Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature : Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular 9781107503922, 9781107041660

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BOCCAC C I O AN D T HE I N V E N TI O N O F I TA L I A N L I T E R AT U R E

Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron but also as scribe of Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written entirely in Boccaccio’s hand, Martin Eisner brings together material philology and literary history to reveal the multiple ways Boccaccio authorizes this vernacular literary tradition. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of Boccaccio as a biographer, storyteller, editor, and scribe, who constructs arguments, composes narratives, compiles texts, and manipulates material forms to legitimize and advance a vernacular literary canon. Situating these philological activities in the context of Boccaccio’s broader reflections on poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, the book produces a new portrait of Boccaccio that integrates his vernacular and Latin works, while also providing a new context for understanding his fictions. m a r t i n e i s n e r is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

cambridge studies in medieval literature General editor Alastair Minnis, Yale University Editorial board Zygmunt G. Bar´anski, University of Cambridge Christopher C. Baswell, Barnard College and Columbia University John Burrow, University of Bristol Mary Carruthers, New York University Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania Simon Gaunt, King’s College, London Steven Kruger, City University of New York Nigel Palmer, University of Oxford Winthrop Wetherbee, Cornell University Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University

This series of critical books seeks to cover the whole area of literature written in the major medieval languages – the main European vernaculars, and medieval Latin and Greek – during the period c. 1100–1500. Its chief aim is to publish and stimulate fresh scholarship and criticism on medieval literature, special emphasis being placed on understanding major works of poetry, prose, and drama in relation to the contemporary culture and learning which fostered them. Recent titles in the series Mary Carruthers (ed.) Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages Katharine Breen Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400 Antony J. Hasler Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority Shannon Gayk Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England Lisa H. Cooper Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late-Medieval England Alison Cornish Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature Jane Gilbert Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature Jessica Rosenfeld Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle Michael Van Dussen From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages Martin Eisner Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular A complete list of titles in the series can be found at the end of the volume.

Frontispiece Giorgio Vasari, Six Tuscan Poets (1544). Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN, USA/The William Hood Dunwoody Fund/The Bridgeman Art Library.

B OCC AC CI O A ND T H E I N V ENTI O N O F ITALIAN LI TERAT UR E Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular

MARTIN EISNER

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107041660  C Martin Eisner 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Eisner, Martin, 1978– Boccaccio and the invention of Italian literature : Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the authority of the vernacular / Martin Eisner. pages cm. – (Cambridge Studies In Medieval Literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-04166-0 (hardback) 1. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313–1375 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Italian literature – To 1400 – History and criticism. I. Title. pq4284.5.e37 2013 858 .109 – dc23 2013009538 isbn 978-1-107-04166-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines! –Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things

Contents

List of figures and tables Acknowledgments List of abbreviations for frequently cited works

page x xii xiv

Introduction: Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch: Cultivating vernacular literary community in the Chigi Codex

1

Dante’s dirty feet and the limping republic: Boccaccio’s defense of literature in the Vita di Dante

29

2 Dante’s shame and Boccaccio’s paratextual praise: Editing the Vita nuova, Commedia, and canzoni distese

50

3 The making of Petrarch’s vernacular Book of Fragments (Fragmentorum liber)

74

4 The inventive scribe: Glossing Cavalcanti in the Chigi and Decameron 6.9

95

1

Epilogue: The allegory of the vernacular: Boccaccio’s Esposizioni and Petrarch’s Griselda

113 117 196 233

Notes Bibliography Index

ix

Figures and tables

Figures 1 Boccaccio’s transcription of Ytalie iam certus honos, addressed to Petrarch, in Chigi l v 176, c. 34r. Reproduced by permission C 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved,  Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. page 14 2 Boccaccio’s transcription of Giovanni del Virgilio’s Theologus Dantes in the Vita di Dante, Chigi l v 176, c. 6r. Reproduced by permission Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights C 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. reserved,  47 3 End of the Vita di Dante and beginning of the Vita nuova with Boccaccio’s editorial note to the Vita nuova in Chigi l v 176, 13r. Reproduced by permission Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with C 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. all rights reserved,  51 4 Boccaccio’s transcription of Quomodo sedet in Chigi l v 176, c. 24r. Reproduced by permission Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, C 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. with all rights reserved,  63 5 Boccaccio’s transcription of Petrarch’s Voi ch’ascoltate (Rvf 1) with the variant “amore” instead of “errore” at the beginning the third line of the transcription after the rubric. Chigi l v 176, c. 43 v. Reproduced by permission Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with C 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. all rights reserved,  76 6 Boccaccio’s transcription of Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega surrounded by Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary in Chigi l v 176, c. 29r. Reproduced by permission Biblioteca Apostolica C 2013 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved,  Vaticana. 99

x

List of figures and tables

xi

Tables 1 2 3 4

Contents of current Chigi l v 176 Transformations of Chigi Codex: three stages Dante’s canzoni distese, with Barbi’s numbers in parentheses Contents of Petrarch’s Fragmentorum liber

2 12 69 77

Acknowledgments

This book began as a conversation with Teodolinda Barolini in front of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall about how to write a dissertation that would not exclude any of the tre corone; I have finished with a book that includes four of them. I am grateful to Teo for all of her help and guidance, without which this book would be much poorer, as these notes can only partially reflect. In various ways that are similarly impossible to cite properly, conversations with Roberto Dainotto, Andrew Piper, Marc Schachter, and Saskia Ziolkowski also contributed to crafting this book’s arguments. I thank the Fulbright Program, American Philosophical Society, and the Arts and Sciences Research Council of Duke University for valuable assistance that allowed me to complete the research for this study in libraries and archives throughout Italy. The Interlibrary Loan office at Duke proved intrepid in the face of my myriad, complex requests. A semester at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton provided me with a rich intellectual community in which to refine many of the core ideas that inform this study and I am especially grateful to the medieval community there, led by Caroline Walker Bynum. In its final stages, two punctilious and cogent readers, Albert Ascoli and Zygmunt Baranski, provided comments and suggestions that vastly improved the book. This study also benefited from a Mellon Faculty Book Workshop, sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, which brought together the collective wisdom and varied perspectives of Albert Ascoli, Ian Baucom, Chris Celenza, Roberto Dainotto, Valeria Finucci, Michael Hardt, Timothy Kircher, Shayne LeGassie, John Martin, Helen Solterer, Fiona Somerset, Ron Witt, and Jessica Wolfe. I thank them all for helping to make the manuscript a better book. I was also fortunate to have my editor at Cambridge University Press, Linda Bree, participate in the workshop; in addition to shepherding the book through the publication process, she proved a model reader. I am also grateful to Alastair Minnis for including the book in his remarkable series. xii

Acknowledgments

xiii

My family has shaped me more than I can recognize, let alone acknowledge, but I place here a loving thank you to my mother, Barbara Elser, and my late father, Francis Eisner, for all of the opportunities they provided. My greatest debt is to my wife, Saskia, who not only improved countless drafts, but also literally created time for me to work on this book, a miraculous feat especially after the arrival of our daughter, Nola. Saskia, writing these acknowledgments means it really is done. I dedicate this book to you.

Abbreviations for frequently cited works

Boccaccio All quotations from Boccaccio derive from Vittore Branca, ed. Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. 10 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1964–98. Dec. Ep. Esp. Gen. Vita De Vita

Decameron Epistole Esposizioni Genealogie deorum gentilium Vita di Dante De Vita Petrarchi

Petrarch Fam. Sen. Epyst. Rvf

Familiares Seniles Epystole metriche Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

Dante Inf. Purg. Par. VN Conv. Epist. DVE

Inferno Purgatorio Paradiso Vita nuova Convivio Epistles De vulgari eloquentia

xiv

introduction

Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch Cultivating vernacular literary community in the Chigi Codex

The coronation of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Cavalcanti in Giorgio Vasari’s Six Tuscan Poets (1544; see Frontispiece) can seem inevitable from a modern perspective, but its vision of Italian literary history is the product of intense debates that began – as Vasari’s painting suggests – among the poets themselves.1 At first glance, Boccaccio appears to have a relatively insignificant place in these discussions. Situated behind and between the imposing figures of Dante and Petrarch, he has no role in the play of hands and books that constitutes the main drama of the painting. To his left, Dante and Cavalcanti stare each other down over a volume of Virgil in a visual gloss on the question of whom Cavalcanti ‘held in disdain’ (ebbe a disdegno) in Inferno 10.2 To his right, Petrarch attempts to intervene in Dante’s Virgilian conversation, with his left hand posed like one of the manicula that occupy the margins of his manuscripts.3 Ignoring Petrarch’s intrusion, Dante silences him with a single finger of his right hand that indicates the green volume Petrarch holds in his lap with its cameo of Laura. This pointed exchange suggests the evolving assessment of Petrarch’s literary achievement: to be celebrated not for his attempt to imitate Virgilian epic in his Latin Africa, but for his vernacular lyrics.4 In the context of these carefully constructed encounters among the laurelled poets, Boccaccio’s lack of involvement is notable. Reduced to a corpulent head floating in the background, Boccaccio is removed from the tensions between these individual figures that Vasari’s painting suggests constitute the tradition itself.5 Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature offers a new perspective on Boccaccio’s place in this literary historical drama by putting into his hands a codex that reveals his pivotal role in mediating the figures of Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti that Vasari’s painting crowns. Written entirely in Boccaccio’s hand and dedicated to Petrarch, this remarkable manuscript, now Chigi l v 176 in the Vatican Library, contains Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante; Dante’s Vita nuova; Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega, surrounded by the unique 1

2

Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature

Table 1 Contents of Current Chigi l v 176 a. b. c. d. e. f.

Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante, the second version of the biography Dante’s Vita nuova in Boccaccio’s modified edition Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega, surrounded by Dino del Garbo’s commentary Boccaccio’s Latin poem Ytalie iam certus honos, dedicating the collection to Petrarch Dante’s canzoni distese, fifteen of Dante’s longer canzoni Petrarch’s Fragmentorum liber, an early version of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

witness of Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary; Boccaccio’s dedicatory Latin poem to Petrarch on Dante, Ytalie iam certus honos; Dante’s fifteen canzoni distese (extended canzoni); and the only extant early redaction of Petrarch’s lyric collection, called the Fragmentorum liber.6 (See Table 1.) While scholars have examined this manuscript in fragments to analyze its rare and unique works individually, this study investigates the manuscript as a whole from Boccaccio’s perspective. Bringing together material philology and intellectual history, I argue that Boccaccio’s preservation of these rare and unique works is no accident of transmission, but a materialization of his larger efforts to vindicate and legitimize this emerging vernacular tradition. The Chigi reveals the variety of ways Boccaccio pursues this project: by constructing explicit arguments and composing narratives; collecting, compiling, and commenting on texts; and manipulating material forms. Boccaccio’s multifaceted role in the transmission and mediation of these vernacular works shows that he is not only one of the vernacular authors canonized in Vasari’s painting, but also a critical figure in the canonization of these other vernacular authors. From the perspective of the Chigi, then, Boccaccio’s central placement in Vasari’s image conveys his crucial role as a mediator, whose efforts to persuade his contemporaries of the value of the vernacular produced the texts and arguments that would be utilized by future generations, embodied in the unlaurelled figures, variously identified as Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, or Angelo Poliziano, at whom Boccaccio directs his gaze.7 The contested identities of those unlaurelled figures to the far left of the frame evince a tension between Vasari’s representation of literary history in Six Tuscan Poets and the three-stage theory of cultural history that he proposes in his Vite de’ pi`u eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects). Instead of an organic progression from humble beginnings through a period of development until finally reaching the height of perfection, Vasari’s Six Tuscan Poets gives pride of place to the first two stages.8 This discrepancy underlines

Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch

3

the novelty of the Italian literary tradition in which Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Cavalcanti are foundational figures in a way that the major figures of fourteenth-century English, French, German, and Spanish literature are not.9 Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Cavalcanti are not points of origin posited by a later national literary history, like the Chanson de Roland or Poema del mio Cid. Instead, they constitute the beginnings that inform the later tradition, providing points of reference and models from the fourteenth century to the present day.10 Indeed, critics continue to use them to characterize different literary modes, classifying modern poets like Eugenio Montale as Dantean, while Giuseppe Ungaretti and Andrea Zanzotto are Petrarchan.11 Boccaccio, meanwhile, has attracted the attention of unconventional artists, like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Aldo Busi, and Dario Fo, all of whom have adapted the Decameron.12 Cavalcanti, too, although excluded from the conventional idea of ‘the three crowns’ (tre corone) of Italian literature, functions as a cultural alternative to Dante not only in Vasari’s painting but also in modern works, like Pound’s ‘Mediaevalism’ essay and Calvino’s ‘Lightness’.13 To argue that Boccaccio invents Italian literature is not to disregard the longer historical and cultural process that stretches from the consolidation of the Sicilian school in Tuscany through Dante and Pietro Bembo to Francesco De Sanctis and Antonio Gramsci, but to emphasize the pivotal role Boccaccio’s texts, arguments, and narratives play in the formation of this tradition that has a persistent place in reflections on Italian literary identity.14 Boccaccio produces the first edition of Dante’s works with an extensive Vita that is also a defense of vernacular poetry; pens the earliest biography of Petrarch and transcribes the earliest redaction of his vernacular collection; transmits the only witness to Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary on Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega; and composes a remarkable story about Cavalcanti in the Decameron (6.9).15 Those interested in Dante’s life, from Leonardo Bruni in the Quattrocento to modern critics, like Ernst Robert Curtius and Giorgio Agamben, have used Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante as a primary point of reference.16 Petrarch himself employs Boccaccio’s biography of him as the model for his own ‘Letter to Posterity’ (Sen. 18.1), and Boccaccio’s story about Cavalcanti (Dec. 6.9) remains one of the most discussed and debated sources for understanding the poet.17 Boccaccio’s reflections on poetry and the vernacular, as well as the texts he transmitted, also informed literary debate over the following centuries in the works of Coluccio Salutati, who appropriates Boccaccio’s arguments for poetry and uses his copy of Petrarch; Leonardo Bruni, who criticizes Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante to motivate his own biographical account; Poliziano, who borrows

4

Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature

Boccaccian images for the Introduction to the Raccolta Aragonese and utilizes Boccaccio’s texts for the collection; Landino, who relies on Boccaccio’s commentary for his own Comento; and Bembo, who makes the copy of the Commedia that Boccaccio gave to Petrarch the basis for the first Aldine edition of Dante’s work.18 Even the edition of Dante’s lyrics that Giacomo Leopardi read in the nineteenth century took its texts from the sixteenthcentury Giuntina edition (1527), which was based on Boccaccio’s copy of Dante’s lyrics.19 Just as the tradition of Sicilian lyrics comes through Tuscan scribes, Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti are mediated through Boccaccio. Boccaccio’s role in this process has often been obscured by a tendency to see the vernacular tradition either as already established by Dante or canonized only later by Bembo, but the Chigi shows how Boccaccio combines theoretical arguments, narrative compositions, and material strategies to make this tradition visible.20 Vasari’s painting not only reflects Boccaccio’s vision but also reveals his triumph. Reading Six Tuscan Poets in chronological order from right to left, the image reveals the ironies of literary historical rivalry, whereby one’s disdain for a precursor links him all the more strongly to that poet: Cavalcanti’s Virgil, Dante’s Cavalcanti, Petrarch’s Dante. It is Boccaccio’s genius to have constructed, instead, a collective project that not only includes but also aims to authorize all of those modern poets. For Boccaccio, each of these authors is an example of both the validity of the vernacular and the legitimacy of the literary. Putting this codex in the context of Boccaccio’s contemporary compositions and transcriptions will bring into relief this larger project to defend the vernacular and literature more generally.

Ideas of tradition and the vernacular in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Despite Boccaccio’s pervasive influence, his role in shaping this tradition tends to be hidden, like his figure in Vasari’s painting, behind the selfauthorizing figures of Dante and Petrarch, who have different ideas of tradition and attitudes toward the vernacular. Over the last thirty years, critics have revealed the sophisticated methods that both Dante and Petrarch use to construct their own authority. Teodolinda Barolini has examined Dante’s complex relationships with classical and vernacular poets.21 Albert Ascoli has explored how Dante appropriates cultural authority for himself.22 In complementary ways, these scholars have shown that the ultimate goal of Dante’s engagement with the classical and vernacular predecessors is to surpass them by establishing his authority on transcendent and universal

Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch

5

grounds as ‘God’s scribe’ (Par. 10.27).23 From the beginning of the Vita nuova, where Dante uses a cosmic perspective to narrate his first encounter with Beatrice, through his definition of the vernacular as original, natural, and noble in the De vulgari eloquentia, to his argument for a world empire in the Monarchia, Dante adopts a universal perspective. Petrarch pursues a different path of self-authorization that entails a more problematic relationship to the vernacular. Refusing to entrust his imagined magnum opus to the ‘soft mud and shifting sands’ of the vernacular (Sen. 5.2), which he dismisses as juvenile, Petrarch emphasizes his intimate connections to the classical past. He not only tries to write a Virgilian epic in the Africa, where he imagines himself as Ennius or Homer reincarnate, but also orchestrates his own poetic coronation in Rome; recovers, reconstructs, and imitates texts of ancient authors, like Cicero and Livy; supports Cola di Rienzo’s efforts to re-establish the Roman Empire; and reforms his writing style to match the Carolingian hand that he associated with classical texts.24 Despite Petrarch’s primary focus on antiquity, he also has a fraught relationship with Dante and the vernacular more broadly.25 Even as he regards the vernacular as without foundations, elsewhere he provides it with a classical genealogy (Fam. 1.1).26 In other words, Petrarch’s positive remarks on the vernacular also fit into his concerns with antiquity. These diverse strategies of self-authorization entail distinct attitudes toward the vernacular: whereas Dante argues for the vernacular as universal and thus appropriate for his project, Petrarch can only justify the vernacular by placing it in a classical context. When Boccaccio describes his place in a literary tradition, he does not claim divinely ordained authority as God’s scribe, present himself as surpassing his contemporaries, or assert an intimate relationship with the classical past. Instead, in the Introduction to Day 4 of the Decameron, he places himself in a community of modern vernacular poets for quite a different purpose: to defend his continued love of ladies. He writes: io mai a me vergogna non reputer`o infino nello stremo della mia vita di dover compiacere a quelle cose alle quali Guido Cavalcanti e Dante Alighieri gi`a vecchi e messer Cino da Pistoia vecchissimo onor si tennero, e fu lor caro il piacer loro. E se non fosse che uscir sarebbe del modo usato del ragionare, io producerei le istorie in mezzo, e quelle tutte piene mostrerei d’antichi uomini e valorosi, ne’ loro pi´u maturi anni sommamente avere studiato di compiacere alle donne. (Dec. 4.Intro.33–34). I will not consider it shameful, until the end of my days, to please those whom Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri, already old, and Cino da Pistoia, very old, held in honor and whose pleasure was dear to them. And if it were not a departure from the customary mode of discourse, I would

6

Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature produce stories here, and show how they are filled with ancient and valiant men who in their more mature years greatly strove to please ladies.27

In this passage, Boccaccio transforms the strategies of literary affiliation he found in Ovid and Dante, but diminishes the claim to singularity that characterizes his predecessors. In Tristia 2, for example, Ovid defends his writing about love by giving a lengthy catalogue of authors who have treated the topic, including Sappho, Homer, and Virgil, to make the point that ‘not I alone have written tales of tender love, but for writing of love I alone have been punished’.28 Within this history of amorous discourse, Ovid singles out the elegiac tradition of Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius, whom he sees himself as succeeding as ‘fourth in order of time’.29 Like the larger catalogue, the point of this smaller group is to indicate Ovid’s singularity: ‘fourth in order of time’ implies, of course, that he is not fourth with respect to art. Dante certainly understood the implication of Ovid’s use of the ordinal number since he re-purposes it for his encounter with classical poets in Limbo, proclaiming himself ‘sesto tra cotanto senno’ (sixth among such wisdom; Inf. 4.102). In the Introduction to Day 4, Boccaccio returns to the Ovidian number of four, but eliminates the self-celebration found in both Ovid and Dante.30 He does not seek to outdo or surpass the vernacular community of Cavalcanti, Dante, and Cino, but to join it. Whereas Dante evokes the ‘fedeli d’amore’ (love’s faithful) at the beginning of the Vita nuova to indicate the other poets’ limitations – because none of them, including Cavalcanti, can understand the true meaning of his dream about Beatrice – Boccaccio emphasizes instead a shared fallibility with respect to desire.31 Boccaccio’s list also distinguishes itself from similar genealogies of the vernacular found in Dante and Petrarch by including only Italian figures.32 This emphasis on the Italian vernacular contrasts not only with Dante’s use of the Ovidian model to link himself to ancient poets in Inf. 4, but also with Dante’s discussions of the vernacular past in the Vita nuova, De vulgari eloquentia, and the Commedia, where Dante includes the Provenc¸al tradition as parallel to, and predecessor of, the Italian tradition. Dante stages the climax of this parallel, pan-Romance history in Purgatorio 26, where he has Guido Guinizelli – ‘il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai / rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre’ (the father of me and of the others, my betters, who ever used sweet and graceful rhymes; Purg. 26.97–99) – describe Arnaut Daniel as ‘miglior fabbro del parlar materno’ (the best craftsman of the modern tongue; Purg. 26.117), who then replies to Dante in Provenc¸al.33 Boccaccio was very familiar with this passage

Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch

7

from Purgatorio. The tale of Filippo Balducci’s son in the Introduction to Day 4 that precedes this discussion of poetry, for example, expands into narrative form Dante’s simile of the mountaineer astounded by the city (Purg. 26.67–69).34 By excluding the Provenc¸al tradition that Dante makes such an effort to integrate, Boccaccio’s all-Italian vernacular community not only distinguishes itself from Dante, but also contrasts with the five-stage lyric history of Petrarch’s Lasso me (Rvf 70).35 In the miniliterary history of his canzone, Petrarch also begins with a Provenc¸al text that Petrarch believed to be Arnaut’s before quotations from Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, Cino da Pistoia, and Petrarch himself.36 Although it is not clear whether Boccaccio would have known Petrarch’s canzone when he wrote the Decameron, the comparison nonetheless reveals the particular nature of his grouping. When Dante and Petrarch engage the vernacular tradition, they include the Provenc¸al tradition to enhance their own status by presenting themselves as surpassing the supreme poets of a larger Romance tradition, while Boccaccio emphasizes an Italian community alone. This passage from the Introduction to Day 4 not only shows Boccaccio’s different relationship to the past and his emphasis on an Italian, as opposed to Romance, tradition, but also brings into focus the problem of vernacular love poetry and authority that Alastair Minnis has seen as the central problem in authorizing the emerging vernacular literatures. Minnis asks, ‘how could a poet who wrote about love, and/or expressed his own (limiting and probably demeaning) emotional experiences, be trusted as a fount of wisdom, accepted as a figure worthy of belief? An auctor amans was an utter paradox, almost a contradiction in terms.’37 Boccaccio clearly engages this tradition in the Introduction to Day 4. Whereas Dante’s Guinizelli describes himself as having repented of his lust before the last part of his life (‘e gi`a mi purgo / per ben dolermi prima ch’a lo stremo’; Purg. 26.92–3), Boccaccio’s vernacular community is characterized by a shared desire that persists ‘infino nello stremo della mia vita’ (until the last part of my life), as Boccaccio puts it, echoing Guinizelli’s verse. Boccaccio’s goal in establishing this vernacular community is to legitimize it, as he makes clear immediately after the list of poets in the Introduction to Day 4, when he claims that he has not strayed from Parnassus in composing these stories: ‘queste cose tessendo, n´e dal monte Parnaso n´e dalle Muse non mi allontano quanto molti per avventura s’avisano’ (in composing these stories, I am not straying as far from Mount Parnassus or from the Muses as many people might be led to believe). In other words, Boccaccio aims to align this problematic tradition of vernacular love poetry with the Muses of Parnassus. Just as

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Boccaccio’s stories suggest his role as a ‘dispenser of legitimation’ within the novelle, the Introduction to Day 4 aims to legitimize the tradition of vernacular literature itself.38 Boccaccio carries forward this argument in the pages of Chigi l v 176, which materialize his efforts to legitimize this tradition and bring vernacular love lyric to Parnassus. It might not be too much to claim, adapting the titles of two well-known books on nationalism, that Boccaccio imagines a community to invent a tradition.39 If the theme of love is a problem for gaining authority for the vernacular, the contents of Chigi l v 176 show how works of vernacular love poets were authorized in the fourteenth century: through the use of a prose frame (Dante’s Vita nuova), assembling a collection of the same poetic form (Dante’s canzoni distese), constructing a sequence of lyrics (Petrarch’s Fragmentorum liber), furnishing a poem with a commentary (Dino del Garbo’s glosses on Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega), and providing a series of works with a scholastic introduction (Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante). Whereas other early manuscripts gather fragments, Boccaccio’s Chigi Codex collects collections that show different ways of authorizing love lyrics. In the Vita nuova, Dante already begins to claim this authority for himself by joining love to reason through the figure of Beatrice, in a strategy that reaches its climax in the Commedia.40 Petrarch, on the other hand, uses a retrospective stance to maintain authority over the passions that he recounts, or at least suggests, in his poems. Dino del Garbo’s commentary on Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega is the product of similar concerns. Dino insists that Cavalcanti could not have been in love when he wrote the poem because, according to the conception of love that the canzone expresses, he cannot be in love and have possession of reason.41 Boccaccio himself not only transcribes each of these works, but also constructs an authorial assemblage of Dante’s works that he prefaces with a Vita where he directly addresses the problem of the relationship between love and authority.42 Just as Boccaccio uses lyric poets to defend himself in the Introduction to Day 4 of the Decameron, his attempt to authorize a lyric tradition in the Chigi aims to legitimize his own work by producing a space in which he can situate his late transcription of the Decameron in Hamilton 90.43 Boccaccio’s composition of the Decameron in the early 1350s and his later transcription of it in the early 1370s significantly serve as the chronological bookends for his construction of the Chigi. In his choice of parchment size, script, and layout, Boccaccio transcribes the Decameron in Hamilton 90 according to the model he constructs in the Chigi. As Armando Petrucci notes, ‘it seems possible that [Boccaccio] consciously attempted to raise

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books with texts in volgare to the dignity of the ruling model of book production of the time – the desk book in gothic textura script with all its physical and symbolic attributes’.44 By investigating the meaning of these material connections, this study reveals Boccaccio’s larger strategy of authorizing himself by canonizing others.

The material turn and the transformation of the Chigi The connections between the Decameron and Chigi l v 176 in their groups of vernacular love poets and concern with Parnassus have often been overlooked because scholars have not examined the codex from Boccaccio’s perspective. Instead, critics have analyzed it for the remarkable texts it contains. Dante editors, like Michele Barbi, Giorgio Petrocchi, and Domenico De Robertis, have identified Boccaccio’s transcriptions of Dante’s works as breaks in their respective textual traditions.45 Petrarch scholars, like Ruth Phelps and Ernest Wilkins, have used Boccaccio’s unique copy of Petrarch’s Fragmentorum liber to try to reconstruct ‘the principles of arrangement’ behind Petrarch’s collection of his lyrics.46 Boccaccio’s unique transcription of Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary has similarly been a crucial resource for a range of readers interested in Cavalcanti, like Ezra Pound, Guido Favati, and Maria Corti, who have relied on it to understand the philosophical context and content of Cavalcanti’s difficult canzone.47 While these critics have used the texts that Boccaccio’s manuscript preserves to access and understand the authorial intentions of Dante, Petrarch, or Cavalcanti, the turn to the material that has taken place over the last several decades across the humanities can help bring Boccaccio’s achievement into focus by investigating not the texts alone but the significance of the physical object itself. From the call for a New, or Material, Philology that returns to ‘the manuscript matrix’ of medieval studies, to the renewed attention to ‘the materiality of the Shakespearean text’, and the emphasis on reading the ‘bibliographical codes’ of Romantic and modernist works, critics have explored how certain material and graphic choices, from a work’s physical dimensions and its hand or type to its mise-en-page and paratextual apparatus, contribute to producing meaning.48 This move toward rematerializing the tradition was set in motion by Giorgio Pasquali’s critique of the Lachmannian system of textual criticism in his Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (History of Tradition and Textual Criticism). From its very title, Pasquali’s attention to the complexity of textual traditions emphasized history over system and contamination over mechanical transmission, which, along with his argument that recentiores non

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deteriores (more recent witnesses are not worse), laid the groundwork for future developments.49 Although Pasquali did not include an analytical concern with material form, his attention to the complexity of individual textual traditions prepared the way for investigating the intricacies of the individual objects.50 If the process of textual criticism involves the ‘dematerialization of the text’, Pasquali facilitated the process of its rematerialization.51 The attention to the material that has occurred in the wake of Pasquali’s work has produced a new kind of literary history that is no longer the account of a tragic loss of authorial will through scribal contamination and corruption, but an examination of these objects in what Caroline Walker Bynum terms a ‘comic mode’, that is, for what they do convey about the historical worlds that produced them.52 From this perspective these textual, material, scribal, and editorial transformations can be interpreted as ‘conscious artistic and intellectual decisions rather than failures to reproduce a primal truth’.53 By shifting away from an exclusive concern with the author and a work’s original meaning, the material turn introduces a new concern with canonization and ‘the forces that motivate the development, growth, coming together, and sanctification of the texts’ that constitute a tradition.54 This attention to the material or physical attributes has entailed a new attention to the ‘human presence’ that crafted these objects.55 While this human presence can sometimes be an author, as in some extraordinary instances like the ‘visual poetics’ Wayne Storey identifies in Petrarch’s autograph of his lyrics (Vat. lat. 3195), most of these figures are unknown.56 For this reason, several scholars, like Brian Stock, Mary Carruthers, and Jeffrey Hamburger have examined not individual scribes but how particular communities produced and used books.57 In the medieval Italian context critics such as Petrucci, Roberto Antonelli, Storey, and Justin Steinberg have similarly examined how the material features of early Italian collections and transcriptions can encode complex literary ideas and provide new perspectives on literary and cultural history.58 This interest in human agents has motivated research into the scribes, editors, publishers, and printers that produced and reproduced these works, as well as the readers who consumed them.59 In the context of the medieval manuscript, these investigations have led to a new interest in scribal intention, as critics have examined miscellanies of unknown scribes and compilers to discover the ‘center of intelligence’ or ‘controlling literary intelligence’ that organized the gathering of materials.60 While Derek Pearsall has expressed concern that some studies of English miscellanies may ‘overestimate the activity of the controlling or guiding

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intelligence of the scribe-compiler’, the role of Boccaccio’s intelligence in shaping these works in the Chigi has been remarkably underestimated.61 This omission is particularly surprising since Boccaccio declares his intention in the codex itself, both in the poem that dedicates the collection to Petrarch, Ytalie iam certus honos (Already certain honor of Italy), and its first text, the Vita di Dante. Nonetheless, critics have questioned whether Boccaccio is responsible for the current state of the manuscript (see Table 1). In his codicological analysis of Chigi l v 176, Domenico De Robertis demonstrates that the codex originally contained the copy of the Commedia that is now Chigi l vi 213, which suggests that Boccaccio began the Chigi as a Dante edition similar to the one he had constructed in another manuscript that is now Toledo 104.6 in the Biblioteca Capitular, Toledo, Spain. The Toledo codex contains a longer version of the Vita di Dante, followed by Dante’s Vita nuova, Commedia, and the canzoni distese with Latin rubrics. The earliest stage of the Chigi followed the same design, although its Vita di Dante is briefer and the canzoni distese do not have any rubrics. In this first stage of the Chigi the only work that is not in the Toledo is Boccaccio’s Latin poem that dedicates the collection to Petrarch: Ytalie iam certus honos. At a later moment, Boccaccio expanded the single author model to a multi-author collection by adding to the codex Petrarch’s collection of vernacular lyrics, which was known at the time as the Fragmentorum liber and consisted of only 215 poems, instead of the 366 that characterize the final version.62 Either around the same time that Boccaccio integrated Petrarch, or perhaps a bit later, the Commedia that is now Chigi l vi 213 was removed and Cavalcanti’s poem Donna mi prega, surrounded by Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary, was put in its place. (For a graphic representation of these transformations, see Table 2.) Although the exact chronology is difficult to state with certainty, the current organization of the codex had certainly occurred by the sixteenth century, when Jacopo Corbinelli possessed Chigi l v 176 and Chigi l vi 213 as distinct manuscripts.63 De Robertis argues that, if Boccaccio were responsible for adding Cavalcanti, ‘it was probably a hurried and uncalcuated move’ (‘fu probabilmente un gesto frettoloso e non calcolato’).64 He associates the change, instead, with the Laurentian court, a suggestion that has been taken up by other critics like Manlio Pastore Stocchi, who proposes that Poliziano engineered the change.65 In his Tradizione e fortuna dei classici italiani, Corrado Bologna avoids the question altogether by analyzing the codex a parte objecti, that is, in light of its later textual influence on scholars like Poliziano and Manetti, instead of a parte subjecti, that is, from Boccaccio’s perspective.66

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Table 2 Transformations of Chigi Codex: Three Stages 1. CONTENTS OF THE CHIGI AT ITS EARLIEST STAGE: A DANTE EDITION a. Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante, the second version of the biography b. Dante’s Vita nuova in Boccaccio’s modified edition c. Dante’s Commedia, with Boccaccio’s editorial apparatus (now Chigi l vi 213) d. Boccaccio’s Latin poem Ytalie iam certus honos, dedicating the collection to Petrarch e. Dante’s canzoni distese, fifteen of Dante’s longer canzoni 2. SECOND STAGE OF THE CHIGI: THE ADDITION OF PETRARCH’S LYRICS a. Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante, the second version of the biography b. Dante’s Vita nuova in Boccaccio’s modified edition c. Dante’s Commedia, with Boccaccio’s editorial apparatus (now Chigi l vi 213) d. Boccaccio’s Latin poem Ytalie iam certus honos, dedicating the collection to Petrarch e. Dante’s canzoni distese, fifteen of Dante’s longer canzoni f. Petrarch’s Fragmentorum liber, an early version of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 3. THE CURRENT CHIGI: THE REMOVAL OF DANTE’S COMMEDIA AND INSERTION OF CAVALCANTI WITH COMMENTARY a. Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante, the second version of the biography b. Dante’s Vita nuova in Boccaccio’s modified edition c. Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega, surrounded by Dino del Garbo’s commentary d. Boccaccio’s Latin poem Ytalie iam certus honos, dedicating the collection to Petrarch e. Dante’s canzoni distese, fifteen of Dante’s longer canzoni f. Petrarch’s Fragmentorum liber, an early version of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

Whether or not Boccaccio put the Cavalcanti section into the codex, he transcribed the work in his own hand in the same period and put it in a particular format that surrounds Cavalcanti’s vernacular poem with a Latin commentary. I address this issue more fully in Chapter 4, but for now it is enough to observe that this transcriptional format reflects Boccaccio’s representation of Cavalcanti in the Decameron (6.9) and fits the project he expresses in both Ytalie iam certus honos and the Vita di Dante, as well as the contemporary Genealogie deorum gentilium (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods). By examining the codex in the context of these works, the significance of Boccaccio’s labors in the whole codex can be addressed.67

The two Boccaccios between Dante and Petrarch: Ytalie iam certus honos Were the scribe of the Chigi l v 176 unknown, the manuscript would perhaps be less problematic, but the tendency to divide Boccaccio’s literary career into two stages, usually described in terms of Dante and Petrarch, has likely contributed to the reluctance to analyze the manuscript as a

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whole from Boccaccio’s perspective. In this view, Boccaccio began following Dante as a composer of vernacular love stories, like the Decameron, but underwent a conversion after his meeting with Petrarch and became a dedicated scholar and Latin encyclopedist of works like the Genealogie deorum gentilium.68 For many scholars, this move from Dante to Petrarch, from the vernacular to Latin, from literature to scholarship, embodies the shift to humanism, and ‘defines a transitional era between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’.69 Because Boccaccio has been seen as a cipher of the authority of others, rather than an independent agent, his own intervention has been obscured. At the same time, because the history of scholarship is usually the history of classical scholarship, critics have tended to emphasize the limits of Boccaccio’s scholarly achievements, particularly in comparison with Petrarch.70 This examination of the Chigi offers a new perspective that complicates this traditional account of Boccaccio’s development, by showing both Boccaccio’s resistance to Petrarch’s Latin cultural model in the dedicatory Ytalie iam certus honos and his sophisticated efforts to promote the vernacular. Ytalie iam certus honos shows that far from being simply ‘il pi`u grande discepolo’ (the greatest disciple) of Petrarch, Boccaccio challenges Petrarch by trying to persuade him of the value of the vernacular.71 In Ytalie iam certus honos, Boccaccio expresses directly what he insinuates in the Introduction to Day 4: that the vernacular can reach Parnassus. (See Fig. 1.) Having recourse to the same Latin that Dante used in the De vulgari eloquentia, Boccaccio tries to convince Petrarch of the value of the vernacular. Boccaccio seems to have originally written the poem to accompany Boccaccio’s gift to Petrarch of a copy of Dante’s Commedia, in what is now Vat. lat. 3199, which he sent to Petrarch some time after his visit with him in 1351, and he took it up again in the Chigi.72 In the poem, Boccaccio asks the ‘already certain honor of Italy’ (Ytalie iam certus honos), the laurelled Petrarch, to join him in praising Dante by offering him a kind of posthumous coronation.73 Boccaccio argues that the vernacular can be worthy of the laurel, because Dante’s use of the vernacular was not the product of ignorance; that Petrarch should praise Dante by using his name; and that Petrarch should welcome Dante, join his works to his own, and celebrate him.74 Ytalie iam certus honos, cui tempora lauro romulei cinsere duces, hoc suscipe gratum Dantis opus doctis, vulgo mirabile, nullis ante, reor, simili compactum carmine seclis; nec tibi sit durum versus vidisse poete

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Figure 1 Boccaccio’s transcription of Ytalie iam certus honos, addressed to Petrarch (Chigi l v 176, c. 34r). Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch

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exulis et patrio tantum sermone sonoros, frondibus ac nullis redimiti. (vv. 1–7) Already certain honor of Italy, whose temples Roman leaders have surrounded with laurel, welcome this work of Dante, pleasing to the learned, remarkable to the common crowd, constructed in such a style, I believe, as in no other age before. Let it not be difficult for you to look at these verses, so resounding in the paternal tongue, of an exiled poet wreathed with no laurels.

Boccaccio maintains that Dante’s work appeals to a double audience of both the learned (‘gratum . . . doctis’) and the commoner (‘vulgo mirabile’), but he has not received due recognition of laurels, because it was written in the vernacular (‘patrio sermone’).75 Boccaccio supports his argument by claiming that Dante used the vernacular not because he was ignorant of Latin ‘as some savage men growling with envy often say’, but because he ‘wanted to show to posterity what modern vernacular poetry could do’ (‘voluisse futuris / quid metrum volgare queat monstrare modernum’; vv. 8–9).76 Whether or not Dante ever had this particular purpose in mind, Boccaccio’s claim reveals the logic of his own investment in Dante’s works as the foundations of a new tradition. Boccaccio argues that although at first glance Dante’s Muses may appear to go about nude (nudas) because of their vernacular language, if Petrarch looks more carefully he will find ‘sublime senses dressed in sacred shadows’ (‘sacris vestirier umbris / sublimes sensus cernes’; vv. 26–27).77 Boccaccio elaborates on this idea in the Vita di Dante, where he proposes a parallel between the complex figural language of Scripture and Dante’s poetry, and again in the Esposizioni where he suggests that the vernacular conceals the fact that it hides other meanings. In all of these works, Boccaccio’s larger point is that Italian can be as sophisticated and meaningful a literary language as Latin. Boccaccio develops these claims further in the Genealogie, where they become claims about the vernacular and poetry more generally. Although the Genealogie is often contrasted to the Decameron, and taken as emblematic of the distinction between the two stages of Boccaccio’s career, there are significant continuities between them that suggest a larger project in which Dante has a central, but not exclusive, part. While Boccaccio’s enthusiasm for Dante has been discussed, the Chigi shows Boccaccio making an argument for the vernacular more broadly.78 In the same period that he is assembling the Chigi, moreover, Boccaccio develops this defense of the

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vernacular in his Genealogie deorum gentilium, which aims to legitimize both the vernacular and love poetry.

The vernacular and love in the Genealogie While Ytalie iam certus honos challenges the conventional conversion narrative by showing Boccaccio’s continued efforts to convince Petrarch of the value of the vernacular, the Genealogie reveals how Boccaccio’s concerns with legitimizing the vernacular and the topic of love in the Decameron remain central to his thinking about poetry more generally. Although, in keeping with the idea of the two Boccaccios, the Genealogie are often viewed as excluding the Decameron, in the Genealogie Boccaccio develops his views on love and the vernacular that were pillars of his claims in the Decameron’s Introduction to Day 4. These continuities are particularly important because, while Ytalie iam certus honos and the Vita di Dante show the Dantean foundations of Boccaccio’s project that he had first elaborated in the Toledo codex, the Genealogie show Boccaccio developing broader arguments during the same period that he transcribes the other materials that are in the current Chigi.79 Although Boccaccio writes the Genealogie in Latin, he does not exclude the vernacular from it, as some have claimed.80 Indeed, Boccaccio goes out of his way to include the vernacular in the key chapter on ‘poetry, its origin and function’ (Gen. 14.7).81 He writes: For, however deeply the poetic impulse stirs the mind to which it is granted, it very rarely accomplishes anything commendable if the instruments by which its concepts are to be wrought out are wanting – I mean, for example, the precepts of grammar and rhetoric [grammatice precepta atque rethorice], an abundant knowledge of which is opportune, although many a man already writes his mother tongue admirably, and indeed has performed each of the various duties of poetry as such [esto non nulli mirabiliter materno sermone iam scripserint et per singula poesis officia peregerint]. Yet over and above this, it is necessary to know at least the principles of the other Liberal Arts, both moral and natural, to possess a strong and abundant vocabulary, to behold the monuments and relics of the Ancients, to have in one’s memory the histories of nations, and to be familiar with the geography of various lands, of seas, rivers, and mountains.82 (Gen. 14.7; Osgood 40)

Boccaccio argues that the divine poetic impulse can be expressed not only in Latin, but also in the vernacular, and he shifts from the emphasis on style, which one finds in prescriptive poetics like Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s

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Poetria nova or the second book of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, to an interest in meaning. In Boccaccio’s view, poetry is not simply verbal craft or style but significant content that can be communicated equally in Latin or vernacular. This passage glosses Boccaccio’s claim in Ytalie iam certus honos that Dante’s vernacular Muses are not nude by emphasizing that vernacular works can conceal hidden truths. Boccaccio clarifies this point in the etymology of poetry that he provides a few lines later, where he argues that ‘the word poetry has not the origin that many carelessly suppose, namely poio, pois, which is but Latin fingo, fingis; rather it is derived from a very ancient Greek word poetes, which means in Latin exquisite discourse (exquisita locutio)’. Boccaccio’s choice of etymology, which he also uses in the Vita di Dante and Esposizioni, seems determined by the fact that a derivation from poio (the Latin fingo) would suggest the craft of rhetoric and potentially an association with falsehood, whereas Boccaccio insists on a contrast between rhetoric and poetry: ‘among the disguises of fiction rhetoric has no part, for whatever is composed as under a veil, and thus exquisitely wrought, is poetry and poetry alone [quicquid sub velamento componitur et exponitur exquisite]’ (Osgood 42).83 Boccaccio’s definition and etymology align poetry not with linguistic or stylistic criteria that would restrict it to Latin grammatica, on the one hand, or mere rhetorical style, on the other, but with the hermeneutical potential of its velamen, or integumentum, which associates poetry with Scripture for containing hidden truths.84 Critics have noted that both here and in the Vita di Dante Boccaccio borrows considerable material from Petrarch’s discussion of poetry in his letter to his brother Gherardo (Fam. 10.4), and Boccaccio explicitly acknowledges his debt in the Esposizioni (1.lit.73), but it is significant that Petrarch never mentions the vernacular, as Boccaccio does here.85 By highlighting hermeneutics and interpretation instead of formal features, Boccaccio produces a definition of poetry, moreover, that not only includes vernacular poetry but also vernacular prose, since there is none of the musical requirement that one finds in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia.86 In the immediate context of the Genealogie, Boccaccio’s discussion is motivated primarily by an attempt to defend the poetry of the pagan past, but he extends these arguments to include the vernacular present as well. A similar double perspective that aims to save both the classical past and the vernacular present also informs Boccaccio’s defense of love in the Genealogie. Janet Smarr argues that there is an ‘abandonment of Ovid more explicitly in Boccaccio’s writings about literature’ and that ‘Ovid’s love poetry, which Boccaccio had imitated in his own Rime and Elegia,

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[ . . . ] become a chief example of the sort of poetry to be abandoned (Gen. 14.15).’87 A careful look at the chapter Smarr cites, however, reveals a more complicated treatment of Ovid’s text. Yet another charge is urged by these zealots – that poets seduce their readers into criminal practices. If they urged this charge with some distinction, I might concede it in part. It is, of course, a well-known fact that long ago there were comic poets of doubtful honor who were such either at the prompting of their own unrighteous minds, or at the demand of an age as yet corrupt. For example, Ovid, the Pelignian, a poet of great eminence but licentious imagination, wrote a book on the Art of Love in which, to be sure, he suggested many a wrong practice; yet it was in no respect really dangerous, since no youth is so mad with passion, and no young woman so simple, that under the impulse of carnal appetite they are not much keener in inventing expedients to achieve their desires than he who thought to make himself an eminent advisor in such matters. If, then, poets like these, who, I admit, should in some cases be rejected, have not kept fair the fame of the art of poetry, why, pray, should others of resplendent fame incur the same taint, and share the blame of the guilty? Why, it is not to be endured! (14.15; Osgood 71–72)

Even as Boccaccio claims to concede the point that some poets are lascivious, he only appears to align Ovid with those dangerous poets, arguing instead that Ovid’s tales of seduction teach nothing, since men and women are more than capable of inventing their own tricks and strategies. Far from condemning Ovid, then, Boccaccio exempts him from any guilt and, echoing an argument from the Decameron (Concl. 11), locates the fault in readers: ‘poets are not corruptors of morals. Rather, if the reader is prompted by a healthy mind, not a diseased one, they will prove actual stimulators to virtue, either subtle or poignant, as occasion requires’ (Gen. 14.15; Osgood 74).88 Boccaccio continues this defense in the next chapter, noting that those who call poets seducers or allurers have chosen to read them of their own free will. The term ‘allurer’, moreover, need not have a negative significance. Indeed, Boccaccio writes, ‘allurer’ may, at times, have a good connotation. Skilful herdsmen may, for example, lure from an infected herd the cattle as yet untainted; much more do cultivated men by their instruction lure away nobler souls from those foundering under moral disease. Thus, I think, do the great poets most frequently lure the credulous to their improvement, while these unjust judges are lured and deluded into an evil course more by their own wickedness than by that of even the less honorable poets, and they try their utmost to show it. (Gen. 14.16; Osgood 78)

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In this extraordinary chapter, then, Boccaccio suggests that love poetry will only seduce those who are already deluded and may allure others instead to virtue. These passages from the Genealogie not only develop arguments that Boccaccio first expresses in the Introduction to Day 4, but also create a space for the Decameron. Far from being excluded from the Genealogie, the Decameron is included in its arguments for both the value of the vernacular and the legitimacy of love as a topic.

The authority of the literary field The continuities between the Decameron and Genealogie also extend beyond the topics of the vernacular and love to encompass Boccaccio’s claims for the literary field more broadly. As in the Vita di Dante, Boccaccio defends both modern vernacular and ancient pagan poetry for their shared use figurative language to conceal and convey hidden meanings as part of a larger argument for literature’s place among other disciplines.89 What Boccaccio attempts to delineate in these passages from the Decameron and the Genealogie is nothing less than the literary field. Boccaccio develops this institutional argument most fully in the defense of poetry in the Author’s Conclusion of the Decameron. Boccaccio begins his defense by claiming that his language must fit his subject matter, but he almost immediately destabilizes this connection by pointing to the figurative nature of everyday language: ‘dico che pi´u non si dee a me esser disdetto d’averle scritte, che generalmente si disdica agli uomini e alle donne di dir tutto d`ı “foro” e “caviglia” e “mortaio” e “pestello” e “salciccia” e “mortadello”, e tutto pien di simiglianti cose’ (I assert that it was no more improper for me to have written them than for men and women at large, in their everyday speech, to use such words as hole, and rod, and mortar, and pestle, and crumpet, and stuffing, and any number of others).90 Having suggested the erotic potential of quotidian speech, Boccaccio then proposes that religious paintings could also be interpreted erotically: Sanza che alla mia penna non dee essere meno d’autorit`a conceduta che sia al pennello del dipintore, il quale senza alcuna riprensione, o almen giusta, lasciamo stare che egli faccia a san Michele ferire il serpente con la spada o con la lancia, e a san Giorgio il dragone dove gli piace; ma egli fa Cristo maschio ed Eva femina, e a Lui medesimo che volle per la salute della umana generazione sopra la croce morire, quando con un chiovo e quando con due i pi`e gli conficca in quella. (Dec. Concl. 6) Besides, no less latitude should be granted to my pen than to the brush of the painter, who without incurring censure, of a justified kind at least,

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature depicts Saint Michael striking the serpent with his sword or his lance, and Saint George transfixing the dragon wherever he pleases; but that is not all, for he makes Christ male and Eve female, and fixes to the Cross, sometimes with a single nail, sometimes with two, the feet of Him who resolved to die thereon for the salvation of mankind. (McWilliam 799)

By establishing parallels between the swords, lances, and nails of religious painting and the ‘salsiccia’ and ’mortadello’ of everyday discourse, Boccaccio asserts that erotic themes are everywhere, from the everyday to the divine. Much more could be said about this remarkable, bravura hermeneutic operation, and Boccaccio’s plea for representational freedom to choose, by analogy, whether to use one nail or two in his own work, but Boccaccio’s use of the word autorit`a in this passage is particularly interesting.91 English translators have variously rendered the term as ‘latitude’ (McWilliam), ‘freedom’ (Musa/Bondanella and Nichols), and ‘liberty’ (Payne/Singleton), all of which undoubtedly express what Boccaccio means, but do not convey the peculiarity of his diction. Elsewhere Boccaccio uses autorit`a to refer to Plato or the Scriptures, but here the authority lies not with an auctor but with a particular art form. In other words, Boccaccio’s use of the word autorit`a suggests that he is thinking of both painting and literature as parallel institutions.92 Boccaccio continues to explore these institutional concerns in the next paragraph of the Author’s Conclusion, where he defines the place of literature as a garden in contrast to the schools of philosophers and the churches of the priests. He writes: Appresso assai ben si pu`o cognoscere queste cose non nella chiesa, delle cui cose e con animi e con vocaboli onestissimi si convien dire, quantunque nelle sue istorie d’altramenti fatte, che le scritte da me, si truovino assai; n´e ancora nelle scuole de’ filosofanti, dove l’onest`a non meno che in altra par te e` richesta, dette sono; n´e tra’ cherici n´e tra’ filosofi in alcun luogo, ma ne’ giardini, in luogo di sollazzo, tra persone giovani, bench´e mature e non pieghevoli per novelle, in tempo nel quale andar con le brache in capo per iscampo di s´e era alli pi´u onesti non disdicevole, dette sono. (Dec. Concl. 7) Furthermore it is made perfectly clear that these stories were told neither in a church, of whose affairs one must speak with a chaste mind and a pure tongue (albeit you will find that many of her chronicles are far more scandalous than any writings of mine), nor in the schools of philosophers, in which, no less than anywhere else, a sense of decorum is required, nor in any place where either churchmen or philosophers were present. They were told in gardens, in a place designed for pleasure, among people who, though young in years, were none the less fully mature and riot to be led astray

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by stories, at a time when even the most respectable people saw nothing unseemly in wearing their breeches over their heads if they thought their lives might thereby be preserved. (McWilliam 799)

For some scholars, Boccaccio’s argument for the autonomy of literature as a garden in contrast to the schools of philosophers and the churches of the theologians suggests a space free of ‘didactic expectations’.93 Boccaccio’s choice of church and school as comparanda, however, could suggest another interpretation. By contrasting literature with theology and philosophy, Boccaccio also associates literature with those disciplines, as he makes clear in the next paragraph, where he defends himself from accusations that his work corrupts by comparing his stories to Scripture.94 He writes: Quali libri, quali parole, quali lettere son pi´u sante, pi´u degne, pi´u reverende, che quelle della divina Scrittura? E s´ı sono egli stati assai che, quelle perversamente intendendo, s´e e altrui a perdizione hanno tratto. (Dec. Concl. 12) What other books, what other words, what other letters, are more sacred, more reputable, more worthy of reverence, than those of the Holy Scriptures? And yet there have been many who, by perversely construing them, have led themselves and others to perdition. (McWilliam 800)

Just as Scripture cannot be blamed for heretical ideas derived from reading it, Boccaccio argues that literary texts are free from blame, which lies instead with its readers (as he also argues with regard to Ovid in the passage of the Genealogie quoted above).95 By defining the literary space in contrast to philosophy and theology, Boccaccio thus suggests the kind of comparison between these disciplines that he will undertake in the Genealogie, where he argues, as Alastair Minnis observes, that ‘as a science the place of poetry is with theology and philosophy’.96 In other words, Boccaccio’s location of literature in contrast to philosophy and theology suggests features that Boccaccio sees it as sharing with those disciplines.97 At the end of the Author’s Conclusion, Boccaccio returns to the image of the garden and offers a more elaborate engagement with the horticultural imagery. He writes: Conviene nella moltitudine delle cose diverse qualit`a di cose trovarsi. Niun campo fu mai s´ı ben coltivato, che in esso o ortica o triboli o alcun pruno non si trovasse mescolato tra l’erbe migliori. Senza che, a avere a favellare a semplici giovinette come voi il pi´u siete, sciocchezza sarebbe stata l’andar cercando e faticandosi in trovar cose molto esquisite, e gran cura porre di molto misuratamente parlare. Tuttavia che va tra queste leggendo, lasci star quelle che pungono, e quelle che dilettano legga: elle, per non ingannare

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature alcuna persona tutte nella fronte portan segnato quello che esse dentro dal loro seno nascoso tengono. (Dec. Concl. 17) Whenever you have a multitude of things you are bound to find differences of quality. No field was ever so carefully tended that neither nettles nor brambles nor thistles were found in it, along with all the better grass. Besides, in addressing an audience of unaffected young ladies, such as most of you are, it would have been foolish of me to go to the trouble of searching high and low for exquisite tales to relate, and take excessive pains in weighing my words. And the fact remains that anyone perusing these tales is free to ignore the ones that give offence, and read [or gather] only those that are pleasing. For in order that none of you may be misled, the stories bear on their brows that which lies hidden in their bosom. (McWilliam 800–01)

In this passage Boccaccio plays with the semantic range of leggere, which can mean both ‘reading’ and ‘gathering’, as Isidore notes in his entry on lector in the Etymologies (10.l.154): ‘lector, from “gathering” (colligere, ppl. collectus) with one’s mind what one reads, as if the term were collector – as in this verse (Vergil, Ecl. 3.92): “You who gather (legere) flowers.”’98 The context of the agricultural metaphor thus suggests that the passage could mean whoever ‘goes reading [or gathering; leggendo] among these, leave those that harm and gather [or read; legga] those that delight’. The connection between gathering and reading may be seen, as Isidore’s etymology suggests, in the term ‘collection’. Although Boccaccio’s appeal to the rubrics that the stories bear on their fronte has an ironic implication, since few of the more lascivious tales could be identified by their rubrics unless one already knows the sexual metaphors that they use, this relationship between gathering and reading is one that Boccaccio will return to again in later works.99 In the final chapter of book 14 of the Genealogie, for example, Boccaccio uses the image of the maiden gathering flowers to develop a similar argument, urging the enemies of poetry to make a distinction between great poets and ‘disreputable ones’. Noting that the Biblical authors were poets, too, he proceeds to establish continuity between the authors of Scripture and modern poets, by recommending Dante and Petrarch as worthy of being placed among both the Biblical poets and other Christian poets, like Prudentius, Sedulius, Arator, and Juvencus, who frequently appear in medieval lists of auctores.100 Boccaccio then uses the image of a woman picking flowers not to figure the individual female reader but to describe how the Church created its canon of Origen’s works:

Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch

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Without citing further examples, let me say that, if no consideration of gentleness can induce you to spare poets of our own nation [i.e. Dante and Petrarch], yet be not more severe than our mother the Church; for she, with laudable regard, does not scorn to favor many a writer; but especially hath she honored Origen. So great was his power in composition that his mind seemed inexhaustible and his hand tireless; so much so that the number of his treatises on various subjects is thought to have reached a thousand. But the Church is like the wise maiden who gathered flowers among thorns without tearing her fingers, simply by leaving the thorns untouched; so she has rejected the less trustworthy part of Origen, and retained the deserving part to be laid up among her treasures. Therefore distinguish with care, weigh the words of the poets in a true balance, and put away the unholy part. (Gen. 14.22; Osgood 100)101

Just as the Church distinguished between Origen’s canonical and spurious works, modern critics should embrace the good poets ‘of our own nation’, namely Dante and Petrarch whom Boccaccio mentions in the previous paragraph.102 According to this passage, then, modern canon formation relies on the act of selecting flowers to make a florilegium, in Latin, or an anthology, to use a Greek neologism first used in 1299 that not only would have appealed to Boccaccio (who coined his own Greek word, Decameron, as the title for his collection of tales), but also describes a collection of complete items, not just excerpts.103 In other words, the image of the maiden gathering flowers suggests that Boccaccio sees the construction of an anthology as constitutive of the process of canon creation, a role it continues to have today.104 This passage from the last chapter of Genealogie 14 suggests Boccaccio’s concern with the problem of canon formation in which the moderns also have a place in the literary garden. A comparison of Boccaccio’s image of gathering flowers in a garden with similar images found in earlier texts, like the Indovinello Veronese and Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, can help to bring into relief the novelty of Boccaccio’s perspective and his role in the invention of the field of Italian literature. The Indovinello calls attention to the very act of writing in something close to the vernacular as the plowing of a new terrain: ‘Se pareba boves, alba prat`alia ar`aba / et albo vers`orio teneba, et negro s`emen seminaba’ (In front of him (he) led oxen / White fields (he) plowed / A white plow (he) held / A black seed (he) sowed).105 According to the common interpretation of this riddle, the oxen are the fingers that use the pen as a plow to sow black ink on the white field of the

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parchment page. In the De vulgari eloquentia, Dante deploys a similar semantic field to describe the pan-peninsular illustrious vernacular. Dante writes that: the whole flock of languages spoken in the cities of Italy turns this way or that, moves or stands still, at the behest of this vernacular, which thus shows itself to be the true head of their family. Does it not daily dig up thornbushes growing in the Italian forest? Does it not daily make new grafts or prick out seedlings? What else do its gardeners do, if they are not uprooting or planting, as I said earlier? (DVE 1.18; Botterill trans.)

Dante’s vernacular thus clears the terrain that the Indovinello had sowed by judging, distinguishing, and even evaluating the differences among the variants or dialects. For Boccaccio, the vernacular, sowed and plowed in the Indovinello and then weeded by Dante’s illustrious vernacular, now needs to be gathered and bound: ‘Tuttavia che va tra queste leggendo, lasci star quelle che pungono, e quelle che dilettano legga’ (Nevertheless whoever goes reading among these, leave alone those that wound and gather [or read] those that delight). It is notable that even Petrarch remains on the same semantic ground to make his contrasting claim about refusing to entrust his imagined magnum opus to the ‘soft mud and shifting sands’ of the vernacular (Sen. 5.2). Boccaccio’s modern garden takes on material form in the Chigi and receives the support of argument in Book 15 of the Genealogie, where Boccaccio makes explicit the exaltation of moderns, like Dante and Petrarch, that he implied at the end of Book 14, arguing that moderns can be as legitimate authorities as the ancients.106 As he puts it in the title of one chapter of the Genealogie: ‘the modern authors cited herein are eminent’ (Insignes viros esse, quos ex novis inducit in testes; Gen. 15.6).107

Boccaccio’s ideas of a cultural renaissance: the letter to Pizzinga (Ep. 19) The continuities between the Decameron and Genealogie – in their defense of love and vernacular, and concern with clearing a space for a garden of literature – characterize Boccaccio’s broader vision of a cultural renewal that he expresses in his letter to Jacopo Pizzinga (Ep. 19). In this 1371 letter Boccaccio celebrates both Dante and Petrarch as having achieved Parnassus by different paths. While Dante reached the Muses on Parnasus ‘not by the path that the ancients had followed, but by certain byways entirely unknown to our ancestors’ (nec ea tamen qua veteres via, sed per diverticula quedam omnino insueta maioribus), Petrarch pursued the

Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch

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‘ancient path’ (vetus iter) and ‘opened the way for himself and those who wished to ascend after him’ (sibi et post eum ascendere volentibus viam aperuit). Boccaccio’s praise of the complementary climbs of Dante and Petrarch on Parnassus suggests an awareness of a kind of cultural renaissance that has been accomplished through both Italian and Latin works.108 Boccaccio not only accommodates these two figures, but even celebrates the unproven Pizzinga. Boccaccio imagines that if Pizzinga pursues poetry, his eventual success will fulfill the promise of Virgil’s fourth eclogue: ‘And I, adding myself to the chorus of those extolling your name with deserved praise, will sing Now the virgin returns, the reign of Saturn is restored’ (‘et ego, choris immixtus festantium tuumque nomen meritis laudibus extollentium, canam: Iam virgo rediit, redeunt saturnia regna’). Boccaccio’s use of Virgil’s fourth eclogue in this letter is quite extraordinary. In Purgatorio, Dante uses Virgil’s fourth eclogue to emphasize the Roman poet’s limitations through the mouth of Statius in Purgatorio – ‘Facesti come quei che va di notte, / che porta il lume dietro e s´e non giova, / ma dopo s´e fa le persone dotte, / quando dicesti: “Secol si rinova; / torna giustizia e primo tempo umano, / e progenie scende da ciel nova.”’ (You did as one who walks at night, who carries the light behind him and does not help himself, but instructs the persons coming after, when you said: ‘The age begins anew; justice returns and the first human time, and a new offspring comes down from Heaven.’)109 Dante thus uses Virgil’s own verses to show how Statius and Dante can see further than Virgil.110 Petrarch appropriates Dante’s image of the unilluminated night traveler, who illuminates the path for others, to express his critical attitude toward Cicero in the letter he writes after discovering Cicero’s Letters to Atticus: ‘Alas, forgetful of brotherly suggestions and so many of your own salutary precepts (preceptorum), like a traveler by night, bearing a light in the darkness, to those who followed you showed the way on which you yourself had quite miserably fallen’ (Fam. 24.3).111 Cicero bore the light of philosophical truth, but his letters reveal that he was not illuminated by them and was carried off to a death unworthy of a philosopher (ad indignam philosopho mortem rapuit). Whereas Dante and Petrarch underline the limitations of Virgil and Cicero, respectively, Boccaccio uses Virgil’s fourth eclogue not to highlight his own superiority, but to celebrate his age and the future. Boccaccio’s application of this idea to his own time would have been impossible for Petrarch who may have seen himself as the inaugurator of a new age but did not believe that it characterized his own times.112 The letter itself offers an image of literary history that emphasizes not contest or competition, but an accommodation of multiple approaches that celebrates a new tradition.

