS 20 is ‘As that sweet black which vailes the heav’nly eye.’ Sidney’s phrase ‘dark bush’, then, where Cupid lies in wait for his intended victim, is the girl’s eyebrow, beauty combining with pitilessness in a humorous and deliberately extravagant deployment of Petrarchan method. Why should Astrophil declare his love so openly? The straightforward answer is that he is celebrating Stella, and he wishes to do so in as loud a voice as possible. Despite the opening sonnets, which have a tentative air about them, and which insist on the Petrarchan suffering in love (especially Son. 2), Astrophil quickly becomes exuberant and even conﬁdent. In accordance with Petrarchan antithesis, Astrophil declares one thing but admits to another: love that is described as pain is, on the contrary, joy. In this respect, Sidney’s use of oxymoron is quite original. Petrarch’s formula, which is that of discovering joy in pain, sweetness in melancholy, receives hyperbolic treatment in Sidney’s language, so that the terms of the antithesis are expanded well beyond what we normally ﬁnd in the Canzoniere, or in any more orthodox imitation of Petrarch. The reason for this is not hard to ﬁnd. Astrophil and Stella tells the story of a love that is reciprocated rather than unrequited. Astrophil is loved by Stella, and he knows that he is loved, though the sequence does not establish this all at once, not in fact ﬁrmly till Son. 66. His delight is clear, delight at being in love with an object so worthy of love, and while his protestation

5 6

Ringler, Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 174–5. Santagata, Canzoniere, p. 732.

232

John Roe

ostensibly depicts despondency and frustration, it evokes an entirely opposite spirit: So Tyran he no ﬁtter place could spie, Nor so faire levell in so secret stay, As that sweet blacke which vailes the heav’nly eye. (AS 20. 5–7)

Sidney’s narrative is much more intense and compressed than that of Petrarch, who after all devotes his entire life to a preoccupation with Laura in one form or another. By contrast Astophil and Stella tells the story of an encounter that lasts apparently a few brief months. The consequent dramatic intimacy, fostered by the impression that much of the ‘action’ (not a word that comes naturally to mind with Petrarch) occurs within doors, makes for a more concentrated experience than that of the Canzoniere, which seems located, in so far as one may speak of so physical a thing as ‘place’ in Petrarch’s poetry, in a largely pastoral setting. Notwithstanding, the two sequences may be compared in terms of their structure. Petrarch falls in love with Laura in the church in Avignon on Good Friday, 6 April 1327. His love is mixed with torment, which sustains itself in a variety of ways. Laura seems both the way of salvation and the path to his despair. The spiritual consequences of such a love are keenly debated by Petrarch and St Augustine in the celebrated dialogue, the Secretum, and many of the arguments between the poet and his saint, who represents his conscience, recur in the Canzoniere. Love is literally a matter of life and death, though not — most poignantly and unexpectedly—for the lover, who dies only metaphorically; on the contrary, the great transforming moment comes in the death of Laura, which is recorded over a sequence of poems occurring about two-thirds of the way through the ‘narrative’. ‘Chi vuol veder’ (Canzoniere 248) is one such poem, and it is possibly the only one that Sidney can be shown to have had deﬁnitely in mind in composing his own sequence, as he adapted it for AS 71. Compare the opening quatrain of each poem: Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura e ’l Ciel tra noi, venga a mirar costei, ch’è sola un sol, non pur a li occhi mei, ma al mondo cieco che vertù non cura. (If you would see what Heaven and Nature may achieve among us, come and gaze on one who not for me alone is the sole sun, but for the world that’s blind to virtue’s way.) (Canzoniere 248. 1–4)7 7

Petrarch, Canzoniere: Selected Poems, trans. A. Mortimer (Harmondsworth, 2002), p. 105.

THE COMEDY OF ASTROPHIL

233

Who will in fairest book of Nature know, How Vertue may best lod’gd in beautie be, Let him but learne of Love to reade in thee, Stella, those faire lines, which true goodnesse show. (AS 71. 1–4)

From that point onwards the poems develop differently, Petrarch sounding a warning to his readers that they must arrive quickly on the scene, as this wonder on earth is about to be claimed by heaven. This is one of the last of the section known as the ‘In Vita’ poems, and already anticipates crossing the boundary to the poems about Laura in death. Naturally Sidney is obliged to modify Petrarch’s theme, as there is no occasion on which to speak of Stella’s death; he therefore turns it into an attack on would-be moralists, specifying, in a way that is convenient to his purpose, those commentators who attempted to adapt Petrarch to Platonic readings, following the inﬂuence of the Florentine Academy under Marsilio Ficino. Astrophil conducts what appears to be an orthodox Platonic reading of love’s purpose, until he capsizes the enterprise in a deﬁant and impudent last line: And not content to be Perfection’s heire Thy selfe, doest strive all minds that way to move, Who marke in thee what is in thee most faire. So while thy beautie drawes the heart to love, As fast thy Vertue bends that love to good: ‘But ah,’ Desire still cries, ‘give me some food.’ (ll. 9–16)

Sidney may well have had in mind such erudite commentators as Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, whose remarkably dense annotation to his edition of the Canzoniere and Trionﬁ typiﬁes the sixteenth century’s way of assimilating Petrarch to, among other things, the Platonic revival. Gesualdo does not comment on Platonism in his remarks on Canzoniere 248 but the Platonic crops up repeatedly elsewhere in his volume. In commenting on the famous ‘Mille ﬁate, o dolce mia guerrera’ (Canzoniere 21, which Wyatt liked enough to translate as ‘How oft have I, my dear and cruel foe’) Gesualdo appears to have consulted Ficino’s Commentary on the Symposium: E per più chiara notitia de lo ’ntendimento del Poeta recarci debbiamo a mente; che, sì come i Platonici ne ’nsegnano, l’amante in se stesso morto vive nella persona amata, quando è amato da lei; sì come è morto del tutto essendo egli odiato e scacciato.8 8

Il Petrarcha colla spositione di messer Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (Venetia, 1541), prima parte, XXI, p. Ciii V.

234

John Roe (And for a clearer indication of the intention of the poet we must recall that, as the Platonists teach, the lover, dead in himself, lives in the person beloved when he is loved by her; just as he is dead entirely being hated and repulsed.)

Gesualdo almost certainly has in mind Pausanias’ speech in Ficino’s Commentary, where he argues: ‘Simple love is where the beloved does not love the lover. There the lover is completely dead. For he neither lives in himself [. . .] nor does he live in the beloved, since he is rejected by him.’9 I do not wish to dwell on the comparison between AS 71 and Canzoniere 248, as it is only relevant to my main theme insofar as Astrophil’s last-line protest strikes a humorous note, and accords with his attitude throughout the ﬁrst part of the sequence; but his humour is not aimed at Petrarch. For one thing, Petrarch’s knowledge of Plato, like that of Dante before him, was sketchy at best, and therefore it is highly improbable that he could have made Plato a signiﬁcant part of his moral and metaphysical scheme, even if he had wanted to. Platonism was, as Gesualdo’s edition and commentary make clear, read back into Petrarch as a result of Quattrocento scholarship, principally that of Ficino. For another thing, it is likely that Petrarch would have been made wary of Platonism by Augustine’s opposition to some of its doctrines.10 There is never any indication that Laura burns for Petrarch, as he for her, though quite late poems, such as ‘Tutta la mia ﬁorita et verde etade’ (Canzoniere 315), indicate that she has always had some feelings for his well-being (she is not without concern); but envious death is determined that the lover shall not have even a few moments in conﬁdence with his beloved. Correspondingly, what might be described as poems of ‘intercession’, in which a now safely deceased Laura assures Petrarch of his heavenly destiny, make it clear that whatever reciprocal feelings she had for him must ﬁnally be understood as purely spiritual. A typical example is

9

Commentary on the Symposium, trans. and ed. S. Jayne (Dallas, TX, 1985), p. 55. As the speech develops, further precise parallels with Gesualdo’s commentary make it clear that he is referring to it. 10 After dallying with Platonism for a period, Augustine rejected it outright. See Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. H. Bettenson, ed. D. Knowles (Harmondsworth, 1972), books VIII–X. On Petrarch and Platonism, see R. V. Merrill, ‘Platonism in Petrarch’s Canzoniere’, Modern Philology, XXVII (1929), 161–74, and W. Melczer, ‘Neoplatonism and Petrarchism: Familiar or Estranged Bedfellows in the High Renaissance’, Neohelicon, III (1975), 9–27. For more on Augustine, see P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1967), and for Augustine’s inﬂuence on Petrarch’s thought, K. Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh, 1984), especially on the Secretum. For themes in Petrarch overall, see P. Hainsworth, Petrarch the Poet: An Introduction to the ‘Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta’ (London, 1988).

THE COMEDY OF ASTROPHIL

235

Canzoniere 362 where, in a communion of minds, Petrarch momentarily visits Laura in paradise: Volo con l’ali de’ pensieri al cielo sì spesse volte che quasi un di loro esser mi par ch’àn ivi il suo thesoro, lasciando in terra lo squarciato velo. Talor mi trema ’l cor d’un dolce gelo udendo lei per ch’io mi discoloro dirmi: —Amico, or t’am’io et or t’onoro perch’à’ i costumi varïati, e ’l pelo. (Canzoniere 362. 1–8) (I ﬂy on wings of thought to paradise so often that I almost seem to enter the company that there keeps all its treasure, leaving on earth the veil that shattered lies. At times a trembling and sweet chill will rise within my heart as she who drains my colour says: ‘Now, my friend, I give you love and honour, for you have changed your fur and changed your ways.’)11

By contrast, Astrophil never changes fundamentally or essentially in his love for Stella. Astrophil falls in love with Stella and gives pursuit; for a while she refuses him, even seems to disdain him, but at a certain point it becomes clear that she returns his love. Astrophil, now certain of her feelings, proposes a meeting in the hope that his love will be consummated. Whether or not this occurs, the narrative, with due discretion, does not say. What incontrovertibly does happen is that love suffers a breach; that is, Stella abruptly changes her mind and dismisses Astrophil. He is forlorn and spends the rest of the sequence thinking about her in her absence. Death does not intervene in Sidney’s sequence but the rupture is absolute and it reduces Astrophil to a much greater despair than he experienced while he still lived in hope of a return of affection. There are, then, similarities, along with the differences, between the two poets. Petrarch suffers the great innamoramento, which causes him to love Laura now and for always. Astrophil repudiates the idea of innamoramento, and tells us that what won his love was his increasing understanding of the lady’s qualities over time (‘Not at ﬁrst sight [. . .]/ But knowne worth did in mine of time proceed’, Son. 2). In point of fact, Sidney does deliver more than one innamoramento, Son. 20 being an example, but the inconsistency can be explained. Astrophil needs to justify his love as being 11

In Mortimer’s able translation, Canzoniere: Selected Poems, p. 147.

236

John Roe

something more than chance, however much he delights in it, for technically this love is adulterous, several sonnets providing evidence that the lady is married. Astrophil’s declaration of his seriousness comes most forcefully in Son. 14 (see below). As for Laura, we may infer that she is married, or is based upon a married person, but Petrarch makes nothing of it as a theme, and the situation is never so concrete as to pose so direct a question. In contrast, Sidney’s sonnets are, in Charles Lamb’s memorable phrase, ‘full, material, and circumstantiated’.12 It is her marriage, her sense of obligation to the vow of matrimony, that at the eleventh hour abruptly and decisively kills the lover’s hopes, causing him to expostulate in the words, ‘Alas, whence came this change of lookes?’ (AS 86). This poem signals a breach and the lovers never again encounter each other in the sonnets that succeed this moment (AS 87–108). However, a temporary reconciliation does occur, as we shall see, in one of the Songs, which play an increasingly important narrative role from about this point. Whereas Petrarch adapts his canzoni to extended meditative purpose, Sidney makes greater use of the Songs as narrative exposition, ﬁlling out circumstantial details that the sonnets can only hint at obliquely. Many commentators, who take a disapproving view of Astrophil’s love, think that his misfortune is only just and proper: not only should he never have attempted her in the ﬁrst place, but also he should suffer now as punishment for his immoral conduct, his attempt to seduce a married woman. But perhaps such critics, often applying what they see as a moralistic, Protestant disapproval of Astrophil on the part of Sidney, should hesitate before condemning him.13 Although Astrophil and Stella qualiﬁes as a ﬁctional narrative, I think it is inappropriate to regard Astrophil as an ‘unreliable narrator’, whom the author treats circumspectly in the narrative manner of Henry James. Rather than seeing him as a teller whose tale, fraught with unintentional ironies, is redolent of self-deception, we should grant him his due for self-awareness. This is particularly true of a non-Jamesian, non-Flaubertian statement, indeed a personal manifesto, which he utters scathingly, and with a much more acerbic humour than he normally employs in the early part of the sequence. Having spent the octave rounding on an acquaintance who has questioned the morality of his love for Stella, Astrophil then proclaims: 12

‘Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney’, Essays of Elia (London, 1903), p. 293. See, for example, T. Roche, Jr, ‘Astrophil and Stella: A Radical Reading’, in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. D. Kay (Oxford, 1987), pp. 185–226; A. Sinﬁeld, ‘Astrophil’s Self-deception’, Essays in Criticism, XXVIII (1978), 1–18.

13

THE COMEDY OF ASTROPHIL

237

If that be sinne which doth the maners frame, Well staid with truth in word and faith of deed, Readie of wit and fearing nought but shame; If that be sinne which in ﬁxt hearts doth breed A loathing of all loose unchastitie, Then Love is sinne, and let me sinfull be. (AS 14. 9–16)

Astrophil is answerable to conscience in his sequence, just as Petrarch in the Canzoniere repeatedly ﬁnds the need to justify himself to his own Augustinian conscience, something he occasionally does triumphantly, at other times with a degree of self-accusation. If this comparison holds good, then it permits us to see Astrophil not as the self-deluded spokesman of an embarrassing, shameful love, subtly undermined by quizzical narratorial stratagems, but as coextensive with his creator, as Petrarch’s speaking ‘I’ is with his. The lady herself does not condemn Astrophil: on the contrary, she opens her heart to him, especially in the dialogue of ‘The Eighth Song’. Just as Laura speaks consolingly to Petrarch in dream-like visitations from Heaven, so Stella offers Astrophil this comfort: ‘Astrophil’ sayd she, ‘my love Cease in these effects to prove: Now be still, yet still believe me, Thy griefe more than death would grieve me. ‘If that any thought in me, Can tast comfort but of thee, Let me, fed with hellish anguish, Joylesse, hopelesse, endlesse languish. (AS, ‘Eighth Song’, ll. 73–80)

Stella continues in this vein for several stanzas and makes it clear in conclusion that only a strong sense of marital duty (which excludes affection for her husband) prevents her from fully reciprocating his love; this accounts for her abruptly breaking off their relationship at a point when her reputation was being jeopardised. Like Astrophil in Son. 14, Stella observes a distinction between personal and public morality: ‘Trust me while I thee deny, In my selfe the smart I try, Tyran honour doth thus use me, Stella’s selfe might not refuse thee.’ (ll. 93–6)

There are marked differences between these words of consolation and those that Laura speaks to Petrarch (compare Canzoniere 362, above). Stella clearly returns Astrophil’s love with equal intensity, and she speaks to him on earth not from in Heaven. They meet ‘in a grove most rich of

238

John Roe

shade’ for ‘mutuall comfort’, though all that passes between them is words, of which Stella’s words are the key ones. Nor is there any ﬁnal ‘Vergine bella’ recantation on the part of Astrophil, as happens famously in the last poem of the Canzoniere. For good or ill, depending on the interpretative inclination of the reader, Astrophil has his sights ﬁxed on Stella till the end. A further and signiﬁcant difference, as the later sonnets of Sidney’s sequence make clear, is that Astrophil feels the need to console Stella in her distress, just as she tries to comfort him. We can see the difference between Petrarch and Sidney in this respect if we look at their treatments of a similar motif, that of seeking the features of the beloved in the faces of beautiful women whom the lover may encounter. In Canzoniere 16 (‘Movesi il vecchierel canuto et biancho’), for example, Petrarch compares his search to that of the old man who wishes to gain a view of the face of Christ, purportedly traced in the Veronica cloth:14 Così, lasso, talor vo cercand’io, donna, quanto è possibile, in altrui la disiata vostra forma vera. (Canzoniere 16. 12–14) (So I, alas, my lady, sometimes roam, seeking in other faces you alone, some semblance of the one true form I love.)15

By invoking the solemn ﬁgure of the ‘vecchierel’, Petrarch manages to avoid imputations of levity, a problem to which Gianfranco Contini refers in his discussion of this poetic tradition in connection with Cavalcanti’s ‘Una giovane donna’.16 The presence of the old man in Petrarch’s sonnet functions so as to temper longing with reverence. Ardour, devotion — but no dangerous or disturbing intimacy — furnish the effect. Things are altogether different in the version of the same idea as given by Sidney, who shows himself to be more concerned than Petrarch with the state of mind of the loved one, as Astrophil attempts to assuage her anxieties that he might be ﬁnding distraction elsewhere. There is even a touch of comedy, so prevalent in the earlier part of the sequence, in his efforts to reassure her: They please, I do confesse, they please mine eyes, But why? because of you they models be, Models such be wood-globes of glistring skies. Deere, therefore be not jealous over me, 14

See Santagata, Canzoniere, p. 70. Mortimer, Canzoniere: Selected Poems, p. 13. 16 Santagata, Canzoniere, pp. 70–1. 15

THE COMEDY OF ASTROPHIL

239

If you heare that they seeme my hart to move, Not them, ô no, but you in them I love. (AS 91. 9–14)

What is remarkable is that, even though the lovers are now separated indeﬁnitely, it matters to Astrophil that Stella should think well of him; it also appears that correspondingly her devotion to him has increased. None of this suggests that either lover regrets having loved — only that circumstances have acted as a bar; nor does the despondency of these ﬁnal sonnets suggest that it might predict the adoption of sackcloth and ashes. The spirit of comedy which testiﬁes to the survival of erotic interest (altogether different from the temper of Canzoniere 315, which celebrates the reconciliation of love and chastity) continues in the following sonnet, 92, where Astrophil, longing to know how Stella seemed when his interlocutor last saw her, resembles Cleopatra dreaming of the absent Antony in Shakespeare’s play: O Charmian, Where think’st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he? Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse? O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony! Do bravely, horse, for wot’st thou whom thou mov’st? The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm And burgonet of men. He’s speaking now, Or murmuring ‘Where’s my serpent of old Nile?’ (Antony and Cleopatra I.v.19–27)

Using a rhetorically adept form of address/inquiry, Astrophil impatiently questions his frustratingly laconic acquaintance: Be your words made (good Sir) of Indian ware, That you allow me them by so small rate? (AS 92. 1–2)

Astrophil complains in this manner for several lines, and then in the sestet increases the tempo, in phrasing remarkably close to that of Cleopatra, as Sidney, with a maturity of psychological understanding that rivals Shakespeare, depicts the urgency of mind of a lover impatient for detail: I would know whether she did sit or walke, How cloth’d, how waited on, sighd she or smilde, Whereof with whom, how often did she talke, With what pastime, time’s journey she beguilde, If her lips daignd to sweeten my poore name. Say all, and all well sayd, still say the same. (ll. 9–14)

Although this is comedy, it modiﬁes the self-conﬁdent spirit of fun that we ﬁnd in the early part of the sequence by becoming more poignant and

240

John Roe

rueful. Astrophil shares Cleopatra’s self-deprecation, and like her is both amusing and moving. Far from estranging the reader through his lack of self-knowledge, he repeatedly ﬁnds ways, and increasingly more convincing ways, of engaging the audience’s sympathy. Thomas Nashe hit the mark when he spoke of the ‘tragicomedy of love’ in that famously pirated edition of Sidney’s sonnet sequence of 1591: Here you shal ﬁnd a paper stage streud with pearle, an artiﬁcial heav’n to overshadow the faire frame, & christal wals to encounter your curious eyes, while the tragicommody of love is performed by starlight. The chiefe Actor here is Melpomene, whose dusky robes, dipt in the ynke of teares, as yet seems to drop when I view them neere. The argument cruell chastity, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue dispaire.17

Sidney certainly writes with a strong sense of dramatic situation, as Lamb clearly recognised, and in the intimate whisperings in which they sometimes converse, as well as in the strong physical awareness the lovers have of each other, we may see the sequence’s potential for theatrical representation. There is, for instance, a good deal that Shakespeare might have taken from Astrophil and Stella for his theatre. In Twelfth Night, Viola (disguised as a boy) woos Olivia on behalf of the Duke, in an exaggeratedly Petrarchan language; in return Olivia involuntarily betrays her love for the youth (Viola), with the words, Get you to your lord. I cannot love him. Let him send no more Unless (perchance) you come to me again, To tell me how he takes it. (Twelfth Night I.v.234–7)

In Son. 66 Astrophil describes how Stella betrays her innermost feeling, in lines distinguished by a similar psychological perceptiveness: And yet amid all feares a hope there is Stolne to my heart, since last fair night, nay day, Stella’s eyes sent to me the beames of bliss, Looking on me, while I lookt other way: But when mine eyes back to their heav’n did move, They ﬂed with blush, which guiltie seem’d of love. (AS 66. 9–16)

17

The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols (Oxford, 1958), III, 329.

THE COMEDY OF ASTROPHIL

241

Petrarch on love is too vast and complex a subject to be summed up brieﬂy. Along with questions of morality and spiritual purpose, he develops ideas of subjectivity which have far-reaching consequences. Sidney is relatively more simple. Love is a law unto itself, as both Astrophil and Stella and the comedies of Shakespeare show, yet to follow its laws unrestrainedly would have catastrophic effects, personally, socially, politically, and culturally— as indeed we often see happen. Astrophil is made to bow to the laws of conventional morality, but whether his reluctance to do this brings his own morality into question is something I very much doubt. He shows himself to be genuinely concerned about Stella, and she for her part, right at the end, acknowledges that she owes him an explanation as to why she withholds the love that she feels. Sidney makes Astrophil an appealing, sympathetic ﬁgure from beginning to end; stylistically he does that to a great extent through the various, subtle ways in which he makes use of comedy.

15

Sidney, Spenser, and Political Petrarchism SYRITHE PUGH

IT HAS LONG BEEN RECOGNISED that the political function of the discourse of Petrarchan love — as ‘a conveyor of political goals, imperial aspirations, and national conscience,’ which, ‘as it dramatizes the lover’s passions, [. . .] lays bare the savagery and frenzy that also disturb the body politic’1 —was thrown into particularly sharp focus in Elizabethan England, thanks largely to the deliberate strategy of a Queen who had translated Petrarch, who wrote her own Petrarchan poems, and whose portraits employed imagery and mottoes from the Trionﬁ.2 As a woman demanding entire obedience bordering on religious devotion from her subjects, she literalised the metaphor of sociopolitical subjection to a ‘sovereign’ mistress — the beloved who ‘nel mio cor siede monarcha’ (RVF 235. 3)—central to the Rime sparse, and to its sources in troubadour poetry and Roman elegy.3 This awareness has been brought to bear on two major English sonnet sequences. The love-suit of Sidney’s Astrophil has been read in the light of Sidney’s frustrated hopes of an aristocratic inheritance and of his failed political career.4 Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), meanwhile, has been read for 1

W. J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France and England (London, 2003), p. 53. 2 L. Forster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 122–47; F. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), pp. 215–19; R. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London, 1977), pp. 50–2. 3 On the relation of the Rime to troubadour poetry, see G. Ferrero, Petrarca e i trovatori (Turin, 1959); on its relation to Roman elegy, see J. Petrie, Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the Canzoniere (Dublin, 1983), pp. 133–60, 171–90, M. L. Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), pp. 115–32; and C. Martin, Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch and Shakespeare (Pittsburgh, PA, 1994). 4 See, for instance, A. R. Jones and P. Stallybrass, ‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella,’ Studies in English Literature, XXIV (1984), 53–68; A. F. Marotti, ‘Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,’ English Literary History, IL (1982), 396–428. Probably composed 1581–2, Sidney’s Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 243–257. © The British Academy 2007.

244

Syrithe Pugh

its negotiation between the poet’s service to two Petrarchan mistresses, his Queen Elizabeth Tudor and his beloved Elizabeth Boyle, usually seen as a conﬂict between his sense of public duty and the temptation to withdraw into private life.5 However, I argue that both these poets’ engagements with Petrarchism are less personal, more serious, and in fact more political than such readings imply. Sidney and Spenser use their critical revisions of Petrarch to articulate their political thought, in particular their anxiety about the absolutist tendency of the Tudors’ imperial concept of monarchy, and its social consequences. Both are committed to the cause of international Protestantism, and both are inﬂuenced by theories justifying resistance to monarchs developed in the interest of religious minorities in France and the Netherlands in the face of the Counter-Reformation and Spanish imperialism.6 Though written with the immediate purpose of defending and arming Protestant subjects against Catholic monarchs, such treatises as Beza’s Rights of Magistrates (1574) and Du Plessis Mornay’s Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579) reassert a concept of limited and contractual monarchy reﬂecting medieval Common Law formulations, and conﬂicting with the absolute power claimed, at least in theory, by the Tudor monarchy since its redeﬁnition as ‘imperial’ by Henry VIII after the break from Rome. Assuming spiritual as well as secular authority over his subjects, and deriving that authority directly from God, unmediated by human institutions, the imperial monarch was, in Henry’s view, ‘under God but not the law, for the king makes the law’, and thus subjects had no right to restrain or resist his power — to disobey even an evil king was to disobey God.7

Astrophil and Stella was ﬁrst printed posthumously, in Thomas Newman’s unauthorised edition, in 1591. 5 See, for instance, C. Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 138–51; W. J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 201–3, 214–19; P. Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993). 6 On contemporary events and the political thought associated with international Protestantism, see B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT, 1996), pp. 41–124 and 209–94; on the Leicester circle and Spenser’s connection to it, see E. Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters (New York, 1955) and S. K. Heninger, Jr, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (Philadelphia, PA, 1989). 7 Manuscript marginalium quoted in J. Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), p. 371. See also J. Guy, ‘Tudor Monarchy and its Critiques’, in J. Guy (ed.), Tudor Monarchy (Oxford, 1997), pp. 78–109.

SIDNEY, SPENSER, AND POLITICAL PETRARCHISM

245

Sidney and Spenser both diverge from the mainstream of the Petrarchist tradition by aligning themselves primarily with the perspective of Petrarch’s condemnation of his desire as vanity, idolatry, and bondage to sin— not in order to follow Petrarch into an attitude of contemptus mundi, but to express scepticism about the particular brand of monarchical authority which, under Elizabeth, ﬁgured itself in the Petrarchan love relationship. Sidney’s ironic portrayal of the passionswayed Astrophil ampliﬁes the Stoic element in Petrarch’s criticism of his own passions, but, in keeping with the political overtones of neo-Stoic discourse in the late sixteenth century, focuses on the connection between moral and political subjection.8 But his attachment to the chivalric order of military aristocracy prevents him from founding his critique of political authority in a truly authoritative poetic voice — from assuming the Petrarchan laurels. His deﬁning political act is not authorship but death in the Netherlands.9 Though motivated by similar political concerns, Spenser’s engagement with Petrarch is more complex and ambitious than Sidney’s, coloured by an awareness of the shape and authority of Petrarch’s career, his ambivalent politics, and his status as a vernacular ‘classic’ and model for creating a national poetry. Spenser’s critique of amatory Petrarchism, and of imperial monarchy, focuses on the relation to God of the beloved, the monarch and the poet, and opposes idolatry and the exploitation of power from the basis of a poetic authority conceived as prophetic and counter-national — emulating the visionary and the reformist Petrarch to create a public voice independent of Elizabeth’s imperial laurels. As Blair Worden has demonstrated in his reading of the Arcadia, Sidney’s moral analysis of desire and self-control is intimately bound up with his analysis of political power, and Astrophil and Stella reﬂects similar ideas.10 Astrophil’s wilful subjection to the tyrant Love, relinquishing rational liberty, and the dishonest, self-seeking, and self-destructive 8 On Astrophil as an ironic persona, see T. P. Roche, English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989); on the Stoic view of the passions in Petrarch, see Petrie, Petrarch, pp. 110–13; on political applications of neo-Stoicism in the late sixteenth century, see M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). 9 On the conﬂict between poetry and aristocracy in Sidney, see K. Duncan-Jones, ‘Philip Sidney’s Toys’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LXVI (1980), 161–78; and K. Pask, ‘The “Mannes State” of Philip Sidney: Pre-scripting the Life of the Poet in England’, Criticism, XXXVI (1994), 163–88. 10 Worden, Sound of Virtue, pp. 209–354. The ﬁrst version of Sidney’s Arcadia was probably composed 1577–80.

246

Syrithe Pugh

behaviour it produces, reﬂects both the conditions of moral weakness which, according to the Vindiciae contra tyrannos and to Sidney’s beastfable ‘As I my little ﬂock on Ister bank’, prompt nations to give up their liberty, allowing tyranny to arise, and the conditions which overcentralised power fosters — ﬂattery, deceit, selﬁsh ambition, and material greed. I would like to illustrate this by looking at Astrophil and Stella 49 in relation to RVF 97 and 98. Petrarch’s sonnet 97, ‘Ahi bella libertà, come tu m’ai’, employs the traditional metaphor of reason as a charioteer or rider managing the horses of the passions — since falling in love, Petrarch is controlled not by ‘reason’s rein’ (il fren de la ragione, 6) but by Love, with his ﬁercer form of control, the spurs (Amor mi sprona, 12), and has thus lost his liberty, which consisted in rational self-control. In the following sonnet, he consoles the aristocratic Orso dell’Anguillara, prevented by a sickness from participating in a tournament. Though temporarily unable to display his chivalric skills, Orso has at least not suffered Petrarch’s fate—his heart is not rendered subject like a ridden horse, but remains dedicated to ‘honour’, the moral ‘armour’ of inherited aristocracy ‘that time, love, virtue and blood have given’: Orso, al vostro destrier si pò ben porre un fren, che di suo corso indietro il volga, ma ’l cor chi legherà, che non si sciolga, se brama honore, e ’l suo contrario abhorre? (Orso, on your charger can be put a rein that will turn him back from his course, but who can bind your heart, so that it cannot get loose, if it desires honour and abhors the contrary?)11

Thus he retains his ‘worth’ (suo pregio). Sidney’s Astrophil is heir both to Petrarch’s ignominious amatory bondage and to Orso’s chivalric code, and the result is devastating: I on my horse, and love on me, doth try Our horsemanships, while by strange work I prove A horseman to my horse, a horse to love; And now man’s wrongs in me, poor beast, descry. The reins wherewith my rider doth me tie Are humbled thoughts, which bit of reverence move, Curbed in with fear, but with gilt boss above

11 Text and translations of the Rime are from R. M. Durling (ed.), Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA, 1976).

SIDNEY, SPENSER, AND POLITICAL PETRARCHISM

247

Of hope, which makes it seem fair to the eye. The wand is will; thou, fancy, saddle art, Girt fast by memory; and while I spur My horse, he spurs with sharp desire my heart; He sits me fast, however I do stir; And now hath made me to his hand so right That in the manage myself takes delight.12

Like Petrarch’s persona, Astrophil has become subject, reduced to the status of a beast, and lost his liberty and nobility. No longer governed by the love of honour and abhorrence of its contrary, he is now controlled by passions of fear, hope, and desire — the reins, bit, and spurs with which he is managed— producing a dependence, humility, and reverence inappropriate to his station. For like Orso, Astrophil inherits the honour code of the aristocracy — ‘to my birth I owe/ nobler desires’, as he puts it in sonnet 21—and unlike Orso he has forfeited this noble liberty and with it his ‘worth’ (suo pregio). By conﬂating Petrarch’s paired sonnets, Sidney identiﬁes the moral servitude of the lover in Canzoniere 97 with the destruction of the aristocratic honour celebrated in 98. The Petrarchan lover’s enslavement to his passions, viewed so sceptically in Astrophil and Stella, is also a vision of the weakening of the old feudal power of the martial nobility under centralised monarchy.13 The allegory is closely related to that of ‘As I my little ﬂock on Ister bank’. In this fable, the animals, who have lived hitherto in a peaceful Golden Age ruled by a benign natural aristocracy, clamour for a king, ignoring Jove’s warnings that ‘Rulers will think all things made them to please,/ And soon forget the swink due to their hire’. So man is created, and quickly exploits the beasts’ passions of envy and fear to divide them into factions, enabling him ﬁrst to destroy the ‘nobler beasts’ who alone would have the strength to resist him, then to remove the liberties of the middling sort, those of ‘not great, but gentle blood’ — ‘by and by the horse fair bits did bind;/ The dog was in a collar taught his kind’ — at last preying mercilessly upon the weakest to feed his appetites. When in sonnet 49 Astrophil descries ‘man’s wrongs in me, poor beast’, what he perceives is both the moral tyranny of the passions and the political tyranny 12

Astrophil and Stella 49. Quotations of Sidney’s poetry from K. Duncan-Jones (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1989). 13 On Elizabethan chivalry and the shifting power-balance between nobility and the crown, see R. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkley, CA, 1989); and R. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL, 1992), pp. 40–59.

248

Syrithe Pugh

which exploits, reﬂects, and serves that moral tyranny. Weakened and curbed by his fear of power, lured by the tinsel trappings of that power, the courtly display of wealth which holds out hope of patronage, Astrophil is so demeaned that he colludes complacently in his own subjection, taking delight in the ‘manage’. ‘Like slave-born Muscovite’, as he puts it in sonnet 2, ‘I call it praise to suffer tyrannie’. The beast fable ends admonishing the ‘poor beasts’ to ‘know [their] strengths’: the strength which Astrophil also needs is both moral and political, to resist subjection to his own passions and thereby to external tyranny.14 Part of the freedom Petrarch has lost in sonnet 97 is his freedom as a poet to choose what to write. Bound by his love to praise Laura in the Rime, [. . .] né le man’ come lodar si possa in carte altra persona. ([. . .] nor do my hands [know how] on paper any other person can be praised.)

Though Petrarch does not specify who the alternative object of praise might be, the moment seems to me reminiscent of those moments in the Amores when Ovid presents himself as forced to turn from epic to love poetry, by Amor himself at the beginning of 1. 1, by his mistress at the beginning of 3. 1. (Ovid’s depiction of his servitium amoris in the triumph of Amor in 1. 2 also includes the image of the bridled horse, a detail retained by Petrarch in his imitation in the Trionﬁ.) Perhaps, then, Petrarch is referring here to his neglect of his epic Africa, with its praise of Scipio.15 Be that as it may, Astrophil’s delinquency is not in respect to any such poetic enterprise. It is owing to Sidney’s doubts about the value of poetry as public service — the Apology for Poetry notwithstanding16 — that he can articulate his critique of monarchy only through self-irony. Despite the medicine among the cherries, Astrophil and Stella is still an ‘idle toy’, and its author is in his own eyes vulnerable to the same charge as Astrophil: ‘My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toys.’ 14

Worden, Sound of Virtue, pp. 266–94. On his delay in completing the Africa, see Familiares 10. 4 and Seniles 18. 1; on Laura as a potential distraction from epic praise, RVF 186. Patrick Cheney looks at love lyric as an impediment to epic in several of Petrarch’s sonnets in Spenser’s Famous Flight, pp. 157–8. On Petrarch’s ‘fusion’ of Laura and Scipio, see A. S. Bernardo, Petrarch, Scipio and the ‘Africa’ (Baltimore, MD, 1962), pp. 47–71. 16 The Apology was probably composed between 1579 and 1583. 15

SIDNEY, SPENSER, AND POLITICAL PETRARCHISM

249

Indeed, his very writing of poetry is presented as evidence of the idleness fostered by Elizabeth’s style of government and paciﬁst foreign policy.17 The paths which led Petrarch out of this impasse are closed to him. The transcendental turn within the Rime itself is rendered impossible by his Protestant scepticism about any smooth ascent from sexual desire to religious devotion, and by his politics — it is through rational selfgovernment that individuals must sustain the virtuous functioning of the commonwealth, not by self-abasing devotion to an apotheosised sovereign. The public role of epic poet is likewise not an option, because, again despite the Apology’s presentation of poetry as the companion of the camps, it conﬂicts with his commitment to aristocratic order — virtue for him must consist in war and statecraft, not in courting the mob through publication. Spenser, however, bids from the ﬁrst for the public authority symbolized by Petrarch’s laurels — though carefully distinguished from Virgilian identiﬁcation with imperial power. He founds this authority on a prophetic role, fulﬁlling the boldest suggestions of Sidney’s Apology: Among the Romans a poet was called vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet. [. . .] so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this heart-ravishing knowledge.18

Sidney cautiously attributes such status only to the ‘heavenly poesy’ of the Psalms, but Spenser claims it for himself: his own elusive treatise The English Poete, promised in The Shepheardes Calender but never published, ‘at large discourseth’, we’re told, on poetry as ‘a diuine gift and heauenly instinct [. . .] poured into the witte by a certain enthousiasmos and celestiall inspiration’.19 Spenser’s prophetic role also takes its lead from Petrarch. Spenser’s career opens with his translation of Petrarch’s Rime 323, the ﬁrst poem in Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings, where it is followed by his translation of eleven sonnets from Du Bellay’s Songe (appended to the Antiquitez de Rome), four sonnets on the Apocalypse, and lengthy commentary. The poems are presented as visions of the transience and therefore vanity of all worldly goods, exhorting readers to turn to God, but underlying this is a strong political programme, urging 17

See R. W. Maslen’s introduction in Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. G. Shepherd, 3rd edn, revised R. W. Maslen (Manchester, 2002). Quotations from the Apology are from this edition. 18 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 83. 19 ‘Argument’ to October in The Shepheardes Calender. Spenser quotations from R. McCabe (ed.), Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999).