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The mediator and the codex At the end of the letter to Pizzinga, Boccaccio briefly considers his own place in this cultural renewal. Whereas Dante and Petrarch achieved the summit by different paths, Boccaccio remains suspended halfway up the slope: ‘and I neither dare to return below, nor am I able to climb higher’ (nec retro gradum flectere audeo nec ad superiora conscendere queo).113 Stuck halfway up the mountain, Boccaccio takes on the role of the mediator who shapes the transmission of their works to the future through arguments, narratives, and philological interventions. Boccaccio’s interest in mediation appears throughout his works, from his appropriation of the name Dante’s Francesca gives to her go-between, Galeotto, as the ‘cognome’ (surname) for his Decameron to his rare praise of himself for facilitating Leonzio Pilato’s translation of Homer (Gen. 15.7).114 It is not insignificant that Boccaccio celebrates his role immediately after exalting the other moderns and with an important distinction.115 Whereas Dante and Petrarch both represent themselves through the figure of Ulysses, Boccaccio praises himself for helping to translate Homer. The idea of the mediator encompasses not only the four ways of making books enumerated by Bonaventure – scribe, compiler, commentator, and author – but also Boccaccio’s work as editor, biographer, and cultural historian. The chapters that follow explore how Boccaccio shapes the tradition that Vasari’s painting canonizes.116 Chapter 1, ‘Dante’s dirty feet and the limping republic: Boccaccio’s defense of literature in the Vita di Dante’, offers a new reading of Boccaccio’s biography of Dante by situating it in its historical and material contexts as part of a conversation with Petrarch about Dante, the vernacular, and poetry more broadly. Chapter 2, ‘Dante’s shame and Boccaccio’s paratextual praise: Editing the Vita nuova, Commedia, and canzoni distese’, explores how Boccaccio carries forward the biography’s defense of vernacular poetry through editorial means by reshaping, in some cases dramatically, Dante’s works. Chapter 3, ‘The making of Petrarch’s vernacular Book of Fragments (Fragmentorum liber)’, investigates Boccaccio’s role in stimulating Petrarch’s reflections on the vernacular and the structure of this earliest collection of his vernacular lyrics. Chapter 4, ‘The inventive scribe: Glossing Cavalcanti in the Chigi and Decameron 6.9’, reconnects Boccaccio’s transcription of Cavalcanti surrounded Dino del Garbo’s commentary to his story about Cavalcanti in the Decameron. While many critics have interpreted Boccaccio’s story as reflecting some larger historical change, I emphasize this portrait as an expression of Boccaccio’s claims about the complexities of the vernacular. In a brief Epilogue, ‘The allegory

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of the vernacular: Boccaccio’s Esposizioni and Petrarch’s Griselda’, I explore the ambivalent success that Boccaccio’s project achieved in his own lifetime, as reflected in his public lectures on Dante in Florence and Petrarch’s Latin translation of the Griselda story. Boccaccio’s investment in these works of other poets can be seen by translating his labor of transcription into time. Although the time of transcription varies from scribe to scribe and work to work, recent scholarship suggests that Petrarch’s scribe could probably accomplish two folios, that is four sides, in a day.117 If Boccaccio worked at the same rate, he would have completed the seventy-two sides of Petrarch’s collection in eight days of work. He was probably able to transcribe the 183 folios of the Commedia at a faster pace, because each page consists of one column of terza rima verse, but, even doubling his pace, the longer Commedia would have taken forty-five workdays to complete. Boccaccio’s multiple transcriptions of Dante’s works would have cumulatively taken up more than half a year of his life, a figure that does not include the time for decoration and rubrication. There may have been other copies, moreover, that do not survive. The time involved in the act of copying, as well as revising the biography and the other Dantean paratexts he created, show that his dedication to the works of others was not just an occasional hobby but part of a larger cultural project. In a 1372 letter to Pietro Piccolo da Montefiore (Ep. 20), Boccaccio contrasts Petrarch’s caution in circulating texts with his own openness to circulation. Whereas Petrarch withheld his works to establish authorial copies that contained immaculate texts, Boccaccio allowed his books to circulate even before they were complete. Indeed, Boccaccio writes his letter to Pietro because he has left a copy of the Genealogie in Naples, where his correspondent reads it, adding comments that Boccaccio then integrates into the work.118 Boccaccio thus treats his Genealogie literally, and textually, as an ‘open work’, not only to be completed by its readers, as in Eco’s idea of the ‘opera aperta’ or Barthes’s definition of the ‘writerly’ work, but to be developed with, and benefit from, the contributions of others.119 Boccaccio’s scholarly work thus shows the same openness to interpretation and accommodation of multiple perspectives that have been increasingly understood as the hallmark of the Decameron.120 In the second half of this letter to Pietro Piccolo, Boccaccio offers what could be read as a self-portrait of his role. Defending Petrarch from accusations that he had refused to circulate his Africa because he despised his time, Boccaccio claims that Petrarch ‘has always praised with splendid epigrams all the greatest moderns and has very often honored them with praises, and

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he has not hesitated to diminish himself sometimes in order to increase the glory of his contemporaries’ (Ep. 20.48).121 Although Boccaccio’s portrait of Petrarch’s attitude toward the moderns does not correspond to extant evidence, it is an accurate depiction of Boccaccio, who collects rare works of modern authors, like Dante and Petrarch, in his earliest notebooks; constructs an edition of Dante’s works with a prefatory Vita; and continues to advocate for their achievements in his final works, like the Genealogie deorum gentilium (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods) and Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (Expositions on Dante’s ‘Comedy’).122 In this sense, Boccaccio’s praise of Petrarch, in its very dissimulation, exemplifies Boccaccio’s efforts ‘to increase the glory of his contemporaries’ by diminishing himself.123 Boccaccio’s concern with mediating the moderns not only distinguishes him from both Petrarch and Dante, but also suggests his current relevance. While Petrarch’s interest in antiquity informed the Renaissance and Dante’s universalism inspired the Romantics, Boccaccio’s interest in cultivating and assembling the new has not yet found its age. Perhaps now, as we begin to transform our cultural heritage into digital archives, Boccaccio’s activities as mediator in the Chigi can serve to remind us of how transmitting texts in new forms can contribute to the invention of new communities and traditions.

c h a p ter o n e

Dante’s dirty feet and the limping republic Boccaccio’s defense of literature in the Vita di Dante

Boccaccio did not jeer at the ‘piedi sozzi’ of the peacock that Signora Alighieri dreamed about. – Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’

When Leonardo Bruni claimed in the Preface to his Lives of Dante and Petrarch (1436) that Boccaccio had composed his Vita di Dante ‘as if he had been writing either the Filocolo, or the Filostrato, or the Fiammetta’, he was not only knowingly criticizing the work’s lack of historical reliability to motivate the need for his own biography, but also, perhaps unknowingly, inaugurating a critical tradition of identifying literary models to explain Boccaccio’s unusual work that continues to this day.1 While recent studies have indicated a range of potential sources, from classical biographies to medieval hagiographies, that inform Boccaccio’s account, the importance of the work’s material and historical contexts has been largely ignored.2 These omissions are particularly surprising because Boccaccio begins the work not only with the image of the limping republic that situates the biography in a particular historical context, but also by calling attention to its codicological context, explaining that he will discuss ‘la nobilt`a della sua origine, la vita, gli studii, i costumi; raccogliendo appresso in uno l’opere da lui fatte, nelle quali esso s´e s`ı chiaro ha renduto a’ futuri’ (the nobility of his origin, life, studies, and customs, gathering afterwards into a whole the works he produced which made him so well known to posterity; Chigi 6).3 The material significance of the final phrase, ‘raccogliendo appresso in uno l’opere da lui fatte’, has been misunderstood by two recent translators, who have rendered it as ‘I shall sum up the works’, in an English version, and ‘dar`o una rassegna globale delle opere da lui composte’ (I will give a comprehensive overview of the works he composed), in a modern Italian one.4 Assuming a modern print identity ‘between a textual unit and a codicological unit’, these translations distort the material nature of Boccaccio’s project, which encompasses both a biography and the collection 29

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of Dante’s vernacular works (Vita nuova, Commedia, and longer poems) that follows it.5 Boccaccio’s deployment of the Vita di Dante to preface a collection of Dante’s works (and not only the Commedia) thus inaugurates the application of what Michel Foucault calls the ‘fundamental category of “the-man-and-his-work criticism”’ to a vernacular author.6 Boccaccio’s collections in both Toledo 104.6 and the original configuration of the Chigi thus constitute crucial moments in what Roger Chartier describes as ‘a gradual change in the way texts in the vernacular were regarded, attributing to them a principle of designation and election that had long been characteristic only of works that were referred to an ancient auctoritas’.7 If Dante had developed an expansive theoretical defense for the apparent paradox of a modern author, as Albert Ascoli has argued, then Boccaccio gave those claims material form.8 While the Occitan vidas represent an important vernacular precedent, Boccaccio’s Vita goes well beyond those paragraph-length biographical sketches in its length, topics, and accompanying textual corpus.9 Boccaccio’s biography shares a prefatory function with the accessus ad auctores, but it also goes significantly beyond those models by providing what has been called ‘the first defense of poetry in a modern language’.10 In other words, Boccaccio presents his praise of Dante in such a way that it is also a praise of all poetry. It is likely for this reason that, only forty years after Bruni had maligned the work’s lack of historical accuracy, Poliziano places Boccaccio’s Vita at the beginning of the Raccolta Aragonese.11 Poliziano recognized that Boccaccio’s work provided the theoretical justifications for the vernacular works in the Raccolta.12 This double perspective, as both biography and theoretical treatise in defense of poetry, may explain why the work is sometimes referred to as the Vita di Dante and other times as the Trattatello in laude di Dante. Boccaccio calls the work a Vita in both autograph versions, but he refers to it as his ‘trattatello in laude di Dante’ (little treatise in praise of Dante) in his Esposizioni (Accessus 36). Although it is by no means clear that Boccaccio intends this later description to be the work’s title, many later editors have preferred to use ‘trattatello’ and one can even find both titles used in the same edition.13 Boccaccio’s Vita is part of a long-standing concern with celebrating the poet who never received his deserved laurel crown, as Boccaccio laments in Ytalie iam certus honos. In his earliest works, Boccaccio uses Dante as a model, rewriting two of Dante’s letters in his first ars dictaminis exercises and imitating Dante’s terza rima rhyme scheme in his first vernacular fiction, the Caccia di Diana. Boccaccio also defends the poet in these early works, exalting him as an equal to the classical poets at the end of the Filocolo;

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imagining Dante’s coronation in the Amorosa visione; and including Dante as one of the authoritative vernacular poets who continued to love in old age in the Decameron’s Introduction to Day 4. Boccaccio also collects several of Dante’s rare Latin works, including his exchange of eclogues with Giovanni del Virgilio and some of his letters (Epist. 3, 11, 12) in the Zibaldone laurenziano. In the Vita, Boccaccio draws on these documents to develop a portrait of the poet that addresses broader issues about the place of poetry in society, the relationship between poets and power, and the value of the vernacular. Investigating Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante in its historical context, this chapter examines the motivations for the work’s composition and revision, suggested by the work’s opening image of the limping body politic. This striking image situates the work as part of an exchange between Boccaccio and Petrarch about Florence, justice, and the liberal arts that substantially informs the work’s larger arguments for poetry and the vernacular. Placing the work in its social circumstances also means exploring how Boccaccio uses the materiality of the manuscript with its combination of both life and works to dramatize his own intervention in what he sees as a civic crisis.

The limping republic and the prospect of Petrarch in Florence Whereas most medieval biographies, like Boccaccio’s own Latin vitae of Petrarch and Peter Damian, begin with the subject of the biography, Boccaccio begins the Vita di Dante with a sententious quotation of Solon.14 He writes: Solone, il cui petto uno humano tempio di divina sapienza fu reputato, e le cui sacratissime leggi sono ancora testimonianza dell’antica iustizia e della sua gravit`a era secondo che dicono alcuni usato tal volta di dire ogni republica s`ı come noi andare e stare sopra due piedi; de’ quali con maturit`a affermava essere il destro il non lasciare alcun difetto commesso impunito, e il sinistro ogni ben fatto remunerare; aggiungendo che, qualunque delle due cose mancava, senza dubbio da quel pi`e la republica zoppicare. (Chigi 1) Solon, whose breast was said to be a human temple of divine wisdom, and whose very sacred laws are still a witness to ancient justice and its gravity, was, according to some, in the habit of saying sometimes that every republic, like ourselves, walks and stands on two feet. With mature wisdom he affirmed that, of these, the right foot stood for not letting any crime that has been committed remain unpunished, and the left stood for rewarding every good

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature deed; he added that whichever of these two things was lacking, then the republic undoubtedly limped on that foot.

Although Boccaccio strives to make the Solonic saying sound like a conventional proverb (‘according to some’), the image of the limping body politic does not appear in any of the familiar works that exploit the image of the body politic, like Aristotle’s Politics, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, or Marsilio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis.15 The image of the limping body politic derives instead from Petrarch’s June 2, 1349, letter to Florence (now Fam. 8.10), which Petrarch wrote after the death of his friend, Mainardo Accursio, at the hands of brigands in the hills outside the city.16 In his letter, Petrarch writes: Even as a child I used to hear my elders talk about the unusual virtues of all sorts possessed by that people [the Florentines], and their outstanding justice not only in civil suits but especially in these two things in which that most wise legislator, Solon, said was the basis of true republic, namely, reward and punishment. If only one of these is missing, the state must limp along as if on the other foot [quasi altero pede claudicantem efficiat civitatem], but if both are missing, it is utterly weakened and sluggish, with the virtue of good citizens becoming dull on the one hand, and, on the other, the badness of evil citizens taking fire.17

In this passage, Petrarch draws on the Ciceronian correspondence he discovered in Verona in 1345.18 In a letter to Brutus, Cicero cites Solon as saying that ‘a state was kept together by two things: reward and punishment’ (Ad Brutum 1.15.3). Petrarch grafts the Solonic statement about reward and punishment onto the familiar image of the body politic to create the image of the limping republic that Boccaccio uses at the beginning of the Vita.19 The point of Petrarch’s image was to motivate the Florentines to avenge the death of his friend, which Petrarch significantly registers on the same piece of parchment in the Ambrosian Virgil that bears the notice of Laura’s death.20 Lest the importance of this pedestrian imagery escape his readers, Petrarch adds that by allowing the offending robbers to go unpunished, the Florentine republic not only limps but also fails to ‘follow in the footsteps’ (eisdem vestigiis gradientes) of its Roman forefathers. Petrarch concludes the letter by urging the Florentines to clear the mountain passes of these assassins, who are protected by the feudal Ubaldini family, before the Jubilee in 1350.21 Boccaccio not only knew of Petrarch’s letter, he wrote the Florentine response to it in 1351 (Ep. 7), where he transforms the meaning of Petrarch’s image of the limping republic. Although Boccaccio had already transcribed

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several Petrarchan texts in his Zibaldone laurenziano, Petrarch’s letter to Florence seems to have provided him with his first opportunity to correspond directly with the poet. Even before he composed the formal reply, Boccaccio sent Petrarch a poem, which is only known from Petrarch’s response, O ego si, qualem tu me tibi fingis amando (Epyst. 3.17), in which Petrarch continues to lament the loss of his friend Mainardo. In October 1350, Boccaccio met Petrarch when the latter was passing through Florence on his way to celebrate the Jubilee in Rome.22 Petrarch and Boccaccio must have quickly developed a friendship, since Petrarch wrote him a letter a few weeks later about an injury he sustained to his left leg on the journey to Rome. In the letter, Petrarch interprets the subsequent limp as a possible outward manifestation of spiritual failing: ‘I confess to believing at times that it might be God’s will to raise with His own hands a person whose spirit had long been limping by causing his body to limp’ (Fam. 11.1).23 Petrarch thus shifts the meaning of the metaphoric limp from the civic significance that it has in his letter to the Florentines to a moral one that it also has in the Secretum.24 The image of the limp thus has a surprisingly prominent place in Petrarch’s early correspondence with Florence and Boccaccio, but when Boccaccio uses Petrarch’s image of the limping republic in the letter he composes on behalf of the Signoria, he deploys it to describe neither the absence of justice nor a spiritual failing but instead a cultural crisis. He writes: Moreover, dearest citizen, since we have recently seen our city to lack liberal studies, as if limping on its right foot [cum nuper civitatem nostram veluti dextero pede claudicantem liberis carere studiis videremus], with mature judgment it was foreseen that here, fruitful in intelligence thanks to the stars, the liberal arts [artes] should be taught and the studies of every profession should flourish, so that our republic, supported by wisdom, may obtain for itself the leadership among the others, like Rome, the parent of all Italy.

Boccaccio thus gives Petrarch’s image of the limping republic a new, cultural valence to convey the city’s need for Petrarch’s help in restoring the liberal arts. He claims, moreover, picking up on Petrarch’s remarks about Florence falling short of Rome, that Petrarch’s return would make the city a new Rome.25 In addition to shifting attention to cultural concerns, Boccaccio’s letter offered Petrarch the leadership of the newly approved Studio that would become the University and, most important, the restitution of the lands his family possessed before being sent into exile.26 Boccaccio notes that this

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restitution of lands may seem ‘a small gift in truth, if looked at in itself, but if you measure it by the laws and customs of our city, which have not given as much to any other citizen, it will be held as no small demonstration of your renown’ (Ep. 7.3).27 Boccaccio’s implied comparison here is to Dante, who was offered a return to Florence under humiliating conditions that he rejected in a letter (Epist. 12) that Boccaccio preserved in his Zibaldone laurenziano (c. 63r). A year before visiting Petrarch in Padova, Boccaccio had attempted to repair the city’s relationship with Dante by bringing ten florins on behalf of the Signoria to Dante’s daughter, Beatrice, who was a nun in Ravenna.28 In this comparison, then, Boccaccio suggests the connection between his efforts to honor both of these poets that the Florentines had exiled. Boccaccio brought the letter in person to Petrarch when he visited him in Padua in the spring of 1351.29 In April, Boccaccio returned to Florence with Petrarch’s reply, which thanked the Florentines for the restitution of his patrimony, but did not respond to the offer to head the University or inform them of his imminent departure for Avignon. In the letter, Petrarch particularly compliments the words that accompanied the Florentines’ offer, which some have suggested may refer not only to the letter of the offer itself, but also to Boccaccio’s biography of Petrarch, the De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi, which was likely part of his campaign to promote Petrarch’s return to Florence.30 If Boccaccio did bring the De Vita Petracchi with him, Petrarch would have been in possession of a work that he would borrow from extensively for his autobiography in the Letter to Posterity (Sen. 18.1).31 Whether or not Petrarch received the De Vita Petracchi, the work is nonetheless significant because it shows Boccaccio using a biography to convince Florence to honor a poet, just as he does in the Vita di Dante. Although Petrarch told Boccaccio that his stay in France would be brief, since he simply intended to retrieve volumes for his Italian library (Fam. 11.6), Petrarch wound up spending the next two years in Avignon. The Florentines took this prolonged absence as an insult and revoked their offer to restore to Petrarch his family’s lands. When Petrarch returned to Italy in 1353, he went to live not in Florence, but in Milan, the seat of Florence’s archenemy, the Visconti.32 When Boccaccio received the news, he was engaged on a diplomatic mission precisely to prevent Milanese expansion and wrote Petrarch a letter reproving him for his decision (Ep. 10).33 Boccaccio begins by recalling his visit to Padua two years earlier, in March 1351, when he spent all day copying Petrarch’s works, while Petrarch dedicated himself to ‘sacred

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studies’.34 Boccaccio’s mention of transcribing Petrarch’s works hints at the use he makes of them in the letter, where he appropriates the mode of pastoral allegory he found in Petrarch’s prefatory letter to his first eclogue (Fam. 10.4), and the idea of criticizing one’s acknowledged master that he would have found in Petrarch’s letters to Cicero and Seneca (Fam. 24.3–5).35 Reminding Petrarch of his remarks about tyrants and his proclaimed love of solitude, Boccaccio splits Petrarch into two figures to suggest that he sees Petrarch’s move to Milan as a kind of self-alienation.36 Boccaccio balances these accusations with a possible justification (excusatio) for Petrarch’s behavior, namely his indignation at the Florentines’ treatment of him by rescinding the offer to restore his patrimony: ‘And no one knows this better than I,’ he notes, ‘since I was the mediator [medius] in these affairs and the caretaker [curator] and bearer of the offered gift.’37 In this self-presentation as mediator and curator, Boccaccio describes the role he would occupy not only for Petrarch, whom he would try to bring back to Florence again in 1365, but also for Dante.38

The two versions of the Vita di Dante Boccaccio’s decision to begin his Vita di Dante with the image of the limping republic thus situates the work in a very specific historical context that encompasses Petrarch’s letter to Florence (Fam. 8.10), Boccaccio’s efforts to bring Petrarch back to Florence (Ep. 7), Petrarch’s move to Milan in 1353, and Boccaccio’s response (Ep. 10). The historical context of these exchanges illuminates the motivation for Boccaccio’s composition of the first version of the Vita in the Toledo codex.39 Boccaccio’s biography of Dante could be read as an extension of this earlier project to bring Petrarch back to Florence. His failed attempt to bring the poet laureate back to Florence would thus have inspired his efforts to advocate for a dead poet, equally unjustly exiled by the fickle Florentines. Boccaccio’s frustration with the Florentine mismanagement of the offer to Petrarch and his disappointment at the loss of Petrarch seem to animate the particular vitriol of the longer version of the Vita in Toledo 104.6, with its extensive invectives against the Florentines.40 When Boccaccio revised the Vita in the Chigi, he changed several parts of the biography, pruning its invectives against Florence, crafting a more concise defense of poetry, and modifying some of his praise of Dante.41 Critics have given particular weight to Boccaccio’s revisions of his celebration of Dante, which they have interpreted as signs of his shifting allegiance from Dante to Petrarch. Carlo Paolazzi, for example, argues that Boccaccio

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revised the biography in keeping with Petrarch’s views as expressed in his letter on Dante (Fam. 21.15); an interpretation that has been followed by several other critics.42 For Warren Ginsberg, the changes ‘bespeak a far fuller acceptance of Petrarchan principles’ and Martin McLaughlin similarly sees these changes as ‘a significant barometer of Boccaccio’s change in literary ideals’.43 Even a critic like Domenico De Robertis, who questions Paolazzi’s reconstruction because Boccaccio’s request for Petrarch’s letter ‘de Dante’ in 1367 (Ep. 15) suggests that he still did not know Petrarch’s letter (Fam. 21.15) when he wrote the second version of the Vita, agrees that the changes suggest that Petrarch had succeeded in ‘dampening’ Boccaccio’s enthusiasm for Dante.44 Whether or not Boccaccio received Petrarch’s letter, Petrarch does seem to have influenced Boccaccio’s modifications, but these changes do not necessarily reflect a change in Boccaccio’s estimation of Dante. An analysis of the biography in the material context of the Chigi suggests the need to develop a more complex interpretation of these changes, because the codex as a whole reveals Boccaccio’s continued enthusiasm for Dante. It not only represents weeks, if not months, of labor, but also includes Ytalie iam certus honos, which attempts to persuade Petrarch of Dante’s value. The presence of Ytalie iam certus honos in the Chigi suggests that, while the first version in the Toledo manuscript was addressed to the Florentines, the second version is addressed to Petrarch. By recognizing that Boccaccio is writing the version of the biography in the Chigi for Petrarch, as he explicitly states in Ytalie iam certus honos, I argue that it should be understood as a strategic revision to persuade Petrarch to join him finally in praising Dante. Instead of indicating a change in Boccaccio’s opinion of Dante, then, the codex as a whole suggests that he is reshaping his argument to satisfy the new audience of Petrarch. This argument also helps to explain why he prunes the invectives against Florence from the Chigi. Whereas Boccaccio composed the earlier version of the work in the Toledo to convince the Florentines, through a series of invectives and justifications, to honor Dante, for the different audience of Petrarch in the Chigi these particular admonitions and excuses had no place.45

The dirty feet of the vernacular The image of the limping republic not only evokes this historical context but also informs the work’s larger arguments for poetry and the vernacular. In the letter on behalf of the Signoria (Ep. 7), Boccaccio gives Petrarch’s

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image of the limping republic a new cultural meaning to signify the absence of the liberal arts in Florence and, in the Vita, Boccaccio claims that a similar cultural crisis motivated Dante’s choice of the vernacular for the Commedia. According to Boccaccio, Dante began a version of the Commedia in Latin but soon switched to the vernacular because he saw that the liberal arts had been abandoned by the leaders who should have supported them.46 Boccaccio explains: veggendo egli li liberali studii del tutto essere abandonati, e massimamente da’ prencipi, a’ quali si soleano le poetiche opere intitolare, e che soleano essere promotori di quelle; e, oltre a ci`o, veggendo le divine opere di Virgilio e quelle degli altri solenni poeti venute in non calere e quasi rifiutate da tutti, estimando non dover meglio avvenir della sua, mut`o consiglio e prese partito di farla corrispondente, quanto alla prima apparenza, agl’ingegni de’ prencipi odierni; e, lasciati stare i versi, ne’ rittimi la fece che noi veggiamo. Di che segu`ı un bene, che de’ versi non sarebbe segu`ıto: che senza tˆor via lo esercitare degl’ingengi de’ letterati, egli a’ non letterati diede alcuna cagion di studiare, e a s´e acquist`o in brevissimo tempo grandissima fama, e maravigliosamente onor`o il fiorentino idioma. (Chigi 129–30) Seeing that liberal studies had been wholly abandoned, especially by the princes, to whom poetic works were usually addressed and who were accustomed to promote them, and, beyond that, seeing that the divine works of Virgil and those of other impressive poets had fallen into disregard and been rejected by almost everyone, thinking that better would not happen to his work, he changed his mind and decided to make it correspond, at least at first glance, to the intelligence of the modern rulers; and leaving aside the Latin verses, he wrote it in the vernacular rhythms that we see. From this came a good that would not have followed from Latin verses: that, without taking away from the literates the exercise of their intelligence, he gave to the illiterate a reason to study, which earned for himself great fame in a short amount to time, and wonderfully honored the Florentine idiom.

According to Boccaccio, Dante’s choice of the vernacular thus aims to rectify the city’s lack of liberal arts that Boccacico had described through the image of the limping republic in his letter to Petrarch. Boccaccio’s claim that Dante’s use of the vernacular appealed to modern capacities ‘at least at first glance’ suggests that Dante’s works, moreover, conceal hidden meanings.47 By writing in the vernacular, moreover, Dante was able to achieve something that he would have been unable to do in Latin alone: he expands his potential audience by giving himself both readers of Latin and those who lack Latin.48

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Boccaccio reinforces this connection between the limping republic and Dante’s decision to write in the vernacular in his explanation of the dream of Dante’s mother, where he identifies the peacock’s dirty feet with the vernacular. According to Boccaccio, Dante’s mother dreamed that she gave birth to a son beneath a laurel tree next to a clear fountain. Her son begins feeding on acorns and then transforms into a shepherd, who reaches for the leaves of the laurel but falls to the ground and then rises as a peacock.49 This dream is inspired by the dream of Virgil’s mother recorded in biographies of the Latin poet, but whereas those lives provide the dream alone without further explanation, Boccaccio includes a new interpretive dimension.50 Unpacking the significance of these symbols, Boccaccio explains that the acorns are Dante’s studies, particularly the books of poets; the fountain is philosophy; reaching for the laurel signifies his desire for coronation; and the peacock represents Dante’s poem. The hundred eyes of the peacock’s feathers, furthermore, represent the hundred cantos of the poem and its dirty feet represent the vernacular in which it is written. He observes: Sono e al paone i pi`e sozzi e l’andatura queta: le quali cose ottimamente alla Comedia del nostro auttor si confanno; perci`o che, s`ı come sopra i piedi pare che tutto il corpo si sostenga, cos`ı prima facie [pare] che sopra il modo del parlare ogni opera in iscrittura composta si sostenga; e il parlare volgare, nel quale e sopra il quale ogni giuntura della Comedia si sostiene, a rispetto dell’alto e maestrevole stilo letterale che usa ciascuno altro poeta, e` senza dubbio sozzo. (Chigi 154) Dirty feet and a quiet gait are characteristics of the peacock, which correspond very well to our author’s Comedy since just as it seems to support its whole body on two feet, so does the mode of speech support every written work; and the vernacular speech, in which and on which every joint of the Comedy is supported, is undoubtedly dirty compared to the high and masterful literary style that every other poet uses.51

The dirtiness at which Boccaccio ‘does not jeer’, as Samuel Beckett puts it in this chapter’s epigram, is the vernacular itself. Boccaccio’s pedantic explanation of the analogy (‘just as it seems to support its whole body on its feet’) suggests a contrast between the dirty feet of the vernacular that support the peacock of the Commedia and the body politic that limps at the beginning of the biography. These vernacular feet may be dirty, in other words, but at least they can support the poem. If the republic wobbled because it lacked the liberal arts, as Boccaccio put it in his letter to Petrarch (Ep. 7) and Dante’s choice of the vernacular responded to the same crisis, then these dirty feet of the vernacular may even help to steady the republic.

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Boccaccio’s genealogy of poetry in the Vita di Dante The historical circumstances of Boccaccio’s attempt to bring Petrarch back to Florence also illuminate Boccaccio’s arguments about the relationship between poet and power in the central section of the Vita di Dante, which Boccaccio calls a ‘trasgressione’ (Chigi 80, 141), usually translated as digression. Although the name trasgressione may suggest an excursus that is unrelated to the substance of the work, the name also calls attention to its presence and suggests its importance, which Boccaccio underlines by explicitly linking its discussion of poetry back to ‘the most sacred saying of Solon described at the beginning of the present work, which the Greeks wonderfully served for a long time, making their republic flourish [fiorendo]’ (Chigi 103).52 Boccaccio’s choice of ‘fiorendo’ underscores, moreover, that Florence, which is etymologically related to such flourishing, has failed to properly honor its poets. The defense of poetry in the trasgressione thus expands on the exordium’s exhortation to honor poetry’s place in society by exploring its role in the beginnings of human civilization. Boccaccio begins his trasgressione by providing an account of what Kant called ‘the conjectural beginning of human history’ that is quite similar to Petrarch’s genealogy in his letter to Gherardo (Fam. 10.4).53 In the Esposizioni (1.lit.15) Boccaccio acknowledges that his similar account there derives in large part from Petrarch’s letter, which Boccaccio likely transcribed during his 1351 stay with Petrarch in Padua; but Boccaccio uses Petrarch’s etymology and genealogy to develop a different argument.54 In his letter Petrarch explains the etymology of poet in the context of a history of civilization, for which he provides sources (Varro, Suetonius, Isidore) and then gives an allegorical interpretation of his first eclogue that itself dramatizes the contrast between theology and poetry, using his brother Gherardo to help define himself – as he also does in the letter on the Ascent of Mt. Ventoux (Fam. 4.1).55 The novelty of Boccaccio’s account is not only that he ‘applies these Petrarchan formulations not to Virgil nor to his own Latin poetry (as Petrarch had done), but rather to Dante’s vernacular poem’, as Gilson observes, but also that he expands the discussion of poetry’s genealogy into the realm of social history, which Petrarch completely ignores.56 In schematic terms, one could say that while Petrarch is concerned with developing a structural analogy between Scripture and poetry in the use of figurative language, Boccaccio is interested in discourse, that is, the social situations of enunciation. This concern with discourse is, of course, the hallmark of the frame that Boccaccio develops for the Decameron, where the stories do not simply exist by themselves, as in the Novellino, but are

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recounted by storytellers who interact through them. Whereas Petrarch emphasizes the connection between poetry and theology in their shared use of figurative language to prepare for the allegorical interpretation of his own Latin eclogue, which dramatizes Petrarch’s anxieties about the relationship between poetry and theology, Boccaccio expands these concerns beyond the personal and into social history to defend both the classical past and the vernacular present.57 According to Boccaccio’s genealogy of poetry, the first people (‘la prima gente’) wanting to discover the truth through study reasoned that there must be something beyond what they saw, an unmoved mover that they called god.58 They venerated this god in various ways, constructing remarkable buildings that they called temples and appointing special ministers that they called priests. They erected statues with various ornaments and, so that their praise should not be mute, they established a special form of speech. Boccaccio claims that the Greeks called this kind of exquisite speech (parlare esquisito) ‘poet`es’, which he argues, following Petrarch, is the origin of the word ‘poet’. Boccaccio acknowledges that while there are ‘other perhaps good explanations, I like this one more’.59 Whereas Petrarch chooses this same etymology on the basis of ‘research’ that makes it ‘the most probable’, Boccaccio calls attention to his own act of selection, evoking, but not explicitly recording, the alternative etymology he provides in both the Genealogie (14.7) and the Esposizioni (1.lit.70). According to this rejected etymology, ‘poet’ derives not from ‘poet`es’, but from poio, the equivalent of the Latin fingo, which could suggest that poets are mere fabricators and, therefore, perhaps liars, whereas Boccaccio’s etymology disassociates poetry from mere pretending and emphasizes its connection to truth. Whereas Petrarch uses this genealogy of civilization merely to support his etymology of poetry, Boccaccio develops the historical narrative further to address the social circumstances that produced apparently polytheist poetry. Boccaccio argues that princes multiplied the gods for their own gain to such an extent that almost all terrestrial things contained a hidden divinity (Chigi 87). Some of those princes even tried to make people worship them like gods.60 In a passage that has particularly interested critics, Boccaccio argues that poets were needed in this process of deification. Because most critics examine the Toledo version of the text, I quote from it here before turning to the different Chigi verison. Boccaccio writes: E oltre a questo diedono opera a deificare li loro padri, li loro avoli e li loro maggiori, acci`o che pi`u fossero e temuti e avuti in reverenzia dal vulgo.

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Le quali cose non si poterono commodamente fare senza l’oficio de’ poeti, li quali, s`ı per ampliare la loro fama, s`ı per compiacere a’ prencipi, s`ı per dilettare i sudditi, e s`ı per persuadere il virtuosamente operare a ciascuno – quello che con aperto parlare saria suto della loro intenzione contrario – con fizioni varie e maestrevoli, male da’ grossi oggi non che a quel tempo intese, facevano credere quello che li prencipi volevan che si credesse; servando negli nuovi iddii e negli uomini, gli quali degl’iddii nati fingevano, quello medesimo stile che nel vero Iddio solamente e nel suo lusingarlo avevan gli primi usato. (Toledo 135–36) And furthermore [the princes] took care to deify their fathers, their grandfathers, and their ancestors, so that they were both more feared and held in reverence by the people. These things could not easily be done without the work of poets, who – to increase their fame, please the princes, delight the subjects, and persuade all to act virtuously [a ciascuno] – that which if spoken openly [con aperto parlare] would have been contrary to their intentions, they made believed that which the princes wished to have believed, with various masterful fictions [con fizioni varie e maestrevoli], which are badly understood by the stupid today, not to mention then [male da’ grossi oggi non che a quel tempo intese]. For the new gods and for the men who pretended to be the descendants of gods, they used the same style [quello medesimo stile] that the early peoples had used only for the worship of the true God and for venerating Him.

Several critics have interpreted this passage as presenting an unflattering portrait of poets and a veiled attack on Petrarch in particular. David Wallace, for example, reads this passage as a critique of poets who ‘cannot legitimate the rule of a despot, [ . . . ] but can gild it with the semblance of legitimacy’, which he sees as directed toward Petrarch’s ‘alliance with the Visconti’.61 Warren Ginsberg similarly argues that ‘these remarks stand out as an explicit critique of his master’s values’, maintaining that in this passage ‘Boccaccio rips the mask away: no matter the intent, the effect of his poems will be to get the people to believe what their rulers want them to believe.’62 Paolo Baldan similarly understands this passage as referring to Boccaccio’s experiences with Niccolo de’ Acciauoli in Naples, while Gregory Stone argues that it is a critique of ‘weak, second-rate poets’.63 Some of these interpretations rely on suppressing the interpretive problems raised by two key phrases: ‘quello che con aperto parlare saria suto della loro intenzione contrario’ (that which if spoken openly would have been contrary to their intentions) and ‘male da’ grossi oggi non che a quel tempo intese’ (badly understood by the stupid today, not to mention then). Does the first phrase mean that poets knew that the indirect means of fiction had greater persuasive power, as Wallace and Baldan suggest, or that the poets

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didn’t believe that these men were descendants of the gods, as Ginsberg and Wicksteed think?64 The interpretation of ‘quello che con aperto parlare saria suto della loro intenzione contrario’ (that which if spoken openly would have been contrary to their intentions) as praising indirect means of persuasion finds some support in Boccaccio’s later discussion of poetry’s difficulty in the Toledo, where he argues that poetry persuades those who would not be convinced by philosophical demonstrations (Toledo 152), and it finds tangential support in the stories of Days 1 and 6 of the Decameron.65 This appealing notion of poetry’s indirect powers of persuasion does not, however, reckon with the second problematic phrase ‘male da’ grossi oggi non che a quel tempo intese’ (badly understood by the stupid today, not to mention then), which suggests that even if these indirect fictions did convince people, the surface meaning was not what poets wanted to communicate. In other words, Boccaccio’s claim that these poets’ stories were ‘male da’ grossi oggi non che a quel tempo intese’ (badly understood by the stupid today, not to mention then) seems to support the interpretation that the poets’ intentions were not to use indirect means to persuade, but instead to claim things in fiction that they did not really believe. Whether one takes the first phrase as referring to the poets’ intention to use the persuasive power of indirect statement or their intentions to conceal their real beliefs, the phrase ‘male da’ grossi oggi non che a quel tempo intese’ (badly understood by the stupid today, not to mention then) suggests that whatever the fiction was, its real meaning was misunderstood. The stupid (‘grossi’) think that the surface meaning is the only message, thus believing what the princes wish to be believed and failing to understand the deeper meaning of the poets’ works.66 The difficulties of Boccaccio’s text, which has led some critics to interpret the passage as a critique of other poets who are employed by a state, like Petrarch and Zanobi da Strada, or as an attempt to distinguish between strong and weak poets, can be explained by placing them in the larger context of Boccaccio’s argument, whose point is not to criticize poets but to defend them.67 His goal in particular is to save those poets who may seem to express polytheistic ideas by explaining the social circumstances that led them to appear to deify these men, although their fictions concealed other teachings.68 When Boccaccio mentions Hercules’ deification later in the Vita di Dante, for example, he explains that the story shows the positive effects of man’s virtue. By providing a historical explanation for the multiple gods in classical literature, Boccaccio anticipates the project that he will develop at much greater length in the Genealogie, where he uses the same argument to explain the origins of the pagan gods (Gen. 1.Pref 1.4–12).69

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In the context of the Vita di Dante, Boccaccio substantiates his claims about the relationship between poetry and theology by drawing parallels between the hidden meanings of classical myths and the Bible to show how the pagan poets ‘follow in the footsteps’ of the Holy Spirit, thus supporting his claim in the genealogy that these later poets used the same style (i.e. figurative language) that the first poets had used for the true God. Boccaccio singles out this discussion for going beyond what he had promised to discuss (‘oltre al promesso’, Chigi 91) and therefore making it a kind of ‘trasgressione’ within the ‘trasgressione’ that the defense itself represents. Just as Petrarch cites Isidore and Suetonius for his argument that poetry and Scripture share the use of figurative language, Boccaccio adduces his own authoritative quotation from Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job (Proemio 5) to support his claims.70 Comparing Scripture to a river that can accommodate both a very small lamb (agnello) and a large elephant, Gregory argues that a text (testo) both has a literal meaning for the ‘semplici’ ‘in publico’ and a mystery (misterio) or hidden meaning for the ‘savi’ ‘in occulto’ (Chigi 94). Just as the Biblical authors wrote ‘sotto velame’ what would be understood ‘senza alcun velo’ at the proper moment, classical poets not only ‘pretended that Saturn had many children’ (‘fingendo Saturno aver molti figliuoli’) to figure time and the elements, but also ‘pretended Hercules was transformed into a man’ (‘fingono li nostri poeti Ercole d’uomo essere in dio trasformato’) to show that through virtuous deeds man can become like a god (Chigi 98–99). To advance his argument, Boccaccio provides a series of examples of allegories from both Scripture and classical literature in a carefully construction exposition. With the figura ‘d’alcuna storia’ (of some story), like the burning bush, Scripture shows the senso that is the Virginity of Mary; ‘d’alcuna visione’ (of some vision), like that of Nebachudnezzer, it reveals Christianity’s triumph; ‘d’alcuna lamentazione’ (of some lamentation), like Jeremiah’s, it foretells the fall of Jerusalem (Chigi 97). Likewise, poets with their ‘fizioni di varii idii’ (fictions of the various gods), like Saturn eating four sons show ‘cagioni delle cose’ (the reasons of things), that is time and its elements; with ‘trasformazioni di uomini in varie forme’ (metamorphoses of men in various shapes), like Hercules transformed into a god and Lycaon into a wolf, they show the ‘effetti delle virt`u’ (effects of virtue) and warn of the ‘vizi da fuggire’ (vices to avoid); with ‘leggiadre persuasioni’ (pleasing persuasions), like the Elysian Fields and Dis, they also suggest Paradise and Inferno (Chigi 96, 98–102). Although these allegories refer to different things, since the Bible reveals history while the classical works deal with ethical teachings, Boccaccio wants to emphasize the continuities or similarities between them.

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The kind of allegorical interpretations of classical myth that Boccaccio proposes here are not novel, but Boccaccio’s goal is not only to save past poetry, as others before him had tried to do, but also to defend the value of the vernacular in which Dante chose to write and for which he deserves the laurel (Chigi 109).71 From this perspective, Boccaccio’s discussion of the political pressures that produced pagan poetry, which some critics have seen as a criticism of Petrarch and others, can be understood not only as a justification of those potentially polytheist poets but also of Dante, who dedicated the three sections of the Commedia to major Ghibelline figures, as Boccaccio notes in the Vita (Chigi 131–32), following information he found in the letter of Frate Ilaro.72 Boccaccio’s social history of classical poetry thus contributes to justifying Dante’s dubious dedication to the Ghibellines (Toledo 168–70; Chigi 112). In Boccaccio’s hands, allegory not only saves the poetry of the classical past but also legitimizes the new vernacular present. In the Genealogie, Boccaccio follows a similar line of argument, moving from a discussion of the allegorical significance of fiction (14.9) to the examples of Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, and himself (14.10). On the surface, Dante may seem to write nakedly in the vernacular, but his works conceal hidden meanings. Boccaccio underlines the novelty of his argument that vernacular works can be allegorical in the Esposizioni, when he comments on Dante’s address to the readers before the walls of Dis, ‘O voi ch’avete li ‘ntelletti sani, / mirate la dottrina che s’asconde / sotto ‘l velame de li versi strani’ (O you who have sound intellects, look at the doctrine that lies hidden behind the veil of the strange verses; Inf. 9.61–63). Boccaccio notes that Dante’s versi are strani because, even though they are in the vernacular, they contain a hidden meaning. He writes: E fanno queste parole dirittamente contro ad alcuni, li quali, non intendendo le cose nascose sotto il velame di questi versi, non vogliono che l’autore abbia alcuna altra cosa intesa se non quello che semplicemente suona il senso litterale; li quali per queste parole possono manifestamente comprendere l’autore avere inteso altro che quello che per la corteccia si comprende. E chiama l’autore questi suoi versi strani, in quanto mai per alcuno davanti a lui non era stata composta alcuna fizione sotto versi volgari, ma sempre sotto litterali, e per`o paiono strani, in quanto disusati a cos`ı fatto stile. These words of the author directly contradict those who, unable to grasp what is hidden under the veil of these verses, deny that the author intended anything other than simply what is contained in their literal meaning. This passage allows such people to understand clearly that the author did in

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fact represent more than what may be seen on the surface. The author calls these verses of his ‘strange’, inasmuch as no one before him had ever composed such a fiction in vernacular verses, but always literal ones. Thus, these verses seem ‘strange’, insofar as they are unaccustomed to such a style. (Esp. 9.lit.39–40; Papio 410)

For Boccaccio, Dante is the first to compose vernacular works that have a more than surface meaning. In both the Genealogie and the Esposizioni, then, Boccaccio adopts the same strategy he uses in the Vita di Dante to argue for the allegorical nature of the vernacular by underscoring its connections to the larger poetic tradition, and in all three works, his effort to save the classical poets is also a way to legitimize the moderns.

The substitute tomb and the bibliographical imagination Boccaccio uses the materiality of the codex itself to dramatize his intervention in this civic crisis of the liberal arts, which he undertakes not only through the biography’s praise of Dante’s intellectual achievements, but also through his editorial activities. In the story and transcription of Dante’s epitaph, he makes the codex into a substitute tomb, and in the stories of the Commedia’s compilation, he both dramatizes the proper attitude political figures should have toward poets and indicates the importance of his own editorial role in assembling Dante’s work. In the opening paragraphs of the Vita, Boccaccio establishes the material connection between the biography and the collection of Dante’s works that follows it. He laments that whereas ancient civilizations constructed ‘marble statues, famous tombs, triumphal arcs, laurel crowns, and other notable things’ (Chigi 2) to honor their worthy citizens, he will have to celebrate Dante ‘not with a statue or wondrous tomb’, but with ‘poor letters’ (5).73 Boccaccio further underlines the connection between Dante’s use of the vernacular and his own. He explains: Scriver`o adunque in istilo assai umile e leggiero, per`o che pi`u sublime nol mi presta lo ‘ngegno, e nel nostro fiorentino idioma, acci`o che da quello che Dante medesimo us`o nella maggior parte delle sue opere, non discordi, quelle cose, le quali esso di s´e onestamente tacette, cio`e la nobilt`a della sua origine, la vita, gli studii, i costumi; raccogliendo appresso in uno l’opere da lui fatte, nelle quali esso s´e s`ı chiaro ha renduto a’ futuri. (Chigi 6) I will therefore write – in a humble and light style, because my genius does not give me a more sublime one, and in our Florentine tongue, so

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature that it will not differ from that which Dante himself used in the most of his works – those things, about which Dante himself was humbly silent, that is, the nobility of his birth, his life, studies, and habits; gathering together afterwards the works through which he made himself well-known to posterity.

Boccaccio not only joins his project with Dante’s but also describes in detail the material nature of his monument. Boccaccio is not just making an argument for a monument, he is making a monument in the codex that will serve as a substitute sepulcher. This idea finds its material expression in Boccaccio’s layout of his transcription of Giovanni del Virgilio’s epitaph, Theologus Dantes. Instead of transcribing Giovanni del Virgilio’s epitaph for Dante ‘a mo’ di prosa’ (in the manner of prose), as he does for the putative beginning of the Latin Commedia, Ultima regna, he writes it with one verse per line, thus distinguishing it from the surrounding text in the manuscript and giving it the appearance of an epitaphic inscription on this substitute tomb.74 (See Figure 2.) According to Boccaccio, when Dante died in Ravenna, Guido Novel da Polenta intended to make ‘una egregia e notabile sepoltura’ (63) to honor the poet, but Guido’s loss of power left his proposal unfulfilled. Nonetheless, many poets composed verses for this anticipated sepulcher, which Boccaccio read on a visit to Ravenna. ‘Of these I chose those of master Giovanni del Virgilio as the most praiseworthy in my judgment; and thinking that this little work should be a witness to that one which would have been part of the tomb, I decided to place it here as follows’ (‘de’ quali alquanti, fattine dal maestro Giovanni del Virgilio, s`ı come pi`u laudevoli al mio giudicio, ne elessi; ed estimando questa operetta quello testificare, che in parte avrebbe fatto la sepoltura, di porglici diliberai come segue’, 65). Like the etymology of poetry, the choice of epitaph is significant.75 Whether they appeared on a real tomb or only in manuscripts, Boccaccio aims to replace those other epitaphs with this one by Giovanni del Virgilio.76 The epitaph’s sketch of the poet’s life, moreover, fits the concerns of both Ytalie iam certus honos and the biography: to praise Dante as theologus and philosopher; to describe his fame; to defend his choice of the vernacular while also acknowledging his ability to compose in Latin; and to lament Florence’s treatment of its poet.77 Boccaccio further dramatizes this connection in the textual tales that he recounts in the Vita, both of which are constructed out of suggestions in Dante’s poem. These stories provide examples of the political

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Figure 2 Boccaccio’s transcription of Giovanni del Virgilio’s Theologus Dantes in the Vita di Dante (Chigi l v 176, c. 6r). Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

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concern that the Florentines have failed to demonstrate for Dante and highlight Boccaccio’s own activities as collector, compiler, and editor of Dante’s works. The first of these stories serves as a gloss to the odd verse ‘Io dico, seguitando’, (I say, continuing) at the beginning of Inferno 8, which Boccaccio interprets as referring to Dante’s exile, when he was forced to leave behind the first seven cantos of the Comedy. According to this story, these canti were discovered by someone who showed them to Dino Lambertuccio, ‘a famous poet of the time’, who then sent them not to Dante directly but to Marchese Moruello Malaspina, who asked Dante to complete it and who would be the dedicatee of the Purgatorio.78 As Johannes Bartuschat observes, this first story functions as ‘a countermodel to the indifference and ingratitude of the Florentines’, by demonstrating the ‘alliance of culture and power, united to work for cultural renewal’.79 While the first story is about the lost beginning of a work that might never been completed, the second is about a completed work all of whose parts may never be found. According to this story, when Dante died in 1321, he had not yet circulated (Boccaccio uses the verb ‘pubblicare’; Chigi 121) the last thirteen canti of the Paradiso, and their location was unknown.80 Dante’s sons, Jacopo and Pietro, begin to compose a conclusion to the work at the request of friends, in a filial recasting of Virgil’s posthumous revision by Varius and Tucca, but before they get very far, Jacopo has a ‘mirabile visione’ (marvelous vision) in which his father reveals that the missing canti are hidden in a wall of Dante’s final residence where they find the pages, which are conveniently numbered, so they can compile the completed work.81 Like the earlier story, which explicitly glossed the opening verse of Inf. 8, this one evokes Dante’s vision at the end of Paradiso (33.85–87), where Dante sees everything that is unbound and scattered throughout the universe ‘legati con amore in un volume’ (gathered with love into a single volume) in the Empyrean.82 Boccaccio thus turns Dante’s image of divine binding into a literal one, just as he uses these tales of textual recovery to suggest the difficulty of assembling the works that follow.83 Boccaccio’s early attempt to restore the liberal arts to Florence by inviting Petrarch to return to the city prepares the way for his effort to accomplish the same task with his material monument of Dante’s life and works. Boccaccio tries to right the wobbling republic by properly honoring its exiled poet and making for him a substitute tomb constructed not of marble but of the same vernacular letters that Dante had used in reaction

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to another cultural crisis. In the course of celebrating the poet, moreover, Boccaccio develops larger arguments about the significance of poetry and the value of the vernacular that he will reuse in the Genealogie and the Esposizioni and that are the core elements of his project to legitimize and authorize modern poets.

chapter t wo

Dante’s shame and Boccaccio’s paratextual praise Editing the Vita nuova, Commedia, and canzoni distese

Boccaccio emphasizes the connection between the Vita di Dante and the collection of Dante’s works that follows not only in the text of the biography but also in its layout, by having the explicit of his Vita di Dante and the incipit of Dante’s Vita nuova merge into each other on the page. (See Figure 3.) This conjunction serves as a material sign of the way Boccaccio uses his edition of Dante’s vernacular works to advance his argument for Dante’s value. Boccaccio’s decision to delimit the collection to Dante’s vernacular works alone, moreover, is significant because Boccaccio is a major (and in some cases the only) source for many of Dante’s Latin works.1 The exclusion of these Latin works suggests that Boccaccio shapes the collection to celebrate the sophistication of Dante’s vernacular production alone.2 This chapter investigates how Boccaccio transforms Dante’s works – textually, materially, and paratextually – to advance his argument that he makes in Ytalie iam certus honos and the Vita di Dante for Dante as a learned vernacular poet. I examine Boccaccio’s declared and tacit modifications of Dante’s works in the Chigi Codex, in his remarkable metamorphosis of the Vita nuova, announced at the bottom of the same folio (Figure 3), his construction of a paratextual apparatus for the Commedia, and the consolidation of Dante’s canzoni into a collection. Although the current Chigi contains only Dante’s Vita nuova and the sequence of fifteen canzoni distese, the codex originally contained a copy of the Commedia that is now Chigi l vi 213, which continued to be associated with the original Chigi even after its removal.3 By analyzing this original form of the codex, this chapter explores the full range of Boccaccio’s dynamic activities as editor of Dante, while the next two chapters will address the later transformations of the codex. The collection of Dante’s works in the original Chigi reflects what is found in the earlier Toledo 104.6 manuscript, where Boccaccio’s biography similarly precedes Dante’s Vita nuova, Commedia, and the canzoni distese.4 In between the construction of these two codices, Boccaccio also produced 50

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Figure 3 End of the Vita di Dante and beginning of the Vita nuova with Boccaccio’s editorial note to the Vita nuova (Chigi l v 176, c. 13r). Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

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a smaller collection of Dante’s works in what is now Riccardian 1035, which contains the Commedia and the canzoni distese, but without either the biography or the Vita nuova. Boccaccio’s collections are unique in the Trecento because, according to a recent codicological survey of 292 Trecento copies of the Commedia, they are the only manuscripts to join the Commedia to any of Dante’s other works.5 At the same time that Boccaccio compiles a unique collection of Dante’s works, his transcriptions establish texts that continue to inform editions of Dante’s works to the present day. For the Commedia, Vita nuova, and the fifteen canzoni distese, Boccaccio is the imposing presence through which any examination of the early tradition of these works must pass, because he transforms what he receives, taking readings from different manuscripts to create what editors call contaminated texts.6 Boccaccio’s copies of the Commedia, for example, are based on the text of Vat. lat. 3199, the copy he gave to Petrarch, but he also takes readings from Trivulziano 1080, which modern editors classify as another branch of the textual tradition.7 This mixing of traditions created a text that had a remarkable influence on later editors, as Petrocchi makes clear in his critical edition of the Commedia, where he describes Boccaccio’s editions as the ‘philological barrier’ between the text of the ‘antica vulgata’ of the early Trecento that Petrocchi aims to reconstruct and the ‘savage wood’ (selva selvaggia) of the post-Boccaccian tradition.8 Michele Barbi observes a similar break in the textual tradition of the Vita nuova, where Boccaccio’s texts also have a vast influence.9 In the case of Dante’s lyric poems, Boccaccio’s role is even more decisive because of the rarity of pre-Boccaccian copies. His copies of Dante’s lyrics formed the textual basis of editions like the Cinquecento Giuntina, whence they continued to inform editions throughout the nineteenth century.10 Even the most recent edition of Dante’s Rime by Domenico De Robertis begins with the sequence of the fifteen canzoni distese that Boccaccio codifies in all three of his autographs. Although De Robertis proposes that the order does not originate with Boccaccio, this return to Boccaccio is a fitting emblem for Boccaccio’s persistent and unavoidable presence in the editing of Dante’s works.11 Boccaccio’s role as editor of Dante is, therefore, quite different from that of the scribes of the Memoriali bolognesi, whom Justin Steinberg has recently called ‘Dante’s first editors’.12 While the scribes of the Memoriali bolognesi certainly transmit versions of Dante’s works that are of editorial interest as early witnesses to Dante’s circulation, there is no evidence that they ‘edited’ Dante’s works in the sense that they were choosing

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among available versions, as Boccaccio does.13 At the same time, Boccaccio’s editorial activities should also be distinguished from the work of another Trecento copyist, Francesco di Ser Nardo, who reportedly produced a hundred copies of the Commedia, uniform in layout and script, to pay for his daughters’ dowries.14 Instead of establishing a single edition, Boccaccio constantly revises his edition, experimenting with different modes of mediating Dante to advance his argument for Dante as a learned vernacular poet. The importance of Boccaccio’s editorial interventions would have appealed to the commissioner of Vasari’s Six Tuscan Poets, Luca Martini, who was among a group of Florentines who met in 1546 to collate several old manuscripts of the Commedia to establish a better text of the Commedia than that found in the popular 1515 Aldine edition.15 Two years later, in 1548, Martini copied the variant readings he found in the oldest of these manuscripts into the margins of his own Aldine copy. These marginalia seem to represent the textual traces of the earliest critical edition of Dante’s poem, which is widely attributed to Forese Donati, who probably performed his task at the invitation of none other than Giovanni Boccaccio.16 This story once again reveals Boccaccio’s constant presence in the editorial tradition, since Martini’s project involved revising one of Boccaccio’s Dantes – the Aldine edition that was based on the copy of Dante which Boccaccio gave to Petrarch (Vat. lat. 3199) – with readings from another manuscript whose construction Boccaccio apparently oversaw. Boccaccio not only changes the texts he receives, but also manipulates material features of paratext, script, layout, and codicological context. He marginalizes the divisioni for Dante’s Vita nuova, develops paratexts for the Commedia, and compiles the canzoni distese into a collection. By situating Boccaccio’s practices in their historical context and highlighting the connections between them, this chapter shows how Boccaccio constructs a textual monument that complements the cultural claims he makes in the Vita di Dante.

Dante’s shame and the divisioni of the Vita nuova The text was loss. The gain is gloss. – J.V. Cunningham, ‘To the Reader’

At the bottom of the same page where Boccaccio joins the biography’s explicit and the Vita nuova’s incipit, he announces his modification of the

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Vita nuova in what must be one of the earliest examples of an editorial note in the vernacular (see Figure 3).17 This note contrasts with the textual tales in the Vita di Dante. Whereas Boccaccio’s bibliographical stories in the Vita di Dante dramatize the difficulty of compiling an integral text of the Commedia, Boccaccio’s note justifies the disaggregation of the Vita nuova that his edition institutes by moving the work’s so-called divisions into the margins of the page. This relocation of the ‘divisions’ constitutes the most overt sign of Boccaccio’s manipulation of Dante’s works, but while several scholars have examined what Boccaccio says in the note, there has been less discussion about what it does to the text. I examine Boccaccio’s note not only for what it says but also for what it does. The note can be divided into two parts. In the first part he explains that: Many will be astonished, I think, because I have not put the divisions of the sonnets in the text, as the author of the present little book did; but to this I answer that there were two causes. The first is that, since the divisions of the sonnets are clearly declarations of them, it appears that they should be gloss [chiosa] instead of text [testo], and so I have placed them as gloss, not text, since the one is not well mixed [mescolato] with the other. If someone were perhaps to say here that the explications [teme] of the sonnets and canzoni he wrote could similarly be called glosses, because they are no less declarations of them than are the divisions – I say that, insofar as they are declarations, they are not declarations made to declare, but rather demonstrations of the causes that led him to write the sonnets and canzoni. And these demonstrations still seem to belong to the principal intention of the work, so they deserve to be called text and not glosses.18

In this first part of the note, Boccaccio distinguishes between the two prose elements of the Vita nuova: the poems’ divisioni, on the one hand, and their teme, on the other. The formal poetic analyses of the divisioni are, in Boccaccio’s judgment, simply ‘declarations to declare’ (‘dichiarazioni per dichiarare’) and therefore deserve to be placed in the margins as gloss (chiosa). The teme, on the other hand, which Dante calls ragioni, ‘belong to the principle intention of the work’, and are therefore text (testo), because they explain the circumstances that produced the poems. Boccaccio graphically distinguishes between these two kinds of texts by moving the divisioni into the margins so that the text and gloss are no longer ‘mixed’ (mescolato), as ‘the author of the present little book did’. In the second part of the note, Boccaccio adds to his argument for textual hierarchies by claiming that he knows the author’s final intentions, which conveniently coincide with Boccaccio’s own. He explains:

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The second reason is that according to what I have many times heard discussed by people worthy of faith, having composed this little book in his youth and then grown in knowledge and works, he was ashamed [si vergognava] of having made it. It seemed too childish to him; and among the other things that he lamented having done, he regretted having included the divisions in the text, perhaps for the same reason that motivates me. Since I could not emend it in other copies, in this one that I have written I wanted to satisfy the author’s desire.19

While the first part of the note led one to believe that the editor was violating the author’s will (since he contrasts his change with what ‘the author of the present little book did’), the second part claims that this change is actually a fulfillment of the author’s mature, final intentions for his youthful work.20 In other words, this coincidence of authorial and editorial perspectives means that there is only one explanation: the distinction between text and gloss. Two critics have recently proposed contrasting interpretations of Boccaccio’s note. Susan Noakes argues that the note is ‘in keeping with humanist aspirations’ of establishing an authorial text.21 Jason Houston, on the other hand, argues that Boccaccio’s marginalization of the divisioni ‘indicates his desire to free the text from the controlling presence of an authorial interpretive dominance. [ . . . ] Open to interpretation and discussion, the text now permits the reader to enter a hermeneutical dialogue with the author rather than passively following the autobiographical narrative.’22 These different views reflect the double nature of Boccaccio’s (but also any) editorial activity, in which the editor takes on at least two roles, as both a critical reader and a secondary author. Boccaccio begins the note as a critical reader and editor, who reestablishes a textual hierarchy that the author had collapsed, and ends the note by having the same author regret his confounding of categories and agree with Boccaccio’s editorial alteration. In other words, Boccaccio invokes the editorial principle of an author’s ‘final intentions’ to justify his own editorial freedom to remake and alter the text he receives. Boccaccio’s note to the Vita nuova not only reflects the larger principle that ‘new readers of course make new texts’, as McKenzie puts it, but also responds to Dante’s own experimentation with the categories of author, reader, and scribe in the Vita nuova itself.23 Just as Dante presents himself as a scribal editor, who reads from one work, the ‘libro della memoria’ (book of memory), transcribing only those events written in his exemplar ‘sotto maggiori paragrafi’ (under greater paragraphs), and selectively rewriting it to reveal its hidden meanings, Boccaccio revises Dante’s own revision by

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situating certain parts of Dante’s text in the margins.24 Boccaccio’s note thus expands on the collaborative and interventionist scribal activity that Dante uses in the Vita nuova, playing with the editorial conceit of the Vita nuova itself and confirming Dante’s own claim in the Vita nuova that works can take on new meanings over time by changing their bibliographical forms. Whereas Dante uses the bibliographical frame of his work to give the poems new meanings, Boccaccio gives Dante’s work a new meaning by relocating Dante’s divisioni into the margins. Boccaccio’s marginalization of the divisioni had a decisive impact on the transmission of the Vita nuova. In a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Vita nuova, for example, the scribe explains that his copy of the Vita nuova is ‘written in the way that Giovanni Boccaccio da Certaldo wrote it’ (scripto per lo modo che llo scripse Giovanni Boccaccio da Certaldo): ‘Dante put the glosses that there are in text and Ser Giovanni took them out’ (Dante le chiose che ci sono mise nel testo, e messere Giovanni ne lle cav`o).25 Finding little worth keeping in a formal poetic analysis like the one for the work’s first sonnet, A ciascun’alma presa (‘Questo sonetto si divide in due parti; che ne la prima parte saluto e domando risponsione, ne la seconda significo a che si dee rispondere. La seconda parte comincia quivi: Gi`a eran’, This sonnet is divided into two parts. In the first part I extend greetings and ask for a response; in the second I explain what requires response. The second part begins: They were already; VN 3.13), many later editors altered, or even eliminated them altogether.26 The 1576 editio princeps, for example, omits the divisioni, as do other editions throughout the nineteenth century.27 Even after Michele Barbi’s 1907 edition of the work established ‘that the author intended the divisions to be an integral part of the work, so that one might, without any discontinuity, go on to them from the narratives and from the poems’, the divisions continued to receive special treatment.28 In his 1922 edition of the Vita nuova, for example, Domenico Guerri puts the divisions in cursive, noting that he has permitted himself this procedure following Boccaccio.29 A 2010 English version continues this tradition, with the translator, David Slavitt, explaining, ‘I have always thought that these passages were unnecessary and boring [ . . . ] So I just got rid of them.’30 While Boccaccio’s decision to put these divisions in the margins of his two copies of the Vita nuova had a decisive impact on the transmission of Dante’s work, it is significant that he does not eliminate the divisions, as later editors would do, but only marginalizes them. When Houston claims that Boccaccio’s marginalization of the divisioni ‘indicates his desire to free the text from the controlling presence of an authorial interpretive dominance’, he confounds the meaning of their marginalization and

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the significance of their elimination.31 Boccaccio’s marginalization of the divisioni can have different effects on different kinds of readers, but even in the margins they continue to be part of the work and to instruct readers on how to divide the poems.32 Boccaccio’s decision to transcribe even those divisioni that assert that the poem does not need division suggests that he had more than the reader’s freedom in mind.33 He keeps them ‘mixed’ (mescolato) with the text but in a different way. What does Boccaccio accomplish by moving the divisions to the margins instead of eliminating them completely, as later editors and translators would do?34 I argue that Boccaccio’s marginalization of the divisioni aims to give the work the appearance of a glossed text. Text and gloss may occupy different parts of the page, but they are still ‘mixed together’ (mescolato) as part of the work. Boccaccio’s choice of the word mescolare itself is significant since Boccaccio often uses words like mescolare ‘as technical terms in a context of declarations of poetics’ (come tecnicismi in un contesto di dichiarazioni di poetica).35 In the Introduction to Day 4 of the Decameron, for example, he claims that he does not want to mix (mescolare) his novella of Filippo Balducci with those of the brigata. In both cases, Boccaccio uses the word ‘mescolare’ to call attention to the heteronymous presence of another kind of text (the incomplete novella of Balducci or the divisioni) that has been rhetorically excluded but materially included. By giving Dante’s divisioni the appearance of gloss, Boccaccio gives a vernacular work the kind of layout one might expect for a glossed classical text of Virgil and makes visually manifest their ‘perfectly scholastic fashion’ by disaggregating the gloss and text that Dante had integrated in his work. To put it another way, Boccaccio visually manifests Dante’s own scholastic strategy.36 The models that critics have proposed for Dante’s own technique of division suggest the models that Boccaccio may have had in mind, from scholastic commentaries in general (Rajna) and commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences (Singleton) in particular to Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica (De Robertis), a glossed Boethius (D’Andrea), glossed Psalter (Stillinger), glossed Book of Lamentations (Martinez), and glossed Song of Songs (Nasti).37 By providing marginal glosses to his copies of the Vita nuova, Boccaccio thus does for Dante what Dante had already done for himself, and provides an emphatic and graphic representation of the self-glossing that Dante had integrated into his own text. By making the work look like a glossed text, Boccaccio not only advances his argument for the sophistication of Dante’s poetry, but also fills the need for commentary that he notes in the Genealogie (15.6).38 Boccaccio writes:

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature The great texts of both civil and canon law have grown in bulk throughout the generations of human failing, by editorial apparatus from many a doctor. The books of the philosophers also carry with them their commentaries compiled with great care and zeal. The books of medicine are filled with marginal notes from countless pens that resolve every doubt, and so with sacred writings, and their numerous expositors; so also with the liberal and the technical arts – each has its own commentary, from which anyone may select on occasion according to his preference. Poetry alone is without such honor. Few – very few – are they with whom it has dwelt continuously. Money-getters have found it unprofitable. It has therefore been neglected and scorned for many centuries, nay even torn by many persecutions and stripped of the aids given to the other arts. Wherefore, wanting such range of selection as they enjoy, one is forced to resort to this and that authority and bring away such slight fragments as one can. A discerning reader will readily see how often this has happened, for I have not only appealed on occasion to modern authors, but have had recourse to anonymous notes. Wherefore let these cavillers bow to expediency and accept the authority of both the unfamiliar Ancients and the moderns.39

While this passage serves partly as a defense of the incompleteness of Boccaccio’s genealogies, since they are built on the ‘slight fragments’ of authorities that he was able to obtain, Boccaccio’s argument in the Genealogie on the need for commentary puts his marginalization of Dante’s divisioni in a new light as a response to what Boccaccio describes as a cultural lack.40 Boccaccio’s claims about poetry’s lack of glosses are likely ‘a piece of rhetorical exaggeration’, since there were many glossed copies of the Aeneid and Thebaid, but the point of his argument about this absence of these glosses is to justify his appeal to modern authorities, and put them on the same plain as ancient ones: ‘accept the authority of both the unfamiliar Ancients and the moderns’, as he puts it at the end of the same chapter, whose very title conveys its argument that ‘The Modern Authors Cited Herein are Eminent’ (Insignes vios esse quos ex novis inducit in testes).41 Boccaccio’s marginalization of Dante’s divisioni can be understood as part of the same project. By moving the divisions to the margins, Boccaccio also provides a material sign for his claim that poetry should be taken seriously as an intellectual pursuit that is equivalent to law, philosophy, medicine, and the other liberal arts.42 Boccaccio gives Dante’s work the kind of gloss an authoritative modern text should have.43 If poetry has been stripped of its apparatus, as Boccaccio claims, then these new modern poets can provide new material both to be glossed and to be used for glossing classical texts, as Dante was.44

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Boccaccio had long been interested in glosses for poetry, as is evident from his early ars dictaminis exercise, Sacre famis (Ep. 4), in which he asks a friend for his annotated copy of the Thebaid, claiming that ‘sine magistro vel glosis intellectum debitum non attingam’ (without a master or glosses I cannot attain adequate understanding; Ep. 4.29).45 In the same letter, Boccaccio expresses his disgust with the Decretals in opposition to poetry, as he also does in Gen. 15.6, which suggests how Boccaccio’s own training in canon law informed his thinking about how literature could attain an institutional space. Boccaccio participates in the practice of commenting on vernacular texts in the glosses he writes to his own Teseida, thus contributing to a mode that had emerged in the Trecento with Dante’s own self-glossing and continued in the commentaries on the Commedia.46 Just as Boccaccio’s own glosses to his Teseida imitate manuscripts of the classical epics after which the work itself is modeled, the location of the divisioni in the margins of the Vita nuova makes an argument through their very existence and location by showing that vernacular poetry is worthy of commentary.47 Just as Boccaccio’s editorial play engages those dynamics in the Vita nuova itself, Boccaccio’s vindication of the moderns through the use of gloss that he advocates in the Genealogie passage quoted above expands on Dante’s argument in Vita nuova 25 about the connection between classical and vernacular, or ancient and modern, authors. Although some critics, like Francesco Bruni, have emphasized Dante’s apparent delimitation of the vernacular to the subject matter of love in this chapter of the Vita nuova, Dante’s larger claim is that the vernacular poet who is able to explain his poetry is the equal of the classical poet.48 In other words, while Dante may initially limit the suitable subject matter for vernacular poets to the amorous, the chapter as a whole aims to erase distinctions between Latin and vernacular poets by establishing historical and poetic continuity between them. For Dante, both those who compose in the vernacular and those who compose in the classical languages should be considered poets. Vernacular poets, moreover, should be allowed the same freedoms as classical poets provided that the vernacular poets can explain their choices in prose: ‘degno e` lo dicitore per rima di fare lo somigliante, ma non sanza ragione alcuna, ma con ragione, la quale poi sia possibile d’aprire per prosa’ (it is fitting that the vernacular poet do the same – not, of course, without some reason, but with a motive that later can be explained in prose). Dante underlines this point in the chapter’s conclusion:

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature E acci`o che non ne pigli alcuna baldanza persona grossa, dico che n´e li poete parlavano cos`ı sanza ragione, n´e quelli che rimano deono parlare cos`ı, non avendo alcuno ragionamento in loro di quello che dicono; per`o che grande vergogna sarebbe a colui che rimasse cose sotto vesta di figura o di colore rettorico, e poscia, domandato, non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotale vesta, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento. E questo mio primo amico e io ne sapemo bene di quelli che cos`ı rimano stoltamente. So that some ungifted person may not be encouraged by my words to go too far, let me add that just as the Latin poets did not write in the way they did without a reason, so vernacular poets should not write in the same way without having some reason for writing as they do. For, if any one should dress his poem in images and rhetorical coloring and then, being asked to strip his poem of such dress in order to reveal its true meaning, would not be able to do so – this would be a veritable cause for shame. And my best friend and I are well acquainted with some who compose so clumsily. (VN 25)

Dante grants the vernacular poet the same freedoms as the classical poet, then, provided that he can explain what he is doing. Dante uses the image of stripping his words (‘denudare le sue parole’) to explain this process, which echoes the image he used to describe the purpose of the divisioni: ‘per`o che la divisione non si fa se non per aprire la sentenzia de la cosa divisa’ (since division is not done except to reveal the meaning of the thing divided; VN 14). Michele Barbi underscores the strong connection between the divisioni and Vita nuova 25 when he asks, in his edition of the Vita nuova, why Boccaccio didn’t marginalize Vita nuova 25 along with the divisioni since it seems to him to constitute gloss instead of text. And that is Dante’s point: Vita nuova 25 provides the rationale for the divisioni. As Albert Ascoli observes in a discussion of Dante’s chapter: ‘all of the narrative ragioni and the analytical divisioni serve, among other things, to create the impression – accurate or not – that Dante-poet knows exactly what he is doing’.49 These vernacular texts are not naked, then, as they might appear, but conceal hidden meanings ‘sotto veste di figure o di colore rettorico’. It is this ability to ‘denudare’ and ‘aprire’, that is, to explain, their works that distinguishes Dante and Cavalcanti from those who ‘rhyme stupidly’. Although Singleton claims that seeing in this statement ‘a doctrine of allegory [ . . . ] is a mistake’, Boccaccio uses the same imagery of nudity in Ytalie iam certus honos, claiming that Dante’s muses are not nude to argue that they have a deeper, allegorical meaning.50 If for Dante the divisioni show his ability to interpret and explain the rhetorical

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clothing of his own poems, then Boccaccio’s editions of the Vita nuova redress Dante’s work in marginal glosses to make that covering manifest. Boccaccio’s marginalization of the divisioni do not clothe something that was naked, but show that the apparently naked vernacular was in fact clothed all along. In the Vita nuova, Dante uses the divisioni to avoid the shame of not being able to explain his poems. In his editorial note, Boccaccio claims that Dante was actually ashamed of these same divisioni, so Boccaccio places them in the margins. By doing so, Boccaccio alters Dante’s work by giving it the appearance of a glossed text and thus contributes to advancing Dante’s argument for the value of the vernacular. Boccaccio’s emphasis on Dante’s shame seems designed to recall Dante’s own confrontation of the issue in the Vita nuova and underline for his readers how his change actually continues Dante’s own claims about the sophistication of the vernacular. Dante’s putative shame at the inclusion of the divisions in the structure of his work thus motivates Boccaccio’s own paratextual praise of Dante.