250

Syrithe Pugh

support for the international Protestant cause. Jan van der Noot was a Protestant refugee, ﬂeeing persecution by ‘that wycked tyrant’ the Catholic Duke of Alva in the Netherlands.20 The commentary moves from interpretation of the Petrarchan text as showing the vanity of mortal life and worldly love, through the Du Bellay sonnets as showing the vanity of imperial Rome, with animadversions on ambition, pride, greed, and cruelty in rulers, to an extended execration of the vanity and tyranny of papal and Spanish power. Petrarch is mentioned both for his turn from concupiscence ‘to Godwarde’ and for his criticism of the papacy.21 The volume urges disobedience to Catholic monarchs, but its attack is more generally applicable: pluck down the hie minded hearts of tira~ts. [. . .] Teache [. . .] Princes [to] vnderstand [. . .] that it becometh the~ to walke in the feare of god, not to do al things vnaduisedly, and according to their owne pleasure, but orderly, as reason and equitie doth require, not to oppresse the poore [. . .] but to aid, succoure and helpe them.22

Even the dedication to Elizabeth praises her not for her accomplishments and imperial crown, because such ‘gifts and graces [. . .] bee transitorie, and can not make any man or woman happie (albeit they seme diuine and supernaturall,) excepte they be accompanied wyth the loue and feare of God’, but rather because God ‘hath vouchesafed (by enclinyng youre graces heart to humilitie) to chose your maiestie, especially to be his champion to defend his beloued church’ — that is, as God’s mortal servant, insofar as she supports the Protestant cause.23 Spenser polished his translations and reprinted them as the The Visions of Petrarch and The Visions of Bellay in the 1591 Complaints volume, adding poems amplifying the themes of political resistance and prophetic authority. The Visions of the worlds vanitie, a sequence of twelve sonnets containing ten prophetic visions, is almost entirely neglected by critics, but it represents Spenser’s only original composition in the genre of the Petrarch and Du Bellay translations. The title leads us to expect a prevailing mood of grief and pity at the transience of worldly things as in the Visions of Petrarch, and occasionally this note

20

J. van der Noot, A Theatre wherein be represented as wel the miseries & calamities that follow the voluptuous Worldlings, As also the greate ioyes and plesures which the faithfull do enioy (London, 1569), 105vo. 21 Van der Noot, fols 14vo, 55vo. 22 Van der Noot, fols 68vo–69ro. 23 Van der Noot, sig. Av ro.

SIDNEY, SPENSER, AND POLITICAL PETRARCHISM

251

is struck. ‘Those sights empassion me ful nere’, we are told in sonnet 1; in sonnet 7 the poet is ‘much dismayed,/ To see so goodly thing so soone decayed’; and in the final sonnet he is ‘engrieved’ ‘with inward ruth and deare affection’. But the melancholy described in sonnet 1 arises not from a recognition of mortality, but from the perceived injustices of the current age: One day, whiles that my daylie cares did sleepe, My spirit, shaking off her earthly prison, Began to enter into meditation deepe Of things exceeding reach of common reason; Such as this age, in which all good is geason [rare], And all that humble is and meane debaced, Hath brought forth in her last declining season, Griefe of good mindes, to see goodnesse disgraced. On which when as my thought was throghly placed, Vnto my eyes strange showes presented were, Picturing that, which I in minde embraced, That yet those sights empassion me full nere.

The third quatrain seems to encourage us to read the ensuing visions as examples of the disgracing of goodness which moves the ‘grief of good mindes’ in line 8. But the creatures thrown down and disgraced in the visions are not ‘good’ at all. The Cedar of sonnet 7 is ‘goodly’, but this is evidently meant in an aesthetic and not a moral sense, referring to her ‘beautie’ and ‘daintie odours’, in which she resembles the ‘foolish’ ‘bragging brere’ of Spenser’s Februarie eclogue, who is punished for her vanity. Those overthrown in the other sonnets are consistently associated with the pride and cruelty of tyrants, and they fall at the hands precisely of the ‘humble and meane’ whose undeservedly lowly status was lamented in the second quatrain. Despite some misleading hints of a tone of regret at the fall from power of the ‘great’, then — evidently enough to persuade the censor, on a cursory reading, to permit publication — the visions represent a series of triumphant blows against the social injustice lamented in sonnet 1. Like Sidney’s ‘As I my little ﬂock on Ister bank’, the visions take the form of beast fables. But where Sidney’s analyses the genesis of tyranny, Spenser’s illustrate the possibility of active resistance. The ‘great’ who are attacked by the ‘meane’ in the sonnets are repeatedly assimilated to monarchs who abuse their power. The bull of sonnet 2 recalls the ‘bigge Bulles of Basan’, ‘that with theyr hornes butten the more stoute:/ But the leane soules treaden vnder foote’, decried by Diggon in September’s satire on the ‘forced’ ‘il’ of absentee landlords and enclosure of common land in

252

Syrithe Pugh

The Shepheardes Calender.24 These ‘Bulles of Basan’ refer to Amos 4. 1, ‘Heare this word, ye kine of Bashan [. . .] which oppresse the poore, and destroy the nedie’, where the Geneva Bible glosses the ‘kine’ as ‘princes and governors’. The Bull of the Visions has ‘gilden hornes embowed like the Moone’, perhaps suggesting a closer resemblance to Elizabeth. Sonnet 3’s Crocodile is ‘cram’d with guiltles blood [. . .] Of wretched people’. Sonnet 4’s Eagle is ‘the kingly Bird [. . .] That made all other Foules his thralls to bee’, politicising its source in Alciati’s emblem 168, ‘a minimis quoque timendum’.25 The Elephant of sonnet 8 is ‘puffed vp with passing surquedrie’ by ‘his ‘riche attire’, ‘all other beasts to scorne’; the ‘Lyon, Lord of all the wood’ in sonnet 10, traditional symbol of monarchy, glories in the ‘spoyle of liuing blood’. The successful resistance of gnats, beetles, and ants to these mighty creatures is a repeated lesson — ‘Let therefore nought that great is, therein glorie,/ Sith so small thing his happines may varie’ — a lesson which in sonnet 4 even Jove approves as a justiﬁed rebuke to overweening power: ‘said Iove,/ Lo how the least the greatest may reproue’. Spenser’s sonnet 11 is slightly different — it tells how a cackling goose saved Rome by awakening it during a nocturnal invasion: What time the Romaine Empire bore the raine Of all the world, and ﬂorisht most in might, The nations gan their soueraigntie disdaine, And cast to quitt them from their bondage quight: So when all shrouded were in silent night, The Galles were, by corrupting of a mayde, Possest nigh of the Capitol through slight, Had not a Goose the treachery bewrayde.

These small rebels and defenders of the state resemble not only subjects empowered to resist monarchy by tracts like the Vindiciae, but also the poet himself. In the same volume appears Spenser’s translation of the pseudo-Virgilian Culex, riddlingly but ostentatiously applied to Spenser’s relation to its dedicatee, his patron Leicester — Spenser presents himself as the gnat whose sting awakened the sleeping shepherd, warning him of the serpent’s imminent attack, a role recalled by the admonitory goose of the Visions. In Mother Hubberds Tale the same role is played by Mercury,

24

September, 124–6. Though the overt target of the eclogue is papal depravity, domestic social concerns lie just beneath the surface: see R. Lane, Shepheards Devises: Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and the Institutions of Elizabethan Society (Athens, GA, 1993), pp. 132–47. 25 A. Alciati, Emblematum libellus (Paris, 1534), p. 58.

SIDNEY, SPENSER, AND POLITICAL PETRARCHISM

253

sent by Jove to denounce the tyranny of the ape and fox, and to wake the royal lion, who sleeps, shamefully forgetful of his duty to protect his subjects. Like the gnat and goose, Mercury ﬁgures the poet’s role, denouncing abuses of power and admonishing monarchs of their duty for the good of the realm. Spenser is remembering particularly what he perceives as the successful warnings to Elizabeth against her planned marriage to the French Duc d’Alençon in 1579, issued by Sidney in his letter to the Queen, Stubbes in his Gaping Gulf, and Spenser himself in The Shepheardes Calender. Mother Hubberd recalls this episode, and so does the goose sonnet in the Visions. It conﬂates two episodes from Livy’s history of Rome— the ﬁrst when the Sabines were admitted to the city by Tarpeia, the custodian’s daughter, whom they had bribed; the second when an attack on the Capitol by the Gauls was foiled by the cackling of the sacred geese — in order to reﬂect the anti-Alençon polemicists’ successful deﬂection of what they feared would amount to the seizing of power in England by the Gauls (France), by marrying its virgin Queen, ‘by corrupting of a mayde’.26 Spenser, son of a cloth-worker, may be lowly as a goose or a gnat; but his prophetic authority is that of the divine messenger Mercury, and this privileged access to the divine gives him the right to admonish kings of their duty, their mortality, and the conditional nature of their authority — as the Visions conclude, ‘if that fortune chaunce you vp to call/ To honours seat, forget not what you be.’ When Spenser ﬁrst assumes the stance of the Petrarchan lover, in the Shepheardes Calender, the Queen is the mistress, and the purpose is a twofold political critique. Colin’s unhappy love for Rosalind, the Tudor rose, ﬁgures his political discontent — not frustrated desire for patronage, but opposition to her policies, and particularly her planned marriage.27 We learn in June that Rosalind has forsaken Colin not out of chastity, but for a rival, ‘a wicked deed’ by which her ‘ﬂowre is woxe a weede,/ And faultlesse fayth, is turned to faithlesse fere’ (109–10) — ‘faithless fere’ suggesting the Catholic spouse for whom Elizabeth looks ready to forsake her

26

Livy, 1. 11; 5. 47. On the relation of Mother Hubberds Tale to the Alençon crisis, see E. Greenlaw et al. (eds), The Works of Edmund Spenser, A Variorum Edition: The Minor Poems, 2 vols (Baltimore, MD, 1943) II, 568 ff. 27 On the anti-Alençon polemic in the Calender, see P. McLane, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame, IN, 1961), pp. 47–60; R. McCabe, ‘ “Little booke: thy selfe present”: The Politics of Presentation in The Shepheardes Calender’, in H. Erskine-Hill and R. McCabe (eds), Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 15–40.

254

Syrithe Pugh

Protestant subjects. In Aprill, Colin’s hymn of Petrarchan praise for Elisa, Queen of shepherds, is sung in the absence of its ‘alienate and withdrawn’ author, and is shot through with warning denunciations of such rhetoric as idolatrous. The concluding emblems, O quam te memorem virgo? O dea certe, alluding to the apparition of Venus in the Aeneid which Petrarch so often echoes,28 reafﬁrm the hymn’s deiﬁcation of Elisa — ‘she is my goddess plain’. Yet within the hymn, Colin interrupts his Petrarchan claim that she outshines sun and moon (recalling, for instance, Rime 31. 115), with the warning example of Niobe, a queen punished by the gods for her hubristic demand that her subjects worship her as a divinity in place of Latona: But I will not match her with Latonaes seede, Such follie great sorow to Niobe did breede [. . .] Warning all other to take heede.

E. K.’s glosses sound similar warning notes. The poet’s beloved ‘deserue[s] no lesse’ to ‘be commended to immortalitie’ than Lauretta the diuine Petrarches Goddesse, or Himera the worthye Poete Stesichorus hys Idole: Vpon whom he is sayd so much to haue doted, that in regard of her excellencie, he scorned and wrote against the beauty of Helena. For which his praesumptuous and vnheedie hardinesse, he is sayde by vengeaunce of the Gods, thereat being offended, to haue lost both his eyes.29

The implication is that the Petrarchan praise lavished on Elizabeth in Colin’s hymn is idolatrous, and an offence to God. At stake here, I argue, is the conﬂict between the imperial concept of monarchy, with its binding together of monarchical and divine authority, giving the monarch a quasi-divine power which subjects may not restrain or resist, and the view voiced by Huguenot resistance theorists. For the latter, the monarch’s authority derives ultimately from God but immediately from the people in parliament, under a contractual arrangement which allows the people to insist on the monarch’s observance of his duty and the law, and if necessary for magistrates — or, according to the Vindiciae, even a private individual convinced he is called by God — to remove him from power. Spenser’s admonitory role, meddling with arcana imperii like the marriage plans, suggests at least a moderate form of the latter; his reminders to the queen of her mortality and warnings against self-deiﬁcation suggest distrust of the former.

28 29

For instance, Canzoniere 90. McCabe, Shorter Poems, p. 66.

SIDNEY, SPENSER, AND POLITICAL PETRARCHISM

255

The Amoretti’s revision of Petrarchan love in favour of Protestant companionate marriage deals with the same issue.30 Recounting his courtship of and betrothal to Elizabeth Boyle, the coincidence of names, the subject of sonnet 74, highlights the fact that many of the sonnets can equally well be taken as addressed to the Queen, and the prefatory matter, urging Spenser’s recall from Ireland, suggests a suit to the Queen underlying the love-suit. But the political concerns are larger.31 The early part of the sequence has been seen as a parody of Petrarchism, heightening Petrarch’s rhetoric of strife and cruelty. The innocent ‘giovenetta donna’ of RVF 121, barefoot amongst the grass and ﬂowers, scorning Petrarch and Love, becomes a bloodthirsty ‘Tyranesse’ ‘who joys to see/ the huge massacres which her eyes do make’ in sonnet 10; Laura’s ‘cor di tigre o d’orsa’ in RVF 151 spawns a menagerie of bloodthirsty beasts to which the mistress is likened in Spenser’s sequence, and the poet’s answering animosity grows too. Insofar as Elizabeth Boyle is the addressee, this rhetoric is excessive and she rejects it: only when she is assured that Spenser’s persona seeks not egotistical conquest but a ‘league’ of ‘mutuall good will’ (65), in which both are bound and both are free, does she accept his suit. Insofar as it refers to the Queen, the rhetoric of tyranny ﬁnds no resolution. Elizabeth Tudor fades from the sequence with the betrothal— obviously it is not the Queen who grants the poet kisses and promises consummation— and unlike the bride’s, her ‘too portly pride’ (5) is unbowed, acknowledging only her power over, and not her contractual ‘league’ with, her subjects. Sonnet 67, the ﬁrst of the Easter sonnets on the betrothal, marks the moment of separation between the two possible addressees, and of Spenser’s dedication of himself to bride rather than Queen. This is not simply a choice between private love and public duty; rather the betrothal stands for a whole ethical, religious, and political position which diverges from the Queen’s view of her own power. Spenser’s ideological turn away from the Tudor monarchy is articulated through his divergence from his Petrarchan model, Canzoniere 190, and can be summed up as a difference between two ways of imitating Christ. Spenser’s deer, Elizabeth Boyle, recalling the deer of Psalms 22 and 42, imitates Christ’s sacriﬁce in her willing surrender, as is brought out in the following sonnet’s prayer to the 30

On the revision of Petrarchan love in the Amoretti, see R. W. Dasenbrock, ‘The Petrarchan Context of Spenser’s Amoretti’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, C (1985), 38–50; L. M. Klein, ‘ “Let us love, deare love, lyke as we ought”: Protestant Marriage and the Revision of Petrarchan Loving in Spenser’s Amoretti’, Spenser Studies, X (1989), 109–37. 31 See S. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 169–77.

256

Syrithe Pugh

‘glorious Lord of lyfe’ that, ‘for thy sake that all lyke deare didst buy’, the couple ‘with loue may one another entertayne’. By contrast, Petrarch’s deer reﬂects not the incarnation and sacriﬁce of Christ, but his ascension. The inscription on her collar, ‘Nessun mi tocchi [. . .] Libera farmi al mio Cesare parve’ (Canzoniere 190) (Let no one touch me [. . .] It has pleased my Caesar to make me free), quoting Christ’s words to Mary Magdalen at John 20. 17, looks forward to the Ascension, implicitly paralleled with Laura’s death, at which she will leave the world behind and become an example of contemptus mundi for Petrarch. Where Spenser’s sonnet foregrounds Christ’s humanity, Petrarch’s stresses his divinity. The imperial concept of monarchy attributes to the Queen this latter sort of similarity to Christ, insisting on the sacral, quasi-divine nature of the ofﬁce, and the elevation of the monarch above the reach of human institutions of parliament and law. In opposition to such theories, the Rights of Magistrates and the Vindiciae explain their theory of contractual monarchy by analogy with marriage. Here is the Vindiciae: Saint Augustine saith Those are properly called Lords and Masters which provide for the good and proﬁt of others, as the husband for the wife, Fathers for their children. They must therefore obey them that provide for them; although indeed to speak truly, those which governe in this manner, may in a sort be said to serve those, whom they command over. For, as sayes the same Doctor, they command not for the desire of dominion, but for the duty they owe to provide for the good of those that are subjected to them; not affecting any Lord like domineering, but with charity and singular affection [. . .].32

The relationship of the betrothed couple at the end of the Amoretti represents just such a system — a ‘league’ of ‘mutuall good will’, ‘without constraynt or dread of any ill’, where each seeks not personal power but to serve the other’s need, ‘with sweet peace to salue each others wound’ (65)—and is intended as a model advocating a more reciprocal and representative attitude to government and to the social order at large than is implied by Tudor imperialism. Twice in the Amoretti, in sonnets 33 and 80, Spenser draws attention to the fact that in writing these love sonnets praising Elizabeth Boyle he is neglecting the praise of his Faerie Queene in his unﬁnished epic, recalling the possible allusions in the Rime to Petrarch’s neglect of the Africa, 32

Vindiciae contra Tyrannos: A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants, or, Of the lawfull power of the Prince over the people, and of the people over the Prince (anonymous English translation, 1648), p. 67.

SIDNEY, SPENSER, AND POLITICAL PETRARCHISM

257

such as the conclusion of sonnet 97 glanced at earlier. Sonnet 33 proclaims that he is thereby doing ‘Great wrong’ to the Queen, and sonnet 80 promises that he will return to epic. But the promise was not kept. The Faerie Queene is left unﬁnished after the six books, which we are told in sonnet 80, that he has already written. Moreover, at the visionary climax of the epic, atop Mount Acidale in book 6, we ﬁnd Colin conjuring through music an enchanted vision of dancing graces recalling Aprill’s hymn to Elisa, but with the Queen explicitly excluded, and the poet’s private love placed instead at the centre. As a true reﬂection of God’s love, the love achieved in the Amoretti is an appropriate object for the immortalising praise of the prophet-poet; but his attitude to the Queen is more ambiguous, his praise conditional, and balanced by admonition. I ﬁnish by remembering Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, in which Colin is hailed as the ‘Priest’ of Love, singing his power divine (838) — true love clearly signifying the Christian God here — and uttering a scathing satire on ‘Cynthia’s’ court, culminating in a denunciation of its abuse of the name of love in its insincere fashionable Petrarchism, which seems the root of all its corruption: For with lewd speeches and licentious deeds, His mightie mysteries they do prophane, And vse his ydle name to other needs, But as a complement for courting vaine. (787–90)

The prophetic Colin presides over what amounts to an alternative court in Spenser’s Ireland, and tells the assembled ‘shepheards nation’ (17) of his visit to England and to Cynthia’s court, of which they have never before heard. This shepherds’ nation, living in accordance with the Christian teaching of the Priest of Love, and apparently beyond Elizabeth’s rule, derives its communal identity not from embodiment in the sovereign, but from the poet and his teachings.33 Following Petrarch in founding a vernacular poetry, to give his country ‘the kingdome of its own language’, as he puts it in the Familiar Letters, Spenser uses it not, like Du Bellay in France, to construct a sense of nationhood dependent on the monarch, but to create a counter-national poetry whose authority is independent of political power. 33

See A. Hadﬁeld, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 188–90; Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, pp. 178–99. Compare Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, pp. 21–59, and, for the impact on the political pastoral of the next generation, M. O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheardes Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford, 2000).

16

Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet RONALD D. S. JACK

THE FIRST QUESTION POSED BY MY TITLE is obvious. As the sonnet form is at once artiﬁcial and mainly dedicated to the universal human experience of love, what is the point of making national distinctions? Surely the inﬂuence of Petrarch’s verse on Scottish practice cannot differ much from that revealed for the English sonnet? As the European inheritance of the latter has been exhaustively studied, surely there is little more to be learned in this area? That Scottish Renaissance poets were enthusiastic about the form is not in question— over 800 sonnets were composed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prior to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the most active Scottish sonneteers were Alexander Montgomerie (1555?–98), James VI himself (1566–1625), John Stewart of Baldynneis (1550–1605), and William Fowler (1560–1612). After the Union, another group continued the tradition — most notably Sir William Alexander (1567–1640), Sir David Murray of Gorthy (1567–1629), Alexander Craig (1568–1627), Sir Robert Ayton (1569–1638), and William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649). There are two ways of approaching this evidence. Those who wish to bypass the Scottish contribution could fairly ask how ‘notable’ these writers really are. Apart from Drummond of Hawthornden, none ﬁgures in any major study of the European sonnet. Indeed, even literary histories and anthologies dedicated to Scottish writing underplay their contribution, or pass over them in virtual silence. Most recently, Roderick Watson’s The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots, and English grants only eleven pages out of 709 to the entire period from 1580 until 1700.1

1

The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots, and English, ed. R. Watson (Edinburgh, 1995).

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 259–273. © The British Academy 2007.

260

Ronald D. S. Jack

There is more to this than meets the eye, however. It is usually fair to suppose that critics who deﬁne their perspective in terms of a minority tradition will be particularly benevolent towards those authors within it. In this case, however, the Scottish bias works against the poets concerned, with scholarly surveys of the British Renaissance coming to more generous qualitative conclusions about them. Alastair Fowler, for example, in The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, grants forty-four pages to James VI, Drummond, Ayton, and Alexander. While his selection has a narrower chronological focus, the Scots do win attention in competition with Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton.2 In fact, political concerns make the aesthetic judgements of ‘Scottish Tradition’ critics unreliable. When one’s ﬁrst motivation is to establish national distinctiveness, measured against an English norm, those of your fellow countrymen who work within English parameters are unlikely to be favoured. The major criteria for ‘traditional’ acceptance as deﬁned by Kurt Wittig support this premise.3 To be a truly Scottish author, Wittig argues, you should write (a) in Scots, (b) unpretentiously, (c) on patriotic themes, and (d) from a radical viewpoint. In this context, Scotland’s manneristic, anglicising courtier poets of the late Renaissance are unlikely to ﬁnd national favour. This is a complex issue which I have discussed elsewhere.4 Canonically, it has a further implication. While the Renaissance as a whole is unpopular, those pre-Union poets who still write in Scots get more consideration than their post-Union counterparts. The latter group, known as the ‘ScotoBritanes’, are virtually excised because their language is very close to English. Roderick Watson ignores them entirely, while the editors of The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse represent the movement’s ﬁnest representative, Drummond of Hawthornden, via his sonnet ‘To Sleepe’ alone.5 These authors are in fact caught in a critical ‘Catch 22’ situation. Most international scholars who wish to understand the British and European Renaissance ﬁnd little comment and less enthusiasm at home and assume

2

The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, ed. A. Fowler (Oxford, 1991). K. Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Literature (Edinburgh, 1958). 4 In The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language, ed. C. Jones (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 213–63 and the ‘Critical Introduction’ to The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature, ed. R. D. S. Jack and P. A. T. Rozendaal, rev. edn (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. i–xxxix. The current chapter develops from earlier research; especially The Italian Inﬂuence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh, 1972) and ‘Petrarch in English and Scottish Literature’, Modern Language Review, LXXI (1976), 801–11. 5 The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse, ed. J. MacQueen and T. Scott (Oxford, 1966). 3

PETRARCH AND THE SCOTTISH RENAISSANCE SONNET

261

this implies lack of quality. But, in fact, nationalistic rather than aesthetic criteria are the major reasons for their domestic unpopularity. Those who do investigate the evidence will ﬁnd important differences between reception of the lyric in England and in Scotland, as this comparative study of Petrarch’s inﬂuence will highlight. The ﬁrst divergence is chronological. In the early sixteenth century, Sir Thomas Wyatt translated ﬁfteen poems from the Rime and imitated ten more. He was ably complemented in this task by Surrey, whose understanding of Petrarchan thought may not have been so profound as Wyatt’s but who was clearly attracted by Petrarch’s style. There is no Scottish equivalent of this early interest. Although political links with Italy did exist at this time, the culture of France still dominated in the reigns of James V and Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as the regencies of James VI’s minority. This bias affected the lyric in particular while the sonnet form became really popular only in the early 1580s. At that time, James VI moved it to centre stage within a carefully planned programme for artistic patronage. Indeed, in one sense, the story of this chapter is the story of Jacobean cultural politics before and after the Union of the Crowns. As king of Scotland at the Edinburgh court, James remembered his mother Mary’s failure to control versifying and her consequent viliﬁcation by Protestant poets. He therefore created for himself a triple persona as divine king (Apollo), poet (David), and patron (Maecenas). To advertise this policy he composed, in 1585, a short rhetorical treatise, setting out clear directives for vernacular writing at his court. Any study of the Petrarchan sonnet in Renaissance Scotland has to begin with this work, The Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie. The guidelines there set down were politically motivated; they even included a directive that all verse concerning the ‘commoun weill’ should be composed in Latin. As such they were designed to give the Scottish lyric, and especially the sonnet, a distinctive national voice. Unsurprisingly, when the king moved to London a more accommodating approach had to be devised and the old ‘rules’ revised accordingly. What, then, were the major distinguishing features of the Scottish sonnet in the 1580s and how did they affect the inﬂuence of Petrarch on that form particularly? The ‘Preface’ to the Reulis introduces the topic clearly. Countering the objection that he is too young to offer poetic guidance in so well trodden an area of discussion, James argues: [. . .] as for thame that hes written of late, there hes never ane of thame written in our language. For albeit sindrie hes written of it in English, quhilk is lykest

262

Ronald D. S. Jack to our language, yit we differ from thame in sindrie reulis of poesie, as ye will ﬁnd be experience. The ane is because they are usit in all languages and thairfore are spokin of be Du Bellay and sindrie utheris.6 ([. . .] as for those who have written recently none of them has ever written in our language. For although several have written about it in English, which is closest to our language, yet we differ from them in several poetic rules, as you will ﬁnd by experience. One is that they are used in all languages and therefore are spoken about by Du Bellay and several others.)

The linguistic (‘Scots’) and comparative (‘French’) bias announced here continues throughout the treatise. To make their voice heard, Scottish court poets are urged to highlight those features of their dialect which distinguish it from other tongues and especially from English. As the harsher sounds of Scots make it ideal for alliteration and for ﬂytings, he says: ‘Let all your verse be literall, quhatsumever kynde they be of, but especiallie tumbling verse for ﬂyting’ (ch. 3, p. 467). James’s critical vocabulary—‘literall’ (‘vers lettrisé’) and ‘tumbling verse’ (‘vers tombant’) — conﬁrms his major reliance on French sources. Among these, Du Bellay’s Deffense et Illustration de la Languae Françoyse (1542) dominates. It largely determines his views on language, rhythm, and translation. More generally, this mirrors the king’s enthusiasm for the Pléiade as fostered by his friend and cousin Esmé Stuart, Sieur d’Aubigné. A sonnet by James’s laureate or ‘maister-poete’, Alexander Montgomerie, will illustrate both of these tendencies. The Ayrshire poet, whose Catholicism would later lead to his exile from the country, was still James’s friend and poetic guide during the 1580s. Having made his name as a poet during the young king’s minority, his status as leader of the so-called ‘Castalian band’ of court poets was unchallenged. How far he dictated the terms of James’s rhetorical treatise and how far he complied with them remains unclear but quotations from his work dominate the list of stanzaic models which conclude the Reulis. The speciﬁc example chosen was probably set to music and sung at court:7 So swete a kis yistrene fra thee I reft In bouing doun thy body on the bed, That evin my lyfe within thy lippis I left.

6 The Mercat Anthology, p. 461. For convenience, quotations for Scottish authors follow this edition unless otherwise stated. 7 See H. M. Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry at the Court of King James VI (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 150–8.

PETRARCH AND THE SCOTTISH RENAISSANCE SONNET

263

Sensyne from thee my spreits wald never shed; To folow thee it from my body ﬂed And left my corps als cold as ony kie. Bot when the danger of my death I dred, To seik my spreit I sent my harte to thee; Bot it wes so inamored with thyn ee, With thee it myndit lykwyse to remane; So thou hes keepit captive all the thrie, More glaid to byde then to returne agane. Except thare breath thy places had suppleit, Even in thyn armes thair, doutles, had I deit. (The Mercat Anthology, p. 350) (So sweet a kiss I stole from you yesterday, when bowing down your body on the bed, that I left my life itself within your lips. To follow you it ﬂed from my body and left my corpse as cold as any key. But when I was enduring death’s enmity, I sent my heart to you to seek out my spirit; but it became so enamoured with your eye, it likewise decided to stay with you; in this way you have kept all three captive, happier to remain than to return again. Had your breath not supplied their functions, there—in your arms — I had doubtless died.)

This is a free translation of Ronsard’s Chanson, ‘Hyer au soir que je pris maugré toy’, which ﬁrst appeared in the Nouvelle Continuation des Amours of 1556. Montgomerie’s inventive approach is consistent with the king’s warning in chapter 7 of the Reulis that translators should not ‘be bound as to a staik to follow that buikis phrasis, quhilk ye translate’ (p. 468). Its use of alliteration conﬁrms the king’s ‘literall’ strategy while word forms such as ‘byde’, ‘lippis’, and ‘suppleit’ make it a recognisably ‘Scottis’ poem. The poem’s interlacing rhyme scheme — ABABBCBCCDCDEE — is another distinguishing feature of the Castalian sonnet. Ninety per cent of the sonnets at James’s court employ it. In England, despite Spenser’s adoption of it, the form never attained such popularity. As ‘maister poete’, Montgomerie was not the most docile of the king’s poetic followers, however. While he obeys James’s imitative, linguistic, stylistic, and formal directives to the letter he proves less servile when it comes to his choice of sources. James preferred the Platonic side to the Pléiade. He had also been taught to hate his mother. Ronsard’s overtly sensual verse and his expressed admiration for Mary made him doubly suspicious in her son’s eyes. The French poet was also too conventional a source for a king whose topical guidelines for the sonnet were the most radical of the distinguishing features he proposed for this, the modal ﬂagship of his

264

Ronald D. S. Jack

Renaissance. Love, James argued, had dominated the European sonnet for too long. Any amorous sonnets by Scottish writers had, therefore, to be as idiosyncratic as those in his own unpublished Amatoria (c.1589–90), addressed to Anne of Denmark. A broader topical range was also proposed for the Castalian sonnet: ‘For compendious praysing of any bukes or the authouris thairof or ony argumentis of uther historeis, quhair sindrie sentences and change of purposis are requyrit, use sonet verse of fourtene lynis and ten fete in every lyne’ (p. 470). Montgomerie, like his fellow Castalians, accepts the broader range criterion, using the form for moral and religious topics, for panegyric, ﬂytings, and debates (The Mercat Anthology, pp. 349–57). But, in imitating a major love poet, especially one whom the king did not favour, the senior poet established some independence. While these considerations explain the Petrarchan sonnet’s relative unpopularity in Scotland before the Union of the Crowns, it should not be supposed that, until then, Petrarch was either unheard of or ignored. Although James’s own interests were primarily classical and French, he praised ‘loftie Petrarch’ in one of his own sonnets. In his age, like Homer and Virgil in theirs, the Italian poet and his ‘sugred (delightful) stile’ stood out like a ‘glistering (glistening) star’: ‘So loftie Petrarch his renowne did blaze/ In toungue Italique in a sugred stile.’8 It is, therefore, unsurprising to ﬁnd one Castalian whose enthusiasms were Italian rather than French. William Fowler, Secretary to Anne of Denmark, is known for his translations of Machiavelli’s Il Principe and his poetic paraphrase of Petrarch’s Trionﬁ (1587, unpublished). But he was also the ﬁrst Castalian to compose a lyrical love sequence, The Tarantula of Love (c. 1584–7, unpublished). The opening sonnet in echoing RVF 1, ‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono’, announces the collection’s Petrarchism unequivocally: O, yow who heres the accents of my smart Diffusd in ryme and sad disordred verse, Gif ever ﬂams of love hath touchte your hart, I trust with sobbs and teares the same to perse; Yea, even in these ruid rigours I reherse, Which I depaint with blodie bloodles wounds, I think dispared saules there plaints sall sperse, And mak the haggard rocks resound sad sounds, Yet whils as ye the causes reids and grounds Off her immortal beutye and my payne, 8

The Poems of King James VI of Scotland, ed. J. Craigie, Scottish Text Society, 2 vols (Edinburgh–London, 1948, 1958), II, 104.

PETRARCH AND THE SCOTTISH RENAISSANCE SONNET

265

Through which greit greiffs and grace in both abounds; With humble speache speake this to her agayne: ‘O of this stayles thought the stayed sing Breide him not deathe that glore to the dois bring.’9 (O you who hear the accents of my pain, diffused in rhyme and sadly disordered verse, if ever ﬂames of love have touched your heart, I hope with sobs and tears to pierce it again. Indeed in recalling my own harsh, cruel treatment and depicting its bloody, bloodless wounds, I hope (other) despairing souls may spread abroad their complaints, and make the haggard rocks resound with sad sounds. Yet, at the same time as you read of the causes and origins of her immortal beauty and my pain, through both of which great grief and grace abound; with humble speech, say this to her again, ‘In all this unstable argument, the moderate minded sing —Do not breed death in the one who brings glory to you.’)