Quomodo sedet: making up for what is lost Boccaccio’s marginalization of the divisioni gives Dante’s text the gloss that poetry has been missing, but it eliminates the important macrostructural function that Dante gives to the divisioni after Beatrice’s death in the Vita nuova, when he shifts the placement of the divisioni from following the poems to preceding them. In a complex moment of transcription that immediately precedes Beatrice’s death, Dante prepares for this change. He explains: E per`o propuosi di dire parole ne le quali io dicesse come me parea essere disposto a la sua operazione, e come operava in me la sua vertude; e non credendo potere ci`o narrare in brevitade di sonetto, cominciai allora una canzone, la quale comincia: S`ı lungiamente. And so I decided to write a poem telling how I seemed to be disposed to her influence, and how her miraculous power worked in me; and believing I would not be able to describe this within the limits of a sonnet, I immediately started to write a canzone which begins: So long a time.

Dante’s explanation prepares the reader for a longer poem, but he interrupts the transcription after only fourteen lines with a Latin quotation from the Book of Lamentations, ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo! facta est quasi vidua domina gentium’, that announces Beatrice’s death.51 Because

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Dante had placed divisioni after each poem thus far in the book, this interruption gives his readers an experience of textual loss that simulates his existential loss of Beatrice. He reinforces the break constituted by Beatrice’s death by moving the divisioni from after the poems they analyze to before them, so that they will, he explains, feel ‘pi`u vedova’ (more widowed) at their end (VN 31.2).52 Dante’s explanation of the relocation of the divisioni shows that they not only have a local heuristic function, but also serve a global purpose by creating a rhythm of reading that Dante disrupts to mark the moment of Beatrice’s death.53 Having already shifted the divisions to the margins, Boccaccio cannot follow Dante in moving the divisions from after to before, so he adopts another strategy to emphasize the moment of Beatrice’s death, marking it with an elaborate initial Q for Quomodo sedet (see Figure 4). Whereas Dante uses the divisioni to mark time and relocates them as a reminder of Beatrice’s death, Boccaccio exploits the space of the page, moving the divisioni to the margins to make a glossed text and emphasizing the moment of interruption with a prominent initial that effectively divides the book into two parts. In an examination of the different ways Trecento copyists managed this moment of Dante’s work, Wayne Storey views Boccaccio’s decision to use a prominent initial for Quomodo as the beginning of an editorial tradition that breaks the work into two parts that could be described as in vita and in morte.54 Boccaccio may underline this division more emphatically than one finds in contemporary copies, because of his decision to marginalize Dante’s divisioni. Having eliminated Dante’s strategy of interrupted reading, Boccaccio has to find a new way to mark Beatrice’s death, so he modifies the layout. In his material manipulations of Dante’s work, Boccaccio thus seems to take on the role of the ‘altro chiosatore’ (other glossator), that Dante imagines in the Vita nuova, who will be able not only to discuss Beatrice’s death in a way that he (Dante) cannot, but also to praise Dante himself (Vita nuova 28.2). Boccaccio fulfills both of these tasks through his marginalization of the divisioni in his edition, which not only praises Dante in a new way by making his work into a glossed text but also establishes a new way of representing Beatrice’s death that is inspired by Dante’s text.

Paratexts for the Commedia Although Boccaccio does not call attention to his editorial interventions in the Comedy as explicitly as he does in his note to the Vita nuova, his

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Figure 4 Boccaccio’s transcription of Quomodo sedet (Chigi l v 176, c. 24r). Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

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changes are no less decisive for the transmission of the text. In his critical edition, Petrocchi makes Boccaccio the barrier between the contaminated later tradition and the antica vulgata that he tries to reconstruct, but in light of Houston’s recent argument that ‘hidden in Boccaccio’s seemingly spurious variants . . . lie examples of his wilful manipulation of Dante’s text’, which constitute ‘scribal malfeasance’ as Boccaccio ‘alters the text to adjust its meaning’, it is important to be clear about the extent of Boccaccio’s intervention.55 Houston contends that ‘In two cases – both Inferno xi (v. 90) and Inferno xxiv (v. 119) – Boccaccio changes the word “vendetta” for the word “giustizia”.’ According to Petrocchi’s edition, however, for Inf. 11.90 Boccaccio’s exemplar, Vat. lat. 3199, does not have ‘vendetta’ but ‘iustitia’, so Boccaccio is simply following his copy-text instead of engaging in ‘scribal malfeasance’.56 In the case of Inf. 24.119, on the other hand, Boccaccio’s decision not to follow the ‘vendetta’ of Vat. lat. 3199 could reasonably be explained by the presence of ‘vendetta’ in the next verse, which caused at least one other scribe to make a similar change.57 Boccaccio contaminates the tradition that follows him less through ‘willful’ conjecture than by integrating variants from different manuscripts to create a new edition that becomes authoritative. Boccaccio’s activities as editor and commentator on Dante are, moreover, characterized by a remarkable attention to the letter of the text (even if those letters may be different from our modern critical editions). Boccaccio not only produces a new text of the poem, but also transforms its script and layout, situates the poem in a unique codicological context, and constructs a paratextual apparatus for it. Further comparison with Vat. lat. 3199 reveals many of these changes. Whereas Vat. lat. 3199, like other Florentine copies from the Trecento, is written in a cancelleresca, or bastarda, script – a cursive hand derived from the notaries’ preparation of documents that was also used outside the chancery – Boccaccio transcribes the poem in the semigothic book hand of littera textualis.58 Instead of the two columns used in his exemplar, he uses a single column. These choices make a claim for the nobility of the work, as Armando Petrucci notes.59 Marco Cursi suggests that this innovation was modeled on a glossed Thebaid that Boccaccio knew, and was thus the material expression of the aspiration, shared by both Dante and Boccaccio, of elevating Dante among the ancient poets.60 Whereas Vat. lat. 3199 contains the Commedia alone, with a dedicatory poem to Petrarch, Boccaccio’s own transcriptions are, as mentioned earlier, the first to connect the Commedia materially to Dante’s other works. Boccaccio supplements these material changes by developing a paratextual apparatus for his copies of the Commedia that includes terza rima

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summaries for each cantica and, in the Chigi, prose rubrics for each canto.61 While textual editors, paleographers, and codicologists have delineated how Boccaccio transforms the textual and material traditions he receives, these paratextual contributions have been largely overlooked, perhaps for similar reasons that motivate the exclusion of the divisioni from the Vita nuova, that is, because they seem pedantic and boring. While in editing the Vita nuova, Boccaccio makes Dante’s own divisioni into marginal glosses, for the Commedia, he crafts a paratextual apparatus that shows a similar dedication to the letter of the work that Dante had shown in his divisioni. In the earliest example of these terza rima summaries of the poem, which could also be considered the earliest piece of (nonauthorial) Dante criticism, their author, Jacopo Alighieri, actually refers to them as a Divisione when he sends them to Guido da Polenta in 1322 (‘I send you this current divisione’, ‘Questa divisione presente invio’) and uses the same terminology of divisio to describe his activity: ‘But so that you should take more delight entering into the meaning of the poem’s intention, I want to show you how it is divided in itself.’62 From its origins, then, these summaries, which are also called capitoli or argomenti use the techniques of textual divisio that Dante deployed in the Vita nuova and apply them to the Comedy. These summaries work indexically by imitating the poem’s rhyme scheme of terza rima and even incorporating whole verses from the poem.63 Although Boccaccio does not call his work a divisione, as Jacopo does, he nonetheless demonstrates the same attention to the letter of the text that characterizes Dante’s own divisioni. Given Boccaccio’s penchant for rewriting Dante’s texts, from the Caccia di Diana to the Decameron, one can easily imagine that the genre might have appealed to him and he includes terza rima verse summaries of each cantica in all three of his copies of the Commedia.64 In Toledo 104.6, Boccaccio calls these summaries argomenti, a name that suggests the summaries are characteristic of medieval copies of the Aeneid and Thebaid, which frequently contain argumenta before each book.65 Boccaccio transcribes an argumentum for the Thebaid, for example, in the Zibaldone laurenziano (c. 59v). In Riccardian 1035 and Chigi l vi 213 he gives his summaries for Dante the collective title, a Breve raccoglimento, explaining that they treat ‘di ci`o che in se superficialmente contiene la lettera’ (that which the letter superficially contains in itself ). Although Boccaccio’s copy-text of the poem, Vat. lat. 3199, did not have any capitoli, they appear in a quarter of the Trecento copies of the Commedia, and Boccaccio would have known them from other copies of the poem that he consulted, like Trivulziano 1080, which contains

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the summaries of both Jacopo Alighieri and Buosone da Gubbio after the poem.66 Although this doubling of summaries might initially appear redundant, the capitoli of Jacopo and Buosone appear together in the majority of Trecento copies that contain capitoli, because each serves a different purpose.67 Jacopo maps the whole terrain of the poem’s world in broad sequential strokes, listing the inhabitants and topography within each circle. Buosone, on the other hand, instead of accounting for how many circles there are, emphasizes moments of allegorical interpretation, paying particular attention to what the three beasts symbolize and the significance of the Purgatorial procession.68 Whereas Jacopo covers the whole of the poem’s otherworld, Buosone is more selective, dedicating the same number of verses to the whole of Paradiso that he dedicates to the problem of interpreting the three beasts.69 Jacopo, with his focus on the poem’s larger structure, doesn’t even mention the three beasts in his summary.70 Boccaccio engages with none of the questions of interpretation that Buosone addresses, and he gives a far more meticulously detailed account of each canto’s text in comparison to Jacopo’s more general overview of its narrative.71 Jacopo may call his work a divisione, but it attends more to the world described by the text than to its letter. Whereas Jacopo’s divisione emphasizes the structure of Dante’s otherworld and uses the sequence of circles and terraces to guide his summary, Boccaccio emphasizes the textual divisions of Dante’s poem by following closely the order of the canti.72 Because they cover the whole text inclusively and treat each canto in order, Boccaccio’s summaries are significantly longer than those of Jacopo or Buosone. While Jacopo summarizes the whole poem in 154 verses and Buosone takes 193, Boccaccio uses 633 (226 verses each for Inferno and Purgatory, and 181 for Paradiso). While Boccaccio includes these capitoli for each cantica in all three of his autograph copies of the Comedy, he adds rubrics for each canto only in the Chigi. Given Boccaccio’s use of rubrics in the Filostrato, Fiammetta, Teseida, Buccolicum carmen, and Decameron, it is surprising that he does not apply the device to the Comedy until his third transcription of it. Boccaccio’s rubrics, which ‘were known as Boccaccio’s production and were considered a work in themselves’, according to the testimony of contemporary transcriptions, demonstrate the same attention to the letter that characterizes his capitoli.73 Comparison to contemporary examples can once again show how Boccaccio’s attention to the textual whole distinguishes his approach. Because rubrics appear in most of the earliest copies of the Comedy, Petrocchi includes the rubrics from Trivulziano 1080 as part of his

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edition of the so-called antica vulgata, and they provide a good baseline for comparison.74 For canto 4 in the ‘antica vulgata’ the rubric reads: ‘Canto iv, in which [the author] shows the first circle of the inferno, called Limbo, and there treats the punishment of the unbaptized and of great men who died before Christ’s coming and did not know God; and how Jesus Christ took many souls from this place.’75 This is a surprising summary of Inferno 4 to modern ears and suggests that the author of the rubric wants to avoid advertising the unorthodox nature of Dante’s treatment of Limbo by emphasizing why these souls are in Limbo and Christ’s harrowing of Hell. Boccaccio, on the other hand, refers to Virgil and the other poets of the ‘nobile castello’, all of whom are omitted in the rubric of the ‘antica vulgata’. He writes: ‘[Here] begins the fourth canto of the Inferno, in which the author shows how he found himself in the first circle of it; and there writes of those who were damned for lack of baptism, and Virgil explains to him how he has already seen some taken away. Then, having encountered four poets, they enter a castle with them, where he sees noble men of arms, philosophers, and valiant women.’76 Whereas the rubrics of the ‘antica vulgata’ make the canto seem to be mostly concerned with Christ, Boccaccio suggests the novelty of Dante’s inclusion of these poets, as well as noble warriors, philosophers, and women, in limbo. As in this example, Boccaccio’s rubrics usually provide more narrative detail than those of the ‘antica vulgata’, whether by accounting for more individual episodes or by giving the names of the characters.77 Boccaccio’s concern for the complexity of the letter of Dante’s text yields some remarkable insights that still have not been fully incorporated into readings of the poem.78 Boccaccio’s rubric for Inferno 4 includes not only the poets who were excluded from the vulgate summary, but also ‘nobili uomini d’arme, filosofi e valorose donne’ (noble men of arms, philosophers, and valiant women). In his Esposizioni (4.all.62), Boccaccio considers the significance of this group at greater length: ‘One could here raise a doubt, asking, “What do men of arms and women have to do with those who are famous for philosophy?”’79 He responds to the first part of the question by pointing out that both philosophy and military tactics are based on certain logical precepts. On the problem of women, he offers a more extensive and interesting explanation: ‘This is also the case for the women who live chastely and honestly and pursue their domestic duties in an intelligent and organized fashion, for without the teachings of philosophy such a life would be impossible. We must recognize that the reading and studying of philosophy is not something confined to

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universities, schools, and disputations. It can oftentimes be read within the hearts of men and women.’ After a description of a woman’s various duties, he concludes, ‘What more is taught by philosophers in schools than what she teaches in ethics, politics, and economics? Nothing at all. Women who have acted and who act worthily according to their station in life, therefore, shall be seated alongside philosophers, for they will have earned praise and enduring fame.’80 For Boccaccio, Dante’s inclusion of women suggests that philosophy is not only the learning acquired from books and in schools but also that acquired from the management of daily life. In his effort to explain every detail of Dante’s text, then, Boccaccio develops ideas that are usually ‘glossed over’ instead of being ‘glossed’ even in modern commentaries.81 Boccaccio’s paratextual strategies for the Commedia continue Dante’s own attention to the text that he showed in his divisioni. In both his capitoli and rubrics, Boccaccio suggests that it is not just what Dante says (which Jacopo’s capitoli provide, for example), but the way he tells the story that is significant. In their content as well as their form, Boccaccio’s paratexts for the Commedia manifest his claim in Ytalie iam certus honos that the vernacular is not naked, and, as he puts it in the Esposizioni (15.lit.97), hides the fact that it conceals. .

The book of the canzoni distese: reconsidering the crisis of the Boccaccian tradition The paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. – G´erard Genette, Paratexts

Boccaccio’s use of the scholastic divisio textus, or textual division, contributes to an understanding of these works as textual wholes. As MarieDominique Chenu explains, describing the novelty of this scholastic method used by Aquinas and Bonaventure, divisio textus explores a text ‘according to the internal order governing the development of the text and the arrangement of its parts’: ‘Whereas traditional glossing latched upon one or another difficult word as one drifted through the text, it is now a matter of seeking to grasp textual wholes, to determine trains of thought by means of a logical analysis pushed to the point of minuteness, regardless of the suppleness most certainly present in the narrative.’82 For the Vita nuova Boccaccio highlights Dante’s own use of divisio textus by moving the divisioni into the margins and for the Commedia he constructs his own editorial apparatus that works by means of division, but for the canzoni

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Table 3 Dante’s canzoni distese, with Barbi’s numbers in parentheses 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Cos`ı nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro (CIII) Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete (LXXIX) Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona (LXXII) Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i’ solia (LXXXII) Amor, che movi tua vert`u dal cielo (XC) Io sento s`ı d’Amor la gran possanza (XCI) Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra (CI) Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna (CII) Io son venuto al punto de la rota (C) E’ m’incresce di me s`ı duramente (LXVII) Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato (LXXXIII) La dispietata mente, che pur mira (L) Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute (CIV) Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire (CVI) Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mio doglia (CXVI)

distese, he performs the different but complementary task of canonizing a collection of Dante’s fifteen canzoni distese by repeating that collection in the same order in all three of his autographs. (See Table 3.) The series of fifteen canzoni that Boccaccio transcribes in Toledo 104.6, Riccardian 1035, and Chigi l v 176 were long thought to be Boccaccio’s editorial invention, because he is the earliest witness to them.83 Near the end of his almost sixty-year review of the textual tradition of Dante’s lyrics, however, Domenico De Robertis proclaimed ‘the crisis of the Boccaccio tradition’ on the basis of a manuscript, Riccardian 1050, that contained the same sequence of poems but different textual readings for some of them.84 What De Robertis described as the ‘non-dependence (or not constant dependence) on the Boccaccian tradition’ suggested that the sequence preexisted Boccaccio. De Robertis developed this line of argument further in the vast critical edition of Dante’s Rime that he published in 2002. Using both Riccardian 1050 and a manuscript from the British Library, Additional 26772, to support his proposal that the sequence existed before Boccaccio, De Robertis decided to print the series formerly identified with Boccaccio as the beginning of his edition ‘with the secret hope, perhaps, that the tradition reflects the poet’s work or restores (transmits) a hypothetical ordering’.85 In other words, to condense De Robertis’s typically cautious and roundabout mode of expression, he proposed that Dante himself may have had a hand in organizing this sequence of poems.

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Some critics were quick to embrace De Robertis’s ‘secret hope’. They argued that these fifteen poems not only reflected ‘the poet’s work’, but even the series (if not the exact sequence) of poems (minus one) on which Dante had planned to comment in the Convivio.86 The idea that the canzoni distese were those that Dante planned to comment upon in the Convivio was not wholly new. In a marginal note in the fifteenth-century Riccardian 1044, Antonio Manetti lists the canzoni distese (minus one) as the fourteen canzoni of the projected Convivio.87 This re-proposal of the idea half a millennium later has, nonetheless, sparked debate, even if the argument itself has attracted few followers.88 Discussions of the hypothesis that the sequence of the canzoni distese was that of the Convivio has had the result of erasing Boccaccio’s crucial mediating role, even as the evidence used actually confirms it. Giuliano Tanturli’s argument that the sequence is Dante’s, for example, relies in part on Boccaccio’s discussion of the relationship between the distese and the Convivio in his biography. While in the Toledo Vita (201) Boccaccio refers to the canzoni distese both independently of and in conjunction with the Convivio, in the Chigi version he mentions the canzoni distese only in close connection to the Convivio, whose description as a whole is also reduced (136–37).89 Whether Boccaccio created the collection or copied it, he consolidates a tradition in his three autographs, giving it a consistent place in his Dante editions. In other words, whether or not Dante intended the sequence for the Convivio, Boccaccio made them into a book by placing it in a codex with Dante’s other, authorial, works.90 The evidence that the sequence precedes Boccaccio, moreover, is more problematic than has been recognized. In a recent handbook of filologia dantesca, for example, Saverio Bellomo summarizes the logic of De Robertis’s argument: since the sequence of the distese can be found in ‘witnesses that are independent of Boccaccio’, the sequence precedes him.91 Presented in this way, the argument would be perfectly valid, but neither of the manuscripts marshaled by De Robertis are wholly independent of the Boccaccian tradition. Notice that in his discussion of Riccardian 1050 quoted above, De Robertis describes the relationship as one of ‘nondependence (or not constant dependence) on the Boccaccian tradition’, instead of independence, because, as he explains in his edition, Riccardian 1050 depends on Boccaccio for the texts of six of the fifteen canzoni.92 This mixture of readings from two traditions makes Riccardian 1050 a far more ambiguous piece of evidence than has been acknowledged. An examination of the manuscript as a whole further complicates its status and value as an independent witness, because Riccardian 1050 begins

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with a copy of Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante, which is followed by the Vita nuova and then the series of the distese. The manuscript even ends with a collection of Petrarch’s lyrics that derives from the Chigi.93 In other words, the structure of the whole codex is Boccaccian. The Boccaccian structure of Riccardian 1050 suggests the possibility that the scribe took the order of the poems from Boccaccio, as he did for the manuscript as a whole, and may have integrated readings for nine of the canzoni from another copy. The scribe of Riccardian 1050, moreover, has been identified with Antonio Pucci, whom Quaglio describes as ‘Boccaccio’s first interpreter’, which reinforces the Boccaccian imprimatur of the manuscript.94 Given these details, Riccardian 1050 represents a very problematic piece of evidence for De Robertis’s hypothesis since its texts are only partially independent, the codex as a whole gives Boccaccio a prominent place, and its scribe is one of Boccaccio’s earliest followers. Instead of moving away from Boccaccio’s sphere of influence, Riccardian 1050 reconfirms his prominence in the early transmission and reception of Dante’s canzoni distese. There are similar problems with De Robertis’s other major piece of evidence, Additional 26772. Although De Robertis claims that Additional 26772 is ‘beyond the boundary’ (‘di l`a dal confine’) of the textual tradition that Boccaccio’s works represent, it too contains readings from the Boccaccian tradition for several canzoni.95 At the end of the transcription of the fifteen canzoni, moreover, the scribe adds a note that, according to De Robertis, reflects the scribe’s direct experience (‘una diretta esperienza’) of another manuscript.96 The note reads: ‘the two stanzas that follow I find placed after the canzone that begins Voi ch’intendendo il terzo cielo’ (‘Queste .ij. stance cheseguitano truovo poste sotto quella canc¸one che comincia Uoi chentendendo ilterc¸o cielo (et)c’) followed by the transcription of Parole mie chep(er)lomondo siete (Rime lxxxiv) and O dolci rime cheparlando andate (Rime lxxxv).97 If this note reflects the scribe’s ‘direct experience’ of another manuscript, then the scribe’s copy-text had these two poems after Voi ch’intendendo and, therefore, did not contain the sequence of the distese but a mixture of the distese with two other poems. The scribe’s relocation of the two stanzas that he had found after Voi ch’intendendo to after the canzoni distese, moreover, suggests that far from following an earlier tradition that had this sequence of the distese, he is transforming his copy-text to match the pattern of the distese. The manuscript Additional 26772 as a whole, moreover, is characterized by other signs of scribal intervention in the form of numerous marginal and interlinear annotations and variants that make contamination all the

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more likely. The high level of annotation in Additional 26772 has been associated with the same late Trecento environment that produced the Santa Croce copy of the Commedia (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Santa Croce 26 sin. 1 known by the siglum LaurSaC).98 This connection is significant, because Petrocchi judges LaurSaC to have too high a level of contamination to be useful in his edition of the Commedia, and the same case could be made of Additional 26772 for the canzoni distese.99 Both Additional 26772 and LaurSaC show an interest in variants that suggests their scribal compilers wanted to make an edition, an effort that necessarily produced contaminated copies that are problematic. The different textual readings found in Additional 26772, like those of the nine canzoni in Riccardian 1050, may testify to an earlier stage of textual transmission, but the paratextual or macrotextual order cannot necessarily be attributed to the same earlier stage. To sum up, the evidence that the sequence of fifteen canzoni precedes Boccaccio relies largely on two later manuscripts: Riccardian 1050 and Additional 26772. Both manuscripts contain the canzoni distese in the same sequence in which they are found in Boccaccio’s autographs, but their texts are only partly independent of those in the textual tradition characterized by Boccaccio’s copies. While this partial textual independence could imply that the sequence precedes Boccaccio, both manuscripts show high levels of scribal intervention, which suggests that the scribes could have taken the paratextual sequence from one source but used readings from another. When De Robertis writes that ‘the chronological priority of Boccaccio’s witnesses is not stemmatically significant’ he defends Pasquali’s philological principle of recentiores non deteriores, namely, that later manuscripts may contain textual readings that are closer to the author’s original work than earlier ones.100 The extension of this principle from text to paratext, however, is difficult to demonstrate when the main pieces of evidence are two highly contaminated and problematic manuscripts. The evidence of Additional 26772 and Riccardian 1050 could, however, be interpreted in another way, as revealing once again Boccaccio’s crucial role in mediating Dante’s works. One might even argue that this evidence could support a return to the old idea that Boccaccio himself was responsible for assembling the collection. While ‘the crisis in the Boccaccio tradition’ precipitated by Riccardian 1050 may have provided access to potentially older texts of the canzoni, the Boccaccian sequence of the fifteen canzoni distese may well be Boccaccio’s creation after all. De Robertis’s ‘secret hope’ that in following Boccaccio’s order (but no longer identifying it with Boccaccio) he was revealing an authorial collection may prove in the

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end simply to be to reproduce once more Boccaccio’s already vast influence on the tradition of Dante’s Rime.101 Whether or not Boccaccio creates this collection, he clearly consecrates it, and the tradition of the canzoni distese ultimately derives from him.102 While one can identify and examine earlier copies of the Vita nuova and the Commedia to evaluate Bocccaccio’s editorial choices, like the marginalization of the divisioni or the emphases of his summaries and rubrics, in the case of the canzoni distese, Boccaccio is almost impossible to avoid. This fact is in itself significant. Boccaccio undoubtedly drew on a pre-existing tradition for his transcriptions of the canzoni, but the real novelty of his treatment of Dante’s lyrics is the emphasis on the collection as a unified whole.103 What the crisis in the Boccaccian tradition reveals, in other words, is how unavoidable Boccaccio is in Dante’s transmission. This collection of canzoni is thus emblematic of the vast influence of the textual monument that Boccaccio creates. By writing a biography of Dante, collecting his works, and creating editorial paratexts for them, while also combining Dante’s life and works into a single volume, Boccaccio constructs the image of Dante as a learned poet, whose knowledge encompasses all of the instruments Vasari subsequently places on the table before him.

c h a p ter t h r e e

The making of Petrarch’s vernacular Book of Fragments (Fragmentorum liber)

Boccaccio dedicates the Dante collection described in the previous two chapters to Petrarch in Ytalie iam certus honos, where he urges Petrarch to ‘welcome, read attentively, join to your own [iunge tuis], cultivate, and praise your learned fellow citizen and poet’.1 Although Boccaccio did not send the Dante edition in the Chigi to Petrarch, he fulfilled the imperative that Petrarch join his works to Dante’s (‘iunge tuis’) by adding to the Chigi Petrarch’s collection of vernacular poems, known at the time as the Fragmentorum liber. As the only extant early redaction of what would become the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Boccaccio’s transcription in the Chigi has an important place in Petrarch scholarship. In keeping with the study of variants that has been a prominent mode of Petrarch criticism at least since Bembo, critics have usually interpreted the Fragmentorum liber as an intermediate stage in what Wilkins called ‘the making of the Canzoniere’ that culminates in Petrarch’s final version, now in Vat. lat. 3195.2 Whereas the teleological perspective of genetic criticism tends to examine Petrarch primarily in his own internal history, this chapter places the collection back into an external history by examining the collection from Boccaccio’s perspective as articulated in the De Vita Petracchi and as part of an ongoing conversation between Boccaccio and Petrarch on the status of the vernacular and Dante in particular.3 By examining the historical and material specificity of the version in the Chigi, this chapter provides a new view of Petrarch’s collection that goes beyond the making of the Canzoniere. The six centuries of literary history that have associated Petrarch with his poems for Laura can make it difficult to remember that Vasari’s representation of Petrarch holding a volume of his vernacular lyrics would have surprised Petrarch’s contemporaries, who only had a limited knowledge of this book. Petrarch’s fourteenth-century fame derived instead from his Latin works, like the incomplete and never circulated Africa, which was the focus of the debate about his coronation.4 Several studies, by William 74

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Kennedy and others, have examined the influence of Petrarch’s vernacular lyrics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the circulation of his vernacular works in the Trecento has received relatively little attention.5 One reason for this neglect is the existence of Petrarch’s own holograph of his lyrics, which promises, as Petrucci notes, a ‘perfect textuality, directly emanating from the author and guaranteed by his autograph’.6 At the same time, the limited circulation of Petrarch’s lyrics during this period is evident from the fact that they left few traces among his contemporaries.7 Petrarch’s notes in the loose sheets now assembled in Vat. lat. 3196, like ‘Habet Lelius’ (Lelius has it) and ‘Habet dominus Bernardus hos duos. 9 Aprilis 1359’ (Master Bernard has these two. April 9, 1359), not only provide scholars with dates of composition and revision but also reveal how carefully Petrarch controlled the diffusion of his poems.8 Petrarch registers the names of Lelius and Bernard to know whom he should hold responsible for any unauthorized circulation. Petrarch had reason to be cautious after the unauthorized circulation of the copy of Mago’s lament from the Africa (6.885–918) that he had given to Barbato da Sulmona in 1340, which encountered a poor reception that still rankled with Petrarch over two decades later (see his 1363 letter to Boccaccio, Sen. 2.1).9 Petrarch may also have hoped to inform their possessors of corrections, as he does for the Bucolicum carmen, or even to ask for their destruction when he had established definitive versions, as he does for his Familiares.10 While some of Petrarch’s lyrics did circulate independently, the Fragmentorum liber in the Chigi is the first evidence of the book form.11 The full title of the collection in the Chigi, Viri illustris atque poete celeberrimi Francisci Petrarce de Florentia Rome nuper laureati fragmentorum liber incipit feliciter contrasts with the final title Rerum vulgarium fragmenta in its emphasis on Petrarch’s Florentine origins and the Roman location of his coronation, but the presence of the term fragmentum supports the likely authorial origins of at least that part of the rubric.12 (See Figure 5.) The title Fragmentorum liber does, however, obscure the vernacular nature of the book that Rerum vulgarium fragmenta conveys. This titular silence about the vernacular confused early readers, like Coluccio Salutati, who, includes a ‘libellus Fragmentorum’ in his list of Petrarch’s Latin works in a 1374 letter to Roberto Guidi and when he does refer to Petrarch’s vernacular lyrics later in the letter to argue that they are superior to Dante’s, he makes no mention of the collection, which suggests how little known it was just after Petrarch’s death.13

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Figure 5 Boccaccio’s transcription of Petrarch’s Voi ch’ascoltate (Rvf. 1) with the variant ‘amore’ instead of ‘errore’ at the beginning the third line of the transcription after the rubric (Chigi l v 176, c. 43v). Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

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Table 4 Contents of Petrarch’s Fragmentorum liber Contains 215 poems, not the 366 of the final edition. Using the numbers of the poems in modern editions of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the contents of the Fragmentorum liber are as follows. Part 1 (cc. 43v–72r) 1–120 Donna mi v`ene spesso ne la mente 122–56 159–65 169–73 184–85 178 176–77 189 Blank Pages (cc. bottom of 72r–72v) Part 2 (cc. 73r–79r) 264–304

The configuration of the Fragmentorum liber differs from what one finds in modern editions of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf hereafter) based on Vat. lat. 3195. Whereas the Rvf. contains 366 poems, divided into two sections of 263 and 103, the Fragmentorum liber contains only 215 poems, also divided into two parts, 174 in the first and 41 in the second. Using the same numbers that identify the poems in modern editions, the redaction in the Chigi contains Rvf 1–120, Donna mi v`ene spesso ne la mente, 122–56, 159–65, 169–73, 184–85, 178, 176–77, 189 in Part 1 and 264–304 in Part 2. (See Table 4.) Although the Chigi is the oldest and only extant copy of Petrarch’s lyric collection, critics have tended to view it either as a provisional step on the way to Vat. lat. 3195 or as a series of additions to a previous redaction, usually called the ‘Correggio’ version because of a note among Petrarch’s drafts, dated November 29, 1357, that suggests Petrarch was preparing a collection for Azzo da Correggio.14 Marco Santagata, who is one of the few critics to have proposed an interpretation of the Chigi form in itself, nonetheless interprets the Chigi as merely ‘provisional’, because it does not fit the narrative of repentance and redemption that he sees as the central theme of Petrarch’s final collection.15 The idea that the redaction in Vat. lat. 3195 fulfills this story of redemption is a matter of some debate. While the opening poem, Voi ch’ascoltate, makes a claim for conversion or at least a transformation, the final prayer does not necessarily mean that this conversion has occurred.16 Teodolinda Barolini, for example, has emphasized

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the ‘instability’ that pervades the collection as a whole.17 Petrarch’s final autograph (Vat. lat. 3195), moreover, is less definitive than the numerological, structural analyses of it might lead one to believe, since at the end of his life Petrarch renumbers the final thirty-one poems of the collection by placing Arabic numerals in the margins.18 This renumbering suggests that even Vat. lat. 3195 was in some sense still provisional, even if death brought Petrarch’s rearrangement to an end.19 The Chigi has also been seen as insignificant in comparison to what putatively comes before it. For Roberto Antonelli, the Chigi ‘seems almost like a second edition with additions rather than an ideologically significant reworking’ in relation to the so-called Correggio form.20 Antonelli’s argument depends on Wilkins’ hypotheses about the configuration of this earlier, but not extant, collection, which Wilkins reconstructed by projecting the relationship between Chigi and Vat. lat. 3195 backward from the Chigi to a pre-Chigi (or Correggio) form.21 In other words, the reason the Chigi does not seem ‘ideologically significant’ is that the earlier pre-Chigi or Correggio version, to which Antonelli compares it, was constructed through critical conjecture by subtracting poems from the Chigi. Although the contents of this Correggio form can only be surmised, this conjectural copy has taken on a substantial reality in Petrarch criticism: Guglielmo Gorni has analyzed the Correggio’s macrotextual structure and Santagata has even proposed that this putative Correggio form, which – it bears repeating – does not exist, was not divided into two parts.22 Teodolinda Barolini has urged critics to interpret the Chigi, but the Correggio copy continues to be more attractive to critics than the more difficult, but real, sequence found in the Chigi.23 When Boccaccio added Petrarch to his Dante edition, he did not merely put the two poets in the same codex, but linked them inextricably by beginning his transcription of Petrarch on the verso side of the same piece of parchment where Dante’s lyrics ended (c. 43). Boccaccio is not simply trying to save parchment, since he leaves blank the majority of another folio (c. 73), including a complete verso side, to signal the division between the two parts of Petrarch’s collection. Boccaccio’s combination of Dante and Petrarch in the Chigi is the culmination of a dream that begins in one of his earliest works, the ars dictaminis exercise Mavortis milex (Ep. 2), dated to 1339, where he rewrites Dante’s letter to Moroello Malaspina, Ne lateant (Epist. 4), and addresses it to a wise man from Avignon, who is usually identified as Petrarch.24 Between 1340 and 1348 Boccaccio materially enacts what he had imagined in Mavortis milex by

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assembling Latin texts of both Dante and Petrarch in his Zibaldone laurenziano (29.8).25 Boccaccio consistently associates these two figures, combining themes, ideas, and forms from both of them in his creative works, from the Caccia di Diana to the Decameron. In his more scholarly works, like Ytalie iam certus honos, the Genealogie, letter to Pizzinga (Ep. 19), and Esposizioni, he also constantly juxtaposes them.26 By copying Petrarch on the same piece of parchment as Dante, Boccaccio not only fulfills the dream of Mavortis milex but also integrates Petrarch into his larger argument for the authority of the vernacular.27 Just as Boccaccio’s edition of Dante supports his argument in Ytalie iam certus honos and the Vita di Dante that Dante deserved the laurel even though he wrote in the vernacular, the Fragmentorum liber showed that even the already-laurelled poet (‘Ytalie iam certus honos’) had collected his vernacular poems. By connecting them, Boccaccio suggests that both authors could, as Boccaccio says of Dante’s choice of the vernacular in Ytalie iam certus honos, ‘show what modern vernacular poetry can do’. Boccaccio’s transcription of Petrarch’s collection thus constitutes another part of their ongoing discussion about the authority of the vernacular. Beginning with Boccaccio’s remarks about Petrarch’s lyrics in his De Vita Petracchi, where the issues of love, the vernacular, and authority first appear, this chapter explores how Petrarch responds to Boccaccio’s explicit attempts to convince Petrarch of Dante’s value. Boccaccio’s Ytalie iam certus honos, in particular, stimulates Petrarch’s most extensive discussions of the problem of the vernacular and the dangers of imitation in a series of letters (Fam. 21.15, 22.2, and 23.19). Boccaccio’s extraordinary reaction to what must have been his first reading of the collection, moreover, prompts Petrarch’s sustained consideration of the problematic prospect of a vernacular canon (Sen. 5.2).

Petrarch’s vernacular lyrics and the problem of love In his De Vita et Moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia Boccaccio provides one of the earliest attempts to interpret and justify Petrarch’s vernacular lyrics.28 After a lengthy discourse on Petrarch’s praiseworthy customs and habits, Boccaccio argues that Petrarch’s only failing was his libido.29 Boccaccio writes: By lust alone was Petrarch, I would not say wholly conquered but rather much bothered; but, if it ever happened that he succumbed, what he could

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature not finish chastely, according to the Apostle’s command, he completed by cautiously bringing to an end. And although in many of the vernacular poems [quampluribus vuglaribus poematibus] that he lucidly sang he showed that he fervently loved a certain Lauretta, it does not contradict what I have said, for, as I myself think, I believe that this Lauretta should be understood allegorically as the laurel crown [Laurettam illam allegorice pro laurea corona] that he later wanted to obtain.30

Santagata argues that Boccaccio’s remarks confirm the hypothesis that Petrarch’s contemporary public privileged the allegorical dimension of Petrarch’s love instead of its sensual aspects, which Santagata sees Petrarch as emphasizing in later poems to defend himself from accusations that Laura was a fiction (Fam. 2.9).31 Boccaccio’s allegorization of Laura as the laurel crown, however, attempts to justify precisely those sensual features that complicate his portrait of Petrarch as a chaste model of virtue. Picking up on the association of Lauretta (as Boccaccio always refers to her) and the laurel crown that Petrarch exploits in many of his poems as well as the Coronation Oration, Boccaccio resolves the problem of the love lyrics by claiming that Lauretta ‘should be understood allegorically as the laurel crown that he later wanted to obtain’. Boccaccio’s allegorical solution would be adopted by Petrarch’s later biographers, who continued to struggle with Petrarch’s vernacular production. Giannozzo Manetti, for example, argues that although Petrarch ‘seems in his lyrics to have indulged amorous passions (to which he was highly inclined by nature), he never departed more than a figure’s breadth, so to speak, from austere gravity. [ . . . ] If all this is true, it is clear that those afore-mentioned poems are meant to be understood in a sense other than their literal meaning, after the fashion of poets’.32 This tension between the amorous desires Petrarch expressed in his vernacular poems and Petrarch’s authority also appears in the Secretum and his lyrics themselves. In an early poem that has been dated to the early 1330s, Se l’onorata fronde che prescrive (Rvf 24), Petrarch responds to a request for educational guidance from Andrea Stramazzo da Perugia and suggests that his love for Laura actually prevents him from earning the laurel crown, following the classical opposition between love and study. At the same time, however, in another sonnet written in 1336, L’arbor gentil che forte amai molti’anni (Rvf 60), Petrarch suggests that his ‘debile ingegno’ (weak wit) was able to develop in the shade of the laurel, meaning that his love for Laura had fostered his intellect. In his Epistle to Posterity (Sen. 18.1), which, as critics have shown, is modeled on Boccaccio’s biography, Petrarch responds directly to Boccaccio’s discussion of his problematic libido.33 Petrarch writes:

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I struggled in my adolescence with the most intense but constant and honorable love, and would have struggled even longer, had not a premature but expedient death extinguished the flame that was already cooling. I wish, of course, I could say I was utterly free of lust, but, if I did, I would be lying. This I shall say with confidence, that, though carried away by the fervor of that age and of my temperament, I have always cursed such vileness in my heart. But as soon as I was approaching my fortieth year, while I still had plenty of ardor and strength, I so completely threw off not only that obscene act, but the very recollection of it, that it seemed I had never looked at a woman. I count this among my greatest blessings, thanks be to God who freed me, while still sound and vigorous, from so vile and hateful a slavery.34

Instead of allegorizing the love reflected in the lyrics, as Boccaccio does, Petrarch argues that he has moved beyond it through this story of a conversion at forty. He insists that his abandonment of love was a product of his will, not the death of the beloved. In other words, he changed while he still could have desired. A similar note of repentance pervades Petrarch’s few other early remarks about his lyrics. In a 1349 letter, Petrarch is explicitly repentant, but not without a hint of pride: ‘Thus, the flames in my heart spread through my bones and filled those valleys and skies with a mournful, but, as some called it, pleasant tune. From all this emerged those vernacular songs of my youthful labors which today I am ashamed of and repent, but are, as we have seen, most acceptable to those who are affected by the same disease’ (Fam. 8.3). In another letter from the same period, Petrarch also related his poetry to youthful frivolity: ‘How often did we give a fancy twist to our syllable or use fancy words! In sum, what did we not do so that love, which modesty at least required be kept hidden if we could not extinguish it, might be sung in a popular manner? We were praised for our learning and we greased our hair with the mad oil of sinners. But the ineffable mercy of God gradually directed your feet to the straight path’ (Fam. 10.3).35 In these, Petrarch’s few explicit comments on his vernacular poems, he aligns them with his youthful amorous love and argues that he has moved beyond them. These comments aim to fulfill the moral instruction Augustinus gives Franciscus in the Secretum: ‘Be ashamed to be called an elderly lover. Be ashamed that for so long now you have been the talk of the town [pudeat esse tam diu vulgi fabula]. [ . . . ] Leave behind childish follies; extinguish the flames of youth.’36 In the De Vita Boccaccio thus identifies a problem that Petrarch tries to resolve in a different way. Petrarch’s solution to this problem of love articulated in these poems, which compromise his moral authority, leads to the remarkable solution of the collection of lyrics itself. Whereas Boccaccio

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tries to save Petrarch’s poems by arguing that they are allegorical, in the first poem of his collection, Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse (Rvf 1) Petrarch chooses the ironic lens of retrospection that allows him both to reject them and to preserve them: Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile amore quand’era in parte altr’hom da quel ch’i’ sono You who listen in scattered rhymes to the sound of those sighs with which I used to nourish my heart during my first youthful love [amore], when I was in part another man from what I am now.

While these verses may seem too well known to require transcription here, Boccaccio’s text, copied above, departs from the author’s copy in one significant detail, namely that he refers to Petrarch’s ‘primo giovenile amore’ (first youthful love; see Figure 5), not his ‘primo giovenile errore’ (first youthful error) that one finds in modern editions based on Petrarch’s autograph.37 This variant reinforces the close connection between amore and errore, which become practically synonyms in Petrarch’s poetry.38 Love is the error that the new man (‘quel ch’i’ sono’) claims to have left, or is trying to leave, behind. When, twenty years later, not knowing what exactly Petrarch’s Fragmentorum was, Salutati finally reads the collection itself, he cites its first poem (‘in principio suorum Fragmentorum’) to dissuade a correspondent from believing that loving is ennobling.39 By framing the work as a retrospective palinode, Petrarch not only preserves his own moral authority, which could be compromised by such amorous desires, but also saves these poems from oblivion and allows for their preservation.

Petrarch’s Familiares 21.15 and the problem of vernacular imitation In the De Vita, Boccaccio articulates the problem of the relationship between love, vernacular poetry, and authority that occupies Petrarch’s own discussions of his lyrics, but whereas Boccaccio seeks to authorize vernacular literature on love in the Decameron and his Vita di Dante, for Petrarch both his youthful love and the vernacular seem to compromise his authority and he consistently portrays himself as having surpassed it. While Boccaccio makes clear in Ytalie iam certus honos that he sees the vernacular as capable of anything, Petrarch has far more vexed relationship to his vernacular production, as the collection’s simultaneous preservation and rejection of his lyrics suggests. Boccaccio’s promotion of the vernacular and Dante,

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particularly in Ytalie iam certus honos, stimulated Petrarch’s first extensive consideration of the vernacular occurs in Fam. 21.15. Critics have often read the letter as a model moment in the history of the ‘anxiety of influence’.40 They have outlined its ‘psychological ambiguity’ and have even detected quotations from Dante in it.41 Petrarch’s anxieties about Dante are not simply a reaction to Dante’s general fame, but also to Boccaccio’s specific arguments about Dante’s importance.42 In Ytalie iam certus honos, Boccaccio invites Petrarch to join him in praising Dante, whose used the vernacular, Boccaccio argues, was not out of ignorance, as some envious people suggest, but to ‘show what modern vernacular poetry can do’. Boccaccio wants Petrarch to say something about Dante and imagines Petrarch using Dante’s name. He writes: dicesque libens: ‘Erit alter ab illo quem laudas meritoque colis, per secula, Dantes, quem genuit grandis vatum Florentia mater atque veretur ovans’. (vv. 29–32) You will freely say: ‘He will be another, after that one, this Dante who you rightly praise and cultivate, whom Florence, great mother of poets, produced and, applauding, reveres.’

With this future imagined speech act (dicesque libens) with its own significant future – ‘Erit alter ab illo’ – Boccaccio makes clear his hope that Petrarch will praise Dante.43 Boccaccio concludes the poem by imagining how Petrarch might praise Dante and grant him the kind of posthumous laureation that Boccaccio had imagined for Dante in the Amorosa visione. Expanding on his opening imperative that Petrarch ‘welcome’ (suscipe) Dante, Boccaccio closes the poem in a series of climactic imperatives, partly quoted at the beginning of this chapter: ‘Welcome, read attentively, join to your own, cultivate, and praise your learned fellow citizen and poet. If you do this, you will gain much merit and applause’ (concivem doctumque satis pariterque poetam / suscipe, perlege, iunge tuis, cole, comproba: nam si / feceris, ipse tibi facies multumque favoris / exquires; vv. 37–40).44 Although Petrarch must have received Boccaccio’s poem several years earlier, Petrarch replied to it in Fam. 21.15 only after Boccaccio wrote a letter to Petrarch apologizing for his praise of Dante during his 1359 visit to Milan.45 Responding to Boccaccio’s concluding suggestion in Ytalie iam certus honos that Petrarch’s praise of Dante would redound to his credit, Petrarch throws Boccaccio’s imperatives back at him, commanding Boccaccio to continue in his chosen office: ‘Continue [Age], therefore, not with my sufferance alone

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but with my approval to honor and cherish [celebra et cole] that beacon of your intellect [illam ingenii tui facem] who has afforded you ardor and light for this pathway that you have been treading with giant steps toward a glorious goal; raise high [ad celum fer] with sincere praise worthy alike of you and of him that torch long buffeted and, I would say, wearied by the windy applause of the multitude [ventosisque diu vulgi plausibus agitatam atque ut sic dixerim fatigatam].’46 Petrarch continues: ‘I have concurred with all such praise, for he deserves such commendation while you, as you say, feel obliged to perform this friendly office. I thus commend your poem of praise and I also praise the poet you praised there.’47 Petrarch’s praise of Dante in the letter occurs through Boccaccio and from within Boccaccio’s perspective: ‘in your adolescence he was the first guide and light (fax) of your studies’. This emphasis on youth typically has a negative value in Petrarch and the implication is that Petrarch is Boccaccio’s new ‘guide and light’, or, as Boccaccio calls him, his ‘preceptor’ or teacher.48 As justification for not possessing a copy of the Commedia, Petrarch explains that at the time he feared ‘becoming an unwilling or unconscious imitator’, so he avoided reading Dante.49 Petrarch then offers a more general statement on imitation: This one thing I do wish to make clear, for if any of my vernacular writings resembles, or is identical to, anything of his or anyone else’s, it cannot be attributed to theft or imitation, which I have avoided like reefs, especially in vernacular works [in his maxime vulgaribus], but to pure chance or similarity of mind, as Tullius calls it, which caused me unwitting to follow in another’s footsteps [iisdem vestgiis]. If you ever believe me about anything, believe me now; nothing can be more true.50

Petrarch’s invocation of Cicero here is odd, because Cicero’s point is the opposite of Petrarch’s claim. For Cicero the idea of imitation due to ‘pure chance or similarity of mind’ is a laughable excuse; it is far more likely that these similarities are the result of having read those previous texts (De oratore 2.36).51 In other words, Cicero argues that those who appeal to chance or some common source did steal these ideas. Petrarch’s concern with imitation is very much his own. Boccaccio does not mention it in either Ytalie iam certus honos or the Vita di Dante. For Petrarch, however, the problem of imitation is a major issue. He returns to this theme in two later letters to Boccaccio that follow Fam. 21.15 in the collection (Fam. 22.2 and 23.19), where Petrarch asks Boccaccio to revise the copy of the Bucolicum carmen that he had made during his stay in Milan. In the first of these (Fam. 22.2), written some months after the letter on

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Dante, Petrarch repeats and confirms his odd reading of the Ciceronian passage, while also arguing that if those poets are caught stealing they have done so in a spirit of competition (‘certandi animo’).52 In both of these letters, Petrarch tries to clarify his borrowings from classical poets in the Bucolicum carmen, which suggests a connection between the anxiety Petrarch expresses over imitating Dante in Fam. 21.15 and his borrowings from classical authors in the Bucolicum carmen. Petrarch’s insistence in those later letters on noting his borrowings from Virgil and Ovid may be another way of denying any suspicion about Dante’s presence there: a way to insist on his intimacy with the ancient, instead of modern, tradition. Petrarch thus insists on revealing his classical sources while dismissing any possible vernacular influence. Petrarch’s expressions of anxiety over imitation in his Latin Bucolics in these letters thus reinforces his claim to have abandoned vernacular composition altogether: ‘Today I have left these scruples far behind, and with my total abandonment of such productions and the waning of my earlier fears, I can now welcome [suscipo] wholeheartedly all other poets, him above all.’ By dismissing and diminishing the importance of vernacular production, which Petrarch associates with youth, he can finally satisfy Boccaccio’s repeated imperative in Ytalie iam certus honos that he ‘welcome’ (suscipe) Dante. As both Kevin Brownlee and Zygmunt Baranski have independently argued, Petrarch insists on distinguishing between himself and Dante, particularly on the matter of Latin and the vernacular.53 ‘How true can it be’, Petrarch asks ‘that I am envious of a man who devoted his entire life to those things that were only the flower and first fruits of my youth?’54 Once he has marginalized the vernacular, Petrarch is happy to grant Dante as much honor as he can in the style that he has abandoned and left behind. Against Boccaccio’s efforts to erase the distinction by emphasizing that the vernacular is not naked, Petrarch insists on separating the styles, characterizing the vernacular as youthful while Latin is mature. Explaining that he gave up on the vernacular because of the perils of circulation, Petrarch complains that people ‘so mispronounce and mangle [Dante’s] verses that they could do no greater injury to a poet’.55 Hearing the multitude mangle his own verses, furthermore, led Petrarch to ‘hate what I once loved’. Petrarch also appeals to the perils of circulation to justify not fulfilling Boccaccio’s imagining of his using Dante’s name. Whereas in Ytalie iam certus honos Boccaccio had precisely asked Petrarch to name Dante, even imagining Petrarch’s discourse for him (‘you will freely say . . . ’), Petrarch omits Dante’s name from the letter ‘lest the rabble that

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hears everything without understanding anything would noisily maintain that I was defaming him’.56 Whereas Boccaccio claims that only envious people question Dante’s choice of the vernacular, Petrarch thinks Dante’s detractors have a point. He writes: ‘In praising him you suggest that he could have used another style [i.e. Latin]; I heartily agree, since I have the highest esteem for his ability, that he could do anything that he undertook; but what he did choose to attempt is clear.’57 Benventuo da Imola ignores the final part of the sentence in his commentary on Inf. 2.10–12 to make it sound like Petrarch is praising Dante; but what Petrarch means is clear.58 Dante may have been able to compose in Latin, as Boccaccio claims in Ytalie iam certus honos, but Petrarch underlines the fact that he chose to write in the vernacular instead, whereas Petrarch composes his Africa in the proper Latin hexameters. The fact that Dante ‘rises to noble and loftier heights in the vernacular than in Latin poetry or prose’ is nothing to be ashamed of: ‘it suffices to have excelled in one mode [in suo genere]’. Instead of joining himself with Dante, Petrarch insists on distinguishing himself from the older poet by associating love, youth, and vernacular poetry as experiences that he has left behind and abandoned. It is not clear whether Boccaccio ever received Fam. 21.15, since he seems to be in search of it in 1367, when he asks Petrarch for his letter ‘de Dante’ to put in a collection of their correspondence that Boccaccio is assembling (Ep. 15.19), but he was certainly aware of Petrarch’s ambivalence toward the vernacular and his anxieties about imitation.59 On the strength of Fam. 22.2 and 23.19 alone, Boccaccio could write of Petrarch in a 1365 letter to Donato Albanzani, ‘Nosti quam solerter imitationes in propria forma evitet’ (You know how carefully he avoids imitations in his own work). These concerns with imitation and the earlier literary tradition guide Petrarch’s framing of his experience in the Chigi’s collection of his lyrics, where issues of imitation seem to inform the structure of the whole, particularly around the death of the beloved and the bipartition of the collection.

Avoiding Dante: the death of the beloved and the bipartition of the collection By joining Petrarch’s lyric collection to Dante, Boccaccio offers the first opportunity to assess how Petrarch distinguishes himself from Dante in the vernacular. The juxtaposition of the canzoni distese on the same piece of parchment with the Fragmentorum liber shows the novelty of Petrarch’s

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mixing of poetic forms in contrast to the conventional grouping of collections around single forms, like sonnets and canzoni. In his holograph of the collection, Vat. lat. 3195, Petrarch emphasizes this novelty using different layout formats for each genre, as Wayne Storey has shown, but Boccaccio does not transmit those ‘visual poetics’, whether because his copy-text did not contain them or because he chose not to follow what he found in Petrarch’s copy.60 Dante, of course, had already mixed genres to tell a story in the Vita nuova, but Petrarch dispenses with the prose frame that Dante uses to explain the poems and develop what little narrative the work contains. At the same time that Petrarch eliminates this prose element, his collection is clearly modeled on Dante’s, including the division into two parts. The bipartition of the collection effected by the blank page that separates the first and second parts of Petrarch’s collection in the Chigi raises the issue of the relationship between the beloved’s death and literary structure that Dante had also explored in the Vita nuova. Although Francisco Rico claims that the first poem (Rvf 1) suggests bipartition, retrospective accounts of conversion, like Augustine’s Confessions, do not necessarily entail a structural division into two parts.61 In the Fragmentorum liber Petrarch ends Part 1 with the suspended shipwreck of Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio (Rvf 189), which portends several possible endings, from the unlikely arrival at the port of salvation to the potential death of either the poet or his beloved.62 This suspension continues through blank space at the end of 73r and for all of 73v, and, even as one anticipates some kind of change, nothing really happens. Instead, the blank is like the one that fascinated Proust in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education: it seems to mean that time passes, an idea that would fit what Barolini has identified as Petrarch’s major metaphysical concern with time.63 In the context of Chigi l v 176, Petrarch’s bipartition of his collection recalls Dante’s Vita nuova where the act of transcription is interrupted by the beloved’s death, which Boccaccio emphasizes with the historiated Q of Quomodo sedet. (See Figure 4.)64 Petrarch’s decision to have the bipartition not coincide with Laura’s death is suprising. Who else but Petrarch would choose Rvf 264 as the beginning of the second half of the collection?65 Petrarch’s placement of the division not at the moment of Laura’s death attempts to tell a story of transformation that does not rely on the Dantean paradigm, but follows instead his own story about his transformation of subjectivity, or moral improvement. Ultimately, however, this story of transformation cannot displace the power of the amorous narrative. The various editors who

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have moved the beginning of Part 2 of the collection from Rvf 264, where Petrarch locates it in his autograph and in the Fragmentorum liber, to the poem that announces Laura’s demise (Rvf 267), suggest that many have not found it to be a fitting choice. By situating the division at the moment of Laura’s death, Petrarch’s later editors transform his work into the Dantean model that Petrarch is trying to avoid.66 Teodolinda Barolini observes that ‘While the division of the text into two parts is Petrarch’s, the headings and the transposed beginning of Part 2 testify to readers’ long-standing desire to impose a clear narrative onto the tenuous and opaque love story that the poems do not narrate so much as conjure and suggest.’67 Whereas later editors will collapse these two models into each other by moving the location of the bipartition of Petrarch’s collection to coincide with Laura’s death, Petrarch’s placement of the break seems like an attempt to distinguish himself from Dante.68 Petrarch’s own notes show a particularly high concentration of engagement with the vernacular tradition around the moment of bipartition, and one could read the second half of the Fragmentorum liber as an extensive effort simultaneously to engage and avoid Dante’s Vita nuova.69 Petrarch’s drafts for the canzone on Laura’s death, Che debb’io far (Rvf 268), for example, show extensive borrowings from Dante’s canzone on Beatrice’s death in the Vita nuova (31), Li occhi dolenti. Petrarch’s revisions aim to eliminate and diminish these echoes, but they remain present even in the final version where Petrarch uses the figure of the widow (vedova) that Dante had deployed in the Vita nuova to describe his poem: ‘vedova sconsolata in vesta negra’ (unconsoled widow in black garments; Rvf 268.82).70 After the canzone on the beloved’s death, Che debb’io far, Petrarch places two poems that suggest a relationship with another woman (Rvf 270–71), just like the episode of the donna gentile in Dante’s Vita nuova.71 Finally, in the sonnet Lev`ommi il mio penser in parte ov’era (now Rvf 302), Petrarch puts a poem of heavenly vision that has been compared to Dante’s Oltre la spera and is similarly situated near the end of its macrotext.72 The canzone on the beloved’s death in Rvf 268, the episode with another woman in Rvf 270–71, and then the vision of the beloved in Rvf. 302 thus follow a pattern established by Dante in the Vita nuova. Whereas Dante promises more poetry to come after Oltre la spera (‘spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna’, VN 42.2), Petrarch decides to bring an end to poetry, burying it along with his beloved. In the final poem of the Chigi collection, Mentre che ’l cor dagli amorosi vermi (Rvf 304), Petrarch expresses quite explicitly his attempt to avoid following Dante too closely. Reinforcing the retrospective renunciation

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of Voi ch’ascoltate (Rvf 1), Mentre che ’l cor dagli amorosi vermi (Rvf 304) maintains the association of love, youth, and the vernacular by announcing an end of poetry and desire. To this bolstering of the opening poem’s palinode, Petrarch adds a polemic with the poetic past that emphasizes his difference from other poets in his relationship to desire. He writes: Quel foco e` morto, e ’l copre un picciol marmo: che se col tempo fossi ito avanzando (come gi`a in altri) infino a la vecchiezza, di rime armato, ond’oggi mi disarmo, con stil canuto avrei fatto parlando romper le pietre, et pianger di dolcezza. That fire is dead and a little marble covers it: if it had gone on growing with time, as it does in others, into old age, armed with rhymes of which today I am disarmed, with a mature style I would speaking have made the very stones break and weep with sweetness.73

Whereas others (altri) have continued to love in old age, even after the death of the beloved, Petrarch renounces such a poetic course. But if he did continue loving and composing into old age, he adds, his mature poetic style (‘con stil canuto’) would make the stones break and weep with sweetness.74 The tension in these terzine between Petrarch’s poetic renunciation and his poetic pride encapsulates his ambivalent relationship with his vernacular production: even as he disavows his poetry, he claims singular powers for it. Petrarch’s claim to reject continuing to write about his beloved even after her death is more convincing in the Fragmentorum liber, where there are only 41 poems in the second part, than in the final version which contains 103 poems. In this final version, moreover, Petrarch shifts away from emphasizing renunciation by moving toward the transcendent in Vergine bella (Rvf 366). The coherence of the Chigi collection finds a significant echo in Petrarch’s first Epystola metrica (1.1), which Giuseppe Velli has shown takes up many of the same themes and images as the first sonnet of the collection, Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse (Rvf 1), but it is also significant that the later verse ‘Nunc breve marmor habet longos quibus arsimus ignes’ (Epyst. 1.1.62) also corresponds to the image of the tomb covering the flames in Rvf 304: ‘Quel foco e` morto, e ‘l copre un picciol marmo’.75 In Fam. 1.1, Petrarch makes clear that he conceived of gathering his Latin prose letters, Latin verse letters, and vernacular lyrics at the same time and critics have noted the correspondences between each collection.76 While it is safe to

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identify the collection of Latin letters as the Familiares and Epystole metriche, the correspondence between Rvf 304 and Epyst. 1.1 underlines the fact that the lyric collection Petrarch has in mind in Fam. 1.1 is the Fragmentorum liber, not the later collection of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and that Petrarch considered the Fragmentorum liber as a completed collection. Petrarch’s claim in Rvf 304 that the death of the beloved should mean the end of poetry thus corresponds to the material reality of the Chigi collection. Petrarch constrasts his abandonment of poetry in the Chigi with other poets who continued to write in old age, but who are these ‘others’ (altri) from whom he wants to distinguish himself? As Domenico De Robertis reasonably asks parenthetically in his reading of the poem: ‘is Petrarch thinking of Dante?’77 Indeed, the theme of continuing to praise one’s beloved even after her death largely derives from Dante, as Petrarch must have recognized, and Petrarch’s repurposing of many of Dante’s themes from the Vita nuova in the Fragmentorum liber is evident, but why does Petrarch use the plural?78 In his Renaissance commentary, Lodovico Castelvetro suggests one possible answer in his gloss to ‘come gi`a in altri’: ‘Ne’ quali la cagione del comporre e` durata infino alla vecchiezza, come in Dante gi`a vecchio, e in M. Cino vecchissimo, siccome scrive il Boccaccio.’79 For Castelvetro, the poets that Petrarch rejects are Boccaccio’s examples of poets who continued to love in old age in the Introduction to Day 4 of the Decameron, where Boccaccio mentions not only Dante and Cino, but also Guido Cavalcanti to justify his own love for women that will persist ‘infino nello stremo della mia vita’.80 Boccaccio insists on linking Dante to love in old age not only in the Decameron but also in his Vita di Dante. In the Chigi Vita, he makes the connection explicit, using a similar phrase (‘allo stremo della sua vita’) to describe Dante’s continued love life after Beatrice’s death.81 Boccaccio writes: N´e fu solo da questo amor passionato il nostro poeta, anzi, inchinevole molto a questo accidente, per altri obietti in pi`u matura et`a troviam lui sovente aver sospirato; e massimamente dopo il suo esilio, dimorando in Lucca, per una giovine, la quale egli nomina Pargoletta. E oltre a ci`o, vicino allo stremo della sua vita, nell’ alpi di Casentino per una alpigina, la quale, se mentito non m’`e, quantunque bel viso avesse, era gozzuta. E, per qualunque fu l’una di queste, compose pi`u e pi`u laudevoli cose in rima. (Chigi Vita 35) Nor was our poet impassioned by this love alone; on the contrary, he was very inclined to this experience, and we find that he often pined in older age [in pi`u matura et`a] for other objects of desire and particularly after being

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exiled, while living in Lucca for a young girl who was called Pargoletta. And after that, near the end of his life [vicino allo stremo della sua vita], in the mountains of Casentino he pined for a mountain woman [una alpigina], who, if I am not deceived, although she had a beautiful face, was goitred [gozzuta]. And, for whichever one of these, he composed more and more praiseworthy poems.82

Dante’s poems for the alpigina and pargoletta thus substantiate Boccaccio’s claim that ‘the lust [lussuria] that found ample space in this marvelous poet not only in his early years but also his more mature ones’.83 Boccaccio’s portrait of Dante’s later years as dedicated to love are based on biographical interpretations of two of Dante’s canzoni distese, Amor da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia (Rime cxvi), often called the montanina, and Io sono venuto al punto de la rota (Rime c), which mentions the pargoletta. These poems show Dante at his most Cavalcantian, describing love as a force that overwhelms reason, takes away one’s free will, and leads one eventually to death.84 Both the montanina and its letter Ne lateant, which Boccaccio imitates in one of his earliest ars dictaminis exercises, Mavortis milex, suggest a Dante who has become Francesca once again at the end of his life: ‘Quale argomento di ragion raffrena, / ove tanta tempesta in me si gira?’ (What rational argument can restrain where such a storm turns within me?).85 On contrasting sides of the same folio, then, there are the final verses of the canzone that confirms Boccaccio’s claims in both the Decameron and Vita di Dante that Dante continued to love in old age (‘allo stremo della sua vita’), and the first poem of Petrarch’s lyric collection, Voi ch’ascoltate (Rvf 1) where Petrarch claims that he has changed and has moved beyond love. This juxtaposition brings into focus the problem of love, reason, and authority that are central to how Petrarch distinguishes himself from Dante. Castelvetro is right, then, to see in the altri of Rvf 304 those poets that Boccaccio identified in the Decameron and his argument finds support in Petrarch’s own collection, where Petrarch quotes all three of them, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Cino, in the canzone Lasso me (Rvf 70).86 In Lasso me (Rvf 70) Petrarch dramatizes and thematizes the issues of imitation broached in Rvf 304 by staging a kind of poetic identity crisis (‘Che parlo, o dove sono . . . ’) against the background of a vernacular literary history.87 In the unique structure of this so-called canzone delle citazioni, where each strophe ends with the incipit of a earlier Romance poem, Petrach quotes Arnault Daniel’s Drez et rayson es qu’ieu ciant e ’m dimori, Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega, per ch’io voglio dire, Dante’s Cos`ı nel mio parlar voglio aspro, Cino da Pistoia’s La dolce vista e ’l bel guardo soave, and finally his own Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade.88 This conclusive

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autocitation suggests a teleology to the lyric history of the stanzas’ endings that reconfirms Petrarch’s privileged place. Although it is framed as a poem of crisis, it clearly expresses Petrarch’s sense of both his moral superiority, which reflects the retrospective stance of Voi ch’ascoltate, and his poetic primacy.89 Petrarch explicitly engages with the tradition to outdo it with a poem that is, as its incipit suggests, among the first fruits of his youth. In Lasso me Petrarch participates in imitation to outdo the poetic past, while in Mentre che ‘l cor he rejects the idea of continuing to write about love in old age, even as he suggests that, if he did so, he would make the stones cry: ‘con stil canuto, avrei fatto parlando / romper le pietre et pianger di dolcezza’ (Rvf 304).

After the Chigi The problem of Petrarch’s attitude toward the vernacular persists through the nineteenth century, when De Sanctis mentions receiving a letter from some students who ask him ‘why Petrarch had written the Canzoniere in Italian and not in Latin’. He remarks that he ‘was sorely tempted to reply that Petrarch had written in Italian because Laura knew no Latin; but it seemed cruel to answer flippantly a question those boys were taking so very seriously’.90 De Sanctis’s response is revealing not only because it aims to avoid the ambivalence of Petrarch’s relationship to the vernacular, but also because it relies on Dante’s explanation for the emergence of vernacular poetry in the Vita nuova, where Dante claims that it only emerged to speak to ladies (VN 25.6).91 This chapter from Vita nuova is both the foundation and foil for Petrarch’s genealogy of the vernacular in Fam. 1.1. Whereas Dante maintains that ‘anticamente non erano dicitori d’amore in lingua volgare, anzi erano dicitori d’amore certi poete in lingua latina’ (VN 25.3), Petrarch maintains that vernacular poetry did exist in antiquity. In the course of explaining the origins of his collections of Latin prose letters (Fam.), Latin verse letters (Epyst.), and lyrics (Rvf), Petrarch writes: Part of the writing was free of literary niceties, part showed the influence of Homeric control since I rarely made use of the rules of Isocrates; but another part intended for charming the ears of the multitude relied on its own particular rules. This last kind of writing, which is said to have been revived among the Sicilians not many centuries ago, had soon spread throughout Italy and beyond, and was once even popular among the most ancient of the Greeks and the Latins, if it is indeed true that the Attic and Roman people used to employ only the rhythmic type of poetry.92 (Fam. 1.1; Bernardo 1: 4)

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In this passage, Petrarch aims to ennoble the vernacular by providing it a classical genealogy that he found in Servius’ commentary on Virgil and that later authors, like Poliziano, would also repeat.93 What has not been adequately appreciated is that the collection of vernacular lyrics that Petrarch refers to in Fam. 1.1 would likely have been the Fragmentorum liber, as the close relationship between Epyst. 1.1 and the Fragmentorum liber’s first and final poems mentioned above suggests. Certainly by the fall of 1359 Petrarch considered the redaction a completed form, since there is no document concerning the collection between October 1359 and the end of 1366.94 During his visit to Milan in the spring of 1359, Boccaccio not only helped Petrarch to revise his Bucolicum carmen and took away a personal copy of that Latin work, but also must also have read Petrarch’s collection of his lyrics in something close to the state he would later transcribe in the Chigi.95 Although Boccaccio had long known of Petrarch’s vernacular compositions, as his remarks in the De Vita Petracchi make clear, he must have been surprised to find them assembled into the collection of the Fragmentorum liber.96 Indeed, according to Petrarch’s account in Sen. 5.2, which Boccaccio confirms in his 1372 letter to Pietro Piccolo (Ep. 20), Boccaccio’s reading of Petrarch’s lyrics led him to burn his own vernacular poems.97 While some Boccaccio critics, like Vittore Branca, have suggested that Boccaccio’s reaction was purely an aesthetic one, it seems likely that what Boccaccio would have found so remarkable about Petrarch in these lyrics was the form in which he read them, that is, as a collection of lyrics.98 Although Petrarch remains ambivalent about his vernacular compositions, Boccaccio’s burning of his own lyrics seems to produce in Petrarch a new indulgence, if not enthusiasm, for them. Whether or not Boccaccio’s burning constitutes the ‘decisive moment’ in the formation of the Canzoniere, as Branca argues, it does seem to signal a new attitude toward his vernacular poems.99 In Fam. 21.15 Petrarch had lamented that the mangling of his verses by the multitude had made him hate what he had once loved and in Fam. 1.1 he announces an attempt at authorial control to deal with these issues of circulation, but in Sen. 5.2 he describes, with some satisfaction, the riches received by the jongleurs to whom he gives his poems. He claims that he once even thought of making a great work in the vernacular but stopped because of a lack of foundations.100 In contrast to his argument for rhythmic poetry’s antiquity in Fam. 1.1, moreover, Petrarch claims in Sen. 5.2 that the vernacular is a ‘stilus modo inventus’. Finally, Petrarch no longer frames the issues of a vernacular literary tradition in terms of the dangers of imitation, as he did in Fam. 21.15, but in terms of a relative ranking,

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proposing a hierarchy among the vernacular authors. Not wanting to state his own opinion, he recounts the assessment of the old man of Ravenna who gives him second place in ‘nostri eloquii [ . . . ] vulgaris’, with Dante first and Boccaccio third.101 Even as he continues to question the foundations of the vernacular tradition, he claims his own privileged place within it, following an idea Boccaccio had proposed a decade earlier in Ytalie iam certus honos. In his discussion of imitation in Fam. 23.19, he had described the proper relationship between imitator and imitated as like that between father and son, but in Sen. 5.2 Petrarch argues that sons should surpass their fathers.102 At the beginning of their friendship, Boccaccio had sent Petrarch several manuscripts, including a codex that combined Varro and Cicero in the same volume. In a letter of thanks, Petrarch writes to Boccaccio, ‘you acted most nobly in joining two men whom the fatherland, time, intellect, love, and studies had united. [ . . . ] They dwell together harmoniously and, believe me, few of their ilk from all centuries and different peoples could you have so joined, even though one was more learned and the other more eloquent’ (Fam. 18.4).103 While one could not perhaps imagine Petrarch expressing similar satisfaction to being joined to Dante, his remark describes the same features that Boccaccio had noted in Ytalie iam certus honos. Boccaccio’s poem may not have convinced Petrarch to praise Dante explicitly, but it does serve as the justification for joining the two authors together that he accomplishes in Chigi l v 176, despite their different responses to the problem of the relationship between love, authority, and the vernacular.104

c h a p ter four

The inventive scribe Glossing Cavalcanti in the Chigi and Decameron 6.9

sine magistro vel glosis intellectum debitum non attingam without a master or glosses I cannot achieve adequate understanding

– Boccaccio, Ep. 4

The modern study of the Cavalcanti section of Chigi l v 176 begins with Ezra Pound, who includes two plates of Cavalcanti’s canzone Donna mi prega surrounded by Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary in his 1932 edition and translation of Cavalcanti’s Rime.1 Dino’s Latin commentary, which is preserved only in the Chigi, was crucial for Pound because he saw it as offering the opportunity to understand Cavalcanti in the medieval poet’s own historical and philosophical context.2 After his discovery, Pound wrote, ‘What we need now is not so much a commentator as a lexicon. It is the precise sense of certain terms as understood at that particular epoch that one would like to have set before one.’3 Pound’s declaration set the course for the future research of scholars, like Bruno Nardi and Maria Corti, who tried to reconstruct the philosophical coordinates of Cavalcanti’s thought.4 Pound’s interest in Cavalcanti, however, was motivated less by scholarly historicism than by a polemical vision of Cavalcanti as a kind of anti-Dante who could have written ‘an Heretical Comedy’ (‘una Commedia Eretica’) and thus function as a precursor for Pound’s own polemical engagement with Dante in his ‘Pagana Commedia’, The Cantos.5 In the preface to his edition, Pound reveals that his idea of Cavalcanti partly derives from his reading of Boccaccio’s story about Cavalcanti in the Decameron (6.9), which he interprets as a rewriting of Dante’s Inferno 10. Pound writes: Basti dire che son venuto ‘Tra il muro della terra e li martiri’ [Inf. 10.2] 95

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature e se, alla fine, salto la tomba e lascio i Betti Brunelleschi, i maledicti inglesi, un amico deboluzzo, etc. aspettiamo ch’io trovi un modo bonario o poetico per dirlo allegramente. Let it suffice to say that I passed ‘Between the wall of earth and the torments’ [Inf. 10.2] and if, in the end, I jump over the tomb and leave the Betti Brunelleschis, the damned English, a weak-minded friend, etc., let us wait until I find a good-natured or poetical way to say it cheerfully.’6

In this passage, Pound identifies his Cavalcanti edition with the poet’s leap over the tomb recounted in Boccaccio’s story, which he interprets as Cavalcanti’s triumph over the sepulchral confinement of the heretics that the pilgrim Dante sees in the Inferno (10.2: ‘tra ’l muro della terra e li martiri’).7 Later scholars, like Robert Durling and Zygmunt Baranski, have examined the polemical nature of Boccaccio’s story in greater detail, but what makes Pound’s intuition so important is less the interpretation in itself than the connection his remarks establish between Boccaccio’s imaginative and philological work.8 Put another way, Boccaccio’s image of Cavalcanti leaping over the tomb not only provided Pound with a model for his own intellectual superiority, but also stimulated the archival research that eventually led to Pound’s discovery of the commentary that Boccaccio had transcribed.9 The connection between Pound’s reading of Boccaccio’s story about Cavalcanti (Dec. 6.9) and his recovery of Boccaccio’s transcription of Cavalcanti with commentary emphasizes the link between philological and imaginative representation that has been missing from recent analyses of the Cavalcanti section. As I mentioned in the Introduction, in discussions of the transformation of the codex, scholars have questioned whether Boccaccio is responsible for placing Cavalcanti in it. This chapter revisits these debates by examining Boccaccio’s transcription of Cavalcanti in light of Boccaccio’s representation of Cavalcanti in the Decameron, which is central to Boccaccio’s own literary self-definition. Moving beyond the debate over the moment of the alteration, I argue that whether or not Boccaccio is responsible for the alteration of the codex, the crucial fact is that he wrote the Cavalcanti section with commentary, which fits Boccaccio’s project of vindicating the vernacular delineated not only in other parts of the manuscript, like Ytalie iam certus honos and the Vita di Dante, but also in contemporary compositions, like the Genealogie. Paleographic evidence, moreover, situates Boccaccio’s transcription of the canzone with

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commentary between his copying of Petrarch’s Fragmentoum liber as well as his own Genealogie, and just before he began to copy the final redaction of the Decameron in what is now Hamilton 90.10 The transcription of Cavalcanti that is now in the Chigi thus represents a bridge between Boccaccio’s transcription of other poets and his return to the Decameron with its corresponding tale of Cavalcanti.

Cavalcanti with commentary While scholars have been comfortable with the addition of Petrarch to the Dante collection, which Corrado Bologna calls ‘almost necessary’ from Boccaccio’s perspective, the presence of Cavalcanti has been viewed as problematic.11 For Francesco Mazzoni, the integration of Petrarch cannot be ‘casuale’, whereas, he implies, the addition of Cavalcanti was.12 Some critics have proposed attributing the insertion of Cavalcanti to a later period. Domenico De Robertis, for example, argues that the addition of Cavalcanti to the codex would be more in keeping with the literary historical attitudes of the Laurentian court, where there is substantial interest in Cavalcanti.13 Building on De Robertis’s suggestion, Manlio Pastore Stocchi proposes that Poliziano himself was responsible for the alteration, because, according to a note in the Miscellanea, he seems to have been able to identify Boccaccio’s hand.14 That Boccaccio did, indeed, transcribe the Cavalcanti section is the fundamental philological fact that these discussions have tended to disregard by relying primarily on received ideas of literary history that make Poliziano a crucial figure in the emergence of a Florentine literary identity.15 Although De Robertis does acknowledge the possibility that Boccaccio could have been responsible, since knowing ‘the effective moment of the separation (and of the substitution) is practically impossible’ (l’effettivo momento della separazione (e della sostituzione) e` praticamente impossibile), he argues that if Boccaccio did perform the substitution, it would have been ‘a hurried and uncalculated gesture’.16 De Robertis claims that the current Chigi with its ‘corpus of Duecento and Trecento lyric founded on a few guiding texts is nothing but the product of fortune, and perhaps our mind’s projection, an unwarranted anticipation, credited to Boccaccio, of models that developed later, even if following his suggestion.’17 He warns of the dangers of projecting onto Boccaccio ‘ideas that only matured much later’, but the idea of a literary history that encompasses Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch can already be found in the Chigi l v 176 itself, where Petrarch explicitly associates these poets in his Lasso me (Rvf 70).18 By trying

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to avoid the Scylla of projecting, then, these debates have shipwrecked on the Charybdis of erasing Boccaccio’s role as the human agent who copied the canzone with commentary. Furthermore, when De Robertis describes the current Chigi as a ‘corpus of Duecento and Trecento lyric founded on a few guiding texts’ (fondato su pochi testi-guida) of Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti, he significantly distorts its actual contents because Boccaccio transmits Cavalcanti in a significant format. The images of the codex that Pound included in his edition make this important point: Boccaccio’s Cavalcanti is a Cavalcanti with commentary. (See Figure 6.) Pound himself was acutely aware of the impact of layout on interpretation. As Richard Sieburth observes of Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti, ‘Pound’s most radical gesture of translatio may lie less in his act of rendering it into English [ . . . ] than in his decision to typographically rearrange the original in his printing of the Italian text.’19 The presence of commentary surrounding Cavalcanti’s canzone thus integrates it into the arguments of the Vita nuova, Vita di Dante, and Ytalie iam certus honos in the Chigi, as well as the Decameron and Genealogie outside of it. Boccaccio calls attention to the relationship between invention and transcription in the Author’s Conclusion of the Decameron, where he defends himself from the potential accusations (‘tacite quistion’) that some of the stories could have been better by explaining that he is only their ‘scrittore’ (scribe), not their ‘inventore’ (inventor). Boccaccio’s adoption of the scribal pose represents not only an ironic celebration of his own creative ability, but also calls attention to his use of scribal devices in the Decameron. He makes this connection clear at the end of the same paragraph, when he claims that his stories ‘have written on their brows what they hold hidden within so that no one will be deceived’ (elle, per non ingannare alcuna persona tutte nella fronte portan segnato quello che esse dentro dal loro seno nascoso tengono).20 In other words, Boccaccio’s scribal pose is not only a rhetorical device but also an indication of the scribal strategies, like rubrics, that he integrates into his work. While the truth of his claim that those brief summaries of the stories’ plots help readers distinguish between those that may delight them and ignore those that might do them harm could be debated, his remark highlights the hermeneutic value of this scribal device.21 Calling attention to this inventive use of the scribal apparatus, Boccaccio thus collapses the distinction between ‘scrittore’ and ‘inventore’ that he had initially proposed by showing how inventive the act of writing, or transcription, can be.22 This connection between the ‘scrittore’ and the ‘inventore’ can also be seen in Boccaccio’s other works where he similarly attends to the meaning of

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Figure 6 Boccaccio’s transcription of Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega surrounded by Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary (Chigi l v 176, c. 29r). Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

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the material text.23 In the Teseida, for example, he writes glosses to his own text and leaves spaces for illustrations, although they were never executed.24 The visual diagrams in the Genealogie also integrate book format with literary form, since the genealogical trees not only illustrate the contents of each book but also give a material form to the work’s ambition to organize classical mythology ‘into the single body of a genealogy’ (in unum genealogie corpus; Gen. 1.Pref.40).25 Although earlier critics tended to emphasize Boccaccio’s carelessness as a scribe, the work of scholars like Vittore Branca, Pier Giorgio Ricci, Armando Petrucci, and Emanuele Casamassima laid the groundwork for a new understanding of Boccaccio’s manipulations of his material texts, whose complexities have been examined in the more recent studies of Patrizia Rafti, Stefano Zamponi, Francesca Malagnini, and Wayne Storey.26 These studies have shown that just as Boccaccio was a ceaseless innovator in literary form – as the author of Italian literature’s first prose romance (Filocolo), first martial epic (Teseida), first psychological novel (Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta), and first work in ottava rima (Filostrato), not to mention his extraordinary novella collection (Decameron) and his innovative scholarly works – he was also ‘an untiring experimenter not only with writing but with the structural syntax of the book and of mise-en-page’.27 In light of this history of experimentation with material texts, the format in which Boccaccio transmits Cavalcanti takes on a new significance. Boccaccio’s Cavalcanti is not just a lyric poet, as he is in other contemporary codices, like Chigi l viii 305 or Martelli 12, but, significantly and only in Boccaccio’s Chigi l v 176, a vernacular poet surrounded by a Latin commentary. As Furio Brugnolo observes, Boccaccio’s transcription of Cavalcanti is ‘the only vernacular – and rather properly lyric – poem of our Middle Ages to enjoy this particular presentation, typical of Bibles and legal books’.28 Since Boccaccio’s copy is unique, there is no way to know how his exemplar presented the text. The discrepancies between the text of the poem quoted in the commentary and that in the center of the page may indicate that Boccaccio is combining elements from two different sources, but it is impossible to be certain.29 What is clear is that Boccaccio’s transcription of Cavalcanti with Dino’s commentary is a particular application of a Latin scholastic model to a vernacular poem that has few precedents.30 Boccaccio’s decision to transmit the poem in this form is revealing because, by making the work look like a glossed text, he connects the Cavalcanti section with his copy of Dante’s Vita nuova with its

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marginalized divisioni. The layout of Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega reinforces Boccaccio’s arguments for the vernacular in Ytalie iam certus honos and the Vita di Dante by materially manifesting vernacular poetry’s lack of nudity. Just as Boccaccio’s transcription of the Vita nuova modifies Dante’s work by putting the divisioni in the margins like a gloss, Boccaccio transmits Cavalcanti’s canzone in a significant material format by surrounding it with commentary. In Chapter 2, I suggested that Boccaccio’s scribal strategy expands on Dante’s argument in Vita nuova 25, where Dante claims that vernacular poets should be able to explain their poems and aligns himself with Cavalcanti against those who ‘rhyme stupidly’: ‘E questo mio primo amico e io ne sapemo bene di quelli che cos´ı rimano stoltamente’ (And my first friend and I know well those who compose so stupidly).31 Dante will surpass Cavalcanti in the Vita nuova, as he will Virgil in the Commedia, but at least Cavalcanti knows the right way to write in the vernacular in contrast to those poets, like Guittone d’Arezzo, who is the probable target of Dante’s jab here, as he is of Cavalcanti’s sonnet, Da pi`u a uno face un sollegismo.32 Boccaccio’s decision to present marginal commentary to both Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega and Dante’s Vita nuova gives material form to the larger argument shared by Dante and Boccaccio that the work has some further meaning. Like the marginalization of the divisioni in the Vita nuova, Boccaccio’s layout of the Cavalcanti canzone with commentary shows him honoring poetry with the apparatus whose absence he laments in the Genealogie. Whereas civil and canon law, philosophy, medicine, sacred writings, indeed all of the liberal and technical arts have their own commentary traditions, ‘poetry alone is without such honor’ (Gen. 15.6; Osgood 117).33 Boccaccio’s claim about poetry’s lack of commentary, as I noted in Chapter 2, needs to be interpreted as part of the larger argument of the chapter, which argues that ‘the moderns cited as witnesses are eminent’ (‘Insignes viros esse quos ex novis inducit in testes’). By transcribing Cavalcanti’s canzone with gloss, Boccaccio presents another modern vernacular poet as an authority. Just as Dino’s commentary, as Alison Cornish observes, ‘intends less to render hard concepts comprehensible than to make an ambitious project in the vernacular acceptable to the Latin-reading world’, Boccaccio’s layout employs material means to makes the same claim of authority for the vernacular.34 Boccaccio may have had a choice of Cavalcanti commentaries. Villani mentions three, of which two survive. The other commentary, which used

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to be attributed to Fra Egidio (and is now attributed to pseudo-Egidio), is written in the vernacular and was transcribed by Nicol´o d´e Rossi in his personal notebook.35 In this commentary, the author is in a Dantean landscape (‘stando io in una selva obscura et andando per duro et aspro camino’) when he has a dream where he sees a woman who identifies herself as love explaining that although in the past she had sent two messengers, Solomon and Ovid (‘Io o` e mandato a dire al mondo due messaggi, cio`e Salamone e Ovidio Nasone’), she now needs a third who is not ‘love’s slave but a friend to it’ (‘non se’ dell’amor servo ma se’ amico’). Just as Boccaccio’s choice between two etymologies of poet (and poetry) and multiple epitaphs for Dante is significant, so too is the choice of Dino’s commentary. Instead of transcribing the vernacular visionary commentary of Egidio, Boccaccio selected the Latin, scholastic one of Dino.36 In his commentary, too, Dino emphasizes that Cavalcanti is no longer love’s victim, otherwise he would not be able to produce such a rational analysis of it. The significance of this choice lies less perhaps in specific details of the commentaries than in the contrast between a vision and the more scholastic analysis of Dino’s Latin text.37 Boccaccio had long been familiar with Dion’s commentary. He first explicitly mentions it in the 1340s, where he uses it as an example of commentary on a vernacular text in one of his own glosses to the Teseida, in a discussion of the Palace of Venus seen by Palamone. In the context of his description of Cupid (7.54) who is figured in the palace making arrows, he tells readers who want a description of love to read Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega along with the glosses on it by ‘Maestro Dino del Garbo’.38 While critics have noted that Dino’s commentary is ‘more indicated than exploited’ in this note, I would suggest that Boccaccio’s interest in Dino not only has to do with the content of his commentary but also the fact of it.39 By citing Dino’s commentary to Cavalcanti’s poem, Boccaccio aims to legitimize his own act of concealed self-commentary in the Teseida, where Boccaccio masks his role as self-commentator by speaking of the author in the third person.40 Whereas Dante uses self-commentary to gain authority for himself, Boccaccio takes the more indirect route of attempting to authorize himself through a putatively non-authorial commentator. This maneuver is typical of Boccaccio’s strategy of authorization throughout his career, from his use of Dante, Cavalcanti, and Cino in the Introduction to Day Four of the Decameron, to the Genealogie and the Chigi Codex itself. Jonathan Usher argues that Boccaccio is not interested in the ideas of the commentary, but his latter uses of it in the Genealogie and Esposizioni

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suggest that he is at least somewhat concerned with its contents as well as its form.41 Like the reference in the Teseida, which situates Dino’s ideas in the House of Venus, Boccaccio’s two explicit quotations of the commentary occur in similarly Venereal contexts: in the chapter De Cupidine (On Cupid) in the Genealogie and in the Esposizioni on Inferno 5. Whereas in the Teseida Boccaccio had cited Dino’s commentary but quoted none of its text, in both the Genealogie and the Esposizioni, Boccaccio quotes Dino at some length without mentioning him explicitly. Boccaccio’s quotation of Dino in his commentary on Inferno 5 is particularly revealing because he uses Dino to describe the idea of love that Dante rejects in Inferno 5. Boccaccio thus uses Cavalcanti’s commentator as a substitute for Cavalcanti, whose ideas about love are, as Teodolinda Barolini has shown, the object of Dante’s critique in the canto of Francesca.42 Boccaccio thus uses Dino both as an authority on love and as a substitute for Cavalcanti in the Teseida, Genealogie, and Esposizioni. He does not, however, tell any stories about Dino, as Petrarch does in the Rerum memorandum libri. Instead Boccaccio tells a story about Cavalcanti in the Decameron (6.9) that underlines how Cavalcanti’s sophistication required the kind of commentary that Dino had provided.

Boccaccio’s portrait of Cavalcanti in Decameron 6.9 Pound is not the only author to use Boccaccio’s Cavalcanti story as a kind of personal emblem to make a claim about literary history. While Pound uses Boccaccio’s tale to advance his own anti-Dantism, other modern critics, like Andr´e Jolles and Italo Calvino, have interpreted the story outside of its Dantean context, as an allegory of historical change. Jolles sees Boccaccio’s Cavalcanti as the representative of a new historical age of skepticism that he associates with the Renaissance.43 Calvino, on the other hand, views Cavalcanti as an emblem of the future. Calvino writes: ‘Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times – noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring – belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.’44 For Calvino, the leggerezza (lightness) of Cavalcanti’s leap suggests a way for us to escape the cemetery of modernity with its industrial detritus.45 Just as debates about the alteration of the codex diminish Boccaccio’s act of transcribing it in a particular form, these allegorical readings tend to erase

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Boccaccio’s role in composing and crafting the story. Indeed, Jolles insists that the story is true and therefore removes all agency from Boccaccio in its construction. Maria Corti likewise argues that the portrait of Cavalcanti as a disdainful intellectual reflects an historical reality, because similar portraits also appear in Dino Compagni, Filippo Villani, and Dante.46 This consensus about Cavalcanti’s personality occurs in very different contexts, however. By comparing Boccaccio’s tale with analogous stories, I highlight Boccaccio’s role in shaping a portrait of Cavalcanti that not only transforms the contemporary accounts of Dante and Dino Compagni, but also differs significantly from the strikingly similar story Petrarch tells about Dino del Garbo in his Rerum memorandum libri. I also add to this list of sources by calling attention to a Dante sonnet, Messer Brunetto, questa pulzelletta (xcix), which has not yet entered into the critical discourse on this story. These comparisons reveal how Boccaccio’s story of Cavalcanti in the Decameron complements and illuminates his transcription of Cavalcanti with commentary in the Chigi.47 Indeed, by reading the story as an allegory of some other cultural shift, Jolles and Calvino have been oddly faithful to Boccaccio, who encourages this model of allegorical interpretation by dramatizing it in the story.48 Put another way, Boccaccio constructs the story to underline the idea of allegorical interpretation to which modern critics have subjected it. Boccaccio’s story can not only be understood as an emblem of the Renaissance and the next millennium, but also as emblematic for Boccaccio’s own ideas about literature and allegorical interpretation. The way Bocccaccio’s story transforms Dante’s encounter with Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti in Inferno 10 has been noted by critics at least since Pound, but Boccaccio’s story also rewrites Dino Compagni’s account of Guido Cavalcanti’s attempt to kill Corso Donati in his Chronicle of Florence (1.20). According to Compagni’s account, Corso Donati tried to have Guido killed while Guido was on a pilgrimage to Santiago da Campostella. Cavalcanti attempts to take his revenge by pursuing Corso through the streets of Florence and intending to kill Corso with the help of the Cerchi, who he hopes to bring into the quarrel (‘credendosi esser segu`ıto da’ Cerchi, per farli trascorrere nella briga’). On horseback, Guido attacks Corso, but he is wounded instead by Corso’s allies.49 Boccaccio transforms several of these details in the Decameron (6.9). Instead of representing Cavalcanti as the faithful pilgrim implied by his pilgrimage to Santiago da Campostella, Boccaccio introduces the problem of Cavalcanti’s faith, since the ‘gente volgare’ (common crowd) think he does not believe in God. Moreover,

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instead of having Cavalcanti attack on horseback to incite a briga (quarrel), Boccaccio’s Cavalcanti is a philosophically distracted intellectual attacked by a brigata that is on horseback.50 These kinds of contrasts characterize the story’s relationship to other analogues as well. Critics have often noted the connection between Boccaccio’s story about Cavalcanti and Petrarch’s anecdote about Cavalcanti’s commentator, Dino del Garbo, in his Rerum memorandum libri (Rml). Whether Boccaccio knew Petrarch’s version of the story or was taking it from a common source, a comparison with the Petrarchan analogue evinces the concern with the figure of the poet and problems of interpretation that characterize Boccaccio’s version of the tale.51 As part of the modern section ‘On the jokes and witticisms of the well known’ (‘De facetiis ac salibus illustrium,’ Rml 2.60), Petrarch tells the story of ‘certain fellow citizen of mine Dino’ (‘Dinus quidam concivis meus’), usually identified as Dino del Garbo.52 He writes: A certain fellow citizen of mine, Dinus, who was a young man in our time of a pleasingly incisive wit, wandering by chance through the crowded places of tombs, discovered some old men who were known to him talking together. Since they were skilled at mocking, they provoked him (but they were all at the same time to be tricked – since that age is so talkative) and even began to apprehend him with their hands. He dragged himself away and responded to all of them in this way: ‘In this place, this contest is unfair: for you are more courageous in front of your homes’, alluding, namely, to their old age and their proximity to death. At first he was not understood, until having removed himself from their eyes, they looked around the cemetery and considered what he had called their homes. He said a number of things of this kind, which are generally known among us; so in this place I will not describe in detail his jokes, but related this to mention briefly his name.53

There are a number of correspondences between the stories, like the graveyard setting and the protagonist’s witticism, but there are also crucial differences that can be brought into focus by examining the characterizations of their main figures. Whereas Petrarch characterizes Dino as having a ‘pleasingly incisive wit’, Boccaccio describes Cavalcanti in a more elaborate manner. He writes: oltre a quello che egli fu un de’ migliori loici che avesse il mondo e ottimo filosofo naturale (delle quali cose poco la brigata curava), si fu egli leggiadrissimo e costumato e parlante uom molto e ogni cosa che far volle e a gentile uom pertenente seppe meglio che altro uom fare; e con questo era

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Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature ricchissimo, e a chiedere a lingua sapeva onorare cui nell’animo gli capeva che il valesse. (Dec. 6.9.8) besides being one of the best logicians in the world and an excellent natural philosopher (about which which the brigata cared little), he was graceful and courteous and well spoken and every thing that he wanted to do and pertained to a gentleman he knew how to do better than anyone else; and beyond that, he was very rich and knew how to honor (as fully as speech allows) anyone that he thought deserved it.

In this characterization of Cavalcanti, Boccaccio establishes the basic tensions of the novella: whereas Betto’s brigata does not care about Guido’s philosophical speculations, Guido knows how to honor those he deems worthy. The novella’s drama comes from the encounter between these two positions in the cemetery. The brigata mocks Guido’s speculations by repeating the idea that Guido was trying to discover that God did not exist, which the narrator attributes to the ‘gente volgare’ (common crowd).54 They shout: ‘Guido, tu rifiuti d’esser di nostra brigata; ma ecco, quando tu avrai trovato che Idio non sia, che avrai fatto?’ (Guido, you refuse to be part of our brigata, but when you have found that God doesn’t exist, what will you have done?). Guido, for his part, demonstrates that he knows how ‘to honor those he deems worthy’ (sapeva onorare cui nell’animo gli capeva che il valesse) by dishonoring them with a kind of riddle – ‘Sirs, you can say to me whatever you like in your house’ (Signori, voi mi potete dire a casa vostra ci`o che vi piace) – before jumping over a tomb to extricate himself from them.55 Whereas in Petrarch’s story, the narrator immediately explains Dino’s remark (‘In this place, this contest is unfair: for you are more courageous in front of your homes’) as ‘alluding, namely, to their old age and their proximity to death’, Boccaccio dramatizes the difficulty of interpretation. The brigata begins to think that Guido was ‘out of his mind’ (‘smemorato’) and that his response meant nothing (‘non veniva a dir nulla’), since, they reason, the cemetery is everyone’s, including Guido’s.56 These members of the brigata thus refuse the distinction between themselves and Guido that Guido’s remark attempts to establish. The brigata interprets Guido’s comment literally, in keeping with the interpretation from Petrarch’s story, where the allusion to the cemetery as home is literal because Dino’s interlocutors are old men who are approaching death. For Boccaccio, on the other hand, the joke is not one about old age. Instead, he uses the riddle to call attention to the process of interpretation that reveals that the death is spiritual, which expresses a distinction

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between a philosophical or literary way of life and an unphilosophical one. Betto Brunelleschi, the leader of the brigata, explains to the others that they have not understood Guido’s point: ‘You are the ones who are out of your minds (sememorati), if you haven’t understood it.’ As in the immediately preceding story of Cesca (Dec. 6.8), Boccaccio uses an uncomprehending audience to highlight the importance of interpretation.57 Betto explains that far from meaning nothing, ‘egli ci ha detta onestamente in poche parole la maggior villania del mondo, per ci`o che, se voi riguarderete bene, queste arche sono le case de’ morti, per ci`o che in esse si pongono e dimorano i morti; le quali egli dice che sono nostra casa, a dimostrarci che noi e gli altri uomini idioti e non litterati siamo, a comparazion di lui e degli altri uomini scienziati, peggio che uomini morti, e per ci`o, qui essendo, noi siamo a casa nostra’ (he has honestly and in few words told us the most insulting thing in the world, since, if you look well, these tombs are the houses of the dead, since in them the dead are placed and reside; he says are these are our houses to show us that we and the other idiots and non-literates are, in comparison to him and other educated men, worse than dead men, and thus, being here we are at home). Betto thus makes the interpretive move from literal to spiritual death that emblematizes the differences between the tales of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Betto’s distinction would seem to fit in quite well with Stephen Greenblatt’s examination of the history of the term ‘literature’, which finds in Boccaccio’s story ‘a revealing gloss’ on the idea of literature as what separates the literary man from others, who are simply idiots.58 Boccaccio’s story does not simply reflect a certain view of the literary figure, however; it produces it. Greenblatt uses the story as exemplary of distinction between literate (litteratus) and illiterate (illiteratus) that usually aligns learned literacy with Latinity, but it is crucial that Cavalcanti is not a Latin poet but a vernacular one. In other words, Boccaccio’s Cavalcanti expands this idea about the difference between literate and illiterate to encompass vernacular composition as well. Cavalcanti thus becomes Boccaccio’s mouthpiece for a vindication of the pursuit of literature.59 Branca notes that the Greek maxim that Boccaccio writes in the autograph of his Buccolicum carmen (Riccardian 1032) could serve a slogan for this story: ‘Antropos agramatos fyton acarpon’, that is, ‘the illiterate man is a plant without fruit’. This phrase, Branca observes, seems to echo Dante’s ‘Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi’ (these wretched ones who never were alive; Inf. 3.64). This intriguing parallel also highlights the distance between the two ideas: for Dante, death in life is the failure to

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make ethical choices, the ‘gran rifiuto’ that would make his journey and poem meaningless, while, for Boccaccio, death in life is to be content with ignorance.60 Boccaccio’s choice of Betto as the only member of the brigata who understands Cavalcanti is interesting because it seems to rewrite a poem that has not been much discussed in this context, Dante’s Messer Brunetto, questa pulzelletta (Rime xcix). The relationship between the story and the poem has only been mentioned in passing, but it deserves further attention for its formative influence on Boccaccio’s story.61 If Boccaccio’s emphasis on the difficulty of interpretation distinguishes his story from its Petrarchan analogue, Dante’s sonnet joins the theme of difficult interpretation with the figure of Brunetto (Betto) Brunelleschi, to whom Dante addresses the poem, according to the rubrics in manuscripts.62 Dante writes: Messer Brunetto, questa pulzelletta con esso voi si ven la pasqua a fare: non intendete pasqua di mangiare, ch’ella non mangia, anzi vuol esser letta. La sua sentenzia non richiede fretta, n´e luogo di romor n´e da giullare; anzi si vuol pi`u volte lusingare prima che ‘n intelletto altrui si metta. Se voi non la intendete in questa guisa, in vostra gente ha molti frati Alberti da intender ci`o ch’`e posto loro in mano. Con lor vi restringete sanza risa; e se li altri de’ dubbi non son certi, ricorrete a la fine a messer Giano. Messer Brunetto, this young girl comes to keep Easter with you; not, you understand, an eating Easter, for she doesn’t eat, she is meant to be read. Her meaning doesn’t call for hasty reading, or a place that’s noisy, or where players perform; in fact she’ll require to be coaxed more than once before she’ll enter a man’s understanding. And if you don’t understand her in this way, there are many brother Alberts in your company to understand whatever’s put into their hands. Get together with them, but without laughing; and if none of them are clear about the difficult bits, in the last resort go and ask Messer Giano.63

The opening clarification of the allusion to ‘pasqua’ as an intellectual instead of gastronomic one (‘pasqua di mangiare’) dramatizes Betto’s stupidity and encapsulates problems of ‘understanding’ (intendere in vv. 3, 8, 9, 12) that Dante emphasizes throughout the poem. (This contrast between

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the gastronomic and intellectual may also inform the opposition between the banqueting of Betto’s brigata and Guido’s intellectual pursuits in Boccaccio’s story.) Whereas Dante suggests that Betto will need to call on others to interpret it for him, whether ‘frati Alberti’ or even a ‘messer Giano’, Boccaccio makes Betto himself into an able interpreter.64 Just as Boccaccio transforms Dante’s portrait of Cavalcanti in Inferno 10, he also changes Dante’s portrayal of Betto Brunelleschi: Boccaccio’s Guido jumps over the tomb that confines his father (and implicitly himself ) in Inferno 10, while Boccaccio’s Betto shows intelligence in contrast to Dante’s claim about his stupidity. Boccaccio thus makes Betto function as a commentator, who, as Francesco Bruni puts it, offers his own ‘glossa al testo dell’auctor’ (gloss to the text of the auctor).65 Boccaccio’s Betto thus takes on the function that Dino has in the Chigi itself, as Cavalcanti’s commentator and glossator. When in the passage from Sacre famis (Ep. 4) that serves as an epigram to this chapter, Boccaccio writes that ‘without a master or glosses I cannot achieve adequate understanding’, he identifies the terrain of connection between the philological and imaginative representations of Cavalcanti that makes the vernacular poet an auctoritas. In Decameron 6.9, Boccaccio makes Betto into the magister who explains the significance of Guido’s remark, while in the transcription of Cavalcanti’s canzone in the Chigi, he represents the vernacular poet surrounded by Latin gloss. By both telling stories and producing texts in a particular format, Boccaccio aims to authorize Cavalcanti as he had Dante. Dante’s engagement with Cavalcanti and the commentaries that greeted his poem certainly suggest that he was an authority even before Boccaccio’s intervention, but Boccaccio also uses Cavalcanti for his own purposes, recruiting him into a larger cultural project. Reconnecting Boccaccio’s narrative about Cavalcanti with his philological labors demonstrates how Boccaccio constructs Cavalcanti as an authority, who, like Dante and Petrarch, has a key role in Boccaccio’s reflections on the poetry. Betto’s basic insight is the story’s hermeneutic message: there is a deeper meaning to poets’ fables. This simple claim to meaning is a central element of Boccaccio’s defense of poetry, reinforcing and reflecting the arguments for poetry in Ytalie iam certus honos, the Vita di Dante and the Genealogie.66 By showing that Cavalcanti’s words did not mean ‘nothing’ (nulla), Betto confirms Boccaccio’s argument in the Genealogie that ‘it is stupid to believe that the poets convey nothing under the outer covering of their fables’ (14.10). This connection to the Genealogie is a crucial one, because it is in this chapter of the Genealogie that Boccaccio cites a significant group of

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poets, whose works contain hidden truths: Virgil (for his Bucolics, Georgics, and Aeneid), Dante (for the Purgatorio), Petrarch (Buccolica), and Boccaccio himself (Eclogues). If the novella of Guido Cavalcanti is the narrative form of the argument in Genealogie 14.10, then Boccaccio’s Cavalcanti belongs in the company of the chapter’s other poets, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio himself – all of whom communicate hidden truths in their fictions. The addition of Cavalcanti to Boccaccio’s catalogue in Genealogie 14.10 constitutes the same group of modern poets to whom he is joined in the Chigi and Vasari’s painting, where Cavalcanti intriguingly points to a passage of Virgil that seems to require gloss. In the final paragraph of the same chapter of the Genealogie, Boccaccio expands further on his claim for poetry. One might expect such truth from such great men, he notes, but there was never a maundering old woman, sitting with others late of a winter’s night at the home fireside, making up tales of Hell, the fates, witches, and the like – much of it pure invention – that she did not feel beneath the surface of her tale, as far as her limited mind allowed, at least some meaning – sometimes ridiculous no doubt – with which she tries to scare the little ones, or divert the young ladies, or amuse the old, or at least show the power of fortune. (14.10; Osgood 54)

Boccaccio uses the scene of an unlearned person making up stories about the otherworld to defend the hidden truth content of almost all stories, including what amount to old wives’ tales.67 Like Cavalcanti’s ‘pronta risposta’, the tales that are told around the campfire significantly conceal hidden meanings.

Cavalcanti, Giotto, and the History of Disciplines In his commentary on Dante’s Commedia, Benvenuto da Imola translates Boccaccio’s novella into Latin as evidence of Cavalcanti’s intelligence and eloquence not, as one might expect, to gloss Inferno 10, where Cavalcanti’s ‘altezza d’ingegno’ is mentioned, but for the artistic histories of Purgatorio 11, where Oderisi da Gubbio declares: Credette Cimabue ne la pittura tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido, s`ı che la fama di colui e` scura. Cos`ı ha tolto l’uno a l’altro Guido la gloria de la lingua; e forse e` nato chi l’uno e l’altro caccer`a del nido.

(Purg. 11.94–99)

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In painting Cimabue believed he held the field and now Giotto has the acclaim, so the other’s fame is obscured. Thus has one Guido taken the glory of our tongue from the other Guido, and perhaps one is born who will chase the one and the other from the nest.

By translating Boccaccio’s story to gloss this passage, Benvenuto links Boccaccio’s story of Cavalcanti to Giotto, who has his own story in the Day (Dec. 6.5). Benvenuto thus implies what Albert Ascoli has recently proposed, namely that Boccaccio must have had Dante’s association of these two figures in mind when he constructed Day 6.68 Just as Dante had suggested a parallel between painting and poetry, Boccaccio implies a parallel between Giotto’s art and Guido’s, but Boccaccio’s praise of Giotto goes well beyond what one finds in Dante.69 Whereas Dante has Oderisi enlist the parallel couples of painters (Cimabue and Giotto) and poets (Guinizelli and Cavalcanti) to anticipate his own future appearance and glory, Boccaccio aims to describe Giotto’s novelty. Having praised Giotto’s realism, Boccaccio continues: E per ci`o, avendo egli quella arte ritornata in luce, che molti secoli sotto gli error d’alcuni, che pi´u a dilettar gli occhi degl’ignoranti che a compiacere allo ’ntelletto de’ savi dipignendo, era stata sepulta, meritamente una delle luci della fiorentina gloria dir si puote. (Dec. 6.5.6) Since it was he who brought back into the light that art, which had been buried for many centuries under the error of some, who had painted more to delight the eyes of the ignorant than to please the intellects of the wise, he can appropriately be called one of the lights of Florentine glory.

Boccaccio’s praise of Giotto’s ability to appeal to the intellect (‘a compiacere allo ’ntelletto de’ savi dipignendo’) thus puts him in the company of Boccaccio’s modern poets, whose works are also characterized by their sophisticated content, not just rhetorical style, as Boccaccio had argued in the Genealogie (14.7). Boccaccio’s story about Giotto, furthermore, dramatizes the argument of Genealogie 14.7 in its concerns with the discrepancy between appearance and reality in the persons of Giotto and Forese, whose talents would not be visible to those who saw only their surface. Giotto may be the master of painterly illusion that makes the verisimilar seem vero (‘molte volte nelle cose da lui fatte si truova che il visivo senso degli uomini vi prese errore, quello credendo esser vero che era dipinto’), but on this journey his talent is concealed within a filthy exterior produced by a summer storm.70 In this way, Giotto embodies the complexity of his own paintings. Boccaccio’s decision to bring this contrast into focus by comparing two leading figures in different disciplines – Giotto in art and Forese in law – is no accident. It not only recalls Dante’s double treatment

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of poetry and painting in Purgatorio 11 but also Boccaccio’s lament in his Genealogie (15.6) that poetry lacked the scholarly apparatus that canon law had and puts the two disciplines on the same plane. Giorgio Vasari will later codify Boccaccio’s claim about Giotto’s foundational role in the emergence of a new kind of painting, but he omits Boccaccio’s emphasis on the intellectual content of Giotto’s art.71 Vasari’s exclusion of this idea is not particularly surprising since Boccaccio’s emphasis on it seems motivated primarily by his effort to use Giotto and painting more generally to illuminate poetry. And in the Decameron, the figure of the poet is Cavalcanti, who is one of the only figures to appear in both the frame and a story. The coordination of these two moments in the Decameron confirms the broader arguments of the Chigi: to show that vernacular love poets can also be authorities. Boccaccio’s portrait of Cavalcanti thus complements his biographical stories about Dante and Petrarch, where he confronts the same issues of love and authority. Boccaccio’s combination of Cavalcanti’s canzone with its Latin commentary in the Chigi materializes his broader arguments about vernacular poetry being worthy of gloss, and puts into philological form the need for commentary that he dramatizes in Decameron 6.9. Whether or not he is the one responsible for literally having them legati con amore in un volume, he certainly associates them by telling tales about them and mediating their works in significant material forms to promote not only the poets themselves but also the authority of the vernacular itself.

ep ilog ue

The allegory of the vernacular Boccaccio’s Esposizioni and Petrarch’s Griselda

The Chigi is now in the Vatican library, whose courtyard is overseen by an unassuming statue of St. Joseph holding the infant Jesus with an inscription that describes Joseph as the library’s ‘custodian and caretaker’.1 This surprising distinction suggests an intriguing analogy between Joseph’s role as foster father for the Incarnate Word and the library’s task of preserving incarnations of words on papyrus, parchment, and paper: both care for the creations of others as if they were their own.2 This celebration of the role of the caretaker furnishes a remarkably appropriate context for Boccaccio’s labors in the Chigi and frames one of the key questions of this study. While Joseph had to accept his humble role as surrogate parent (for which he was traditionally mocked), what motivated the author of the Decameron to devote months of labor to transcribing other people’s poetry? The involvement of an author like Petrarch, Machaut, Pope, Blake, or Mallarm´e in the execution of his own work is not surprising, but why did Boccaccio copy the works of others?3 In the Introduction I suggested that Boccaccio’s effort to authorize others is part of an attempt to authorize his own works. It is significant in this respect that after transcribing the Cavalcanti section of the manuscript, Boccaccio begins to write the final redaction of the Decameron in Hamiltion 90. By creating a collection of Dante’s life and works with an editorial apparatus; arguing for the vernacular through argument and narratives; binding Petrarch’s lyrics to Dante; and using the layout of Dino’s commentary to promote the portrait of Cavalcanti as learned poet that he crafts in the Decameron, Boccaccio creates a space for his own vernacular works. The material manuscript thus functions as an ideal complement to the arguments for vernacular literature that he develops in Ytalie iam certus honos, the Vita di Dante, and the contemporaneous Genealogie. Two events near the end of Boccaccio’s life could have given Boccaccio hope that he had practically accomplished his larger task of vindicating this new vernacular tradition: he was invited to deliver public lectures on 113

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Dante in Florence, and he learned that Petrarch had translated his story of Griselda into Latin. Although both events would have to be considered ambiguous successes, they also contained promising hints about the future of the vernacular and of Boccaccio’s own works. Boccaccio’s lectures brought Dante back within the walls of the city from which he had been exiled, but they also damaged Boccaccio’s health.4 In several sonnets, he laments the illness that beset him as punishment for having ‘vilely brought down the Muses into the brothel [fornice] of the vulgar crowd and foolishly laid bare their hidden parts to the common dregs’ (S’io ho le Muse vilmente prostrate / nella fornice del vulgo dolente, / e le lor parte occulte ho palesate / alla feccia plebeia scioccamente; Rime cxxii.1–4).5 In the Author’s Conclusion of the Decameron, Boccaccio had declared ‘son io s´ı lieve che io sto a galla nell’acqua’ (I am so light that I float on the water; Dec. Concl. 23), but by the time of the Dante lectures, Boccaccio no longer presents himself as the ‘light’ (lieve) go-between (Galeotto) of the Decameron, but as a wounded pimp, who is ‘a sack full of heavy lead’ (di piombo grave). Although these sonnets are usually read as a record of Boccaccio’s failure, Boccaccio’s disillusionment with being an interpreter also confirms the nature of his project: his desire to be a pilota that guides the vulgo through the learned production in the vernacular. In other words, even as they lament the illness that followed Boccaccio’s labors as commentator they also reveal that Boccaccio saw himself as the mediator of the tradition. One of his last writings testifies to the significance Boccaccio gives to this act of commenting on a vernacular text. Contrasting Petrarch’s fame with Dante’s in his Esposizioni on Inferno 15, Boccaccio writes that while Petrarch had achieved fame through Latin, Dante has only ‘begun to be sought out and held dear by the greatest scholars’, because ‘the light of his genius was hidden under the fog of the maternal vernacular’ (per alquanto tempo stata nascosa sotto la caligine del volgar materno) (Esp. 15.lit.97). The vernacular itself thus becomes a covering that conceals Dante’s real value from those who believe that such learning can only be accomplished in Latin. Dante’s use of the vernacular thus contributes a further layer of allegory, because the vernacular linguistic surface conceals the fact that his vernacular text contains hidden meanings. The popular, vulgar quality of the vernacular becomes an allegory of allegory.6 With this idea Boccaccio goes beyond his inclusion of the vernacular in the definition of poetry in the Genealogie (14.7). It is not only that vernacular works share the feature of using figurative language to conceal hidden truths that one finds in Scripture, but also that they

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add another layer of allegorical difficulty, because they only seem to be naked. While Boccaccio worries about having exposed Dante’s meanings too nakedly in his lectures, Petrarch’s translation attempts to achieve the opposite task: to re-clothe Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda in Latin.7 Petrarch’s translation may seem like a legitimation not just of the vernacular but even of the vernacular prose that Petrarch had not even recognized as a potential genre or style in the introductory letter to his Familiares (1.1). Petrarch’s translation of Boccaccio’s story is, however, similarly problematic. Should the translation be interpreted as an acknowledgment of what the vernacular can achieve, or is it an indication that the vernacular must be translated into Latin in order to be considered worthwhile? In the decades that followed, the second interpretation would probably have prevailed, as Latin humanist culture overshadowed the vernacular in the ‘secolo senza poesia’, but Boccaccio might well have read it as a vindication.8 After all, even though Petrarch denigrates the vernacular from which he translates in the prefatory letter (Sen. 17.2), his Latin translation of Boccaccio’s story proves Boccaccio’s argument about the vernacular’s allegorical potential (Gen. 14.10).9 That Petrarch chooses to place this letter (or collection of letters since he emphasizes that he has put them in a particular order) at the end of the Seniles is itself significant. Whereas Petrarch had ended the Familiares with a book of prose and verse letters to ancient authors, he concludes the Seniles with a double rewriting of Boccaccio: not only translating Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda, but also revising Boccaccio’s De Vita in the Letter to Posterity that was to be the final letter of the Seniles (18.1).10 In the shift from the concern with the classical past at the end of the Familiares to the interest in the future that occupies the conclusion of the Seniles, Petrarch moves from writing to classical authors, such as Cicero, Seneca, Varro, Quintilian, Livy, Horace, Virgil, and Homer, to rewriting Boccaccio. ‘Whatever the vocation of others’, Boccaccio writes in the Genealogie, ‘mine, as experience from my mother’s womb has shown, is clearly the study of poetry. For this, I believe, I was born’.11 Boccaccio makes this dedication to poetry the defining feature of his life, from his mother’s womb to the autoepitaph he crafted for his grave: Studium fuit alma poesis (sweet poetry was his pursuit).12 In the Genealogie, Boccaccio explains that his passion for poetry prevented him from succeeding in either business or canon law: ‘In both cases I so tired of the work that neither my teacher’s admonition, nor my father’s authority, who kept torturing me with ever renewed orders, nor the pleas and importunities of my friends, could make me yield, so

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great was my passion for poetry. It was not finally a sudden change of plan that sent me headlong into this pursuit, but rather a disposition of long standing.’ Boccaccio’s resistance to social pressures described with a sequence of negations recalls Dante’s characterization of Ulysses (‘n´e dolcezza di figlio, n´e la pieta / del vecchio padre, n´e ‘l debito amore’; Inf. 26.94–95), but Boccaccio’s pursuit does not take him beyond the bounds of the human to the ‘mondo sanza gente’ (Inf. 26.117).13 Instead, he justifies his passion for poetry by situating it among the diversity of human inclinations and occupations: ‘Then let those who allow the cobbler his awl and bristles, the wool-raiser his flock, the sculptor his statues, in all patience give me leave to cultivate the poets.’14 This appeal to a variety of human dispositions in defense of poetry is a frequent theme in Boccaccio’s works, and its plea for accommodation instead of exclusion characterizes his openness toward other poets as well.15 Chigi l v 176 captures these multiple facets of Boccaccio’s devotion to poetry, mediating the works of others not only to authorize himself but also the vernacular tradition as a whole.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. The frequent appearance of Giorgio Vasari’s Six Tuscan Poets (1544) on the covers of books about Italian literature suggests that it continues not only to be recognizable, but also to be relevant as a kind of canonical image of the canon nearly half a millennium after its execution. Some recent titles that use the image on their covers include Ardizzone, ed., Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori; Stewart and Cornish, eds., Sparks and Seeds; Baranski and McLaughlin, eds., Italy’s Three Crowns; Baranski and McLaughlin, eds., Dante the Lyric and Ethical Poet; and Crouzet-Pavan, Rinascimenti italiani. The painting also serves as the frontispiece to Kirkham and Maggi, eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide.Whereas earlier representations of these poets, such as Andrea del Castagno’s frescoes of Uomini famosi (1448–51), situate each author in his own frame with a totemic volume in his hands, Vasari portrays the tradition as a conversation happening around books. For a discussion of the tradition of cycles of famous men and women, see Donato, ‘Famosi Cives’. Vasari’s painting was commissioned by Luca Martini, a member of the Florentine Academy that aimed to restore Dante’s place in the linguistic-literary canon established by Bembo through a celebration of his accomplishments as ‘sapientissimo filosofo, divinissimo teologo e dottissimo poeta’, in the words of Giovan Battista Gelli (Caesar, ed., Dante, 261), which echo the claims of Boccaccio and, even earlier, Giovanni del Virgilio. Six Tuscan Poets is, then, part of its own cultural debate, the so-called questione della lingua. 2. The verse ‘a cui ebbe a disdegno’ (Inf. 10.63) has been controversial among modern critics, who have debated whether the cui refers to Virgil, Beatrice, or God, but medieval and early modern commentators take it as referring to Virgil, as Cristoforo Landino does in his 1481 commentary, which both Vasari and his patron Luca Martini would have known. The tensions between Dante and Cavalcanti suggested by Inf. 10 are already articulated by Dante in the earliest chapters of the Vita Nuova. 3. Petrarch calls attention to the significance of his own marginalia as signs of his privileged relationship to the past: ‘With what youthful zeal I plucked from them for several years before becoming familiar with other kinds of writers may be seen in my surviving works from that period, and especially in my marginal 117

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notations on certain passages whereby I would conjure up and precociously reflect upon my present and future state’ (Fam. 24.1; Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, 3: 309). For examples of Petrarch’s manicula with other references, see Fiorilla, Marginalia figurati nei codici di Petrarca, 26–27, esp. 26 n. 7. For more on the significance of Petrarch’s note-taking (and his reflections on this activity in the Secretum) for their influence on later humanists, see Schiffman, The Birth of the Past. Petrarch offers extensive commentaries on the Aeneid at the end of the second book of the Secretum and Sen. 4.5, which provides a moral interpretation of the whole poem. For discussions of his interpretive methods, see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 163–69, and Fenzi, ‘L’ermeneutica petrarchesca’. For the larger context of Petrarch portraits, see Trapp, ‘Petrarch Illustrated’ and Macola, ‘I ritratti col Petrarca’. 4. Disappointment with Petrarch’s Africa began almost immediately after the unauthorized circulation of Mago’s lament, which attracted critical responses, according to Petrarch’s own letter to Boccaccio (Sen. 2.1). For the rise in the fame of Petrarch’s vernacular works and an analysis of how Petrarch was both authorized in Renaissance commentaries and adapted by poets in different linguistic contexts to construct their own literary communities, see Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch and The Site of Petrarchism. 5. Boccaccio’s figure in this image is even misidentified in the detail printed in Branca, Giovanni Boccaccio: Profilo biografico, facing page 119. Although the responsibility for the ‘corredo iconografico’ is not Branca’s, the confusion is revealing, since it would be difficult to imagine a similar confusion over Dante. For a literary historical analysis of Vasari’s image as part of an attempt to recover the oldest iconography of Boccaccio, see Kirkham, ‘L’immagine del Boccaccio’, 85–89. 6. Throughout this book, I follow the titles that Boccaccio uses for these works in the Chigi, which in many cases differ from the more common modern names and the names Boccaccio himself uses in other contexts. For example, in the Chigi Boccaccio calls his biography of Dante the Vita di Dante, not the Trattatello in laude di Dante, a phrase he employs to refer to the work in the later Esposizioni (Accessus 36), although it is not clear that he intends Trattatello to be a title. Boccaccio’s name for Dante’s libello in the Chigi is Vita nuova, not Vita nova, which he had used in the earlier transcription in what is now Toledo 104.6. In his edition, Gorni advocates for Vita Nova as the work’s correct Latin title with the consequent capitalization of both words, but ‘vita nova’ could also be vernacular on the strength of Purg. 30.115, as suggested by Baranski ‘The Roots of Dante’s Plurilingualism’, 114. The choice of Vita nova or Vita nuova in Boccaccio’s and other early copies, however, seems to rely on the language of the incipit or explicit instead of any essential feature of the work itself. In another Trecento manuscript, Magliabechiano vi.143, not written by Boccaccio, one finds both: ‘Incipit il libro della nuova vita di’ and ‘Explicit liber nove vite’. Similar variations characterize the incipit of Cavalcanti’s canzone, which Boccaccio records as Donna mi prega, not the Donna me prega found in most modern editions. The rubric for Petrarch’s collection of lyrics gives the title Fragmentorum liber, instead of the Rerum

Notes to pages 2–3

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8.

9.

10.

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vulgarium fragmenta that Petrarch uses in his later holograph manuscript (Vat. lat. 3195), which has itself been largely replaced by the moniker Canzoniere, which was first used in Francesco Griffo’s 1516 edition. In the case of the Fragmentorum liber, the different title does correspond to the diverse contents of the collection. The identification of the figures as Cristoforo Landino (at the extreme left) and Marsilio Ficino is now widely accepted, because they match the portraits Vasari himself identifies as Landino and Ficino in Domenico Ghirlandadio’s 1485 fresco in the Tornabuoni Chapel of Santa Maria Novella. An engraving of the painting published by Hieronymus Cock that is now in the British Library provides labels, however, that identify the figures as Poliziano and Ficino. The precise identifications are less important than the fact that they clearly represent a falling away, rather than a culmination. In Vasari’s own verbal description of the painting, moreover, the figures are identified as Cino da Pistoia and Guittone d’Arezzo. Even if one follows Vasari’s identifications, however, the image would still not accord with Vasari’s three-stage model of cultural history, since Dante would be a member of the second generation, instead of the first. For a precise consideration of these identifications as Landino and Ficino, see Bowron, ‘Giorgio Vasari’s Portrait’. For further discussion of the image, see Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, 290–91, and Nelson, ‘Giorgio Vasari, Sei Poeti Toscani’. For a reading of the painting as if the figures were Guittone and Cino, see Parker, ‘Vasari’s Portrait’. See Vasari, Le Vite, 1: 209. In Vasari’s formulation, there is no decline, as noted by Panofsky, ‘The First Page of Giorgio Vasari’s Libro’, 218. Gombrich, ‘Vasari’s Lives’ proposes that the idea of a common historical model for the arts derives from Cicero’s Brutus, but the idea would also have been familiar to Vasari from Dante (Purg. 11) and Boccaccio (Dec. Conclusione). By comparison, English studies, for example, has been particularly concerned with the dynamics of the emergence of a vernacular literary tradition, perhaps because its foundations are less clear than those of the Italian tradition. See Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature; Kastan, ‘Humphrey Moseley’; and Butterfield, ‘National Histories’. For a broader, Bourdieu-inspired approach, see Guillory, Cultural Capital. Also see the valuable anthology of primary texts in Wogan-Browne et al., eds., The Idea of the Vernacular, as well as the interpretive essays in Somerset and Watson, eds., The Vulgar Tongue. For a discussion of these problems in the French tradition, see CerquigliniToulet, A New History of Medieval French Literature. It is worth noting that a 1544 painting of English literature would not have represented Shakespeare. Whereas the foundational works of English and French literature emerge in print, the codification of Italian that occurs in the Cinquecento involves the printing of works that were born in manuscript, so, even more than other traditions, the beginnings of Italian literature need to be sought in manuscript culture. For the distinction between beginnings and origins, see Said, Beginnings. The critique of these national philological enterprises has been a frequent theme of recent medieval work.