Fowler’s Italianate sequence may be unusual among the Castalians but his ‘rebellion’ is not a radical one. He still writes in Scots and assumes Scots pronunciation, as the Scots assonance of ‘resoon sad soons’ in line 8 illustrates. He employs the Castalian interlacing rhyme scheme and translates Petrarch freely throughout the sequence. The practice employed in ‘O yow who heres’ where close initial translation gives way to freer imitation proves a favoured method. Fowler’s major Italian sources have been discussed at length by scholars.10 Other sonnets which derive from Petrarchan originals include Tarantula 22, ‘The day is done, the sunn doth ells declyne’, and Tarantula 60, ‘As that poore foolische ﬂiee’, which derive from ‘Or che’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace’ (RVF 164) and ‘Son animali al mondo’ (RVF 19), respectively. Thematically, too, as the title suggests, we are concerned with the tarantula of love as deﬁned by Castiglione in Il Cortegiano. In that work, the poison of the spider induces Petrarchan symptoms of warring emotional extremes, while the ladder of love described by Bembo in book 4 can be seen as an elaboration of the poet’s growing realisation that love for Laura is a stairway to God. Certainly the seventy-one sonnets of Fowler’s sequence trace such a progression, even concluding with an explicit

9 The Works of William Fowler, ed. H. W. Meikle et al., Scottish Text Society, 3 vols (Edinburgh– London, 1914–40), II, 29. 10 See J. Purves, ‘Fowler and Scoto-Italian Cultural Relations in the Sixteenth Century’, in Fowler, Works, III, and R. D. S. Jack, ‘William Fowler and Italian Literature’, Modern Language Review, LXV (1970), 481–92.

266

Ronald D. S. Jack

statement of Christian faith — ‘As I in one God ever ay haith trust.’ Like Petrarch too, Fowler follows his mistress beyond death. The short ‘Death’ sequence, which includes Bellisa’s return in a vision, raises the same issues as Petrarch’s ‘morte’ sonnets. This echoing of Petrarchism’s philosophical and metaphysical dimension also allows Fowler to claim that he has contextualised love within the broader thematic context advocated by James. During the 1580s and 1590s, therefore, Petrarch did not ﬁgure largely in the development of the Scottish lyric. In nationalistic terms this was partly because Elizabeth I consciously cultivated the image of Petrarch’s Laura to support her persona as ‘Virgin Queen’. But, as the likelihood of James inheriting the English throne increased, these linguistic and nationalistic divisions began to weaken. In particular, James’s determination to keep Scots a distinctive dialect lessened. Many modern critics see his later encouragement of anglicisation as linguistic treachery. But the situation is not as simple as they suppose. Aware that Scots emerged from Northumbrian English and primarily concerned with maintaining its persuasive efﬁciency, James found it easier to downplay the nationalistic side of the linguistic equation than these commentators acknowledge. What he did abandon was his earlier effort to counteract those anglicising forces which had threatened the Scots dialect since the days of John Knox. The most important socio-linguistic change from the 1570s onwards was the development of the printing press. As most printing was done in London or abroad, this destabilised all modes of written Scots. The translation of the Bible also played an important part. By a Scottish law of 1579, every householder with 300 merks had to possess a Bible and a psalmbook ‘in vulgare langage’. In practice this meant the 1561 Geneva edition in English.11 Nor were James’s directives extreme. His fellow Scoto-Britanes were advised to retain Scots words when English alternatives proved inadequate. Nor should it be forgotten that this was still, primarily, an aural culture in which Scottish poets could rely on their distinctive accent as a distinguishing mechanism. If Scottish sonnets, after 1603, look very like English ones, they still might sound different. In terms of motivation, patriotic condescension rather than modest accommodation is the name of the game. The erudite Scots under James as Apollo–David–Maecenas saw themselves as descending from the 11

G. Simpson, Scottish Handwriting (Edinburgh, 1975), p. 41; J. M. Templeton, ‘Lowland Scots: An Outline History’, in Occasional Papers, no. 2, ed. A. J. Aitken (Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 4–11.

PETRARCH AND THE SCOTTISH RENAISSANCE SONNET

267

peaceful north to impart wisdom to their war-torn neighbours. Sacriﬁcing some linguistic autonomy to achieve this end more effectively was a small price to pay. Given James’s advice that political verse should avoid the vernacular, this patriotically condescending argument is largely conﬁned to the neo-Latin evidence as preserved in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum. In that collection, the pragmatic, ‘educating the English’ case is forcefully advanced while the modern critic’s fears of linguistic treachery are nowhere sustained.12 If the Scottish sonnet during the British years of James’s reign is more anglicised, it is also more Italianate. When James brought his Edinburgh court poets south, English Petrarchism was on the way out. Indeed, among English poets, only Shakespeare and Greville published new sequences after 1597. In Scottish poetry, the opposite happened. The enduring inﬂuence of the Pléiade weakened and Petrarchism became the dominant lyrical inﬂuence. As the only love sequences composed at the Edinburgh court—James’s singularly unpassionate Amatoria and Fowler’s Tarantula —were both unpublished, the way was open for Scots to make a late contribution in this area. Although the Scoto-Britanes of the early seventeenth century were anxious to justify the ﬁrst part of the title, they did deﬁne their poetic allegiance in terms of the English schools — Ayton siding with Donne; Alexander and Drummond with Drayton. Analysis of the two major love sequences which preceded Drummond’s Poems of 1616 will explain how this nice balance was maintained. The leader of the Scottish poets in the London court was William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Educated at Glasgow University, Alexander was a poet, dramatist, privy counsellor, landowner, and coloniser. Best known, in his own day, for his Senecan dramas he also composed a lyrical love sequence, Aurora, which was published in 1604. Sonnet 63 from that collection will illustrate the new Scottish approach to Petrarchism. Oft have I heard, which now I must deny, That nought can last if that it be extreame; Times dayly change and we likewise in them, Things out of sight do straight forgotten die; There is nothing more vehement then love, And yet I burne, and burne still with one ﬂame. Times oft have chang’d, yet I remaine the same, 12 Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum Huius Aevi Illustrium, ed. A. Johnston, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1637). The opening poems by Patrick Adamson (I. 13–17) and Henry Anderson (I. 14–18) establish the tone.

268

Ronald D. S. Jack Nought from my mind her image can remove; The greatnesse of my love aspires to ruth, Time vowes to crowne my constancie in th’end, And absence doth my fancies but extend; Thus I perceive the poet spake the truth, That who to see strange countries were inclin’d, Might change the aire, but never change the mind.13

The most obvious difference from Castalian practice is linguistic. Almost all the verbal forms employed are English. Even at the Edinburgh court, however, Alexander had been notorious for ignoring the ‘Scottis’ bias to the Reulis. James even rebuked him poetically for writing ‘harshe vearses after the Inglishe fasone’ (The Mercat Anthology, p. 354). That this renegade Castalian was now collaborating with the king and Drummond on a new version of the Psalms shows how times had changed. Aurora marks a signiﬁcant break with the older model for the Scottish sonnet. The interlacing verse scheme is seldom employed and the king’s ‘cautel’ against conventional love sonneteering is ignored. The sequence contains 125 lyrics of which 105 are sonnets. Although Alexander uses Latin, French, and English originals, Italian sources dominate with Petrarch the most important model of all. For example, Aurora 53, ‘If now clear Po that pittie be not spent’, derives from ‘Po, ben puo’ tu portartene la scorza’ (RVF 180), while the opening appeal in Aurora 36, for a river to send messages to his beloved, follows the argument of ‘Rapido ﬁume, che d’alpestra vena’ (RVF 208). Aurora is, however, more remarkable for its thoughtful ‘translation’ of Petrarchan style and philosophy than for close rendering of individual sonnets. Like Fowler before him, Alexander starts from an analytic assessment of the dilemma faced by Petrarch rather than re-enacting its conﬂicts and excitements. The ﬁrst twenty-ﬁve sonnets introduce the reader to the antitheses and paradoxes of the passion. Love wars with lust, body with soul, ice with ﬁre. From that base, his own narrative unfolds. ‘Oft have I heard’ belongs to this later stage in the sequence. In it the conﬂicts implicit in Petrarchan love become the topic for Alexander’s own probing intellect. In particular, he challenges the usually accepted tenet that this life is dark and mutable while the world to come offers clarity and constancy. For him stability exists only in his vows to Aurora, while the life to come remains a mystery. Like Fowler, but unlike most English 13

The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, ed. L. E. Kastner and H. E. Charlton, Scottish Text Society, 2 vols (Edinburgh–London, 1920, 1928), II, 492.

PETRARCH AND THE SCOTTISH RENAISSANCE SONNET

269

Petrarchists, he traces his affection through most of the stages on Ficino’s Platonic ladder of love. He endures absence and slowly gains the faith he lacked. Throughout, however, Aurora is as much the Platonic Idea of love as she is an individual. In Aurora 3 she is already ‘th’Idaea which his soule conceived’ and it is her status as ‘Forme’ which ﬁnally leads him to sight of ‘the divine face’ in Aurora 70. His contemporary, Alexander Craig of Rosecraig, chose another way of addressing the full range of issues raised by Petrarch in the Canzoniere. Craig was born in Banff, in the late 1560s, attended St Andrews University, and, on graduation, became servant cum notary to John Chein, later Provost of Aberdeen. He then followed James south at a time when the king was looking for new poetic talent. Of this situation he took conscious advantage: ‘When others cease, now I begin to sing;/ And now when others hold their peace, I shout.’14 In 1608, he returned to his Scottish estate but not before his major lyrical sequence, The Amorose Songes, Sonets and Elegies of 1606, had been published in London. In this collection Craig addresses eight mistresses in interlaced sequences. One is Erantina, whose appropriate epithet in Craig’s introduction is ‘lovely’. To beauty, the ﬁrst sonnet under her name adds virtue. The third emphasises her chastity. It will, therefore, be no surprise to discover that the intervening sonnet explicitly deﬁnes her as the typological fulﬁlment of Laura: Sweete lovely Laura, modest, chast and cleene, It seems that Poet Petrarche took delight, Thy spotles prayse in daintie lines to dight, By Prophecies, before thy selfe was seene.15

The other seven mistresses personalise the vast variety of forms the passion may take. At one extreme, Idea foreshadows Platonic perfection while at the other Lais offers sexual gratiﬁcation alone. Kala, whose sequence draws heavily on Sidney, is the pastoral heroine. The remaining four are associated with ladies of the London court — Penelope, for example, is directly connected with Lady Penelope Rich. But they too have deﬁning characteristics. Penelope’s wealth, Cynthia’s morality, Pandora’s nobility, and Lithocardia’s intellect determine the kind of love each offers. Craig is an uneven writer whose love of erudite classical analogies makes some of his lyrics not so much expressions of passion as recondite 14

A. Craig, The Poeticall Essayes (1604) in The Poetical Works of Alexander Craig of Rosecraig, ed. D. Laing, Hunterian Club (Glasgow, 1873), p. 7. 15 A. Craig, The Amorose Songes, Sonets and Elegies (1606) in Works of Craig, p. 32.

270

Ronald D. S. Jack

intellectual exercises. But, in his preference for Italian and English sources and his determination to offer an analytical, wide-ranging account of love, he aligns himself with Alexander’s redeﬁnition of the Scottish lyric. For reasons which will be discussed later, the inventive approach to translation which characterised Castalian practice continues after the Union. Certainly it governs Craig’s treatment of Petrarch which is not conﬁned to the Erantina sequence alone. ‘Twixt Fortune, Love and most unhappie mee’ (p. 66) is addressed to Kala and proves to be a free adaptation of ‘Amor, Fortuna e la mia mente schiva’ (RVF 124). Similarly, while Erantina is praised in ‘Even as a man by darke that goes astray’ (p. 61), using Petrarch’s conceit of the poet as erring pilgrim in ‘Movesi il vecchierel canuto e bianco’ (RVF 16), the analogy is differently developed. In short, Craig recreates the authentic Petrarchan tone and style as one established approach to love. In character terms it deﬁnes Erantina, is a valuable motif for addressing Pandora and may occasionally be attained by Kala. In this way he maintains his own inventive integrity while weaving Petrarch’s legacy into a broader discussion of love’s variety. This leaves William Drummond of Hawthornden. How does this survey of his lesser known Scottish predecessors affect the way in which we view him? That Drummond saw himself as belonging to both Scottish and English traditions is not in doubt. He admits the inﬂuence of Fowler and Alexander upon him and calls his heroine Auristella because that name links Alexander’s Aurora with Sidney’s Stella.16 This dual heritage assumes particular importance when it comes to assessing his translations. First of all, there is the question of linguistic range. Drummond earned his title as ‘literary chameleon’ because he was a master of so many languages. To be polymathic and erudite, however, was practically a prerequisite for membership of the Castalian band under its scholar king. Of course, Drummond makes his contribution at the end of James’s long period of literary patronage. But he does so with an awareness of its earlier, peculiarly Scottish phase. This is what Ben Jonson failed to consider when criticising his host in the Conversations for being too conservative and composing verses which ‘were not after the fancy of the time’.17 Undeniably, Drummond is a learned and imitative poet, but his enthusiasm for Italianate love sequences is outdated only within the

16 See R. D. S. Jack, ‘Drummond of Hawthornden: The Major Scottish Sources’, Studies in Scottish Literature, VI (1968), 36–46. 17 Ben Jonson, ed. I. Donaldson, Oxford Authors Series (Oxford, 1985), p. 597.

PETRARCH AND THE SCOTTISH RENAISSANCE SONNET

271

English tradition. When Jonson talks of Hawthornden’s passive echoing of earlier ‘schools’, he is thinking in solely English terms. Drummond’s source map also reﬂects James’s freer, less nationalistically defensive period of patronage. The change of comparative bias does not mean that French sources are proscribed. Du Bartas, Ronsard, Pontus de Tyard, and others are drawn in to praise Auristella. But Italian sources do dominate and among love lyricists Petrarch stands supreme. On Drummond’s own evidence, ‘The best and most exquisite Poet on this subject, by consent of the whole Senate of Poets is Petrarch.’18 In practical terms, this does not mean that he is closely imitated. A comparison between the opening octets of Poems 2. 9 and its acknowledged source, Petrarch’s ‘Zeﬁro torna e ’l bel tempo rimena’ (RVF 310), will illustrate the characteristic distance Drummond keeps between himself and his ‘most exquisite’ model: Sweet Spring, thou turnst with all thy goodlie traine, Thy head with ﬂames, thy mantle bright with ﬂowrs, The Zephyres curle the greene lockes of the plane, The cloudes for joy in pearls weepe downe their showrs. Thou turn’st (sweet Youth) but ah my pleasant houres And happie dayes, with thee come not againe; The sad Memorialls only of my paine Doe with thee turne, which turne my sweets in soures.19

Here is the equivalent passage in Petrarch’s lyric: Zeﬁro torna e ’l bel tempo rimena e i ﬁori et l’erbe, sua dolce famiglia, e garrir Progne et pianger Filomena, et primavera candida et vermiglia; Ridono i prati e ’l ciel si rasserena, Giove s’allegra di mirar sua ﬁglia, l’aria et l’acqua et la terra è d’amor piena, ogni animal d’amar si riconsiglia.20 (Zephyr returns and brings back the pleasant season and its sweet family, the ﬂowers and plants, and the warbling of Progne and the weeping of Philomene, and spring that is white and vermilion. The meadows laugh and the sky clears; Jupiter

18

Cited by D. Masson in Drummond of Hawthornden (London, 1873), p. 80. The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. L. Kastner, Scottish Text Society, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1913). 20 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. M. Santagata (Milan, 1997), poem 310, p. 1190. 19

272

Ronald D. S. Jack enjoys admiring his daughter; air, water and earth are full of love; every living creature is in love again.)

This is, of course, a common topic. Yet paradoxically the very neatness of the divergences argues for Petrarch as the major source. ‘Zeﬁro’ becomes ‘Spring’; Nature is personiﬁed in both but her family becomes her ‘train’, a word, whose dual association allows the idea of her cloak to be developed. Only when Petrarch’s mythological focus has turned to Progne and Philomela does Drummond introduce the ‘Zephyrs’. When Petrarch highlights vermilion and white, Drummond turns to green. In the later sections of the poems, when poetic attention turns to human misery, the Scottish poet continues to follow his master’s general argument while self-consciously using different images and phrases to present it. It should not be supposed that the Scoto-Britanes still favour free translations of Petrarch because of James’s guidelines to that effect in his Reulis. A more pragmatic and varied approach was now adopted by the king and his poets. Broadly this meant that the more accessible an author already was, the less justiﬁcation there was for tying yourself to his ‘buikis phrasis’. Ironically, this meant that Petrarch’s ‘ancient fame’ practically guaranteed the kind of inventive treatment we have already discovered. It also explains why Drummond’s most literal translations acquaint British readers with lyrics by later, relatively unknown ﬁgures such as Luigi Groto and Valerio Belli. The fact that the Scottish poet produces his nicest balance between imitation and invention when translating Marino and Sannazaro is also consistent with these gradated principles. Better than Groto, less ancient than Petrarch, they deserve to have a more ﬁrmly established reputation in Britain. In this area, where translation’s qualitative and informative motivations are most clearly satisﬁed, Drummond concentrates his efforts and achieves his ﬁnest ‘transformations’. If Drummond’s contribution conﬁrms the negative side of Scottish Petrarchism—its lateness and the few close translations it produces — the structure and topical range of his Poems mirrors its counterbalancing strengths. The nationalist priorities of James VI may have sidelined Italian sources but they also encouraged a thematic approach to love which stressed its philosophical and spiritual implications. Fowler, Alexander, and Craig may have produced neat critical conceptions of Petrarch’s amorous struggles but what they lost in dramatic excitement, they made up for in their enthusiastic readdressing of all the intellectual issues raised. Drummond, in following his love for Auristella beyond life into death (Poems parts 1 and 2; Urania; Flowres of Sion), follows in this tradition

PETRARCH AND THE SCOTTISH RENAISSANCE SONNET

273

structurally. By adopting a translation strategy which favours poems reﬂecting his own known concerns with solitude, death, transience, and decay, he also carries Scottish Petrarchism’s topical range, profundity, and inventiveness on to a new level of skill. Drummond was not alone in claiming a dual national heritage. All Scottish poets in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did so. This was, after all, a period dominated prospectively or actually by the Union of the Crowns and the need to forge new alliances, patriotic and poetic. That context along with James’s proactive approach to patronage at both courts provides the ﬁrst, general answer to the questions which opened this chapter. Without an understanding of the king’s cultural politics as established in Edinburgh and redeﬁned in London, the entire Scottish Renaissance will remain in danger of being condemned and dismissed on false premises. ‘Scottish’ critics will continue to convict that period of being too English on sophistic grounds of literary treachery, while their ‘English’ equivalents will follow Jonson’s methods and ﬁnd them not English enough! My chosen topic, ‘Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet’, is therefore not only of interest in itself; it is also the most extreme example of this problem. Without knowledge of James’s early guidelines for the Scottish lyric, it is impossible to understand why Petrarch could be so highly valued and widely read by the Castalians while his Canzoniere (particularly) had to give way to French models. After the Union, when enthusiasm for Petrarch characterised a radically redeﬁned Scottish sonnet, the same kind of research is needed if the king’s new policies on language and translation techniques are to be understood, on their own terms, as part of an evolving, patriotic approach to changed circumstances rather than a cowardly selling out of Henryson and Dunbar in favour of Donne and Drayton.21 Both historically and comparatively, therefore, the debt of the Scottish Renaissance to Petrarch warrants serious consideration.

21 The case argued by T. F. Henderson in Scottish Vernacular Literature: A Succinct History (London, 1898) and still generally accepted. He concludes unequivocally: ‘Scottish vernacular prose as well as poetry virtually terminates with James VI.’

17

Leopardi and Petrarch PAMELA WILLIAMS

IN ITALY, PETRARCHISM continued to be fashionable at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it was an object of fun. During a stay in Bologna in 1825–6, Leopardi complained to a friend that all men of letters did there was write sonnets.1 In the Dialogo della moda e della morte (‘Dialogue between Fashion and Death’, 1824), Fashion ironically mocks Death because even Death ‘petrarcheggia’ (speaks in the Petrarchan manner) like an Italian poet of the sixteenth or nineteenth century, and Leopardi comments with similar irony on his ten canzoni published at Bologna in 1824 that they were not all completely (‘non tutte e non in tutto’) in Petrarchan style.2 The Trecento poet had been imitated so much, he wrote in his Zibaldone, that it was Petrarch himself who seemed like the imitator.3 This chapter gives a brief illustration of Leopardi’s own ‘imitation’ of Petrarch. Initial comments on the historical context at the beginning of the nineteenth century will help explain its signiﬁcance. Dante as a model 1

‘Qui gli studi archeologici e ﬁlologici sono in uno stato che fa pietà, anzi non esistono affatto. Non si sa altro che far sonetti, e letterato e sonettista son sinonimi’ (Archeological and philological studies are in a pitiful state here, in fact they are non-existent. All they know how to do here is write sonnets, and ‘man of letters’ and ‘sonneteer’ are synonyms): letter to Giuseppe Melchiorri, 18 January 1826, in G. Leopardi, Tutte le opere, ed. W. Binni and E. Ghidetti, 5th edn, 2 vols (Florence, 1988), I, 1234. All further references to the works of Leopardi are to this edition. Translations of Leopardi’s prose are my own. 2 ‘Annotazioni alle dieci canzoni stampate a Bologna nel 1824’, Tutte le opere, I, 56. 3 ‘A forza di sentire le imitazioni, sparisce il concetto, o certo il senso, dell’originalità, del modello. Il Petrarca, tanto imitato, di cui non v’è frase che non si sia mille volte sentita, a leggerlo, pare egli stesso un imitatore: [. . .] quelle tante espressioni racchiudenti un pensiero o un sentimento, bellissime ec. che furono suoi propri e nuovi, ora paion trivialissimi, perché sono infatti comunissimi’ (By listening to the imitations, the conception, the meaning certainly, the originality of the model disappears. Petrarch, who has been imitated so much, whose every phrase has been heard a thousand times, seems himself like the imitator when you read him: [. . .] so many expressions articulating his thoughts and feelings, which were so beautiful etc. when they were his and new, now seem very crude, because they are in fact so very common) (Zibaldone, 4491, 20 April 1829). All Zibaldone references are to the author’s MS pages. Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 277–299. © The British Academy 2007.

278

Pamela Williams

for writers was at this time in the ascendancy and Petrarch’s stature as a poet was beginning to be questioned. Sismondi, one of the most inﬂuential writers of the period, wrote, in his De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813), that while he certainly admired Petrarch for having inspired his age with love ‘for all that is high and noble in the poetry, the eloquence, the laws, and the manners of antiquity’, he confessed himself a stranger to the charms of the love poetry, even though, as he admitted, he was distrustful of his own view because it was ‘in opposition to the general taste’.4 Dante began to be considered a better model by those writers in Italy who wanted to promote a new society through civic and national change.5 From such a viewpoint, the thoughts and feelings of just one individual seemed seductively beautiful, frivolous, and self-indulgent, culpably lacking precisely in engagement with social and political realities. Foscolo for one felt sympathy for the sufferings of Petrarch in love, but admired more Dante’s strength and spirit. In ‘An Essay on the Poetry of Petrarch’, ﬁrst published in England in 1821, he argued: Petrarch makes us see every thing through the medium of one predominant passion, habituates us to indulge in those propensities which by keeping the heart in perpetual disquietude, paralyze intellectual exertion—entice us into a morbid indulgence of our feelings, and withdraw us from active life. Dante, like all primitive poets, is the historian of the manners of his age, the prophet of his country, and the painter of mankind; and calls into action all the faculties of our soul to reﬂect on all the vicissitudes of the world.6

Leopardi was only too aware of contemporary criticisms of his own poetry on similar grounds. As he writes with heavy irony in Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi (‘Retraction to Marchese Gino Capponi’, 1835), a self-declared expert, generally identiﬁed as Niccolò Tommaseo, advised him not to write about his own feelings: ‘Il proprio petto/ esplorar che ti val?’ (ll. 235–6) (What does it proﬁt you to search your soul?). The poem’s epigraph, ‘Il sempre sospirar nulla rileva’ (Sighing continually is no help at 4 J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe, trans. T. Roscoe, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London, 1850), I, 292 and 284. See also p. 277: ‘the prodigious labours of Petrarch to promote the study of ancient literature, are [. . .] his noblest title to glory’. 5 A. Cicciarelli, ‘Dante and the Culture of Risorgimento: Literary, Political or Ideological Icon?’, Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, ed. A. R. Ascoli and K. von Henneberg (Oxford, 2001), pp. 77–102. 6 Saggi e discorsi critici: saggi sul Petrarca, discorso sul testo del Decameron, scritti minori su poeti italiani e stranieri (1821–1826), ed. C. Foligno, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, X (Florence, 1953), p. 122. The essays on Petrarch published by John Murray in 1823 were translated from Foscolo’s French. An Italian translation by Camillo Ugoni was published by Vanelli, Lugano, in 1824.

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

279

all), a quotation from Petrarch (Canzoniere 105. 4), is similarly ironical. He had been told, he writes, to take up more ‘masculine’ subjects, related to contemporary studies in economics and politics. Such gendering of literary discourse was a characteristic of the times. Foscolo sums up the difference he saw between Dante and Petrarch with the epigraph: ‘l’un disposto a patire e l’altro a fare’ (the one disposed to suffer, the other to act) which, in the context of Statius’ discourse in Purgatorio (25. 47), refers to the passiveness of menstrual blood and the active part of the male seed in conception.7 Petrarch, however, continued to be admired as a sentimental poet by both sides in the Romanticist–Classicist debate in Italy. Leopardi’s discourse on Romantic poetry, composed as a critique of the Romantic views of Ludovico di Breme, quotes di Breme’s view that no poet was better than Petrarch in the sentimental genre.8 Leopardi concurred with di Breme’s opinion, although he disagreed with him on the nature of sentimental poetry. Di Breme admired modern sentimental poetry, whereas Leopardi distinguished the naturalness of the ancients (Petrarch among them), who with a few sure brushstrokes make their art not apparent at all, from what he considered to be the affectation of the moderns.9 In a note in the Zibaldone, he compares Petrarch with modern poets, having Lord Byron among others probably in mind: La gran diversità fra il Petrarca e gli altri poeti d’amore, specialmente stranieri, per cui tu senti in lui solo quella unzione e spontaneità e unisono al tuo cuore che ti fa piangere, laddove forse niun altro in pari circostanze del Petrarca ti farà lo stesso effetto, è ch’egli versa il suo cuore, e gli altri l’anatomizzano (anche i più eccellenti) ed egli lo fa parlare, e gli altri ne parlano.10 (The great difference between Petrarch and other love poets, especially foreign ones, which makes you sense in him alone a smoothness, spontaneity, and harmony, and feel it in your own heart so that it makes you weep, when perhaps no one else in circumstances like Petrarch’s would have the same effect on you, is that he pours his heart into his poetry, whereas the others anatomise their

7

‘A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch’, Saggi e discorsi critici, p. 109. ‘Non conosce poeta che nel genere sentimentale meriti di essere anteposto, quel miracolo d’ineffabile sensibilità’ (‘Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica’, Tutte le opere, I, 935; italics in original). The ‘Discorso’ was sent for publication in Lo Spettatore Italiano to the Milanese publisher Antonio Fortunato Stella, 27 March 1818, in reply to the Osservazioni del Cavalier Lodovico di Breme sulla poesia moderna, but remained unpublished until 1952. 9 ‘E per esempio di quella celeste naturalezza colla quale ho detto che gli antichi esprimevano il patetico, può veramente bastare il solo Petrarca ch’io metto qui fra gli antichi’ (And as an example of that heavenly naturalness with which I have said the ancients expressed pathos, Petrarch alone will sufﬁce whom I include here among the ancients) (‘Discorso’, Tutte le opere, I, 938). 10 Zibaldone, 112–13, no date. 8

280

Pamela Williams feelings (even the best poets); he makes his heart speak to you, and the others speak about their heart.)

Leopardi admired Lord Byron for writing about all kinds of characters, but marvelled at his annotations in an edition of the Corsair which explained and justiﬁed their passions by reference to historical examples.11 Foscolo had a similar distinction in mind when he wrote that Petrarch felt like the ancients and philosophised like the moderns: the Trecento poet felt deeply and examined his feelings, but not in Foscolo’s opinion in the modern way of those who anatomise or dissect.12 Sentimental literature, especially from abroad, was most deﬁnitely in vogue. Leopardi wrote in his ‘Discorso’: possiamo vedere non so s’io dica senza pianto o senza riso o senza sdegno, scialacquarsi il sentimentale così disperatamente come s’usa ai tempi nostri, gittarsi a manate, vendersi a staia; persone e libri innumerevoli far professione aperta di sensibilità; ridondare le botteghe di Lettere sentimentali, e Drammi sentimentali, e Romanzi sentimentali e Biblioteche sentimentali intitolate così [. . .] in Italia tanta sfacciataggine ancora, mercé di Dio, non è volgare, e i libri sentimentali per professione, son pochi, e questi pochi non sono suoi.13 (we can see and I don’t know whether it is cause for tears, laughter, or scorn, a desperate waste of sentimentality in our times, thrown about in handfuls, sold in bale loads; innumerable people and books profess their sensibility openly; the bookshops are full of sentimental letters, and sentimental dramas, and sentimental novels, library series are given the name ‘sentimental’ [. . .]; in Italy, thank God, such impudence is not common, and few books are intended to be sentimental, and those few are not Italian.)

For that reason, the idea of a new commentary on Petrarch seemed a good ﬁnancial prospect from a publisher’s point of view.14 Leopardi’s commentary appeared in a ‘Ladies Library’ series, Biblioteca amena ed istruttiva per le donne gentili, in livre de poche format, and in an announcement of its publication Petrarch is described as ‘veramente il poeta delle Donne gentili’ (truly a poet for reﬁned ladies).15 11 L. Press and P. Williams (eds), Women and Feminine Images in Giacomo Leopardi, 1798–1837: Bicentenary Essays (Lewiston, NY, 1999), pp. 103–4. 12 ‘An Essay on the Poetry of Petrarch’, Saggi e discorsi critici, p. 53. 13 Tutte le opere, I, 937. 14 ‘Il Petrarca è sembrato allo Stella un’ottima speculazione, non solo per gli esteri, ma anche perché questi studi, o pedanterie, sono dominanti in Italia’ (Petrarch seemed an excellent investment to Stella, not only for his foreign market, but also because such studies, such pedantry, are prevalent in Italy): letter to Monaldo Leopardi, 3 July 1826 (Tutte le opere, I, 1259). 15 ‘Manifesto, prefazione e scusa dell’interprete alle rime di Francesco Petrarca’, Tutte le opere, I, 984. R. Bessi, ‘Leopardi commenta Petrarca’, La rassegna della letteratura italiana, CIII

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

281

As well as being admired as a sentimental poet, Petrarch was judged by many of his most enthusiastic admirers as ‘Platonic’ in the modern sense of the word, even if, as both Foscolo and Leopardi noted, Petrarch’s love for Laura was not as spiritual as traditionally celebrated. Leopardi wrote in a letter to his publisher that Petrarch’s Platonism ‘a me pare una favola, perché piú d’un luogo de’ suoi versi dimostra evidentissimamente che il suo amore era come quello di tanti altri, sentimentale sí, ma non senza il suo scopo carnale’ (to me the Platonism of Petrarch seems a myth, because in more than one place in his poetry we clearly see that his love was like that of so many other people, sentimental certainly, but not without its carnal intent).16 But the ‘Platonic’ image of Petrarch was, and is still, difﬁcult to change. It explained in part why Sismondi found himself a stranger to the charms of Petrarch’s love poetry for he thought that Petrarch’s love for Laura was of a kind which few people experience, ‘a

(1999), 174–92 (177), gives some of the other titles in the Biblioteca Amena. Leopardi did not want his Operette morali to appear in the same series: see the letter to Antonio Fortunato Stella, 6 December 1826 (Tutte le opere, I, 1274). 16 Letter to Antonio Fortunato Stella, 13 September 1826 (Tutte le opere, I, 1266), written two months after the appearance of the Canzoniere of Petrarch ‘con l’interpretazione composta dal conte Giacomo Leopardi’ in Milan. Leopardi refused categorically to add at the end of his commentary ‘un discorsetto, lettera o altro’ (a short account, a letter or whatever else) which would make known, as Stella suggested, ‘i pregi di questo gran poeta, ed anche il suo platonismo’ (the qualities of this great poet, and his Platonism as well). In this famous letter Leopardi states: ‘io le confesso che, specialmente dopo maneggiato il Petrarca con tutta quell’attenzione ch’è stata necessaria per interpretarlo, io non trovo in lui se non pochissime, ma veramente pochissime bellezze poetiche, e sono totalmente divenuto partecipe dell’opinione del Sismondi, il quale nel tempo stesso che riconosce Dante per degnissimo della sua fama, ed anche di maggior fama se fosse possibile, confessa che nelle poesie del Petrarca non gli è riuscito di trovar la ragione della loro celebrità’ (I confess, especially after working on the Petrarch with all the attention that was needed in order to interpret him, I ﬁnd very little, really very little poetic beauty in him, and now I totally share Sismondi’s opinion, who while acknowledging Dante to be most worthy of his fame, and even of more fame if that were possible, confesses that he has been unable to understand why the poems of Petrarch are celebrated). According to most critics, Leopardi’s comments reﬂect only the laboriousness of the task of writing a commentary on Petrarch. B. Biral, ‘La lettera allo Stella sul Petrarca (13 settembre 1826)’, Leopardi e la letteratura italiana dal Duecento al Seicento: Atti del IV Convegno internazionale di studi leopardiani, Recanati 13–16 settembre 1976 (Florence, 1978), pp. 389–98, argues that they reﬂect Leopardi’s realisation that modern poetry, in responding to the moral and intellectual problems of its time, had to distance itself from the model of Petrarch (p. 395). Foscolo questioned the Platonism of Petrarch in his ‘An Essay on the Poetry of Petrarch’: ‘although Petrarch has contrived to throw a beautiful veil over the ﬁgure of Love, which the Grecian and Roman poets delighted in representing naked — it is so transparent that we can still recognize the same forms’ (Saggi e discorsi critici, p. 5); ‘the illusions of a pure passion are succeeded by the desires of an impatient love, which escape, in expressions and lines too plain to be quoted, and which are not ordinarily observed, because Petrarch is traditionally read with sentimental prepossession’ (p. 17).

282

Pamela Williams

sort of religious enthusiastic passion; such as mystics imagine they feel towards the Deity, and such as Plato supposes to be the bond of union between elevated minds’.17 Foscolo more cynically ascribed the number of Petrarch’s imitators in Italy ‘to the example of those Church dignitaries and learned men, who, to justify their commerce with the other sex, borrowed the language of Platonic love from his poetry’. Such poetry, he continued, was ‘admirably calculated for a Jesuits’ college, since it inspires devotion, mysticism, and retirement, and enervates the minds of the youth’.18 In such a climate of ideas, Leopardi did want to write sentimental poetry, but of a kind for a modern age, deﬁnitely not calculated, as Foscolo said of Petrarch’s imitators, for the religious institutions of Italy. ‘Tutti i sensati italiani e forestieri, si accordano in dire che l’Italia manca del genere sentimentale’ (All sensible Italians and foreigners, agree that Italy lacks the sentimental genre), he wrote, and it was the task of creating such a genre that he set himself.19 What he meant by modern sentimental poetry can be illustrated by the poem Alla sua donna, arguably one of his most Petrarchan poems.20 If we compare this extraordinary poem and two of the most beautiful canzoni in the Canzoniere, 126 and 129, it well exempliﬁes Leopardi’s ‘imitation’ of Petrarch in the context of nineteenthcentury judgements of Petrarch’s sentimentality and his Platonism. To borrow an image used by Ugo Dotti in relation to Petrarch, Leopardi does 17

Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe, p. 283. See also: ‘I could have wished, in order to comprehend and to become interested in the passion of Petrarch, that there should have been a somewhat better understanding between the lovers; that they should have had a more intimate knowledge of each other; and that, by this means we might ourselves have been better acquainted with both [. . .]. The poets, who have succeeded Petrarch, have amused themselves with giving representations of a similar passion, of which, in fact, they had little or no experience’ (pp. 281, 283). 18 ‘A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch’, Saggi e discorsi critici, p. 125. He continues: ‘But since the late revolutions have stirred up other passions, and a different system of education has been established, Petrarch’s followers have rapidly diminished; and those of Dante have written poems more suited to rouse the public spirit of Italy’ (p. 125). 19 Zibaldone, 733, 8 March 1821. 20 Alla sua donna (the full text of which is given in the appendix to this chapter, along with the text of Petrarch, Canzoniere 126 and 129) was written in six days in September 1823, two years before the ﬁrst reference to the commentary on Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Trionﬁ in a letter of 9 October 1825 to Luigi Stella, son of the publisher Antonio Fortunato (Tutte le opere, I, 1214). On the Petrarchan elements in Alla sua donna, see E. Bonora, ‘Leopardi e Petrarca’, Leopardi e la letteratura italiana dal Duecento al Seicento, pp. 91–150 (pp. 120–4); A. Jacomuzzi, ‘La canzone leopardiana Alla sua donna’, Italianistica, IV (1975), 32–49 (47–9); G. Savarese, ‘La canzone leopardiana Alla sua donna tra consapevolezza e illusione’, Rassegna della letteratura italiana, I (1970), 3–15 (11–12). Bonora notes that the Petrarchan language gives to Alla sua donna that tone of ‘quiet reﬂection’ of Petrarch’s best canzoni (‘Leopardi e Petrarca’, p. 121).