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Notes to page 3

11. At least since Contini, Montale has been seen as representative of Dante’s ‘plurilinguismo’ and Ungaretti of Petrarch’s ‘monolinguismo’. See Contini, Varianti e altra linguistica, 169–92. For the application of these ideas to modern poets, see Noferi, Le poetiche critiche novecentesche and Cortellessa, ed., Un’altra storia. For some qualifications to Contini’s view, see Gardini, Breve storia della poesia occidentale. 12. Pasolini, Decameron; Busi, Decamerone da un italiano all’altro; Fo, Il Boccaccio riveduto e scorretto. Dante too has attracted a following among avant-gardes of the twentieth century; see for example, Mandelstam, ‘Conversation about Dante’. 13. Pound’s essay originally appeared in Pound, ed., Guido Cavalcanti Rime and was republished as ‘Cavalcanti’; Calvino, ‘Lightness’. The earliest use of the term the ‘tre corone’ to refer to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio occurs in the Paradiso degli Alberti (1435), but the text seems to have been largely unknown until the nineteenth century. See Gorni, ‘Storia della lingua’, 27–30. Petrarch’s discussion of the relative ranks of Dante, himself, and Boccaccio in Sen. 5.2 may be the earliest example. A slightly later witness to the idea, if not the name, is Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Istrum, from the first decade of the Quattrocento, where Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are clearly considered as a group. Bruni’s later Vite di Dante e Petrarca with its Notizia del Boccaccio confirms the consistency of this grouping and establishes the model of the parallel lives of Dante and Petrarch, to the exclusion of Boccaccio, that will continue through Foscolo’s Parallel between Dante and Petrarch to the current day. 14. Whereas Francesco Bruni claims in Boccaccio: L’invenzione della letteratura mezzana that Boccaccio crafts a new literary register, that is between high and low, this study is interested in how he authorizes or legitimizes it. Bruni’s claim that Boccaccio creates a ‘letteratura mezzana’ or middle register could also be understood as another way of recognizing Boccaccio’s efforts to make vernacular literature high. 15. Boccaccio’s role in shaping the responses to these authors through both philological and narrative forms has been a common but not connected theme of recent studies of the reception of Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti by Simon Gilson, William Kennedy, and Zygmunt Baranski, respectively. On the vast topic of Dante’s reception and canonization, there are numerous resources, from old but remarkably valuable anthologies, like Zenatti, Dante e Firenze and Del Balzo, ed., Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri, to the recent comprehensive selection of sources in English translation in Caesar, ed., Dante. Some fundamental studies of Dante’s reception are Barbi, Dante nel Cinquecento and Della fortuna di Dante; Dionisotti, ‘Dante nel Quattrocento’; Dionisotti, ‘Dante nel Rinascimento (1965)’; Dionisotti, ‘Varia fortuna di Dante’; Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2: 819–911; Parker, Commentary and Ideology; Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence. On Petrarch, see Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch and The Site of Petrarchism, as well as Forster, The Icy Fire; Quondam, Petrarchismo

Notes to pages 3–4

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

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mediato; Braden, Petrarchan Love; Chines, ed., Il petrarchismo. For Cavalcanti, see Baranski, ‘Guido Cavalcanti and his First Readers’; ‘Per similitudine di abito scientifico’; ‘Alquanto tenea della oppinione degli Epicuri’; ‘Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti’. See Bruni, Le vite di Dante; Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 373–74; and Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, 57–58. See Baranski, ‘Alquanto tenea della oppinione degli Epicuri’. Angelo Poliziano uses Boccaccio’s version of the Vita di Dante in the Chigi as the first work of the Raccolta Aragonese and adapts many of its images and ideas in his own introductory epistle. On the Raccolta and its contents, see Barbi, ‘La Raccolta Aragonese’; De Robertis, ‘La Raccolta Aragonese’ and ‘Lorenzo aragonese’; Macciocca, ‘Il Palatino 204’. Poliziano also cites Boccaccio’s Ytalie iam certus honos in his Nutricia (v. 727). In his letter on Landino’s commentary, Ficino writes from the perspective of the persona of Florence to celebrate the commentary as the fulfillment not only of Dante’s dream of being crowned with the laurel (Par. 25) but also of Boccaccio’s efforts in his Vita di Dante to persuade the city to honor its exiled poet. Throughout his commentary, Landino draws on Boccaccio’s Esposizioni, as later commentators, like Vellutello (1544), complain; see Solerti, Le Vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio, 202–03; Procaccioli, Filologia ed esegesi dantesca nel Quattrocento; and Gilson, ‘Notes on the Presence of Boccaccio in Cristoforo Landino’s Comento sopra la Comedia di Danthe Alighieri’. On Bembo’s use of Vat. lat. 3199, see Barbi, Della fortuna di Dante; Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy, 52–53; and Bordin, ‘Prime approssimazioni’. For the observation that Leopardi read a copy of Dante’s lyrics based on the Giuntina, see Bologna, ‘review of Domenico De Robertis, ed. Rime’, 719. For a facsimile of the Giuntina, see De Robertis, ed., Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani. Ernst Robert Curtius writes that ‘Of the modern literatures, the Italian was the first to develop a canon’, which he attributes to Pietro Bembo, who established Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as linguistic models for imitation, both theoretically in his Prose della volgar lingua (1525) and through a series of Aldine editions (Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 264, but also see 225–26). Like Bembo, Boccaccio combines a theoretical defense with editorial practice, but he does not canonize poetic forms as Bembo does, most famously perhaps by overseeing the Aldine publication of Dante’s Commedia as Le terze rime. For a more detailed treatment of the argument that Italian literature was born in the sixteenth century, see Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, 39–43 and Kristeller, ‘Latin and Vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy’. For further discussion of vernacular classicism in the sixteenth century, see Robey, ‘Humanist Views’. For an exploration of the role of editors in the formation of Italian literature, see Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto, and Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities seems to have led scholars to disregard the ways ‘textual communities’ were created in the age of

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21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

Notes to pages 4–5 manual reproduction. For an in-depth discussion of the formation of ‘textual communities’ in the centuries before the emergence of the vernaculars, see Stock, The Implications of Literacy. On ideas of nationhood post-Petrarch, see Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism. On the idea of Italian literature, particularly from the perspective of national identity, see Raimondi, Letteratura e identit`a nazionale; Jossa, L’Italia letteraria; Ferroni, Prima lezione di letteratura italiana; and Carducci, ‘Presso la tomba di Francesco Petrarca’. From the period before Boccaccio, critics have emphasized the three early canzonieri, which have been published along with a volume of detailed philological essays in Leonardi, ed., I canzonieri della lirica italiana delle origini. On the importance of Vat. lat. 3793, in particular, see Antonelli, ‘Canzoniere Vaticano latino 3793’, and for an analysis of Giacomo da Lentini’s translation of Folquet, with which that collection begins, see Folena, Volgarizzare e tradurre. Even as Boccaccio emphasizes the Florentine origins of each of these exiled poets both in the rubrics (Chigi lv 176, cc. 1r, 29r, 34v, 43v) and stories he tells about them (situating Cavalcanti, for example, in the very heart of the city in Dec. 6.9), he sees them not simply as municipal models but as examples for a larger Italian culture, as he underlines by addressing Petrarch, ‘Ytalie iam certus honus’ (Already certain honor of Italy). See Barolini, Dante’s Poets and The Undivine Comedy. One could see these concerns embodied by Vasari in the volume of Virgil and figure of Cavalcanti. See Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. One could see this issue emblematized by the books and other instruments of knowledge on the table before him. Dante’s visionary claims caused controversy among his earliest readers, as they do today. Whereas an earlier commentator, like Guido da Pisa, reinforces Dante’s own claims to be a prophet and others, like Cecco d’Ascoli, mocked Dante’s pretensions, Boccaccio diminishes this visionary element to make Dante exemplary of the kind of learned vernacular poetry that he seeks to cultivate. Vasari’s image follows Boccaccio in many respects by downplaying this prophetic element and emphasizing the poet’s knowledge exemplified by the books and instruments on the table before him. ‘Intellexi tandem molli in limo et instabili arena perdi operam’ (Sen. 5.2.54). On the importance of Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero, see Rico, ‘Philology and Philosophy in Petrarch’. On his reconstruction of Livy, see Billanovich, ‘Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy’, with the revisions of Reeve, ‘The Vetus Carnotensis of Livy Unmasked’. On Petrarch’s coronation, see Wilkins, ‘The Coronation of Petrarch’. For an excellent collection of documents on Petrarch and Cola di Rienzo, see Cosenza, ed., Petrarch: The Revolution of Cola di Rienzo. On Petrarch’s writing reformations, see Petrucci, La scrittura di Francesco Petrarca. Petrarch, moreover, left just one piece of vernacular prose – of dubious attribution – and the only two vernacular works in his library seem to have been the copy of Dante’s Commedia that Boccaccio gave him and perhaps of a copy of the Decameron, of unknown origin. Petrarch’s complex relationship with Dante has only recently become the focus of sustained inquiry in Baranski and Cachey, eds., Petrarch & Dante.

Notes to pages 5–6

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

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For an exploration of how Petrarch’s classical readings inform his lyrics, see Greene, The Light in Troy. For the classical genealogy in Fam. 1.1, where he argues that the genre of rhythmic verse was ‘reborn’ among the Sicilians and thus has an ancient pedigree, Petrarch’s source is Servius’ commentary on Georgics 2; see Feo, ‘Francesco Petrarca (1984)’ and Rizzo, ‘Petrarca e il genus renatum’. Petrarch’s idea contrasts with Dante’s claim in the Vita nuova (25) that vernacular poetry arose to discourse on love with Latin-less ladies. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. Ovid, Tristia 2.361–2. Ovid reiterates the point in Tristia 2.495–6: ‘Truly, I am the only one singled out from so many writers (and I bear them no ill-will) to be ruined by his muse.’ And again in 2.567–8: ‘Amid all the myriads of our people, many as are my writings, I am the only one whom Calliope has injured.’ Boccaccio’s heavily annotated copy of Ovid’s Trisitia can be found in Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 489; see Mostra di manoscritti, documenti e edizioni: VI centenario della morte di Giovanni Boccaccio, 154–55. See Tristia 2.467–9: ‘I was their successor, for generosity bids me withhold the names of prominent living men.’ 4.10.53–4: ‘Tibullus was thy successor, Gallus, and Propertius his; after them I came, fourth in order of time.’ Boccaccio’s different deployment of Ovid does not challenge Dante’s claim that he is a modern who belongs among the ancients, which Boccaccio imagines in Amorosa visione 5. For a different interpretation of Boccaccio’s vernacular community here that sees it as a deflating critique of the dolce stil novo, see Marcus, ‘The Tale of Maestro Alberto’. The idea of a poetic community united through desire also appears in the pre-Commedia Dante, in poems like Guido i’ vorrei, on which see the commentary in Barolini, ed. Dante Alighieri: Rime giovanili, but Dante is already moving beyond this particular community at the beginning of the Vita nuova. In the rubrics of the Chigi, Boccaccio insists on noting that each of these authors is ‘di Firenze’ (1r, 29r, 34v) or, in the case of the Latin rubric for Petrarch ‘de Florentia’ (c. 43v). This ‘di’ or ‘de’ notably refers to derivation, since all three poets die in exile (although Boccaccio did try to bring Petrarch back to Florence several times), and even as it is undoubtedly part of his larger desire to create a community and city of poets, the vision is more than merely municipal, as his two Latin poems to Petrarch emphasize, the patria may be Florence but the cultural geography is Italia. Boccaccio’s emphasis on Florentine origins should not be assimilated to the later debates that arose in the sixteenth century about whether the tre corone composed in Italian, Tuscan, or Florentine, which are well discussed by Gambarota, Irresistible Signs. For the argument that in the Quattrocento there was only a Tuscan literature, not an Italian one, see Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, 39. On the relationship between Tuscan and other languages, see Kristeller, ‘Latin and Vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy’, but for the argument that these various dialects were united by syntax, see Vincent, ‘Languages in Contact in Medieval Italy’. The idea of Italy as a poetic

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33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

Notes to pages 6–8 concept is a common one: Dante in Purg. 6, Petrarch in Italia mia (Rvf 128); Boccaccio also quotes Purg. 6 in the Consolatoria Pino de’ rossi. For an extensive analysis of Dante’s treatment of this tradition, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets. For Benvenuto da Imola’s use of Decameron (4.Intro) to gloss Purg. 26, see Picone, ‘Donne e papere’, 163–64. Boccaccio’s rejection of this French tradition is quite remarkable given his time in Naples and the influence of French romances on his Filocolo. On the absence of any extant French texts in lingua d’o¨ıl or lingua d’oc in Boccaccio’s hand, see Brunetti, ‘Franceschi e provenzali’. An anti-French strain can also be detected, however, in the first story of the Decameron, where the French ignorance of Italian leads them to canonize ‘un ser Cepparello da Prato’ partly because the French did not know what his name meant, ‘credendo che “cappello”, cio`e “ghirlanda” secondo il lor volgare a dir venisse’ (thinking that it signified chapel, which in their language means ‘garland’; McWilliam, trans.). Cappello is the word that Dante uses in Par. 25 to describe his imagined Florentine coronation. Could this story be interpreted as a further rejection of the French offer to crown Petrarch? Petrarch does omit the Provenc¸al tradition in other contexts, however, such as Fam. 1.1, where he claims that the classical model of rhythmic verse that existed in antiquity was reborn, not among the French, but among the Sicilians. For Petrarch’s dismissive attitude toward French culture, see his disparaging remarks about the Roman de la Rose in Epyst. 3.30. Minnis, Fallible Authors, 7. Minnis develops similar arguments in ‘De vulgari auctoritate’ and Magister amoris. I take the phrase ‘dispenser of legitimation’ from Forni, ‘The King of Cyprus’, 220. Boccaccio’s catalogue of poets here reflects the interest in community that characterizes so many of his fictions, from the catalogues of the Caccia di Diana and the Amorosa visione to the group of storytellers in the Filocolo, Ameto, and Decameron. The ideas of ‘imagined communities’ and ‘invented traditions’ come from Anderson, Imagined Communities, and Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, respectively. Although Hobsbawm uses the term ‘invention’ to demystify national customs, the term ‘invention’ can also have a positive force, and it is in that sense that I use it here. For an important reconsideration of Hobsbawm along similar lines, see Phillips and Schochet, eds., Questions of Tradition, especially the introductory essay by Phillips. According to Dante, Love is always accompanied by ‘lo fedele consiglio de la ragione’ (the faithful counsel of reason; VN 2.9). For Dino’s comment, see Fenzi, La canzone d’amore di Guido Cavalcanti, 86–88. There is clearly a tension here, as Cornish points out in her discussion of Dino’s comment: ‘To talk about love on this level, according to Dino, one cannot be in its throes. Yet according to the doctrine of the “gentle heart,” it is precisely love that gives understanding.’ Cornish, ‘A Lady Asks’, 171. In the first version of the Vita in Toledo 104.6, Boccaccio offers three different views on the relationship between Dante’s love for Beatrice and his genius. He

Notes to pages 8–9

43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

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notes that many believe they are connected, but he doesn’t (38). He then claims that all believe it (119). He then defends Dante’s fault of lust in the Toledo Vita with examples from classical myth and Biblical history that seem to vindicate Dante’s desires (172–74). These classical and Biblical contexts allow him to claim in the next sentence that the poems Dante wrote for Beatrice were beautiful and thus works of genius (175). In the Chigi, Boccaccio also establishes a connection between Dante’s love and his poetry (30) that seems to extend to Dante’s poems for other women as well (35). At the same time, in the very next paragraph, love is seen once again as an impediment to study (36). And in his treatment of Dante’s faults, the treatment of lust is considerably abbreviated (114), and the classical and Biblical examples are eliminated as he argues only that lust was an ongoing problem. For a discussion of these variants, see Barbi, ‘Qual e` la seconda redazione?’ Boccaccio also addresses this issue in his life of Petrarch (De Vita Petracchi), where Boccaccio attributes to Petrarch the same struggles with lust that characterize Guido, Dante, and Cino: ‘By lust alone he was somehow not wholly conquered, but rather very much bothered’ (Libidine sola aliqualiter non victus in totum, sed multo potius molestatus). For the argument that Boccaccio omits Petrarch from this list because Petrarch was no longer assailed by lust, see Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 157. This historical positivist interpretation, however, simply follows Petrarch’s own claims in Voi ch’ascoltate (Rvf 1), and has little support. One could equally argue that Boccaccio’s silence on Petrarch follows the Ovidian model, where Ovid purposely ‘withhold[s] the names of prominent living men’ from his catalogue (Tristia 2.467–68). In his biographies of Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio attenuates the relationship between the poets’ loves and their work to legitimize them, according to the conventional medieval idea of authority that Boccaccio knowingly inverts in the Introduction to Day 4. For a different interpretation of Boccaccio’s transcription of the Decameron in Hamilton 90 that sees it as a sign that Boccaccio had been scholastic all along and supports a moral reading of the Decameron, see Branca, Boccaccio medievale, xi–xii. Petrucci, ‘Reading and Writing Volgare’, 189 Barbi, ed., La Vita nuova; Petrocchi, ed., Dante Alighieri: La Commedia; De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime. For a more extensive discussion of these editorial traditions, see Chapter 2. Phelps, The Earlier and Later Forms; Wilkins, The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’. On Petrarch’s rewriting and correction of Boccaccio’s biography in his Letter to Posterity, see Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 135–43; Rico, ‘Il nucleo della Posteritati (e le autobiografie di Petrarca)’; Villani, ‘Introduzione’; and Veglia, ‘Vite parallele’. For further discussion, see Chapter 3. Pound, ed., Guido Cavalcanti: Rime; Favati, ed., Guido Cavalcanti: Rime. See Chapter 4. These quotations are from Nichols, ‘Philology’, 8; de Grazia and Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’; and McGann, The Textual Condition, 77. The major catalysts for Nichols were Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variant and Huot, From Song to Book. For Nichols’ move from New to

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49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

Notes to page 10 Material Philology, see Nichols, ‘Why Material Philology?’ For critical responses to the New Philology, see Busby, ed., Towards a Synthesis?: Essays on the New Philology and Kay, ‘Analytical Survey 3: The New Philology’. In the context of this book, the final chapters of Pasquali’s work are particularly interesting, since he uses the autographs of Petrarch and Boccaccio as testing grounds for his discussions. In histories of Italian philology, the emphasis on history over system inaugurated by Pasquali is frequently noted; see, for example, Cherchi, ‘Italian Literature’; Varvaro, ‘The “New Philology” from an Italian Perspective’; Fahy, ‘Old and New in Italian Textual Criticism’; and Robins, ‘The Study of Medieval Italian Textual Cultures’. Cavallo, ‘Un’aggiunta al ‘decalogo’ di Giorgio Pasquali’, 152. Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, 107. For the notion of history in a comic mode, see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 11–26. Also see the interesting reflections on this idea in Fulton and Holsinger, ‘Afterword: History in the Comic Mode’. Grafton, ‘Notes from Underground’, 2. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, 64. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 29: ‘Bibliography has a massive authority with which to correct that tendency [toward anti-humanism]. It can, in short, show the human presence in any recorded text.’ Dionisotti similarly encourages an analysis of editors and publishers in order to ‘ridare figura umana’ [give back a human figure] to literary history (Geografia e storia, 56). For an extensive exploration of the earliest collections of vernacular anthologies, as well as Petrarch’s autograph of his lyrics in Vat. lat. 3195, see Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics. For further examination of the significance of Petrarch’s project in his autograph, see Petrucci, ‘Reading and Writing Volgare’; Brugnolo, ‘Libro d’autore e forma-canzoniere’. For a more extensive discussion of Petrarch’s scribal habits and innovations, see Petrucci, La scrittura di Francesco Petrarca. Just as Pasquali prepares the way for the materialist orientation, Contini’s variantistica calls attention to the meaning to be found in authorial variants, an approach that shares certain concerns with the idea of ‘genetic criticism’. Stock, The Implications of Literacy; Carruthers, The Book of Memory and The Craft of Thought; Grafton, Defenders of the Text; Celenza, ‘Creating Canons’. See Camille, Mirror in Parchment; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists. The major early collections of Italian lyrics are Vaticanus latinus 3793, Biblioteca Laurenziana Redi 9, Biblioteca Nazionale Central di Firenze Banco Rari 217 (formerly Palatino 418), Chigiano l viii 305, and the more aleatory transcriptions in the Memoriali bolognesi. All three of the early canzonieri have been published in facsimile editions, accompanied by a fourth volume of critical essays; see Leonardi, ed., I canzonieri della lirica italiana delle origini. For a detailed analysis of Vat. lat. 3793, see Antonelli, ‘Canzoniere Vaticano latino 3793’; ‘Struttura materiale e disegno storiografico del canzoniere Vaticano’. For an historical analysis of the Memoriali bolognesi and Vat. lat. 3793, see Steinberg, Accounting for Dante. Also see Borriero, Canzonieri Italiani:

Notes to pages 10–11

59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

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Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Ch (Chigi l viii 305), and Carrai and Marrani, eds., Il canzoniere escorialense e il frammento marciano dello stilnovo. For a longer historical perspective that includes Provenc¸al materials, see Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self. In the medieval Italian context, the foundational studies are those collected in Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy. Among the many works that examine the meaning of medieval literary manuscripts, most often from the perspective of reception, the following list provides examples from different disciplines: in French: Huot, From Song to Book; Busby, Codex and Context; Arn, The Poet’s Notebook; McGrady, Controlling Readers; and Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print; in English: Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England; Taylor, Textual Situations; and Rust, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books; in Spanish: Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading, and De Looze, Manuscript Diversity, Meaning, and ‘Variance’ in Juan Mauel’s ’El Conde Lucanor’; in German: Starkey, Reading the Medieval Book. Nichols, ‘Why Material Philology?’, 21; and Lerer, ‘Medieval English Literature’, 1255. Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader, xii describe these scribes as ‘professional readers’, which they define parenthetically as ‘(those who edited, annotated, and illustrated books for the medieval reading public)’. The term’s emphasis on reading runs the danger of diminishing precisely the activities of editing, annotating, and illustrating that it aims to bring into focus. A third solution to the problem of the anonymity of the figures involved in the production of medieval and early modern books has led to the construction of rich social histories, such as Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers, and it is significant in this regard that book history arises partly out of the work of social historians, such as Robert Darnton and Carlo Ginzburg. See Pearsall, ‘The Whole Book’, 29. That binding has meaning for Petrarch and Boccaccio can be seen not only in Ytalie iam certus honos where Boccaccio invites Petrarch to join Dante’s works with his own, but also in Petrarch’s warning to Boccaccio not to bind Plato and Homer together (Var. 25/ Disp. 46) and his remarks on Boccaccio’s binding of Cicero and Varro as a positive example of such codicological connection (Fam. 18.4). Putting elements in the same codex implies a relationship that can also be unflattering, as Boccaccio put it in De montibus, 126: ‘Contraria iuxta se posita magis eluscescunt.’ Binding also has a significant place in Dante’s linguistics and poetic reflections in the Convivio and DVE (Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 108–21 and 130–57), as well as the Commedia (Ahern, ‘Binding the Book’). According to a note in the manuscript, Corbinelli brought Chigi l v 176 to the court of Catherine de’ Medici in Paris, where it was later bought by Count Federigo Ubaldino, who then gave it to Fabio Chigi, who became Pope Alexander VII (1599–1667, r. 1655–67), and whose library was integrated into the Vatican. The earlier history of the manuscript is hazy, but Salutati may be the link between Boccaccio and Corbinelli. Salutati refers to Petrarch’s collection as a ‘frammenti libellus’ (Novati, ed., Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati,

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64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

Notes to pages 11–13 1: 180 and 3: 18), which suggests the Fragmentorum liber title found in the Chigi (see Rico, ‘Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’, 121 n. 63). He also writes a defense of poetry on behalf of a member of the Corbinelli family in which he uses the arguments of Boccaccio and Petrarch about the relationship between poetry and theology; see Ullman, Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 247–54, and Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, 406–13. De Robertis, ‘Il “Dante e Petrarca” di Giovanni Boccaccio’, 7. Pastore Stocchi, ‘Su alcuni autografi del Boccaccio’, 132–35, on the basis of De Robertis, ‘Il “Dante e Petrarca” di Giovanni Boccaccio’, 28. Bologna, Tradizione e fortuna, 205. Bologna does allow that this later history may reflect ideas that were potentially those of the original compiler. Since there is no evidence that would resolve this debate, interpretation will have to rely more on literary than on philological arguments. For a discussion of this problem in the context of classical scholarship, see Reeve, ‘Reception/History of Scholarship: Introduction’, 249. For some examples of the critical commonplace of the two Boccaccios and Boccaccio’s ‘conversion’ after his meeting with Petrarch, see Bergin, Boccaccio, 52; Bruni, Boccaccio; McLaughlin, ‘Latin and Vernacular’, 614; Surdich, Boccaccio; and Rico, ‘La “conversione” di Boccaccio’. Branca argues against this interpretation by claiming that both periods are ultimately scholastic. Kirkham, ‘Giovanni Boccaccio’, 130. For a discussion of earlier biographies that tend to emphasize Boccaccio’s achievements as a scholar, see Mass`era, ‘Le pi`u antiche biografie del Boccaccio’. For claims about Boccaccio’s poor transcriptions, even of his own works, see Billanovich, Prime ricerche dantesche, 80; Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 23; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 132; Mostra di manoscritti, documenti e edizioni: VI centenario della morte di Giovanni Boccaccio, 1: 123; Barbi, ed., La Vita nuova, clxxvi n. 3; Branca and Ricci, Un autografo del Decameron, 26–31; Pasquali, Storia della tradizione, 443; Contini, Breviario di ecdotica, 15; Robathan, ‘Boccaccio’s Accuracy as a Scribe’. For the view that many of Boccaccio’s errors are not transcriptional but conceptual, see Ageno, ‘Errori d’autore’ and ‘Ancora sugli errori d’autore’. For the observation that Boccaccio’s transcriptions of Petrarch do not respect the ‘visual poetics’ of the original’s format, see Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics, 228. Whereas Petrarch demonstrated a prescient understanding of the mechanics of textual criticism, Boccaccio is merely Livy’s vernacular translator. For some reservations on Petrarch’s much-vaunted philological abilities, see Fera, ‘La filologia del Petrarca e i fondamenti della filologia umanistica’. For a broader discussion of the problem of volgarizzamenti in this period, see Cornish, Vernacular Translation. The phrase ‘il pi`u grande discepolo’ comes from Billanovich, Petrarca letterato. The precise narrative surrounding Boccaccio’s gift of Vat. lat. 3199 has been complicated by some recent studies, but they do not alter the basic sequence traced by Boccaccio’s Ytalie iam certus honos and Petrarch’s later response (Fam. 21.15), according to which Petrarch did not have a copy of the Commedia,

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which he claims never to have read for fear of imitating Dante. Boccaccio’s sending of Vat. lat. 3199 is traditionally dated to 1351–53 because the rubric for Ytalie iam certus honos in Palatino 323 states that Petrarch was in Avignon when the copy was sent: ‘Versi di messer Giovanni Boccacci a messer Francesco Petrarcha mandatigli a Vignone choll’ opera di Dante ne quali loda decta opera et persuadegli che la studi.’ The Latin rubric adds further information about the source: ‘Versus Iohannis Boccacii ad Franciscum Petrarcham cum ei librum Dantis ad Avignonem transmitteret. Transcripti ex originalibus ipsius Boccaccii.’ Since Petrarch’s last stay in Avignon was from 1351–53, scholars have dated the gift to this period. For the traditional view that Forese Donati (not the same figure that appears on Dante’s terrace of gluttony, of course) brought Boccaccio’s gift to Petrarch in Avignon in the early 1350s, see Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 269–70. For the argument that Boccaccio also sent Petrarch a copy of his Vita di Dante along with the manuscript of the Commedia, see Paolazzi, ‘Petrarca, Boccaccio e il Trattatello’. Giuseppe Velli notes, however, that the version of the poem in Palatino 323 is not identical to the one in Vat. lat. 3199. In his view the date of 1351–53 only applies to the version in Palatino 323, not the one in Vat. lat. 3199. Whatever the actual chronology, the rubric in Palatino 323 shows that near contemporaries noted Boccaccio’s role in promoting the vernacular against Petrarch. Although Petrarch was long thought to have left only one autograph note in the margins of Vat. lat. 3199, Carlo Pulsoni argues, on the basis of the intertextual connections he finds between the marginal notes and Petrarch’s works, that Boccaccio sent this copy of the Comedy to Petrarch before their first encounter in 1350. See Pulsoni, ‘Il Dante di Francesco Petrarca’, 207–8. In a paleographic analysis of the version of Ytalie iam certus honos in Vat. lat. 3199, Boschi Rotiroti, ‘Sul carme Ytalie iam certus honos del Boccaccio nel Vaticano Latino 3199 (Nota paleografica)’ notes that Ytalie iam certus honos appears to have been recopied by a later hand attempting to imitate the older script of the Commedia in Vat. lat. 3199, but Boschi Rotiroti’s ‘impression’ is that the scribe wrote Ytalie iam certus honos in the late fourteenth century. The main differences between the versions of Ytalie iam certus honos in Vat. lat. 3199 and the Chigi concern how Dante’s glory is described. In the Chigi he is: ‘factusque fere est gloria gentis / altera florigenum; meritis tamen improba lauris / Mors properata nimis vetuit vincire capillos.’ In Vat lat. 3199: ‘factusque fere est par gloria gentis, / inque datura fuit meritas quas improba lauros; Mors properata nimis vetuit vincire capillos.’ Dante was either ‘almost made another glory of the Florentine people [gloria gentis / altera florigenum]; A wicked and too hurried death prevented him from binding his head with the merited laurels’ or ‘almost made an equal glory of the people [par gloria gentis].’ For the argument that Virgil is the point of the par comparison, see Petrini, ‘Il Boccaccio tra Dante e Petrarca’. For alter Florigenum, the candidates are either Claudian or Petrarch. Recent critics have opted for Claudian, but in the first redaction of the Vita di Dante Boccaccio makes clear the fact that Claudian was never crowned, so Claudian would be a strange choice (Toledo 99). ‘Alter’ would connect to a whole

130

73.

74.

75.

76.

Notes to pages 13–15 network of ideas in Petrarch regarding poetic style that Boccaccio would have known from Fam. 24.11, where Petrarch quotes Cicero’s description of Virgil as altra spes of the Romans. (Fam. 24.11 has its own Dantean borrowings, as Usher, ‘Petrarch Reads Inferno 4’ observes.) These transcriptions of the poem also have slightly different rubrics. In Vat lat. 3199, the dedication is Francisco Petrarche poete unico atque illustri and from Iohannes de Certaldo tuus. In the Chigi, it is ‘to the famous laureate, Francis Petrarch’ (Illustri viro francisco petrarce laureato) with the closing signature Johannes boccaccius de certaldo florentinus. For a discussion of Boccaccio’s signatures and their significance, see Kirkham, Fabulous Vernacular, 76–134. She notes that Boccaccio usually signs his works as ‘Johannes de Certaldo’ (133), so the addition of Florentinus in the Chigi may be of some significance. Whether the coronation Boccaccio desires for Dante is potentially real or only imagined is difficult to determine. The privilege that accompanied Petrarch’s coronation seems to include the possibility of crowning other poets, but it is not clear whether that would have been thought to include deceased poets as well, in a poetic version of Gregory’s conversion of Trajan. For more on the significance of the laurel, see Sturm-Maddox, ‘Dante, Petrarch, and the Laurel Crown’. To make his argument in Ytalie iam certus honos, Boccaccio adapts at least two of Petrarch’s works that Boccaccio likely transcribed while in Padua: Petrarch’s verse epistle to Vergil (Fam. 24.11) and the epystola metrica to Zoilo (Epyst. 2.10), a pseudonym for an unknown contemporary that may derive from the enemy of Homer mentioned by Ovid (Remedia 365–66). See Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 148 n. 2. Boccaccio makes the same claim about Dante having a double audience in the Vita di Dante. The idea also appears in the epitaph by Giovanni del Virgilio that Boccaccio records in the biography, where Dante is described as ‘glory of the muses, most pleasing author to the crowd’ (‘gloria musarum, vulgo gratissimus auctor’). For the idea of a work having two audiences as crucial for the canonization of a secular text, see Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, 144. Boccaccio’s phrase may echo Sordello’s praise of Virgil as ‘gloria d’i Latin’ (glory of the Latin), who ‘mostr`o ci`o che potea la lingua nostra’ (showed what our language could do; Purg. 7.16–17). Boccaccio possessed various pieces of evidence to support his case about Dante’s Latin, most important of which was the original Latin beginning of the poem found in the Letter of Frate Ilaro, which he transcribed in his Zibaldone laurenziano. Boccaccio also possessed copies of Dante’s pastoral exchange with Giovanni del Virgilio, where Giovanni censures Dante precisely for having written in the vernacular. In both versions of the Vita, Boccaccio argues that Dante chose the vernacular as a reaction to his social world, where the princes failed to honor the liberal arts, and as providing work for the learned and a reason to study for the vulgar. In both versions of the Vita, Boccaccio notes that Dante’s decision to compose the Commedia in the vernacular had a futher consequence of

Notes to pages 15–16

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

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showing the beauty of the Florentine vernacular (Toledo 191 and Chigi 130). Boccaccio echoes this prospective perspective in the Vita di Dante when he describes his own undertaking as ‘raccogliendo appresso in uno l’opere da lui fatte, nelle quali esso s´e s`ı chiaro ha renduto a’ futuri’. Boccaccio’s image of interpretive nudity in Ytalie iam certus honos is part of a long tradition that goes back to the Roman de la Rose (on which see Minnis, Magister amoris), but likely draws particularly on Dante’s claim in the Vita nuova (25.10) that the vernacular poet should be able to ‘strip his words of their rhetorical covering, to show its true meaning’ (denudare le sue parole da cotale veste, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento), citing himself and Cavalcanti as two positive examples. For a more complete analysis of Vita nuova 25, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 193–201, as well as my discussion here in Chapter 2. Another source for this idea may be Macrobius’ claim that Virgil was ‘schooled in all the arts’; see Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 392. Boccaccio makes similar arguments in Esp. 9.lit.39–40 and 15.lit.96–97. For discussions of Boccaccio as dantista, see Vandelli, ‘Giovanni Boccaccio editore di Dante’; Grabher, ‘Il culto del Boccaccio’; Padoan, ‘Il Boccaccio “fedele” di Dante’; Rossi, ‘Dante nella prospettiva del Boccaccio’; Societ`a Dantesca Italiana, ed., Giovanni Boccaccio editore; and Sandal, ed., Dante e Boccaccio. To be handled with some caution for reasons discussed in Chapter 2 is the more recent Houston, Building a Monument to Dante. For a broader consideration of Boccaccio’s engagement with Dante, see Hollander, Boccaccio’s Dante. The textual history of the Genealogie and its chronology are quite complex, but reducing the complications to their simplest terms, Boccaccio seems to have prepared a fair copy between 1365 and 1370, which he brought with him to Naples, where additions were made that he later integrated into the text in the early 1370s. For a full history, see Zaccaria, ed., Genealogie deorum gentilium, 2: 1592–99. For a condensed history of the work, see Solomon, ed., Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, viii–ix. For the conventional tendency to see the Decameron as excluded from the Genealogie, see, for example, Wallace, Giovanni Boccaccio, 49. Wallace remarks that Boccaccio’s ‘most famous defense of literary values, which dates from the same post-plague period, is the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, books xiv–xv. But the Latin Genealogia celebrates the inspired, transcendent power of Latin poetry; the Decameron is in Florentine prose.’ He thus sees the Decameron as excluded from the arguments of the Genealogie on both linguistic and formal grounds. Boccaccio’s discussion of the vernacular in the Genealogie is not often noted, but some passing mentions appear in Branca, Boccaccio medievale, 287; Stefanelli, Boccaccio e la poesia, 25 n. 38 and 115; and Hege, Boccaccios Apologie. For a survey of various ideas of poetry in both scholastic and vernacular literature in the Duecento, see Sebastio, Per una storia dell’idea di poesia nel Duecento, esp. 127–201.

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Notes to pages 16–20

82. All translations of the Genealogie are from Osgood, ed., Boccaccio on Poetry. Later references to page numbers of the translation will be given in text. In this case, I have also modified Osgood’s punctuation to match that found in Boccaccio’s autograph (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana 52.9), which is faithfully reproduced in the edition Osgood used: Hecker, Boccaccio-Funde, 209, for the current passage. This same punctuation is also followed in the more recent editions of Romano, ed., Giovanni Boccaccio: Genealogie deorum gentilium libri and Zaccaria, ed., Genealogie deorum gentilium. 83. As Osgood notes, Boccaccio’s insistence on poetry as more than rhetoric contrasts with the conventional medieval placement of poetry as among the lowest modes of knowledge, as in Aquinas and John of Salisbury. Boccaccio uses the same etymology in Esposizioni (1.lit.70) and the Vita di Dante, where he mentions but does not include the alternative etymology. 84. Kallendorf, ‘The Rhetorical Criticism of Literature in Early Italian Humanism from Boccaccio to Landino’, 39: ‘The key point here is that Boccaccio refuses to defend the eloquence of the poets on the basis of style alone. For Boccaccio, eloquence is bound to the pursuit of truth.’ For a discussion of a later shift back to style, see Tanturli, ‘La Firenze laurenziana’. For fuller discussions of Boccaccio’s ideas about poetry, see Tateo, Retorica e poetica fra medioevo e rinascimento; Gilson, ‘Poesie et verit´e’; Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics; and Usher, ‘Boccaccio on Readers and Reading’. 85. For an outline of the elements that Boccaccio borrows from Petrarch in his defense of poetry, which includes passages from Petrarch’s Invectives and Coronation Oration, see Zaccaria, Boccaccio narratore, 175–90. In Fam. 1.1 Petrarch does recognize that the vernacular could be a genre, and Poliziano quotes this passage in his introduction to the Raccolta Aragonese (Poliziano, ‘Allo illustrissimo signore Federico d’Aragona, figliolo del re di Napoli’, 987), but Petrarch’s relationship to the vernacular is an intensely ambivalent one, discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. 86. In DVE 2.4.2, Dante defines poetry as ‘a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music’ (fictio rethorica musicaque posita). 87. Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta, 216. In the Introduction to his translation Osgood makes the same error (xxxvi). 88. Whereas Boccaccio does not ultimately reject Ovid, Petrarch does implicitly in Fam. 24.1: ‘I used to listen to Ovid, who was for me a more serious authority and incorruptible witness, the more licentious his Muse’ (Bernardo 3: 309). 89. In the Vita di Dante, Boccaccio gives a genealogy of civilization to explain the social circumstances in which pagan poetry emerged, and how it can seem polytheist but also contain hidden truths. 90. This translation is from Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. McWilliam 798–99. All subsequent citations appear parenthentically in text. 91. Gilbert, ‘Boccaccio’s Devotion to Artists and Art’, 57 suggests that Boccaccio may be thinking of actual frescoes, such as the one by Nardo di Cione in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella. Also see Watson, ‘The Cement

Notes to pages 20–21

92.

93.

94.

95.

96.

133

of Fiction’. Watson and Gilbert seem to have been more sensitive to the implications of Boccaccio’s moves here than more literary scholars have been. Watson notes that the mention of Christ was sometimes changed to Adam and that the number of nails did constitute a change. Gilbert worries that the nails in the feet of Christ make him a woman, but as scholars like Caroline Walker Bynum have shown, this characterization appears in late medieval religious thought. Boccaccio’s comparisons of literature with painting, philosophy, and theology in both the Decameron and Genealogie are also related by a shared appeal to everyday language (Gen. 14.9 and 14.18), use of the scribal pose (Gen. Pref. 1.49), and appeal to the idea of the originals (Gen. 15.3). For the history of the term ‘literature’ from medieval to modern, see Williams, ‘Literature’; Marino, The Biography of “The Idea of Literature”; and Teskey, ‘Literature’. In keeping with the views of many critics, Marcus observes that ‘the garden that Boccaccio cultivates here is a new literary space free from the didactic expectations of the schoolmen or the clergy’; Marcus, ‘The Tale of Maestro Alberto’, 238. For a similar interpretation of the garden, see Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio and the Debate of Love, 156. Although it may be appealing to see in Boccaccio’s paragraph a claim for the literary as a place of pleasure alone and not instruction, which one will find in the later centuries when Castelvetro insists on this separation in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, this does not seem to be Boccaccio’s point here. For a passing mention of the possible connection between Boccaccio’s garden and Deduit’s garden in the Roman de la Rose, see Battaglia Ricci, Ragionare nel giardino, 171–75, and ‘Gardens in Italian Literature during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’. For a discussion of the very different way the garden image is used in early modern French literary discourse, see Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century, 14–15. For a broad consideration of the topos of the garden, see Harrison, Gardens. Boccaccio not only makes a similar claim in his discussion of Ovid in the Genealogie discussed above but also develops it along similar lines in the Genealogie (14.18, Osgood 82–83), where he also evokes heretical thinkers to defend poetry and once again makes a comparison to painting. He makes the same point in the first Preface to Genealogie, where he emphasizes that ancient myth, like Scripture, has been subject to a variety of interpretations (Gen.1.Pref.1.42–43; Osgood 11). Boccaccio’s defense of poetry’s obscurity also relies on a comparison to philosophical and theological texts (14.12; Osgood 58). Boccaccio pays particular attention to the connection between poetry and Scripture, because of their shared use of figurative language (14.14; Osgood 71). In this passage, as in the Vita di Dante and Esposizioni, Boccaccio argues by analogy that if it is acceptable for Scripture to use figurative language to convey truth, poets can do the same. Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 388. Boccaccio reiterates the distinction of literature from philosophy later in the

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Notes to pages 21–22

Author’s Conclusion: ‘per ci`o che n´e a Atene n´e a Bologna o a Parigi alcuna di voi non va a studiare, pi´u distesamente parlar vi si conviene che a quegli che hanno negli studii gl’ingegni assottigliati.’ On what literature shares with philosophy, see Esp.4.all.64, where Boccaccio seems interested in collapsing the distinction between them by showing an internal continuity instead of an institutional distinction: ‘We must recognize that the reading and studying of philosophy is not something confined to universities, schools, and disputations. It can oftentimes be read within the hearts of men and women’ (Boccaccio, Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s ’Comedy’, 251). Boccaccio’s choice of the garden could also be read as a challenge to philosophy, since ‘the mosaic in the sweat room of a bath in Africa (fifth century) has the inscription filosofi locus over a representation of a garden’ (Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 209). This image suggests the literary-philosophical nexus that Boccaccio proposes in both the Author’s Conclusion to the Decameron and Esposizioni. For the larger question of poetry’s place among the arts, see Petrarch, Invectives, Book 3, as well as Petrarch’s letter to Benvenuto da Imola (Sen. 15.11), where he affirms that poetry is with theology and philosophy in not being mentioned by Martianus and therefore greater than them. Boccaccio shares these ideas, as one can see in the Gen. 14.4 and 15.8, as well as Ep. 4. While Boccaccio tends to use the word ‘poesia’ in the modern sense of literature, Petrarch often uses ‘litterae’. For further bibliography on poetry among the arts, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 6 n. 5; Hardison, The Enduring Monument, 3–23; and Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’. 97. One consequence of this connection between literature and Scripture is that, like Scripture, literature can have two audiences, as Boccaccio claims in Genealogie 14.9 (Osgood 51): ‘Such then is the power of fiction that it pleases the unlearned by its external appearance, and exercises the minds of the learned with its hidden truth; and thus both are edified and delighted with one and the same perusal.’ While the unlearned can deal with the external, the learned grapple with the hidden truth, as Boccaccio had already argued in Ytalie iam certus honos and Vita di Dante. This idea that poetry contains hidden truths leads to the examples of Gen. 14.10, who are Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and finally, at the end of the same chapter, old ladies telling stories. Boccaccio underlines the novelty of this idea in the Vita di Dante where it first appears through his quotation of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, a work that seems to have informed the Genealogie, as Osgood notes. Boccaccio uses Gregory to define allegory in the Esposizioni, where underlines the dual nature of Scripture though Gregory’s metaphor of the river in which both the lamb and elephant can swim: ‘In this way, wise men may investigate its allegories while simple men (those who still do not perceive enough to be able to get to the allegorical meanings) nourish themselves on the sweetness of the text’ (1.all.23). In Gen. 14.8 (Osgood 46), Boccaccio uses the same image of the Gentiles following the footsteps of the Holy Spirit that one finds in the Vita di Dante. 98. Barney et al., eds., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 222.

Notes to pages 22–23

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99. For more extensive discussions of the rubrics, see D’Andrea, ‘Le rubriche del Decameron’; and Milanese, ‘Affinit`a e contraddizioni’. The image of gathering also appears in Teseida 3.7–10, Dec. 5.10, and the Dedication to De mulieribus claris, as well as the Genealogie, to be discussed momentarily. For an analysis of this image in the context of Dec. 5.10, see Eisner and Schachter, ‘Libido Sciendi: Apuleius, Boccaccio, and the Study of the History of Sexuality’. 100. On these lists of auctores, see Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 48–54, and Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism. 101. The phrase ‘without citing further examples’ at the beginning of the passage echoes Dec. 4.Intro.33: ‘E se non fosse che uscir sarebbe del modo usato del ragionare, io producerei le istorie in mezzo’. The Church’s act of selection also parallels Boccaccio’s own process in the Genealogie, which he describes in heroic terms in the Proemio, when he describes himself as Daedalus, Prometheus, and Aesclepius (1.Pref.1.40, 41, 50). 102. Boccaccio must be thinking of the controversy over Origen revealed in the exchanges between Jerome and Rufinus. Although Boccaccio suggests a distinction between holy and unholy, as in his discussion of Ovid, he is not particularly dedicated to maintaining it. Boccaccio makes a similar distinction between good and disreputable poets in a discussion of love poets in Gen. 14.16, which has a parallel passage regarding painting that also mentions Giotto in Gen. 14.6. 103. On the term anthology and its cognates, see Rigg, ‘Anthologies and Florilegia’, 708: ‘Although both words mean “gathering of flowers”, anthologia is usually restricted to a collection of complete items (normally poems), and florilegium to a collection of excerpts. The word excerpt is itself a metaphor from plucking flowers’. Also see Brugnoli, ‘Collectanea di testi’, 40–43. Also see the observations of Dutschke, ‘Il libro miscellaneo’, 95. He notes that while both Petrarch and Boccaccio shared a distaste for reading by means of florilegia, ‘spetta unicamente al Boccaccio il merito di aver fatto s`ı che la miscellanea, nella forma particolare dello zibaldone, diventasse un libro esemplare del suo mondo intellettuale e letterario’. Dutschke is referring to Boccaccio’s Zibaldoni, but his comments could be applied to the Chigi as well. 104. For a discussion of the connections between our continued modern use of anthologies and medieval practices, see Lerer, ‘Medieval English Literature’; on the anthology as producing the idea of Standard English, see Guillory, Cultural Capital; on the function of the anthology in the formation of the novel, see Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. The word miscellany would be equally Boccaccian, since according to Oxford English Dictionary ‘Classical Latin miscellus derives ultimately from misc¯ere to mix’, an idea that is central to Boccaccio’s ars combinatoria. 105. For further discussion of the Indovinello, see Castellani, I pi`u antichi testi italiani. The plow–pen analogy continues in modern literature, as in Seamus Heaney, ‘Digging’, which ends ‘Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.’

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Notes to pages 24–26

106. Boccaccio’s argument recalls Giorgio Pasquali’s philological maxim recentiores non deteriores, i.e. that more recent manuscripts are not worse than older ones because they may contain readings that testify to earlier or lost traditions. 107. Gen. 15.6 (Osgood 111): ‘Thus I have dared cite as my authorities moderns whom I have known or know personally, or whom by their merits I recognize as exceptional and reliable men. I know by every sign that they have spent nearly their whole lives in sacred studies, that they have ever mingled with men eminent for their attainments both of learning and character, they have lived laudable lives, are without stain or taint of any kind, and that both their writings and conversation are approved by the wisest.’ He notes that although the authority of these moderns, is ‘in suspense’ (in pendulo), he can vouch for the legitimacy of authors such as Andal`o di Negro, Dante, Francesco Barberino, Barlaam, Paul of Perugia, Leonzio Pilato, Paul the geometrician, and Petrarch. 108. On the motif of rebirth, see Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, 19; Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, 15; Greene, The Light in Troy, 91; and Usher, ‘Metempsychosis and “Renaissance” between Petrarch and Boccaccio’. 109. The translation is from Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Durling, 2:365–67. 110. For Boccaccio’s use of the idea of rebirth of antiquity among his contemporaries, see his comments on Dante in the Toledo Vita di Dante, Petrarch in the De Vita Petracchi, and Giotto in Decameron 6.5 (with an implied parallel to Cavalcanti in Dec. 6.9). He also uses ‘Saturnia regna’ in the Allegoria mitologica and in the commentary to Inf. 4.37–39 to discuss the Virgilian prophecy itself. 111. ‘Heu et fraterni consilii immemor et tuorum tot salubrium preceptorum, ceu nocturnus viator lumen in tenebris gestans, ostendisti secuturis callem, in qua ipse satis miserabiliter lapsus es.’ Bernardo’s translation has been revised here. For a more extensive discussion of the significance of Petrarch’s borrowing from Dante to describe his relationship with Cicero in Fam. 24.3, see my ‘In the Labyrinth of the Library.’ 112. Petrarch writes, in no uncertain terms: ‘I have dwelt single-mindedly on learning about antiquity, among other things because this age has always displeased me, so that, unless love for my dear ones pulled me the other way, I always wished to have been born in any other age whatever, and to forget this one, seeming always to graft myself in my mind onto other ages’ (Sen. 18.1; Petrarca, Letters of Old Age, 673–74). For Petrarch’s hatred of his own time, the other loci classici are Triumphus Cupidinis 1.17; De Vita solitaria 1.8; and Sen. 3.9. 113. In the letter to Pizzinga, Boccaccio also evokes Zanobi da Strada to claim that Zanobi was unworthy of the laurel he had received. 114. For a discussion of Galeotto and the ways it not only problematizes the relationship between author, reader, and text, but also brings into focus the importance of mediation, see Stillinger, ‘The Place of the Title (Decameron,

Notes to pages 26–28

115.

116.

117.

118. 119.

120.

121.

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Day One, Introduction)’. In the first story of the Decameron, he reflects on mediation both vertically, between man and God, and horizontally, between linguistic cultures since the French do not understand the real meaning of Cepperello. For an investigation of Boccaccio’s dedication to recovering Greek literature, see Lummus, ‘Boccaccio’s Hellenism’. For a discussion of how Boccaccio presents himself as a mediator through his use of the figures of Phaeton and Prometheus, see Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, 155–80. Boccaccio seems to takes on the role of cultural mediator (and curator) quite explicitly in the following passage: ‘I have also performed what I considered in some directions a most urgent duty, and shown that the poets, contrary to the notion of my opponents, are, I will not say all just men, but at least not absurd nor mere story-tellers – nay, they are marked with secular learning, genius, character, and high distinction’ (Gen.15.14). Just as some critical approaches to the Decameron interpret the work as simply reflecting an external literary or social reality, thus discounting Boccaccio’s role in crafting these narratives, the analysis of Boccaccio’s scholarly activities frequently portrays him only as a conduit, thus overlooking how he shapes what he receives. For critiques of the tendency to divest Boccaccio of agency in some critical interpretations of the Decameron, see Ascoli, ‘Boccaccio’s Auerbach’ and Eisner and Schachter, ‘Libido Sciendi: Apuleius, Boccaccio, and the Study of the History of Sexuality’. On the pace of Petrarch’s favorite scribe, Giovanni Malpaghini, see Zamponi, ‘Il libro del Canzoniere’, 25–26. The time needed for decoration and for the revision of the Vita di Dante would add to this figure. For overviews of medieval modes of book production, see De Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators and Thomson, ‘Technology of Production’. For the question of scribal speed in an earlier period, see Gullick, ‘How Fast Did Scribes Write’. Boccaccio will also use ideas from Pietro Piccolo to develop his arguments in Genealogie 14.9, 14.14, 14.18, 14.20, and 15.8. See Billanovich, ‘Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte’, 489. See Eco, The Open Work, 13–14, where Eco schematizes the differences he sees between closed medieval art and open modern (Baroque and after) art. For Barthes’s idea of the ‘writerly’ text, see Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Petrucci uses the phrase ‘open work’ to describe Petrarch’s procedures, but this openness extends only to the author’s adjustments not to readers’ interventions, about which Petrarch famously complains in his letter to Boccaccio on Dante (Fam. 21.15). For Boccaccio’s openness to multiple perspectives, see Greene, ‘Forms of Accommodation’ and Marcus, ‘The Acccommodating Frate Alberto’. For a similarly open reading of the Decameron, see Fido, Il regime delle simmetrie imperfette. For a generous understanding of Boccaccio as literary thinker with a discussion of non-Decameron works, see Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse. ‘Eum epygramatibus splendidis summos semper quoscunque decorasse modernos eosque persepe honorasse laudibus, nec destitit, quin sibi aliquando detraheret ut contemporaneorum gloriam augeret.’ Parodi, Poeti antichi e

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Notes to pages 28–29

moderni, 176 echoes Boccaccio’s image: ‘Di fronte a Dante e al Petrarca, il Boccaccio si sente piccolo, si vuol piccolo, e, caso mai, ripone la sua gloria nel celebrare la loro gloria.’ 122. Boccaccio’s earliest notebooks collect rare works of Dante and Petrarch for which they are sometimes the only extant witnesses. This notebook is now split into two volumes, the so-called Zibaldone Laurenziano (Pl. 29.8) and the Miscellanea Laurenziana (Pl. 33.31), both preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana in Florence. The Dante and Petrarch materials date to between 1340 and 1348. For a more detailed analysis of the manuscripts, their original wholeness, and the relative chronology, see Zamponi, Pantarotto, and Tomiello, ‘Stratigrafia dello Zibaldone’. Boccaccio’s tendency to mix his masters also manifests itself in his early compositions, like the Caccia di Diana; see Eisner, ‘Petrarch Reading Boccaccio’. 123. It is worth reflecting here that efforts at self-authorizing are not enough, as the limited fame of the works of Francesco da Barberino and Nicolo de’ Rossi demonstrate. CHAPTER ONE 1. Bruni, ‘The Lives of Dante and Petrarch’, 126. Le vite di Dante, 29: ‘Come se a scrivere avesse il Filocolo, o il Filostrato o la Fiammetta.’ Dante scholars have largely followed Bruni in considering Boccaccio’s biography the work of an imaginative poet instead of a ‘true historian’ (vero istorico), as Alessandro Vellutello calls Bruni to distinguish him from Boccaccio and Landino, whom Vellutello regarded as having included too many ‘silly inventions that they made up in their own minds’ (sciocche invenzioni fabbricate da i loro propri cervelli). Solerti, Le Vite di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio, 203. For a more generous interpretation of Boccaccio’s inventions as a potential mode of access to Dante’s life, however, see Mazzotta, ‘Life of Dante’, 3–4. 2. For studies of Boccaccio’s biography in light of its literary sources, see Larner, ‘Traditions of Literary Biography’; Bartuschat, Les ‘Vies’ de Dante, P´etrarque et Boccace, which emphasizes Suetonius; Kirkham, ‘The Parallel Lives’, which argues that Boccaccio fits ‘Dante’s life into a pattern reminiscent of Virgil’s’ (244), as Landino had already suggested in his fifteenthcentury commentary, and joins it to the model of Cicero’s Pro Archia; Gross, ‘Scholar Saints and Boccaccio’s Trattatello’, which proposes the influence of lives of Thomas Aquinas, with a generous overview of previous scholarship; Bellomo, ‘Tra biografia e novellistica’; Boli, ‘Boccaccio’s Trattatello’; Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition; and Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio’. 3. All quotations from Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante identify the version according to the autograph manuscripts (Toledo for the ‘prima redazione’, Chigi for the ‘seconda redazione’) and cite the paragraph section numbers provided in Boccaccio, Vite di Dante. All translations are my own.

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4. Although both translations are based on the Toledo version of the Vita, the phrasing of this particular one does not differ from the Chigi version. The English version is from Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. Nichols, 8. The Italian translation is from Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, 6. The same error appears in another English version, Carpenter, Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, 34: ‘Then I shall sum up the works.’ An earlier English translation by Philip Wicksteed does convey the material meaning: ‘and thereafter will I gather together the works he composed’ (Life of Dante, 5). Undoubtedly reflecting on his own editorial role in publishing Tutte le opere di Dante in preparation for 1921, Michele Barbi is one of the few to have appreciated the connection between Boccaccio’s biography of Dante and his editing of Dante’s works, underlining Boccaccio’s ‘animo generoso’ and ‘la cura amorosa di un buon editore’ in his assessment (‘Qual e` la seconda redazione?’, 427). 5. Chartier, The Order of Books, 55. I say ‘modern print’ to account for the fact that the products of early print often include multiple works in a single physical volume. 6. Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, 239. 7. Chartier, The Order of Books, 58. On the question of medieval auctoritas in general, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship; on Dante’s self-fashioning of his authority, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author; on the Trecento reception of Dante’s claim, see Bara´nski, Chiosar con altro testo. For a discussion of how the construction of an author’s collected works continues to play an important role in defining both an author and literature itself in later periods, see Piper, ‘Rethinking the Print Object’, 125. 8. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. 9. For studies of the vidas and razos, see Meneghetti, Il pubblico dei trovatori; Egan, ‘Commentary, vita poetae, and vida’; Egan, ed., The Vidas of the Troubadours; Poe, ‘The Vidas and Razos’; Paden, ‘Manuscripts’; Burgwinkle, ‘Chansonniers as Books’ and Love for Sale. For a sample of these vidas in English, see Egan, ed., The Vidas of the Troubadours. Another valuable collection with Italian translations is Liborio, ed., Storie di dame e trovatori di Provenza. Critical editions of these texts can be found in Favati, ed., Le biografie trovadoriche and Bouti`ere, Cluzel, and Schutz, eds., Biographies des troubadours. On the manuscript tradition, see Avalle, I manoscritti della letteratura in lingua d’oc. Saverio Bellomo claims that the ideological purpose of the vidas is ‘la valorizzazione della poesia e del suo ruolo nella societ`a’, but this seems like a projection of the concerns of Boccaccio’s work on the earlier vidas. See Bellomo, ‘Tra biografia e novellistica’, 153. 10. Parodi, ‘Il Boccaccio in laude di Dante’, 184: ‘La prima difesa della poesia in lingua moderna.’ On the accessus tradition, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship as well as the translations of examples in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, eds, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 12–36. 11. On the Raccolta and its contents, see Barbi, ‘La Raccolta Aragonese’; De Robertis, ‘La Raccolta Aragonese’ and ‘Lorenzo aragonese’; and Macciocca, ‘Il Palatino 204’.

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12. Poliziano also borrows liberally from Boccaccio’s text in the dedicatory letter to the Raccolta, although these presences have seldom been noted, probably because Poliziano is more explicit about his borrowings from Petrarch (esp. Fam. 1.1). Poliziano begins with the same praise of ancient civilizations for honoring their worthy citizens with monuments and repeats Boccaccio’s assertions later in the Vita about the power of poets to make political figures immortal. In counterpoint to Boccaccio’s characterization of the republic as wobbling because it has failed to honor its poets, Poliziano presents the example of the Greek leader Pisistratus who reassembled the Homeric poems (‘con soma diligenza e esamine tutto il corpo del santissimo poeta insieme raccolse’) that in his time had been ‘almost dismembered’. Like Pisistratus, Lorenzo and Poliziano have honoured poets by gathering them together. For a discussion of Poliziano’s literary history in the Nutricia in the context of Villani and Landino, see Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli, 74–76. 13. In the paperback version of Pier Giorgio Ricci’s standard critical edition of the work, for example, the cover and title page refer to the book as Vite di Dante, while within the volume and in the table of contents it is called the Trattatello. The title ‘trattatello’ is often used for works on rhetoric, as can be seen in the list given in Cox, ‘Ciceronian Rhetoric in Late Medieval Italy’, 138–43. Baldan, ‘Introduzione’, 3 argues that the recent preference for the title Trattatello instead of Vita suggests an interest in promoting the work as part of the sphere of philosophical debate instead of the traditional biography, but this philosophical dimension has not really received that much attention, because the biography tends to be read by those interested more in Dante than Boccaccio. 14. This kind of proverbial beginning does not appear in accessus ad auctores or in the Lives of Vergil, but it is sometimes recommended in the ars dictaminis tradition. On these suggestions to use proverbs, see Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 233–35. For Boccaccio’s use of this model of the chria or sententia, see Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages, 132. On the sententiae in general, see Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 57–59. For an overview of the ars dictaminis tradition, also see Witt, ‘The Arts of Letter-writing’. 15. Boccaccio possessed Aristotle’s Politics in William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation (Mazza, ‘L’inventario della parva libreria’, 15), so he knew Aristotle’s discussion of the relationship between the individual and the state using the analogy with the body (1253a18). For a complete edition of Moerbeke’s version, see Susemihl, ed., Aristoteles Politicorum Libri Octo. On the metaphor of the body politic, see Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; Najemy, ‘The Republic’s Two Bodies’; Hale, ‘Analogy of the Body Politic’; and Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art, 61–115. 16. For brief mentions of the connections between Petrarch’s letter, Boccaccio’s response, and the Vita, but without any further development, see Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio’, 116–17, and Auzzas, ‘Studi sulle epistole I’, 219–20.

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17. Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters, 1: 431. Petrarch received the news on May 23, 1349, when a messenger arrived at his residence in Parma ‘during a very intense storm, wet with rain and with tears’ (Fam. 8.9) to tell him about the death of his friend, Mainardo Accursio, whom he called Simplicianus, at the hands of robbers on ‘a summit of the Apennines’. For biographical overviews of this episode, see Wilkins, Life of Petrarch; Foresti, Aneddoti della vita di Francesco Petrarca, 239 and 275; and Dotti, Vita di Petrarca, 206–10. Petrarch’s placement of the letter to Florence as the final letter of book 8 of the Familiares makes it the tragic conclusion to Petrarch’s plans to live together with his friends recounted in that book. On Petrarch’s rewriting of these letters and their arrangement in the collection, see Fenzi, ‘Petrarca e la scrittura dell’amicizia’, 581–82. When Petrarch revised the original letter to become Fam. 8.10, he eliminated most of the letter’s circumstantial information, like Mainardo’s name and a final paragraph requesting more information about Mainardo’s companion, Luca Christiani, who, Petrarch later learned, did survive the attack. In this earlier version, Petrarch blames himself for Mainardo’s death: ‘solus ego, ut mihi videor, totius infortunii causa fui’. Fracassetti prints this original version as Var. 53, which has a slightly different construction of the passage, reading solum instead of Solon: ‘sed in his duobus maxime quibus solum sapientissimus legislator ait’ (Petrarca, Lettere, 3:453). I have not been able to consult the manuscript witnesses that Fracassetti lists (xxiii, lxxv) as containing this version of the letter with ‘solum’ instead of ‘Solon’, all of which are in the Vatican (1935, 2951, 3355, 4518, 4523, 4527, 5221, 5621). Rossi’s omission of this variant from his edition of the earlier version, however, suggests that he also thought the lectio difficilior of Solon was in the original letter. Even if the original did not mention Solon explicitly, the allusion to him as the ‘sapientissimus legislator’ would be hard to mistake. For more discussion of Fam. 8.10, see Le familiari, 2:1158–73. 18. In several letters (Fam. 24.2–4), Petrarch celebrates the discovery of the collection of Cicero’s correspondence, which contains Ad Brutum, Ad Quintum fratrem, the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Octavianum, and Ad Atticum, and in another letter (Fam. 21.10.16), he mentions transcribing it. Neither the Verona manuscript that Petrarch discovered nor Petrarch’s copy of it survive, but Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, 49.18 appears to be a copy of Petrarch’s copy. In that manuscript (c. 8r), the passage reads ‘neque solum ut solonis dictum usurpem qui est et sapientissimus fuit ex septem et legum scriptor solus ex septem. Is rem publicam contineri duabus rebus dixit, praemio et pena’ (And I do not rely solely on the dictum of Solon, who was at once the wisest of the Seven and the only lawgiver among them. He said that a state was kept together by two things – reward and punishment). 19. Although the idea of the body politic was ubiquitous, Petrarch’s letter responding to the Florentine offer (now Fam. 11.5) may reveal the source of his use of the image of the body politic that he adds to Cicero. He quotes Plutarch’s letter to the Emperor Trajan, which he likely knew from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, which contains an extensive discussion of the members of the

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20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

Notes to pages 32–33 body politic, in which the feet are the people. Petrarch also quotes from this text in his letter to Quintillian (Fam. 24.7) and mentions it in his letter to Seneca (Fam. 24.5). For a bibliography on pseudo-Plutarchan epistle, see Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives. Nederman, ‘Aristotelianism and the Origins of “Political Science”’, 192 suggests that the putative Plutarchan source may be ‘a fabrication on John’s part’. For the note of Mainardo’s death, which is the second entry in the second column on c. 1r, see Baglio, Testa, and Petoletti, eds, Francesco Petrarca: Le Postille del Virgilio Ambrosiano, fig. 1 (for a reproduction) and 185 (for a transcription). Petrarch registers Laura’s death on c. 1v. For a facsimile of the whole codex, see Galbiati, ed., Francisci Petrarcae Vergilianvs codex. Matteo Villani mentions Mainardo’s death in his Cronica (1.23). Petrarch’s complaint yielded results when, in 1349, the Florentine councils ‘voted to allocate 450 florins to purchase various war machines to retaliate and destroy’ the Ubaldini. Cohn, Creating the Florentine State, 174. In a paper delivered to the medieval group of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, in spring 2008, William Caffero suggested that these campaigns against the Ubaldini could be called ‘Petrarch’s War’. During his stay in Florence, Petrarch read poetry to his other Florentine admirers in addition to Boccaccio, including Lapo da Castiglionchio, Francesco Nelli, and Zanobi da Strada. On Petrarch’s poetry reading, see Cochin, ed., Un ami de P´etrarque, 206. Also see Petrarca, Le Familiari, 2:324n. Petrarch sent the metrical epistle to Boccaccio on January 7, 1351, along with what is now Fam. 11.2. From the signature to the original version of the letter, one learns that Petrarch received a ring as a gift from Boccaccio during his visit in Florence: ‘Peregrinus tuus quem anulo insignisti.’ This kind of gift was not unusual, according to Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 135 n. 2. Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters, 2:86. The letter is dated November 2, 1350. For Petrarch’s earlier fall from a horse in 1345 that first caused this injury, see Fam. 5.10. For a reading of Petrarch’s limp in the Secretum in light of the patristic tradition that Freccero outlines in his interpretation of Dante’s ‘pi`e fermo’, in which the left foot is affectus and the right foot is intellectus, see Rosenberg, ‘Petrarch’s Limping’. For an association of the limp of Fam. 8.10 with Dante’s limp in the Commedia, see Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 126–27. This same wound must have been aggravated by the attack of Petrarch’s volume of Cicero’s letters in 1359 (see Disp. 46). On this attack, see Spitzer, ‘The Problem of Latin Renaissance Poetry’, 120–25; Jed, Chaste Thinking; Hinds, ‘Petrarch, Cicero, Virgil’ and ‘Defamiliarizing Latin Literature’, and Martinez, ‘Petrarch’s Lame Leg’. In addition to Petrarch’s letter to Florence (Fam. 8.10), Boccaccio draws on two other Petrarch letters in his response: Petrarch’s metrical epistle to Zanobi da Strada (Epyst. 3.8), in which he complains that the Florentines had failed to honor him properly in contrast to the enthusiastic welcomes he has received both in Italy and abroad, and Petrarch’s letter to Luca Cristiani (later split

Notes to pages 33–34

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

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into Fam. 8.2–5), where Petrarch provides a mini bio-bibliography of the works he composed while in Vaucluse and proposes a few places where he and his friends (Luca, Mainardo, and Socrates) might live together. Among these possible locations, he proposes Parma and Padua while also praising the nearby cities of Bologna, Piacenza, Milan, Genova, Venice, and Treviso, but without ever mentioning Florence. For the connection to the letter to Zanobi, see Feo, ed., Codici latini del Petrarca, 356. For Boccaccio’s knowledge of the letter to Luca Cristiani, see Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 92 n. 3. ‘We want to give you your ancestral lands, and we want to give them redeemed from private citizens by public expense, without any restriction, as a sign of liberal paternal love.’ For a discussion of the debates surrounding the establishment of the university, see Brucker, ‘Florence and its University, 1348–1434’. On the founding of the Studio in Florence, see also Villani, Nuova cronica, 1:17. For an interpretation of Boccaccio’s offer to Petrarch of the position as head of Studio as a proposal that he comment on his own Africa, see Feo, ed., Codici latini del Petrarca, 355. ‘Munus quidem parvum si ad rem respicias, si ad civitatis nostre leges ac mores, quique hoc cives assequi nequivissent, non modica laudum tuarum gratificatione pensandum.’ For Boccaccio’s visit to Dante’s daughter Beatrice, see Piattoli, Codice diplomatico dantesco, 284–85. Also see Ricci, L’ultimo rifugio di Dante Alighieri, 213–16; Bacci, Il Boccaccio lettore di Dante, 5; and Branca, Giovanni Boccaccio, 83. Although Auzzas dates Boccaccio’s letter (Ep. 7) to April 19, 1351, in her edition, it does not seem logical that it would precede Petrarch’s reply (now Fam. 11.5), dated to April 5, 1351, unless Petrarch altered the date for this letter as he did for several others. For the proposal that the De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia was part of Boccaccio’s campaign of promoting Petrarch’s possible return to Florence in the late 1340s, see Fabbri, ‘Introduzione’, 883, as well as the further discussion in Usher, ‘Monuments More Enduring than Bronze’, 26–28. There is still debate over the date of composition of the De Vita. For an alternative dating of the biography to 1341–42, see Velli, ‘Il De Vita et moribus’, 32 and Feo, ed., Codici latini del Petrarca, 346. Feo proposes the early date of the De Vita Petracchi on the basis of the remark that the text was written when Petrarch was in Parma ‘cum Azone de Corigio’, which could mean that it precedes Petrarch’s departure from there in 1345: ‘Esso e` stato scritto non nel 1347–49 (come credono Mass`era e altri), bens`ı nel 1341–42 o nel 1344.’ Fabbri acknowledges Feo’s claims but does not find his interpretation of the phrase convincing. She argues that Boccaccio could just as easily be interpreted to mean that Petrarch was again in Parma, which he was in 1348. Even if Boccaccio had written much of the biography earlier, he could well have revised an earlier text for this new occasion. What is important is that both the Petrarch and Dante biographies are motivated by similar goals of bringing both poets back to Florence.

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31. On Petrarch’s rewriting and correction of Boccaccio’s De Vita in his Letter to Posterity, see Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 135–43; Rico, ‘Il nucleo della Posteritati (e le autobiografie di Petrarca)’; Villani, ‘Introduzione’, 32–35; Veglia, ‘Vite parallele’. It is significant that the only copy of the De Vita comes from a Petrarchan environment (Fabbri, ed. 945). 32. For Hans Baron, the conflict between Florentine republican liberty and the tyranny of Milan fostered the development of ‘civic humanism’. For discussion of this widely debated thesis, see Hankins, ‘The “Baron Thesis” after Forty Years’ and Renaissance Civic Humanism. 33. Boccaccio must have read Petrarch’s Disp. 19 (Var. 7), which Petrarch sent either to the Florentine circle (and directly to Francesco Nelli) or to the Neapolitan circle around Zanobi da Strada. See Petrarca, Lettere disperse, 130 n. 2. Nelli’s claim in a letter to Petrarch to have a more balanced view of the matter than other Florentines suggests that Boccaccio was not alone in his outrage (Cochin, ed., Un ami de P´etrarque, 192–93). For an overview of their protests and an explanation of Petrarch’s decision, see Wilkins, Petrarch’s Eights Years in Milan, 9–15. The continued exchange of manuscripts after 1353 seems to indicate that the rupture between Boccaccio and Petrarch was only temporary (see Auzzas, ed., Epistole, 792 n. 35). By May 11 1355, Petrarch acknowledges having received a massive manuscript of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos (now Paris lat. 1989 1–2) as a gift from Boccaccio (Fam. 18.3), and some time later a manuscript with Varro and Cicero (Fam. 18.4). 34. Ep. 10.5: ‘Tu sacris vacabas studiis.’ According to Auzzas, sacris studiis is Boccaccio’s usual term for literary studies. Boccaccio uses the same verb vacare in Gen. 15.10.10 to describe his dedication to poets. 35. During his 1351 stay with Petrarch in Padova Boccaccio likely transcribed Fam. 24.3–6, 8, and 10 (Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 8). He seems to allude directly to this correspondence in Ep. 10: ‘Mirarer minus, se ab eo in Ciceronem atque Anneum decantata non audissem’ (I would be less amazed if I hadn’t heard him blame Cicero and Seneca), referring to Fam. 24.3–5. Likewise, his later references to Monicus and Socrates (Ep. 10.29) allude to Petrarch’s Fam. 10.4. 36. In the context of Petrarch’s move to Milan, Boccaccio’s praise of solitude in the Vita di Dante is less an attempt to describe Dante in Petrarchan terms, as Todd Boli (‘Boccaccio’s Trattatello’) argues, than an accusation that Petrarch is not following his own principles. 37. ‘Nemo me melius novit: medius fui talium atque curator, et muneris oblati portitor’ (Ep. 10.24). Boccaccio goes on to argue that the danger of Petrarch’s behavior is that it reflects badly not only on those who vouched for him, like Boccaccio, but also on poets more generally. In Disp. 40, Petrarch claims that he will explain the reasons of his move to Milan in a ‘libellum de vitae meae cursu’ (a little book on the course of my life) that some identify with the Letter to Posterity (Sen. 18.1). 38. Boccaccio would attempt to bring Petrarch to Florence again in 1365 by obtaining a canonry for him, although this effort also failed. On this episode, see Wilkins, Life of Petrarch, 197, Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch,

Notes to pages 35–36

39.

40.

41.

42.

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27–28, and Petrarch’s Later Years, 82–83; see also Billanovich, Restauri boccacceschi, 170–73. Some scholars have attended to the broader historical context in which Boccaccio produces this biography. For example, Boli, ‘Boccaccio’s Trattatello’ sees the work as participating ‘in a controversy that is already well established’ (395) about Dante, but even as he recognizes the work’s defensive purpose, which he contrasts with Billanovich’s emphasis on its legendary qualities, he is more concerned with tracing putatively Petrarchan influences than in reconstructing the Petrarchan context in which the work is written. For a more detailed analysis of the civic context, see Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 105–47. The version of the first paragraph in Toledo 104.6 is emblematic. It begins with the same Solonic saying about reward and punishment found in the Chigi, but ends on a bleaker note, foretelling the potential fall of the republic: ‘se per isciagura si peccasse in amendue, quasi certissimo avea, quella non potere stare in alcun modo’ (Toledo 1). This unjust republic that does not honor its poets like Dante and keeps others in exile like Petrarch, will not have, to modify a modern expression, a foot to stand on. For a full discussion of these changes, see Ricci, ‘Le tre redazioni del Trattatello’; De Robertis, ‘Sulla tradizione del “2 Compendio” della Vita di Dante del Boccaccio’; Barbi, ‘Qual e` la seconda redazione?’, 404–05; Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio’, 127; and Ricci, ‘Introduzione’, xi–xiv. There is also a third version of the Vita, printed by Ricci as ‘seconda redazione B’ in his edition, that does not exist in a Boccaccian autograph. It expands on the reduced Chigi version in the section devoted to the defense of poetry, adding both a fourth quality to the laurel as divinatory or prophetic, which Petrarch had already proposed in his Coronation Oration, and a quotation from Paradiso (124–26) on the need for human diversity, which is one of Boccaccio’s arguments for the need for poetry in his other defenses and is also quoted by him in his commentary on Inf. 1 (Esp. 1.all.14). Before Ricci, the chronological relationship between these two briefer versions had been the subject of some critical debate, which creates terminological problems. Barbi, for example, thought that what is now considered the third version was actually an intermediate stage between the long Toledo version and the briefer Chigi version, so he refers to the Chigi version as the ‘secondo compendio’ (Barbi, ‘Qual e` la seconda redazione?’). To avoid any potential confusion, I refer to the two versions by their autographs with the corresponding paragraph numbers in Ricci’s edition. Paolazzi’s argument in ‘Petrarca, Boccaccio e il Trattatello’ builds on the narrative proposed by Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 269. Whereas in the Toledo version, Boccaccio claims that Dante had brought dead poetry to life and returned the banished Muses and emphasizes Dante’s familiarity with Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Statius (Toledo 19 and 22), in the Chigi he eliminates these arguments. Boccaccio had already placed Dante among those same ancient poets at the end of the Filocolo (5.97), usually dated 1336–38, where Dante’s

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44.

45. 46.

47.

Notes to pages 36–37 ‘misurati versi’ situates him among the ‘alti ingegni’ (great geniuses) in contrast to Boccaccio’s humble prose. Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 140. McLaughlin, ‘Latin and Vernacular’, 614. McLaughlin makes the same argument in Literary Imitation, 54–59; ‘Humanism and Italian Literature’, 228–29; and ‘Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance’, 46–48. For a more moderate position, see Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, 41, who argues that ‘under the influence of Petrarch, Boccaccio no longer found it acceptable to relate the classical canon as directly and emphatically to a work of vernacular poetry as he had a decade earlier’. De Robertis, ‘Petrarca interprete di Dante’, 50 n. 7. It is not clear whether Boccaccio ever received Fam. 21.15 since in a 1366 letter to Petrarch, he identifies a letter ‘de Dante’ as among those letters ‘quas nunquam habui, etiam si a te misse sunt’ (Ep. 15). Petrarch’s letter is addressed to a larger audience in any case and Boccaccio clearly knew about its contents. Paolazzi suggests that this letter ‘de Dante’ may be a different letter by Petrarch that does not survive that discussed the title of the Commedia, according to Francesco de Buti’s commentary on the Commedia. On Buti’s note, also see Alessio, ‘Hec Franciscus de Buiti’, 104. Buti’s reference might be explained as part of the later confusion that attributed epitaphs on Dante to Petrarch. Whether or not Boccaccio read Fam. 21.15, the first lines of Petrarch’s letter (Fam. 21.15) suggest that Boccaccio was already in the process of modifying his claims about Dante in order to satisfy Petrarch. The absence of these invectives in the Chigi version has tended to be explained only in political terms by critics. See Bruni, Boccaccio, 421–22 n. 19. Boccaccio’s account follows the explanation that Dante himself provides in the Letter of Fra Ilaro, which Boccaccio transcribed in his Zibaldone Laurenziano in the early 1340s (c. 67r). For the argument that Boccaccio takes the letter to be authentic, see Storey, ‘Contesti e culture testuali’. For the argument that the letter of Ilaro is Boccaccio’s fiction, based on Dante’s Convivio (1.9.5), see Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio’, 69. For a brief review of these debates, along with a valuable edition and Italian translation of the letter, see Arduini and Storey, ‘Edizione diplomatico-interpretativa della lettera di frate Ilaro (Laur. xxix 8, c. 67r)’. The transcription dates to 1341–44, according to Zamponi, Pantarotto, and Tomiello, ‘Stratigrafia dello Zibaldone’. In his biography Bruni argues that Dante chose the vernacular because his Latin wasn’t good enough: ‘Dante conosceva s´e medesimo molto pi`u atto a questo stile vulgare in rime che a quello latino e litterato.’ Several other Dante commentaries, like Benvenuto da Imola, quote Dante’s Latin beginning, likely following Boccaccio’s similar report in the Esposizioni (Accessus 74–77). Filippo Villani reports a story he heard from his father that Dante compared his Latin works to those of the nobile castello and found them lacking; see Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, 75–76. There are also Latin translations of the poem before 1343, like that published by Witte, ed., Dantis Alligherii Divina Comoedia hexametris latinis reddita. In the earlier Toledo version, Boccaccio does not make this point about Dante’s poem having a more than surface meaning, concluding simply that Dante ‘in

Notes to pages 37–39

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

147

istile atto a’ moderni sensi ricominci`o la sua opera’ (began to write his work again in a style adapted to modern tastes; Toledo 192), but he will repeat the idea in the Esposizioni (Accessus 77: ‘nella corteccia di fuori’). For a different interpretation of Boccaccio’s varied presentations of Dante’s decision to write in the vernacular, see Tanturli, ‘Il Petrarca e Firenze’. Boccaccio makes the same claim for the utility of the vernacular in Ytalie iam certus honos, as does Dante in Convivio (1.9). Why the peacock? ‘In its Christian glory,’ Victoria Kirkham notes in an erudite survey of the fowl’s meaning, ‘the bird-of-the-long-tail acquired meaning as an emblem of eternal afterlife’ (Fabulous Vernacular, 226). Boccaccio’s source for this idea is Petrarch’s De remediis (1.62), behind which is probably Augustine’s De civitate dei (21.4). The peacock also suggests the problem of poetic genealogy via metempsychosis, since Ennius, in one of the few surviving passages of his work, thought he became a peacock, which is read as a sign of his being an ‘alter Homerus’. For a discussion of this tradition, see Usher, ‘Metempsychosis and ‘Renaissance’ between Petrarch and Boccaccio’, 133 and Usher, ‘Petrarch’s Second (and Third) Death’. For a discussion of how metempsychosis combines with a genealogy of poetry and wisdom, see Murphy, The Gift of Immortality, 115. For a wide-ranging discussion of the curious subgenre of the dream of the peacock, see Sasso, Il sogno del pavone. Boccaccio uses revelatory dreams in many of his fictions, like Filocolo 4.74; Comedia 35.84; Filostrato 7.23; Dec. 4.5, 4.6, 9.7; and the Amorosa Visione and Corbaccio in their entireties. The dream of Virgil’s mother appears in both the Donatus and Suetonius versions of Virgil’s biography. See Ziolkowski and Putnam, eds., The Virgilian Tradition, 181–99. For a reading of Boccaccio’s Dante biography in terms of the Virgilian model, see Landino’s commentary and Kirkham, ‘The Parallel Lives’. Boccaccio’s use of this Virgilian tradition of the dream thus situates Dante in a literary context that pointedly contrasts with the Biblical context that Guido da Pisa emphasizes in the Prologue to his commentary where he claims that Dante’s poem fulfills Biblical visions recorded in the books of Daniel and Ezekiel. For an English translation of Guido’s text, see Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, eds, Medieval Literary Theory, 469–70. In the Toledo version of the Vita, Boccaccio records this dream at the beginning of the work when telling of Dante’s birth, probably because such a dream appears in that place in Boccaccio’s likely source, Donatus’ Life of Vergil: ‘While pregnant with him, his mother dreamed that she gave birth to a laurel branch, which took root when it touched the earth and sprang up on the spot into the form of a full-grown tree, stuffed with diverse fruits and flowers’ (Ziolkowski and Putnam, eds, The Virgilian Tradition, 190). In the text of the Toledo the word ‘pare’ follows ‘prima facie’ but Boccaccio leaves it out as understood in the Chigi and Ricci adds a bracketed ‘[pare]’ in his edition, which I follow here. For the larger traditions of the dream of the pregnant mother, see Lanzoni, ‘Il sogno presago’. Like Boccaccio’s careful invocation of it, the trasgressione is itself a rhetorical trope, as Boccaccio acknowledges in the Genealogie (15.7; Osgood 118). In the Preface to the Genealogie, Boccaccio similarly underlines the structural novelty of the last two books, which are distinguished from the first thirteen because

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53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

Notes to pages 39–42 they constitute defenses of poetry. By singling out these books, Boccaccio calls attention to their presence rhetorically and structurally while also emphasizing their importance to the whole. Kant, ‘Conjectural Beginning of Human History’. For the borrowings from Fam. 10.4 in the Vita di Dante, see Hortis, Studi sulle opere latine del Boccaccio, 187 and Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 123. For an excellent comparison, see Squarotti, ‘Le poetiche del trecento in Italia’, 312. For Petrarch’s own conflicting views on the status of the poet, see Baglio, Testa, and Petoletti, eds, Francesco Petrarca: Le Postille del Virgilio Ambrosiano, 311: ‘L’accusa ai poeti di essere “medaces et sacrilegos” viene ripetuta in Afr. 9.103–5 e in Epyst. 2.2.23 e 2.10.155; per contro la sacralit`a della poesia e il suo rapporto con la teologia vengono invece riconosciuti nella Fam. 10.4, al fratello Gherardo.’ For Petrarch’s insistence on the superiority of religious over secular poetry, see Fam. 22.10. For further discussion, see Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 148–88 and Schildgen, ‘Petrarch’s Defense of Secular Letters’. On Gherardo and Petrarch, see Ascoli, ‘Petrarch’s Middle Age’ and ‘Blinding the Cyclops’. Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, 31. Petrarch also suggests a connection between poetry and theology in his Coronation Oration, where he distinguishes his treatment of Virgil as ‘without those minute distinctions that are usually to be found in theological declamations’ (Wilkins, ‘Petrarch’s Coronation Oration’, 1242). Some of this narrative about the origins of poetry likely also derives from the beginning of Cicero’s De inventione. ‘Questa adunque fu la prima origine della poesia e del suo nome, e per conseguente de’ poeti, come che altri n’assegnino altre ragioni forse buone: ma questa mi piace pi`u’ (Chigi 86). Boccaccio’s argument may derive from Augustine’s argument against Varro that ‘Those who divided up temporal tasks between the gods did so because they wished to encourage the foolish populace to worship them’ (De Civitate Dei 6.1). Another source could be the first book of Livy’s Ab urbe condita, which is concerned with the creation of divine ancestors as part of the founding of a civilization, most fully elaborated in the structural parallel Livy establishes between Romulus’ descent from Mars and Hercules’ deification. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 271. Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 123. Baldan, ‘Introduzione’, xiv, and Stone, The Ethics of Nature, 170. Baldan’s interpretation would entail a post-dating of the biography itself to after Zanobi da Strada’s coronation in 1355. Because ellipses occupy this space in Chaucerian Polity, I quote Wallace’s fuller translation from Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, eds, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 494: ‘to urge virtuous behaviour upon everyone (an appeal which would have had an opposite effect if framed in plain language) employed various and masterly fictions (little understood by dimwits today, let alone

Notes to page 42

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by the dimwits of that period), thereby causing to be believed that which the princes wished to be believed.’ Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 123: ‘and induce all to act virtuously, which had they spoken plainly would have had the effect opposite to the one they intended, made various and masterful fictions. These fictions, misunderstood by the coarse today not to mention those of that time, made the people believe what the princes wanted them to believe.’ In his translation of the passage, Stone omits these phrases. 65. Boccaccio formulates the discussions of difficulty quite differently in the Toledo and Chigi. In the Toledo version, poetry persuades those who would not be persuaded by philosophical demonstrations. In the Chigi, the beauty of the work attracts men to read it and the hidden meaning scares them into fleeing vice and following virtue. Toledo 152: ‘Manifesta cosa e` che ogni cosa, che con fatica s’acquista, avere alquanto pi`u di dolcezza che quella che vien senza affanno. La verit`a piana, perci`o ch’`e tosto compresa con piccole forze, diletta e passa nella memoria. Adunque, acci`o che con fatica acquistata fosse pi`u grata, e perci`o meglio si conservasse, li poeti sotto cose molto ad essa contrarie apparenti, la nascosero; e perci`o favole fecero, pi`u che altra coperta, perch´e la bellezza di quelle attraesse coloro, li quali n´e le dimostrazioni filosofiche, n´e le persuasioni avevano potuto a s´e tirare.’ Chigi 101: ‘Nelle quali fizioni assai chiaro mostrano d’ingegnarsi, con la bellezza dell’uno, di trar gli uomini a virtuosamente operare per acquistarlo, e, con la oscurit`a dell’altro, spaventargli, acci`o che per paura di quella si ritraggano da’ vizii e seguitin le virt`u.’ 66. There is a further ambiguity in this passage. If the grossi do not understand the real message, how can poets persuade everyone (‘ciascuno’) to act virtuously (Toledo 136)? To eliminate this tension Boccaccio revises this passage in the Chigi, stating that poets write ‘s`ı ancora per suadere agl’intendenti il virtuosamente operare’ (to persuade those with understanding; Chigi 89), not ‘everyone’ (ciascuno). Baldan, ‘Pentimento ed espiazione di un pubblico lettore (Boccaccio e la Commedia dantesca)’, 33 argues that this revision restricts the potential audience of poetry, because it no longer refers to everyone, but it seems more convincing to view this change as establishing a more rigorous contrast between the limitations of the stupid (‘grossi’) and the intelligent (‘gl’intendenti’) who grasp that the work has a hidden meaning. In other words, the intelligent understand that it expresses the need to act virtuously while the stupid think it only praises the princes. 67. Boccaccio’s mode of argument here seems to recall Dante’s discussion of Plato’s idea of astral origin and destination of the soul, which Beatrice claims may simply have been misunderstood since what Plato really wanted to communicate may have been astral influence. Even the verbal texture of the passage suggests parallels: ‘Questo principio, male inteso, torse / gi`a tutto il mondo quasi, s`ı che Giove, / Mercurio e Marte a nominar trascorse’ (Par. 4.61–63). Given that this episode represents one of Dante’s more direct treatments of classical philosophy and the classical gods, it is not surprising that Boccaccio remembered it so well. This interpretation of the passage as a critique of

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68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

Notes to pages 42–45 Petrarch proposed by Wallace and Ginsberg, furthermore, stands in tension with Boccaccio’s celebration of Petrarch’s ability to persuade princes to pursue poetry in De Vita 13 and Gen. 14.22. Virgil is a good example, since he appears to write poetry that celebrates the tyrant Augustus and could be believed by the stupid to deify Augustus, but his poem is really an allegory of the education of the human soul, according to the popular medieval interpretations of Fulgentius and Bernard Silvestris. Boccaccio provides similar interpretations in Gen. 14.10 and 14.13, where he makes the case, in a discussion of why Virgil made up his account of Dido in the Aeneid, that one can explain the text from artistic, ethical, political, and prophetic perspectives (Osgood 67–69). Similarly, Virgil appears to be a polytheist who writes about many gods, but he seems to have intuited that there was just one, as medieval interpretations of Eclogue 4 argue. Fulgentius brings all of these concerns together in his early sixth-century commentary on the poem, which Boccaccio knew, and Boccaccio was also familiar, of course, with Dante’s staging of Virgil’s text as salvific in his account of Statius’ conversion. For the medieval interpretation of Eclogue 4, see Ziolkowski and Putnam, eds, The Virgilian Tradition, 487–503. For Dante’s moral reading of the Aeneid, see Convivio 4.23. For a broader discussion of Boccaccio’s defense of classical myth, see Garin, ‘Le favole antiche’, 63–75. Boccaccio will quote the same passage from Gregory the Great in the Esposizioni (1.all.18–25; Papio 82–3), where he quotes it in Latin to define allegory. Pietro Alighieri quotes from the same paragraph of Gregory (but not the same image) in his commentary; see Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, eds, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 480. See, for example, Augustine’s defense of using pagan thought in the De doctrina christiana (2.40.144). In the Esposizioni, Boccaccio does not include the information about these dedications, although he continues to rely on Frate Ilaro’s explanation for why Dante chose to write in the vernacular. Although this representation of the literary work as a monument goes back to Horace’s ‘exegi monumentum aere perennius’ (I have erected a monument more permanent than bronze; Odes 3.30.1), the analogy between artistic representations of political and religious communities and the construction of a literary tradition is interesting in the context of the Trecento. For the possible influence of the contemporaneous decoration of Santa Maria Novella on Boccaccio’s biography, for example, see Gross, ‘Scholar Saints and Boccaccio’s Trattatello’. Municipal monumental art flourishes in this period in the frescoes of Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the town hall of Siena from 1338 and in the sculptures from the same decades (1330s and 1340s) on the Campanile of Florence’s own cathedral by Andrea Pisano. On the former, see Starn and Partridge, ‘The Republican Regime’; Starn, Ambrogio Lorenzetti; Norman, Siena, Florence, and Padua. On the latter, Trachtenberg, Campanile of Florence Cathedral. See also Benes, Urban Legends.

Notes to page 46

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74. Kirkham, ‘The Parallel Lives’, 238. For Kirkham, the choice is motivated by two external factors: that there should only be one epitaph, as Boccaccio himself claims in the Toledo Vita, and that del Virgilio was Dante’s friend. In Toledo 104.6, he also transcribes the epitaph verse per line (c. 11r). For Boccaccio’s interest in the layout of these transcriptions, see Usher, ‘Monuments More Enduring than Bronze’. Usher notes that Boccaccio records Petrarch’s Collatio during his coronation in his Zibaldone laurenziano, f. 73r in rustic capitals, which he usually uses only for titles or rubrics and marks the importance of the occasion. Curiously ‘Petrarch turned to the Gothic graphic tradition and book-style layout of the day’ for the epitaph of his nephew (Petrucci, Public Lettering, 15), not the more classical Carolingian script that he often celebrated. For more on this episode, see Petrucci, Writing the Dead, 66–67. On sepulchral inscriptions more generally, see Ruini, ‘Tra epitaffio ed epigrafe’. The epitaph fits Boccaccio’s interests in monumental writing, particularly in Latin verse, as in the dialogue of his early Elegia di Costanza, in which a dead girl speaks from her tomb; his epitaph for Pino and Ciampi della Tosa; and his own autoepitaph, whose final words ‘studium fuit alma poesis’ express the zeal for poetry that his transcriptions materialize. 75. The other epitaphs were likely Jura Monarchiae (ante 1355, according to the explicit in Laur. 40.22) and Inclita Fama (ante 1378). Both epitaphs single out the Commedia and Monarchia for particular mention and allude to Dante’s afterlife. Inclita fama mentions the vernacular (Dante is ‘conditor eloquii lumenque decusque latini’ translated by Campana as ‘fondatore e onore e lume della lingua italiana’), but Jura Monarchiae omits it. On the other hand, Jura Monarchiae emphasizes his exile, which is not mentioned in Inclita fama. Theologus Dantes also mentions the Commedia and Monarchia, but is the only one to mention the Latin eclogues: laicis rhetoricisique modis’. All three, in deference to Dante’s own text, mention stars. 76. For the argument that Boccaccio is misinformed about the presence or absence of inscriptions on Dante’s tomb, see Campana, ‘Epitafi’. For a dismissal of the claim that Jura Monarchiae was transcribed there, see Bellomo, ‘Parvi Florentia mater amoris: Gli epitafi sul sepolcro di Dante’, 24 n. 20. For an edition of Inclita fama, with some discussion of its circulation, see Mazzoni, ‘Per il testo dell’epitafio dantesco Inclita fama’. Whether or not these epitaphs appeared on real tombs, they were often transcribed in manuscripts of Dante’s works; see the catalogue in Boschi Rotiroti, Codicologia trecentesca della ‘Commedia’. 77. The authenticity of Giovanni del Virgilio’s epitaph was most fully questioned by Rossi, ‘Dante, Boccaccio e la laurea poetica’. Paolazzi, ‘Dall’epitafio dantesco’ uses the evidence that Rossi adduced to show Boccaccio’s authorship to address the time Boccaccio came to know the epitaph. If Boccacccio did write it, though, the question would be why he chose to conceal his authorship and attribute it to Giovanni del Virgilio in the first place. On the echoes of Theologus Dantes in the portrait of Dante in the Amorosa visione, see Paolazzi, ‘Dall’epitafio dantesco’. On its echoes in Ytalie iam certus honos, see

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78.

79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

Notes to pages 48–50 Carducci, ‘Della varia fortuna di Dante’. For the argument that Boccaccio invents all of these texts, see Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio’; Rossi, ‘Boccaccio autore della corrispondenza Dante-Giovanni del Virgilio’; ‘Dossier di un’attribuzione’; and, more recently, Ginzburg, ‘Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande and Its Two Authors’. For a discussion of the importance of del Virgilio’s epitaph, see Ascoli, ‘Blinding the Cyclops’, 117–20; De Lisio, ‘Dante nell’epitaffio’; and Velli, ‘Sul linguaggio letterario di Giovanni del Virgilio’. Boccaccio repeats the story of the recovered canti of the Commedia in his Esposizioni but with a different protagonist. On this change, see Barbi, ‘Qual e` la seconda redazione?’, 412. Boccaccio’s story is the basis for the reconstruction of the poem’s circulation in Padoan, Il lungo cammino, 3–123. For studies that seem to confirm both of Boccaccio’s stories, see Ciccuto, ‘Minima boccacciana’. Bartuschat, Les ‘Vies’ de Dante, P´etrarque et Boccace, 69. For the claim that both of these passages constitute ‘miracles’ that derive from the hagiographical tradition, see Larner, ‘Traditions of Literary Biography’, 113, but he gives no precise sources for his claim. Although stories like the Visio S. Pauli depend on the topos of the discovered manuscript, there are few hagiographies that involve the same kind of textual recovery of an author’s work described here. It is interesting to note that Boccaccio discovers Peter Damian in the same city, Ravenna, that Jacopo finds the end of the Commedia. On the book imagery in Dante, beyond the discussion in Curtius, ‘The Book as Symbol’, see Ahern, ‘Binding the Book’. For another miraculous vision at the end of a work, see Vita nuova 42.1. Boccaccio similarly dramatizes the Promethean task of collecting classical myths in the Genealogie (Preface; Osgood 10–11), which Boccaccio also describes in terms of reassembling a body (15.3; Osgood 108). CHAPTER TWO

1. Boccaccio is the major source for Dante’s exchange with Giovanni del Virgilio (Ecl. 1 and 2) and three of Dante’s letters (Epist. 3, 11, and 12), all of which he transcribes in his Zibaldone Laurenziano (29.8). For Boccaccio as an authoritative source for Dante’s Latin works, see Mazzoni, ‘L’edizione delle opere latine minori’ and Ciociola, ‘Dante’, 170–72. 2. Boccaccio’s focus on Dante’s vernacular works may follow Dante’s own emphasis on the vernacular in Vita nuova (30.2), where Dante notes that the work is intended to be exclusively in Italian and exclude Latin. Latin does, however, have a conspicuous role in the work; see Singleton, ‘The Use of Latin in the Vita Nuova’. 3. The original unity of this Dantean section was intuited by Vandelli, Rubriche dantesche, 9–10, and then conclusively demonstrated by De Robertis,

Notes to pages 50–52

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

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‘Il “Dante e Petrarca” di Giovanni Boccaccio’, who revealed the significance of corresponding blue marks on both manuscripts. As the similar shelf-marks suggest,the manuscripts entered the Vatican as part of the library of Fabio Chigi (Pope Alexander vii), but Jacopo Corbinelli had possessed and annotated both manuscripts in the sixteenth century. There are small but significant differences between the configurations of the collections. In Toledo 104.6, the Commedia has introductory poetic summaries for each canticle and Latin rubrics for each of Dante’s fifteen canzoni, which are collectively called the cantilene dantis aligherii, not the canzoni distese. The Chigi not only contains a briefer version of the biography, but also adds vernacular prose rubrics for each canto and eliminates the rubrics for Dante’s longer poems, which are called the canzoni distese instead of the Latin equivalent cantilene that is found in Toledo 104.6. Boccaccio likely translated the rubrics for the canzoni distese in Toledo 104.6 from a vernacular original (similar perhaps to Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Conventi soppressi 122 or Additional 26772) because there is a gap in the rubric for Poscia ch’amor due to the untranslatability of the term leggiadria. In Riccardiano 1035, he puts these rubrics in the vernacular, but in the Chigi, they are completely absent. Most important, the Chigi includes Ytalie iam certus honos, which dedicates the collection to Petrarch. For the development of Boccaccio’s hand between Toledo 104.6 and the Chigi, see Ricci, ‘Evoluzione nella scrittura del Boccaccio’. For the observation that Boccaccio’s changes from writing sanc¸a to senc¸a, see Corradino, ‘Rilievi grafici sui volgari autografi’. For a catalogue of the various codicological contexts in which the Commedia appears in the Trecento, see Boschi Rotiroti, Codicologia trecentesca della ‘Commedia’, 107–51. While the Vita nuova is often transmitted in the company of lyric poems of Dante and others, as in Martelli 12 and Chigi l viii 305, Boccaccio’s copies are the only ones to connect either his lyrics or the Vita nuova materially to the Commedia. Barbi has shown that the tradition that derives from Boccaccio makes up the majority of the transmission of the Vita nuova, and thirteen of these manuscripts also have at least one other part of Boccaccio’s monument, whether the Vita di Dante or canzoni distese, or both, along with the Vita nuova. For a list of these manuscripts, see Barbi, ed., La Vita nuova, cxlii. See De Robertis, ‘La tradizione boccaccesca’, but a more complete assessment of Boccaccio’s complex place in the tradition of the Rime can be found in his Dante Alighieri: Rime. On Vat. lat. 3199 (the copy Boccaccio gave to Petrarch) or its twin as Boccaccio’s copy-text, see Petrocchi, ‘Dal Vaticano Lat. 3199 ai codici del Boccaccio’. For more on the scribe of Vat. lat. 3199, see Pomaro, ‘Codicologia dantesca 1’. For Petrocchi, the ‘antica vulgata’ ends with Boccaccio’s transcription of the Comedy in Toledo 104.6, which he dates to after 1355. By representing the endpoint of the ‘antica vulgata’, Boccaccio defines it. Although several editions have taken issue with Petrocchi’s reconstruction of the text of the Comedy and proposed alternative editions, none has disputed Boccaccio’s determinative role.

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9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Notes to pages 52–53 Indeed, the proposed changes to Petrocchi’s stemma have tended to reclassify earlier stages in the transmission tradition. See Lanza, ed., Dante Alighieri: La commedia: Nuovo testo critico secondo i pi`u antichi manoscritti fiorentini; Sanguineti, ed., Dantis Alagherii Comedia; Inglese, ed., Dante Alighieri: Commedia Inferno. For a comprehensive rethinking of Petrocchi’s stemmatics that similarly leaves Boccaccio’s crucial place undisturbed, see Trovato, ed., Nuove prospettive sulla tradizione della ‘Commedia’. Barbi, ed., La Vita nuova. The tradition of fifteen canzoni distese derives from Boccaccio (De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime 2: 244), and most of that tradition comes from Chigi l v 176 (2: 341), which relies on Riccardian 1035, which does not itself derive from Toledo 104.6 (2: 326). Boccaccio’s texts of the Rime were also used in the Giuntina (2: 341). For a review of the influence of Boccaccio’s texts of Dante’s Rime, see Ciociola, ‘Dante’, 151–52, and, for a fuller exposition, De Robertis, ‘La tradizione boccaccesca’. De Robertis suggests that the Raccolta Aragonese relies on the Chigi not only for the VN, as Barbi showed (Barbi, ed., La Vita nuova, clxvii–clxxv), but also for the canzoni distese; see De Robertis, ‘La Raccolta Aragonese’, 57–61; ‘Il “Dante e Petrarca” di Giovanni Boccaccio’, 68–70; and De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 349. For an acute critique of De Robertis’s decision to follow Boccaccio, see Barolini, ‘Editing Dante’s Rime’. She argues that ‘Boccaccio – because he is a great author in his own right, with his own agendas – cannot provide the appropriate filter through which to present Dante’s poems to the world’ (260). See Steinberg, Accounting for Dante, Chapter 1, ‘Dante’s First Editors: The Memoriali Bolognesi and the Politics of Vernacular Transcription’. On the editorial value of these copies in the Memoriali, see Varvaro, ‘Critica dei testi’. The story about the dowry derives from Borghini, Lettera intorno a’ manoscritti antichi. For a useful comparison of Boccaccio’s edition of Dante’s works with that of the Danti del Cento, see Pomaro, ’Commedia: Manuscripts,’ 199–200. On Martini’s patronage, see Nelson, ‘Luca Martini, dantista’ and ‘Creative Patronage’. Petrocchi gives Martini’s marginal annotations their own siglum (Mart) in his edition (Dante Alighieri: La Commedia, 1: 76), because the text of Forese Donati’s edition can only be reconstructed from them. On the value of these marginal remarks, see Vandelli, ‘Il pi`u antico testo critico’ and Bordin, ‘Prime approssimazioni’. The Forese Donati who edited this manuscript is not, of course, the same Forese Donati that Dante encounters in Purgatorio, but a friend of Petrarch, according to Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 161–64, which is accepted by the Enciclopedia Dantesca, s.v. Forese Donati. Forese Donati may have been responsible for bringing Petrarch the copy of the Commedia that Boccaccio sent to the laureate poet as a gift (now Vat. lat. 3199), which is precisely the text that Martini aims to improve. For Billanovich (‘L’altro stil nuovo’, 84), the commentary of Maramauro confirms his hypothesis that Forese Donati was the one responsible for bringing the text to Petrarch.

Notes to pages 54–55

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17. Boccaccio places the same note in Toledo 104.6. 18. I transcribe from the text of the note in the Chigi. ‘Maraviglierannosi molti, per quello che io advisi, perch´e io le divisioni de’ sonetti non ho nel testo poste, come l’autore del presente libretto le puose; ma a ci`o rispondo due essere state le cagioni. La prima, per ci`o che le divisioni de’ sonetti manifestamente sono dichiriazioni di quegli: per che pi`u tosto chiosa appaiono dovere essere che testo; e per`o chiosa l’ho poste, non testo, non stando l’uno con l’altre ben mescolato. Se qui forse dicesse qualcuno “e le teme de’ sonetti e canzoni scritte da lui similmente si potrebbero dire chiosa, con ci`o sia cosa che esse sieno non minore dichiarazione di quegli che le divisioni,” dico che, quantunque sieno dichiarazioni, non sono dichiarazioni per dichiarare, ma dimostrazioni delle cagioni che a fare lo ’ndussero i sonetti e le canzoni. E appare ancora queste dimostrazioni essere dello intento principale; per che meritamente testo sono, e non chiose.’ 19. ‘La seconda ragione e` che, secondo che io gi`a pi`u volte udito ragionare a persone degne di fede, avendo Dante nella sua giovanezza composto questo libello, e poi essendo col tempo nella scienza e nelle operazioni cresciuto, si vergognava avere fatto questo, parendogli troppo puerile; e tra l’altre cose di che si dolea d’averlo fatto, si ramaricava d’avere inchiuse le divisioni nel testo, forse per quella medesima ragione che muove me; l`a onde io non potendolo negli altri emendare, in questo che scritto ho, n’ho voluto sodisfare all’appetito de l’autore.’ 20. Boccaccio’s discussion of Dante’s shame in the note serves to gloss Boccaccio’s claim in the Toledo Vita that Dante was ashamed of the Vita nuova: ‘E come che egli d’avere questo libretto fatto, negli anni pi`u maturi si vergognasse molto, nondimeno, considerata la sua et`a, e` egli assai bello e piacevole, e massimamente a’ volgari’ (And although in his more mature years he was very ashamed of having made this book, nonetheless, considering its age, it is very beautiful and pleasing, especially to the unlearned [volgari]; Toledo 175). Although some critics, such as Boli, have interpreted Dante’s shame in this passage as a critique of Dante’s ‘amorousness’ (‘Boccaccio’s Trattatello’, 401), the editorial note suggests that the issue is aesthetic instead of amorous. This aesthetic reading is reinforced by Boccaccio’s detailed but inaccurate description of the work’s structure that immediately precedes his mention of Dante’s shame. He explains that Dante collected some of his compositions in ‘uno volumetto, il quale egli intitol`o Vita nova’ (a little volume he called Vita nova) and ‘di sopra da ciascuna partitamente e ordinatamente scrivendo le cagioni che a quelle fare l’avea[n] mosso, e di dietro ponendo le divisioni delle precedenti opere’ (before each composition he distinctly and in order explained the reasons that led him to write it, and after he placed the divisions of the preceding works; Toledo 175). In this outline, Boccaccio misstates the position of Vita nuova’s divisioni as always following the poems and fails to account for the narrated shift that occurs after Beatrice’s death. This description of the Vita nuova’s textual organization in the Toledo Vita may help to explain the wonder that Boccaccio anticipates readers experiencing when they read

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21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

Notes to pages 55–56 his edition of the Vita nuova. ‘Many will marvel’ (Maraviglierannosi molti), he writes at the beginning of the note, because the text he provides does not follow the structure he outlines. Noakes, Timely Reading, 85. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, 41. Houston’s explanation recalls the argument that Dante’s divisioni do not foreclose meaning but open it that can be found in Roush, Hermes’ Lyre, 29. Houston applies what Roush claims for the divisioni themselves to Boccaccio’s marginalization of them. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 29. Boccaccio’s intervention could be considered an extreme example of what has been called ‘determined variation’ (Greetham, Textual Scholarship, 281–83), when the scribe purposefully intervenes to improve the received text. For a discussion of how Dante mixes the role of both reader and (secondary) author in his role as editor and takes on multiple roles as scribe, compiler, commentator, and author, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 200–201, and for a bibliography on Dante’s scribal prose, see 186 n. 28. For a more general treatment of Dante’s book metaphors, see Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova, 25–54. For a materialist explanation of Dante’s use of these textual and transcriptional languages, see Storey, ‘Following Instructions’. For Dante’s use of images of concealing and revealing, see Kleiner, ‘Finding the Center’. See Barbi, ed., La Vita nuova, xvi and xxx; De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 1: 118; and Zenatti, Dante e Firenze, 519–20. Another sign of Boccaccio’s influence can be found in those editions where scribes and editors put the divisions back in the text but always located them after the poems, in contradiction to Dante’s own carefully articulated movement of the divisioni after Beatrice’s death but following Boccaccio’s erroneous description of their placement in the Toledo Vita di Dante (175). Dante may have constructed the prose frame of the Vita nuova in part to control interpretation, but the editorial tradition shows the libello was ultimately helpless to withstand editorial intervention. At rare moments, the divisions provide new information, just as the prose ragioni do. One of the most interesting examples is in the divisione for Donne ch’avete in which Dante introduces a mouth where the text has viso, which is an unlikely extension of the poetic text. Dante protests that while some may think that what he desired from that mouth was not a kiss, he emphasizes that all he desired was her greeting. For discussion, see Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal, 63, and Valesio, ‘The Fierce Dove’, 76. Dante, Vita nuova di Dante Alighieri: Con xv. canzoni del medesimo. E la vita di esso Dante scritta da Giouanni Boccaccio con licenza, e privilegio. For an example from the Ottocento, see Gotti, ed., La Vita nova di Dante Alighieri. Barbi, ed., Dante Alighieri: La Vita nuova, xvi. In the 1907 edition, the observation also occurs on xvi. The editorial self-defense is provided in Guerri, ed., Dante: La vita nuova, 115. For Guerri, whose edition is dedicated to Croce, the divisioni constitute a kind

Notes to pages 56–58

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

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of ‘non-poesia’, that is, gloss. On this connection to Croce, see D’Andrea, ‘La struttura della Vita nuova’, 27 n. 5. Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, trans. Slavitt, xii. Slavitt does not in fact get rid of the divisioni altogether, but only those parts that mark the boundaries of the divisions that he judges superfluous because they do not correspond to his translation. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, 41. Botterill, ‘“Per`o la divisione non si fa”’, 65 sees the divisioni as ‘a set of instructions for at least one kind of reading of one part of the text’. Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal, 68–69, find in the divisions an interpretive model to follow, which they see as an invitation to the reader to divide further to discover the Neo-Platonic structures that Dante has designed. There are four poems in the Vita nuova that are not divided, plus S`ı lungiamente, which is interrupted. For a complete typology, see Botterill, ‘“Per`o la divisione non si fa”’. Singleton, for example, misstates the situation when he writes that ‘in his edition of the Vita Nuova [Boccaccio] simply omitted’ the divisioni (An Essay on the Vita Nuova, 46). Battistini and Raimondi, Le figure della retorica, 73 n. 30. Boccaccio’s use of the term ‘mescolato’ may derive Dante’s deployment of the word ‘mischiata’ in one the canzoni distese, Poscia ch’Amor, which Barolini (‘Sotto benda’, 339–40) suggests describes the poem’s mix of courtly and ethical virtues. Bologna, Tradizione e fortuna dei classici italiani, 168–69 considers Boccaccio’s transformation of the work to be in keeping with Boccaccio’s own gothic and scholastic tastes. For Dante’s work as an example of scholastic manifestatio, see Panofsky, Gothic 36–37, quoted by Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 411 n. 4. For a list of the many sources that have been proposed for the divisioni, see Stillinger, The Song of Troilus, 54. For the proposal that Brunetto was Dante’s source, see De Robertis, Libro, 207–20. Also see D’Andrea, ‘La struttura della Vita nuova;’ Martinez, ‘Mourning Beatrice;’ and Nasti, Favole d’amore. As Thomas Stillinger comments on the divisions: ‘By their very marginality, [the divisioni] prompt a sensitive reader like Boccaccio to produce a copy of the Vita nuova that looks, indeed, like a book of commentary’ (The Song of Troilus, 68). Stillinger argues that Dante’s particular model for his divisions is a glossed Psalter. Osgood, 117. ‘Habent enim civiles et canonice leges preter textus multiplices, hominum nequitia semper auctos, apparatus suos a multis hactenus doctoribus editos. Habent phylosophorum volumina diligentissime commenta composita. Habent et medicinales libri plurimorum scripta, omne dubium enodantia. Sic et sacre lictere multos habent interpretes; nec non et facultates et artes relique glosatores proprios habuere, ad quos, si oportunum sit, volens habet, ubi recurrat, et, quos velit, ex multis eligat. Sola poesis, quoniam perpaucorum semper domestica fuit, nec aliquid afferre lucri avaris visa sit, non solum per secula multa neglecta atque deiecta, sed etiam variis lacerata

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40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

Notes to pages 58–59 persecutionibus a se narrata non habet! Quam ob causam saltim huc illuc, ad quemcunque potes, absque tam celebri selectione recurras necesse est, et, si non multum, a quocunque saltem, quod modicum potes, excerpas. Quod me persepe fecisse intelligenti satis apparet, cum non nunquam non tantum ad novos autores diverterim, sed ad glosulas etiam autore carentes recursum habuerim. Et id circo queruli, sic oportunitate volente, non solum inauditis veteribus, sed et novis etiam autoribus acquiescant.’ This passage also brings together many of Boccaccio’s long-standing concerns with the status of poetry, both personally (the invocation of canon law recalls Boccaccio’s own training) and more generally (the emphasis on the non-lucrative dimension of poetry also appears in the Decameron and Esposizioni). Minnis, ‘Review of Susan Noakes, Timely Reading’, 144. Noakes quotes the passage in reference to Boccaccio’s interest in glossing but does not use it to explain the purpose of Boccaccio’s versions of the Vita nuova, since she is more interested in contrasting Dante’s claims about what the divisions do in the Vita nuova with Boccaccio’s claims about why he’s moving them. Noakes views these authors as mirroring the distinction between interpretation – which she sees in Dante’s concern with the reader – and exegesis, which she locates in Boccaccio’s concern with the author and text of the work. Dante himself makes a similarly tendentious claim in Inf. 1, when he claims that Virgil ‘per lungo silenzio parea fioco’ (seemed faint from long silence), despite the popularity of his works throughout the medieval period. For examples of glossed Virgil manuscripts, see Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England. Poetry’s absence from among the medieval artes creates some problems for those, like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who want to defend it. One response is that poetry is not included among the artes because it is the mother of them all, which Petrarch, for example makes when replying to Benvenuto da Imola (Sen. 15.11). Boccaccio’s marginalization of the divisioni could be read as part of an attempt to professionalize the modern practice of poetry, which likely begins with Petrarch’s coronation. On Petrarch’s Coronation Oration as a call for the professionalization of poetry, see Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 27–44. As part of his list of eminent moderns, Boccaccio mentions Andal`o di Negro, Dante Alighieri, Francesco da Barberino, Barlaam, Paul of Perugia, Leontius Pilatus, Paul the geometer, and finally Petrarch. For Dante being used to gloss classical texts, see Alessio, ‘La ‘Comed`ıa’ nel margine dei classici’. Boccaccio also uses Dante as source several times in the Genealogie: in Gen. 1.21 he discusses his representation of Fraud in Inf. 7.10, 55 and Geryon from Inf. 16.2; in Gen. 8.6 he cites Inf. 9.55 on the city of Dis, i.e. of Pluto, immediately after a quotation from Aeneid 6.563; in Gen 3.5 on Acheronte he refers to Dante’s tale of the Old Man of Crete (Inf. 14. 94); and in Gen. 3.17 he mentions Dante as an authority on Lethe. Boccaccio presumes that this glossed copy of Statius will no longer be needed by his friend, now that he is married, following a conventional contrast

Notes to pages 59–62

46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

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between marriage and study that Boccaccio also uses in the Vita di Dante. Billanovich considers glossing to be ‘l’idea fissa del Boccaccio, lettore o scrittore, fedele anche in questo a una disciplina scolastica’. Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio’, 92. For examples of commentary on vernacular works, see the glossed, Dante editions like Lana’s or the self-glossing of Francesco da Barberino, Nicolo de’ Rossi, and Boccaccio himself in the Teseida. Also see Dino del Garbo’s commentary on Cavalcanti, discussed in Chapter 4. For a recent survey of commentary on vernacular text, see Hanna et al., ‘Latin Commentary Tradition and Vernacular Literature’. For discussions of the Teseida’s glosses, see Hollander, ‘The Validity of Boccaccio’s Self-Exegesis in His Teseida’; Noakes, Timely Reading, 87–97; and Schnapp, ‘Commentary on Commentary’. Bruni, Boccaccio, 35–36. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 197. Also see 197 n. 47, where Ascoli discusses the scholars who have explored the tensions between Dante’s claims and his practice, concluding that ‘none explains the forceful repetition of the (to my knowledge unprecedented) call for moderns to be able to “explain themselves,” nor deals with the evident homology between chapter 25 and the otherwise unexplained deployment of ragioni and divisioni throughout.’ For further considerations of Dante’s self-glossing see Baranski, ‘Dante Alighieri: Experimentation and (Self-) Exegesis’ and ‘The Epistle to Can Grande’, as well as Ascoli, ‘Access to Authority’. On the broader issue of Dante’s own meta-literary reflections, also see Baranski, Sole nuovo, luce nuova. In his recent ‘Dante poeta e lector’, Baranski attributes the emergence of this topic to Contini, ‘Introduzione’. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova, 49. For Singleton the passage has to do not with poetry but with the poet’s ability to explain the poem (50), and he sees it as positing a transcendental author in whom meaning resides just like a transcendent God. Although Singleton does not specify the critics to whom he is responding here, he is likely thinking of the observations on VN 25 in Lewis, Allegory of Love, 47–48. Boccaccio also uses this Biblical tag for different purposes in the Filostrato, Preface. ‘E acci`o che questa canzone paia rimanere pi`u vedova dopo lo suo fine, la divider`o prima che io la scriva: e cotale modo terr`o da qui innanzi.’ On this episode of widowed words, see Vickers, ‘Widowed Words’, 99–100. Antonio D’Andrea (‘La struttura della Vita nuova’, 53) argues that the divisions create a narrative rhythm, which he characterizes as ‘staccato’ when they follow the poems but then accelerates when they occur before the poems. While D’Andrea is one of the few critics to understand the meaning of Dante’s movement of the divisions in terms of rhythm, his description of the meaning of the movement to before the poems as accelerating to the end misses Dante’s stated intention of their movement, which is to keep reminding readers of Beatrice’s end.

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Notes to pages 62–65

54. Storey, ‘Following Instructions’, 126. For Storey, Chigi l viii 305 has the proper layout: ‘there is no dramatic structural shift and the paragraph is uninterrupted’. In his reading, other manuscripts, especially Chigi l viii 305, support ‘an interpretive trajectory in which the narrative movement from the canzone S`ı lungiamente, the biblical citation, and the brief treatment of Beatrice’s death constitute a single, episodic unit whose dramatic intensity concludes only when Dante definitively refers further commentary to another glossator.’ 55. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, 24. 56. See Petrocchi, ed., Dante Alighieri: La Commedia, 2:186 and 413. 57. According to Petrocchi’s apparatus, Cortona, Biblioteca Comunale e dell’Accamedia Etrusca 88 also has ‘giustizia’ instead of ‘vendetta’. Although Petrocchi’s early dating for this manuscript has been challenged on strong grounds by Pomaro (‘I testi e il testo’), the text does not seem to derive from Boccaccio, so the changes are most likely polygenetic. 58. For a discussion of Boccaccio’s choice of littera textualis instead of a ‘cancelleresca’ hand, see Pomaro, ‘Forme editoriali nella Commedia’, 284 and Boschi Rotiroti, Codicologia trecentesca della ‘Commedia’, 102. Although Florentines used littera textualis for other literary works in the vernacular, Savino, ‘L’autografo virtuale della Commedia’ hypothesizes that the tendency to use ‘cancelleresca’ or ‘bastarda’ for Dante may reflect the appearance of Dante’s own autograph. For a comprehensive consideration of these early copies, see Ahern, ‘What Did the First Copies of the Comedy Look Like?’ 59. Petrucci, ‘Reading and Writing Volgare’, 189. 60. Cursi, ‘Percezione dell’autografia’. For a different view, see Pomaro, ‘Forme editoriali nella Commedia’, 284. 61. For Boccaccio’s own meditation on the importance of divisions of the work into smaller parts, see Boccaccio, The Fates of Illustrious Men, 46– 47. 62. I write ‘nonauthorial’ because of Dante’s vast corpus of self-commentary. The text of Jacopo’s poem is from Del Balzo, ed., Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante Alighieri, 1: 317: ‘Ma perch`e pi`u vi debbia dilectare / Della sua intentione entrar nel senso, / com’`e divisa in s`e vi v`o mostrare’. Michele Barbi interprets the sonnet as referring to the divisione that are the capitoli, but Saverio Bellomo (Jacopo Alighieri: Chiose all’Inferno) thinks that Jacopo refers to his Chiose, although he provides no real evidence to support his case. There are, in any case, many similarities between the divisione and Chiose, as demonstrated by Rocca, Di alcuni commenti della Divina commedia, 34–38. The language of division also appears in the Epistle to Can Grande (9) and Guido da Pisa’s commentary on the Commedia. 63. Jacopo Alighieri, for example, ends his summary with the poem’s first verse: ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.’ These argumenta belong to a subgenre that Genette describes as working ‘by condensation; its product is commonly called digest, abridgement, r´esum´e, summary, or, more recently in French high school parlance, text contraction’ (Palimpsests, 238).

Notes to pages 65–67

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64. Boccaccio’s summaries, which appear in all three of his copies, have been largely ignored by critics and it is to Vittore Branca’s credit that he thought they should be published as an appendix to his edition of the Rime. He notes: ‘E` venuto il momento, ora, di impostare uno studio generale sul Boccaccio rubricatore, sommarista, abbreviatore, epitomare: dalle prime sue opera al Decameron e ai riassunti danteschi in prosa e in versi e poi alle stesse opere latine e soprattutto alla Genealogia deorum’ (Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 2: 527). 65. For examples, see the fourteenth-century manuscript of the Aeneid in Riccardian 1005 or the copy of the Aeneid, reproduced in Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 43, Plate 2. The contents of these verse summaries are in Riese, ed., Anthologia Latina, 1–8. 66. For more on these early commentaries and the need to reconsider the rubrics and argomenti, see Abardo, ‘I commenti danteschi: I commenti letterari’. 67. Using Boschi Rotiroti’s catalogue of codices, I arrive at the following calculations. Of the 292 witnesses listed by Boschi Rotiroti 73, or 25%, contain one capitolo or more. Of these 73, 41 have the capitoli of both Jacopo Alighieri and Buosone da Gubbio; 63 of the 73, or 86%, contain Jacopo Alighieri either alone or, more often, with another commentary. Boccaccio’s capitolo appears in 8 of these 73 manuscripts, 3 of which are his own autographs. 68. For Buosone, the three beasts represent lust, pride, and avarice, which is the same interpretation one finds in Boccaccio’s Esposizioni and most medieval commentators. 69. Buosone covers both the three beasts and the Paradiso each in four out of a total of sixty-four terzine. 70. Jacopo’s summary of Inferno 1 significantly occurs at the end of his divisione. 71. Boccaccio’s decision to quote Dantean verses at the beginning and end of each capitolo may have been inspired by Jacopo’s commentary, which ends by quoting the first line of the Inferno. 72. In the context of Boccaccio’s career, these capitoli could be read as an extension of the ars combinatoria, or the poetics of mescolare, that characterizes all of his works. Insofar as these capitoli attempt to summarize the poem in the same meter, it could be related to the genre of the cento, which Boccaccio mentions in his life of Proba in the De mulieribus claris (97). 73. Vandelli, Rubriche dantesche, 11: ‘fossero note come lavoro del Boccaccio e si considerassero come opus a s`e’. Vandelli cites examples from Vatican, Barberiniano latino 4071; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Palatino 320, in the latter of which the rubrics are written in the margins next to the incipits of the canti; and Chigiano l. vii. 253 (Branca lists it as l. vi. 253), which is a faithful copy of Chigiano l. vi. 213 for its text of the Commedia, to which Villani’s commentary has been added. For a list of manuscripts that contain Boccaccio’s rubrics, see Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 1: 21–23. 74. Petrocchi, ed., Dante Alighieri: La Commedia, 1: 473. Petrocchi transcribes the rubrics of type a, which are both longer and belong to an older tradition than

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75.

76.

77.

78.

79. 80.

Notes to pages 67–68 those of type b. These rubrics were important, since they were used by at least some of the poem’s illustrators who made errors in their designs on the basis of misinformation in the rubrics. See Abardo, ‘I commenti danteschi: I commenti letterari’, 322 n. 6. ‘Canto IV, nel quale mostra del primo cerchio de l’inferno, luogo detto Limbo, e quivi tratta de la pena de’ non battezzati e de’ valenti uomini, li quali moriron innanzi l’avvenimento di Ges`u Cristo e non conobbero debitamente Idio; e come Ies`u Cristo trasse di questo luogo molte anime,’ Petrocchi, ed., Dante Alighieri: La Commedia, 2:57. Chigi l vi 213, p. 11: ‘Comincia il canto iiii [quarto] dello ‘Nferno. Nel quale l’autor mostra come si ritrov`o nel primo cerchio di quello; e quivi scrive di esser quegli che per difetto di battesimo son dannati, e dichiaragli Virgilio come gi`a n’avea veduti trarre alquanti. Poi, venuti loro incontro quattro poeti, con loro entrano in un castello, dove nobili uomini d’arme, filosofi e valorose donne vede.’ For Inferno 1, for example, Boccaccio mentions Virgil’s role as ‘duca’, as well as the fact that Dante is ‘smarrito in una valle e impedito da tre bestie’, all of which are absent from the antica vulgata (Petrocchi, ed., Dante Alighieri: La Commedia, 2: 3). Similarly, Boccaccio’s rubrics mention the old man of Crete (in Inf. 14), name Brunetto Latini (Inf. 15), and account for all of the episodes of Inferno 16, all of which are excluded from the rubrics of the antica vulgata. Comparing Boccaccio’s rubrics to those of the antica vulgata, Padoan writes that ‘Anche il Boccaccio dunque vuol cogliere le cose; ma non le sa considerare se non nel nesso inscindibile del come esse sono descritte, quasi che il realismo descrittivo dantesco sia imprescindibile dal racconto’ (155). The attention to the literal meaning that characterizes Boccaccio’s capitoli and rubrics persists in his Esposizioni, where his concern with the literal meaning of Dante’s text often outweighs his interest in its allegorical interpretation. His commentary, moreover, is based on a ‘ruthless separation of letter and allegory’ (Botterill, ‘The Trecento Commentaries’, 604), and he sometimes omits the allegorical section, as he does for both Inferno 10 and 11. Boccaccio, Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s ‘Comedy’, 251. Esp. 4.all.62: ‘Ma puossi qui muovere un dubbio e dire: “Che hanno a fare gli uomini d’arme e le donne con coloro li quali per filosofia son famosi?”’ Esp. 4.all.64, 67: ‘Cos`ı ancora le donne, le quali castamente e onestamente vivono e i loro offici domestici discretamente e con ordine fanno, sanza filosofica dimostrazione non gli fanno. E dobbiamo credere non sempre nelle catedre, non sempre nelle scuole, non sempre nelle disputazioni leggersi e intendersi filosofia: ella si legge spessissimamente ne’ petti delli uomini e delle donne. [ . . . ] Che [il filosofo] legger`a pi`u a costei nella scuola, che nella sua etica, che nella politica, che nella iconomica le dimosterr`a? Niuna cosa. Dunque quelle, che cos`ı hanno adoperato e adoperano, non indegnamente, secondo il grado loro, co’ filosafi sederanno, di laude e di fama perpetua degne.’

Notes to pages 68–70

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81. More could be said about this passage, which seems to anticipate Boccaccio’s exculpatory rewriting of Dante’s condemnation of figures like Dido and Francesca among the lustful in Esp. 5.lit. The celebration of the everyday philosophy of women seems to echo Boccaccio’s exaltation of the stories that women tell around the campfire, which, he argues, also have a deeper meaning (Gen. 14.10). I owe my discovery of this passage to Chris Celenza who examined it from the different perspective of Boccaccio’s conception of philosophy. 82. See Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, 250. For more on scholastic modes of reading, see Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon along with the commentary in Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text. For a discussion of scholastic reading that adds the issue of the material book, see Rosemann, Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault. Allen, The Ethical Poetic, 126: ‘The crucial act of medieval criticism, then, is division.’ See also Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 118. 83. In Toledo 104.6 Boccaccio calls them cantilene, the Latin equivalent of canzoni. In both the Riccardian and the Chigi, however, he uses canzoni distese as their collective title. Pietro Alighieri uses the word cantilena to describe Dante’s canzone Amor che ne la mente in his Latin commentary on Purg. 2 and Petrarch uses the same term in an annotation to Triumphus Cupidinis 3.114 in Vat. lat. 3196 (c. 17v), where he refers to Rvf. 71 as a ‘cantilena oculorum’. Jacopo della Lana uses canzoni distese in his commentary on Par. 8 where Dante’s canzone Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete is quoted. The term canzoni distese means ‘extended’, that is, pluristrophic canzoni, not ‘the unconnected poems’, as one finds in Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, 46. Houston may be projecting the fact that these poems are not ‘connected’ to any authorial macrotext onto their title, but from the Trecento to the present, distendere refers to extent, not connection. 84. De Robertis, ‘L’edizione delle Rime’, 330. 85. De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 1144: ‘con la segreta speranza, magari, che la tradizione rispecchi la storia del lavoro del poeta o restituisca (tradisca) un’ipotesi ordinatrice.’ 86. See Tanturli, ‘L’edizione critica delle Rime’ and Leonardi, ‘Nota sull’edizione critica delle “Rime”’. Tanturli addresses the question of which fourteen poems would have been glossed, arguing that the first of the canzoni distese, Cos`ı nel mio parlar, would have been placed fifth or sixth in the Convivio, while the final poem in the sequence of the distese, Amor da che convien, would have been excluded from the commentary altogether. 87. Manetti may be picking up on Boccaccio’s vague suggestion of an identity between the canzoni distese and the Convivio in the Chigi Vita. For a fuller discussion of Manetti’s manuscript, see Arduini, ‘Un episodio della tradizione quattrocentesca del Convivio’. 88. For doubts about the relationship between the canzoni distese and the Convivio, see Barolini, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime giovanili e della ‘Vita nuova’, 20 n. 15. The hypothesis continues to be put forward, however; see, most recently, Tonelli, ‘Le rime’.

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Notes to pages 70–73

89. For some doubts regarding the extent of Boccaccio’s knowledge of the Convivio; see Storey and Arduini, ‘Edizione diplomatico-interpretativa della lettera di frate Ilaro’, 83 n. 19. 90. What defines the collection is the shared sequence of poems, not a common name, since Boccaccio calls them cantilene in Toledo 104.6 and canzoni distese in the Chigi and Riccardian. For an attempt to read the sequence that uses Olivia Holmes’s thesis regarding Dante’s two beloveds as its guiding principle, see Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, 60–64. 91. Bellomo, Filologia e critica dantesca, 40: ‘non fu Boccaccio a riunire le quindici canzoni “distese” nell’ordine in cui compaiano nei suoi manoscritti, perch´e il gruppo cos`ı costituito si ritrova in testimoni che da Boccaccio sono indipendenti, sicch´e si deve collocare la costituzione del gruppo in epoca pi`u alta.’ 92. See De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 244. 93. On Boccaccio’s prominent place in the codex and an identification of the series of Petrarch’s poems in Riccardian 1050 with the form in Chigi l v 176, see Bettarini Bruni, ‘Notizia di un autografo di Antonio Pucci’, 195 n. 1. The manuscript must have been completed before 1388 when Pucci died. 94. See Quaglio, ‘Antonio Pucci primo interprete di Boccaccio’. 95. Additional 26772 follows the Boccaccian tradition represented by branch b in the inversion of strophes four and five in Poscia ch’Amore, a variant congedo in Io son venuto, and a variant in Amor, che movi, v. 70. See De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 590 and 594. 96. ‘Nessun testimone noto, salvo i due descripti L49 e R94, reca i due sonetti di s´eguito in tale posizione; ma l’uso della 1a persona (che si perde, vedremo, nei descripti) fa riferimento a una diretta esperienza.’ De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 594. 97. De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 594. I quote their incipits following De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 1: 449. 98. Tanturli, ‘L’edizione critica delle Rime’, 257. 99. Petrocchi calls LaurSaC ‘la seconda edizione della Commedia’. Petrocchi, ed., Dante Alighieri: La Commedia, 1: 47. For more on this manuscript, see Paolazzi, ‘Dante fra i frati minori’. 100. ‘La priorit`a cronologica dei rappresentanti costitutivi di Bocc, appunto To, R32, C2, rispetto all’interno residuo testimonale [ . . . ] non e` stemmaticamente significativa’ (De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 269). For the Commedia, Petrocchi found that Pasquali’s maxim that recentiores non deteriores did not apply to the post-Boccaccian tradition. 101. To give a sense of Boccaccio’s pervasive influence, the following figures can be excavated from De Robertis’s edition. Sixty-nine of the seventy-eight witnesses of b* derive from Boccaccio (De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 265). b* represents three-fifths of b (2: 259), which represents three-quarters of the whole tradition of Dante’s rime (2: 234).

Notes to pages 73–74

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102. De Robertis writes that the sequence was ‘non ideata [ . . . ] ma consacrata da Boccaccio.’ De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 1148. In his edition, De Robertis (Dante Alighieri: Rime, 1148) argues that even if Boccaccio were responsible for the distese, the placement of Cos`ı nel mio parlar at the beginning of the sequence should be attributed to Petrarch’s influence on Boccaccio, through Petrarch’s quotation of Dante’s canzone in Lasso me (Rvf 70). In other words, the collection of the distese is either Dante’s work or the result of Petrarch’s influence, but not the handiwork of Boccaccio, despite the fact that he transcribes the collection three times. Molinari (‘L’edizione delle Rime di Dante’) takes issue with De Robertis’s claim that Petrarch provided the inspiration to argue the contrasting case that Petrarch’s quotation of Cosi nel mio parlar in Lasso me depends on Petrarch’s having read the collection perhaps in just this order. For more discussion of Dante’s Cosi nel mio parlar in Petrarch’s Lasso me see Santagata, Per moderne carte, 327–62; Bologna, ‘PetrArca petroso’; and Baranski, ‘Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti’. 103. Two of the more interesting collections before Boccaccio are Martelli 12 and Chigi l viii 305. Martelli 12 contains a sequence of six poems from the Vita nuova, followed by Cosi nel mio parlar in 7, then Io son venuto as 8 (it is usually 9), Al poco giorno as 9 (usually 7), Voi ch’intendendo as 10 (usually 2), Amor tu vedi ben 11 (usually 8), Le dolci rime as 12 (usually 4), with Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega at 13, and other Cavalcanti poems until 18, followed by another poet at 19, Tre donne at 20 and Doglia mi reca at 21, and then the Vita nuova. On Martelli 12, see Storey, ‘Interpretative Mechanisms’ and for the argument that the arrangement of texts in Martelli 12 anticipates Boccaccio’s, see Ciociola, ‘Dante’, 150–51. For a detailed analysis of Chigi l viii 305, see Borriero, Canzonieri Italiani: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Ch (Chigi l viii 305). CHAPTER THREE 1. Ytalie iam certus honos, 37–38: ‘concivem doctumque satis pariterque poetam /suscipe, perlege, iunge tuis, cole, comproba’. For the argument that Boccaccio produced all of these editions primarily to persuade Petrarch, see Mazzoni, ‘Giovanni Boccaccio fra Dante e Petrarca’. 2. For the use of the Chigi redaction to understand the final version, see Phelps, The Earlier and Later Forms and Wilkins, The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’. 3. For the emergence of genetic criticism in relation to Petrarch, see Segre, ‘Petrarca e gl’incunaboli della critica genetica’. Bembo discusses potential Petrarch’s variants in his Prose della volgar lingua (2.8). For a modern analysis of Petrarch’s revisions, see Contini, ‘Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca’. On genetic criticism more broadly, see Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden, eds., Genetic Criticism.