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

283

not just embed words from another source in his poetry so as to create a perfect inlay, rather he stamps the borrowed words with originality, imbuing them with the meaning of his own experience.21 In his discourse on Romantic poetry, Leopardi repeats a commonplace on imitation that all the best poets in the Italian tradition are very similar to ancient poets and at that same time very different: L’osservanza cieca e servile delle regole e dei precetti, l’imitazione esangue e soﬁstica, in somma la schiavitù e l’ignavia del poeta, sono queste le cose che noi vogliamo? sono queste le cose che si vedono e s’ammirano in Dante nel Petrarca nell’Ariosto [. . .] dei quali [. . .] è stato detto mille volte che sono e similissimi agli antichi, e diversissimi.22 (The blind and servile observance of rules and precepts, a lifeless and overwrought imitation, in sum a slavish and lazy poet, is that what we want? Is that what we see and admire in Dante, in Petrarch, in Ariosto [. . .] of whom [. . .] it has been said a thousand times that they are at once very similar to the ancients, and very different.)

Alla sua donna well illustrates such a blend of similarity and difference; and more than that, I would argue, the likeness is there deliberately to enhance the meaning of the poem and to deﬁne its originality. Petrarch’s two poems display the nature of his love for Laura, the temper of the passion itself, rather than, as we ﬁnd in some other poems in the Canzoniere, the cost or meaning of such a love to him. Love in these two poems is an imaginative passion that ﬁnds its fulﬁlment in the tenderness of the thoughts it produces. It is the object of its own contemplation; the thought of the beloved brings such joy that love is its own reward. An immediate reminder of Canzoniere 126 comes in the second line of Alla sua donna with ‘inspiri’, a word which appears only once in the Canzoniere.23 I want to draw attention, though, not so much to the 21 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, commento di Giacomo Leopardi, con il ‘Saggio sopra la poesia del Petrarca’ di Ugo Foscolo, ed. U. Dotti (Milan, 1979), p. 10. The relationship between the two poets has been variously presented. In an article published after this chapter was written, M. Brose, ‘Mixing Memory and Desire: Leopardi Reading Petrarch’, Petrarch and the European Lyric Tradition, special issue of Annali d’italianistica, XXII (2004), 303–19, notes that ‘most critics argue for an organic and spontaneous afﬁnity between the two poets’ (p. 306). L. Dell’Albero, ‘Petrarchismo e memoria poetica in Leopardi’, Rassegna della letteratura italiana, VII (1983), 88–101, refers to ‘inventio in imitando’ (p. 89). With reference to Aspasia, Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna, and Palinodia, she argues that the allusions to Petrarch completely overturn and eliminate the model (p. 101). 22 ‘Discorso’, Tutte le opere, I, 932. 23 The hapax legomenon ‘inspiri’ replaced the ‘insegni’ of the Bolognese (1824) and Florentine (1831) editions (see Canzoniere 140. 5). Jacomuzzi notes that the very high frequency of

284

Pamela Williams

Petrarchan language of Alla sua donna, which has been well documented, as to the similarity of more general characteristics, for example, the attachment to place and the interweaving of past, present, and future. Canzoniere 126 recounts the emotions aroused in Petrarch by a place most intimately connected with the experience of his love for Laura. With Laura now absent, the place substitutes for her. Quite what occurred in the past is vague, but it is clear that the poet had a vision of a lover’s paradise from which he felt excluded. He now imagines that he will die from his love in this place and that Laura ﬁnding his grave may be moved by love to beg mercy for him in heaven, implying — and this is why such poems ‘witness and give force to the sins and errors from which the [Canzoniere] as a whole records a lifetime’s struggle to convert’24 — that the heavenly paradise is the closest he may come to the lover’s paradise. Laura and the landscape are intimately bound together in his memory and imagination; the image of her in the past and the future throws his present state of mind into relief: his hope for the future grows naturally out of his hope in the past. Similarly in Alla sua donna, Leopardi speaks of his attachment to places through the imaginative dreams they inspired and continue to inspire and delicately interweaves the past, present, and future, with the crucial difference that his present state of mind is certainly not coloured by hope, a point of course that he wants to emphasise: ‘Viva mirarti omai/ nulla spene m’avanza’ (But now I have no hope/ to see you in the ﬂesh) (Alla sua donna, ll. 12–13) echoes ‘Questo m’avanza di cotanta spene’ (of all my hopes, but this alone remains) (Canzoniere 268. 32).25 Petrarchan language in Alla sua donna is quoted direct from source, as it were, untainted by the long history of Petrarchism in Italy (‘La canzone leopardiana Alla sua donna’, 47). Leopardi himself draws attention to his Petrarchan model in his marginal notes, referring to Canzoniere 73. 68 in relation to ‘Simile a quella che nel cielo india’ (l. 33) and to Canzoniere 69. 9–11 in relation to ‘peregrina stanza’ (l. 15). It is interesting to note also that he changed ‘mi nascondi il viso’ to ‘nascondendo il viso’ (l. 2), drawing nearer to Petrarch (Canzoniere 119. 16–21) (Bonora, ‘Leopardi e Petrarca’, pp. 121–2). Even his rejection of many Petrarchan variants (Savarese, ‘La canzone leopardiana Alla sua donna tra consapevolezza e illusione’, p. 12, n. 29) demonstrates his constant attention to the Petrarchan model for this poem. 24 K. Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh, 1984), p. 74. D. Woolf, ‘Aspects of Love’, The Concept of the Text: An Enquiry into the Criticism of Lyric Poetry (Canberra, 1978), pp. 1–14, comments on the originality of Petrarch’s handling of the traditional theme that earthly love can set one upon the way to heaven: ‘as Petrarch uses it, the idea is reversed, for he implies that the heavenly paradise is the closest he can come to love’s paradise, the heavenly paradise being all that is left for him to hope for, since love’s paradise has proved unattainable’ (p. 5). 25 An attachment to place and the interweaving of past, present, and future are, of course, features common to many of Leopardi’s most famous poems. Brose, ‘Mixing Memory and Desire’, describes the inﬂuence of the vago and indeterminato of Petrarch’s lyric poetry on Leopardi, ‘their shared understanding of the temporality and indeterminacy implicit in rhetorical reﬁgurations of

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

285

The blend of the speciﬁc and generic in Alla sua donna is reminiscent of Canzoniere 129. As you read Di pensier in pensier, which Leopardi describes as ‘forse’ (perhaps) the most beautiful canzone Petrarch ever wrote in the elegiac genre, you cannot say whether Petrarch is describing a speciﬁc occasion or a series of typical occasions.26 As love guides his steps to lonely places, so it prompts the progress of his thoughts once solitude has set them free. The poem is both an account of an experience of love and of what Petrarch thinks love is. His experience is his own, yet typical of love. There is a strong resemblance to Leopardi in this respect, for in Alla sua donna there is an evidently individual and introspective voice speaking for humanity. The combination is a central feature of Alla sua donna, and, I would argue, of the beauty of Leopardi’s poetry in general.27 Leopardi gives us ‘a self-portrait of a genius which is also a portrait of Everyman’.28 The differences between the poems discussed here are worth setting out in detail. In Alla sua donna, the poet’s love is an image of beauty, famously a woman who cannot be found, ‘una donna che non si trova’.29 As Leopardi jokes in comments on his poem, no earthly lover, apart from the author himself, would want to ‘fare all’amore col telescopio’ (make love through a telescope), but it is clear, as I have said, that the personal experience relates to generic human existence. His mental image is of beauty imagined, but not in the sense in which the imagination may retain what has been perceived; it is of beauty not seen. In Canzoniere 126 when Petrarch images a scene, he sets it before his mind’s eye, an image of Laura returning to the place of their love and weeping: his vision of heaven is based on his actual vision of Laura. For Leopardi the image he has in mind is something that will never be seen on earth. It is the kind of image his imagination conjures up in L’inﬁnito when his lack of prospect, his inability to see the distant horizon beyond the hedge, enables a vision of inﬁnite space, of timelessness, of absolute quietness. It is the kind of image he refers to when expounding his theory of pleasure: Indipendentemente dal desiderio del piacere, esiste nell’uomo una facoltà immaginativa, la quale può concepire le cose che non sono, e in un modo in cui le cose reali non sono. [. . .] ella può ﬁgurarsi dei piaceri che non esistano, e

memory and desire’ (p. 317). She refers to canzone 126 as a poem in which ‘memory and desire are inseparable and held in a timeless present tense’ (p. 316). 26 ‘Frammento di un abbozzo della prefazione’, Tutte le opere, I, 987. 27 See P. Williams, Introduction to Leopardi’s ‘Canti’ (Leicester, 2004), pp. xiii–xv. 28 Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans. with an introduction by J. G. Nichols (Manchester, 2002), p. xiii. 29 ‘Annotazioni alle dieci canzoni stampate a Bologna nel 1824’, Tutte le opere, I, 57.

286

Pamela Williams ﬁgurarseli inﬁniti: 1. in numero, 2. in durata, 3. in estensione. Il piacere inﬁnito che non si può trovare nella realtà, si trova così nella immaginazione.30 (Apart and separate from the desire for pleasure, there is in man an imaginative faculty, which can conceive of things which do not exist, and in such a way in which real things are not. [. . .] it can imagine pleasures that do not exist, and imagine them as inﬁnite: 1. in number, 2. in duration, 3. in size. Inﬁnite pleasure which cannot be found in reality, can thus be found in the imagination.)

Alla sua donna is one of Leopardi’s clearest statements of a Platonic vision. This is not a ‘Platonic’ love in the modern sense, rather it is a hypothetical statement about the existence of a world of Ideas, a world contrasted with the real world.31 Like Plato, and like Augustine for that matter, Petrarch’s mentor and alter ego, Leopardi thinks that a desire for happiness motivates all human activity and that only the supreme good provides the happiness all human beings seek. The fundamental fact about the empirical world is its restless, unending search for things that will satisfy.32 In Leopardi that generic desire is linked to childhood and to the state of being in love, for both are times of life when it is felt most strongly.33 He notes in the Zibaldone that ‘il sommo bene è voluto, desiderato, cercato di necessità, e ciò sempre e sommamente anzi unicamente, 30

Zibaldone, 167, 12–23 July 1820. M. A. Rigoni, ‘Il materialista e le idee’, Saggi sul pensiero leopardiano (Padua, 1982), pp. 43–56 (p. 44), notes that it is not just the marked Petrarchan and ‘platonising’ language of the poem that makes it a ‘platonic vision’: ‘it is the entire organisation of the canzone in terms of form and content, which portrays, through an uninterrupted series of antitheses, the grand dualistic conception of reality postulated by Plato’ (p. 44, my translation, italics of the author). 32 ‘Happiness’ (Greek ‘eudaimonia’, Latin ‘beatitudo’) is ‘not merely the ephemeral, subjective feeling that present-day English speakers often refer to as “happiness” ’, according to B. Kent, ‘Augustine’s Ethics’, The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge, 2001), p. 207. For Augustine moral philosophy itself is an enquiry into the supreme good and how we attain it (De civitate Dei 8. 8 and 19. 1). Speaking in precise terms Augustine will say that nobody can attain happiness in the present life (Kent, ‘Augustine’s Ethics’, p. 211). 33 ‘Dalla mia teoria del piacere seguita che l’uomo, desiderando sempre un piacere inﬁnito e che lo soddisﬁ intieramente, desideri sempre e speri una cosa ch’egli non può concepire. [. . .] Ora osservate che per l’una parte il desiderio e la speranza del vero amante è più confusa, vaga, indeﬁnita che quella di chi è animato da qualunque altra passione [. . .]. Per l’altra parte notate, che appunto a cagione di questo inﬁnito, inseparabile dal vero amore, questa passione, in mezzo alle sue tempeste, è la sorgente de’ maggiori piaceri che l’uomo possa provare’ (From my theory of pleasure it follows that man, always desiring an inﬁnite pleasure and one that entirely satisﬁes him, always desires and hopes for something of which he cannot conceive [. . .] Now observe that on one hand the desires and hopes of a true lover are more confused, vague, indeﬁnite than that of anyone animated by any other passion [. . .]. On the other hand take note, that precisely because of this sense of inﬁnity, which is inseparable from true love, this passion, in the midst of its torments, is the source of the greatest pleasure that man can experience) (Zibaldone, 1017–18, 6 May 1821). 31

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

287

dall’uomo; ma egli nel volerlo, cercarlo, desiderarlo, non ha mai saputo né saprà che cosa essa sia [. . .], e ciò perché il suo sommo bene non esiste in niun modo’ (By the fact of its very nature the greatest good is the one thing wanted, desired, and looked for by human beings, always and to the greatest extent; but in wanting it, looking for it, and desiring it, they have never known nor will they ever know what it is [. . .], and that is because the greatest good does not exist in any form at all).34 If the greatest good did exist, life would be perfect, ‘simile a quella che nel cielo india’ (like that enjoyed in heaven by the gods) (Alla sua donna, l. 32): this is an echo of Canzoniere 73. 68, ‘pace tranquilla senza alcuno affanno,/ simile a quella ch’è nel ciel eterna’ (peace and tranquillity with no distress,/ such as we hope for all eternity), and also of Dante.35 In searching for goodness or beauty, lovers in Plato are not trying to create perfections that would not have come into being without their love. On the contrary, they are seeking union with an abstract entity whose being precedes their own, as it also precedes the being of everything else.36 For Plato that entity is detected by intellect; for Leopardi it is in the human mind by force of the imagination. It can be destroyed by reason, but it is not necessarily delusional, for a delusion is a wrong opinion, whereas an illusion of the imagination may withstand the truth and is accompanied by passionate feeling. In RVF 129, in the second part of stanza 3, the sirima, Petrarch’s thoughts of love are said to have such ‘imaginative power that they are strong enough to challenge reality’.37 While the poet keeps his mind ﬁxed on the image of Laura, he feels love so close that his soul is content with its own deception, and, if that error were to last, he would ask for nothing more: Ma mentre tener ﬁso posso al primo pensier la mente vaga, et mirar lei et obliar me stesso, sento Amor sì da presso che del suo proprio error l’alma s’appaga: in tante parti e sì bella la veggio, che se l’ error durasse altro non cheggio. (RVF 129. 33–9) 34

Zibaldone, 4168, 11 March 1826. Canti, ed. M. Fubini and E. Bigi (Turin, 1978), p. 148: the word ‘india’ ‘refers not only to the length of happiness, but its profound transformation of human nature’. See above, note 23. It is also a neologism used just once by Dante (Paradiso 4. 28). In Plato’s Symposium (202c), it is axiomatic that the especial quality of the gods is that they are self-sufﬁcient, complete within themselves. Translations of Petrarch in this essay are by J. G. Nichols. 36 I. Singer, The Nature of Love, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Chicago, IL, 1984), I: Plato to Luther, p. 69. 37 Woolf, The Concept of the Text, p. 3. 35

288

Pamela Williams (But just as long as I can hold my wandering mind to that ﬁrst thought and look at her, myself being out of mind, then Love seems near at hand and I contented to be so distraught: I see her often, and so beautiful, that this delusion could not ever pall.)

Petrarch’s sentiments are echoed by Leopardi in Alla sua donna. If the poet could only retain his image of beauty, he would be content: di te pensando, a palpitar mi sveglio. E potess’io, nel secol tetro e in questo aer nefando, l’alta specie serbar; che dell’imago, poi che del ver m’è tolto, assai m’appago. (ll. 40–4)38 (when you come back to mind, my heartbeat quickens. If I could only in these dark times and fetid atmosphere retain the pristine image! For the image, since I’m denied the real, sufﬁces me.)

Leopardi’s image of beauty is a subjective vision (albeit a generic one, as I have pointed out), subjective and introspective, but not in his opinion an evasion of social and political realities. Alla sua donna ﬁrst appeared in the 1824 edition of his ten canzoni. In the 1825 ‘Annuncio’, he presented this last canzone to his Milanese readers ‘per saggio’, a sample of the whole collection, which included poems on the personal tragedy of recognising illusions as such, as in Ultimo canto di Saffo and Bruto minore, and others on their value in both a public and private sense. Leopardi’s stance, though, must be distinguished from that of, say, Edmund Burke, or Alessandro Verri, who were suspicious that the exercise of reason might lead to the discovery of certain truths, which were best not communicated to the people.39 For those writers, for the status quo to be maintained, the upper classes should be the chief repositories of the ‘collective wisdom’ on 38

In ‘Ricordi d’infanzia e di adolescenza’, the poet records that kissing a woman in his dreams was so truly delightful that he can say the same as Petrarch: ‘In tante parti e sì bella la veggio/ Che se l’error durasse altro non chieggio’ (Tutte le opere, I, 364, author’s italics). The line is echoed again in ‘Il pensiero dominante’ (ll. 145–7). In that later love poem it is a miracle to hold on to the imaginative dream, ‘the predominant thought’, despite the poet’s awareness that it is a ‘sogno e palese error’ (l. 111, ‘a dream and manifest illusion’). The translation of Leopardi’s lines is by P. Lawton, in Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, selected and introduced by F. Fortini (Dublin, 1996). Strictly speaking, ‘L’alta specie’ should be translated by ‘sublime image’, and the technical term imago, used by Dante and Tasso, should be left in its Latin form. 39 G. Trombatore, ‘I romanzi di Alessandro Verri’, Belfagor, XXIII (1968), 36–49 and 129–55 (44–7).

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

289

which the well-being of the community depends. Leopardi, on the other hand, was arguing that all human beings should recognise illusions for what they are, and value them. The message was one he had perceived in Theophrastus, one of his favourite philosophers among the ancients. Theophrastus had not run away from illusions, had not sought to ban them from people’s lives as some modern philosophers did, those who wanted to rid society of both illusions and the passions they incited.40 Theophrastus thought illusions as such were valuable in both a private and public sense, and he searched them out and loved them. Leopardi wrote Alla sua donna in an age of neo-Platonism, at a time when there were numerous translations of Plato in German, French, and English, by Friedrich Schleiermacher, by Victor Cousin, among others. As Sebastiano Timpanaro writes, ‘they were not written for the sake of knowledge alone, but for the ideological and practical aim of defeating the atheism and materialism of the eighteenth century’.41 Leopardi’s uncle, Carlo Antici, wanted him to translate all the works of Plato for just such a purpose.42 Leopardi himself described Plato as ‘il più gran propugnatore dei fondamenti della morale religiosa che abbia avuto l’antichità’ (the greatest supporter of the foundations of religious moral philosophy in the ancient world).43 Schleiermacher is the theologian par excellence on the subjectivisation of all religious truth, at least in the Protestant tradition.44 In his ‘theology of feeling’, and that of Chateaubriand, speaking from within the Catholic tradition, inﬁnite desire was expected to awaken the 40

See D. Diderot on the passions: ‘people ceaselessly proclaim against the passions’, they ‘impute to the passions all of man’s pains, and forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures. It is an element of man’s constitution of which we can say neither too many favorable, nor too many unfavorable things. But what makes me angry is that the passions are never regarded from any but the critical angle. People think they do reason an injury if they say a word in favour of its rivals. Yet it is only the passions, and the great passions, that can raise the soul to great things’, quoted by P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols (London, 1967–9), II, 188. 41 S. Timpanaro, Classicismo e illuminismo nell’ottocento italiano, 2nd edn (Pisa, 1969), p. 208. Leopardi himself was asked to translate Plato’s works: ‘Lo stampatore De Romanis mi ha proposto d’intraprendere per lui una traduzione di tutte le opere di Platone. Questo lavoro si fa contemporaneamente in Germania e in Francia nelle rispettive lingue; ed è molto desiderato in Italia’ (The publisher De Romanis has proposed I do a translation of all the works of Plato for him. It is a job which is being carried out at the same time in Germany and France in their respective languages; and it is much in demand in Italy): letter to Monaldo Leopardi, 4 January 1823 (Tutte le opere, I, 1140). 42 Timpanaro, Classicismo e illuminismo, p. 208. 43 Letter to Carlo Bunsen, 3 August 1825 (Tutte le opere, I, 1207). 44 B. M. G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism: Studies in Early Nineteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 29–30.

290

Pamela Williams

appetite for, and eventually to put a person in touch with, ultimate truths that reason would later validate.45 Alla sua donna, with its emphasis on the idea of beauty as an imaginative dream, makes it clear where Leopardi stands. Here is a poet who ‘sogna e sa sognare’ (dreams and knows he is dreaming),46 and ‘parla di nulla a nessuno’ (speaks to no one of nothing).47 It is perhaps no wonder that Manzoni told De Sanctis that he was unable to discover the meaning of the poem.48 Leopardi’s idea of beauty is a dream of the imagination, a dream which the imagination has the capacity to create, to which nothing in the world can compare. Often in his poems that illusion is a motive for suffering. In The Triumph of Life by Shelley, another contemporary translator of Plato, Plato himself is a soul who suffers because his search for beauty and for love was conquered by the realities of life.49 Alla sua donna is not, however, about the suffering; it is a hymn to beauty and the poet is in love, albeit with a ‘donna che non si trova’. The references to Petrarch serve to highlight this aspect of the poem, suggesting a similar tenderness, a similar love towards an image of the mind. For Leopardi love is a disposition which may, so to speak, be brought into activity. It is not an exhortation to value, and it is not an ideal in the sense of that idealist tradition that sees a meaningfulness in nature, and treats that meaningfulness as basic to spiritual longings deﬁnitive of human beings. An illusion is a property of mind, a fundamentally natural belief produced by the imagination. It is not optional, in that it is imposed, as it were, on us by our nature. It is certainly not fanciful and arbitrary, like those statements of fact about life which ﬂy

45

Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. II: Courtly and Romantic, p. 286. F. De Sanctis, Opere di Francesco De Sanctis, ed. C. Muscetta, 21 vols (Turin, 1956–93), XIII: La letteratura italiana nel secolo decimonono: Leopardi, ed. C. Muscetta and A. Perna (1960), p. 410. 47 Jacomuzzi, ‘La canzone leopardiana Alla sua donna’, 49. 48 Angelo Camillo De Meis reported that after a meeting with Manzoni, who could not understand ‘come il Leopardi potesse passar per poeta, tanto poteva in lui la disformità dell’indole, e del modo onde era avvezzo ad apprendere il mondo e la vita’ (how Leopardi could pass for a poet, since so much about him was due to his natural deformity, and the way he was used to learning about the world and life), De Sanctis returned to Turin and wrote his essay on Alla sua donna ‘che il Manzoni sembrava riporre fra le più oscure e meno poetiche delle leopardiane’ (which Manzoni seemed to number among the most obscure and least poetic of Leopardi’s poems): ‘Commemorazione di Francesco de Sanctis di Angelo Camillo De Meis’, in Opere di Francesco de Sanctis, vol. I: La giovinezza: memorie postume seguite da testimonianze biograﬁche di amici e discepoli, ed. G. Savarese (Turin, 1961), p. 503. 49 In Leopardi, there is no such innate idea, but it is as if the mind were programmed with the capacity to create the idea through the imagination and to suffer because there is nothing in nature to compare to it. 46

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

291

in the face of reality, the intellectual illusions, as Leopardi calls them, of his contemporaries who build systems in spite of the evidence of things, who know, for example, that the Earth is not literally at the centre of the universe, but who continue nevertheless to speak as if it were.50 In a famous letter to Boccaccio (Familiares 23. 19), Petrarch wrote that imitation should be like the resemblance between a father and his son: ‘as soon as we see the son, he recalls the father to us, although if we should measure every feature we should ﬁnd them all different [. . .] we writers must look to it that with a basis of similarity there should be many dissimilarities’.51 Leopardi had a similar view, as we have seen, of the best imitation, a view referred to in his age as a commonplace. Perhaps the strongest resemblance between Petrarch and Leopardi, in general, not with speciﬁc reference to the poems discussed here, in this sense of dissimilarity within similarity, is that they both speak of illusions without self-delusion. In RVF 129 the illusion is an image of Laura absent, but in the context of the Canzoniere it echoes the illusion of which the poet speaks in his penitential poems where Laura is part of a world of shadows in the Platonic sense. In the Secretum, ‘Augustinus’ accuses ‘Franciscus’ precisely of self-delusion, a kind of perverse and destructive delight in self-deception which blinds him to knowledge of divine things. But selfdeception is the last thing with which one could charge the author of the Secretum, or the author of the Canzoniere, for the poet’s reason is in full control of his emotions and imagination, even when especially intense. Petrarch’s love for Laura is an error; it may be a ‘giovanile errore’ (youthful error), as in the opening sonnet (1. 3), but it stays with the poet until the end of his life. Petrarch’s ‘habitual alert lucidity’, as Kenelm Foster calls it, which ‘accompanies and, paradoxically, in part explains the persistent pathos’ of the Canzoniere, serves Leopardi’s concept of illusion very well.52 He echoes ‘giovenile errore’ in Alla sua donna (l. 36) in speaking of a time before his imaginative dream was recognised as such, but the 50

See P. Williams, ‘La ginestra: The Last Will and Testament of a Poet and Philosopher’, ‘L’ultimo orizzonte [. . .]’, Giacomo Leopardi: A Cosmic Poet and His Testament, ed. R. Bertoni (Turin–Dublin, 1999), pp. 35–68. 51 Cited in T. M. Greene, The Light of Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), pp. 95–6. In another letter on the theory and practice of imitation to Boccaccio, Familiares 22. 2, Petrarch speaks of ornamenting both his life and his writing with the example of others, and also states that just as each one of us has a unique personal quality to his face and gestures, so also to his voice and style: see N. Mann, ‘From Laurel to Fig: Petrarch and the Structures of the Self’, Proceedings of the British Academy, CV (2000), 17–42 (22). 52 K. Foster, ‘Beatrice or Medusa’, Italian Studies Presented to E. R. Vincent, ed. C. P. Brand et al. (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 41–56 (p. 45).

292

Pamela Williams

poem as a whole is a statement of the value and importance of the illusion, despite the fact he fully recognises its nature. That description of the central theme of Alla sua donna is encapsulated in the rhyme ‘appago/imago’, in lines 43–4 already quoted.53 The rhyme appears in Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade (Canzoniere 23. 152, 157), a poem described by Petrarch as one of his earliest compositions.54 The opening line of that canzone reappears at the end of the last stanza of Canzoniere 70, ‘Lasso me’, a poem in which Petrarch self-consciously places himself within the tradition of love poetry by ending each stanza with the opening line of poems by earlier poets. In ‘Lasso me’, Petrarch confesses what might be considered the essence of his own poetry, his inability to pass beyond the beauty of this world and his failure to keep his eye steady on the true splendour. In Alla sua donna, in my view, Leopardi similarly situates himself in the tradition of Italian love poetry: he politicises his love story to a degree, if we consider Alla sua donna as the ‘sample’ of his ﬁrst ten canzoni and in relation to the neo-Platonism and Christianity of his age; more importantly, he makes his love story in the sentimental genre ‘existential’, as it were, in using it to speak of human life from a modern personal dimension in the sentimental genre and of the value of images of beauty in human experience. Foster describes Leopardi as one of ‘the ﬁnest critical intelligence ever to have occupied itself, in depth, with Petrarch’s lyrics’.55 Here is a son who recalls the father to us, although when we measure every one of his features we ﬁnd them all somehow different, and magniﬁcently so.

53

See La quiete dopo la tempesta (tempesta/festa, ll. 1–2) and Il sabato del villaggio (si appresta/festa, ll. 6–7), where likewise the rhyme words echo the themes of the poems. The rhyme ‘appago/imago’ appeared ﬁrst in the earliest composition included in the Canti, Il primo amore (ll. 101–3). Leopardi noted in the diary he kept at the time of his ‘ﬁrst love’: ‘non credo d’aver sentito affetto né moto altro che spontaneo, e non ho in queste carte scritta cosa che non abbia effettivissimamente e spontaneamente sentita: né ho pur mai voluto in questi giorni leggere niente d’amoroso, perché, come ho notato, gli affetti altrui mi stomacavano, ancorché non ci fosse punto d’affettazione; manco il Petrarca, comeché credessi che ci avrei trovato sentimenti somigliantissimi ai miei’ (I do not think I have ever felt any affection or emotion that was not spontaneous, and I have not written anything down here I have not actually felt myself of my own accord: and while I was writing I did not even want to read anything about love, because, as I have noted already, other people’s emotions used to make me feel nauseous, despite the fact they were not at all affected; even Petrarch, though I knew I would ﬁnd there feelings very similar to my own) (‘Diario del primo amore’, Tutte le opere, I, 359). 54 See P. Hainsworth, Petrarch the Poet: An Introduction to the ‘Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta’ (London, 1988), pp. 41–2. 55 Foster, Petrarch, p. 140.

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

293

Appendix Canzoniere 126 Chiare, fresche et dolci acque, ove le belle membra pose colei che sola a me par donna; gentil ramo ove piacque (con sospir’ mi rimembra) 5 a lei di fare al bel ﬁancho colonna; herba et ﬁor’ che la gonna leggiadra ricoverse co l’angelico seno; aere sacro, sereno, 10 ove Amor co’ begli occhi il cor m’aperse: date udïenzia insieme a le dolenti mie parole extreme.

S’egli è pur mio destino, e ’l cielo in ciò s’adopra, 15 ch’Amor quest’occhi lagrimando chiuda, qualche gratia il meschino corpo fra voi ricopra, e torni l’alma al proprio albergo ignuda. La morte ﬁa men cruda se questa spene porto a quel dubbioso passo; ché lo spirito lasso non poria mai in più riposato porto né in più tranquilla fossa fuggir la carne travagliata et l’ossa.

20

25

Tempo verrà anchor forse ch’a l’usato soggiorno torni la fera bella et mansueta, et là ’v’ella mi scorse nel benedetto giorno volga la vista disiosa et lieta, cercandomi: et, o pieta!, già terra infra le pietre vedendo, Amor l’inspiri in guisa che sospiri

30

35

Clear, fresh, and pleasant water in which she laid her limbs, the only lady ever on my mind; bough where she took her ease (as I recall with sighs) taking it as a column for her side; grass, ﬂowers, all covered over with her dress, a cover also for her white breast; bright, sacred air, at rest, where Love and her bright eyes opened my heart— give audience together to these sad words, the last that I shall utter. If it must be my fate (in which heaven plays its part) that Love should close at last these weeping eyes, may someone have the grace to bury me in this place and let my naked soul ﬂy to the skies. Death’s anguish will be less if I but have this hope to go through that dark pass; there is no better refuge from which the soul may ﬂy away, once done— its body laid to rest— with travail incident to ﬂesh and bone. Perhaps the time will come when the wild gentle creature will make her way to her accustomed home; and there where she saw me on that most blessed day will move her happy eager eyes about to ﬁnd me; but the pity! Seeing I am already reduced to a little dust already closed in stone,

294

Pamela Williams

sì dolcemente che mercé m’impetre,

will ﬁnd Love move her to such prayerful sighs as conquer heaven for me, as with her lovely veil she dries her eyes.

et faccia forza al cielo, asciugandosi gli occhi col bel velo. Da’ be’ rami scendea, 40 (dolce ne la memoria) una pioggia di ﬁor’ sovra ’l suo grembo;

Down from the bough there dropped (a joy but to recall) ﬂowers in gentle showers upon her breast; et ella si sedea and she sat modestly humile in tanta gloria, in all her majesty, coverta già de l’amoroso nembo. 45 covered already in a loving cloud; Qual ﬁor cadea sul lembo, one ﬂower fell on her skirt, qual su le treccie bionde, and one on her fair braids ch’oro forbito et perle which had the look that day eran quel dì, a vederle; of burnished gold and pearl; qual si posava in terra, et qual su l’onde; 50 one came to rest on earth, one on the waves; qual, con un vago errore one drifting here and there, girando, parea dir: Qui regna Amore. appeared to say, ‘Love reigns here over all.’ Quante volte diss’io allor pien di spavento: Costei per fermo nacque in paradiso. Così carco d’oblio il divin portamento e ’l volto e le parole e ’l dolce riso m’aveano, et sì diviso da l’imagine vera, ch’i’ dicea sospirando: Qui come venn’io, o quando?; credendo esser in ciel, non là dov’era. Da indi in qua mi piace questa herba sì, ch’altrove non ò pace.

Se tu avessi ornamenti quant’ài voglia, poresti arditamente uscir del boscho et gir in fra la gente.

55

60

65

How often have I said, full of a kind of awe, ‘For certain she was born in Paradise!’ Her bearing and her face, those words of hers, with that sweet smile of hers, brought me forgetfulness, and distanced me so far from things as they really are that I said through my sighs, ‘How, when did I come here?’ thinking myself in heaven, not where I was. And now I know I love this grass so much I ﬁnd peace nowhere else. Were you but well-adorned, as you’d prefer, canzone, you could leave the wood behind, and go where people are.

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH

295

Canzoniere 129 Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte mi guida Amor, ch’ogni segnato calle provo contrario a la tranquilla vita. Se ’n solitaria piaggia, rivo o fonte, se ’nfra duo poggi siede ombrosa valle, ivi s’acqueta l’alma sbigottita;

5

et come Amor l’envita, or ride, or piange, or teme, or s’assecura; e ’l volto che lei segue ov’ella il mena si turba et rasserena, et in un esser picciol tempo dura;

10

onde a la vista huom di tal vita experto diria: Questo arde, et di suo stato è incerto. Per alti monti et per selve aspre trovo qualche riposo: ogni habitato loco

15

è nemico mortal degli occhi miei. A ciascun passo nasce un penser novo de la mia donna, che sovente in gioco gira ’l tormento ch’i’ porto per lei; et a pena vorrei cangiar questo mio viver dolce amaro,

20

ch’i’ dico: Forse anchor ti serva Amore ad un tempo migliore; forse, a te stesso vile, altrui se’ caro. Et in questa trapasso sospirando: Or porrebbe esser vero? or come? or quando?

25

From thought to thought, along each mountain top Love leads me on, for no well-trodden ways could ever bring my mind to be at peace. Still by some stream on a deserted slope, or in the mountains’ dark declivities, my soul ﬁnds comfort in its dire distress; then at Love’s invitation it smiles, it weeps, it fears, or feels secure; my face, which follows where my soul has gone, is clouded or serene, and one condition does not long endure. Who would not say, looking at such a sight, ‘He burns with love; his future is in doubt’? On lonely heights and in wild woods I ﬁnd some respite: other spots, where people are, trouble my sight like mortal enemies. At every step a fresh thought comes to mind Which often turns the pain I feel for her into a sort of pleasurable ease; and I would hardly wish to change this life which is so sweetly bitter; in fact I say, ‘Love is preserving me for better things maybe; vile to myself, I may well please another.’ And I take up this thought, and sigh, and then: ‘Could this be true? And if so, how and when?’

296

Pamela Williams

Ove porge ombra un pino alto od un colle talor m’arresto, et pur nel primo sasso disegno co la mente il suo bel viso. Poi ch’a me torno, trovo il petto molle

30

de la pietate, et alor dico: Ahi lasso, dove se’ giunto, et onde se’ diviso! Ma mentre tener ﬁso posso al primo pensier la mente vaga, et mirar lei, et obliar me stesso,

35

sento Amor sì da presso che del suo proprio error l’ alma s’ appaga: in tante parti et sì bella la veggio che, se l’error durasse, altro non cheggio. I’ l’ò più volte (or chi ﬁa che mi ’l creda?) ne l’acqua chiara et sopra l’erba verde

40

veduto viva, et nel tronchon d’un faggio e ’n bianca nube, sì fatta che Leda avria ben detto che sua ﬁglia perde, come stella che ’l sol copre col raggio; et quanto in più selvaggio loco mi trovo e ’n più deserto lido,

45

tanto più bella il mio pensier l’adombra. Poi quando il vero sgombra quel dolce error, pur lì medesmo assido me freddo, pietra morta in pietra viva, in guisa d’uom che pensi et pianga et scriva. Ove d’altra montagna ombra non tocchi, verso ’l maggiore e ’l più expedito giogo

50

Where a tall pine or small hill casts a shade I stop, in the ﬁrst stone I come across imagining I see her lovely face. Then when I come back to myself I ﬁnd my breath is wet with tears, and say, ‘Alas, what have I come to, and what left behind!’ But just as long as I can hold my wandering mind to that ﬁrst thought and look at her, myself being out of mind, then Love seems near at hand and I contented to be so distraught: I see her often, and so beautiful, that this delusion could not ever pall. I have so often (who would credit me?) seen her, and so alive, in the clear water, in the green grass, the trunk of a beech, or in a cloud, that Leda would be moved to say that she outshone the beauty of her daughter, a tiny star extinguished by the sun; and in whatever wild or savage place, whatever barren shore, her image grows in beauty more and more. Then when the truth makes clear the error I am in, I settle down on natural stone, cold dead stone carved like one who sits and thinks and weeps and writes things down. Where shades of other mountains never reach, towards the highest and most open pass,

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH tirar mi suol un desiderio intenso; indi i miei danni a misurar con gli occhi comincio (e ’ntanto lagrimando sfogo di dolorosa nebbia il cor condenso) alor ch’i’ miro et penso quanta aria dal bel viso mi diparte,

55

60

che sempre m’è sì presso et sì lontano. Poscia fra me piano piano: Che sai tu, lasso? forse in quella parte or di tua lontananza si sospira; et in questo penser l’alma respira.

Canzone, oltra quell’alpe, là dove il ciel è più sereno et lieto, mi rivedrai sovr’un ruscel corrente, ove l’aura si sente d’un fresco et odorifero laureto.

65

70

Ivi è ’l mio cor, et quella che ’l m’invola; qui veder pôi l’imagine mia sola.

297

my strong desire has always led me on; and there I start, as far as eye can stretch, to measure loss and, weeping, to release the cloud of misery my heart is in, when I so clearly see what distance separates me from her face who is so dear to me and yet so far. Then to myself I wonder, ‘What do you know? For somewhere, it may be, someone is sighing that you are not there.’ And at this thought I breathe more easily. Canzone, over the Alps, under a sky more cheerful and serene, you will eventually see me again, beside a running stream and breathed upon by sweetlysmelling laurel. My heart is there, and she who steals it away: here it is just my image you can see. Translated by J. G. Nichols

Alla sua donna Cara beltà che amore lunge m’inspiri o nascondendo il viso, fuor se nel sonno il core ombra diva mi scuoti, o ne’ campi ove splenda più vago il giorno e di natura il riso; forse tu l’innocente secol beasti che dall’oro ha nome, or leve intra la gente anima voli? o te la sorte avara ch’a noi t’asconde, agli avvenir prepara?

5

10

Sweet beauty who inspires my love from far although your face were veiled, except, exquisite shade, when you disturb my sleep or in the ﬁelds when splendour of day makes nature smile in all its beauty; did you delight the age of innocence we call the golden age perhaps and waft, soft spirit, among us now? Or else does selﬁsh Fate hide you from us and keep you for our children?

298

Pamela Williams

Viva mirarti omai nulla spene m’avanza; s’allor non fosse, allor che ignudo e solo per novo calle a peregrina stanza 15 verrà lo spirto mio. Già sul novello aprir di mia giornata incerta e bruna, te viatrice in questo arido suolo io mi pensai. Ma non è cosa in terra che ti somigli; e s’anco pari alcuna

20

ti fosse al volto, agli atti, alla favella, saria, così conforme, assai men bella.

Fra cotanto dolore quanto all’umana età propose il fato, se vera e quale il mio pensier ti pinge, alcun t’amasse in terra, a lui pur fora

25

questo viver beato: e ben chiaro vegg’io siccome ancora seguir loda e virtù qual ne’ prim’anni l’amor tuo mi farebbe. Or non aggiunse il ciel nullo conforto ai nostri affanni;

30

e teco la mortal vita saria simile a quella che nel cielo india.

Per le valli, ove suona del faticoso agricoltore il canto, ed io seggo e mi lagno del giovanile error che m’abbandona; e per li poggi, ov’io rimembro e piagno i perduti desiri, e la perduta

35

But now I have no hope to see you in the ﬂesh unless my spirit, naked and alone, would wander down the unknown paths that lead to strange abodes. Once at my dark, uncertain beginnings of existence, I imagined that you might bear me company to trudge this arid earth. But nothing in the world resembles you: if someone else should boast your looks, your gestures or the way you speak, she would, however like you, be less lovely. Despite the tribulations that fate prescribes as part of human life, if you were real and as I picture you, someone who loved you on this earth could yet be happy in this life; and I again see very clearly how your love would spur me on to fame and honour, as in my early years. But providence affords no consolation to assuage our grief; and mortal life lived near you would be like that which angels live among the gods. Among the valleys where the weary peasant’s singing can be heard and where I pause and grieve how youth’s illusions have abandoned me; among the hills where I recall and mourn the loss of the desires and vanished hopes

LEOPARDI AND PETRARCH speme de’ giorni miei; di te pensando,

40

that once I had—when you come back to mid, my heartbeat quickens. If I could only in these dark times and fetid atmosphere retain the pristine image! For the image, since I’m denied the real, sufﬁces me.

45

If you are one among the immutable ideas eternal Reason refused to clothe in a corporeal form and through these poor remains refused the sorrow of a dismal life, or if some other planet shelters you among the teeming worlds that spin in space and, brighter than the sun, a nearby star sheds light on you in purer atmospheres, accept this poem from an unknown lover here where the years are ominous and brief.

a palpitar mi sveglio. E potess’io, nel secol tetro e in questo aer nefando, l’alta specie serbar; che dell’imago, poi che del ver m’è tolto, assai m’appago. Se dell’eterne idee l’una sei tu, cui di sensibil forma sdegni l’eterno senno esser vestita, e fra caduche spoglie provar gli affanni di funerea vita; o s’altra terra ne’ superni giri fra’ mondi innumerabili t’accoglie,

50

e più vaga del Sol prossima stella t’irraggia, e più benigno etere spiri; di qua dove son gli anni infausti e brevi, questo d’ignoto amante inno ricevi.

299

55

Translated by Paul Lawton Note. The translations of Canzoniere 126 and 129 (Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. and trans. J. G. Nichols (Manchester, 2000)) appear here by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd. The translation of Alla sua donna appears here by permission of the Dublin Foundation for Italian Studies.

18

Between Tradition and Transgression: Amelia Rosselli’s Petrarch EMMANUELA TANDELLO

PETRARCH’S PRESENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN POETRY has been seen to progress from an initial position of relatively undisputed centrality, to being the object of a paradoxically secret, difﬁcult legacy. Jointly with Dante—though both opposed to, and in dialogue with the poet of the Commedia— and almost invariably mediated through Leopardi, Petrarch ﬁgures at the very heart of the critical debate that informs and shapes the poetry of the ﬁrst half of the Novecento.1 All major poets, from Ungaretti to the third generation Hermetics (Luzi, Bigongiari, Gatto), to Montale, and Saba, ﬁnd Petrarch, in the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, an indispensable interlocutor. Ungaretti’s ‘essential’, absolute poetic language, and the ‘Ptolemaic’ centrality granted to the poetic subject, are ﬁrmly rooted in his rereading of Petrarch. Montale’s own poetry, generally acknowledged as leaning more towards the Dantean model, is known to undergo a crucial Petrarchan phase with Gli orecchini (1940); and Saba’s own Petrarchism, half-hearted when not altogether dismissed by the poet himself, is ﬂagrantly allowed to linger through the most compromising title of his opus, even when his Canzoniere’s lifelong project moves further and further away from its original, disputed model. As we progress though the century, the dialogue with Petrarch becomes increasingly beset with difﬁculty and unease. Even Sereni and Zanzotto, in whose poetry Petrarch is most visibly present and recognisable, exhibit, on closer acquaintance, a severe case of anxiety of inﬂuence. In both cases, the poetic legacy of the RVF is hailed as a ‘via negativa’ crucially mediated by Leopardi. Sereni — troubled by the narcissism of

1 See A. Noferi, ‘Le poetiche critiche novecentesche “sub specie petrarchae” ’, in Le poetiche critiche novecentesche (Florence, 1970), pp. 225–81.

Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 301–317. © The British Academy 2007.

302

Emmanuela Tandello

the Petrarchan Subject, perceived as veritable original sin of lyric discourse—only faintheartedly recognises the centrality of the original emotion obsessively revisited and recast, the passion endlessly metamorphosed into phantasm as the necessary, indeed indispensable nucleus of poetry.2 For Zanzotto, the intellectual, ethical essence of the Petrarchan legacy lies paradoxically in what modern mass culture would recognise as irrelevance, in its exemplary ‘going beyond’ (‘oltranzismo’, a word that is signiﬁcantly resonant of his own poetry), its power of resistance, its refusal to succumb to each failed attempt at dialogue, its determination to reafﬁrm the inevitable non-answer (‘un’unica non-risposta’) that the poetic voice, forced into monologue, unavoidably has to confront today, as it did then. But this is nevertheless also a ‘via negativa’, leading rather to the contemplation of a most/post-Leopardian ‘nulla’, which Zanzotto’s own poetry programmatically embraces.3 Far more difﬁcult and contradictory still is the relationship with the author of the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta for poets as diverse as Bertolucci, Sanguineti, and the great dantesco par excellence, Giorgio Caproni: paradoxical, and even transgressive, it would appear to be experienced as innermost secrecy and difﬁculty.4 Of this complex reality of difﬁcult and often unacknowledged debt, the poetry of Amelia Rosselli has been said to represent one of the most extreme, even unlikely, examples. The choice of her work, as a way of approaching the subject of Petrarch’s legacy in contemporary Italian poetry, might thus appear a peculiar, even contentious choice. Not unjustly described as radical, unique, if not positively anomalous within the panorama of the poetry of the second half of the century, she is generally understood to pledge her literary allegiance to a wide, post-romantic modernist tradition that polemically brings together the Leopardi–Montale line (but also D’Annunzio and Campana) with an equally wide European, and North American latitude (with Rimbaud, Lautréamont, but also Hopkins, Cummings, and Rilke as her acknowledged sources). Indeed, it is with poets lying outside the Italian tradition (authors as different as Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath,

2

V. Sereni, ‘Petrarca, nella sua ﬁnzione la sua verità: testo di una conversazione tenuta alla biblioteca cantonale di Lugano la sera del 7 maggio 1974’, in Sentieri di Gloria: note e ragionamenti sulla letteratura (Milan, 1996), pp. 127–46. 3 A. Zanzotto, ‘Petrarca tra il palazzo e la cameretta’, in Fantasie di avvicinamento (Milan, 1991), now in Scritti sulla letteratura (Milan, 2001), pp. 261–71 (p. 262). 4 Thus Andrea Cortellessa in his introduction to Un’altra storia: Petrarca nel Novecento italiano, ed. A. Cortellessa (Rome, 2004), p. xii.

AMELIA ROSSELLI’S PETRARCH

303

Paul Celan) that she is generally — and perhaps too hastily — more comfortably associated. Such poetic topographies would appear to place her very far from what is known as the ‘Petrarchan’ line of the Novecento. Rather, her radical, sustained linguistic experimentation would appear to place her, jointly with a poet like Sanguineti, closer to Dante; and her avowed opposition to a solipsistically central poetic self can sound positively anti-Petrarchan. In reality, as this chapter aims to show, there is much in Rosselli that chimes both with the unease expressed by Sereni, and at the same time with Zanzotto’s belief in poetry’s ethical radicalism. The essence of her poetry remains, nothwithstanding her ‘intentions’, essentially lyrical. It revolves, in other words, around the mythic construction of a universal subjectivity caught at the moment of loss, mourning for an absence, and in that absence seeking — and failing to ﬁnd—meaning and self-deﬁnition. It is in this ultimate allegiance to the lyric, I argue, that Rosselli’s poetry can be seen to reafﬁrm the enduring value of the Petrarchan legacy at the close of the second millennium. I endeavour to show here how Petrarchan discourse operates within her poetry as a veritable ghost in the machine, and how — albeit ‘dissonant’, elusive to the point of being almost invisible, and transgressed to the point of being almost unrecognisable5 — it constitutes the ‘degree zero’ from which the transgression — and reafﬁrmation — of lyric discourse perpetrated by her own poetry can be seen to depart. Of her three major books, Serie ospedaliera (1969) appears to me to be the one in which the dialogue with Petrarch is more explicitly and ‘productively’ engaged. My analysis thus concentrates on Serie, and focuses on three major aspects of Petrarchan presence, arguing ﬁrst of all that the sparse, but unmistakable verbal echoes always aim at deliberately and explicitly challenging lyric discourse; that the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta’s lyric degree zero is evoked, resummoned, by being exposed and allowed to dialogue a posteriori with some of its later poetic paradigms (through a rare ‘modern nostalgia’ that is shared with Leopardi and Montale). Lastly, perhaps more importantly, I argue how Rosselli’s use of archaic mythologemes in constructing a personal poetic myth ﬁnds in the RVF an ‘inevitable’ interlocutor. Serie ospedaliera marks a signiﬁcant departure from the modernist/ avant-garde-inspired experimentation of Rosselli’s ﬁrst book, Variazioni

5

A. Baldacci, ‘Il Petrarca di Amelia Rosselli: da Mallarmé verso Celan’, in Cortellessa, Un’altra storia, pp. 271–7.

304

Emmanuela Tandello

belliche (1964).6 The adjective ‘ospedaliera’ is meant to carry, according to the poet’s own explanation, a metapoetic meaning of linguistic and stylistic ‘cure’ and ‘recovery’ from the corrosive and bellicose plurilingual experimentation that characterised the earlier poetry. The modernist legacy, with its masters Rimbaud, Campana, Montale (i.e. the poets whose presence is macroscopically visible, in the poetry of Variazioni belliche, and of the experimental poemetto ‘La libellula’) is replaced by other inﬂuences, deﬁned by the poet as ‘minor’ or ‘out-dated’, such as Saba, Hermetic poets, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rilke. Rosselli is notoriously idiosyncratic in her mapping of literary history, and often unreliable in owning up to her extraordinarily wide poetic culture. Petrarch is never mentioned here — nor, incidentally, is Leopardi, of whom Rosselli is perhaps, with Sereni, the most original contemporary heir. Given that even Rosselli’s idiosyncracy would not extend as far as to class these poets as ‘minori’, we are left with their declared outdatedness. In other words, her lack of acknowledgement might betray an embarrassment, something similar to Sereni’s reluctance to even mention lyric poetry, let alone admit to its practice. And yet Serie is essentially that: a revisitation of the lyric model in all its major deﬁning features. Written between 1962 and 1966, during one of Rosselli’s worse, and longer, spells of illness, its eighty-eight poems draw on what the poet herself calls her intimate, private experience of depression and melancholy, and are haunted by obsessive, darkly threatening intimations of death. The adjective ‘ospedaliera’ is also meant to carry a crucial narrowing of focus, and an essentially passive, ‘supine’, crippled outlook (but we shall later on venture to call it ‘posthumous’) on external reality, experienced as distant and utterly unreal. The theme of desire, which galvanised and empowered the bold, ‘bellicose’ diction of the previous book, is here daringly, if misleadingly, announced as utterly spent. A void, deserted space is contemplated instead, populated by shadows of a previous life; one of these shadows is love itself, now reduced to a pointlessly wandering, intermittent, neglectful presence/absence; the other one, all-powerful, is death. The rediscovery of the iconic and emotional spatiality of the landscape, the inﬁnitely more restrained tone and contained register, the greater adherence to a less foreign, deviant language (‘un rigore linguistico maggiore’),7 in the pursuit of a new (renewed, rediscovered) 6 A. Rosselli, Serie ospedaliera (Milan,1969); now in A. Rosselli, Le poesie, ed. E. Tandello (Milan, 1997). All quotations are taken from this edition, abbreviated as ARP. All English translations are mine. 7 G. Spagnoletti, ‘Intervista ad Amelia Rosselli’, in A. Rosselli, Una scrittura plurale, ed. F. Caputo (Novara, 2004), p. 299.

AMELIA ROSSELLI’S PETRARCH

305

classicism (‘una nuova classicità’)8 — all unmistakably spell a lyric inspiration, and a lyric intent, for which the dialogue with Petrarch is not just implied but unavoidable. Beginning with the landscape. Serie, as already suggested, is dominated by a distinct pathos of place. A ‘real’ landscape, the ‘boschi e rocce dell’alto Abruzzo’, where the poet spent her convalescence, and her emotional response to it (a most Leopardian yearning for a benign, protective Nature is underscored by the anguished vision of its illusory and treacherous reality) is staged as theatre of mourning, where a crippling loss is experienced again and again. There are players in this drama of loss, which, as we shall see, come to occupy/to haunt this stage : ‘someone’ has died/has left; someone else is distressed by this loss/departure; the third player is Death. As the following ‘twin’ poems eloquently demonstrate, Rosselli engages with two immediately recognisable models: the Petrarchan locus amoenus, and the Leopardian idyll, allowing them to interact, and to ‘correct’ each other: C’è vento ancora e tutti gli sforzi non servono a tenere la radura ferma nel suo proposito.

Faccia nell’erba odori quel poco che c’è da odorare. Sei stanco vuoi dormire, ma non puoi. Le rocce frastagliate prendono pose sardoniche.

Sento tintinnire l’erba, essa non può, amarsi. Salvo che immettendo nell’aria fragranze, disobbediendo La morte è nell’aria, ti sfugge alla natura. solo per un poco. Quando torni in pensione ti metti in ginocchio. Rocce covano serpi che correggono quest’idillio nascente.9 O vorresti. Ma non puoi.10

These ‘twin’ poems are quintessential of the book as a whole: a restrained, remote voice records minimal happenings within a landscape that has been stripped of everything, except its essentials: a windswept (‘vento’) clearing (‘la radura’) of grass (‘l’erba’) and rocks (‘rocce’). The human presence is hardly noticeable, the verb ‘sento’ the only give-away of a passive observer and listener. The wind, whistling through the blades of grass, makes a 8

Ibid. ‘C’è vento ancora’, ARP, p. 420: ‘It is windy still and no efforts/ will hold the clearing/ to its purpose.// I hear the grass jingle, it/ cannot, love itself. Save by issuing/ fragrances into the air, disobeying/ nature.// Rocks hide snakes,/ this budding idyll stands corrected.’ 10 ‘Faccia nell’erba’, ARP, p. 421: ‘Your face in the grass you smell what little/ there is to be smelled. You are tired/ wish to sleep, but cannot. The/ jagged rocks strike/ sardonic attitudes.// Death is in the air, it barely escapes/ you. Once back/ in your hotel room you kneel down.// Or would like to. But cannot.’ 9

306

Emmanuela Tandello

sweet sound and sweet scents are released into the air. Yet this is no restful picture. It is ‘still’ windy (‘ancora’), and the restlessness, the movement caused by the insistent wind on the clearing, defeats ‘tutti gli sforzi’: to put it simply, this landscape —which would appear to have not only a purpose (‘proposito’), but indeed a determination (‘ferma nel suo proposito’)—is in motion, it won’t keep still. The negative ‘non servono’ is reinforced in the second stanza, through what would appear to be a paradox: the grass ‘cannot love itself’ (but see the comma that separates the modal from the inﬁnitive — ‘it cannot, love [. . .]’) except by ‘inserting’ sweet scents into the air, thus ‘disobeying’ nature. This is no spring landscape, if this act of love — sweet scents announcing the coming of spring, the time for conception and birth — is deﬁned as deﬁant of the laws of nature. The rescue and ‘ﬁxing’ of the landscape — see the active function of the gerunds (‘immettendo’, ‘disobbediendo’), and their assonance with ‘sento’—pursued in the ﬁrst two stanzas would appear to achieve their aim in the ﬁnal one, but chillingly so. The life being ‘hatched’ here, in what now has become the most barren of landscapes (intensiﬁed by the absence of deﬁnite articles: ‘rocce’, ‘serpi’) is chthonic, and utterly evil. Both poems carry, in language and iconography, the powerful, unmistakable memory of the locus amoenus both as place of (far from comforting) evocation of the absent Laura, and space where the poet’s vision of her death is witnessed, and where the contra natura behaviour of the landscape projects the poetic subject’s sense of desperation (his weariness) at her loss. The synecdoches, ‘erba’ and ‘rocce’, evoke widely used Petrarchan tropes, but so does ‘stanco’. A few examples will sufﬁce: ‘Ed io non ritrovando intorno intorno/ ombra di lei, né pur de’ suoi piedi orma/ come uom che tra via dorma/ gittaimi stancho sovra l’erba un giorno’ (Canzoniere 23. 108–11); ‘Da indi in qua mi piace/ questa herba sì, ch’altrove non ò pace’ (126. 64–5); and ‘L’aura mia sacra al mio stanco riposo/ spira sì spesso’ (356. 1–2); perhaps more relevantly still, canzone 129, where the refuge offered by the landscape — ‘Per alti monti et per selve aspre trovo/ qualche riposo’ (129. 14–15), and again ‘Ove porge ombra un pino alto od un colle/ talor m’arresto, et pur nel primo sasso/ disegno co la mente il suo bel viso’ (129. 27–9) — and the ensuing vision (‘quel dolce error’) are chased off by ‘il vero’. Last but not least, death’s threat in the ﬁrst poem is conveyed through a strikingly similar image in canzone 323, where Laura–Eurydice dies ‘punta poi nel tallon d’un picciol angue’ (323. 69).11 11

RVF 23: ‘And I, not ﬁnding—How I looked around!—/ her shadow or her footprint anywhere, like a tired traveller/ just threw myself one day upon the grass’; RVF 126: ‘And now I know I love/

AMELIA ROSSELLI’S PETRARCH

307

The Rossellian version of the devastated locus amoenus as sterile desert is object of sustained repetition and variation (thus, incidentally, echoing the Canzoniere’s very own iterative nature). The closing poem of Serie, for example, restages the same scene: among ‘grass intermingled with tenderness’ death’s threat, its cruelty, is met, and the fantasma is sought in the illusory comfort of sleep: ‘Ritrovare tra le erbe frammiste di tenerezza/ un’obbligatoria crudeltà’; ‘Cercare nel sonno che concede qualche mal posto ristoro un’ombra gracile’.12 Both poems also carry a powerful memory of the Leopardian idyll — to which they are also formally closer — with its characteristic dramatisation of the contemplative stance, its visual and auditory prompt, and its staging of a comforting yielding to the vision, as in the lines from ‘L’inﬁnito’, ‘come il vento/ odo stormir fra queste piante’, and the phrase ‘dolce naufragare’. Indeed, the Leopardian idyll is the modern translation of the Petrarchan ‘sweet error’: ‘e naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare’. That Rosselli is well aware of the discourse she is engaging with is perhaps given away by that verb ‘correggono’: the ‘serpi’ — symbol of evil and sin, as well as death— lurking under the rocks are another incarnation of the corrective powers of ‘il vero’. Indeed, this ‘correction’ is witnessed in Serie again and again, where the vision is both celebrated for its sweetness (‘apre nuovi orizzonti alla mia gioia’), and unmasked as lie (‘menzogna’): ‘Dolcezza dello sguardo e una eventuale/ menzogna da proliferare con le mani/ aperte a tutte le visioni [. . .]’; ‘un verissimo/ dirsi che è ﬁnita la strada che rimane/ chiusa a ogni scuotere di portone [. . .].’13 Like the vision/idyll, the landscape itself is exposed as conceit. ‘Giardino’, ‘piccolo parco’, ‘deserto’, ‘campo’, and even ‘campo di morte’ (death camp, but also cemetery), it is openly acknowledged in its purpose as a framing, imaginative device: ‘questo tuo quadro giardino’, ‘giardino della mia ﬁgurata mente’ (‘your square garden’, ‘garden of my imagined/ imagining mind’, or indeed ‘ﬁgurate mind’). Once more, death’s bold, and this grass so much I ﬁnd peace nowhere else’; RVF 129: ‘Still by some stream on a deserted slope,/ or in the mountains’ dark declivities,/ my soul ﬁnds comfort in its dire distress’; ‘Where a tall pine or small hill casts a shade/ I stop, in the ﬁrst stone I come across/ imagining I see her lovely face’; RVF 323: ‘bitten by a serpent in the heel’. All quotations from Petrarch are taken from the Santagata edition of the Canzoniere (Milan, 1996). All English translations are taken from Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans. J. G. Nichols (Manchester, 2000). 12 ARP, p. 431: ‘To ﬁnd again, in the grass mingled with tenderness,/ an obligatory cruelty’; ‘To seek in sleep that hardly grants repose a fragile shadow’. 13 ARP, p. 372: ‘Sweet pleasant gaze and a possible lie/ to be extended profusely to all visions’; ‘a most true/ saying to oneself that the road has reached its end and remains/ closed to any shaking of the gate’ (my italics).

308

Emmanuela Tandello

bitterly ironic, proclamation of its own reality and importance, turns it into ‘angolo morto’ (a dead corner), thus disabusing us, and the poetic subject with us, of its deceptive peacefulness. And as in the RVF, the vision of a devastated landscape is witness to an event that binds together the poet’s emotional and poetic fate. The topos of vanity and futility invests poetry itself, in a way that is again strongly reminiscent of the RVF. As Enrico Testa has recently observed, this second book is crossed by a strong undercurrent of ironic metapoetic reﬂections, uttered by a bitter and disappointed subject on the verge of withdrawing from the lifelong engagement with the ‘cult’ of poetry now declared futile and obsolete.14 In particular, the poem ‘Dialogo con i poeti’ stages a bitter and ironic invective in which a modern perte d’auréole15 is pitted against the very essence of the lyric stance : Da poeta a poeta: in linguaggio sterile, che s’appropria della benedizione e ne fa un piccolo gioco o gesto, rallentando il passo sul ﬁume per lasciar dire ogni onestà. Da poeta in poeta: simili ad uccellacci, che rapiscono il vento che li porta e contribuiscono a migliorare la fame. Di passo in passo un futile motivo che li rallegra, vedendosi crescere in stima, i letterati con le camicie aperte che s’abbronzano al sole di tutte le tranquillità: un piccolo gesto sfortunato li riconduce all’aldilà con la morte che sembra scendere e stringerli. [. . .]16

The syntactic prolepsis ‘da poeta a poeta’, ‘da poeta in poeta’ (from poet to poet), and above all ‘di passo in passo’ (step after step), is an unmistakable echo of Canzoniere 129, ‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’, whose very setting is also, signiﬁcantly, evoked in Rosselli’s poem by the image of the poet walking along the river: ‘Se ’n solitaria piaggia, rivo o fonte [. . .]’ and again in the congedo ‘mi rivedrai sovr’un ruscel 14

E. Testa, Dopo la lirica: antologia della poesia italiana 1960–2000 (Turin, 2005), p. 198. We ﬁnd this suggestion in Daniela La Penna’s own reading of this poem in her article ‘La metafora ventosa nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli’, in Trasparenze, XVII–XIX, special issue dedicated to Amelia Rosselli, ed. E. Tandello and G. Devoto (Genoa, 2003), 309–32 (325). 16 ARP, p. 393: ‘From poet to poet: in sterile words, that/ make blessing their own and turn it into a little/ game or gesture, slowing down as they walk along the river/ to allow every truthfulness to speak. From poet to poet:/ like scavenging birds, kidnapping the wind/ that carries them and helping to improve/ hunger. Step after step a futile reason/ makes them rejoice, as they see their fame increase, the literati/ with their open shirts basking in the sun/ of all tranquillity: a small unlucky gesture/ leads them to the afterlife and death seems to/ descend upon them and seize them’ (my italics). 15

AMELIA ROSSELLI’S PETRARCH

309

corrente’.17 Furthermore, ‘rallentando il passo’ unmistakably alludes to the ‘passi tardi e lenti’ of the famous sonnet 35 (and the same allusion is found again in Rosselli in ARP 373, ‘Dolce caos [. . .]’: ‘in questo paciﬁco piccolo parco vedo te partire, a/ passi ancora lenti’).18 Tradition (that which is handed down ‘from poet to poet’), and poetry’s prime source of inspiration—Petrarch’s phantasm, through its airy synecdoche — are thus the underlying themes of Rosselli’s poem, and the very targets of her critique. Elsewhere in her poetry Rosselli launches derisive invectives against the ‘holy fathers’ of tradition, the sustained practice of (mis-) quotation and allusion constituting as much a searing critique of tradition as a strategy to ﬁnd one’s own place within it.19 ‘Dialogo con i poeti’ has all the pathos of an indictment precisely because it allows Petrarch’s language to leave its ghostly trail across it. Poetry itself is dismissed as sterile language, insigniﬁcant play (‘piccolo gioco’), inspired by ‘futile’ motives. Its practitioners — the poets-literati — are like scavenging birds (‘uccellacci’), who in abducting the aura that inspires them, hijack its role as emotional core of the lyric act, and drive it instead of being driven by it. The pursuit of poetry as futile narcissistic play (think of the closing line of 129, ‘In guisa d’uom che pensi e pianga e scriva’) is reiterated elsewhere, too: Pensi pensi pensi e è la ﬁne. Di tutti i tuoi incartamenti incantamenti. Mentre menti io me la ﬁlo sulla linea del sonetto montagnaro.20

‘Pensi’ inevitably echoes the many uses of ‘pensare’ and ‘pensieri’ in the Canzoniere, its pointed repetition suggesting again an empty exercise (and that applies even if we interpret the interlocutor to be the poet herself). The paronomastic pair ‘incartamenti (papers)–incantamenti (spells)’ unlocks its own ghost, the lie (‘menti’) that informs it, whilst the poetic subject ironically ‘scarpers’ poetically in a different direction. The setting of Canzoniere 129 informs ‘Dialogo con i poeti’ in another important respect. In Petrarch’s poem, the wandering subject is reunited with his heart, there where the object of his quest dwells: ‘mi rivedrai

17

‘still by some stream on a deserted slope’; ‘you will see me again,/ beside a running stream’. ‘in this peaceful small park I see you leave with slow and measured steps’. 19 This is particularly visible in the long poem ‘La libellula’ (ARP, pp. 141–58), where the poet engages with, and deconstructs, texts by Rimbaud, Campana, Montale, as well as several other poets, including Dante. 20 ARP, p. 366: ‘You think think think and there you have it. The end of all your spells/ of all your papers. While you lie, I scarper along the line of the/ mountain sonnet.’ 18

310

Emmanuela Tandello

sovr’un ruscel corrente,/ ove l’aura si sente/ d’un fresco et odorifero laureto./ Ivi è ’l mio cor, et quella che ’l m’invola’ (129. 68–71). His promenade, if we may be allowed a modern allusion here, shapes the space of the text, and seals it as the only legitimate space where the poet should dwell: there where inspiration holds him. The promenade in Rosselli’s poem, however, ends in a far more ominous place: un piccolo gesto sfortunato li riconduce all’aldilà con la morte che sembra scendere e stringerli. [. . .]

The poets’ descent into the underworld, surrounded by death/the dead harks back to the nekyia of Homeric, Ovidian, Dantean memory, instigated either by their desire to speak with the dead (and that is indeed the purpose fulﬁlled by nekyia in epic poetry), or by the desire to bring One back to life, as in the Orphic myth. The strongly parodic, abrasive apostrophe of ‘Dialogo con i poeti’ suffers a sudden lyric surge (or is it a plunge?) and leads us back not only to where poetry is sorely tested (and shown wanting), but perhaps where Rosselli believes it should be: in close proximity to transience and tremendousness (as Emily Dickinson would have put it), acknowledging itself defeated, and silenced. If this is what poetry should do — meet and dialogue with death, with the dead — then where does this leave lyric poetry, and that ‘other’ dialogue it stages? Rosselli’s reply lies in an unescapable identiﬁcation of the two dialogues—made possible by the form they share, the dialogue ‘io–tu’.21 If the unlucky gesture belongs to the poet, the realm of the dead belongs to the ﬁgure he evokes (and irretrievably loses) through his gaze. This is observed in those poems where the theatre of mourning, as I have called the Rossellian locus amoenus, becomes witness to a dramatised, dialogic relationship of love, loss, and mourning between two separate, alienated personae. This dramatisation effectively displaces the centrality of the lyric self (which is morphologically marked as feminine), weakening its control over the textual space by making it dependent on another (morphologically marked in the masculine). This other, addressed as ‘tu’, is speechless — sometimes ‘sordo’, certainly neglectful — but endowed with vision. Indeed, he is in actual fact auctor of the space of the garden, which is presented as existing through his gaze. The poetic subject is established as

21

On this subject, see T. Bisanti, ‘Il dialogo negato: tentazione mistica e ricerca del “tu” nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli’, Nuova Rivista di Letteratura Italiana, VII (2004), 411–50.

AMELIA ROSSELLI’S PETRARCH

311

hostage to this auctoritas, and conﬁned to the void, empty dispossessed space of the garden, condemned to a futureless fate as object of his vision: E non posso lamentarmi d’altro, che vedendo la tua visione, tu non chiami o ﬁorisci allegramente attorno al mio corpo profumato di innocente pigrizia.22

It is his vision that conjures her, and leads her to the garden — ‘un addolcimento visionario/ mi porta stanca nel tuo quadro giardino’ (a visionary softening/ leads me tired to your square garden) — and keeps her there to witness his departure, and his return — which is however never complete, as he appears to hover at the threshold, apparently branded by some kind of curse, or punishment: Tutt’intorno il vuoto gentile sembra pensare ad altra cosa che il tuo ritorno — sembra scacciandoti, infestarti d’una punizione [. . .]

But someone/something else claims her utterly: La morte forte del suo avere fa cenno sì, vieni — ed io rompendo ogni indugio fastosamente la saluto.23

Death—which, as we have seen in ‘Faccia nell’erba [. . .]’ is in the air itself (‘La morte è nell’aria’) — hovers ominously in the garden, turning it into ‘un angolo morto’ by asserting its claim, and drawing her deep into its domain. Indeed, death replaces the other as the subject’s truest companion: ‘Povera creatura/ è la morte se nell’inferno delle piccole/ ore sonnecchia anche fra le mie braccia’ (Death is indeed a wretched creature if in the early hours’ hell/ it naps in my arms). Controlled by the other, the poetic subject is merely the product of writing, ‘un refrattario separarsi dell’inchiostro/ dalle tue ambigue mani’ (a reluctant severing of ink/ from your ambiguous hands). ‘Mitragliata da un ﬁume/ di parole’ — his words — she is deﬁned through a clearly recognisable Petrarchan attribute, ‘chioma trapassata dalle passioni’,

22

APR, p. 379: ‘And I cannot complain about anything else, but that in seeing/ your vision, you do not call or blossom/ happily around my body/ smelling sweetly of innocent laziness’ (my italics). 23 APR, p. 372: ‘All around the gentle emptiness seems/ to think of something other than your/ return—seems in chasing you to riddle/ you with a punishment [. . .]; death, strong in her possessions gestures towards me/ — yes, come — and I hasten to greet her, ostentatiously.’

312

Emmanuela Tandello

surrounded by shadows, protagonist of a mystery that is disclosed only to his narcissistic gaze: Vi è solo ombra intorno alla capanna, solo monti morti e vuoti attorno al mio segreto che solo tu con il tuo sguardo puoi prevedere questa solitudine che si quesita per ritornare ancora, morta sulla preda.24

Still bound by desire, she compliantly relinquishes her freedom: ‘Ed ora ti mostro, fra le selve secche, anche/ un sorriso compartecipe’.25 In challenging the auctoritas of the gaze, by having the subject occupy the position normally held by the (silent, dead) object of desire, casting it as hostage, captive, of an immutable destiny, Rosselli thus radically perverts the lyric model. Indeed, it is in her adoption of the constitutive form of lyric discourse, the dialogue in absentia, that we can locate the most complex aspect of Rosselli’s relationship with Petrarch’s Canzoniere. As with the vision/idyll poems discussed earlier, that relationship reveals itself to be far from exclusive, as it strays and betrays, collides and colludes with other discourses — some elective, like Leopardi’s, some more distant and openly anti-Petrarchan, like Montale’s. They all emerge in the Rossellian text tainted by association, to the point of no return, as indeed the following poem amply demonstrates: Tu non ricordi le mie dorate spiagge, se come penso infesto ti sporgi dalla balconata, senza vedere alcunché fuori della tua mente, che scrive difﬁcilmente cose belle [. . .] E poi vedi il cielo blu, colorandosi a tuo dispetto che sporge anch’esso, assistendoti, attendendoti mentre con la musa fai ricamo, altre piccole astuzie o il naufragare. Ed è dolce il naufragare in questo sonno così spiritato [. . .]26

24

ARP, p. 400: ‘Only shade around the hut, only/ hills dead and empty around my secret/ that only you through your gaze can foresee/ this loneliness addressing itself only to return/ again, dead on its prey.’ 25 ARP, p. 404: ‘And now I show you, amid dry woods/ a sympathetic smile’. Compare the intimation of mortality in RVF 22. 37: ‘Ma io sarò sotterra in secca selva’ (I shall be under earth and dry wood). 26 APR, p. 406: ‘You do not remember my golden shores, if as I suspect/ you lean hostile from the balcony, failing/ to see anything at all outside your own mind,/ which hardly ever writes/ beautiful things [. . .]; And then you see the blue sky, colour spreading across it despite you/ it also leans, assisting you, attending you/ while with the muse you embroider, other small tricks/ or your drowning. And drowning is sweet in this sleep/ so possessed [. . .]’ (my italics).

AMELIA ROSSELLI’S PETRARCH

313

Three opening lines — ‘Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri’, from Montale’s ‘Casa dei doganieri’, ‘Silvia rimembri ancor’, from Leopardi’s ‘A Silvia’, and ‘Standomi un giorno solo a la fenestra’, from Petrarch’s own Canzone delle visioni (323) — are forced here to acknowledge a shared conceit. First established in the RVF as a framing device for the essentially scopophilic position of the subject (embodied in its verb par excellence, ‘mirar’) lying outside the vision, but responsible for it (we watch him watching another/something else), the image/conceit of the window returns in ‘A Silvia’ — Leopardi’s ‘d’in sul verone del paterno ostello’ (from the balcony of my paternal dwelling) — and, with a reversal of roles, in Montale’s ‘Il balcone’ (it is Arletta who leans out/appears at the window, not the poet): ‘ti sporgi da questa/ ﬁnestra che non s’illumina’ (you lean towards it/ from this unlighted window). Another is gazed at, waited for, evoked through memory, or through memory lost forever, forgotten. The critique is still there: ‘con la musa fai ricamo’, ‘[fuori del]la tua mente, che scrive difﬁcilmente/ cose belle’; the sky is unmasked once more as conceit as it ‘assists’ the other-as-poet as well as hosting his vision/his ‘waiting’ (compare ‘Il balcone’ again: ‘sull’arduo nulla si spunta/ l’ansia di attenderti vivo’). The poetica della rimembranza which informs ‘A Silvia’ and ‘Casa dei doganieri’ is turned on its head, as the incipit of the Rosselli poem takes on an embattled, resentful tone. Her ‘tu non ricordi’ is an accusation of neglect, not the living’s meditation over the dead’s loss of being. And it is spoken from a perfectly recognisable position, as Silvia, Arletta (and inevitably Laura) converge into one major ﬁgure, that of the ‘dead girl’, which in turn is the modern paradigm of the Eurydice–Persephone archetype. And it is here, in the use of archaic and literary myth with the aim of constructing a powerful personal myth, that the poet of Serie ospedaliera, and the poet of the RVF would appear to ﬁnd an unexpected alliance. The ﬁgure that comes to dominate — through her liminality, her passivity, her very posthumousness (it is Arletta who leans out/appears at the window, not the poet) — the poetry of Serie is thus the product of a ‘mythical’ operation. Arletta/Annetta, Montale’s negative, ‘infernal’ muse, until recently much neglected by critics, has now been recognised as a Eurydice ﬁgure; Silvia, of whom Arletta is said to be a much younger, feral ‘sister’,27 is Leopardi’s own modern Kore, a Persephone 27

G. Lonardi, ‘Mito e “melos” per Arletta: “Punta del Mesco” ’, in Il ﬁore dell’addio: Leonora, Manrico e altri fantasmi del melodramma nella poesia di Montale (Bologna, 2003), pp. 139–59 (p. 139).

314

Emmanuela Tandello

ﬁgure custodian of the dead. They are both ‘povere fanciulle che perdero il ﬁor degli anni’ (Leopardi), both transformed into powerful, meaningful absences–presences which become bound up with the poet’s own personal story, his relationship with death, with being, with poetry itself. But another poet cast his lady into a bride of Hades, many centuries before. The ﬁrst revisitation of the Eurydice–Persephone myth, is, of course, Petrarch’s own rewriting of the Orphic myth as told by Virgil in the fourth book of the Georgics. As is well known, this is conﬁned to three texts: it is ﬁrst developed in canzone 270 (‘Ritogli a Morte quella che m’ha tolto,/ E ripon le tue insegne nel bel volto’), it culminates in canzone 323, in the so-called ‘Eurydice stanza’, and reappears brieﬂy in sestina 332: ‘Or avess’io un sì pietoso stile/ che Laura mia potesse torre a Morte/ come Euridice Orpheo sua senza rime,/ ch’i’ viverei anchor più che mai lieto!’ (332. 49–52).28 The decision to cast Laura as ‘moritura puella’ who shares Eurydice’s fate, enables him to cast himself as the orphaned Orpheus ﬁgure. As Virgil’s Eurydice dies whilst she tries to ﬂee from Aristaeus, she is thus distantly related to Daphne, who ﬂees from Apollo, as Santagata observes. The choice of myth, as Fredi Chiappelli points out, is thus an ampliﬁcation of the canonical pairing Laura–Francesco⫽Daphne–Apollo. Michele Feo’s study of Petrarch’s tenth Eclogue and Claudianus’ De raptu Proserpina suggests further — albeit arguably — that the myth of Ceres and Proserpine is also implied in Petrarch’s complex operation, establishing a powerful triangulation: Laura–Francesco⫽Daphne–Apollo⫽Eurydice– Orpheus⫽Proserpine–Ceres, where the poet identiﬁes with Ceres’ grief, thus setting ‘personal grief [. . .] against a larger pattern of loss and renewal’.29 As a result, Laura also acquires the features of a chthonian maiden, as she departs, enveloped by a ‘nebbia oscura’, a bride of Hades who nevertheless does not return, making the poet’s mourning permanent, and ﬁnal.

28

Petrarch’s use of the Orphic myth in the Canzone delle visioni has been explored at length. See F. Chiappelli, Studi sul linguaggio del Petrarca: la canzone delle visioni (Florence, 1971); N. Gardini, ‘Un esempio di imitazione virgiliana nel Canzoniere petrarchesco: il mito di Orfeo’, in Modern Language Notes, CX (1995), 132–44; F. Brunori, ‘Il mito ovidiano di Orfeo e Euridice nel Canzoniere di Petrarca’, Romance Quarterly, XLIV (1997), 233–44; M. Santagata, ‘Il lutto dell’umanista’, in Amate e amanti: ﬁgure della lirica amorosa fra Dante e Petrarca (Bologna, 1999), pp. 195–221; M. Feo, ‘Il sogno di Cerere e la morte del lauro petrarchesco’, in Il Petrarca ad Arquà: atti del convegno di studi nel VI centenario (1370–1374), ed. G. Billanovich and G. Frasso (Padova, 1975), pp. 117–48, esp. pp. 128–9. 29 C. Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore, MD, 1989), p. 138.

AMELIA ROSSELLI’S PETRARCH

315

Eurydice, Laura, Persephone, Arletta (and Silvia) converge into a synchronic mythologeme that haunts one of Serie’s central elegies: Tu non vivi fra queste piante che s’attorcigliano attorno a questo mio piede senza vasi, e non hai nella tua linea alcuna canzone per questi miei versi sterili ora che tu non avvicini le tue labbra strette a questo mio corpo ombrato. Tu non appari a chiarire il mistero della tua non-presenza, tu non stimoli i ﬁori in corona attorno al mio polso, rotto perché non posso tenerti vicino. [. . .] [. . .] Tu non agganci stretti ﬁli alla mia mano che tanto lontana non può sollevare i pesi dalla tua testa rotta dai singulti. Temo di fare con la mia presenza scempio delle occasioni, ora che tu non rinverdisci l’orizzonte. Temo di apparire strana, confusa a belare quest’incomprensione [. . .] Non ho altro sorso dalle tue arse labbra che questo mio empio mistero, noia del giorno spaccato in mille schegge.30

The immediate referent of this poem is, unquestionably, Montale’s Arletta, who is the object herself of a mythical operation in ‘Incontro’, where she displays recognisable Daphnean qualities: ‘Una misera fronda che in un vaso/ s’alleva s’una porta di osteria [. . .] A lei tendo la mano, e farsi mia un’altra vita sento [. . .] quasi anelli/ alle dita non foglie mi si attorcono ma capelli’ (a sad bough craning from a jar/ by a tavern door. I reach for it and feel/ another life becoming mine [. . .] and it’s hair, not leaves, that winds/ around my ﬁngers like rings). It is again Arletta, who in ‘Casa dei doganieri’ is turned into a Eurydice ﬁgure, lonely, enveloped 30

ARP, p. 427: ‘You do not live among these potless plants twisting and winding/ around my feet/ and you do not have a song lined up for/ these sterile lines of mine now that you/ won’t bring your tight lips to this/ shaded body.// You won’t appear to clear the mystery of/ your non-presence, won’t stir the garland/ of ﬂowers around my wrist, which was broken because/ I cannot keep you close [. . .]// [. . .]You won’t tie/ tight strings to my hand now so distant/ it cannot relieve the burden off your head/ shattered by sobs.// I fear my presence will tear the occasions/ to pieces, now that you won’t renew/ the horizon with green tendrils. I fear I’ll seem strange, confused/ bleating uncomprehendingly [. . .] I drink no draught from your lips/ other than this wanton mystery, boredom of a day/ shattered into a thousand shards’ (my italics).

316

Emmanuela Tandello

by darkness, indeed absent/dead, to whom the poet still tries to cling though the thread of memory: ‘un ﬁlo s’addipana.// Ne tengo un capo, ma tu resti sola/ né qui respiri nell’oscurità’ (a thread gets wound.// I hold one end still [. . .] but you’re alone, not here, not breathing in the dark). Rosselli’s poem, however, cannot be read as merely a response, or a rewriting, of the Montalean source — rather, as we have witnessed in the ‘twin’ poem ‘Tu non ricordi le mie dorate spiagge’, the poet is happy to allow tradition to confront its own very making, its own very history. The distressed, speechless Other, and his visible, excessive distress (his sobbing literally tearing his head apart) are strongly reminiscent both of Orpheus’ fate, and of his furor in the Georgics (‘Orpheu,/ quis tantus furor?’),31 which in Petrarch had become restrained ‘sgomento’ and ‘pianto’: ‘Ahi, nulla, altro che pianto [. . .]’. He is thus an Orpheus ﬁgure, whose restorative powers (those of poetry) fail to restore the landscape to life again: ‘tu non stimoli i ﬁori’, ‘tu non rinverdisci/ l’orizzonte’. His poetry will not rescue her, he is struck dumb (‘le tue labbra strette’). Just as Petrarch in Canzoniere 332 afﬁrms the impossibility of life without Orpheus’ power to rescue Laura— ‘Or avess’io un sì pietoso stile/ che Laura mia potesse torre a Morte,/ come Euridice Orpheo sua senza rime,/ ch’i viverei anchor più che mai lieto’32 — similarly the Rossellian Other cannot and does not live: ‘tu non vivi’. Up to this point, the poem would appear to articulate the Laura–Eurydice perspective, and not that of the poet/Other, who becomes, paradoxically, the absent, lost one. But the image of sterile verse, which reinforces the failure of poetry to restore life, is characteristically ambiguous — the possessive ‘questi miei [versi]’ may suggest that they belong to her (i.e. traditionally, as they are about her), but also that she has authored them, and that he is their object. As a consequence, the topos of the laurel’s departure and absence is not merely turned on its head: he, the Other, has departed, has abandoned her (‘tu non appari’, ‘la tua non-presenza’). And this is the more grievous, as he would also appear to possess the powers of spring/Persephone/Laura in the RVF, as can be seen in numberless occasions, for example in 194: ‘L’aura gentil, che rasserena i poggi,/ destando i ﬁor’(L’aura, the gentle breeze that clears the hills,/ rousing ﬂowers). But it is he who fails to hold on to her hand: we have stressed the Montalean source of ‘ﬁli’, but the image of the hand

31

‘What madness, Orpheus’, Virgil, Georgics 4. 494, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA, 1986). 32 ‘I wish I had such a sorrowful style/ that it could take my Laura from Death,/ as Orpheus rescued his Eurydice without poetry,/ for I would then live even happier than ever.’

AMELIA ROSSELLI’S PETRARCH

317

that Orpheus stretches out to Eurydice is already in the Georgics: ‘invalidasque tibi tendens, heu! Non tua, palmas’ (stretching out to thee strengthless hands, thine, alas! no more). And indeed, as in the Georgics, and in the Canzone delle visioni, the Rossellian subject is conﬁned to disappearing into shadow: ‘ex oculis subito, ceu fumus in auras [. . .] fugit diversa [. . .]’ (from his sight, like smoke mingling with thin air, she vanished afar). Compare RVF 323: ‘ma le parti supreme/ eran avolte d’una nebbia oscura’ (but all that lady’s head/ was hidden by surrounding mist and cloud) (323. 67–8). She is condemned to her life as symbol of poetry (her Daphnean nature) and of shadow: ‘il mio corpo ombrato’, protagonist of an Orphic mystery that is wanton, evil — whilst his mystery remains utterly uncomprehended by her. Something very complex is going on here. We seem to be missing a passage, or a position in the equation. If we go back to the Petrarchan mythologisation of Laura, we had Orpheus–Francesco, and Eurydice/ Proserpine–Laura. But in Rosselli we seem to have Orpheus–Francesco– Amelia and Eurydice/Proserpine–Laura–Amelia. This creates a powerful destabilising effect on the subject of this poetry, which becomes thus exposed to the posthumous position traditionally reserved for the feminine ‘tu’. To conclude. By casting itself as ‘hostage’ to another’s auctoritas (emotional and poetic) the Rossellian subject renounces centrality, allowing itself to move between the traditional positions of lyric discourse, and establishing itself as necessary Otherness, thus guaranteeing the dialogue with death that for the poet is the true purpose of poetry. In order to do so, the poet has only one option: to engage with lyric discourse at its source, and to create her own powerful personal myth. Petrarch proves then to be the not-so-secret ghost in her machine, truly inevitable — if irretrievably remote.

19

Nineteenth-century British Biographies of Petrarch MARTIN MCLAUGHLIN

IF THE LATE EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES saw the start of the British enthusiasm for Dante, it must not be forgotten that this period also witnessed initially a similar fascination for Petrarch.1 In the seventy-ﬁve years between 1775 and 1850, there appeared in English at least six substantial works concerned with the life of Petrarch, and a growing body of translations of the poems. Two of the former were lengthy, two-volume biographies: the ﬁrst life was by Susannah Dobson, a highly popular work which appeared ﬁrst in 1775 and went into at least seven editions by 1807; the second was by Thomas Campbell in 1841, and his abbreviated summary of the poet’s life was placed as a preface to one of the ﬁrst complete translations of the Canzoniere in 1859. In addition to these we ﬁnd a substantial 250-page biography in one volume by A. F. Tytler (published in 1810, an expansion of his forty-four-page pamphlet of 1784); the four major essays by Ugo Foscolo (1821–3), amounting to over 100 pages and dealing both with the life and with the works of the poet; an important chapter by Macaulay on Petrarch in his 1824 essay, ‘Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers’; and a substantial review in 1843 by Walter Savage Landor of Campbell’s biography, which amounts almost to an alternative biography and a critical essay on the poet. Two things strike one immediately about this phenomenon: one is the popularity of Petrarch’s biography in this seventy-ﬁve-year period, eliciting a 1

Amidst the extensive bibliography on the Dante revival in this period, see C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1957); S. Ellis, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge, 1983); R. Pite, The Circle of our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1994); N. Havely (ed.), Dante’s Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney (Basingstoke, 1998); A. Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester, 1998); A. Braida, Dante and the Romantics (Basingstoke, 2004). It is symptomatic of Petrarch’s eventually less prominent position in nineteenth-century Britain that no similar body of secondary literature exists for the subject. Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 319–340. © The British Academy 2007.

320

Martin McLaughlin

substantial body of works from famous and less famous critics alike; the other is the strange dearth of Petrarch’s lives after this period. These two phenomena prompt the two main questions which I broach in this chapter: first, I consider how significant these works were in critical terms for the British reception of Petrarch, how accurate a picture they portrayed of the poet’s life and works; second, I suggest some reasons why Petrarch’s popularity, unlike Dante’s, died out in Britain so suddenly and so radically in the second half of the nineteenth century. The last quarter of the eighteenth century marks the beginning of the modern British reception of Petrarch. The ﬁrst translations to appear belong to the period 1754–64, and were initially inspired, as François Mouret showed, by writers of other languages: Baretti translates Petrarch’s ﬁnal canzone to the Virgin in his Introduction to the Italian Language (1755); then English translations of works by Voltaire, Keyssler, and Rousseau bring other poems to the attention of British readers.2 After 1765 the ﬁrst ‘spontaneous’ English versions appear, gradually growing in number up to and beyond the turn of the century. Leaving aside translations of just a few sonnets, the main publications are Sir William Jones’ version of thirteen poems (1772); seventeen translations by the anonymous ‘Lucia’ (1774); thirty-three versions by John Nott (1777), who later published his translation of eighty Petrarch poems in 1808, and appears to have carried out a complete English version of the Canzoniere by the time of his death in 1825;3 twenty-four sonnets by Thomas Le Mesurier published in 1795; twenty-eight poems by John Penn in 1797; and James Caulfeild, ﬁrst Earl of Charlemont, had by his death in 1799 translated the twenty-three poems that appeared in the posthumous publication of his Select Sonnets of Petrarch (Dublin, 1822).4 Amongst these publications there were also occasional translations from the Trionﬁ, and in 1807 Henry Boyd’s new translation of that poem appeared, the ﬁrst since Lord Morley’s version of the Triumphs in 1554.5 After the turn of the century, 2

F. J.-L. Mouret, Les traducteurs anglais de Pétrarque 1754–1798 (Paris, 1976), pp. 17–22. The 1777 translations of thirty-three poems are anonymous but attributed to John Nott: Sonnets and Odes Translated from the Italian of Petrarch (London, 1777). For Nott’s complete (unpublished) translation, see the entry by W. P. Courtney, revd M. J. Mercer, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004), XLI, 214. 4 Mouret, Les traducteurs anglais de Pétrarque, pp. 127–33. 5 There was even an abridged English translation of the De Remediis by Susannah Dobson, Petrarch’s biographer, in 1791. Also around this time, Coleridge was interested in Petrarch’s treatise on solitude, De Vita Solitaria: a quotation from the treatise headed the ﬁrst essay in Coleridge’s journal The Friend (1809–10). See A. G. Hill, ‘The Triumph of Memory: Augustine, Petrarch, and Wordsworth’s Ascent of Snowdon’, Review of English Studies, n.s. LVII (2006), 247–58. 3

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

321

the popularity of such translations continued unabated: in 1808 Nott published his version of eighty poems, Tytler printed thirty translated poems in his expanded biography of 1810, Francis Wrangham published forty sonnets in 1817, Susan Wollaston 100 sonnets in 1841, before the two complete translations of the Canzoniere in the 1850s. As is clear, the number of these translations increases exponentially once Dobson’s and Tytler’s biographies are published. In fact the British enthusiasm for Petrarch in the period 1775–1825 is without parallel in Europe. The vogue for Petrarchan translations and imitations in this halfcentury was well documented by Brand,6 who also noted the diminution of his popularity after 1825, as the taste for stronger content emerges with the development of high Romanticism. Indeed, Brand goes so far as to suggest paradoxically that it was partly the detailed information about Petrarch’s life furnished by the many biographies that helped diminish his popularity.7 However, here I am primarily concerned with the biographies and critical works on the poet rather than with the translations and imitations.8 The immediate cause of this upsurge of interest in Petrarch was the Abbé de Sade’s monumental three-volume Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque (1764–7). Written primarily to show that Laura had been the wife of Hugues de Sade, a distant ancestor of the Abbé, in fact de Sade’s work was a huge, erudite undertaking, with countless original Italian poems and Latin letters reproduced in the margins and translated into French, and a full apparatus of scholarly references and appendices.9 Mrs Dobson probably became interested in translating and abridging de Sade’s biography after Baretti’s essay, Manners and Customs of Italy (1768), praised the French work. However, her biography, The Life of Petrarch: Collected from Mémoires pour la vie de Petrarch (ﬁrst published in 1775), was both a translation and an abridgement of the French original, and it 6

Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, pp. 93–101. ‘Researches on Petrarch’s life hastened the decline of his popularity’: Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, p. 101. 8 For more information on the translations, see Chapter 20 by Peter Hainsworth in this volume. 9 Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade, Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque: tirés de ses oeuvres et des auteurs contemporains, avec des notes ou dissertations, & les pièces justificatives, 3 vols (Amsterdam [really Avignon], 1764–7). The work begins with a ninety-page letter to Italian scholars justifying another biography of the poet, and surveying those of previous writers, followed by a thirty-page letter to French readers. The Life is divided into six books; each page contains footnotes, references in the margin, and quotations from original documents; many pages reproduce sonnets or canzoni and their French translations; at the end of each volume there are substantial appendices. 7

322

Martin McLaughlin

served a different purpose. Dobson’s was not a work of detailed scholarship, but rather a readable biography, without any footnotes or appendices, or quotations of the original Petrarch texts: unlike de Sade’s work, here everything was translated into English, including the Italian poems and Latin letters. However, she was translating always from the French not from the Latin or Italian originals of Petrarch. This is clear both from the translations and from the fact that she uses French forms of Italian names throughout: John Boccace, James de Corrare (sic), Azon de Correge, and so on. Dobson is consciously writing a less scholarly work: she admits to pruning some ‘prolix and intrusive digressions’ from the French original, in order to concentrate more on ‘every part of Petrarch’s private character, and his admirable letters, thus to exhibit him encircled with his friends, and in the familiar circumstances of life’.10 Instead, the only additions she admits to are ‘a few remarks with respect to the characters of Petrarch and Laura particularly at the close of their lives which I thought myself obliged to make’ (Dobson, I, xviii). Her objective was to be ‘less minute’ than de Sade, and the work was written primarily not for scholarship but for ‘the amusement of the English reader’ (I, xxviii). As for her translations of sonnets and Latin letters, she modestly declares herself incapable of ‘transfusing the spirit and elegance of the sonnets into any English translation’, so she has ‘only inserted a few lines from some of them, as they were necessarily connected with the subject’, in order ‘to enliven the circumstances to which they refer, or illustrate the character of Petrarch, where they particularly mark the delicacy and justness of his sentiments’ (I, xxix–xxx). Her translations of about sixty poems are thus much fewer than de Sade’s 202 poems, they are in prose, and are rarely of whole poems. As an abridged translation of de Sade’s work, Dobson’s rendering is fairly accurate, though on occasions she deliberately omits or adds elements to the original. To give just one instance, in the description of Petrarch’s physical appearance, she glosses over the errors of Petrarch’s youth that even the Abbé was prepared to mention. That such interventions are due not to her ignorance of French or carelessness but to a deliberate strategy of censorship is conﬁrmed by a number of instances: the Abbé notes that there is an inconsistency between Petrarch’s mention of his impatience at the way his striking physical appearance attracted 10

Mrs [Susannah] Dobson, The Life of Petrarch: Collected from Memoires pour la vie de Petrarch, 2 vols (London, 1775), I, xviii–xix. All quotations in what follows are from the ﬁrst edition.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

323

attention and other letters where he admits to a youthful obsession with appearance (de Sade, I, 119), but this contradiction, and implicit criticism, is not mentioned by Dobson, who simply makes the positive statement that ‘In the ﬂower of his youth, the beauties of his person were so very striking, that wherever he appeared he was the object of attention’ (Dobson, I, 34). Even more revealing is the way she translates the de Sade passage which quotes the Letter to Posterity about the poet being tormented by lust until his fortieth year: Il étoit né d’ailleurs avec un coeur fort tendre & capable d’une grande passion, comme l’experience l’a fait voir; un temperament vif & ardent qui l’entraînoit malgré lui dans le libertinage, pour lequel il se sentoit de l’horreur. Il faut entendre lui-même en faire l’aveu. ‘Mon temperament me portoit malgré moi au commerce des femmes & aux plaisirs qu’on goût avec elles; mais je puis dire avec vérité, que dans le fond de l’ame, je détestois cette faiblesse [. . .] Le repentir et le dégoût suivoient de près des plaisirs bien courts [. . .] Je suis au désespoir de n’être pas né insensible; je voudrois quelquefois être aussi dur qu’un rocher.’ (de Sade, I, 119–20)

Mrs Dobson’s translation or rather distortion of this passage totally transforms its thrust, turning negatives into positives, including the word ‘libertinage’, mentioning anger rather than lust, and speaking only vaguely of his passions: His heart was candid, and benevolent, susceptible of the most lively affections, and inspired with the most noble sentiments of liberality.11 But his failings must not be concealed. His temper was on some occasions violent, and his passions headstrong and unruly. A warmth of constitution hurried him into irregularities, which were followed by repentance and remorse. ‘I can aver that from the bottom of my soul I detest such scenes.’ (Dobson, I, 34)

Her moralising interpretation of the words of both the Abbé and his subject render the passage about ‘irregularities’ completely opaque.12 Samples such as these conﬁrm Mouret’s view of the difference between the two

11

In the ﬁrst edition this was deemed a misprint for ‘liberty’ (I, xxxii). Similarly in the description of Laura at their ﬁrst meeting, she is chary of physical details: she omits the second of half of this sentence of de Sade’s description ‘Elle avoit le col bien fait & d’une blancheur admirable’ (de Sade, I, 123), and suppresses entirely the phrase ‘Elle avoit de jolis piés, de belles mains plus blanches que la neige et l’ivoire’ (ibid.). For an example of her adding elements, see the passage shortly after this, where the sentence ‘Son regard avoit quelque chose de gai et de tendre, mais en même tems si honnête qu’il portait à la vertu’ (de Sade, I, 123) becomes ‘An air of gaiety and tenderness breathed around her, but so pure and happily tempered, as to inspire every beholder with the sentiments of virtue: for she was chaste as the spangled dew-drop of the morn’ (I, 37). 12

324

Martin McLaughlin

biographers: ‘Sade était historien, Dobson est moraliste.’13 Similarly, at the end of the biography, where there is a concluding summary of Petrarch’s character, his faults are once more played down, and his love for Laura is seen as excusing his emotional instability: I shall, therefore, only remark one particular, which, with all feeling hearts, will apologize for that unﬁxed and variable temper so justly ascribed to Petrarch, and this was his tender and ardent passion for Laura, which entirely unsettled him for twenty years, and produced a restlessness in his mind (not formed, perhaps, by nature in the calmest mould) through every succeeding period of life. (Dobson, II, 557)

The year after Mrs Dobson’s biography came out, the ﬁrst volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) was published. Gibbon’s third volume appeared in 1788, and it was here that the historian devoted most of a chapter (chapter 70) to Petrarch. Given his neo-classical tastes, Gibbon praises the Latin Petrarch more than ‘the songster of Laura’; indeed instead of ‘the tedious uniformity’ of Petrarch’s lyric poems, he strongly prefers the Italian epic tradition, ‘the original wildness of Dante, the regular beauties of Tasso, and the boundless variety of the incomparable Ariosto’. He condemns the love poetry also on moral grounds: The merits of the lover I am still less qualiﬁed to appreciate: nor am I deeply interested in a metaphysical passion for a nymph so shadowy, that her existence has been questioned; for a matron so proliﬁc, that she was delivered of eleven legitimate children, while her amorous swain sighed and sung at the fountain of Vaucluse. But in the eyes of Petrarch, and those of his graver contemporaries, his love was a sin, and Italian verse a frivolous amusement.14

Despite these strictures Gibbon was enthusiastic about Petrarch’s scholarly achievement, and naturally empathised with someone who had like himself been struck by the beauty of the fragments of ancient Rome. This positive view of the historian, combined with the commercial success of Mrs Dobson’s biography, which went through seven editions in just over thirty years, brought knowledge of Petrarch’s life to a wide swathe of English readers at the turn of the eighteenth century. Amongst those who were caught up in this interest in Petrarch was A. F. Tytler (later Lord Woodhouselee), who published a short, biographical

13

Mouret, Les traducteurs anglais de Pétrarque, p. 30. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womersley, 3 vols (Harmondsworth, 1995), III, 1019.

14

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

325

essay in 1784.15 Tytler recounts the main facts, but also accompanies them with footnotes quoting the original Italian of a number of sonnets, and supplies versions of seven sonnets at the end of the essay. However, the main purpose of this brief biography was to disprove the claim, upheld by de Sade and Dobson, that Laura was a member of the de Sade family and mother of ten children. Of the French biographer’s monumental work, Tytler declares: ‘We admire his industry, and sometimes his critical ingenuity; but [. . .] we cannot hesitate to our own belief that Laura of Petrarch was never married’ (Tytler, p. 24). This declaration is then followed by ﬁfteen pages of footnotes attempting to refute de Sade’s claims, the main motive being Tytler’s wish to excuse the poet of adultery: ‘An Amour of this kind, with a married woman, the mother of a family, was in itself an offence against morality and religion, and must have been viewed by the Poet in a criminal light’ (p. 36 note). This moralising approach also accounts for Tytler’s ﬁnal convoluted sentence in which he vaguely suggests that one of the reasons Petrarch and Laura never wed was the poet’s own illegitimate children: Petrarch, however amiable in his character, however virtuous in the general tenor of his conduct, was not exempt from the failings of humanity; and perhaps a temporary indiscretion, which is a crime in the eyes of a pure affection, might have retarded the accomplishment of his wishes, and the reward of his passion. (p. 44)

Almost thirty years later, in 1810, Tytler expanded his essay into a full-blown biography of the poet, running to more than 250 pages.16 In the ‘Advertisement’, Tytler claims he has been induced into expanding and revising his defence of the poet by ‘several Italian gentlemen of distinguished literary talents and tastes’, who wanted ‘a satisfactory vindication of their illustrious countryman’, as well as a refutation ‘of some material errors in the common accounts of his life and character’ (1810 edn, pp. vi–vii). The opening of the biography proper conﬁrms that the main motivation is to defend Petrarch’s moral reputation: he claims that the result of de Sade’s researches has been ‘a diminution of that esteem which the world has hitherto entertained for this eminent man, in the most important point of his character, his morals’ (p. 5). He regards de Sade as a ‘most uncourteous knight, who, with a spirit very opposite to 15

Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch. To which are added seven of his sonnets translated from the Italian (London, 1784). 16 An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, with a Translation of a Few of his Sonnets (London, 1810).

326

Martin McLaughlin

that of the heroes of chivalry, blasts at once the fair fame of the virtuous Laura, and the hitherto unsullied honour of her Lover’, by suggesting that Laura was married, had borne several children, and that ‘Petrarch, with all his professions of a pure and honourable ﬂame, had no other end in his unexampled assiduity of pursuit, than what every libertine proposes to himself in the possession of a mistress’ (pp. 47–8). Despite his efforts, Tytler was almost a lone voice championing an unmarried Laura, since the scholarly consensus by now agreed with de Sade and his followers that Laura had indeed been a married lady. These moral questions dominate much of the discussion of Petrarch in the early nineteenth century. In 1815 Hazlitt publishes an article on ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’ in the Edinburgh Review (June 1815), which defends Petrarch from the two most common accusations: the affectation of his poetry and his obsession with Laura. Hazlitt points out that true sentiment may exist even in spite of laboured poetic conceits, and he rejects the Swiss historian’s view that it would have been better for Petrarch’s poetry if his relationship with Laura had been more intimate: ‘The love of a man like Petrarch would have been less in character, if it had been less ideal. For the purposes of inspiration, a single interview was quite sufficient.’17 Coleridge also grapples with the first of these questions. In his early Sonnets from Various Authors (1796) he is negative both about the conceits and about the abstract qualities of the Italian poet’s verse: ‘I have never yet been able to discover either sense, nature, or poetic fancy in Petrarch’s poems; they appear to me all one cold glitter of heavy conceits and metaphysical abstraction.’18 However, he does translate at least one sonnet (Canzoniere 275), and in his copy of the Canzoniere makes more nuanced notes: of poem 23 he says ‘This poem is ridiculous in the thoughts, but simple and sweet in diction’; whereas on 270 he remarks ‘With the omission of half a dozen conceits [. . .] this second canzone is a bold and impassioned lyric, and leaves no doubt in my mind of Petrarch’s having possessed a true poetic genius’.19 Later, in his 1818 Lectures (Notes), he maintains this more discriminating approach, praising Petrarch’s style but not his content, admiring his ‘fascinating delicacy in the choice and position of the

17

Cited in Italian Poets and English Critics: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. B. Corrigan (Chicago, IL–London, 1969), p. 61. 18 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols (Princeton, NJ, 2001), I, 1205. 19 Cited in Mouret, Les traducteurs anglais de Pétrarque, p. 47, n. 259.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

327

words and the flow of the metre’, but noting that the poems fail to excite ‘a gush of manly feeling’.20 The enthusiasm for Petrarch felt by the other great Romantic poets is more pronounced. Byron praises Petrarch in a thirty-line sequence in Childe Harolde (IV, 261–88), though he appears to subscribe to Tytler’s view that Laura was not a member of the de Sade family, and therefore not married. However, despite thus considering that Laura was available as a possible bride for the poet, he also subscribes to Hazlitt’s opinion against Sismondi that it was better that Petrarch and Laura never married, or as he puts it in Don Juan, III, 63–4: ‘Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,/ He would have written sonnets all his life?’21 He also adopts a critical approach to the Letter to Posterity, noting that despite Petrarch’s protestations that by the time he was forty he had forgotten about sexual urges, in fact there are at least six poems where the poet’s love is clearly not Platonic, and that he could hardly have forgotten about the sexual act by forty since his illegitimate daughter was born when he was thirty-nine. However, despite these indications of critical interest, Byron clearly prefers Dante: in The Prophecy of Dante, III, 103–7, the English poet sides with Gibbon’s view that Petrarch is outshone by the poets of Italy’s epic tradition, Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso.22 Shelley is more enthusiastic than Byron. The title, rhyme scheme, and some of the content of the Trionﬁ are models for The Triumph of Life; he was fond of reading the Trionfo della Morte aloud, and the Trionﬁ also inﬂuence The Masque of Anarchy and Adonais. At one stage he ‘preferred Petrarch to any Italian poet; he had his works constantly in hand and would often spout his ode to Italy, Italia mia’;23 and he felt that none of the fragments of Greek lyric poetry matched ‘the sublime and chivalric sensibility of Petrarch’.24 In his Defence of Poetry he stated that Petrarch’s ‘verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love’.25 However, in the next sentence but one he showed that when it came to a comparison between Dante and Petrarch, he—like Byron and others — felt that the former was superior,

20

Cited in Corrigan (ed.), Italian Poets and English Critics, p. 19. Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford, 1980–93), V, 163. 22 Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, IV, 230. 23 T. Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London, 1847), I, 262. 24 Cited by Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, p. 97. 25 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck, 10 vols (London–New York, 1930), VII, 128. 21

328

Martin McLaughlin

even in love poetry: ‘Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch’ (ibid.). Wordsworth also came under the spell of the Petrarch enthusiasm of this period: it was thanks to Wordsworth that the sonnet form became popular again in Britain, and he clearly looked back to his Italian predecessor in this genre, since as early as 1798 he translated Canzoniere 12; later, in 1820, he saw Petrarch’s copy of Virgil with the miniature by Simone Martini (in the Ambrosiana in Milan), and in 1837 was deeply impressed by his visit to Vaucluse. It has even been argued that Wordsworth’s ascent of Snowdon stems from his reading of Petrarch’s account of his own climb up Mont Ventoux (Familiares 4. 1).26 However, the most thorough analysis of Petrarch’s poetry, and the one that established the real strengths and weaknesses of the poet for an English audience, appeared in the series of four essays on Petrarch written by Ugo Foscolo between 1820 and 1823. The ﬁrst essay is ‘An Essay on the Love of Petrarch’, this topic coming ﬁrst probably because the genesis of the work was bound up with Foscolo’s love at the time for Caroline Russell.27 Indeed on occasions when writing about Petrarch and Laura he seems to be writing about himself and Caroline: after stating that Laura’s chastity proved morally beneﬁcial to Petrarch, he adds ‘But he was also disposed to a morbid sensibility; a disease peculiar to men of genius, and which, whenever it is embittered by protracted misfortunes or lingering passions, never fails to degenerate into a hopeless consumption of the mind’ (p. 31). Foscolo cites Dobson’s description of Petrarch’s physical appearance when young, but also adds the evidence from Petrarch’s own Letter to Posterity: ‘Without being uncommonly handsome,’ says he, in his Letter to Posterity, ‘my person had something agreeable in it in my youth. My complexion was a clear and lively brown; my eyes were animated; my hair had grown gray before twenty-ﬁve, and I consoled myself for a defect which I shared in common with many of the great men of antiquity — for Caesar and Virgil were gray-headed in youth; and I had a venerable air, which I was by no means very proud of.’ (pp. 13–14)

26

See Hill, ‘The Triumph of Memory’. The essays were ﬁrst published privately in 1821, then in the Quarterly Review (April 1821), before the deﬁnitive edition of 1823. For details of the genesis of the essays, see the introduction to U. Foscolo, Saggi e discorsi critici. Saggi sul Petrarca, Discorso sul testo del ‘Decameron’, Scritti minori su poeti italiani e stranieri (1821–1826), ed. C. Foligno, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Ugo Foscolo (Florence, 1953), X, xxi–xlvii. The ﬁrst essay, ‘An Essay on the Love of Petarch’, is at pp. 5–36.

27

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

329

Foscolo is thus aware of Petrarch’s construction of his own image. The Italian critic then mentions Petrarch’s impatient love, and notes, like Byron, that several expressions of it are not usually noticed since ‘Petrarch is traditionally read with sentimental prepossession’ (p. 17). He openly admits that Petrarch had an illegitimate son and daughter, and quotes more accurately from the Letter to Posterity the passage that Mrs Dobson had sanitised: ‘ “I always felt,” says he, “the unworthiness of my inclinations, and at my fortieth year, retain them no more than if I had never seen any other woman; sane and robust, in the warmth and vigour of life, I have subdued so shameful a necessity” ’ (p. 26). In the second essay, ‘An Essay on the Poetry of Petrarch’ (pp. 37–78), Foscolo continues this more ‘philological’ approach by citing the autograph manuscripts that he had seen, and which bear witness to the poet’s meticulous search for perfect phrasing: ‘If the manuscripts did not still exist, it would be impossible to imagine or believe the unwearied pains he has bestowed on the correction of his verses’ (p. 39). Foscolo is original in showing that scriptural echoes are as prominent in Petrarch’s verse as classical and Provençal motifs (pp. 48–50), and in noting the poet’s attention to varying melody and rhythm, and his careful selection of a diction that has never become obsolete (pp. 63–4). Foscolo’s interest in philology made him attach importance to what he thought was a novelty but was in fact a forgery: two letters by Petrarch written in Italian, the only examples of Petrarch’s vernacular prose (p. 65). The fact that Lord Holland bought the letters in 1804 gives an indication of the extent of the enthusiasm for Petrarch in aristocratic circles at the start of the century. However, the key contribution in this essay was genuinely philological: in this, the longest of the four essays, Foscolo displays considerable analytical skill in showing how Petrarch arrived at the perfect poetic choice of word and phrase, though he recognises that it takes a native speaker to appreciate this: ‘it requires a profound knowledge of Italian to perceive, that after such perplexing scruples, he always adopts those words which combine at once most harmony, elegance, and energy’ (p. 40). In his third essay, ‘An Essay on the Character of Petrarch’ (pp. 79–107), Foscolo concentrates on the poet’s nature, outlining his condemnation of Papal corruption in Avignon, but also noting his tendency towards ‘a pedantic gravity and a false modesty, which tarnish the natural candour of his character’ (pp. 84–5). Again he notes the composite nature of the Posteritati: ‘Whilst he calls himself “a simple individual of the human ﬂock,” he compares himself indirectly to the most illustrious men in history; and cannot inform posterity of the origin of his family, without

330

Martin McLaughlin

borrowing the words of Augustus’ (p. 85). As in the ﬁrst essay Foscolo had identiﬁed with the love poet, so here the author of Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis identiﬁes also with the exile who writes patriotic political poetry: talking of Petrarch’s three political canzoni, he praises ‘the tone of conviction and melancholy in which the patriot upbraids, and mourns over his country’ (p. 87). This essay ends, however, with Foscolo subscribing to one of the Petrarch legends: ‘on the twentieth day of July, 1374, the eve of his seventieth anniversary of his birth, he was found dead in his library, with his head resting on a book’ (p. 107). The final Foscolo essay, ‘A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch’ (pp. 109–38), was perhaps added, as Foligno suggests (p. xxxv), after a ﬁnal rebuff from Caroline Russell, since in it he relegates Petrarch, whom he had initially seen as a sort of intermediary in his pursuit of Caroline, to second position behind Dante. Whatever the personal motivations behind it, the essay was certainly inﬂuential: although it went into considerable detail in its analysis of the qualities of Petrarch’s poetry, it constantly reiterated Dante’s superiority over his successor. Foscolo starts by noting that the Renaissance preference for Petrarch’s poetry over Dante’s has held up to the present time — or, as he puts it, the preference for ‘elegance of taste’ over ‘the boldness of genius’ (p. 109), the terms indicating the author’s priorities from the outset. The whole thrust of the essay is to indicate Dante’s superiority in a number of key areas, and to suggest that the time has now come for the Renaissance view to be reversed. The Italian critic observes that although Petrarch selects the most elegant and melodious words and phrases, Dante actually creates a new language that was often ‘the result of more powerful art’, citing Dante’s ‘rime aspre’ of Inferno 32. 1–12 as an example (pp. 112–13). Whereas Petrarch makes us see everything through the one predominant passion of love, ‘Dante, like all primitive poets, is the historian of the manners of his age, the prophet of his country, and the painter of mankind; and calls into action all the faculties of our soul to reﬂect on the vicissitudes of the world’ (p. 122). But the key moment of the essay is when Foscolo identiﬁes the shift in the Zeitgeist, which he feels is largely due to the changed political climate in Europe, especially in Italy: But since the late revolutions have stirred up other passions, and a different system of education has been established, Petrarch’s followers have rapidly diminished; and those of Dante have written poems more suited to rouse the public spirit of Italy. Dante [. . .] descended to the tomb with the last heroes of the middle age. Petrarch lived amongst those who prepared the inglorious heritage of servitude for the next ﬁfteen generations. (p. 125)

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

331

Dante thus emerges as a superior ideological model for the poets of the early nineteenth century: because of his political passion and exile, he is associated with the revolutions of the 1820s and subsequent decades, whereas Petrarch is implicitly linked by Foscolo with Italy’s servile domination by foreign powers. Even in terms of their besetting sins or ﬂaws, Dante emerges as a more sympathetic ﬁgure, since he is associated with pride, Petrarch with vanity: in an interesting aside here, the critic notes that whereas Petrarch was occasionally mocked for his passionate obsessions, ‘Dante, on the contrary, was one of those rare individuals who are above the reach of ridicule’ (p. 132). As Brand pointed out, in the second half of the century Petrarch would be portrayed, particularly in Landor’s image of him, as an overweight priest, therefore much more liable to mockery than Dante. Foscolo’s essay thus displayed not only persuasive critical accuracy in analysis and comparison, but also an intuitive and even prophetic sense of the way Romantic taste was evolving in the third decade of the new century. Despite his gullibility over the fake vernacular letters, Foscolo’s contribution is marked by greater precision than any of his predecessors, and rests on a greater range of sources. He cites liberally from the Letter to Posterity, but also from other texts little known at the time: the Vatican manuscripts of his poems, the autograph note about his son in the Ambrosiana Vergil, the Secretum, and Petrarch’s will. The four essays together represent the most substantial contribution to the critical understanding of Petrarch in early nineteenth-century Britain. Yet the ﬁnal essay deﬁnitively relegated Petrarch to second position in the canon of Italian literature. Around the same time, the year 1822 saw the posthumous publication of the Earl of Charlemont’s Select Sonnets of Petrarch (Dublin, 1822). Apart from the deliberately rather literal translations, this publication also contained Charlemont’s perceptive chapter on Petrarch’s poetry from his unpublished History of Italian Poetry from Dante to Metastasio (c. 1799). He was one of the few critics to prefer Petrarch to Dante, ﬁnding the Comedy the product of ‘a rude Age’ and Dante’s lyrics ‘hard, obscure, and inelegant’.28 By contrast Petrarch was ‘Elegant in the midst of Inelegance, Polished in the midst of Rudeness, Reﬁned in the midst of Barbarity!’ Charlemont is a sensitive reader of the poetry: he remarks on Petrarch’s ability to provide a satisfying ‘chiusa’ to the sonnet in the last

28

See the recent edition of Lord Charlemont’s ‘History of Italian Poetry from Dante to Metastasio’, ed. G. Talbot, 3 vols (Lewiston, NY, 2000), II, 6.

332

Martin McLaughlin

tercet, which often contains ‘the principal thought on which the Sonnet is built, or, at least, some conspicuous Sentence or striking Allusion’ (II, 10). He is alert also to the unusual ‘andamento Maestoso di Versi’ in Canzoniere 189, ‘Passa la nave mia’ (II, 40), and he agrees with many critics that in the poems after Laura’s death Petrarch abandons his conceits for ‘the Language of real Afﬂiction’ (II, 58). Charlemont was by choice a pedestrian translator but he displayed considerable critical sensitivity to the poetic and structural qualities of Petrarch’s original poems. However, his dismissal of Dante as belonging to a ‘crude’ age, showed that Charlemont’s tastes were those of the previous century, tastes and preferences that Foscolo and others were reversing. In the same year, 1822, we also ﬁnd Thomas Carlyle’s dismissive remarks on both de Sade’s biography and his subject’s poems. Carlyle, a Scot, epitomises the no-nonsense British approach to certain aspects of Petrarch’s life and work, an approach later taken up by the English historian Macaulay. In a letter to Jane Welsh of December 1822, Carlyle comments in a typically brusque manner on de Sade’s biography and its subject: I have spent a stupid day in reading the Abbey de Sade’s Memoir of Petrarch. What a feeble whipster was this Petarch with all his talents! To go dangling about, for the space of twenty years, pufﬁng and sighing after a little coquette, whose charms lay chieﬂy in the fervour of his own imagination, and the art she had to keep him wavering between hope and despondency [. . .] that he might write Sonnets in her praise!29

Having dismissed the poet’s love life, Carlyle then turns to the poems: To me they seem a very worthless employment for a mind like Petrarch’s—he might have built a palace, and he has made some dozen snuff-boxes with invisible hinges, — very pretty certainly — but very small and altogether useless. (Carlyle, p. 214)

Not surprisingly, when Carlyle later came to write his inﬂuential work on ‘The Hero as Poet’ (1840), along with Shakespeare he would pair not Petrarch but Dante. Shortly after this, in 1824, Macaulay devoted considerable space to Petrarch in his ‘Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers’. The historian admires certain aspects of the great humanist, admits he possessed a writer’s genius, but has no time for the love poet. In fact he sees pedantry 29

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, ed. C. R. Sanders (Durham, NC, 1970–), II, 213–14.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

333

in all of Petrarch’s works, and articulates his criticism in anaphoristic formulae: ‘His love was the love of a sonneteer: — his patriotism was the patriotism of an antiquarian’.30 Like Foscolo, he compares the poet unfavourably with Dante: ‘He did not possess, indeed, the art of strongly presenting sensible objects to the imagination; — and this is the more remarkable, because the talent of which I speak is that which peculiarly distinguishes the Italian poets. In the Divine Comedy it is displayed in its highest perfection’ (Corrigan, p. 138). Even Petrarch’s ingenuity is seen to be excessive, causing him to abandon a natural style for the conceits which he produced ‘with a facility at once admirable and disgusting’ (ibid., p. 139). This pushes the English critic to indulge in humour at Petrarch’s expense, saying that the paucity of his thoughts in their endless permutations puts the poet on a par with the French cook who could make ‘ﬁfteen different dishes out of a nettle-top’ (ibid., p. 139). Macaulay even blames Laura, whom he calls an ‘insipid and heartless coquette’, for the poet’s affected style, since she ‘like most critics of her sex, preferred a gaudy to a majestic style’ (ibid., p. 140). Instead he appreciates the poetry of the political canzoni, and the Avignon sonnets, and regards the ﬁnal poem to the Virgin as ‘perhaps the ﬁnest hymn in the world’, but holds nothing but contempt for the ‘Petrarchistic’ elements in the poems, especially those that play on Laura’s name: ‘When his brilliant conceits are exhausted, he supplies their place with metaphysical quibbles, forced antitheses, bad puns, and execrable charades. In his ﬁfth sonnet he may, I think, be said to have sounded the lowest chasm of the Bathos’ (ibid., p. 141). Yet, despite this strongly critical attitude, Macaulay is deeply impressed by the sincerity of the Letter to Posterity, which he regards as his most important Latin work: ‘a simple, noble, and pathetic composition, most honourable both to his taste and to his heart. If we can make allowance for some of the affected humility of an author, we shall perhaps think that no literary man has left a more pleasing memorial of himself’ (ibid., p. 146). The other element of naivety in Macaulay’s approach is the fact that he, like Foscolo, believed in the ﬁnal legend of Petrarch’s death, for which the historian provides a characteristic epitaph: ‘He lived the apostle of literature; — he fell its martyr: — he was found dead with his head on a book’ (ibid., p. 138). The consensus about Petrarch’s two failings — the repetitive nature of the love poems, and his obsessive love for Laura — is in evidence in 30 See Corrigan, Italian Poets and English Critics, p. 138. In what follows further references to this anthology will be given in parenthesis in the text.

334

Martin McLaughlin

Thomas Campbell, who was to become a major biographer of the poet. In the late 1830s Campbell still ﬁnds these two obstacles to appreciating the Italian poet: ‘I had always, until of late, something like an aversion to Petrarch, on account of the monotony of his amatory sonnets, and the apparent wildness and half insanity of his passion for Laura. I used to say to myself (indulging, I confess, a rather vulgar spirit of criticism), hang these cater-wauling sonnets! They afﬂict my compassion’ (ibid., p. 18). However, in a letter written in 1839, we ﬁnd a change of heart: ‘A happy change has taken place in my frame of mind regarding my manufacture of the “Life of Petrarch”. He was a ﬁne fellow; and (though he loved a married woman twenty years) I admire the grace of his writing’ (ibid.). In this new spirit of enthusiasm, Campbell writes his two-volume biography, published in 1841. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the book Campbell tells us how he was asked to look over Archbishop Coxe’s unpublished biography, but found it so defective that he decided to write his own. Campbell feels like other critics, that Petrarch’s elevation of Laura to divine status, comparing her birthplace with Bethlehem, was almost a form of madness, but he is one of the few to defend Petrarch’s other conceits, noting that ‘they are so often in such close connexion with exquisitely ﬁne thoughts, that, in tearing away the weed, we might be in danger of snapping the ﬂower’ (ibid., p. 149). He cites verbatim Foscolo’s views on ‘the tone of conviction and melancholy’ in the political canzoni (ibid., p. 154). Campbell ends by proclaiming Petrarch’s role as a forerunner of the Renaissance, an ‘unconscious patriarch of the Reformation’, and ‘an Italian patriot who was above provincial partialities, a poet who still lives in the hearts of his country’. Even when admitting the poet’s failings as a man, he quotes Goldsmith, saying that ‘even his failings leaned to virtue’s side’ (ibid., p. 155). In the same year as Campbell’s biography appeared, Susan Wollaston published her translation of 100 sonnets from Petrarch, preceded by a short thirty-six-page biographical introduction.31 Wollaston was part of a line of women writers who had been captivated by Petrarch’s poems, from the pseudonymous ‘Lucia’, who had translated seventeen poems in 1774, to Charlotte Smith, whose translation of four sonnets had been reprinted several time since they ﬁrst appeared in 1784, Anne Bannerman who had included six sonnets in her 1800 volume of poems,32 and Lady Dacre, who 31

One Hundred Sonnets Translated after the Italian of Petrarch. With the Original Text, Notes and a Life of Petrarch (London, 1841). 32 See Poems by Anne Bannerman (Edinburgh, 1800).

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

335

had translated several poems for Foscolo’s essays. Petrarch’s love lyrics, unlike Dante’s epic poem, found a distinct and responsive female audience in Britain in this period. Wollaston mentions the ‘extreme labor’ it cost her to translate 100 sonnets by ‘the ﬁrst lyric poet perhaps of any age’ (Wollaston, pp. v–vi). She too borrows much from the Epistle to Posterity, noting that her subject was ‘Gifted with a free mind, pliant, and enthusiastic for poetry’ (p. 30).33 Her description of his appearance is an elaboration of a passage from the same source, but is more accurate than Mrs Dobson’s quotation: In his person Petrarca was handsome; his complexion was neither fair nor dark, and his eyes beamed with ﬁre and intelligence.// In youth he was punctiliously careful about his dress, and prided himself exceedingly on his ﬁne hair, though at the age of twenty-ﬁve it had begun rapidly to change to grey. (Wollaston, p. 31)

Wollaston shows herself also to be an acute reader of the poems, noting that Petrarch created a number of devices to give the lyric the variety of epic, and highlighting the variations in language in the Canzoniere: ‘He ingeniously alternates the tender with the harsher verse — the vigorous with the simple style, and weaves them together with a grace at once studied and natural. The creator of a new metre, he gave another cadence — a new impetus to the language [. . .].’ (ibid., p. 33). Like others before her, she noted the change of tone in the poems written after Laura’s death: ‘But, when Laura died, his lyre, which had only hitherto breathed forth the tenderest strains — sweet and consonant to mortal ear, suddenly awoke to a more vigorous, to a sublimer melody — it seemed to pursue that angel-spirit, in tones more harmonized to its ethereal essence’ (ibid., pp. 33–4). But Wollaston’s is an uncritical Life: she says little about her subject’s ﬂaws, and admits in the ﬁnal words of her introduction that if she is guilty of suppression of the truth, this is because ‘the noblest object of a biographer is, to give immortality to virtue, and to awaken in the present age a fervent admiration and respect for the man, who, by his works, has shed an unquenched and unquenchable luster upon that which has passed away’ (ibid., p. 36). However, it was Campbell’s biography that had a greater resonance with the public. Apart from being incorporated in abbreviated form in the 33

Wollaston has, however, omitted Petrarch’s own emphasis on moral philosophy over poetry: ‘Ingenio fui equo potius quam acuto, ad omne bonum studium apto, sed ad moralem precipue philosophiam et ad poeticam prono’. See K. Enenkel, B. de Jong-Crane, and P. Liebregts (eds), Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance. With a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity (Amsterdam–Atlanta, GA, 1998), p. 262.

336

Martin McLaughlin

1859 Bohn translation of the whole Canzoniere (and subsequent reprints), it provoked a critical reaction from Walter Savage Landor, who had already become interested in Petrarch, portraying him in his Pentameron (1837) as a faintly comic ﬁgure, the fat friend of Boccaccio. Landor’s review of the Campbell Life came out in 1843 and amounted almost to an alternative biography and critical essay on the poet. On the Life, he agrees that Laura was married to Hugues de Sade and subscribes to Hazlitt’s view that it was as well that Laura was obdurate in resisting his advances, ‘for the sweetest song ceases when the feathers have lined the nest’, though it is likely that Landor’s discussion is overlaid by his own marital difﬁculties. The critic subscribes to the legend that the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles of Luxemburg, kissed Laura’s forehead at a ball (based on Canzoniere 238),34 but Landor is also alive to Petrarch’s faults. He says he was ‘certainly the very best man that ever was a very vain one’, and he chastises Campbell for excusing Petrarch for the poet’s coldness to his illegitimate son: ‘This has been excused by Mr. Campbell: it may be short of turpitude; but it is farther, much farther from generosity and from justice. [. . .] Of his two children, a son and daughter, not a word is uttered in any of his verses’ (Corrigan, p. 169). However, the most interesting part of the review is the analysis of Petrarch’s poetry. Landor goes further than Campbell in defending conceits and wordplay in the Italian poetry, and argues that there could be genuine passion behind such devices as the puns on Laura’s name: ‘surely there is a true and a pardonable pleasure in cherishing the very sound of what we love. If it belongs to the heart, as it does, it belongs to poetry, and is not easily to be cast aside’ (ibid., p. 160). He is also original in opposing the Italian enthusiasm for the three canzoni on Laura’s eyes (Canzoniere 71–3), and he attacks Petrarch’s sestinas with great satirical wit: If the terza-rima is disagreeable to the ear, what is the sestina, in which there are only six rhymes to thirty-six verses, and all these respond to the same words! Cleverness in distortion can proceed no further. Petrarca wearied the Popes by his repeated solicitations that they should abandon Avignon: he never thought of repeating a sestina to them: it would have driven the most obtuse and obstinate out to sea; and he would never have removed his hands from the tiara until he entered the port of Civita-Vecchia. (ibid., p. 163)

The rest of the essay is taken up with an analysis of speciﬁc poems. He criticises Petrarch for imitating Cino da Pistoia too closely in several 34 See A. Foresti, Aneddoti della vita di Francesco Petrarca, ed. A. Tissoni Benvenuti, con una Premessa di G. Billanovich (Padua, 1977), pp. 86–93.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

337

poems, producing exact quotations to prove this. He distinguishes precisely between the good and weak poems in the collection: ‘Di pensier in pensier’ (Canzoniere 129), ‘Chiare dolci e fresche acque’ (Canzoniere 126), ‘Se il pensier che mi strugge’ (Canzoniere 125), ‘Benedetto sia ’l giorno’ (Canzoniere 61), ‘Solo e pensoso’ (Canzoniere 35), are incomparably better than the ‘Tre sorelle’ (Canzoniere 71–3), by which the Italians are enchanted, and which the poet himself views with great complacency. He is able to point to the ‘sad cacophony’ of the phrase ‘Qual all’alta’ in the middle canzone on Laura’s eyes (Canzoniere 72. 65). He attacks the frigid conceits of Laura turning into the laurel (34. 14) and of the poet metamorphosing into a swan (23. 50–60), and his wit again adds spice to his criticism when he says of Canzoniere 41: ‘Here are Phoebus, Vulcan, Jupiter, Caesar, Janus, Saturn, Mars, Orion, Neptune, Juno, and a chorus of Angels: and they only have fourteen lines to turn about in’ (Corrigan, p. 172). Landor conforms to prevailing taste in preferring the ‘far more pathetic’ poems written after Laura’s death to ‘the importunities of petty fancies’ in the ﬁrst part, but more originally he objects to canzone 360 because it imitates a Cino poem, and as for its opening line full of adjectives, he comments: ‘what a crowd of words at the opening! “Quell’antico mio dolce empio signore.” It is permitted in no other poetry than the Italian to shovel up such a quantity of trash and triviality before the doors’ (ibid., p. 176). Landor even has precise comments to make on the Trionﬁ: he attacks the Trionfo d’amore for being simply a roll-call of proper names, yet has supreme praise for two lines from the Trionfo della morte: ‘Nothing, in this most beautiful of languages, is so beautiful, excepting the lines of Dante on Francesca, as these: “E quella man già tanto desiata/ A me, parlando e sospirando, porse” ’ (Trionfo della morte 2. 10–11). Landor is the most precise, analytical, and witty English critic of Petrarch’s Italian poetry. But what is curious is that his 1843 essay is about the last authoritative voice to be concerned with Petrarch in the century. It is true that the 1850s saw the ﬁrst two complete translations of the Canzoniere: in 1854, Captain Robert Guthrie MacGregor published his version of the Rime in his book of translations, Indian Leisure,35 aware as he was that the popular Bohn’s Library was about to bring out its own complete translation of the Canzoniere and Trionﬁ. This duly appeared ﬁve years later in 1859, with Campbell’s critical summary of his life of Petrarch, originally placed at the end of his biography, used as the Bohn Preface.36 35

R. G. MacGregor, Indian Leisure (London, 1854). The Sonnets, Triumphs and Other Poems of Petrarch now ﬁrst completely translated into English verse by various hands (London, 1859). 36

338

Martin McLaughlin

The 1859 translation had a wider circulation than MacGregor’s, but it was not a new translation, since it merely included already existing versions, from Chaucer to J. H. Merivale, and sometimes provided several translations of the same poem. But after this ﬂurry of biographies, critical essays, and translations, it is astonishing to note that for over a century, from 1859 to 1976, there would be no new complete English translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.37 Having examined the sudden rise in Petrarch’s popularity in Britain in the period 1775–1850, we are left, in conclusion, with the task of explaining the equally dramatic fall of Petrarch’s stock after the 1850s. Apart from Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata sonnet sequence (1881), Petrarch inspires no great writers in the late nineteenth century, and even in that sonnet sequence his presence and inﬂuence is equally shared with Dante’s. Brand’s pioneering study suggested four reasons for the demise of Petrarch’s popularity. It ﬁrst declines rapidly after 1825 because he is not championed by any of the great Romantic poets except Shelley; secondly, the polish of his verse was at the opposite extreme from the ‘language of everyday’ advocated by Wordsworth and other Romantic poets, while his conceits were almost universally denounced; the third reason for his decline was the perceived need for ‘stronger and more violent passions’ (Brand, p. 100), whereas Petrarch’s ‘unearthly’ subject-matter seemed inappropriate; the ﬁnal reason, according to Brand, was the paradox that ‘researches on Petrarch’s life hastened the decline of his popularity’ (p. 101). The realisation that Laura had indeed been married and had borne numerous children made the poet vulnerable both on comic and serious grounds: comically because his plight seemed quite absurd, and Landor’s image of the ageing priest trying to mount a horse stuck in the mind; and seriously because the life and the poetry became morally dubious if the poems were used as texts for learning the Italian language, as they often were, especially for young women eager to learn the language of art, poetry, and love. To these I suggest some other factors be added in the light of the foregoing analysis. On the ﬁrst reason, Petrarch’s lacking a champion amongst the Romantic poets, we should remember that even Shelley, who was the poet’s strongest defender here, still placed Petrarch below Dante in a straight comparison between the two, and this was backed up by 37

The ﬁrst complete twentieth-century translation of Petrarch’s Italian poetry did not appear until the last quarter of the century: Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime sparse’ and Other Poems, trans. and ed. R. M. Durling (Cambridge, MA–London, 1976).

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH BIOGRAPHIES OF PETRARCH

339

Foscolo’s authoritative essays. As for the second motive, Petrarch’s less natural language, it is worth noting that actually in the Italian original, his poetic language is much more ‘natural’ than the two extremes (vulgar and divine) of Dante’s poetry; however, this was not apparent in the rather stilted translations, and in any case the impatience with Petrarch’s conceits intensiﬁed as Romantic taste continued to evolve. On the third reason, the need for stronger content, here what should be borne in mind was Foscolo’s intuition, that the time was ripe for political, patriotic, and revolutionary subjects: the Italian question was to boil over between 1848 and 1861, the period of the Risorgimento, and the British were enthusiastically sympathetic to the cause of Italian independence.38 The newly reunited country instantly canonised Dante, not Petrarch, as the ‘poeta patriae’ on the sixth centenary of his birth, 1865. For the British public, then, after 1860, Dante is the Italian poet par excellence. On the fourth factor, the role of the biographies in Petrarch’s declining popularity, we should also remember the moral difﬁculties posed for Victorian sensibilities by Petrarch’s twenty-year love for a married woman: Dante’s love for Beatrice while she was alive did not last so long, and was thus less problematic for Victorian morality. Moreover, the biographical information exposed Petrarch to the kind of comic criticisms we saw in the works of Carlyle, Macaulay, and Landor, whereas Dante’s biography lacked detail, and in any case never turned him into a ﬁgure of ridicule. One ﬁnal crucial factor should be borne in mind: no amount of biographies could compensate in Petrarch’s case for the failure to ﬁnd a widely accessible English translation of his major Italian work. No translator was able to do for the poet of Laura what Cary had done for Dante, that is to say to make the poems popular with inﬂuential contemporary poets and with the wider public, and to inspire a whole series of other translations. By 1850, there were already four translations of Dante’s complete Comedy, and by 1900 there would be ﬁfteen English translations available; the two complete translations of Petrarch in the 1850s were all that the century could boast. Even Dante’s minor work fared better than Petrarch: between 1846 and 1862 no fewer than four translations of Dante’s Vita nova appeared, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s highly inﬂuential one (1861). Petrarch could boast plenty of biographies but only two full translations in the 1850s, neither of which circulated widely. 38

See D. Mack Smith, ‘Britain and the Italian Risorgimento’, in M. McLaughlin (ed.), Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism: A Festschrift for Peter Brand (Oxford, 2000), pp. 13–31.

340

Martin McLaughlin

Last, but certainly not least, the widespread success and inﬂuence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its cult of Dante puts him at the forefront of British Italophilia, and leads to the high road of English-language Dante-worship, via Ruskin, Norton, Eliot and Pound down to Heaney in the late twentieth century.39 The image of Dante conjured up by iconography of the time was that of the young poet of the Vita nova in Rossetti’s many paintings where Dante’s ﬁgure was based on the fresco of the young Dante attributed to Giotto.40 The image of Petrarch was that of the ageing, overweight cleric, trying to mount a horse in Landor’s Pentameron. It was Ruskin, in fact, Victorian Britain’s ‘arbiter elegantiae’ in the second half of the century, who put the ﬁnal seal on Petrarch’s lack of popularity in this country by aligning him with Raphael. His 1871 Lecture on the Relation between Michelangelo and Tintoret made the following comparison: The Northern temper accepts the scholarship of the Reformation with absolute sincerity, while the Italians seek refuge from it in the partly scientiﬁc and completely lascivious enthusiasms of literature and painting, renewed under classical inﬂuences. We therefore, in the north, produce our Shakespeare and Holbein, they their Petrarch and Raphael. And it is nearly impossible for you to study Shakespeare or Holbein too much, or Petrarch and Raphael too little.41

By 1875, then, a century after the great surge of interest in Petrarch began in Britain, the enthusiasm was all but extinct. Ruskin’s alignment of Petrarch with Raphael meant that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (and for some considerable time afterwards) to be fashionably PreRaphaelite in artistic taste went hand in hand with being Pre-Petrarchan in poetic preferences.

39

See E. Grifﬁths and M. Reynolds (eds), Dante in English (Harmondsworth, 2005). On Dante’s changing iconography at this time, see M. McLaughlin, ‘Introduction: The Centrality of Dante’, in Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism, pp. 1–12. 41 The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols (London, 1906), XXII, 80–1. 40

20

Translating Petrarch PETER HAINSWORTH

THE TRADITION OF PETRARCH TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH is not a glorious one overall. The high points come early, with ‘S’amor non è’ (Canzoniere 132) recast as the Cantus Troili in Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida (l1. 400–20), and the twenty or so versions of Wyatt and Surrey, which range in character from fairly close translation to free adaptations. Those of Wyatt are probably the best that the English tradition achieves, even if their terseness and unmusicality might seem a long way from the originals. Wyatt was also exceptional in producing versions of three canzoni (37, 206, 360),1 which would be followed by Spenser’s version of ‘Standomi un giorno’ (323) (probably via Marot).2 Overall there is little else of Petrarch himself in Elizabethan poetry. English Renaissance Petrarchism certainly exists, but it is precisely that — a form of lyric poetry working in the Petrarchan idiom as it had been developed by ﬁfteenth- and sixteenth-century French and Italian Petrarchists with scant recourse to Petrarch himself.3 There seems to have been most interest in a small number of sonnets, mostly ones celebrating Laura’s beauty and ones built up around paradoxes (such as 132 which is the most translated poem 1

Respectively ‘So feeble is the thread that doth the burden stay’ (LXXXVI), ‘Perdie, I said it not’ (LXXVII), and ‘Mine old dear en’my, my froward master’ (LXXIII). All quotations from Wyatt are from Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth, 1978). 2 The seven sonnets of ‘The Visions of Petrarch’, in Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. R. A. McCabe (Harmondsworth, 1999), pp. 319–22. 3 Thomas Watson’s curious Ekatompathia (1582) is typical (see Chapter 13 by Stephen Clucas in this volume). It draws explicitly much more on Seraﬁno than on Petrarch, and those few poems of Petrarch that are reworked are commonplace choices for the time: ‘If’t bee not loue I feele, what is it then?’ (V⫽132), with a Latin version (VI), ‘Hoc si non sit amor, quod persentisco, quid ergo est?’, ‘Who list to vewe dame Natures cunning skil’ (XXI⫽opening of 248), ‘When ﬁrst these eyes beheld with great delight’ (XXXIX⫽20 (tercets only)), ‘I ioy not peace, where yet no war is found’ (XL⫽134), and in Latin ‘Dum caelum, dum terra tacet, ventusqe silescit’ (LXVI⫽164), ‘Me sibi ter binos annos unumque subegit’ (XC⫽364), and ‘Lugeo iam querulus vitae tot lustra peracta’ (Epilogue⫽365): see Thomas Watson, Poems, ed. E. Arber, English Reprint Society (London, 1870). Proceedings of the British Academy 146, 341–358. © The British Academy 2007.

342

Peter Hainsworth

of all and has a determining effect on Petrarch’s image in English), no interest in the canzoni, barring the isolated examples just mentioned, and little or none in the more obviously serious poems as a whole, including almost all those for the dead Laura, barring the ﬁnal penitential sonnets. Sidney could see no point in going back to ‘poor Petrarch’s long-deceasèd woes’4 and major English poets seem in reality to have agreed, even if they might from time to time come out with a few cursory words of admiration.5 Dante is discovered in the early nineteenth century and in the twentieth century becomes a ﬁgure of prime importance for front-rank poets and critics writing in English. Petrarch remains relegated to the background. For a certain strand of poetic thinking he is the epitome of the false and pretentious in poetry, the literary in the most negative sense. For a long time those translations that were available tended to support this view. A ﬁrst revival of interest occurred in the later eighteenth century, which found the more idyllic landscapes of some poems particularly assimilable to its neo-classical taste, and saw in Petrarch the lamenter of his own woes and of the dead Laura a prototype of contemporary sensibility.6 Here is the opening sonnet (which is the focus of my discussion of subsequent translations) and an anonymous version of it that ﬁrst appeared with a small selection of other poems in 1777:

5 4

Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono, del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono

Astrophil and Stella, 15. Still fundamental for English Petrarchism are G Watson, The English Petrarchans: A Critical Bibliography of the ‘Canzoniere’ (London, 1967) and P. Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background (London, 1964). The overviews of A. Meozzi, ‘Il petrarchismo in Inghilterra’, in Il petrarchismo europeo (Pisa, 1934), pp. 167–308, and J. G. Scott, Les sonnets Élisabéthains: Les sources et l’apport personnel (Paris, 1929) are also still useful. Other recent general studies are T. P. Roche, Jr, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989); H. Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY–London, 1995); W. J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore, MD–London, 2003). For Wyatt and Spenser, in particular, see Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background; R. W. Dasenbrock, Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce (Baltimore, MD–London, 1991); and P. Hainsworth, ‘Sir Thomas Wyatt e la ricezione del Canzoniere del Petrarca nel sec. XVI in Inghilterra’, in P. Salwa (ed.), La tradizione del Petrarca e l’unità della cultura europea (Warsaw, 2005), pp. 289–304. A useful selection of relevant texts is contained in Petrarch in England: An Anthology of Parallel Texts from Wyatt to Milton, ed. with an Introduction by J. D’Amico (Ravenna, 1979). 6 See F. J.-L. Mouret, Les traducteurs anglais de Pétrarque 1754–1798 (Paris, 1976). 5

TRANSLATING PETRARCH

343

fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono. 10

5

10

Ma ben veggio or sí come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me mesdesmo meco mi vergogno; et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto, e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno. All ye who list, in wildly-warbling strain, those sighs with which my youthful heart was fed; ere while fond passion’s maze I wont to tread, ere while I liv’d estranged to manlier pen; for all these vain desires, and griefs as vain, those tears, those plaints by am’rous fancy bred; if ye by Love’s strong power have e’er been led, pity, nay haply pardon I may gain. Oft on my cheek the conscious crimson glows, and sad reﬂection tells — ungrateful thought!— how jeering crowds have mock’d my love-lorn woes; But folly’s fruits are penitence and shame, with this just maxim, I’ve too clearly bought that man’s applause is but a transient dream.7

Even making allowances for changes of taste, it would be difﬁcult to read this as representing great poetry, but probably even for the translator Petrarch was not a great poet. The ‘Advertisement’ justiﬁes presenting only a selection of poems ‘by reason of the great difﬁculty of the verse, the perplexities of the author, and the quibbles with which he abounds that cannot be translated; besides were all these sonnets translated, fewer perhaps would read more of them than I have comprised in this little collection; for sweet as they are, their number must cloy, being but the same thoughts on the same subject’. He goes on to say that he has included the Italian texts because ‘otherwise some of the English sonnets may appear ridiculous, particularly those abounding with “concetti”, which, when confronted with the Italian, will appear to owe their singularities and perhaps too frequent want of poetic harmony, to an endeavour of strictly copying Petrarch’s singular style, where he often sacriﬁces harmony to 7 Originally in the anonymous Sonnets and Odes of Petrarch, with the Original Text and some Account of his Life (London, 1777), reprinted (with corrections) in 1808. The translations are usually ascribed to John Nott, although quite different versions of this poem and others are given under Nott’s name in Bohn (for which, see note 9).

344

Peter Hainsworth

quaint conceits’. It is an only too recognisable English response to Petrarch, and not one that nineteenth-century translations will do all that much to counter. The conventional idiom of eighteenth-century poetry gradually faded, but the highly literary tone remained. It is strikingly evident in the ﬁrst complete versions of the Canzoniere in English, which began to make their appearance in the mid-nineteenth century. The very ﬁrst was by Captain Robert Gutherie MacGregor of the Bengal Relieved List, and appeared in his Indian Leisure in 1854.8 Some of the eighteenth-century versions and some of MacGregor’s appeared in the one English edition of Petrarch ever to enjoy wide circulation. This was the Bohn Petrarch’s Sonnets and Poems of 1859,9 which included the Triumphs10 as well as the whole Canzoniere. The translations were, as the Preface said, ‘of various hands’, almost all made in the preceding hundred years. In many cases Bohn gave more than one version, perhaps not always productively. The versions of the opening quatrain of the ﬁrst sonnet give the ﬂavour of the whole volume and hence of what Petrarch tended to mean for the nineteenth century and beyond: Ye who in rhymes dispersed the echoes hear Of those sad sighs with which my heart I fed When early youth my mazy wanderings led, Fondly diverse from what I now appear [. . .] (Earl of Charlemont) O ye who list in scattered verse the sound Of all those sighs with which my heart I fed, When I, by youthful error ﬁrst misled, Unlike my present self in heart was found [. . .] (John Nott) Ye, who may listen to each idle strain Bearing those sighs on which my heart was fed In life’s ﬁrst morn, by youthful error led, (Far other then from what I now remain!) [. . .] (Barbarina, Lady Dacre)11 8

R. G. MacGregor, Indian Leisure (London, 1854), which included also translations from Alﬁeri and Voltaire (among others). MacGregor had published a ﬁrst selection of Petrarch translations in 1851. 9 Bohn’s Illustrated Library: Petrarch, The Sonnets, Triumphs and Other Poems of Petrarch, Translated into English Verse by Various Hands, With the Life of the Poet by Thomas Campbell (London, 1859), subsequently reprinted various times by George Bell, London. 10 A full translation had been made around 1553 of the Triumphs by Lord Morley (1476–1556). The Bohn versions are again by ‘various hands’. 11 Originally published as follows: J. Caulfeild, Earl of Charlemont [1728–99], Select Sonnets of Petrarch (Dublin 1822), now more easily available in Lord Charlemont’s ‘History of Italian Poetry

TRANSLATING PETRARCH

345

It was not an idiom that would quickly disappear. Here is William Dudley Foulke in 1915: O ye who hear in these my scattered rhymes the sound of sighs that on my heart did prey, drawn from the errors of those youthful times when I was other than I am today [. . .] 12

Given the unfashionable character of translations such as these and the prevailing admiration for Dante, it is not surprising that there is a remarkable dearth of English versions of Petrarch’s poems from the 1920s until at least the mid-1970s. R. M. Durling ﬁlled an obvious gap in the academic market when he brought out his bilingual edition in 1976,13 though the fact that his versions were in prose suggested that they were to be read as having a mainly ancillary function. Durling has remained in print, but verse has made a strong comeback since the early 1980s, with various complete versions and selections of the Canzoniere appearing, most notably from Nicholas Kilmer (1980),14 Mark Musa (1985),15 James Wyatt Cook (1995),16 J. G. Nichols (2000),17 Frederick Jones (2000),18 Anthony Mortimer (2002),19 and David Young (2004),20 and most of them have appeared in easily obtainable paperback editions. All of these reﬂect the deep-rooted changes in poetic taste which have occurred over the last century. A contemporary translator cannot deploy lexical archaisms such as ‘ye’, ‘list’, ‘fondly, ‘strain’ and imagery such as ‘life’s ﬁrst morn’ which mark the versions of poem 1 just cited as poetic (or pseudo-poetic). He or she must also try to make as little use as possible of syntactic inversions, which have the same function and at the same time facilitate translation from Dante to Metastasio’, ed. G. Talbot, 3 vols (Lewiston, NY, 2000), II, 1–125 (see also Chapter 19 by Martin McLaughlin in this volume); J. Nott [1751–1825], Petrarch Translated in a Selection of his Sonnets and Odes (London, 1808); B. Lady Dacre [1767–1854], ‘Translations from Petrarch’, included in U. Foscolo, Essays on Petrarch (London, 1823). 12 Some Love Songs of Petrarch, trans. and annotated and with a Biographical Introduction by W. D. Foulke (London, 1915). 13 Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. R. M. Durling (Cambridge, MA, 1976). 14 Francis Petrarch, Songs and Sonnets from Laura’s Lifetime, trans. N. Kilmer (London, 1980). 15 Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works, trans. M. Musa (Oxford, 1985). Also complete in Canzoniere (Bloomington, IN, 1996). 16 Petrarch’s Songbook, trans. J. W. Cook (Binghamton, NY, 1995). 17 Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans. J. G. Nichols (Manchester, 2000). 18 Francesco Petrarca, The Canzoniere (Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta), trans. F. J. Jones, 2 vols (Market Harborough, 2000). 19 Petrarch, Canzoniere: Selected Poems, trans. A. Mortimer (Harmondsworth, 2002). 20 The Poetry of Petrarch, trans. D. Young (New York, 2004).

346

Peter Hainsworth

into rhyming verse. These are used with more freedom by the Bohn translators than was normal in early nineteenth-century poetry and are probably the main technical reason why their versions are generally unsatisfying. Along with a much more prosaic syntax, modern translators have generally treated rhyme with much greater caution, not only because of the evident straitjacket it imposes, but also, I think, because if Petrarchan schemes are maintained, especially in the sonnet, the English still risks assuming the rather stultifying conventional air which the translator is usually set on avoiding. Solutions have ranged from rejecting rhyme altogether to using irregular or partial rhyme schemes or various forms of assonance. Unsurprisingly the less constrained by any form of rhyme the translator has chosen to be, the closer the results have been overall to Petrarch’s literal sense, though unscrambling his syntax has sometimes been a problem. On the other hand abandoning rhyme and opting for a generally prosaic register runs the opposite risk: if the form and expression are pared down or stripped away in order to keep to the conventions of modern English and American poetry, there may seem to be little left. Here is how some of the translators I mentioned negotiate their way through the opening of the ﬁrst sonnet. Mark Musa leaves rhyme aside: O you who hear within these scattered verses the sound of sighs with which I fed my heart in my ﬁrst errant youthful days when I in part was not the man I am today [. . .]

James Wyatt Cook also avoids rhyme: O you that hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs that I used to feed my heart in my ﬁrst youthful error, when I was in part a different man than now I am [. . .]

J. G. Nichols keeps a mixture of rhyme and assonance: You who can hear in scattered rhymes the sound of all that sighing which once fed my heart in my ﬁrst youthful error, when in part I was a person of a different kind [. . .]

And Anthony Mortimer follows a similar path: All you that hear in scattered rhymes the sound of sighs on which I used to feed my heart in youthful error when I was in part another man, and not what I am now [. . .]

TRANSLATING PETRARCH

347

Frederic Jones, heroically, keeps full rhymes and the ABBA pattern (to be followed by a second ABBA quatrain): O you who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those laments on which my heart I fed, when ﬁrst to love’s sweet erring I was led and myself in part a different man I found.

I would say rather impressionistically that Musa focuses most directly on the sense while keeping the most insistent beat, Mortimer injects most interest and resonance into the phrasing and rhythms of the English, and Nichols falls somewhere between the two. Jones stands somewhat apart in being willing to accept syntactic distortions which attach him much more ﬁrmly to the nineteenth-century tradition, even if his lexicon is not noticeably antiquated. Cook, somewhat puzzlingly, given his refusal of rhyme, is even more willing to depart from modern syntax.21 The other three have really a good deal in common. How much they have in common is evident if they are put beside Nicholas Kilmer, whose ﬁrst three lines cover some of the material in Petrarch’s second quatrain: These verses hold the sound of the grief my heart has eaten. My life has turned the boy’s mistake into a different man. Regret and hope have drawn me into such empty sadness.

Kilmer obviously has set himself a quite different agenda. Following in the footsteps of Lowell’s Imitations, he consciously reworks Petrarch as if he were a modern poet, casting rhyme and rhythm of a traditional sort aside, revitalising the metaphors at the risk of distorting their sense, amplifying and curtailing at will. Here and throughout his selection the result is a long way from the literal sense of the original and at times from standard modern prose conventions (as in the syntax of l. 2, if I understand it correctly), but undoubtedly there is an energy here that is not apparent in any of the other versions I have quoted. For something like an equivalent we have to look to Wyatt (who did not translate poem 1), and what he managed in, for instance, his version of ‘Passa la nave mia’ (189):

21

Even more pronounced in Cook’s version of the second quatrain: ‘Whoever knows of love by trial, from him/ if pardon none, compassion then I hope/ to ﬁnd, for this the various style in which/ I weep, debate these vain hopes, this vain woe.’

348

Peter Hainsworth My galley charged with forgetfulness Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass ’Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas, That is my lord, steereth with cruelness; [. . .]22

I plunged into the sharp seas of Petrarch translation in 1995, when I signed a contract to translate about a third of the poems in the Canzoniere, together with a few other Italian poems and a selection of Latin writings. Though not all the translations I have been discussing had appeared at that point, I found myself confronting almost immediately the questions which they raise, implicitly or explicitly, regarding form and language, literality and free invention. I say almost immediately because I made one fundamental resolution before confronting them. An almost banal point is regularly made about verse-translation (and all literary translation) which I resolved to take seriously, instead of making a nod in its direction and then struggling on vainly all the same. Dante declared that ‘nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si può de la sua loquela in altra transmutare sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia’ (nothing that has been shaped as poetry with musical constraint can be transferred from one language to another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony) (Convivio 1. 7. 14). We can add to the musical texture of a poem, its precise effects of syntax and register, the particular connotations of the speciﬁc lexical choices, and the resonances with other texts in the language. In fact all the features of the text which go beyond literal meaning can only be echoed at intervals and in part in the target language, if at all. The literal sense itself may well be multiple or ambiguous and can be transported into another language only at the cost of drastic simpliﬁcation. I told myself from the start to try to accept this situation rather than ﬁght against it. Whatever I came up with would have to offer at best partial solutions. I would aim to present literal meanings that I could reasonably claim corresponded to literal meanings in the original, with the same syntactic logic if not always the same syntax. I would keep the same formal relations between parts of a poem, even if the parts did not have the same form, and I would try to highlight some of the features of the writing that seemed to be particularly highlighted in the original—for instance, antitheses or epigrammatic closures — but I would not try on the whole to produce direct English equivalents for Petrarch’s music or his particular sort of suggestiveness.

22

Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems, XIX.

TRANSLATING PETRARCH

349

I knew that it would always be possible to say that too much had been lost and what was being presented was even more distorting than is usually the case with translations. Rhythmic subtlety, musical correspondences, semantic ambiguity, indeﬁnite suggestiveness, and a host of other features that the sympathetic reader registers at some level even if they resist analysis are essential elements in Petrarch’s poetry. Conversely literal meanings have often been felt to be relatively weak. A contrast is traditionally drawn with Dante, whose wonderful manipulations of language are commonly read as directed to supporting and enriching a complex and powerful message. Even within the narrower thematic limits which he set himself it is not immediately evident that Petrarch wants to convey a message or a set of messages in the way that Dante does, except perhaps in his political canzoni and the sonnets against the Avignonese court. In many instances the artistry may primarily have aesthetic purposes, though the sheer beauty of the text may also be rendered problematic. In any event the strategy I envisaged plainly ran serious risks. My mental response to doubts of this sort was robust. In the ﬁrst place I have always been convinced that Petrarch does have interesting and important things to say. He is the great poet of beauty, desire, time, and death, a poet who is acutely conscious of not being able to make convincing intellectual or spiritual sense of any of these things or of his compulsion to write about them, which he fears may be more malaise than divine inspiration, but who constantly re-engages with these questions in ever different but hypnotically repetitive ways, often in terms that are not all that remote from those of modern thinkers who have concerned themselves with the ambiguous and contradictory intricacies of language and desire. The canzoni articulate the problems most explicitly, but the sonnets present them again and again in abbreviated and allusive form. Later imitations make it hard to see certain celebrations of the beauty of the donna as anything but formulaic, but a series of poems such as 154, 156, 159, 160, and 192, which may seem very similar at ﬁrst reading, in fact call into question in a variety of different ways the status of what they are celebrating and of the act of celebration itself. Similarly the juxtaposition of a sonnet blessing every aspect of the experience of Laura (61) and one asking God for release (62) because it is a destructive waste of time and energy effectively closes off any possibility of evaluating the signiﬁcance of the beautiful in life and poetry within the text of the Canzoniere, at least at this moment, but lays it open for the reader to resolve or not resolve the issue as he or she wishes or is able. Aiming to produce translations which somehow gave prominence to explicit and

350

Peter Hainsworth

implicit presentations of such issues seemed to be in conformity with Petrarch’s central poetic nuclei. The question was of course how to do it. Again one choice seemed obvious, even compelling. There seemed to be no alternative to a plain style, that is, one that did not immediately draw attention to itself and its differences from modern prose and which therefore directed the attention at least as much to content as to style, at least in the ﬁrst instance, though I felt there should be mechanisms I could use which would work the other way. What had to be resisted on the other hand was the pull of the nineteenth-century tradition as represented by Bohn. And there was also the question of Petrarchism as a whole which I expected (correctly as it turned out) to have a strong submerged force. I felt that, for centuries, not just in English but in Italian and probably other languages too, Petrarch had been the prisoner of an idiom which had grown from and on his practice but which was not ultimately his. It was as though he were the prisoner of his Renaissance children. Legitimate they might be, but several generations down the line they were oppressing him. It was easy enough to rule out ‘thou’ for ‘you’ and ‘list’ for ‘listen’, but archaic terms with no convincing modern alternative, beginning with ‘lady’ for ‘donna’, were much more of a problem. So too were those recurrent adjectives that might still exist in modern English but which modern poets avoided as if they were vampires, most evidently the obvious versions of ‘bello’ (more than 300 appearances in 366 poems) — ‘lovely’, ‘beautiful’, or, heaven forbid, ‘beauteous’ or ‘fair’. Nicholas Kilmer had tried explicitly to produce a version of what Petrarch might have written if he had been reincarnated as an English or American poet writing in 1980. I thought this was an exciting thing to do, which worked extremely well as a kind of commentary to be read against the originals and which had a great deal to say about historical differences. Some element of commentary and reinterpretation is necessary in any reading of a fourteenth-century poet, especially the reading implicit in translation into a modern foreign language, but I knew that I wanted my versions to be closer to the originals and to show in themselves a perceptible sense of the difference between Petrarch’s poetic culture and our own, some elements of strangeness or estrangement that might intermittently remind the aware reader that the originals had been written more than six centuries ago. I thought at ﬁrst that the estrangement might be achieved largely through the ways in which the poems position themselves rhetorically. Modern poets normally don’t address their readers in the way Petrarch does in sonnet 1, let alone talk about the appearance and

TRANSLATING PETRARCH

351

qualities of women they love in the terms Petrarch uses of Laura. If my prosy English stayed at all close to Petrarch’s literal sense, the effect, I thought, was going to be of oddness with respect to modern norms, and perhaps at times the oddness would even be quite forceful. I thus put myself in the same camp as the other modern translators I mentioned above, even before I had read them. Within that camp I opted for the section which sets its face against rhyme. I decided that I would keep pentameters for Petrarch’s endecasillabi and six- or eight-syllable iambics for his settenari, but that was all. In fact I would allow myself to break up metronomic beats quite frequently to avoid monotony as well as for my own convenience and from time to time would have elastic moments to deal with Petrarch’s lists. My reasoning was that, even if a strict Petrarchan scheme was abandoned, and something like a Shakespearian sonnet taken up instead, keeping up rhymes in English risks being unproductively taxing. The translator risks putting all his or her efforts into preserving a viable sense within the scheme adopted, with rhymes that are anyway always weaker in their effects, musical or otherwise, than those of the original. I did attempt a rhyming version of sonnet 1, which demonstrates my own limitations clearly enough, and perhaps also some of the barely avoidable perils of rhyming generally.

5

10

You who can hear the sound in scattered rhymes of those sighs on which I once fed my heart in the ﬁrst error of my youthful times, when I was other than I am in part, for these displays of tears and argument amid my vain hopes and vain suffering, from any who have learnt love’s real extent, I hope for pity, not just pardoning. But I well see now that for long my name has been ridiculous, and often hence it’s only to myself I show my shame. And shame’s the fruit of all my vain confusion, and penitence, and clear cognizance that pleasure in this world is brief illusion.

The alliteration has survived with some force in places (lines 8 and 11). More importantly so has the syntax, together with some of the signiﬁcant internal break-points (notably ll. 8, 10, and 13). But the rhyming makes for strains which are completely absent from the original. Apart from the imperfect ‘hence:cognizance’ (ll. 10, 13) and the weak ‘suffering:pardoning’ (ll. 6, 8), there is an uncomfortable word-order in lines 4 (‘in part’ would be better after ‘I was’) and 10 (‘hence often’ would be better than

352

Peter Hainsworth

‘often hence’), while confusion:illusion eliminates the image of the dream from the ﬁnal line, even if the overall sense is kept. And all this effort, I felt, had gone into manufacturing a sonnet which was not Petrarchan in its rhyme scheme (it would undoubtedly have been worse if I had maintained Petrarch’s ABBA ABBA CDE CDE pattern) and which overall was ponderous and laboured. My sonnet had at best something of the tone, I thought, of Pietro Bembo, and those who followed his precepts, but too much of Petrarch himself had evaporated. Dropping rhyme on the other hand evoked the spectre of recreating some of Petrarch’s effects, apart from those achieved through rhyme, not necessarily the same effect at the same moment, and certainly not all his effects, but something nonetheless. Perhaps it would also be a way of catching a measure of his elusive tone, or at least alluding to it. All these were preliminary thoughts and resolutions of a fairly general sort. They bore up well enough in the actual practice of translating so far as they went, although I had repeatedly to remind myself that major losses were inevitable and that whatever I produced was indeed provisional and partial. But in at least one respect practice pushed me in a signiﬁcantly different direction from the one I had envisaged. The style I found myself adopting was not really a plain one. Though it was not hard to hold obviously archaic poetic language at a distance, words such as ‘bello’ and ‘donna’ remained problematic and seemed to occur in greater numbers than I had expected. What was to be done with ‘dolce’, ‘soave’, ‘leggiadro’, ‘vago’, etc., which all carry different connotations and are functional in Petrarch’s Italian as well as decorative? What about their related substantives (‘dolcezza’, ‘vaghezza’, etc.) or about others such as ‘valore’, which proved particularly troublesome? I tried various possibilities at different times, including omission, feeling that variation was quite admissible since neither these words nor any others constitute a technical vocabulary; it is part of Petrarch’s anti-scholasticism to go against the ostensible conceptual precision of Cavalcanti or Dante in his moral canzoni. At a certain point I realised that the important thing was not to allow whatever solution I opted for to dominate the line or the poem. Words such as ‘bello’ or ‘dolce’ are commonly absorbed into the overall texture of Petrarch’s verse, though there are some striking exceptions. For instance the climactic conclusion to poem 4, ‘onde sì bella donna al mondo nacque’ throws ‘bella’ into relief, but the famous opening of 126, ‘Chiare, fresche e dolci acque’, does not allow any of its three adjectives to weigh more than the others or more than the ‘acque’ to which they refer. Instead it integrates the four main elements of the line together through assonance, alliteration, and the

TRANSLATING PETRARCH

353

placing of the accents. In English ‘beautiful’, ‘sweet’, ‘gentle’, and the like seem both vague and over-emphatic, as if they occupy too much of the material space of the line in question. There was usually no way round the problem in the terms within which I was working. The version I eventually settled on for 4. 14 was ‘where such a lovely being had her birth’, sacriﬁcing ‘donna’ in view of the inappropriate connotations of both ‘lovely lady’ and ‘lovely woman’. On the whole I felt that the line was acceptable as a version of Petrarchan closure because of the binding alliteration between two quite strongly accented words (being, birth), which together with ‘such’ also deﬂected attention from the all too magnetic ‘lovely’. While I kept the obvious ‘sweet’ for ‘dolce’ in many instances, for the opening of 126 I followed another set of connotations and opted for ‘Clear waters, cool and fresh’, a line that no self-respecting English poet of today would think of writing but which I could claim was at least discreetly anodyne. The difﬁculty with ‘bello’ and company is just the most obvious manifestation of a general problem that is one of the prime reasons for Petrarch’s lack of popularity in English through the ages. English poetry likes to be concrete or speciﬁc where Petrarch and the whole central Italian lyric tradition deriving from him are generic or abstract. It is no accident that English translators and their readers have preferred Dante, Michelangelo, Montale, and even Belli, all of whom can be read or recast (with some straining) as quasi-English poets, over Petrarch, Foscolo, Leopardi, and Ungaretti. Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch are satisfying as English poems because of the concrete force which they substitute for Petrarch’s deliberate attenuations. If I was convinced that Petrarch was ‘saying something’ and wanted to make him ‘say something’ in English, almost inevitably I would have to be more concrete than he literally was in Italian. There was obviously a tension here, and the risk that the eventual result would be a ricocheting between the more concrete (demanded by English practice) and the more generic (demanded by literality). But I also thought that the unevenness could sometimes be masked through sound effects, which might bind together what otherwise was disjunctive. After all that was what Petrarch himself did, though that was no guarantee that the same tactic would work in English. I also felt I was becoming notionally Petrarchan in a way I had not expected. Petrarch’s style becomes the model for high lyric poetry during the Renaissance and as such the epitome of literariness. In the terms of its own time it is much more a middle style, which fuses together elements taken from high vernacular poetry (the stilnovo, lyric moments of the

354

Peter Hainsworth

Comedy), and from the classics and the Bible, with others that go back to poesia giocosa or derive from the free, conversational manner that became almost the norm for fourteenth-century verse. A high style as such is evident in the political canzoni but rarely in the love poems, though the metamorphosis canzone is something of an exception. At the same time in this context ‘middle’ clearly does not mean the language of good prose, which broadly speaking was what I thought I would aim at before starting, but rather a literary language of a certain kind. Though I was uncertain how satisfactory my admission of ‘sweet’, ‘beautiful’, and other words in the same register would turn out to be, I felt that it was worth running the risk. Kept within limits, and with a good measure of luck, the resulting mixture might suggest something of the harmonisation of disparate features that characterises the original. The above is something of a post-factum rationalisation. In practice verse translation means making all sorts of minor, highly speciﬁc decisions that may seem at the time to have little to do with general principles, while hoping that, when exhaustion or exasperation signals that it is time to stop, the results are not absurdly outlandish. Poem 1 is a revealing testcase and not for nothing have I quoted so many versions of its opening. That this should be so is determined by Petrarch himself. Like the whole tradition in which he was working he knew that the captatio benevolentiae is crucial. His own is wonderfully subtle. It has a music which had not been heard before in Italian poetry. It is also a marvel of sonnet engineering, one that will turn out to be the template for how the structuring of parts can and will be repeated and varied in the 316 sonnets that follow. With architectural elegance it combines drama, pathos, self-display, and selfdenial, the various strands all coming together in a ﬁnal line which afﬁrms triumphantly the very beauty whose value the poem is seriously questioning. What sympathetic reader of the original would not embrace the contradictions and read further? After all an unconvinced one could always close the book and look elsewhere for spiritual nourishment. I am sure that every modern translator feels more daunted by this poem than many that follow, whatever difﬁculties they pose, but struggles, perhaps enjoyably, to produce something that will be more or less serviceable and will not actually put the ﬁrst-time English reader off the Canzoniere. I myself came to it after trying a good number of poems from within the collection and then I found myself going back to revise what I had done with it more than with any other poem. At various times I found myself striking out in different directions from those taken by others, but in the end, for good or ill, accepted the constraints which the poem imposes as inevitable.

TRANSLATING PETRARCH

355

The opening quatrain was indeed troublesome, beginning with the very ﬁrst words. Commentators point out that ‘Voi ch’ascoltate’ echoes the openings of poems by Dante, Guittone, and others.23 They also cite a biblical verse from Jeremiah, ‘o vos omnes qui transitis per viam, adtendite et videte si est dolor sicut est dolor meus’ (Lamentations 1. 12), which it could be argued has resonances for the whole poem. These are precisely the sort of echoes that I believe cannot be captured in English and have to be listed in a note if at all. In fact I wanted to avoid any slight echoes of the King James Bible or traditional poetic usage as inappropriate and rejected ‘O you who hear’ or ‘All you who hear’ for that reason. I thought for a while of ‘You who can hear’, which simply follows common current usage and is not a marked phrase signalling out those capable of hearing from the deaf or from those who are acoustically impeded in other ways. I also liked this phrasing because it ﬁtted with the stylistic register I was aiming for. What followed was much more difﬁcult; literal versions of ‘in rime sparse’ such as ‘in scattered verse’ are opaque and will need to be glossed in a note (as is the case in Italian too). Whatever the gloss, ‘scattered verse’ (or anything like it) sounds strange in English, whereas ‘rime sparse’ is not a strange phrase in Italian, and not just because Petrarch has made it well known. In this context ‘rime’ means poems in the vernacular, which at the time were inevitably rhyming. English ‘rhymes’ in this sense is antiquated, and ‘verse’ also seems old fashioned, at least here, as does ‘verses’, which in addition creates rhythmic problems for the phrase that follows, whether it keeps to ‘the sound of sighs’ or not. And then there is ‘scattered’: ‘sparse’ (or ‘sparsi’ or ‘sparti’) is a talismanic word for Petrarch, which he applies most strikingly to Laura’s hair ﬂowing free in the wind, most famously in ‘Erano i cape’ d’oro all’aura sparsi’ (90). Here it is usually taken as suggesting that the poems were previously known individually or in small groups or else that, put together they do not form a unitary whole, unlike the great poems of antiquity or perhaps even Dante. What adds to the difﬁculty is that the participle suggests more a state than an action, though the latter is presupposed, whereas the English ‘scattered’ quite forcefully suggests that someone or something has been scattering. I wondered whether it were possible to ﬁnd some word or phrase without connotations of this sort. The problem of ‘rime sparse’ merged with that of the next phrase, ‘il suono de’ sospiri’, the 23

For a very full list, see Santagata’s notes in Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, edizione commentata a c. di Mario Santagata (Milan, 1996).

356

Peter Hainsworth

object of ‘ascoltate’ which demands to be integrated with what has come before. I felt that, leaving aside the troublingly commonplace alliteration, ‘the sound of sighs’, ‘the sounds of the sighs’ (if it could be made to ﬁt rhythmically), and ‘the sound of sighing’ were all a little too close to the idiom of Rogers and Hammerstein for my liking. This, I began to feel, was one of the instances where I should accept the preference of English verse for more concrete imagery. I found myself focusing on the general sense of the quatrain as a whole, which I decided was most convincing as something like: ‘You who can perceive in these jumbled poems some traces of the emotions I indulged myself in and cultivated when I was younger and more misguided than I am’. Whatever else, I wanted this sense to come through quite clearly and forcefully. The eventual result of these by no means systematic ruminations was as follows: You who can hear in incoherent poems the echoes of those sighs I fed my heart on in my ﬁrst phase of youthful waywardness when part of me was different from today [. . .]

In many ways I liked this. The opening couplet does have a deﬁnite sense, and one which corresponds ﬁrmly with the sense of the original as I interpret it. There is also sound patterning of a Petrarchan sort in the sequence ‘can hear’ — ‘incoherent’ — ‘echoes’, but a pattern which is not emphatic, and not (I ﬂattered myself) banal. Lines 3 and 4 manage to keep to the register of the ﬁrst two lines: a relatively conversational and modern ‘phase’ replaces the generic ‘time’, ‘error’ is abandoned for the more concrete ‘waywardness’. Overall, in spite of the relative modernity of the phrasing, I felt that a certain otherness is maintained, principally through the archaic imagery of the opening two lines, and then through the complexity of the syntax and sense of the whole. The self-satisfaction did not last. My version is plainly open to various serious criticisms. There is perhaps too much energy and concreteness in it; the music (such as it is) just doesn’t sound like most readers’ sense of what Petrarch sounds like; and the idiom and tone are brusquely conversational, while the syntax (in lines 1–8) is convoluted by English standards. And then one could object that ‘You who can hear in incoherent poems/ the echoes’ for ‘in rime sparse il suono’ is more a gloss than a translation, and, what is more, one that closes off options that the original leaves open. The ‘rime sparse’ might indeed be ‘poems known in small groups here and there throughout Italy’ as much as ‘poems that do not form a single uni-

TRANSLATING PETRARCH

357

ﬁed composition’. Perhaps I had come down too strongly on one side; perhaps after all ‘scattered’ was the better alternative, or at least, the less bad. I rewrote as follows: You who hear echoes in my scattered verse of those sighs which I fed my heart upon during my early youthful waywardness when part of me was different from today [. . .]

This, I decided, would do, at least for me. I had managed to keep the literal sense of the ﬁrst phrase without introducing a ‘can’; ‘echoes’ was an appropriate concession to English concreteness; line 3 kept Petrarch’s syntax but because of ‘waywardness’ (rather than ‘error’) had a certain English sinewiness. And ‘scattered’ seemed a good deal less enigmatic because of the insertion of ‘my’; even if it needed a gloss, so too did the Italian. Overall the quatrain had a certain ﬂow and an energy quotient which was not too much of an imposition on the original. The result was modest enough, given the labour, but I felt acceptable. The rest of the poem proved much less unmanageable, at least within the terms I had set myself. Here is the full text: You who hear echoes in my scattered verse of those sighs which I fed my heart upon during my early youthful waywardness when part of me was different from today, 5

10

for my erratic wails and worrying, caught between vacuous hopes and vacuous pain, should someone know from loving what love is, I hope they’ll grant me pity, not just pardon. But I can now well see how I’ve long been a butt for all to jibe at. So I often suffer my shame with no-one but myself. And shame’s the fruit of my vacuity, and repenting, and knowing clearly that what’s beauty to the world is a brief dream.

Following on from ‘waywardness’ for ‘errore’ I opted for a fairly energetic line 5, at the risk of overemphasising the negative implications with ‘erratic’ for ‘vario’ and the possibly melodramatic ‘wails and worrying’ for a literal version along the lines of ‘weep and reason/argue’. Similarly I preferred ‘vacuous’ to ‘vano’ in line 6, as slightly more forceful than ‘vain’; this had the added advantage of being easily picked up in ‘vacuity’ for ‘vaneggiare’ in line 12. The archaism ‘proof’ would have been convenient

358

Peter Hainsworth

in line 7; I subsumed the notion of experience into the anaphoric ‘loving [. . .] love’, which I thought had a quasi-poetic air without being attributable to any speciﬁc poetic idiom. ‘[P]ity [. . .] pardon’ in line 8 were the obvious choices and kept Petrarch’s alliteration, which I hoped was not too emphatic in the English at this point since it was already present in the octave as a whole. Something like the rhythmic contrast which Petrarch has at the start of the sextet seemed to be achievable in English through the use of accented monosyllables and through keeping the break half-way through line 10 (‘But I can now well see how I’ve long been/ a butt for all to jibe at’), even if the ambiguities of ‘fui’, which is perhaps (but not deﬁnitely) a Latin perfect, and the nuances of ‘favola’, which is a good deal more rueful than ‘butt’, are lost. Conversely to the practice I found myself generally following, I felt that it was necessary to reduce the unusually expressive alliteration of the original line 11 (‘di me medesmo meco mi vergogno’). I thought any equivalent would be almost comic in English, the stress on the self being quite evident, though it may be that in fact I imposed self-restraint on Petrarch at a moment when he himself is indulging ﬂeetingly in self-absorbed guilt and pleasure. The original ﬁnal line is a rhythmic and musical tour de force and semantically open—in particular ‘piace’ suggests the sensuous or sensual appeal of beauty as well as pleasure as a whole, and ‘al mondo’ suggests both ‘to the world’ (that is, perhaps, to the human race as a whole, or to people in general as opposed to myself) and ‘in this world’ (as opposed to heaven). It was plain to me from the start that I could get only a small part of this to pass into English. I tried to follow Petrarch’s build-up by breaking the rhythm of line 13 as he does, whilst keeping close to its literal sense. For line 14 itself I found a modest amount of alliteration to bind the two parts together (‘beauty to the world [. . .] brief dream’), but then I had to settle for one set of connotations of the original sense. In any event it was time to stop with this poem. I fell back on the principle that I had formulated initially — that no translation is perfect, and that the possibilities will end only when the translator calls a halt. The version I had settled on was readable enough and I could justify my interpretations and choices up to a point, and argue that my general strategy of freeing Petrarch from Petrarchism was a valid one. It was a sufﬁcient basis for going on, even if I was no more likely to turn the tide of opinion in English-speaking countries in Petrarch’s favour than anyone else.