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Notes to pages 74–75

4. Petrarch’s political poems seem to have had the widest early circulation. The earliest commentary on Petrarch by Luigi Marsigli (1342–94) deals not with an amorous poem but the political canzone, Italia mia (Rvf 128). For an example of one of Petrarch’s political poems (Rvf 102) written in the margins of a copy of Livy, see Billanovich, ‘Nel 1330 il Petrarca d`a lezioni di poesia italiana’. Calcaterra, Nella selva del Petrarca, 94–99, argues that some of Petrarch’s vernacular poems on Rome were known by the time of his coronation and may have been part of the reason for it. While these political poems were popular, the criticism over Petrarch’s coronation, reflected in Petrarch’s letter to Zoilo (Epyst. 2.10), focused on the fact that the Africa was incomplete, which suggests that his contemporaries viewed the Africa as the reason for his coronation. At the same time, some of these amorous poems were clearly known. See, for example, Geri Gianfigliazzi’s pre-1336 sonnet, Messer Francesco, chi d’amor sospira, where Geri seeks Petrarch’s advice about love. Petrarch responds to Geri’s poem in Rvf 179, which Petrarch does not include in the Chigi version, despite what must be its early date. 5. Indicative of Petrarch’s absence is the thin chapter ‘Il Petrarca nel Trecento’ in Sozzi, Petrarca, 13–16. The best basic orientation remains Wilkins, ‘On the Circulation of Petrarch’s Italian Lyrics’. From the extensive coverage of the later periods, see Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch and The Site of Petrarchism; Dionisotti, ‘Fortuna del Petrarca nel Quattrocento’; Forster, The Icy Fire; Belloni, Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo; Quondam, Petrarchismo mediato and Il naso di Laura; Finucci, ed., In the Footsteps of Petrarch and Petrarca: Canoni, esemplarit`a; Navarrete, Orphans of Petrarch; Chines, ed., Il petrarchismo. 6. Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy, 194; translation modified. I follow Storey in using the term, holograph, to refer to Vat. lat. 3195, since it is only a partial autograph due to Giovanni Malpaghini’s work on the transcription. For detailed analyses of Petrarch’s Vat. lat. 3195, see Belloni et al., eds., Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Codice Vat. lat. 3195: Commentario all’edizione in fac-simile, as well as Storey, ‘Petrarch’s “Original” of the Fragmenta 1362–1558’. 7. On the limited circulation of Petrarch’s lyrics in his lifetime, see Balduino, Boccaccio, Petrarca e altri, 301–30 and Botterill, ‘Minor Writers’, 112. 8. Wilkins, ‘On the Circulation of Petrarch’s Italian Lyrics’, 2. The earliest datable traces of Petrarch’s poems in Bologna, for example, are from around 1360, according to Antonelli, ‘Tracce extravaganti’, 168–69. For a discussion of Petrarch’s uncollected lyrics, which offers further insights into the early circulation and could be leveraged in a larger study to get a better grasp on how Petrarch’s vernacular works and reputation spread, see the essays in Berra and Vecchi Galli, eds., Estravaganti, disperse, apocrifi petrarcheschi, as well as Steinberg, ‘Petrarch’s Damned Poetry’ and ‘Dante Estravagante, Petrarca Disperso’. For an Italian critical edition, see Solerti, ed., Rime disperse. For an edition with English translations, see Barber, ed., Francesco Petrarch: Rime disperse. 9. On the wide diffusion of the excerpt from the Africa, see Fera, ‘Il ‘lamento’ di Magone’.

Notes to page 75

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10. Petrarch asks that Boccaccio make changes in his copy of Bucolicum carmen, because two verses echoed passages from Ovid and Virgil too closely (Fam. 22.2 and 23.19). For a full discussion of Petrarch’s procedures for circulating supplements and changes to his eclogues, see Mann, ‘“O Deus, qualis epistola!”’. Petrarch asks the dedicatee of his Familiares, Ludwig van Kempen (Socrates), to ‘urge those who may still have copies of these letters to destroy them forthwith, lest they become upset at the changes I have made in the content or in the style [nequa in eis rerum aut verborum mutatione turbentur]’ (Fam. 1.1.30; Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters, 1: 10). 11. The earliest hint of a collection comes from a note in Vat. lat. 3196 accompanying Apollo, s’anchor vive il bel desio (Rvf 34): ‘ceptum transcribe ab hoc loco. 1342 augusti 21, hora 6’. Whether or not this note means that Petrarch was arranging a collection that began with this poem, as Wilkins, The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’, 81–92 argues, it does suggest that Petrarch is thinking of some kind of lyric collection, albeit one that would be quite different from what one finds in Vat. lat. 3195. The next solid indication is from considerably later, November 28, 1349, when Petrarch notes in Vat. lat. 3196 that a draft of what will become Che debb’io far (Rvf 268) is transcribed ‘non in ordine sed in alia papiro’ (not in order but on another sheet). A more speculative suggestion comes from Petrarch’s remark about a libellus in his copy of Horace, for which see Billanovich, ‘L’altro stil nuovo’, 17–19. For discussion of the problematic references to collections of lyrics in both Var. 21/Disp. 6 (1344–45) and Epyst. 1.1 (1350), see Feo, ‘In vetustissimis cedulis’, 142. 12. Petrarch’s rubric in Vat. lat. 3195 reads simply ‘Francisci petrarche laureati poete. Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’. For the argument that the title Fragmentorum liber is Boccaccio’s invention, see Rico, ‘Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’, 116–22 and Picone, ‘Petrarca e il libro non finito’. The use of the word ‘fragmentum’ in both versions, however, suggests that the title is Petrarch’s (as Vecchi Galli, ‘Onomastica petrarchesca’, 22 points out), a proposal reinforced by the connection to Petrarch’s title for the collection of his letters, Familiarum rerum libri. The nuper (‘recently’) led Forest and Wilkins astray in supposing that this title meant the collection was first formed just after Petrarch’s coronation, but the nuper has a universal value, meaning after years of no laureate poets since Statius. For the claim that it emphasizes the Florentine origins of its contents, see Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 254– 55. The emphasis on Florence reinforces Boccaccio’s portrait of Florence as the mother of poets in Ytalie iam certus honos, as well as the civic project Boccaccio announces in the Vita di Dante. This association of Florence and Rome appears in Giacomo Colonna’s Se le parti del corpo mio, addressed to Petrarch upon his coronation, and it also recalls Petrarch’s first letter to Florence and Boccaccio’s reply (Ep. 7), discussed in Chapter 1. The emphasis on the Roman coronation may intend to distinguish Petrarch’s from Zanobi da Strada’s Paduan coronation. 13. Novati, ed., Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, 1: 183. Salutati even describes the vernacular, which he characterizes as ‘stroking the ears of the multitude’ (vulgarium auricule demulcentur), in terms that echo Petrarch’s description of

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

Notes to pages 77–78 the vernacular as ‘intended to charm the ears of the multitude’ (mulcendis vulgi auribus intenta) in Fam. 1.1, where Petrarch provides an account of the genesis of the lyric collection. The fact that Salutati knows most of the external evidence for the collection, like the early title and the declaration of the project at the beginning of Fam. 1.1, but does not put this information together, confirms the work’s limited circulation. The note is on c. 7 r of Vat. lat. 3196 in the upper margin, accompanying the sonnets Per mirar Policleto and Quando giunse a Simon l’alto concepto (Rvf 77–78). For a diplomatic transcription of the poems and note, see Paolino, ed., Il Codice degli abbozzi, 129 and ‘Il codice Vaticano latino 3196’, 816. For Santagata’s interpretation of the Chigi form of Petrarch’s collection, see Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 253–67. For Santagata the ‘binomio pentimento-redenzione’ (267) is crucial to the collection, but he tends to project this theme onto earlier collections and catalogue how they fail to achieve it; see ‘Introduzione’, xcii. For a similar evaluation of the collection in the Chigi as ‘open-ended and ideologically unresolved’, ‘ideologically and formally unresolved’, and ‘ideologically unresolved and aesthetically still tentative’, see Cachey, ‘Between Petrarch and Dante’, 24, 29, and 34. Petrarch decides to put the prayer to the Virgin at the end of the collection in the 1370s, according to a note that appears in Laur. 41.17 the poem ‘in fine libri pon[atur]’. For an interpretation of this note and the material forms of the later copies of the collection, see Feo, ‘In vetustissimis cedulis’, especially 130 and 138. See Barolini, ‘The Self in the Labyrinth of Time’, 36. For an interpretation of Rvf 366 as incongruous with the collection as a whole, see Ariani, Petrarca, 228–57. For an example of a numerological analysis, see Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet. For the argument that even Vat. lat. 3195 is not definitive, see Took, ‘Petrarch’, 94. Even in the collections Petrarch did circulate, he seems to have experimented with a different sequence of the first three poems, moving Rvf 3 to before Rvf 2 in some copies. For a discussion of the sequence Rvf 1, 3, 2, see Feo, ‘In vetustissimis cedulis’ and Quaglio, ‘Ipotesi intorno agli ultimi esercizi’. For further investigations of the material dimensions of Petrarch’s production, see the essays in Barolini and Storey, eds., Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation. Antonelli, ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta di Francesco Petrarca’, 395: ‘appare quasi come una seconda edizione con aggiunte piuttosto che una rielaborazione ideologicamente significativa’. Marco Santagata similarly regards the collection as simply some ‘additions’ to the Correggio form (I frammenti dell’anima, 267). For a critique of Wilkins that emphasizes his dependence on second hand evidence instead of detailed examination of the manuscripts themselves, see Storey and Del Puppo, ‘Wilkins nella formazione’. For an analysis of the so-called Correggio form, see Gorni, ‘Metamorfosi e redenzione in Petrarca’. For the argument that the Correggio was not

Notes to pages 78–79

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

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divided into two parts, see Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 122. Traces of the Chigi form of Petrarch’s collection are reflected in some other manuscripts, which have added poems from the final collection to the base of the Chigi form. See Wilkins, ‘Manuscripts Containing the Chigi Form’. For the development of a thesis first proposed by Wilkins that the Correggio is present in a fifteenth-century manuscript, Florence’s Biblioteca nazionale centrale ii.iv.114, see Frasso, ‘Pallide sinopie’. For an identification of the Correggio with the Chigi form itself, see Feo, ‘Francesco Petrarca (2001)’, 277. Barolini, ‘Petrarch at the Crossroads of Hermeneutics and Philology’, 39. Boccaccio’s earliest ars dicataminis exercise, Crepor celestudinis (Ep. 1), also rewrites a Dante letter, Exultanti Pistoriensi (Epist. 3), which Dante had addressed to Cino da Pistoia, but Boccaccio redirects to a political figure, Carlo, Duke of Durazzo. In both Crepor celestudinis and Mavortis milex, Boccaccio also integrates rare Latin words that he takes from Apuleius. On these transformations, see Billanovich, Restauri boccacceschi, 50–57. Given the tension between love and study described in Mavortis, it is interesting that a collection of texts against taking a wife begins on the verso of the same parchment where Mavortis ends (c. 52r). When he makes a similar appeal to Petrarch in the De casibus 8, the assistance he seeks will be of a different kind. For a discussion of that scene, see Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 190–239. The Zibaldone already shows a Boccaccio who is a ‘storiografo della letteratura’, according to Cazal´e B´erard, ‘Riscrittura della poetica’. Usher, ‘Monuments More Enduring than Bronze’, 20, argues that the Petrarchan texts, like the Notamentum on the coronation, ‘are clearly part of a different project’ from the Dantean–Giovanni del Virgilio works that precede them, but, although they may be different sections, they were done at the same time. For a detailed analysis of Boccaccio’s notebooks, see Zamponi, Pantarotto, and Tomiello, ‘Stratigrafia dello Zibaldone’, 240. They argue that there is a ‘stacco grafico’ from cc. 67r–74v that dates them all to 1341–44 and ‘accomuna tutte le opere trascritte’, which includes the letter of Frate Ilaro, the pastoral exchange between Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio, Boccaccio’s commemoration of Petrarch’s coronation, and four of Petrarch’s Epystole metriche. For more on Boccaccio’s engagement with Dante in Lauretta’s tales, see Eisner, ‘Boccaccio on Dante and Truth in Ferondo’s Purgatory (Decameron 3.8)’. For Boccaccio’s integration of Dante and Petrarch in the Caccia di Diana, see Eisner ‘Petrarch Reading Boccaccio’. The Dante and Petrarch sections in Chigi L V 176 are part of the same gathering that encompasses cc. 39r–46v. Boccaccio likely composes the De Vita in the early 1340s and then revises it around 1350 to promote Petrarch’s possible return to Florence. For the debates on the dating of the work, see Chapter 1. According to Wilkins’s research, which is valuable for dating the poems, even if one does not follow his claims about their having been gathered into collections, Boccaccio could

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29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

Notes to pages 79–81 have known Rvf 34–36, 41–46, 49, 58, 60, 64, 69, to which one might add Rvf 23 and any number of others. On Boccaccio’s knowledge of Petrarch’s lyrics via Sennuccio del Bene, see Balduino, Boccaccio, Petrarca e altri, 231–47. On Boccaccio’s knowledge of Petrarch’s lyrics more generally, see Silber, The Influence of Dante and Petrarch and Hainsworth, ‘Petrarchism in Boccaccio’s Rime?’ In the De remediis (1.69) Petrarch will furnish himself with a classical tradition for his libidinous desires that derives partly from Cicero (Tusculan Disputations 4.35.75). Although Reason (Ratio) intends to discount these poets that she invokes in keeping with the Ciceronian argument against love that she follows, this illustrious genealogy that includes Plato as love poet provides one way for Petrarch to justify his own love poetry in a larger context, as Noferi (Le poetiche critiche novecentesche, 406–7) argues against the more literal interpretation of Santagata (Frammenti, 110). ‘Libidine sola aliqualiter non victus in totum, sed multo potius molestatus; sed si quando ipsum contingit succumbere, iuxta mandatum Apostoli, quod caste nequivit explere, caute peragendo complevit. Et quamvis in suis quampluribus vulgaribus poematibus in quibus perlucide decantavit, se Laurettam quandam ardentissime demonstrarit amasse, non obstat: nam, prout ipsemet et bene puto, Laurettam illam allegorice pro laurea corona quam postmodum est adeptus accipiendam existimo’ (De Vita 26). For the idea that Boccaccio had Quando io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi (Rvf 5) in mind, see Balduino, Boccaccio, Petrarca e altri, 310 n. 17 Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 93–94: ‘Il pubblico contemporaneo, dunque, della mitologia amorosa petrarchesca privilegiava, a detrimento degli aspetti passionali e sensuali, quella componenete allegorica che faceva di Laura, identificata con lauro e quindi la corono di alloro, il simbolo della poesia e della gloria poetica. Ce lo conferma Boccaccio.’ For an interpretation of Petrarch’s letter defending Laura’s reality (Fam. 2.9) as a response to Boccaccio’s claim, see Tonelli, ‘Laura, Fiammetta, Flamenca’. In Fam. 2.9, Petrarch’s defense of Laura’s reality is connected to his attempt to recover the classical past, which suggests that she may simply have another or different allegorical significance from that which Boccaccio attributes to her in the De Vita. Manetti, Biographical Writings, 76–77. For a similar claim that Petrarch’s poems require allegorical interpretation, see Matteo Palmieri, Della Vita Civile (Varese, ed., Prosatori volgari del Quattrocento, 356). On Petrarch’s use of Boccaccio’s biography as a source for his letter to Posterity see Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 137–40 and Villani, ‘Introduzione’, 30–35. The current letter likely developed in several stages. For a summary of this general chronology, see Feo, ed., Codici latini del Petrarca, 203–4. For an early dating of Petrarch’s letter to 1347–53, see Rico, ‘Il nucleo della Posteritati (e le autobiografie di Petrarca)’. Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, 2: 673. Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters, 2: 60–61.

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36. Petrarca, The Secret, 131. Also see Fenzi, ed., Petrarca: Secretum, 254. Augustinus repeats the problem of being discussed by the crowd a few paragraphs later: ‘Think about these things, and also about how vulgar it is to be pointed at and gossiped about’ (133). 37. On Boccaccio’s transcription of ‘amore’ instead of ‘errore’, see Barbi, ed., Dante Alighieri: La Vita nuova, clxxvi. Barbi challenges the argument that the errors show that Boccaccio was not the scribe, made by Cesareo, Su le “Poesie volgari” del Petrarca, 296–97, by showing Boccaccio making similar errors in other transcriptions. On the linguistic, metrical, and graphic differences between Petrarch’s habits in the holograph and Boccaccio’s transcription, see Savoca, Il Canzoniere di Petrarca, 99–100. 38. For a discussion of the meaning of ‘errore’ in Rvf 1, see Rico, ‘Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’, 123–28: ‘errare no significa meramente fallo, sino el fallo vulgar de quien desoye las lecciones de la filosof´ıa’ (128). 39. See Novati, ed., Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, 3: 18. The discrepancy between Salutati’s earlier letter and this one is noted by Ullman, Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 209–10. 40. Harold Bloom’s category of the ‘anxiety of influence’ has been applied to Petrarch by Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree’, 39 n. 3; Warkentin, ‘The Form of Dante’s Libello’, 164; and Pasquini, ‘Dantismo petrarchesco’, 37. 41. The phrase ‘ambiguit`a psicologica’ comes from Contini, Letteratura italiana delle origini, 663. For a pithy summary of the usual interpretation of Fam. 21.15, see Ascoli, ‘Blinding the Cyclops’, 115. On Petrarch’s possible quotation of Inf. 26 in Fam. 21.15, see Bosco, ‘N´e dolcezza di figlio’. Whether this passage in Fam. 21.15 betrays Petrarch’s direct reading of Inf. 26 or his reading of Boccaccio’s Vita, the association that it establishes between Dante and Ulysses is one that Dante’s own work encourages. On Petrarch’s similar identification of himself with Ulysses, beginning in Fam. 1.1, see Fenzi, ‘Tra Dante e Petrarca: il fantasma di Ulisse’; Carrai, ‘Il mito di Ulisse nelle Familiares’; Mazzotta, ‘Petrarch’s Epistolary Epic’; and, in the context of a reading of Rvf 189, the last poem of the Chigi, see Cachey, ‘From Shipwreck to Port’ and ‘Between Petrarch and Dante’, 35–39. 42. Some critics, like Paolazzi (‘Petrarca, Boccaccio e il Trattatello’), have proposed that Petrarch’s Fam. 21.15 may also respond to Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante, but there is little evidence for this view. Ytalie iam certus honos is clearly the ‘carmen illud tuum laudatorium’ to which Petrarch refers in the letter, and he takes up several of Boccaccio’s arguments in the course of his response. Petrarch’s public refusal of the vernacular is related to his contempt for the vulgo. For a survey of this theme in both his Familiares and the Rvf, see Spinetti, ‘Rapporti tematici’, 32–39. 43. Boccaccio’s Petrarch picks up both on the illustrious, Virgilian genealogy that Giovanni del Virgilio proposed (‘erit alter’) in his eclogue to Dante (Giovanni del Virgilio, Eclogue 3.33–5), which Boccaccio preserved in his Zibaldone laurenziano, and uses the image of Florence as mother that Petrarch used to underline the Florentines’ inability to prevent Mainardo’s death (Fam.

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44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

Notes to pages 83–84 10.8.17). Boccaccio thus takes the positive image of Florence that Petrarch had intended ironically and uses it to integrate both Petrarch and Dante into his project. Poliziano uses ‘Florentia mater’ in the context of a celebration of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Cavalcanti that precedes his praise Lorenzo de’ Medici (Nutricia, 727). Other elements in Ytalie iam certus honos may also derive from Giovanni del Virgilio’s epitaph, such as the image of fame reaching the stars (sydera pulses). Giuseppe Velli argues that in Ytalie iam certus honos Boccaccio incorporates Petrarchan details into his portrait of Dante so that ‘il Petrarca e` messo davanti a un Dante con abiti petrarcheschi!’ (477), but the characteristics, like love of solitude, owe just as much to conventional descriptions of the poeta doctus to be found in Macrobius as any actual Petrarchan customs. Indeed, the Macrobian line may be just as important to understanding both Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s ideas about poery as Cicero’s Pro Archia. Curtius observes: ‘It is clear that Macrobius already sees in poetry everything that the Middle Ages saw in it: theology, allegory, universal knowledge, rhetoric. [ . . . ] In the mouth of a pagan Neo-platonist of late Antiquity, then, we find the first “cosmic” conception of the poet which compares him to the architect of the universe’ (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 444). Boccaccio likely sent a copy of Ytalie iam certus honos along with the copy of the Commedia in Vat. lat. 3199, which Petrarch must have received in the early 1350s. During his visit to Milan in 1359, Boccaccio certainly transcribed a copy of Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen and on March 16, Petrarch and Boccaccio even planted laurels together, according to Ellis-Rees, ‘Gardening in the Age of Humanism: Petrarch’s Journal’. Fam. 21.15.3. The correspondences between Boccaccio’s imperatives and Petrarch’s lines are noted by Velli (‘Petrarca e Boccaccio: L’incontro milanese’, 148), who is one of the few critics to have recognized the precise connections between Boccaccio’s carmen and Petrarch’s letter. I have altered Bernardo’s translation here to convey Petrarch’s awkward formulation. Bernardo’s translation reads: ‘I have concurred with all such praise, for he deserves such commendation while you, as you say, feel obliged to perform this friendly office. I thus commend your poem of praise and join with you in extolling him.’ (3: 202). The image of the torch (fax) is interesting because Dante uses it for Virgil in Purg. 22.67–72 and Petrarch uses it for Cicero in Fam. 24.3. For more on the connections between these two passages, see Eisner, ‘In the Labyrinth of the Library’. Boccaccio’s claim that Dante was his first teacher suggests the letter of the pseudo-Homer which mentions Homer’s teachers, according to Petrarch’s response in Fam. 24.12. Given Petrarch’s own insistence on carefully attending to his sources and changing his text to avoid imitation, as in his letters to Boccaccio about the Bucolicum carmen, he clearly knows that the only way to avoid imitation is to know the text well enough to prevent it. For the argument that Petrarch’s encounter with Dante may have occurred in Genova before the move to Provence, see Foresti, Aneddoti della vita di Francesco Petrarca, 6–7.

Notes to pages 84–86

173

50. Fam. 21.15.12–13: ‘Hoc unum non dissimulo, quoniam siquid in eo sermone a me dictum illius aut alterius cuiusquam dicto simile, sive idem forte cum aliquo sit inventum, non id furtim aut imitandi proposito, que duo semper in his maxime vulgaribus ut scopulos declinavi, sed vel casu fortuito factum esse, vel similitudine ingeniorum, ut Tullio videtur, iisdem vestigiis ab ignorante concursum. Hoc autem ita esse, siquid unquam michi crediturus es, crede; nichil est verius.’ 51. For a different interpretation of Petrarch’s appropriation of this Ciceronian idea, see Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom, 83–4. He takes Petrarch’s idea of affinity across time without direct influence as a way to investigate the similar descriptions of plagues found in Thucydides and Boccaccio. 52. Petrarch cites the same Ciceronian passage in Rerum memorandum libri 3.66.5 (Billanovich ed. 152). Petrarch’s earlier reference to Quintilian’s relationship with Seneca as an analogue to his own with Dante is similarly ambiguous, since the passage in Quintilian is also a critical problem for classicists; see Laureys, ‘Quintilian’s Judgement of Seneca’. For Petrarch’s quotation of Quintilian, note that his copy of the Institutiones was given to him by Lapo da Castiglionchio in 1351 in Boccaccio’s presence, according to Coulter, ‘Boccaccio’s Knowledge of Quintilian’, 495, who cites Petrarch’s Var. 45 (Disp. 12), which describes the circumstance of the gift. 53. Brownlee, ‘Power Plays’, 482 and Baranski, ‘Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti’. What Billanovich regarded and used as historical evidence, these critics rightly interpret as Petrarch’s willful strategy. 54. Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters, 3: 205. 55. On the same theme, see the two stories about commoners mangling Dante’s verses in Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, Novelle 114 and 115. 56. Petrarch’s resistance to Dante in Fam. 21.15 is all the more surprising given his positive remarks on Dante in Rerum memorandum libri, where he mentions Dante among the moderns in two of the exemplary anecdotes, as in ‘Dantes Allagherius, et ipse concivis nuper meus, vir vulgari eloquio clarissimus fuit.’ (2.83, p. 98). These stories about Dante from the Rml had a particularly wide independent circulation, according to Billanovich, ed., xxxii n. 2. The issue of one poet refusing to name another also appears in Petrarch’s response to Homer (Fam. 24.12), which discusses Virgil’s silence on Homer. In that same letter Petrarch presents himself as like Penelope waiting for Ulysses to return home, in an interesting reversal of the Ulyssean thematics with which the collection begins. If he starts the collection as Ulysses, he ends it as like Penelope. For recent discussion of Petrarch’s letter, see Pastore Stocchi, ‘Riflessioni sull’epistola a Omero’. He calls into question whether Boccaccio is the pseudo-Homer, as argued by Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio. Whoever the author may have been, the letter compelled Petrarch to return to issues that are central to his discussions with Boccaccio about imitation and predecessors. On this Ulysses theme in Petrarch, see Boitani, L’ombra di Ulisse: figure di un mito, 64–5; Mazzotta, ‘Petrarch’s Epistolary Epic’; Fenzi, ‘Tra Dante e Petrarca: il fantasma di Ulisse’; Carrai, ‘Il mito di Ulisse nelle Familiares’; and Cachey, ‘From Shipwreck to Port’.

174

Notes to pages 86–88

57. Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters, 3: 205. 58. In his commentary on Inferno 2.10–12, Benvenuto da Imola quotes only the second half of Petrarch’s sentence: ‘Magna mihi de ingenio ejus oppinio est potuisse eum omnia, quibus intendisset’ (Fam. 21.15.22). See Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, 253 n. 76. 59. On Boccaccio’s knowledge of Petrarch’s letter, see the discussion in Chapter 1. 60. Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics, 228. 61. For the argument that the initial poem implies the bipartition of the collection, see Rico, ‘Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’, 107: ‘El soneto inicial implica la bipartici´on del Canzoniere y, en consecuencia, igualmente debe ser posterior a la muerte de Laura.’ For a similar argument, see Picone, ‘Petrarca e il libro non finito’. 62. While Cachey (‘From Shipwreck to Port’) chronicles Petrarch’s movement of Passa la nave mia (Rvf 189) from the end of the first part and its recontextualization in the later version, its fittingness at the moment of the Chigi deserves attention, because its tone is very much in keeping with the first and last poems of the collection in the Chigi. De Robertis suggests that the sonnet may problematic because it could perhaps be read as a poem ‘in morte’, since her eyes are hidden, and, lacking her eyes, he cannot navigate to the port. In the Chigi the current Rvf 176–77, which recount a journey that Petrarch also tells in two letters at the beginning of the Familiares (1.4–6), preceded Rvf 189. For the theme of travel in Petrarch, see Greene, ‘Petrarch “Viator”’. Picone (‘Il sonetto clxxxix’) notes analogies with the Commedia, but the suspended journey may also recall the moment of bipartition in Dante’s Vita nuova where the path of writing is interrupted by the beloved’s death. At the end of the first part in Vat. lat. 3195, Petrarch chose to emphasize the fused emblem of the Laura and laurea in Arbor victor¨ıosa triumphale (Rvf 263) instead of a voyage arrested in mid-course, but this poem has seemed problematic, too. Wilkins (The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’, 186–87) writes, ‘I find no evidence, internal or external, to indicate that Petrarch ever thought of 263 as the terminal poem for Part 1, or that he was ever concerned to bring the total number of poems in the Canzoniere to three hundred and sixty-six’. 63. For Proust’s reflections on Flaubert, see Ginzburg, ‘Reflections on a Blank’. For Petrarch as a metaphysical poet, see Barolini, ‘The Self in the Labyrinth of Time’ and ‘Petrarch as the Metaphysical Poet Who Is Not Dante’. 64. The imagery of Petrarch’s poems is in constant movement and frequently in tension with one another but the proximity of these two different ideas of the journey in Rvf 189 and Rvf 264 might also have encouraged their separation. 65. As Santagata acknowledges of Petrarch’s placement of the bipartition: ‘Petrarca prefer`ı mantenere un ordinamento che a noi sembra incongruo’ (I frammenti dell’anima, 320). 66. For critics, too, Laura’s death may not signal the division but colors the whole second part. For Bettarini, Laura’s death ‘non bipartisce il Canzoniere, ma da quello la Seconda parte prende motivazione e colore’ (Lacrime e inchiostro nel

Notes to page 88

67. 68.

69.

70.

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Canzoniere di Petrarca, 46). For similar remarks on the importance of Laura’s death, see Fenzi, ‘Sull’edizione del Canzoniere’, 160. Barolini, ‘The Self in the Labyrinth of Time’, 34. Petrarch’s collection undergoes the further transformation of being divided into three parts in the edition of Vellutello, an innovation that actually connects the collection all the more strongly to the Vita nuova, since all the poems that do not deal with Laura are exiled to a third section, apparently applying to Petrarch Dante’s proclaimed principle of selection in the Vita nuova that he would only include poems that deal with Beatrice. There are also echoes of Arnaut Daniel in Rvf 265 and Cino in Rvf 267. Petrarch’s note on reading Arnaut Daniel appears in all but one of the apparent copies of Petrarch’s now lost autograph notes. For a reproduction of the note in Casanatense MS 924, see Petrarca, Opere italiane: Ms. Casanatense 924, 34. The verse that Petrarch quotes from Arnaut recalls Rvf 23.4: ‘cantando il duol si disacerba’ as well as 293.9–11: ‘et certo ogni mio studio in quel tempo era / pur di sfogare il doloroso core / in qualche modo, non d’acquistar fama.’ For an attempt to reconstruct the text of Arnaut that Petrarch read, see Pulsoni, ‘Propter unum quod leggi in Cantilena Arnaldi Danielis’. For more on Petrarch’s engagement with Arnaut, see Santagata, Per moderne carte, 157–211. For a list of connections between Dante’s canzone and Petrarch’s, see Contini, Letteratura italiana delle origini, 610; Paolino, ‘Ad acerbam rei memoriam’; and, in greater detail, Bettarini, Lacrime e inchiostro nel Canzoniere di Petrarca, 43–83. For a reading of the canzone with an emphasis on the role of Jeremiah’s Lamentations, see Martinez, ‘Mourning Laura’, who notes ‘The influence of Boccaccio’s early Filostrato (c. 1335) on Petrarch’s uses of Lam. 1.12 is also probable’ (2 n. 3). For another interpretation, see Vickers, who argues that Petrarch’s revision ‘entailed a studied, systematic incorporation of Dante’s parallel text [i.e. Li occhi dolenti]’. In her reading, ‘Dante is highlighted at the expense of erasing the ostensible object of desire; the obsession with Laura yields to an obsession with lauro, with the status of the laureate poeta’ (‘Widowed Words’, 103). Vickers’s general argument about the ‘differential imitation’ between Petrarch and Dante on the matter of mourning is convincing, but her claim that Dante replaces Laura does not account for the fact that Laura only appears in the second version of the poem. For another discussion of Petrarch’s revisions, beginning with Petrarch’s note that the beginning of the canzone is ‘not sad enough’ (‘non satis triste’), see Chiappelli, ‘Non Satis Triste Principium’, 80) and, for another interpretation of Petrarch’s remark, Martinez, ‘Mourning Laura’, 21–22. On Petrarch’s borrowings from Dante, see Trovato, Dante in Petrarca and Kuon, L’aura dantesca. On Petrarch’s relationship with other vernacular poets, see Santagata, Per moderne carte. It is interesting that Petrarch claims that rereading Rvf 287, his poem on Sennuccio’s death where he mentions Dante, helped him to revise his Dantean canzone on Laura’s death (Rvf 268).

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Notes to pages 88–90

71. Both Paolino and Bettarini connect Rvf 270 to Rvf 268, although they propose different relationships between the two poems. For Bettarini, Rvf 270 was written at the same time as Rvf 268. For Paolino, on the other hand, Rvf 270 is later than Rvf 268. See Bettarini, ‘Che debbi’io far (rvf cclxviii)’ and Paolino, ‘Ad acerbam rei memoriam’. In Rvf 270 and 271, moreover, as Santagata notes, Petrarch takes up the motif of the ‘other lady’ that follows Beatrice’s death in the Vita nuova; Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 204–7. For a more extensive consideration of this episode and its relationship with Dante, see Steinberg, ‘Dante Estravagante, Petrarca Disperso’. Petrarch is revising Rvf 270 when Boccaccio visits him at Padova in 1351. 72. For a comparison of Rvf 302 and Oltre la spera, see Olson, ‘Two Sonnets of Heavenly Vision’. Olson distinguishes between them in terms of the truth of the experience they represent, but the clear Dantesque qualities of Rvf 302, which connect it to Dante’s final poem of the Vita nuova, Oltre la spera, establish its place in a pattern that seems to follow the Vita nuova. 73. The translation is from Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 482. 74. For this Orphic image, Santagata points to Fam. 8.10, the letter Petrarch writes to the Florentines on the death of Mainardo Accursio. ‘I realize that my loss cannot be recovered, not if I were to speak eternally with a thousand powerful tongues, or were to charm more sweetly than Orpheus the stone with my tearful plaints accompanied by the lyre.’ (Letters on Familiar Matters 1: 434). For the Virgilian source for the Orphic image, see Gardini, ‘Un esempio di imitazione virgiliana nel Canzoniere petrarchesco: Il mito di Orfeo’, 141. 75. For the connections between Rvf 1 and Epyst. 1.1, see Velli, ‘A Poetic Journal (Epystole)’. Eypst 1.1 is usually dated to 1350, but it was revised in the period before the death in 1363 of their dedicatee Barbato da Sulmona (for the dedication, see Fam. 23.3). Also see Rizzo, ‘Petrarca, il latino e il volgare’, 22. The connection between the collections goes further than these echoes of images. Some have suggested that Epyst 1.1 may refer not to the metriche themselves but to the vernacular lyrics. For Magrini, Le epistole metriche, following Volpi, these references cannot mean that Petrarch sent the Canzoniere to Barbato, as Rossetti and Gaspary had suggested. Whatever the case, the debates underline the close relationship between the Epystole and the Chigi collection of Petrarch’s lyrics, although, as Bernardo notes, few of these epistles are about love; only 1.6, 1.8, and 1.14 mention Laura (Petrarch, Laura, and the Triumphs, 68–75). The connection between these verses in Epyst. 1.1 and Rvf 304 is noted in the commentaries of Ponte, Chiorboli, and Santagata. 76. On the correspondences between the three collections, see Rico, ‘Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’. 77. De Robertis, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, 143: ‘(`e a Dante che Petrarca sta pensando?)’. 78. In a useful exploration of this theme in the lyric tradition before Dante, Santagata shows the distance between earlier examples of the lament and Dante’s innovative development of the theme: Dante is ‘il primo a fare uscire la lirica “in morte” dai binari stretti del planh e dell’improperium e a fondarla in genere letterario autonomo’ (Amate e amanti, 84).

Notes to pages 90–91

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79. Castelvetro, Le rime del Petrarca, 2: 79. Given Boccaccio’s remarks in the De Vita, Petrarch’s exclusion from the list has surprised critics. Branca claims that Petrarch’s name is omitted from Dec. 4.Intro because he was ‘venerated too highly as the hero of the more aristocratic culture’, citing Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 157, who argues that Petrarch was freed of that sin by the time the poets met in 1350, citing Sen. 8.1. 80. Evidence of the early circulation of both of Dante’s letters, Ne lateant (Epist. 4) and Exultanti Pistoriensi (Epist. 3), with their poems may be detected in the imitations composed by Petrarch’s close friend, Sennuccio del Bene; see Piccini, ‘Un sonetto dubbio tra Dante e Cino’. 81. The phrase ‘allo stremo’ not only appears in Dec.4.Intro, but also in its source, Purg. 26, where Guinizelli describes himself: ‘e gi`a mi purgo / per ben dolermi prima ch’a lo stremo’ (Purg. 26.92–3). It is interesting to note that Ghismonda also uses the phrase ‘infino a questo stremo della vita mia’ in Decameron 4.1, a story that shares much common ground with the Introduction to Day 4. 82. This passage suggests Boccaccio is using both the poem and the epistle, according to Allegretti, ed., Dante Alighieri: La canzone ’montanina’, 94–95. In the Toledo Vita (172–74), Boccaccio offers an extensive discussion of the problem of Dante’s lust, providing examples of other lovers, like Jove, Hercules, Paris, David, Solomon, and Herod. He omits all of these examples in the Chigi (114). On the tensions between the intended audience of Dante’s letter and that proposed by the poem’s congedo, see Gorni, ‘La canzone “montanina”’. On the montanina and the issue of desire, see Barolini, ‘Ora parr`a’ and ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’. Barolini notes that Amor da che is Cavalcantian in its view that love is divorced from reason and leads to death. (Dante and the Origins, 41 and 64.) Barolini also includes it as part of a series of poems whose language is reminiscent of Inferno 5 (85) and whose idea of love is refuted in the central canti of Purgatorio (91). 83. Chigi 114: ‘Tra cotanta vert`u, tra cotanta scienza, quanta dimostrato e` di sopra essere stata in questo mirifico poeta, trov`o ampissimo luogo la lussuria, e non solamente ne’ giovani anni, ma ancora ne’ maturi.’ Although Boccaccio subsequently discusses Dante’s marriage, since Boccaccio describes these other loves as occurring either ‘after his exile’ or ‘close to the end of his life’, he intends to place them chronologically after the marriage. 84. For further analysis of Cavalcanti’s presence in Inferno 5, see Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’. 85. In the letter, Dante laments the inescapability of Love, which has taken him away from his studies. He explains that when he left Malaspina’s court, he encountered Love, who ‘slew, then, that praiseworthy resolve which held me aloof from women and from songs about women; and he pitilessly banished as suspect those unceasing meditations wherein I used to ponder the things of heaven and of earth; and, finally, that my soul might never again rebel against him, he fettered my free will, so that it behoves me to turn me not whither I will, but whither he wills’ (Epist. 4). The other Dante letter that Boccaccio

178

86.

87.

88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

Notes to pages 91–92 imitates, Exultanti Pistoriensi (Epist. 3), and its accompanying poem, Io sono stato con amore insieme, sound similar themes. Boccaccio is well aware that Dante condemns Cavalcanti’s idea of love not only in Inf. 5 but also in the central canti of Purgatorio, which he mentions in his commentary on Inf. 5, referring readers to Purg. 17 (Esp. 5.lit.160). For the joining of Dante, Cino, and Cavalcanti in 1301 in the Memoriali bolognesi, see Orlando, ed., Rime due e trecentesche. There is also a transcription of Cosi nel mio parlar in Bologna from 1315, which speaks to an independent circulation that has no connection to the canzoni distese. Barolini, ‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence’, 209, notes that within the collection as a whole, however, ‘the blocked voice of 70 makes way for the released voice of 71–73’, a macrotextual mirroring of the interchange of incipits and explicits, whereby ‘not only have beginnings been converted into endings, but endings into beginnings, since the canzone’s end finds [Petrarch] at the beginning of his own story, at the “prima etade”’. Drez et rayson is not attributed to Arnaut by modern scholars, although Petrarch did think it was his. On the importance of Lasso me as the organizing principle behind the so-called Appendix Aldina, see De Robertis, ‘L’Appendix Aldina’. For a reading of Lasso me (Rvf 70) as about poetic primacy, see Bologna, ‘PetrArca petroso’; for moral superiority, see Santagata, Per moderne carte, 327–62. Also see Baranski, ‘Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti’, 83–91. It is a poem of crisis, or at least one that performs a crisis that established both Petrarch’s own primacy and – in keeping with Fam. 21.15 – his own superiority in relationship to his own past. In this sense, the poem’s palinode reflects the retrospective stance of the whole as announced in Rvf 1. On Lasso me, also see Bologna, ‘Occhi, solo occhi (RVF 70–75)’ and Caputo, Cogitans fingo, 119–70. De Sanctis, ‘Francesca da Rimini’, 35. For a modern example of the tendency to simplify Petrarch’s complex relationship to the vernacular, see Asor Rosa, ‘La fondazione del laico’, 36. VN 25.6: ‘E lo primo che cominci`o a dire s`ı come poeta volgare, si mosse per`o che volle fare intendere le sue parole a donna, a la quale era malagevole d’intendere li versi latini. E questo e` contra coloro che rimano sopra altra matera che amorosa, con ci`o sia cosa che cotale modo di parlare fosse dal principio trovato per dire d’amore.’ Although Petrarch lived in France for a considerable stretch of time, he never seemed to entertain the idea of composing in French. See his dismissive attitude towards French culture, emblematized by the Roman de la Rose, in Epyst. metrica 3.30. For a more extensive consideration of this issue, which reveals similar attitudes towards French material as for the vulgo, not for the elite, see Peron, ‘Lingua e cultura d’o¨ıl in Petrarca’. Fam. 1.1: ‘Et erat pars soluto gressu libera, pars frenis homericis astricta, quoniam ysocraticis habenis raro utimur; pars autem, mulcendis vulgi auribus

Notes to page 93

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intenta, suis et ipsa legibus utebatur. Quod genus, apud Siculos, ut fama est, non multis ante seculis renatum, brevi per omnem Italiam ac longius manavit, apud Grecorum olim ac Latinorum vetustissimos celebratum; siquidem et Athicos et Romanos vulgares rithmico tantum carmine uti solitos accepimus.’ The same idea of collecting fragments also appears in Petrarch’s Secretum: ‘sparsa anime fragmenta recolligam’ (I will collect the scattered fragments of my soul; Fenzi, ed., Petrarca: Secretum, 282; Petrarch, The Secret, 147). On the date of the letter, see Antognini, Il progetto autobiografico, 50–63. On the connections between the three collections, see Rico, ‘Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’, 108–14 and Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 44. A similar tripartition of ‘rima . . . prosa . . . versi’ appears in Tr. Cup. 4.70–71. For the observation that there is no vernacular prose in Petrarch, see Panizza, ‘Humanism’, 132. 93. Petrarch’s source for these ideas is Servius’ commentary on Virgil’s Eclogues 2.385 and he marks this passage in his copy. The image is reproduced in Feo, Petrarca nel tempo, 39, fig. 25. For discussion of Petrarch’s novel argument here, see Feo, ‘Francesco Petrarca (1984)’, 58; Rizzo, ‘Petrarca, il latino e il volgare’ and ‘Petrarca e il genus renatum’; and Fubini, Humanism and Secularization, 19. Petrarch’s classicizing genealogy will be repeated in the Preface to Raccolta Aragonese written by Poliziano. 94. The terminus post quem for the collection is October 8 or 18, 1359, because Petrarch’s notation of having transcribed Rvf 159 (the usual ‘tr’) occurs next to the second line of the poem instead of next to its first line since he needed to accommodate a notation that was already there, which read: ‘Hoc dedi Jacobo ferrariensi portandum thomasio etc. 1359, octobris [1]8.’ Wilkins, ‘The Evolution of the Canzoniere of Petrarch’, 428–29, but anticipated by Cesareo, Su le “Poesie volgari” del Petrarca. Paolino, ‘Il codice Vaticano latino 3196’, 811 has ‘1359 octobris 18’. After this annotation, there is no dated notation in Vat. lat. 3196 until December 5, 1366, when Petrarch has Giovanni Malpaghini begin to transcribe what will be the final copy that would become Vat. lat. 3195. 95. For Boccaccio’s role in revising the Bucolicum carmen and his possession of a copy, see Petrarch, Fam. 22.2. There is debate as to whether Boccaccio copied from Petrarch’s copy, which would have likely contained the ‘visual poetics’ that Storey has identified in Petrarch’s holograph of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta or, as others maintain, he copied from another copy that may have already changed the layout of the poems. On the evidence of textual comparisons with other copies that reflect this early version, De Robertis says Boccaccio copies the Fragmentorum liber ‘nel 1366 circa’ from an indirect source. Rico, ‘La “conversione” di Boccaccio’ also maintains that Petrarch would not have let Boccaccio copy it, despite Boccaccio’s own suggestions about copying Petrarch’s works during his visits in both Padua and Milan. Storey (‘Petrarch’s “Original” of the Fragmenta 1362–1558’, 28) argues that Boccacccio copied directly from Petrarch’s copy in 1362.

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Notes to pages 93–94

96. Boccaccio had long been in pursuit of Petrarch’s works, of course. His first letter to Petrarch, sent just before their meeting in Florence during the fall of 1350, asked Petrarch to send him some of his works. Boccaccio’s letter is now lost, but Petrarch’s reply makes it clear that Boccaccio had requested Petrarch send him some of his works (Epyst. 3.17), since the central topic of the first half of the letter is the circulation of Petrarch’s works. In the spring of 1351, during his stay with Petrarch at Padova, Boccaccio recounts that he spent much of his time transcribing Petrarch’s works (Ep. 10) and his visit in Milan seems to have been much the same. 97. On the strength of Petrarch’s letter, this bonfire must have occurred before Petrarch arrives in Venice in 1362, when Donato Albanzani finally tells him why Boccaccio burned his poems. This bonfire is reported by Petrarch in Sen. 5.2, which Bert´e dates to before 1365, but was likely written earlier. For a summary of this issue, see Bert´e, ed., Francesco Petrarca: Senile V 2, 5. If the Petrarchan reproof mentioned in Boccaccio’s letter to Donato Albanzani discovered by Augusto Campana refers to Senile 5.2, as Martellotti hypothesized, then Boccaccio may have received the group of three letters that are now Seniles 5.1, 2, and 3 in 1365. On Donato Albanzani’s important role in the transmission of Petrarch’s letters, see Bert´e, ed., Francesco Petrarca: Senile V 2, 5. 98. Branca, ‘Il momento decisivo della formazione del “Canzoniere”’, 35. For the argument that Boccaccio only burned his earliest poems, see Branca, ‘L’attegiamento del Boccaccio di fronte alle sue Rime e la formazione delle pi`u antiche sillogi’. 99. Branca (‘Il momento decisivo della formazione del Canzoniere’) argues that Sen. 5.2 constitutes a decisive moment in the creation of Vat. lat. 3195, and the temporal connection between these two moments: the letter of 1364 and the beginning of Vat. lat. 3195 in 1366 is intriguing. Boccaccio returns to the scene of burning several times in his own works, as in Sappho (Buccolicum carmen 12). For a discussion of potentially significant discrepancies between Petrarch’s account and Boccaccio’s, see Usher, ‘Sesto fra cotanto senno’. 100. Letters of Old Age, 1: 162–63. 101. For a thorough discussion of the ranking, see Usher, ‘Sesto fra cotanto senno’. 102. By the time Petrarch writes his letter to Pandolfo Malatesta, dated to 1373, Petrarch has an increasingly fond relationship to his vernacular collection, which is the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Even as he continues to associate love, youth, and the vernacular, he also expresses pride in the vernacular achievement, hoping that Pandolfo ‘will deem them worthy of some section of your library, perhaps the furthest one’ (Sen. 13.11; Petrarca, Letters of Old Age, 3: 499–500). Petrarch’s lyrics have gone from fragments that circulate without the control of their author (although he continues to make this topical complaint) to become a volume that belongs in a library. For the significance of the earlier version of the letter (in Petrarca, Lettere disperse,

Notes to pages 94–95

181

533–39) and the post-Chigi circulation of the collection, see Feo, ‘In vetustissimis cedulis’. For the observation that this passage appears in a different textual place in different avenues of transmission, which complicates Feo’s interpretation, see Dotti’s commentary in Petrarca, Le senili. Tanturli, ‘Il Petrarca e Firenze’ cites Rvf 166 as suggesting that Petrarch did believe he could gain something from the vernacular, but most other commentators, like Vellutello, read it as a commentary on Petrarch’s inability to complete the Africa (see Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism, 45–46). Whatever the case, the desire to be Florence’s poet expressed in Rvf 166 is unusual for Petrarch and it is interesting that the poem does not appear in the Chigi, even though most critics think it is likely from an early date. 103. Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters, 3: 49. For Petrarch’s other reflections on the significance of binding two works together, see Var. 25/Disp. 46 on binding Homer and Plato. 104. After Petrarch’s death, Boccaccio continues to try to track down Petrarch’s works. He writes a poem to the Africa, hoping that it has escaped the flames of both its author and the lawyers. He also looks forward to seeing Petrarch’s other experiment in the vernacular, the Triumphi, which Petrarch begins in the 1350s and in whose conceptualization Boccaccio may also have played a major role (Ep. 24). The earliest extant note on Petrarch’s work on the Triumphi is September 8, 1357, and it already suggests a long labor. Boccaccio definitely knows about them by the time of Petrarch’s death. For Boccaccio’s influence on Petrarch’s conceptualization of the Triumphi, see Billanovich, ‘Dalla “Commedia” e dall’ “Amorosa Visione” ai “Trionfi”’ and Eisner, ‘Petrarch Reading Boccaccio’. For a broader assessment of ‘the complexity of the Trionfi’s inspiration’, see Baranski, ‘The Constraints of Form’, 75.

CHAPTER FOUR 1. Pound reproduces Chigi l v 176, cc. 29 r and 30 v as plates 2 and 3 of his Cavalcanti edition (Pound, ed., Cavalcanti: Rime). Pound’s discussion of the commentary intrigued Etienne Gilson, who asked Pound for copies of the complete commentary from the codex to have them transcribed in full. Gilson’s student, Otto Bird, later published an edition of the Latin commentary with an English paraphrase and extensive commentary. Bird acknowledges Pound’s assistance in the introduction to his edition, Bird, ‘The Canzone d’Amore of Cavalcanti According to the Commentary of Dino del Garbo’, 154. Bird’s edition was supplanted by Favati, ‘La glossa latina di Dino del Garbo a “Donna me prega” del Cavalcanti’. On Pound’s correspondence with Gilson, see Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti, 146–49 and 169–73. For a collection of Pound’s writings on Cavalcanti, see Anderson, Pound’s Cavalcanti.

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Notes to pages 95–96

2. Dino’s commentary itself was known through a Trecento vernacular version by Jacopo Mangiatroia, which appears, for example, in Antonio Manetti’s collection of Cavalcanti’s work, now in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana 41.20. For a full account of the commentary’s transmission history, see Favati, ed., Guido Cavalcanti: Rime, 348–78. Mangiatroia’s version was first published in 1813, Cicciaporci, ed., Rime di Guido Cavalcanti. 3. Cavalcanti, Rime, ‘Partial Explanation’, 14. His emphasis. 4. For Pound’s influence on the historical contextualization of Cavalcanti, see Mancini, ‘Cavalcanti e Pound’, 297: ‘Proprio queste due linee tenute presenti da Pound – il contesto filosofico e la necessit`a di una serrata lettura testuale – saranno determinanti per la ricerca successiva.’ Corti sounds like she is translating Pound, when she writes that her approach is ‘to investigate whether the lexicon of the canzone finds its genesis and correspondence in a vast and generic semantic field of love or in the restricted technical language of a specific line of thought’ (‘indagare se il lessico della Canzone trova la sua genesi e corrispondenza in un vasto e generico campo semantico dell’amore o nel ristretto linguaggio tecnico di un indirizzo specifico di pensiero’; La felicit`a mentale, 9–10). Also see Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale. 5. Pound, ed., Cavalcanti: Rime, 7. For Pound, Cavalcanti represents the ‘medieval clean line’ that ‘has nothing to do with Christianity’. Pound’s view of Cavalcanti in opposition to Dante often overstates the differences between them and his Cavalcanti is far more Dantean than he acknowledges, as Mancini notes (‘Cavalcanti e Pound’). The post-Poundian emphasis on Cavalcanti as an ‘other’ to Dante has continued in the work of more recent critics, like Ardizzone. The continued interest in Cavalcanti can be seen in three major collections of essays: Ardizzone, ed., Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori; Arqu´es, ed., Guido Cavalcanti laico; and Antonelli, ed., Alle origini dell’Io lirico. For Pound’s use of the term ‘Pagana Commedia’, see Redman, ‘Pound’s Debt to Dante’, 165. On Pound’s engagement with Dante, see Wilhelm, Dante and Pound and ‘Guido Cavalcanti as a Mask’; Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition; Dasenbrook, ‘Paradiso ma non troppo’ and Imitating the Italians; as well as the essays in Ardizzone, ed., Dante e Pound. 6. The translation is from Anderson, Pound’s Cavalcanti, 7. The original Italian is from Pound, ed., Cavalcanti: Rime, 14. 7. The polemical nature of Pound’s Cavalcantian philology may have contributed to his diminished role in Cavalcanti scholarship (except perhaps as that scholarship is viewed by Poundians, of course). Pound uses Cavalcanti as a mask for what Sieburth describes as the ‘moral nadir’ of the poem in Cantos 72 (Sieburth, ‘Introduction’, xvi). 8. Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’ and Baranski, ‘Alquanto tenea della oppinione degli Epicuri’. For more on Cavalcanti’s early reception and his cultural significance as an auctoritas, see also Baranski’s ‘Guido Cavalcanti and his First Readers’ and ‘Per similitudine di abito scientifico’. 9. Pound knew that Barbi had suggested the Cavalcanti section was in Boccaccio’s hand, but he doesn’t make anything more of the connection, which might have weakened his own personal and authoritative vision. Pound, ed., Cavalcanti:

Notes to page 97

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

183

Rime, 28: ‘Michele Barbi suspects that Ceo [i.e. the Chigi l v 176] shows the writing of Boccaccio “in his old age when his hand was no longer steady.” This might well be. Boccaccio was a friend of the Garbo family as we know by his sonnet on the death of Dino’s son. Dino had a wide reputation as physician, he attended Mussato and we have record of the bracing effect of his presence in the sick room.’ For the date of Boccaccio’s transcription of Cavalcanti, see Ricci, ‘Evoluzione nella scrittura del Boccaccio’, 95–96. Bologna, Tradizione e fortuna, 204: ‘`e un evento epocale, impensabile nell’ottica di Petrarca, quasi necessario nell’orizzonte nuovo del Boccaccio’ (an epochal event, unthinkable from Petrarch’s perspective but almost necessary in Boccaccio’s new horizon). Bologna’s remarks echo Billanovich’s claim that ‘Nessun letterato tra i posteri pot`e pi`u sentire cos`ı unite le persone e le opere dei due fondatori della letteratura italiana’ (Petrarca letterato, 271). Mazzoni, ‘Giovanni Boccaccio fra Dante e Petrarca’, 39–40: ‘Se l’inserzione del quaderno cavalcantiano (pur sempre autografo di Boccaccio) sar`a frutto di un trapianto eseguito pi`u tardi e da altri, l’annessione al corpus dantesco del Canzoniere e` fatto troppo sintomatico e qualificante per essere casuale, e risponde ad una evidente quanto precisa intenzione storiografica: le due prime corone si intrecciano ora di fatto, volontariamente conserte l’una accanto l’altra: saranno i posteri a completare la serie col nome del grande che tanto si era adoperato per diffonderne il culto.’ For the Laurentian interest in Cavalcanti, see Antonio Manetti’s preparation of a codex collecting available documents on Cavalcanti (Biblioteca Laurenziana 41.20) and the poet’s privileged place in both Poliziano’s introductory letter to the Raccolta Aragonese and Ficino’s Commentarium on Plato’s Symposium. On Manetti, see De Robertis, ‘Antonio Manetti copista’ and Tanturli, ‘Proposta e risposta’. Poliziano seems to know Boccaccio’s hand on the basis of a copy of Ausonius, but, although a copy of Ausonius appears in the inventory of Boccaccio’s library, the manuscript that Poliziano mentions has not survived, so it is impossible to confirm his claim. For the suggestion that Poliziano knew Boccaccio’s hand, see Pastore Stocchi, ‘Su alcuni autografi del Boccaccio’. The Chigi certainly passed through Poliziano’s hands, since he used its version of the Vita di Dante to begin the Raccolta Aragonese, and it certainly informed his construction of a vernacular literary history. It is by no means clear, however, that the Commedia was still part of the Chigi when Poliziano used it, as De Robertis suggests; De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 2: 346 n. 75. More skeptical is Corrado Bologna who writes: ‘Ancora esile e` la griglia indiziaria che lega Boccaccio a Poliziano: e occorreranno pi´u robuste spie perch´e l’intero edificio per adesso solo intuibile si lasci riconoscere interamente’ (Tradizione e fortuna dei classici italiani, 1: 206). For another argument that Pastore Stocchi’s hypothesis about Poliziano’s intervention in the Chigi ‘sarebbe da verificare’, see Delcorno Branca, ‘Percorsi danteschi del Poliziano’, 365. Following Barbi, Quaglio (‘Prima fortuna della glossa garbiana’, 343 n. 2)

184

15.

16.

17.

18.

Notes to page 97 attributes the alteration to Jacopo Corbinelli. On the evidence of Palatino 561, which is a fifteenth-century partial copy of the Chigi that does not have the Cavalcanti section, Quaglio judges the Cavalcanti section as extraneous (345), but Palatino 561 does not contain either Petrarch or the Commedia, so it does not represent a strong piece of evidence for these issues or yield answers to these questions. Reeve, ‘Reception/History of Scholarship: Introduction’, 249: ‘Many debates in classical scholarship are caused by loss of evidence that must once have existed, but the evidence that would resolve most debates over literary interpretation – why did Tactius include this episode? why did Propertius put this poem next to that one? why did Virgil choose that word? – has never existed if one’s notion of truth is correspondence to fact. Truth as coherence is the most that one can hope for.’ See De Robertis, ‘Il “Dante e Petrarca” di Giovanni Boccaccio’, 21. According to De Robertis’s reconstruction, the diptych of Dante and Petrarch persisted ‘for a certain length of time’, until the Commedia was removed and Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega with Dino del Garbo’s Latin commentary was put in its place. The terminus ante quam for the alteration is Jacopo Corbinelli (1535–90), who owned both manuscripts as separate pieces. De Robertis, ‘Il “Dante e Petrarca” di Giovanni Boccaccio’, 28: ‘L’integrazione di Dante con Petrarca e` dunque la vera novit`a della silloge boccaccesca; e il corpus lirico due-trecentesco fondato su pochi testi-guida, com’`e nell’attuale Chigiano, non e` che un prodotto della fortuna, e forse una proiezione della nostra mente, un’indebita anticipazione, a credito del Boccaccio, di modelli maturati pi`u tardi, anche se proprio su questo suggerimento; ed effettivamente sembra corrispondere meglio al disegno (peraltro non notevoli ampliamenti) dell’Epistola a Frederico d’Aragona e alla celebrazione del ‘fiorentino imperio’ che non a quella di Dante poeta e teologo e al ‘compromesso storico’ di cui Boccaccio si fa mediatore.’ Pastore Stocchi, ‘Su alcuni autografi del Boccaccio’, 134, argues that the current make up of the manuscript with Cavalcanti ‘ha in ogni modo una sua logica, sia pure riduttiva e non originale ma tuttavia non priva di una qualche capacit`a di persuasione’ but, like De Robertis, Pastore Stocchi finds the Dante–Petrarch to be more original than a lyric collection a` trois. The lyric genealogy of Lasso me also includes two poets who are not present in the current Chigi: Arnaut Daniel and Cino da Pistoia. Arnaut’s exclusion can be explained according to linguistic criteria, because Boccaccio seems primarily interested in the lingua di s`ı, but the exclusion of Cino has been judged to be problematic. Some critics, like Giorgio Padoan (‘In margine al centenario’, 256) and Furio Brugnolo (‘Il libro di poesia nel Trecento’), contend that if Boccaccio were responsible for the addition of Cavalcanti, he would also have added his ‘beloved Cino’. Boccaccio’s relationship with Cino seems as complex as Dante’s, who honors Cino in the DVE by referring to himself as ‘Cino’s friend’, but excludes him from the Commedia. Boccaccio refers to Cino extensively. He was likely a major source for Boccaccio’s Dantean

Notes to pages 98–100

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

185

materials, beginning with Dante’s letter to Cino (Exultanti Pistoriensi, Epist. 3), which Boccaccio rewrites in his own Crepor celestudinis (Ep. 1). Boccaccio also transposes Cino’s La dolce vista into the ottave of the Filostrato (5.62–66), includes Cino in the list of poets who loved in old age in the Decameron (4.Intro), and places him with other love poets, like Dante and Petrarch in Or sei salito (Rime 126). On the other hand, if Cino is the teacher Boccaccio refers to in the Genealogie (15.10), Boccaccio portrays his teacher’s occupation in opposition to Boccaccio’s desire to pursue poetry. Cino may be what ‘must be forgotten if the essential is to be preserved’ (Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 396). For more on Cino, see Balduino, Boccaccio, Petrarca e altri, 183–95. Sieburth, ‘Chanelling Guido’, 290. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 204: ‘This passage clearly demonstrates knowledge of the technique for disavowing responsibility as employed in compilers’ prologues, but equally clear is Boccaccio’s impulse to discard the convention and come out in the open as the unashamed inventor of his stories, the self-confessed craftsman whose creativity parallels (in so far as is humanly possible) the perfect creation of God. By comparison, Jean de Meun and Chaucer appear quite conservative. They were content to adopt the role of the reporter who cannot be blamed for what his sources say, to peer out from behind the “shield and defence” of the compiler.’ The fact that Boccaccio calls it an ‘author’s conclusion’ (‘conclusione dell’autore’) is also interesting given the different roles it describes. For detailed examinations of the rubrics, see D’Andrea, ‘Le rubriche del Decameron’ and Milanese, ‘Affinit`a e contraddizioni’. By contrast, at the end of the De montibus, Boccaccio maintains a rigorous distinction between authors and scribes in order to defend the authority of the former from the laziness of latter. Boccaccio’s remarks in the De montibus recall Petrarch’s complaints about scribes ‘painting’ in a letter to Boccaccio (Fam. 23.19). Boccaccio also uses the author-compiler idea in Allegoria mitologica and Genealogie; see Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, 68. Malagnini, ‘Il libro d’autore’, 523–76. For images of these trees, see Branca, ed., Boccaccio visualizzato, 1: 10. Boccaccio may have also played a role in the design of the illustrations in early manuscripts of the Decameron. See Branca and Vitale, Il capolavoro del Boccaccio. Branca and Ricci, Un autografo del Decameron; Branca and Vitale, Il capolavoro del Boccaccio; Petrucci, ‘A proposito del MS berlinese Hamiltoniano 90. (Nota descrittiva)’ and ‘Il libro manoscritto’; Casamassima, ‘Dentro lo scrittoio del Boccaccio’. Among recent studies on Boccaccio’s textual practices, see Rafti, ‘Osservazioni sull’interpunzione’; ‘Lumina dictionum (i)’; ‘Lumina dictionum (ii)’; ‘Riflessioni sull’usus distinguendi’; ‘Lumina dictionum (iii)’; ‘Lumina dictionum (iv)’; Brown, ‘Between the Convent and the Court’ and ‘Boccaccio in Naples’; Malagnini, ‘Il sistema delle maiuscole nell’autografo

186

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

Notes to pages 100–1 Berlinese’; ‘Il libro d’autore’; and ‘Sul programma illustrativo del Teseida’; Zamponi, ‘Genesi e metamorfosi del libro segreto di Boccaccio’; Zamponi, Pantarotto, and Tomiello, ‘Stratigrafia dello Zibaldone’; Storey, ‘Contesti e culture testuali’; Storey and Arduini, ‘Edizione diplomatico-interpretativa della lettera di frate Ilaro’. Another example of Boccaccio’s experiments may be the construction of an eclogue codex that joined the modern efforts by Dante, Petrarch, and himself to that of Vergil, which demonstrates that he was certainly thinking about how a manuscript could construct a tradition; see Billanovich and Cada, ‘Testi bucolici nella biblioteca del Boccaccio’. Boccaccio also mentions making a collection of Petrarch’s letters to him in 1363, traces of which may survive in Oxford, Balliol College, 146 B. See Monti, ‘Per la Senile V 2’ and Veglia, ‘Vite parallele’. Casamassima, ‘Dentro lo scrittoio del Boccaccio’, 259. For Boccaccio’s role as an innovator in genres, see Branca, ‘Giovanni Bocaccio, rinnovatore dei generi letterari’. Brugnolo, ‘Testo e paratesto’, 55: ‘l’unico testo poetico volgare – e anzi propriamente lirico – del nostro Medioevo a godere di questo particolare presentazione, tipico delle Bibbie e dei libri giuridici.’ For a more general discussion of textual layouts, see Parkes, ‘Layout and Presentation’. For the argument that Boccaccio is responsible for the combination of a different text of the canzone with the commentary and also the shaper of its material form, see Quaglio, ‘Prima fortuna della glossa garbiana’, 351. For the view that text and commentary already appeared together in Boccaccio’s exemplar, see Usher, ‘Boccaccio, Cavalcanti’s Donna’. A similar kind of framed layout was used for Jacopo della Lana’s commentary on Dante’s Commedia in Riccardian 1005, Jacopo’s commentary is in the vernacular, not Latin. For a description of Riccardian 1005, see Boschi Rotiroti, Codicologia trecentesca della ‘Commedia’, 127 and 240, fig. 72. Bartolo da Sassoferrato’s critical assessment of Dante’s Le dolci rime in his 1355 treatise on nobility, De dignitatibus, shows that some vernacular poems were taken seriously as points of departure for exegesis even by more learned figures. Mengaldo, Linguistica e retorica di Dante sees Cavalcanti and Dante as opposed regarding the use of Latin. Although the object and substance of Cavalcanti’s attack on Guittone in Da pi`u a uno face un sollegismo is quite clear, the precise text that he is thinking of has been the matter of some debate. See the notes in De Robertis, ed., Guido Cavalcanti: Rime and, more recently, the analysis in Capelli, Guittone d’Arezzo: Del carnale amore, 135–46. In Purg. 26.119–20, Dante significantly has Guido Guinizelli use the term ‘stupid’ again to inveigh against ‘li stolti / che quel di Limosi credon ch’avanzi’. Guinizelli then relates this stupid perception of Giraut de Borneil’s superiority with the old admiration for Guittone: ‘Cos`ı fer molti antichi di Guittone, / di grido in grido pur lui dando pregio, / fin che l’ha vinto il ver con pi`u persone’ (Purg. 26.124–26). While the

Notes to pages 101–2

33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

187

debate about the chronology of Donna mi prega and Vita nuova has tended to portray the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti as an opposition that reaches its conclusion in Inferno 10, the complexities of the relationship cannot be reduced to a polemic that moves in linear fashion from friendship to enmity. In the opening chapters of the Vita nuova, Dante emphasizes that Cavalcanti does not understand the real meaning of Dante’s dream, but he also identifies Cavalcanti as the only other vernacular poet who can show his poetry has another meaning (Vita nuova 25); in the De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante replaces Cavalcanti with Cino as Dante’s ‘friend’; in Inferno 10 he implicitly condemns Cavalcanti and on the terrace of pride (Purg. 11) Dante claims to surpass him, but in the earthly paradise Dante also recuperates Cavalcanti, using his pastorella as a model for the encounter with Matelda (Purg. 28). For the problem of the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti, which extends to the tensions between Donna mi prega and the Vita nuova, see Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’, 60–63. Zaccaria, ed., Genealogie deorum gentilium, 1538: ‘Habent enim civiles et canonice leges preter textus multiplices, hominum nequitia semper auctos, apparatus suos a multis hactenus doctoribus editos. Habent phylosophorum volumina diligentissime commenta composita. Habent et medicinales libri plurimorum scripta, omne dubium enodantia. Sic et sacre lictere multos habent interpretes; nec non et facultates et artes relique glosatores proprios habuere, ad quos, si oportunum sit, volens habet, ubi recurrat, et, quos velit, ex multis eligat. Sola poesis, quoniam perpaucorum semper domestica fuit, nec aliquid afferre lucri avaris visa sit, non solum per secula multa neglecta atque deiecta, sed etiam variis lacerata persecutionibus a se narrata non habet!’ Cornish, ‘A Lady Asks’, 171. See Brugnolo, ed., Il canzoniere di Nicol`o de’ Rossi. For a convenient edition of the pseudo-Egidio commentary, as well as Dino del Garbo’s, see Fenzi, La canzone d’amore di Guido. It seems likely that the visionary commentary would have been available to Boccaccio, since Nicolo de’ Rossi transcribes it in his collection, now Vatican Barberiniano latino 3953, ‘compilato da diverse mani tra il 1325 e il 1335 sotto la diretta sorveglianza del de’ Rossi, che ne trascrive una parte e interviene a correggere le parti degli altri copisti’ (Fenzi, La canzone d’amore di Guido, 178). Dino’s commentary reverses the linguistic hierarchy between Latin and the vernacular that Dante, for one, expresses in the Convivio, where he explains that he had to write his commentary in the vernacular or else the Latin commentary would have been worth more than – and sovereign instead of subject to – the vernacular poems on which it commented (1.5.5–7). ‘Alcune ne pone quasi confermative dello appetito eccitato per le sopradette: tra le quali pone Cupido, il quale noi volgarmente chiamiamo Amore. Il quale amore volere mostrare come per le sopradette cose si generi in noi,

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39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

Notes to pages 102–3 quantunque alla presente opera forse si converrebbe di dichiarare, non e` mio intendimento di farlo, perci`o che troppa sarebbe lunga la storia: chi disidera di vederlo, legga la canzone di Guido Cavalcanti Donna mi priega etc. e le chiose che sopra vi fece Maestro Dino del Garbo. Dice adunque sommariamente che questo amore e` una passione nata nell’anima per alcuna cosa piaciuta e di poterla avere; al quale fervore isegnare, perci`o che egli non pu`o essere senza gravissime punture, generalmente ciascuno che di lui parla dice che egli e` armato di saette. Altri vogliono per queste saette intendersi il suo subito e penetrativo entramento; le quali due cose per presto volo e per la puntura della saetta ottimamente si possono prendere.’ For a discussion of some interpretations of this note, see Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 186 n. 44. Quaglio, ‘Prima fortuna della glossa garbiana’, 347: ‘una fonte contemporanea, pi`u indicata che sfruttata’. For a discussion of Boccaccio’s uses of Dino’s glosses, also see Usher, ‘Boccaccio, Cavalcanti’s Donna’. For a discussion of Boccaccio’s strategies of self-authorization in the Teseida through the use of gloss and other paratextual devices, see Schnapp, ‘Commentary on Commentary’. For more discussion of Boccaccio’s selfcommentary in the Teseida and the autograph, see Hollander, ‘The Validity of Boccaccio’s Self-Exegesis in His Teseida’; Malagnini, ‘Il libro d’autore’ and ‘Sul programma illustrativo del Teseida’; McGregor, ‘Boccaccio’s Glosses to Teseida and his Knowledge of Lactantius’ Commentary on Statius’ Thebiad’; Roncaglia, ed., Giovanni Boccaccio: Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia; Schnapp, ‘Commentary on Commentary’; Stillinger, The Song of Troilus. Usher, ‘Boccaccio, Cavalcanti’s Donna’. Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti’. In the Esposizioni on Inferno 5, Boccaccio uses the following parts of Dino’s commentary (with parenthetical citations indicating the section numbers in the edition of Dino’s commentary in Fenzi, La canzone d’amore di Guido): the discussion of Love deriving from Mars and quotation of Aly (26); the psychological process of falling in love, omitting Dino’s distinction between possible and agent intellect, but including the quotation from Aristotle’s De anima (33); Dino’s distinction between two kinds of love, one directed at more than one thing, the other as furia or ereos (70). He also rejects Dino’s claim that love is not a choice (79; cf. Esp. 5.lit.165). See Jolles, ‘La facezia di Guido’, as well as the valuable introduction, Contarini, ‘La voce di Guido Cavalcanti’. Calvino, Six Memos, 12. ‘Se volessi scegliere un simbolo augurale per l’affacciarsi al nuovo millennio, scegelierei questo: l’agile salto improvviso del poeta-filosofo che si solleva sulla pesantezza del mondo, dimostrando che la sua gravit`a contiene il segreto della leggerezza, mentre quella che molti credono essere la vitalit`a dei tempi, rumorosa, aggressiva, scalpitante e rombante, appartiene al regno della morte, come un cimitero d’automobili arrugginite’ (‘Leggerezza’, 639).

Notes to pages 103–5

189

45. For a critique of Calvino’s reading, see Veglia, ‘Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (novella vi, 9)’. Veglia argues suggestively that Guido’s lightness would be better associated not with Cavalcanti’s poetry but with Boccaccio’s own work. 46. For the argument that these accounts reflect an historical reality, see Corti, La felicit`a mentale, 4. 47. See Gorni, ‘Invenzione e scrittura nel Boccaccio’ which identifies five potential sources for the story to which Dante’s sonnet Messer Brunetto would be the sixth. On Boccaccio’s rewriting of Inf. 10 in Dec. 6.9, see Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’. For an extreme reading of this intertextual exchange, see Baranski, ‘Alquanto tenea della oppinione degli Epicuri’, which argues, on the basis of two Biblical intertexts, that Boccaccio’s story not only parodies Dante’s portrait of Cavalcanti in the Inf. 10 but also represents Cavalcanti as a Saint. Durling argues that ‘Boccaccio has unmistakably used the imagery of resurrection in Guido’s escape’ (italics in original; 282) and Baranski suggests that ‘behind Guido’s salto lies Christ’s saltus’, as found in exegesis of the Song of Songs (321–23). For other considerations of Boccaccio’s story, see Watson, ‘On Seeing Guido Cavalcanti’; Stone, The Ethics of Nature, 107–21; Alfie, ‘Poetics Enacted’; Cherchi, ‘Da me stesso non vegno’; Cornish, ‘Sons and Lovers’; Stone, The Ethics of Nature; Shklovskii, Lettura del Decameron; and Gagliardi, Guido Cavalcanti: poesia e filosofia. 48. By trying to bring Boccaccio’s agency back into focus, I follow Albert Ascoli’s critique of Auerbach’s reading of Boccaccio, where Ascoli argues that Boccaccio had constructed the critique of Dante’s figural model that Auerbach saw Boccaccio as merely reflecting. See Ascoli, ‘Boccaccio’s Auerbach’ and ‘Auerbach fra gli Epicurei’. 49. Compagni, Cronica, 93. Dino Compagni singles out this episode as a major incident in the spread of bad feelings between the White Cerchi and Black Donati. 50. For the argument that Cavalcanti is not represented as an ‘unbeliever’, see Parodi, ‘La miscredenza di Guido’, who argues that the issue of Guido’s unbelief should be attributed only to the ‘gente volgare’. 51. The Rerum memorandum libri did not circulate while Petrarch was alive, according to Billanovich in his edition (xcv), but Boccaccio could have come across it while reading Petrarch’s works even after he had written his own story. Gorni suggests that it would have been likely that Boccaccio read Petrarch’s version, although he provides no evidence for his claim. For a recent analysis concerned with the problem of influence, see Olson, ‘Resurrecting Dante’s Florence’. It is interesting to note that even if Boccaccio did not know Petrarch’s version, Petrarch likely knew Boccaccio’s which he would have read in the Decameron before translating the story of Griselda. 52. If Boccaccio takes the story from Petrarch, then he changes it from a story about the commentator, Dino del Garbo, to the poet upon whom he comments, Guido Cavalcanti. 53. Rml 2.60: ‘Dinus quidam concivis meus, qui etate nostra gratissime dicacitatis adolescens fuit, casu preteriens per loca frequentissima sepulcris, aliquot sibi

190

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

Notes to pages 106–7 notos senes illic confabulantes comperit; qui ut iocandi peritum irritarent, iocari simul omnes – ut est etas illa loquacior – et manibus etiam apprehendere ceperunt. Ille se proripiens hoc unum omnibus respondit: “Iniquum hoc loco certamen; vos enim ante domos vestras animosiores estis”; senio scilicet eorum et vicinie mortis alludens. Nec prius intellectus est, quam eo ex oculis ablato cimiterium circumspicientes, quas ille domos loqueretur perpenderunt. Innumerabilia dixit ad hunc modum, que apud nos vulgo etiam nota sunt; hoc enim loco non iocos eius prosequi, sed nomen attingere propositum fuit.’ It is strange that Petrarch does not describe this ‘Dino’ with any further identifying features, especially since he claims to tell this story ‘to briefly mention his name’ (‘sed nomen attingere propositum fuit’). The ambiguity has led to debate among modern scholars about whether this ‘Dinus’ is to be identified with the Dino del Garbo who wrote the commentary to Guido’s canzone or not. Billanovich opts for skepticism, while Gorni supports the identification, although his strongest piece of evidence is that Benvenuto calls Dino ‘Dinus florentinus’ in his commentary on Inf. 10.61–63, a fact already mentioned by Quaglio, ‘Prima fortuna della glossa garbiana’, 366. Petrarch was a friend of Dino del Garbo’s son, Tommaso, to whom he writes Seniles 8.3 (Bernardo ed. 1:281–88). In this letter on belief and fortune, Petrarch discusses the relationship between the imaginary and real using several examples, including Cassius running from Caesar’s ghost, the question of Paul’s ascent to heaven, and how Francis received the stigmata. All of these episodes suggest some potentially interesting connections to the figure of Laura. Even Guido’s presence in the cemetery is a product of his philosophical speculations for which he prefers solitude, whereas Petrarch’s Dino is simply there ‘by chance’ (casu). Cavalcanti’s solitude is significant in this regard not only because Boccaccio, like Petrarch and Macrobius, argues that poets prefer solitude (Gen. 14.11 and Vita di Dante), but also because Cavalcanti’s solitude makes him into something of a mystery that gives rise to conflicting interpretations. For Seneca as Boccaccio’s likely source for the phrase (and also Petrarch’s?), see Velli, ‘Seneca nel Decameron’ and Rossi, ‘Sul motto di Cavalcanti’. Parodi, ‘La miscredenza di Guido’ proposes the Gregory’s Dialogues (4.4) on Ecclesiastes 3 and Salimbene de Adam’s Chronicle on Frederick II, but the latter was not widely known in the Trecento, since only a holograph survives. ‘quivi dove erano non avevano essi a far pi´u che tutti gli altri cittadini, n´e Guido meno che alcun di loro’ (Dec. 6.9.13). The theme of interpretation is, of course, the main topic on Days 1 and 6, those days of Hermes (mercoled`ı) and hermeneutics. For an analysis of Day 6 from this perspective, see Fido, ‘Boccaccio’s Ars Narrandi in the Sixth Day of the Decameron’. Greenblatt, ‘What Is the History of Literature?’, 463 Durling points out Boccaccio is not explicit about Cavalcanti being a poet in the story itself, but he does mention him as poet in the Introduction to Day 4 of the Decameron and the parallel with Giotto suggests the

Notes to pages 108–9

60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

191

common terrain of Purg. 11, where the poetic parallel to Giotto as painter is Cavalcanti. Boccaccio, Decameron, 2:758: ‘Proprio sulle guardie di un suo autografo, il Riccardiano 1032 contenente il suo Buccolicum carmen, il B. noter`a, nel suo greco approssimativo e in caratteri latini, la sentenza Antropos agramatos fyton acarpon cio`e l’uomo illetterato [`e] pianta senza frutto: affermazione, simile a questa, di una convinzione fatta ragion di vita. Riecheggia qui probabilmente anche il dantesco: ‘Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi’ (Inf. 3.64).’ Albert Ascoli suggests that this passage may also echo the beginning of Dante’s Monarchia. For a passing mention of the connection between Dante’s poem (Rime XCIX; Foster/Boyde 76; De Robertis 49) and Decameron 6.9, see Foster and Boyde, eds., Dante’s Lyric Poetry, 2: 255–57. The poem appears in Firenze, Accademia della Crusca, ms. 53, transcribed by Lorenzo Bartolini in the sixteenth century (1529–30 for Barbi, Studi, 123 e n.), where one reads ‘A m. Betto brunelleschi. O Messer betto questa pulzelletta’ (c. 1 r), according to De Robertis, ed., Dante Alighieri: Rime, 1:91. The other witnesses are Bologna, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, 1289, which is dated to the second half of the sixteenth century, where the incipit is ‘M(esser) Dante a M(esser) Betto Brunelleschi di Firenze Messere Betto questa polzelletta’ (c. 32 r), according to De Robertis 1: 50. Finally, in Vat. lat. 3214, which dates to 1523 and was one of Bembo’s books, although written by Antonio Sallando (see De Robertis 1: 680), the transcription is ‘Questo mando dante al[l]igheri amesser betto brunellesc[h]i di fire(n)ze. Messer brunecto questa pulzellecta (c. 153 r-v)’ (De Robertis 1: 683). For the text, see De Robertis 3: 357–59. The issues over the historical identification of the Brunetto with Betto Brunelleschi, his less well-known namesake (Contini) or Brunetto Latini (Gorni) is not crucial for this analysis, since the sonnet’s connection to the Cavalcanti story suggests that Boccaccio associated Dante’s ‘Messer Brunetto’ with his own character of Betto Brunelleschi. Translation is from Foster-Boyde. From the perspective of this dedicatory sonnet, one understands that the poem it introduces is difficult, not unlike the dedicatory sonnet itself. Dante tells Brunetto to seek out interpretive help from others, whose interpretive abilities are evoked in order to be mocked since these friars understand whatever comes into their hands (i.e. by applying their own interpretive models) instead of acquiring true understanding. Even these interpreters, however, fall short of the skill of Giano, yet another self-involved interpreter who will also fail to understand the poem’s meaning. This poem has been used as a piece of evidence in the debates about Dante’s authorship of the Fiore because of the mention of a Frate Alberto in Fiore 88.13 and 130.4. Whether or not the poem confirms Dante’s authorship, however, these verses from the Fiore confirm the idea that ‘Frate Alberto’ means a bad interpreter in the sonnet. These references to the need for interpreters recall Bonagiunta da Lucca’s accusations in the sonnet Voi ch’avete mutata la maniera, especially the last

192

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

Notes to pages 109–11 two terzine: ‘Cos`ı passate voi di sottigliansa, / e non si pu`o trovar chi ben ispogna, / cotant’`e iscura vostra parlatura. // Ed e` tenuta grave ’nsomilliansa, ancor che ’l senno vegna da Bologna, / traier canson per forsa di scritura’. Bruni, ‘Comunicazione’, 82 and Boccaccio, 171–72. For the observation that many of the ideas in the Cavalcanti story ‘are very close to points made in the defense of poetry in the Genealogie deorum gentilium’, see Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, 281 and 294 n. 16. In the modern critical edition of the story, Guido is described as ‘un de’ miglior loici che avesse il mondo e ottimo natural filosofo’ (6.9.8), but there may be a significant graphic distinction to be found in Boccaccio’s autograph transcription of the story (Berlin, Staatsbibliotheck 90). In the Berlin MS, Boccaccio writes that Cavalcanti is ‘uno de’ miglior loyci che avesse il mondo et optimo phylosopho naturale’. Boccaccio uses this classicizing form of the usual filosofo mostly in elevated contexts, according to Corradino, ‘Rilievi grafici sui volgari autografi’, 65–66. In this translation, I have revised Osgood’s ‘ghosts’ into ‘witches’. ‘sed etiam nullam esse usquam tam delirantem aniculam, circa foculum domestici laris una cum vigilantibus hibernis noctibus fabellas orci, seu fatarum, vel Lammiarum, et huiusmodi, ex quibus sepissime inventa conficiunt, fingentem atque recitantem, que sub pretextu relatorum non sentiat aliquem iuxta vires sui modici intellectus sensum minime quandoque ridendum, per quem velit aut terrorem incutere parvulis, aut oblectare puellas, aut senes ludere, aut saltem Fortune vires ostendere’ (1422). This chapter revises, as Osgood 168 notes, the apparent dismissal of ‘old wives’ tales’ in the previous chapter, where Boccaccio’s classification of the four ways of composing fiction appears to discard old wives’ tales (14.9). Zaccaria, Boccaccio narratore, 176 notes that this chapter (14.10) is ‘non preceduto in riscontri diretti con Petrarca’ and therefore constitutes one of Boccaccio’s most original contributions to the definition of poetry. This concession to old wives’ tales is equally a concession to Boccaccio’s own past literary productions. Marcus, An Allegory of Form, 5 suggests that the anecdote is ‘a kind of limiting case for the allegorical nature of all fictions’. See Ascoli, ‘Auerbach fra gli Epicurei’, 144. Boccaccio makes the same connection between the arts of painting and poetry in the Author’s Conclusion of the Decameron and Gen. 14.6, where he mentions Giotto explicitly as a great painter just before his definition of poetry. Although Benvenuto da Imola does not use Boccaccio’s story about Giotto in the Decameron in his commentary on Purg. 11, the story he does tell also involves the discrepancy between surface and depth in the contrast between the beauty of Giotto’s art and personal ugliness. According to his story Dante visited Giotto when he was painting in Padova and noted the contrast between the ugliness of his children and the beauty of his painting, which gives rise to Giotto’s explanation: ‘Quia pingo de die, sed fingo de nocte’ (Because I paint during the day but I make [i.e. have sex] at night). Benvenuto concludes, ‘Dante enjoyed the response, not because it was novel, since it can be found

Notes to pages 112–14

193

in Macrobius’ Saturnalia, but because it seemed to be born from the man’s genius (Haec responsio summe placuit Danti, non quia sibi esset nova, cum inveniatur in Macrobio libro Saturnalium, sed quia nata videbatur ab ingenio hominis). The Marcrobius passage is Saturnalia 2.2.10, where it occurs in the context of jokes told by wise or famous men. Petrarch’s tale of Dino in the Rml occurs in a similar thematic context. Petrarch also notes that both Giotto and Simone Martini were ugly but produced beautiful art (Fam. 5.17), as noted by Watson, ‘The Cement of Fiction’, 48. 71. Vasari, Le Vite, 118: ‘Et insieme a Fiorenza inviatisi, non solo in poco tempo pareggi`o il fanciullo la maniera di Cimabue, ma ancora divenne tanto imitatore della natura, che ne’ tempi suoi sband´ı affatto quella greca goffa maniera, e risuscit`o la moderna e buona arte della pittura, et introdusse il ritrar di naturale le persone vive, che molte centinaia d’anni non s’era usato.’ (Having gone together to Florence, the boy not only equaled Cimabue’s style in a brief time but even became such a good imitator of nature, that in his times he banished the crude Greek style, and revived the good, modern art of painting, and he introduced drawing from live people, which had not been done for hundreds of years.) EPILOGUE 1. The Latin inscription is ‘Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticane custos atque provisor’. Although the statue itself dates from the early twentieth century, its conception of Joseph as caretaker derives from late fourteenth-century theology. On the transformation of the understanding of Joseph, see Newman, God and the Goddesses, 283–90 and Payan, Joseph. For a recent analysis of the topic in the context of the M´erode altarpiece with relevant bibliography, see Hahn, ‘Joseph Will Perfect’. 2. It is fitting that the Vatican as a ‘library of libraries’ as Franklin, ‘Pro communi doctorum’ puts it, should contain the collection of collections that is Giovanni Boccaccio’s codex Chigi l v 176. 3. Benedict’s rule did, of course, require reading, which in its turn required the establishment of scriptoria to write those texts. In this context, the act of inscription was the sacred and devotional task. See Leclercq, The Love of Learning. 4. For more on Boccaccio’s lectures, see Papio, ‘Introduction’ and Baldan, ‘Pentimento ed espiazione di un pubblico lettore (Boccaccio e la Commedia dantesca)’. 5. Boccaccio’s use of fornice here suggests Inf. 5, in the commentary to which he traces the relationship between the fornix and fornication (Esp. 5.all.64–5; Papio 299). For a discussion of ‘fornice’ in this context, see Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, 187–89. In worrying that he has conveyed the secrets of the Muses to too many, Boccaccio is also following Dante’s concern in the Vita nuova about the divisions of Donne ch’avete (Vita nuova 19.22): ‘chi non e` di tanto ingegno che per queste che sono fatte la possa intendere, a me non

194

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

Notes to pages 114–15 dispiace se la mi lascia stare, ch´e certo io temo d’avere a troppi comunicato lo suo intendimento pur per queste divisioni che fatte sono, s’elli avvenisse che molti le potessero audire’ (if anyone is not intelligent enough to understand it from the divisions already made, I would not mind in the least if he would simply leave my poem alone. As it is, I am afraid I may have shared its meaning with too many readers because of these divisions I have already made – if it should happen that many would bother to read them). For the observation that Boccaccio’s poems of renunciation regarding the Esposizioni follow topoi established by Petrarch in the poems that conclude the Chigi collection of Petrarch’s Fragmentorum liber, see Tufano, ‘Quel dolce canto’, 182. For a discussion of allegories of allegory in Dante, see Martinez, ‘Allegory’. The image of re-clothing returns to the issues of interpretation that were frequently expressed with ideas of clothing and nudity, as in Dante’s Vita nuova (25). On Griselda, see Albanese, ‘Fortuna umanistica della ‘Griselda’’; Francesco Petrarch: De Insigni Obedientia Et Fide Uxoria (Il Codice Riccardiano 991); and ‘Un dittico umanistico: Petrarca e Boccaccio’ See also Goodwin, ‘The Griselda Game’. It seems unlikely that Boccaccio received Petrarch’s version of the story, but he clearly knew of it, since he requests of a copy from Francesco da Brossano after Petrarch’s death: ‘Furthermore I fervently want, if you can easily do it, [ . . . ] a copy of the last of my stories which he embellished with his speech [copiam ultime fabularum mearum quam suo dictatu decoraverat]’ (Ep. 24). His request for these letters must be part of the collection of his correspondence with Petrarch (as well as Petrarch’s Bucolics) that he begins to develop in 1366 according to Ep. 15. Some traces of this collection may be represented by Balliol 146 B, which contains Petrarch’s prefatory letter to the Invective in medicum, the Invective themselves, Seniles to Boccaccio (1.5, 5.2, 8.1, 3.5 and 6 together, 17.1, 2, 3; 5.3; 17.4), and the original redaction of Fam. 11.5, Petrarch’s reaction to the Florentine offer. For discussion, see Billanovich, ‘Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte’, 466–68 and more recently Monti, ‘Per la Senile V 2’ and Veglia, ‘Vite parallele’. Another codex that Billanovich notes is close to Balliol is Siena, Biblioteca comunale, h vi 23, which contains Boccaccio’s Buccolicum Carmen, the correspondence of Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio, eight letters of Boccaccio and eleven letters of Petrarch: 17.2, 3, 4 found in Balliol; Sen. 5.1 and 1γ; as well as Fam. 10.3γ, Sen. 10.1, and Sen. 15.6, all of which discuss monastic life. It also includes Cicero’s Pro Archia. For a summary of the importance of this Siena manuscript, see Monti, ‘Per la Senile V 2’, 110–11. These collections suggest that Boccaccio may have not only known of Petrarch’s version of the Griselda story but also perhaps read it. For a discussion of Boccaccio’s bold plea for the allegorical nature of all storytelling in Gen. 14.10, see Chapter 4. On Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity (Sen. 18.1), see Wilkins, ‘On the Evolution of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity’; Enenkel, ‘Modelling the Humanist’; and Villani, ‘Introduzione’.

Notes to pages 115–16

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11. Osgood, ed., Boccaccio on Poetry, 131–32 for this quotation and those that follow. 12. Boccaccio’s autoepitaph borrows language from Petrarch’s Africa 9.400–2. 13. In addition to Dante’s identification with Ulysses, also see Petrarch’s rewriting of himself as Ulysses in Fam. 1.1. 14. Gen. 15.10: ‘Qui ergo patiuntur cerdonen[subule]setisque vacare, lanistam pecori, sculptorem statuis, me etiam queso, vacasse poetis equo animo patiantur.’ The translation is from Osgood, ed., Boccaccio on Poetry, 133. 15. For Boccaccio’s defense of poetry as part of life’s variety, see Gen. 14.18, the Decameron (Author’s Conclusion), and the third version of the Vita di Dante, where Bocaccio quotes Dante’s discussion of the necessity of human diversity in Par. 8.

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Index

Abardo, Rudy, 161, 163 Acciauoli, Niccolo de’, 41 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 121 Ageno, Franca Brambilla, 128 Ahern, John, 127, 152, 160 Albanese, Gabriella, 194 Alessio, Gian Carlo, 146, 160 Alexander VII, Pope. See Fabio Chigi Alfie, Fabian, 189 Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Alighieri Alighieri, Jacopo, 48, 65, 66, 161 Alighieri, Pietro, 48, 150, 153 Allegretti, Paola, 177 Allen, Judson Boyce, 163 Andal`o di Negro, 24, 160 Anderson, Benedict, 121, 124 Anderson, David, 181, 188 Andrea Stramazzo da Perugia, 80 Antognini, Roberta, 179 Antonelli, Roberto, 10, 78, 122, 126, 166, 168, 182 Apuleius, 192 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 68, 138 Arator, 22 Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, 117, 182 Arduini, Beatrice, 163, 165, 186 Ariani, Marco, 168 Aristotle, 32, 140, 188 Arn, Mary-Jo, 127 Arnaut Daniel, 6, 91, 175, 178, 189 Arqu´es, Rosanna, 182 Ascoli, Albert, 4, 30, 60, 122, 127, 131, 134, 137, 139, 148, 152, 157, 159, 162, 171, 191 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 178 Assmann, Jan, 126 Auerbach, Erich, 126 Augustine, 87, 147 Ausonius, 183 Auzzas, Ginetta, 140, 143 Avalle, D’Arco Silvio, 139

Bacci, Orazio, 143 Baglio, Marco, 142, 148 Baldan, Paolo, 41, 140, 149, 193 Baldassari, Sefano, 195 Balduino, Armando, 166, 170, 185 Baranski, Zygmunt, 85, 96, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 139, 159, 165, 173, 178, 181, 182, 186 Barbato da Sulmona, 75, 176 Barber, Joseph, 166 Barbi, Michele, xiv, 9, 52, 56, 60, 120, 121, 125, 128, 138, 139, 145, 152, 153, 154, 156, 160, 171, 182, 183, 191 Barkan, Leonard, 140 Barlaam, 24, 158 Barolini, Teodolinda, 77, 78, 87, 88, 103, 122, 124, 154, 163, 165, 168, 169, 174, 175, 177, 178, 188, 189 Baron, Hans, 144 Barthes, Roland, 27, 137 Bartolo da Sassoferrato, 188 Bartuschat, Johannes, 48, 138, 152 Baswell, Christopher, 127, 162, 164 Battaglia Ricci, Lucia, 133 Battistini, Andrea, 157 Beckett, Samuel, 29 Bellomo, Saverio, 70, 138, 139, 151, 160, 164 Belloni, Gino, 166 Bembo, Pietro, 3, 4, 117, 121, 122, 138, 165, 191 Benes, Carrie, 150 Benvenuto da Imola, 7, 86, 124, 158, 174, 190 Bergin, Thomas, 128 Bernardo, Aldo, 172 Berra, Claudia, 166 Bert´e, Monica, 180 Bettarini, Rosanna, 175, 176 Bettarini Bruni, Anna, 164 Bible Book of Lamentations, 57, 61 Psalter, 57 Song of Songs, 57

233

234

Index

Billanovich, Giuseppe, 122, 125, 128, 129, 130, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 152, 159, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173, 177, 187, 189, 194 Biow, Douglas, 158 Bird, Otto, 181 Blake, William, 113 Bloom, Harold, 171 Boccaccio Allegoria mitologica, 185 Ameto, 124 Amorosa visione, 31, 83, 123 auto-epitaph, 115 Breve raccoglimento, 65 Bucolicum carmen, 107 Caccia di Diana, 30, 65, 79, 124, 138 Consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi, 124 Convivio, 70 De casibus, 161, 169 De montibus, 127, 161, 185, 186 De mulieribus claris Dedication, 135 De Vita Petracchi, 3, 34, 79, 115, 125, 143, 169, 170, 177, 180 Decameron, 12, 13, 39, 65, 79, 91, 100, 124, 158 (1), 42 (1.1), 124, 137 (3.8), 169 (4.Intro), 8, 16, 31, 57, 90, 102, 109, 135, 177, 185, 190, 195, (4.1), 177 (5.10), 135 (6), 42, 190 (6.1), 67 (6.5), 136 (6.8), 107 (6.9), 3, 97, 103, 112 Author’s Conclusion, 22, 98, 114, 163, 185, 195 autograph. See Manuscripts: Hamilton 90 Galeotto, 26, 114, 136, 193 Relationship to Genealogie, 24 Eclogues, 110 Editions of Dante, Influence of, 53 Elegia di Costanza, 151 Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, 100 Epistles 1 (Crepor celsitudinis), 169, 185 2 (Mavortis milex), 78, 91, 169 4 (Sacre famis), 59, 95, 109 7 (Movit iam diu, Letter to Petrarch), 32, 34, 36, 143, 167 10 (Ut huic epistole, Letter to Petrarch), 34, 180

15 (Ut te viderem, Letter to Petrarch), 36, 86, 146, 194 19 (Letter to Jacopo Pizzinga), 25, 79 20 (Epistolam tuam, Letter to Pietro Piccolo), 27, 28, 93 24 (Flebilem epistolam tuam, Letter to Francesco da Brossano), 181 Esposizioni, 28, 67, 79, 102, 114, 158, 162, 163, 164, 178 (Accessus 36), 30 (1.litt.15), 39 (1.litt.70), 40 (1.all.14), 145 (1.all.23), 134 (4.all.64), 135 (5.litt.), 163 (5.all.), 194 (9.all.), 44 (15), 114 Filocolo, 30, 100, 124, 145, 147 Filostrato, 100, 159, 175, 185 Genealogie, 12, 13, 21, 24, 27, 28, 65, 71, 79, 96, 100, 102, 113, 114, 185, 195 (1.Pref.1), 42, 133, 185 (14.7), 16, 40 (14.8), 134 (14.9), 44, 133, 134, 192 (14.10), 44, 110, 115, 134, 150, 163, 192, 194 (14.11), 190 (14.12), 133 (14.13), 150 (14.14), 133 (14.15), 18 (14.16), 18, 137 (14.18), 133, 134, 195 (14.22), 24 (15.3), 133 (15.6), 24, 57, 136, 185 (15.7), 26, 147 (15.10), 115, 144, 185, 195 (15.14), 137 autograph. See Manuscripts: Hamilton 90 etymology of poetry in, 17 love in, 19 Relationship to Decameron, 24 textual history, 131 views on the vernacular in, 17 Ideas of Cultural Renewal, 25 Ideas of literature as garden, 24 Mavortis milex. See Boccaccio: Epistles: 2 mescolare, significance of term, 57 Petrarch and, 15 Petrarch, first meeting with, 33

Index Rime (122), 114 (126), 185 Teseida, 57, 59, 100, 102, 103, 186, 188 (3.7–10), 135 Trattatello in laude di Dante. See Boccaccio: Vita di Dante Vita di Dante, 1, 3, 8, 11, 12, 16, 18, 26, 50, 68, 71, 79, 96, 101, 109, 114, 118, 124, 129, 133, 167, 171, 177, 183, 190, 195 Bibliographical stories in, 48 Dante’s other loves, 91 differences between versions, 125 dream of Dante’s Mother, 38 Epitaphs, Choice of, 46 etymology of poetry, 40 explanation of Dante’s choice of vernacular, 38 First (Toledo) Version, Historical circumstances of, 35 genealogy of poetry, 45 Limping, image of, 35 peacock, as image of Dante’s Commedia, 38 Second (Chigi) Version, Reasons for changes, 36 Third Version, 145 Title, Versions of its, 30 Vita nuova, Edition of Beatrice’s death in, 64 Divisioni as gloss, 61 Editorial Note, 56 Marginalization of divisioni, 61 Ytalie iam certus honos, 2, 11, 12, 16, 17, 30, 36, 46, 50, 74, 79, 83, 85, 96, 101, 109, 171 Boethius, 57 Boitani, Piero, 173 Boli, Todd, 138, 145, 155 Bologna, Corrado, 11, 97, 121, 128, 157, 165, 178, 183 Bonagiunta da Lucca, 191 Bonaventure, 68 Book of Lamentations. See Bible: Book of Lamentations Bordin, Michele, 121, 154 Borghini, Vincenzo, 154 Borriero, Giovanni, 127, 165 Boschi Rotiroti, Marisa, 129, 151, 158, 160, 161, 186, 188 Bosco, Umberto, 171 Botterill, Steven, 157, 160, 162, 166 Bowron, Edgar Peters, 119 Boyde, Patrick, 191 Braden, Gordon, 120 Branca, Vittore, 93, 100, 107, 118, 125, 128, 131, 143, 163, 165, 180, 185, 187

235

Brantley, Jessica, 10, 126 Brownlee, Kevin, 85, 173 Brucker, Gene, 143 Brugnoli, Giorgio, 135 Brugnolo, Furio, 100, 126, 184, 186, 187 Brunelleschi, Betto, 107, 191 Brunetto Latini, 57, 161 Bruni, Francesco, 59, 109, 120, 128, 146, 162, 192 Bruni, Leonardo, 3, 29, 120, 121, 138, 185 Buosone da Gubbio, 66, 161 Burgwinkle, William, 139 Busby, Keith, 126, 127 Busi, Aldo, 3, 120 Butterfield, Ardis, 119 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 10, 126, 133 Cachey, Theodore, 122, 168, 171, 174 Caesar, Michael, 120 Caffero, William, 142 Calcaterra, Carlo, 166 Calvino, Italo, 3, 103, 104, 120, 188 Camille, Michael, 126 Campana, Augusto, 151, 180 Cannon, Christopher, 119 Capelli, Roberta, 186 Caputo, Rino, 178 Carducci, Giosu`e, 122, 152 Carpenter, George, 139 Carrai, Stefano, 127 Carruthers, Mary, 10, 118, 126, 127 Casamassima, Emanuele, 100, 185, 186, 187 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 90, 133, 177 Cavalcanti, Guido, 60, 90, 91, 112, 159, 177 Da pi`u a uno face un sollegismo, 101 Donna mi prega, 1, 118 Cavallo, Guiglielmo, 126 Cazal´e B´erard, Claude, 169 Cecco d’Ascoli, 122 Celenza, Christopher, 126, 163 Cerquiglini, Bernard, 125 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline, 119 Cesareo, Giovanni, 171, 179 Chanson de Roland, 3 Chartier, Roger, 30, 139 Chenu, M.-D., 68, 163 Cherchi, Paolo, 126, 192 Chiappelli, Fredi, 175 Chigi, Fabio, 127 Chines, Loredana, 121, 166 Chiorboli, Ezio, 176 Ciccuto, Marcello, 152 Cicero, 5, 25, 32, 35, 84, 119, 122, 127, 130, 136, 138, 141, 142, 144, 172, 194

236

Index

Cino da Pistoia, 5, 6, 7, 90, 91, 102, 119, 125, 169, 175, 177, 178, 184, 185, 187 Ciociola, Claudio, 152, 154, 165 Claudian, 129 Cohn, Samuel, 142 Cola di Rienzo, 5, 122 Colonna, Giacomo, 167 Compagni, Dino, 104, 189 Contarini, Silvia, 188 Contini, Gianfranco, 120, 126, 128, 165, 171, 175, 191 Corbinelli, Jacopo, 127, 153, 184 Cornish, Alison, 101, 117, 124, 128, 187, 189 Corradino, Alessandra, 157, 192 Cortellessa, Andrea, 120 Corti, Maria, 9, 95, 182, 189 Coulter, Cornelia, 173 Cox, Virginia, 140 Cristiani, Luca, 141, 142 Croce, Benedetto, 156 Crouzet-Pavan, Elisabeth, 117 Cursi, Marco, 160 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 3, 121, 134, 135, 140, 172, 185 Dagenais, John, 127 Damian, Peter, 31 D’Andrea, Antonio, 135, 157, 163, 164, 185 Dante, 24 A ciascun’alma presa, 56 Amor da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia, 91 authorization, self-, 5 canzoni distese, 2, 11, 50, 52, 73, 86 choice of vernacular, according to Boccaccio, 38 Commedia, 11, 50 Commedia, Boccaccio as scribe of, 68 Commedia, Boccaccio’s capitoli for, 66 Commedia, Boccaccio’s rubrics for, 68 Convivio, 70, 127, 147, 160, 187 (4.23), 150 Cos`ı nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro, 91, 165, 178 De vulgari eloquentia, 5, 6, 17, 18, 23, 122, 127, 184, 187 (1.18), 24 (2.4), 132 Epistle to Can Grande, 159 Epistles (3), 162, 169, 177, 178, 185 (4), 78, 177 (11), 162 (12), 34, 162 Fiore, 191 Ghebellinism, 36

Guido i’ vorrei, 123 Inferno (1), 25, 161 (2), 86 (3), 107 (4), 6, 136 (5), 103, 163, 177 (8), 48 (9), 44 (10), 1, 95, 96, 104, 109, 117, 162 (11), 64, 162 (14), 162 (15), 162 (16), 162 (24), 64 (26), 116, 171 Io son venuto, 91 Messer Brunetto, questa pulzelletta, 104, 109 Monarchia, 5 Paradiso, 161 (8), 163, 195 (10), 5 (25), 121, 124 (33), 48, 112 Purgatorio, 110 (2), 163 (6), 124 (11), 119, 187, 190, 191 (22), 25 (26), 6, 124, 186 (28), 187 (30), 118 Vita nuova, 1, 5, 8, 11, 50, 87, 124, 174 (3), 6, 56 (14), 60 (19), 194 (25), 59, 92, 101, 131, 187, 194 (27), 61 (28), 62 (31), 88 (42), 88, 152 Dante as scribal editor in, 55 Vita nuova (1576 editio princeps), 56 Vita nuova, Boccaccio as scribe of, 64 Dasenbrook, Reed Way, 182 Decretals, 59 de Grazia, Margreta, 125 De Hamel, Christopher, 137 De Looze, Laurence, 127 De Robertis, Domenico, 9, 11, 36, 52, 57, 69, 72, 90, 97, 121, 125, 128, 139, 145, 146, 152, 154, 156, 157, 163, 164, 174, 176, 178, 179, 183, 184, 186, 191 De Sanctis, Francesco, 3, 92, 178

Index Del Balzo, Carlo, 120, 163 Delcorno Branca, Daniela, 183 del Garbo, Tommaso, 190 Del Puppo, Dario, 168 Deppman, Jed, 165 Despres, Denise, 127 Dido, 163 Dino Compagni. See Compagni, Dino Dino del Garbo, 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 12, 27, 95, 99, 102, 104, 105, 124, 159, 181, 184, 186, 189, 190 Dionisotti, Carlo, 120, 121, 123, 126, 166 Donati, Forese, 129 Donato Albanzani, 180 Donato, Maria Monica, 117 Dotti, Ugo, 141 Durling, Robert, 96, 156, 157, 182, 189, 190, 192 Dutschke, Dennis, 135 Eco, Umberto, 27, 137 Egan, Margarita, 139 Egidio (pseudo-author of commentary on Donna mi prega), 187 Eisner, Martin, 135, 136, 137, 138, 169, 181 Ellis-Rees, William, 172 Enenkel, Karl, 194 Fabbri, Renata, 143, 144 Fabio Chigi, 153 Fahy, Conor, 126 Favati, Guido, 9, 125, 139 Fenzi, Enrico, 118, 141, 171, 175, 186, 187, 188 Feo, Michele, 123, 143, 167, 168, 169, 170, 179, 181 Fera, Vincenzo, 128, 166, 194 Ferguson, 136 Ferroni, 122 Ficino, Marsilio, 2, 119, 121, 183 Fido, Franco, 137, 190 Finucci, Valeria, 166 Fiorilla, Maurizio, 118 Flaubert, Gustave, 87 Fo, Dario, 3, 120 Folena, Gianfranco, 122 Forese Donati, 154 Foresti, Arnaldo, 141, 167, 172 Forni, Pier Massimo, 124 Forster, Leonard, 120, 166 Foscolo, Ugo, 120 Foster, Kenelm, 191 Foucault, Michel, 30, 139 Fracassetti, Giuseppe, 141 Francesco da Barberino, 24, 59, 138, 158, 159, 187 Francesco da Brossano, 194 Francesco da Buti, 146 Francesco di Ser Nardo, 53

237

Franklin, Carmela, 194 Frasso, Giuseppe, 169 Frate Ilaro, 130, 146, 150 Freccero, John, 171 Fubini, Riccardo, 179 Fulton, Rachel, 126 Gagliardi, Antonio, 189 Gambarota, Paola, 125 Gardini, Nicola, 120, 176 Garin, Eugenio, 150 Genette, G´erard, 68, 160 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 16 Gianfigliazzi, Geri, 166 Gilbert, Creighton, 132 Gilson, Etienne, 132, 181 Gilson, Simon, 39, 120, 138, 146, 148, 174 Ginsberg, Warren, 36, 41, 138, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 169 Ginzburg, Carlo, 126, 152, 174 Giotto, 136, 137 Giovanni del Virgilio, 31, 46, 130, 151, 153, 169, 171, 172 Gittes, Tobias, 137, 185, 193 Giuntina, 154 Godman, Peter, 140 Gombrich, E. H., 119 Goodwin, Amy, 194 Gorni, Guglielmo, 78, 118, 120, 163, 168, 177, 189, 191 Grabher, Carlo, 131 Grafton, Anthony, 126 Gramsci, Antonio, 3 Greenblatt, Stephen, 110, 190 Greene, Thomas, 123, 136, 137 Greenfield, Concetta, 132 Greetham, David, 156 Gregory the Great, 43, 134, 150, 190 Griffo, Francesco, 119 Griselda. See Petrarch: Seniles: (17.3) Gross, Karen, 138, 150 Guerri, Domenico, 56, 156 Guido da Pisa, 122, 160 Guido da Polenta, 46, 66 Guillory, John, 119, 135 Guinizelli, Guido, 6, 186 Guittone d’Arezzo, 101, 119, 175 Gullick, Michael, 137 Hahn, Cynthia, 193 Hainsworth, Peter, 170 Hale, David, 140 Hamburger, Jeffrey, 10, 126 Hampton, Timothy, 133 Hankins, James, 144

238

Index

Hanna, Ralph, 159 Hardison, O. B., 134 Harrison, Robert, 133 Heaney, Seamus, 135 Hecker, Oscar, 132 Hege, Brigitte, 131, 132 Henri d’Andeli, 134 Hercules, 42, 43, 148 Hinds, Stephen, 142 Hobbins, Daniel, 127 Hobsbawm, Eric, 124 Hollander, Robert, 57, 131, 132, 159, 188 Holmes, Olivia, 127, 164 Holsinger, Bruce, 126 Homer, 130, 181 Horace, 150, 167 Hortis, Attilio, 148 Houston, Jason, 55, 56, 64, 131, 156, 157, 160, 163, 164 Hugh of St. Victor, 163 Huot, Sylvia, 125, 127 Hyde, Thomas, 124 Ilaro, Frate. See Frate Ilaro Illich, Ivan, 163 Inclita Fama, 151 Indovinello Veronese, 23 Inglese, Giorgio, 154 Isidore of Seville, 22, 43 Jacopo della Lana, 159, 163, 186 Jed, Stephanie, 142 Jerome, 135 John of Salisbury, 32, 141 Jolles, Andr´e, 103, 104, 188 Joseph, St., 113 Jossa, Stefano, 122 Jura Monarchiae, 151 Juvencus, 22 Kallendorf, Craig, 132 Kant, Immanuel, 39 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 140 Kastan, David, 119 Kay, Sarah, 126 Kempen, Ludwig van (Socrates), 167 Kennedy, William J., 75, 118, 120, 122, 166, 181 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, 127 Kermode, Frank, 130 Kircher, Timothy, 173 Kirkham, Victoria, 117, 118, 128, 130, 138, 147, 151 Kleiner, John, 156 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 122, 123, 134 Kuon, Peter, 175

Lambertuccio Dino, 48 Landino, Cristoforo, 2, 4, 117, 119, 121, 138, 140 Lanza, Antonio, 154 Lanzoni, Francesco, 147 Lapo da Castiglionchio, 142, 173 Larner, John, 138, 152 Latini, Brunetto. See Brunetto Latini Laureys, Marc, 173 Leclercq, Jean, 193 Leonardi, Lino, 122, 126, 127, 163 Leonzio Pilato, 24, 158 Leopardi, Giacomo, 4, 123 Lerer, Seth, 127, 135 Liborio, Mariantonia, 139 Livy, 5, 148, 166 Lombard, Peter, 57 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 150 Lorenzo de’ Medici, 172 Lummus, David, 137 Macciocca, Gabriella, 121, 139 Machaut, Guillaume de, 113 Macola, Novella, 118 Macrobius, 131, 172, 190 Maggi, Armando, 117 Magrini, Diana, 176 Mainardo Accursio, 32, 33, 141, 176 Malagnini, Franceca, 100, 185, 188 Malaspina, Moroello, 48, 78 Malatesta, Pandolfo, 180 Mallarm´e, St´ephane, 113 Malpaghini, Giovanni, 137, 166, 179 Mancini, Mario, 182, 186 Mandelstam, Osip, 120 Manetti, Antonio, 11, 70, 163, 183 Manetti, Giannozzo, 80, 170 Mangiatroia, Jacopo, 182 Mann, Nicholas, 167 Manuscripts Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Hamilton 90, 8, 97, 113, 125, 192 Bologna, Archivio di Stato Memoriali bolognesi, 52, 126, 178 Cortona, Biblioteca Comunale e dell’Accamedia Etrusca, 88, 160 Florence, Accademia della Crusca ms, 5, 191 Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana Conventi soppressi 122, 153 LaurSaC (Santa Croce 26 sin. 1), 72 Martelli 12, 73, 100, 153, 165 Plut, 29.8, 31, 33, 65, 79, 138, 151, 153, 169, 171 Plut, 33.31, 138

Index Plut, 41.17, 168 Plut, 49.18, 141 Plut, 52.9, 8, 132 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Banco Rari 217, 126 Magliabechiano vi.143, 118 Palatino 320, 161 Palatino 323, 129 Palatino 561, 184 Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana 1005, 164, 186, 188 1032, 107 1035, 52, 65, 69, 153, 154 1044, 70 1050, 69, 70, 72 489, 123 London, British Library Additional 26772, 71, 153, 164 Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana Ambrosian Virgil, 32 Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana 1080, 52, 65, 66 Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense MS 924, 175 Siena, Biblioteca comunale H vi 23, 194 Toledo, Biblioteca Capitular Zelada 104.6 11, 30, 35, 36, 50, 66, 69, 124, 130, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Barberiniano latino 3953, 187 Barberiniano latino 4071, 161 Chigi l v 176: Transformation of, 13, 98 Chigi l vi 213, 11, 50, 65, 161 Chigi l vii 253, 161 Chigi l viii 305, 73, 100, 126, 153 Vat. lat, 3195, 77, 78, 87, 119, 126, 166, 167, 168, 174, 179, 180 Vat. lat, 3196, 163, 167, 168 Vat. lat, 3199, 52, 53, 64, 65, 118, 128, 153 Vat. lat, 3793, 120, 122, 126 Maramauro, Guglielmo, 161 Marcus, Millicent, 123, 133, 137, 192 Marino, Adrian, 122 Marrani, Giuseppe, 127, 188 Marsigli, Luigi, 166 Marsilio of Padua, 32 Martellotti, Guido, 180

239

Martial, 158 Martinez, Ronald, 57, 142, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 175, 194 Martini, Luca, 53, 117, 159 Mass`era, Aldo, 128 Mazza, Antonio, 140 Mazzoni, Francesco, 97, 152, 165, 183 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 126, 137, 138, 171 McGann, Jerome, 125 McGrady, Deborah, 127 McGregor, James, 188 McKenzie, D. F., 55, 126, 156 McLaughlin, Martin, 36, 117, 128, 146 Melchizedek, 195 Meneghetti, Maria Luisa, 139 Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 186 Milanese, Angela, 135, 185 Minnis, Alastair, 7, 124, 125, 131, 132, 135, 139, 163, 185 Molinari, Carla, 165 Monicus, 144 Montale, Eugenio, 3 Monti, Carla, 187, 194 Morse, Ruth, 140 Murphy, James J., 140 Murphy, Stephen, 147 Najemy, John, 140 Nardi, Bruno, 95, 182 Nardo di Cione, 132 Nasti, Paola, 57, 157 Navarrete, Ignacio, 166 Nederman, Cary, 142 Ne lateant. See Dante: Epistles: (4) Nelli, Francesco, 142, 144 Nelson, Jonathan, 119, 154 Newman, Barbara, 193 Nichols, Stephen G., 125, 127 Nicol`o de’ Rossi, 101, 138, 159, 186, 187 Noakes, Susan, 55, 158, 159 Noferi, Adelia, 120 Norman, Diana, 150 Novati, Francesco, 167, 171 Olson, Kristina, 189 Olson, Paul, 176 Origen, 22, 135 Orlando, Sandro, 178 Orpheus, 176 Osgood, Charles, 132, 134, 185, 192, 195 Ovid, 85, 130 Tristia (2), 6, 123

240 Pade, Marianne, 142 Paden, William, 139, 158 Padoan, Giorgio, 131, 152, 165, 184 Palmieri, Matteo, 170 Panizza, Letizia, 179 Panofsky, Erwin, 119, 138, 164 Paolazzi, Carlo, 129, 145, 146, 151, 164, 171 Paolino, Laura, 168, 176, 179 Paolo dell’Abacco (the Geometer), 24, 158 Papio, Michael, 193 Parker, Deborah, 119, 120, 122 Parkes, Malcolm, 187, 189 Parnassus, 7, 8, 9, 13, 24 Parodi, E. G., 137, 139, 189, 190 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 3, 120 Pasquali, Giorgio, 9, 72, 126, 128, 136, 164 Pasquini, Emilio, 146, 171 Pastore Stocchi, Manlio, 11, 97, 128, 183, 186 Paul of Perugia, 24, 158 Payan, Paul, 193 Pearsall, Derek, 10, 127 Peron, Gianfelice, 178 Pertusi, Agostino, 173 Petrarca, Francesco. See Petrarch Petrarch, 15, 24, 28 Africa, 1, 5, 27, 74, 75, 86, 118, 166, 181, 195 authorization, self-, 5 Boccaccio and, 15 Boccaccio, first meeting with, 33 Bucolicum carmen, 75, 85, 93, 110, 179, 180 Coronation Oration, 80, 148, 158 De remediis, 170 early circulation of vernacular lyrics, 168 Epistle to Posterity. See Petrarch: Seniles: 18.1 Epystole metriche, 169 (1.1), 89, 167 (2.10), 130, 166 (3.8), 142 (3.17), 33, 180 (3.30), 124, 178 Familiares (1.1), 5, 90, 115, 123, 124, 132, 167, 168, 178, 195 (1.4), 174 (1.8), 176 (1.14), 176 (2.9), 80, 170 (4.1), 39 (5.10), 142 (8), 141 (8.2–5), 143

Index (8.3), 81 (8.9), 141 (8.10), 32, 141, 142 (10.3), 81 (10.4), 18, 35, 39 (10.8), 171 (11.1), 33, 142 (11.2), 142 (11.5), 141, 143, 194 (11.6), 34 (18.4), 127 (21.10), 141 (21.15), 36, 79, 86, 93, 128, 137, 171, 172, 173 (22.2), 75, 84, 86, 179 (23.3), 176 (23.19), 75, 84, 86, 94, 185 (24.1), 117, 132 (24.3), 25, 136, 172 (24.3–5), 35 (24.11), 130 (24.12), 172 Fragmentorum liber, 2, 9, 11, 26, 75, 79, 118 contents, 77 ideas of imitation, 86 Invectives, 148 Book 3, 134 Lettere disperse (6), 167 (19), 144 (40), 144 (46), 127, 181 Milan, move to, 35 Rerum memorandum libri, 104, 105, 107, 173, 189 Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 1 (1), 77, 82, 87, 89, 91, 92, 125, 168, 171 (2), 168 (3), 168 (5), 170 (23), 91, 175 (24), 80 (34), 167 (60), 80 (70), 7, 91, 97, 165, 178, 188 (71), 163 (77), 168 (78), 168 (102), 166 (128), 124, 166 (166), 181 (179), 166 (189), 87, 174 (263), 174

Index (264), 87, 88 (265), 175 (267), 88, 175 (268), 88, 167, 175 (270), 88 (271), 88 (287), 175 (293), 175 (302), 88, 176 (304), 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 (366), 89 autograph. See manuscripts: Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: Vat. lat, 3195 Bipartition of the collection, 89 Correggio form, 78 Secretum, 33, 81, 118, 142, 179 Seniles (2.1), 75, 118 (5.1), 180 (5.2), 5, 79, 93, 120, 180 (5.3), 180 (5.4), 118 (8.1), 177 (8.3), 190 (13.11), 180 (15.11), 134 (17.2), 115, 193 (17.3), 27, 114, 115 (17.4), 194 (18.1), 3, 80, 115, 136 Triumphi, 163, 179 Ytalie iam certus honos, 166, 167 Petrini, Mario, 129 Petrocchi, Giorgio, 9, 52, 64, 72, 125, 153, 154, 160, 163, 164 Petrucci, Armando, 9, 10, 64, 75, 100, 124, 125, 126, 127, 137, 151, 160, 166, 185 Pfeiffer, Rudolf, 128 Phelps, Ruth, 9, 125, 165 Phillips, Mark, 124 Philology New or Material, 9 Piattoli, Renato, 143 Piccini, Daniele, 177 Picone, Michelangelo, 124, 167, 174 Pietro Alighieri. See Alighieri, Pietro Pietro Piccolo da Montefiore, 27, 93, 137 Piper, Andrew, 139 Pisano, Andrea, 150 Pisistratus, 140 Pizzinga, Jacopo, 24, 79 Plato, 181 Poe, Elizabeth, 139

241

Poema del mio Cid, 3 Poliziano, Angelo, 2, 3, 11, 30, 97, 119, 121, 132, 140, 172, 183 Pomaro, Gabriella, 153, 154, 160 Ponte, Giovanni, 176 Pope, Alexander, 113 Pound, Ezra, 3, 9, 96, 103, 104, 120, 125, 181, 182 Price, Leah, 135 Proba, 161 Procaccioli, Paolo, 121 Proust, Marcel, 87 Prudentius, 22 Pucci, Antonio, 71, 164 Pulsoni, Carlo, 129, 175 Quaglio, Antonio Enzo, 164, 168, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190 Quillen, Carol, 148 Quintilian, 142, 173 Quondam, Amadeo, 120, 166 Raccolta Aragonese, 4, 30, 132, 154, 183 Rafti, Patrizia, 100, 185 Raimondi, Ezio, 122, 157 Rajna, Pio, 57 Redman, Tim, 182 Reeve, Michael, 122, 128, 184 Reynolds, L. D., 128 Ricci, Corrado, 143 Ricci, Pier Giorgio, 100, 128, 140, 153, 183, 185 Richardson, Brian, 121, 122 Rico, Francisco, 87, 122, 125, 128, 144, 167, 170, 171, 176, 179 Rigg, A. G., 135 Rizzo, Silvia, 123, 179, 180 Robathan, Dorothy, 128 Robey, David, 121 Robins, William, 126 Rocca, Luigi, 160 Roche, Thomas, 168 Roman de la Rose, 124 Romano, Vincenzo, 132 Roncaglia, Aurelio, 188 Rosemann, Phillip, 163 Rosenberg, Nancy, 142 Rossetti, Domenico, 176 Rossi, Aldo, 131, 151 Rossi, Luca Carlo, 190 Rouse, Mary, 127 Rouse, Richard, 127 Roush, Sherry, 70 Rubin, Patricia Lee, 119 Rufinus, 135

242

Index

Ruini, Roberto, 151 Rust, Marth, 127 Sacchetti, Franco, 173 Said, Edward, 119, 126 Salutati, Coluccio, 3, 75, 82, 127 Sandal, Ennio, 131 Sanguineti, Federico, 154 Santagata, Marco, 77, 78, 80, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179 Sasso, Gennaro, 147, 188 Savino, Giancarlo, 160 Savoca, Giuseppe, 171 Schachter, Marc, 135, 137 Schiffman, Zachary, 118 Schildgen, Brenda, 148 Schnapp, Jeffrey, 159, 188 Sebastio, Leonardo, 132 Sedulius, 22 Segre, Cesare, 165 Seneca, 35, 142, 144, 173, 189, 190 Sennuccio del Bene, 170, 177 Servius, 123 Shklovskii, Viktor, 189 Sieburth, Richard, 98, 182, 184 Silber, Gordon, 170 Singleton, Charles, 57, 60, 152, 157, 160, 161 Skubikowski, 195 Slavitt, David, 56 Smarr, Janet, 132 Socrates, 144 Solerti, Angelo, 121, 138, 166 Solomon, Jon, 131 Solon, 31, 141, 195 Somerset, Fiona, 119 Song of Songs. See Bible: Song of Songs Sozzi, Bortolo, 166 Spinetti, Mariarosaria, 171 Spitzer, Leo, 142 Squarotti, Giorgio, 148 Stallybrass, Peter, 125 Starkey, Kathryn, 127 Starn, Randolph, 150 Statius, 158, 167 Thebaid, 58, 59, 64, 65 Stefanelli, Ruggiero, 131, 132 Steinberg, Justin, 10, 52, 126, 127, 156, 166, 176 Stewart, Dana, 117 Stillinger, Thomas, 57, 137, 157, 165, 188 Stock, Brian, 10, 122, 126 Stone, Gregory, 41, 189 Storey, H. Wayne, 10, 62, 87, 100, 126, 127, 128, 146, 156, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 174, 179, 185

Sturm-Maddox, Sara, 130 Suetonius, 43, 138, 147 Surdich, Luigi, 128 Tanturli, Giuliano, 70, 132, 147, 163, 164, 181 Tateo, Francesco, 132 Taylor, Andrew, 127 Teskey, Gordon, 122 Theologus Dantes. See Giovanni del Virgilio Thompson, N. S., 133 Thomson, Rodney, 137 Thucydides, 173 Tonelli, Natascia, 163, 170 Took, John, 168 Trachtenberg, Marvin, 150 Trajan, 130, 141 Trapp, J. B., 118 Trovato, Paolo, 121, 154, 175 Tufano, Ilaria, 194 Ubaldini, 32, 142 Ubaldino, Federigo, 127 Ullman, B. L., 128, 171 Ulysses, 116, 171, 195 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 3 Usher, Jonathan, 102, 130, 132, 136, 143, 147, 151, 169, 180, 186, 188, 189 Valesio, Paolo, 159 Vandelli, Giuseppe, 131, 152, 154, 161 Varro, 127 Varvaro, Alberto, 126, 154 Vasari, Giorgio, 53, 73, 110, 119 Six Tuscan Poets, 1, 117 Vite (Lives), 2 Vecchi Galli, Paola, 166, 167 Veglia, Marco, 125, 144, 187, 189, 194 Velli, Giuseppe, 89, 103, 129, 143, 172, 190 Vellutello, Alessandro, 121, 138, 175, 181 Vickers, Nancy, 159, 175 Vico, Giambattista, 126 Vidas, Occitan, 30 Villani, Filippo, 104, 140, 146, 195 Villani, Gianni, 125, 144, 170 Villani, Giovanni, 143 Vincent, Nigel, 123 Virgil, 85, 101, 110, 150 Aeneid, 58, 65, 163 Eclogues (4), 25 Visconti, 34 Vitale, Maurizio, 185 Wallace, David, 41, 131, 148 Warkentin, Germaine, 171

Index Watson, Nicholas, 119 Watson, Paul, 132, 189 Wicksteed, Philip, 42, 139 Wilhelm, James, 182 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, 9, 74, 78, 122, 125, 141, 144, 148, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 174, 179, 194 William of Moerbeke, 140 Williams, Raymond, 122 Wilson, N. G., 128 Witt, Ronald, 128, 140 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 119

243

Xerxes, 195 Zaccaria, Vittorio, 131, 132, 192 Zamponi, Stefano, 100, 137, 138, 146, 169, 185 Zanobi da Strada, 42, 126, 142, 144, 148, 167 Zanzotto, Andrea, 3 Zenatti, Oddone, 120, 156 Zibaldone laurenziano. See Manuscripts: Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana: Plut, 29.8 Ziolkowski, Jan, 147, 150

cambridge studies in medieval literature

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Robin Kirkpatrick Dante’s Inferno: Difficulty and Dead Poetry Jeremy Tambling Dante and Difference: Writing in the “Commedia” Simon Gaunt Troubadours and Irony Wendy Scase “Piers Plowman” and the New Anticlericalism Joseph Duggan The “Cantar De Mio Cid”: Poetic Creation in its Economic and Social Contexts Roderick Beaton The Medieval Greek Romance Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Reformist Apocalypticism and “Piers Plowman” Alison Morgan Dante and the Medieval Other World Eckehard Simon (ed.) The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama Mary Carruthers The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture Rita Copeland Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts Donald Maddox The Arthurian Romances of Chr´etien de Troyes: Once and Future Fictions Nicholas Watson Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority Steven F. Kruger Dreaming in the Middle Ages Barbara Nolan Chaucer and the Tradition of the “Roman Antique” Sylvia Huot The “Romance of the Rose” and its Medieval Readers: Interpretations, Reception, Manuscript Transmission Carol M. Meale (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500 Henry Ansgar Kelly Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages Martin Irvine The Making of Textual Culture: Grammatica and Literary Theory, 350–1100 Larry Scanlon Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition Erik Kooper Medieval Dutch Literature in its European Context Steven Botterill Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the “Commedia” Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (eds) Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530 Christopher Baswell Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer James Simpson Sciences and Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s “Anticlaudianus” and John Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” Joyce Coleman Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France Suzanne Reynolds Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text Charlotte Brewer Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text

29 Walter Haug Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: The German Tradition in its European Context 30 Sarah Spence Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century 31 Edwin Craun Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker 32 Patricia E. Grieve “Floire and Blancheflor” and the European Romance 33 Huw Pryce (ed.) Literacy in Medieval Celtic Societies 34 Mary Carruthers The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 35 Beate Schmolke-Hasselman The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: The Verse Tradition from Chr´etien to Froissart 36 Siˆan Echard Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition 37 Fiona Somerset Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England 38 Florence Percival Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women 39 Christopher Cannon The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words 40 Rosalind Brown-Grant Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading beyond Gender 41 Richard Newhauser The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature 42 Margaret Clunies Ross Old Icelandic Literature and Society 43 Donald Maddox Fictions of Identity in Medieval France 44 Rita Copeland Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning 45 Kantik Ghosh The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts 46 Mary C. Erler Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England 47 D. H. Green The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction 1150–1220 48 J. A. Burrow Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative 49 Ardis Butterfield Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut 50 Emily Steiner Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature 51 William E. Burgwinkle Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature 52 Nick Havely Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the “Commedia” 53 Siegfried Wenzel Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England 54 Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (eds) Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures 55 Mark Miller Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the “Canterbury Tales” 56 Simon Gilson Dante and Renaissance Florence 57 Ralph Hanna London Literature, 1300–1380 58 Maura Nolan John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture 59 Nicolette Zeeman Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire 60 Anthony Bale The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 61 Robert J. Meyer-Lee Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt

62 Isabel Davis Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages 63 John M. Fyler Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante and Jean de Meun 64 Matthew Giancarlo Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England 65 D. H. Green Women Readers in the Middle Ages 66 Mary Dove The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions 67 Jenni Nuttall The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England 68 Laura Ashe Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 69 J. A. Burrow The Poetry of Praise 70 Mary Carruthers The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Second Edition) 71 Andrew Cole Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer 72 Suzanne M. Yeager Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative 73 Nicole R. Rice Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature 74 D. H. Green Women and Marriage in German Medieval Romance 75 Peter Godman Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages: Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet 76 Edwin D. Craun Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing 77 David Matthews Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship, and Literature in England, 1250–1350 78 Mary Carruthers (ed.) Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages 79 Katharine Breen Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400 80 Antony J. Hasler Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority 81 Shannon Gayk Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England 82 Lisa H. Cooper Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late-Medieval England 83 Alison Cornish Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterature Literature 84 Jane Gilbert Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature 85 Jessica Rosenfeld Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle 86 Michael Van Dussen From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages 87 Martin Eisner Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular