Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista 9781442685727

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Monument to Dante Allighieri [sic]
1. Editor: Shaping the Material
2. Biographer: Crafting the Figure
3. Apologist: Defending the Monument
4. Commentator: Presenting the Monument
Conclusion: Boccaccio the Architect
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

BUILDING A MONUMENT TO DANTE: BOCCACCIO AS DANTISTA

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JASON M. HOUSTON

Building a Monument to Dante Boccaccio as Dantista

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4051-1

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Toronto Italian Studies Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Houston, Jason M., 1973– Building a monument to Dante : Boccaccio as Dantista / Jason M. Houston. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4051-1 1. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313–1375 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. I. Title. PQ4286.H69 2010

858′.109

C2009-906825-7

This book has been published with help from a grant provided by the University of Oklahoma Office of the Provost and the College of Arts and Sciences. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

vii ix

Introduction: A Monument to Dante Allighieri

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1 Editor: Shaping the Material 12 Editor – Medieval and Modern 12 Boccaccio, Editor of Dante 20 The Legacy of Boccaccio’s Edition of Dante 47 2 Biographer: Crafting the Figure 52 Sopra il monumento di Dante 52 Boccaccio and the Genres of Medieval Biography An Empty Tomb 89

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3 Apologist: Defending the Monument 92 Boccaccio’s Advice to Petrarca: Read Dante! 94 The Corbaccio: Boccaccio’s Vernacular Parody 100 4 Commentator: Presenting the Monument 124 Boccaccio’s Latin Dante 124 Pro Dante Poeta 127 Boccaccio’s Esposizioni: Dante as ‘Vernacular Humanist’ Boccaccio’s Paradiso 155

133

vi

Contents

Conclusion: Boccaccio the Architect 157 Boccaccio Dantista and the Decameron 163 Notes

171

Works Cited Index

217

203

Illustrations

1. Statue of Dante Allighieri [sic] by Paolo Emilio Demi, erected in 1842 in the loggiato of the Uffizi Museum, Florence. 4 2. Biblioteca Apostolica Latina, Codice Chigiano L.V. 176, f. 17 v.

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3. Biblioteca Apostolica Latina, Codice Chigiano L.V. 176, f. 29r

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4. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Codice Chigiano L.V. 176, 13r.

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5. Statue of Francesco Petrarca by Andrea Leoni, erected in 1845 in the loggiato of the Uffizi Museum, Florence. 158 6. Statue of Giovanni Boccaccio by Odoardo Fantacchiotti, erected in 1845 in the loggiato of the Ufizzi Museum, Florence. 159

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Acknowledgments

I have a fortune in generous teachers. F. Regina Psaki sensitively encouraged my intellectual curiosity while I was an undergraduate at the University of Oregon. My first readings of Boccaccio came under her expert tutelage. I am happy to admit that any insight this book produces is in great part due to my teacher Giuseppe Mazzotta. His scholarly passion and prodigious intellectual force continues to serve as an example for my work. Vittore Branca gave me gracious and welcome encouragement in my work on Boccaccio. Teodolinda Barolini and Simone Marchesi were more than generous in their critical engagement in various phases of this book; their work as readers of the manuscript made me aware of the high professional standards of Boccaccio scholars. I could never have completed this book without the efforts of Lynne Levy and Ellen Bannister, smart and careful readers and editors. Mike Mandeville ably compiled the index. Many others have also been willing colleagues, and mentors: Joyce Coleman, Luis Cortest, Giuseppe Gazzola, Olivia Holmes, Erin Larkin, David Levy, Stephanie Malia Hom, Filippo Naitana, Joel Pastor, Dan Ransom, Arielle Saiber, H. Wayne Storey, Heather Webb, and Logan Whalen. I would like to thank the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Research Council at the University of Oklahoma for their financial and institutional support. I would like to thank the University of Toronto Press for their kind professionalism throughout the process of converting this study from manuscript to book, particularly Ron Schoeffel, Ruth Pincoe, and Patricia Simoes. Permissions for the use of images in this book have been granted by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and Edizioni Firenze. Portions of the first chapter of this book were published as an article in Dante Studies.

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Acknowledgments

My most profound thanks go to my wife Monica Sharp for all that she does for me. I dedicate this book to my parents, Bill and Candace, my brother Derek, and my sister Sarah.

BUILDING A MONUMENT TO DANTE: BOCCACCIO AS DANTISTA

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Introduction: A Monument to Dante Allighieri [sic]

You cannot walk through Florence without being continually reminded that both inside and outside her walls Dante Alighieri remains her most famous son. Despite the fact that he was exiled from Florence in 1301, numerous monuments to Dante mark the city. Indeed, it would be hard to find an Italian city without a via D. Alighieri or a Piazza Alighieri.1 The most conspicuous of these monuments is the statue of Dante Alighieri in the loggiato of the Uffizi museum that intersects with the Piazza della Signoria. The loggiato, the most famous of all streets in Florence that transects the political heart of the city, leads pedestrians from the Piazza della Signoria to the Ponte Vecchio, a space used by Florentines as a public courtyard dedicated to the importance of their city in intellectual history. Many illustrious Tuscans are honoured with statues: Galileo, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Giotto, to name a few of the nearly fifty famous men celebrated. Dante Alighieri stands prominently in a central place among them. This statue (see figure 1) follows the given iconography of representations of Dante from Giotto onward. With his aquiline nose, distant and serious gaze, classical robes, and laurel crown, the poet seems more dutiful than inspired by poetic genius. He clutches a volume marked ‘Virgilio’ to his breast with his right arm. One feature of this monument to the divine poet becomes apparent only after close inspection: the poet’s name is misspelled or – to put it in the language of the philologist – is a variant reading: Allighieri instead of the more common Alighieri. Readers familiar with medieval manuscripts, early printed books, or other premodern sources know that variants commonly occur, especially with proper names. But this statue is a product of the nineteenth rather than the fourteenth century; the decision of the city fathers of Florence to

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Building a Monument to Dante

Figure 1. Statue of Dante Allighieri [sic] by Paolo Emilio Demi, erected in 1842 in the loggiato of the Uffizi Museum, Florence.

Introduction: A Monument to Dante Allighieri 5

use Allighieri represents a conscious change from the accepted spelling. Even more striking, this suspect act of public philology comes under the specific authority of Giovanni Boccaccio. The notes of one particular meeting of the committee charged with the design of the loggiato shed light on their decision concerning the spelling of Dante’s last name. [il Consiglio amministrativo] preferì restituire alla primiera integrità il nome del più insigne toscano; e volle perciò che Allighieri vi si leggesse sculto … allorchè lo veggiamo con doppia L usato costantemente dal Boccaccio nella Vita di Dante; … è da sperarsi che i posteri vi daranno pur questo merito, di aver contribuito validamente a rintegrare quel sommo nella denominazione di famiglia,2 [(the administrative Council) preferred to restore to its original integrity the name of the most illustrious Tuscan; and it wanted therefore Allighieri was to be read there in stone … in that we see that Boccaccio in the Vita of Dante constantly used the double L; … it is to be hoped that those who come after will offer here at least this credit, to have contributed worthily in the reintegration of that great man with his family name,]

We can only admire the diligence of these officials and understand their attempt to atone, in some small way, for Dante’s exile by restoring his true name. It is ironic that in spite of what the city fathers thought, Boccaccio likely never spelled Dante’s name with two ls. We are fortunate to have numerous manuscripts in Boccaccio’s own hand in which he spells out Dante’s name. In the many manuscripts that Boccaccio copied, he wrote Alighieri. Indeed, Boccaccio, concerned with establishing Dante’s reputation, goes out of his way to insist on the proper spelling of Dante’s last name.3 Modern philology allows us to understand the errors of earlier philologists and see the irony of this ‘misspelling’ of Dante’s last name. The episode illustrates the importance of Boccaccio’s authority in a philological decision; this book will discuss many instances where Boccaccio’s influence on Dante’s text has tangible results in the afterlife of the transmission and interpretation of Dante’s work. I will not focus too closely on these philological questions; rather, they serve as evidence of my real interest. Boccaccio had a great influence on the choice of spelling Dante’s name, and his work as dantista so monumentalized Dante in the fourteenth century that 500 years later, during the Risorgimento, a stone monument might finally be raised in Florence. In tracing Boccaccio’s influence on Dante’s transmission and reception,

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Building a Monument to Dante

I seek to illumine not Dante’s texts but Boccaccio’s ideologies. At this point it is useful to recall the etymology of the word monument: moneo – meaning to warn or admonish as well as to remind. As Gittes has recently pointed out, Boccaccio must have known from his translations of the first ten books of Livy’s History of Rome in the years just prior to his work as dantista that the history of one man can serve as a monument (inlustri posita monumento) for all to view.4 Nor did this lesson escape him. Boccaccio recalls this same etymology in praising Dante in his last work as a dantista, the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante.5 The Florentine misspelling issue is little more than an amusing anecdote, but it does admonish us to recognize two difficulties inherent in the art of reading Dante. First, philology, or the attempt to establish original texts, is a tricky process hampered by both time and the wilful intervention of generations of individuals.6 Second, the misspelling hints at how Boccaccio left his mark on the monument to Florentine and Italian history and culture that is Dante Alighieri. The relationship between Boccaccio and Dante has certainly seen a great deal of critical attention. The sheer volume of Dante and Boccaccio criticism prohibits me from speaking of any critical neglect, and I will make repeated use of this literature throughout this study.7 There are numerous studies dedicated to detecting Dantean echoes in Boccaccio’s writings. Many critics argue that Boccaccio was a faithful intellectual follower of Dante; others argue that Boccaccio rejected Dante’s intellectual framework, and still others argue that both are true. This study distinguishes itself from these previous critical readings, brilliant and insightful as they are, by focusing on the primary evidence, material and literary, of Boccaccio’s dantismo as indicative of his intellectual development. Simply put, I am more interested in Boccaccio dantista for what it reveals about Boccaccio than about the history of Dante’s reception. Admittedly, the result of my investigation will be limited to conclusions about Boccaccio, but I do purport to lay out a clearer picture of Boccaccio’s relationship to Dante than any previous study has done. This book will only be tangentially relevant to those wanting to read exclusively about Dante or his early reception; conversely, I do think that students and scholars of Boccaccio and the literary environment of the tre corone will come away from reading this book well served. Boccaccio did much more than serve as an early link in filologia dantesca: he constructed a textual, biographical, political, and intellectual monument to Dante. In this book I will focus on four different but related aspects of Boccaccio’s dantista: editor, biographer, apologist, and

Introduction: A Monument to Dante Allighieri 7

commentator. His lifelong preoccupation with Dante and Dante’s literary, political, and cultural importance show a concerted effort to create a figure of the poet: Boccaccio shaped Dante so that his legacy would serve him in his own contemporary intellectual battles.8 Scholars have mostly been interested in Boccaccio’s work as dantista in terms of their interest in filologia dantesca, the philological quest for Dante’s texts. However, the inescapable fact of his wilful manipulation of Dante’s texts and literary heritage calls for an understanding of Boccaccio’s dantista in his own terms. This study will show that Boccaccio moulded Dante and his texts to fit his own intellectual designs. Boccaccio stands on the cusp of a change in perspective that would come to define the Renaissance, but unlike Petrarca, his teacher and friend (and in many ways the antagonist of my narrative), Boccaccio saw Dante as the future and not the past. This Dante emblematizes the emergence of a noble vernacular, the political role of the poet, and the moral voice of the city. Indeed, Boccaccio was both an architect of a new vernacular culture and an archaeologist of past literary cultures: he built this new literary monument with the materials of all available literary traditions.9 The reader will therefore not find it surprising to find that this book, which purports to offer insight on Giovanni Boccaccio and, in smaller measure, Francesco Petrarca and Dante Alighieri, does not focus on the Decameron, Canzoniere, and the Commedia. This choice is not due to a frustration with the overwhelming amount of scholarship already devoted to these topics. I have taken advantage of countless important critical insights on these respective ‘masterpieces,’ and have used these canonical texts as points of reference that all readers of the tre corone have in common. Nor does this book focus exclusively on the ‘minor’ texts that have seen less severe scrutiny over the centuries. Although I do look closely at the Trattatello in laude di Dante and the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, they are only central in that they represent a direct record of Boccaccio dantista. Rather, I look at the record of Boccaccio’s work as a dantista and humanist across the long chronology and wide spectrum of his intellectual undertakings. I hope that from Boccaccio’s dantismo we might derive an intellectual biography of the man. Perhaps one of the most important fruits of the labour contained in this book will be new insights into Boccaccio’s own writings. This work offers a novel use for traditional philological approaches to literature and literary cultures. Taking my cue from the wealth of critical materials and different methodological approaches, I will provide a reading of texts and of their transmission in material, rhetorical, and intellectual

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Building a Monument to Dante

terms. I intend to use philological tools to detect and explicate ideological motives. My aim has been to discover and explain the complicated web of influences that exist between the texts of Dante Alighieri and the dantismo of Giovanni Boccaccio. It is not a novel idea that Dante had a direct and important impact on Boccaccio; neither is it new to argue, as I will, that Boccaccio had a direct and important impact on Dante’s texts. The contribution of this study will be to answer the question of why Boccaccio spent the last twenty years of his life as a dantista. Boccaccio the dantista manipulated his subject; generations of readers, our own included, read Dante through the lens of Boccaccio. I will pull back the curtain on these silent intrigues. And Petrarca, never marginal in this picture, hovers over Boccaccio and this study both as a teacher and as a critic of Boccaccio’s dantismo. The process I propose to follow is a delicate one. It is already difficult, if not impossible, to look back across the horizon of seven centuries to interpret these texts in their own particular context. How much more difficult is it then to interpret Boccaccio’s interpretation and manipulation of Dante? Surely this path must be lined with many hidden pitfalls. Furthermore, could we conceive of an author more elusive than Boccaccio? What can I really extract from his writings that can be used to build a solid case for the motivation for his work as dantista? Can we not, like the pure textual critics who came before, simply dismiss Boccaccio’s work on Dante as amateurish? Or might we perhaps see every inch of distance between the two writers as a sign of satire or irony? My insistence that Boccaccio genuinely engaged in his dantismo for ideological concerns, rather than mere literary playfulness, demands that I locate philosophical interests, or at least a rhetorical motive, behind his act of creation. Fortunately, Boccaccio was an extraordinarily conscientious scribe and an extremely prolific writer and note keeper. The wealth of his manuscript production gives the first and best evidence for this study: the material record. Chapter 1 (Editor) considers Boccaccio as the editor of Dante’s poetry. Of the sixteen autograph manuscripts attributed to Boccaccio, four contain mostly or exclusively Dante’s work. In collecting and editing selected texts, Boccaccio shaped a version of Dante that is consistent with his own formulations on vernacular poetics found in the Genealogia deorum gentilium. The central discussion of this chapter relates to Boccaccio’s long marginal notation to his version of the Vita Nova. In this most rare case of an editor’s note in a medieval manuscript, he explains why he changes Dante’s original text. His work as editor of Dante shows a

Introduction: A Monument to Dante Allighieri 9

tendency to fit Dante’s innovative poetic texts into more accepted forms. However, his traditional manuscript culture hides a more radical notion of an editor’s role in relationship to an auctor. Chapter 1 also considers the special case of the Chigiano manuscript; with his editio of the Vita Nova placed in the specific context of other Tuscan poets, Boccaccio inaugurated a Tuscan school of poets. In chapter 2 (Biographer), I argue that in his biographical writings (Trattatello in laude di Dante, De casibus virorum illustrium, Vita Petri Damiani, and De vita et moribus domini Francisci Petracchi) Boccaccio created a figure of Dante that supported his own position in contemporary political and intellectual debates, especially those with Petrarca. Boccaccio’s turn toward Latin authors and his own Latin writing can be viewed, in large part, as a turn toward biographical writing. As a biographer he combined his interest in discovering texts with a political identity that formed an early Tuscan humanism. Boccaccio as dantista monumentalizes Dante in a literary ploy to defend the political republicanism under fire in Florence during the 1350s. By championing Dante Boccaccio also took up a lifelong battle with Petrarca over the validity of the vernacular idiom versus Latin and over the role of the poet in relation to the res publica. Boccaccio the biographer attempted to mediate the rival positions claimed by Dante and Petrarca with regard to the value of the vernacular, staging this intellectual drama in fictional encounters between himself, Dante, and Petrarca. Boccaccio the biographer explicitly claims that poetry can never be distinguished from the life of the poet. In the Trattatello, his most important biography, Boccaccio elevates Dante to the status of an auctor while preserving the importance of the vernacular. In chapter 3 (Apologist) I treat two lesser known works by Boccaccio written in response, I will argue, to criticism of Dante’s Commedia: the Latin poem ‘Ytalie iam certus honos’ and an enigmatic little work titled the Corbaccio. I argue that Boccaccio defended Dante from attacks by members of his own circle, Petrarca specifically, and by the wider public. The Latin poem responds to Petrarca’s refusal to show respect for his fellow exiled Florentine. In a series of exchanges with Petrarca concerning his possible return to Florence with full honours, Boccaccio argues, in this poem and elsewhere, that Petrarca should accept Dante’s poetic example so that he might fully embrace his own Florentine origins. The argument with Petrarca concerning Dante fundamentally alters the relationship between teacher and pupil. Boccaccio also defends Dante to a broader and less intimate group of critics. I argue that the Corbaccio should be read as a satire that ridicules

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Building a Monument to Dante

the critics of vernacular poetry. Specifically Boccaccio parodies the Dominican preachers and volgarizzatori that had objected to Dante’s use of the vernacular in his Commedia. Boccaccio sees the hypocrisy of these Dominicans, themselves volgarizzatori, who take the poets to task for their dangerous use of classical and Christian auctores in the vernacular. The Corbaccio was, in a sense, written as a critique that exposes both the hypocrisy of the Dominicans and the potential dangers inherent in Dante’s Commedia. Boccaccio understands the radical nature of the Commedia, but he distrusts the public’s ability to handle it correctly. Both ‘Ytalie iam certus honos’ and the Corbaccio offer a defence for Dante’s poetic and ethical vision by critiquing those who had come out against vernacular literary culture. In chapter 4 (Commentator) I read Boccaccio’s commentary on the Commedia in his last work, the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante. At the end of his career as dantista, rather than on adding new details to his work as dantista, he focuses his attention on presenting his monumental figure of Dante to the public. Even before he received the commission to deliver public lectures on the Commedia in Florence in 1373, Boccaccio used his position of literary prominence to argue for Dante’s excellence. I begin by considering one such effort: a letter to Jacopo Pizzinga, a young noble Sicilian poet removed from Tuscan debates, in which Boccaccio broadens his claims concerning Dante’s political value from Tuscany to all of Italy. The bulk of chapter 4 details Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante as his final effort to monumentalize Dante in Florence. Boccaccio realized that his readings must be neither too radical nor too traditional; he needed to appeal simultaneously to two different audiences. On one hand, he remains faithful to Dante’s choice to write in the vernacular by speaking to the illiterate citizens of Florence who need Dante’s ethical lesson. On the other hand, he strives to gain respect for Dante’s masterpiece with the emerging humanists who had discounted Dante’s genius because of his low style. The Esposizioni manipulate Dante’s text in order to satisfy both of these audiences. Of course, Petrarca remains in his mind; in the Esposizioni Boccaccio takes on his master for one last time. The Esposizioni represent Boccaccio’s chance to translate his own Latin encyclopedic texts for a vernacular audience. In my conclusion I apply the insights gained from this investigation into Boccaccio’s work as dantista to formulate a hermeneutic that differs from either Dante’s or Petrarca’s. I will argue that Boccaccio dantista describes an intellectual perspective that inhabits his fiction as well as his

Introduction: A Monument to Dante Allighieri 11

work as dantista: he has an architectural hermeneutic that constructs new literary edifices out of the detritus of the dilapidated classical world and the new material of vernacular culture. Although the scope of this work does not allow for a full consideration of Boccaccio’s Decameron, not to mention his entire literary production, the overt presence of Dante in Boccaccio’s fiction demands attention. After briefly discussing Boccaccio’s juvenile attempts to imitate Dante, I consider an overtly Dantean novella from the Decameron as Boccaccio’s implementation of his dantismo in his own fiction: Day V, 8, the story of Nastagio degli Onesti. In Boccaccio’s own literary writings, his work as dantista shaped his artistic vision. Boccaccio’s own monumental status as one of the tre corone depends, in great measure, on his dantismo. By detailing Boccaccio’s manuscript production and his writings specific to Dante, this book attempts to augment current critical models of the complex relationship between Boccaccio and Dante. In short, I hope to give due consideration to Boccaccio’s own motives rather than describe his influence in terms of Dante’s reception. The record of Boccaccio’s work on Dante reveals a far less one-sided dialectic between the two Florentines. In his work as dantista he concerns himself more with championing his own political and intellectual causes than confronting those of Dante. The evidence in the transmission history of Dante’s texts shows that time and again editors relied on Boccaccio’s version of Dante’s texts; he gains the trust of editors, even to our own day, because he staked a position of authority at the origin of Dante Studies. As a corollary to this argument, my study positions Boccaccio as the author of the myth of poetic origins that now guide our critical genealogies: the tre corone. My most sincere hope is that the reader will, when walking the streets of Florence with the tourist hordes, look at the many monuments to Dante and Petrarca in that once lovely city and remember one name: Giovanni Boccaccio.

1 Editor: Shaping the Material

L'editore non può e non deve certo sostituirsi all'autore, ma deve proporsi esplicitamente, senza feticismi superstiziosi, di attuare la volontà reale dello scrittore stesso. [The editor should and certainly must not substitute himself for the author, but he must set about openly and without excessive reservations, the task of carrying out the real will of the writer himself.] Vittore Branca1

Editor – Medieval and Modern Vittore Branca, the foremost editor and scholar of Giovanni Boccaccio, made the above confident statement on the task of the editor in his criteria for his 1973 critical edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, based on the Hamilton 90 manuscript, which he had recently established as an autograph manuscript. It is easy to understand his strict criteria knowing that he was in possession of Boccaccio’s autograph manuscript of the Decameron; any textual editor would feel justifiably confident that his edition could ‘attuare la volontà reale dello scrittore stesso.’ Branca suggests that the danger facing a textual editor lies in the propensity to interpolate his own editorial agenda into the process of textual recovery: the editor must defer to the author whenever possible. Branca knew Boccaccio’s concern for the vagaries of textual transmission; this manuscript ensured that Boccaccio’s text, in the hands of a properly detached editor, would come down intact to readers of every generation. As it turns out, Boccaccio’s motivations as editor of Dante’s work dif-

Editor: Shaping the Material

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fered from those Branca had for Boccaccio’s works. This chapter discerns the criteria that Boccaccio employed in editing the texts of Dante Alighieri. In looking at Boccaccio work as editor of Dante I will attempt to elucidate what moved him to alter Dante’s texts. Generations of editors, from Bartolomeo Sermatelli’s edition of Dante’s works in the 1570s to the critical edition of the Rime published by Domenico de Robertis in 2002, have recognized Boccaccio’s fundamental influence on the transmission of Dante’s text; they have not, however, accounted for the intellectual impulse behind Boccaccio’s ecdoctic efforts.2 Perhaps this indifference to Boccaccio’s intention springs from an assumption, like Branca’s cited above, that Boccaccio saw his role as an editor of Dante in the same light as a modern philologist does: the recovery of an original, best text from the imperfect manuscript record. As this chapter will evince, Boccaccio had a different view on his role as editor of Dante’s texts. He was not looking to restore the text to its pristine state; instead, he wanted to mould his version of Dante to fit into the tradition of the classical, specifically the pagan, poets. His production of manuscript editions of Dante’s texts constitutes the first step in his building of a monument to Dante. The story that unfolds in the pages of Branca’s editions of the Decameron tells of Boccaccio’s elusive nature as both editor and author. The autograph manuscript that Branca discovered does indeed record Boccaccio’s own version of the Decameron, but, as evidence presented by Branca thirty years later reveals, Boccaccio significantly rewrote the text when he wrote out the Hamilton manuscript.3 Boccaccio’s revision of his own text complicates the process of bringing out the ‘real will of the writer himself.’ As editor of the Decameron Branca must now consider changes made by the author from the earlier to the later version and ultimately respond to questions that arise concerning these changes. Which Boccaccio are we looking for: the author who wrote around 1350, or the author who revised his own text in 1372? Branca wants to cross the void of history and culture while successfully leaving his own intellectual predisposition behind: this is a difficult task. How much greater does this difficulty become when confronted with multiple authorial versions?4 In trying to do justice to the author’s intent in his edition of the Decameron, Branca later found this task more complicated than he had previously thought: the editor must negotiate both the text and the intervening history of that text. Boccaccio knew well the decisions forced on an editor, for he too was an editor. This chapter considers the empirical evidence of Boccaccio’s

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Building a Monument to Dante

role as an editor of the works of Dante Alighieri. The transmission record shows that his editorial policy diverges from the positivistic criteria proposed by Branca and other modern philologists; Boccaccio’s editions of Dante’s Commedia, Vita Nova, and Rime show the important role that an editor plays in disseminating texts. I will also show how Boccaccio’s role as editor diverged from the medieval categories of authorship as elucidated by St Bonaventure. Boccaccio, one of the most active collectors of rare and unknown classical texts of the trecento, understood that the survival of a text depends on the copyist as well as the original author. In the 1350s Boccaccio began a lifelong task of copying the texts of Dante Alighieri in his own hand for delivery to his intellectual colleagues; as a humanist involved in the discovery and transmission of classical texts, he also knew that his editions of Dante would infiltrate the manuscript record. Although Boccaccio did not live to see the invention of the printing press, his copies of Dante benefited from the de facto version control that arose from the spread of the printed book: most readers of Dante from 1400 through the early 1900s read Boccaccio’s version of Dante. Boccaccio’s own authority as an auctor made his account of Dante and his text a proto editio princeps for later editors of Dante. Boccaccio, far from removing himself from the textual process, brought to bear his own agenda as an editor of Dante’s texts. His project of editing Dante was a material attempt to shape a figure of Dante that would resonate in contemporary Florentine cultural and political debates. This effort was the first stage in Boccaccio’s larger project of establishing a Tuscan school of poets with Dante as the founding dean. Scholars recognize sixteen manuscripts either entirely or mostly in the hand of Giovanni Boccaccio; other remnants of Boccaccio’s distinctive book hand appear as marginal notes or on loose folia separated from their original codex.5 This important aspect of Boccaccio’s literary production points up his contribution to the manuscript and reading culture of the Italian trecento.6 It is likely that there are many more manuscripts copied by Boccaccio that have escaped identification or have not survived the intervening centuries. Fortunately, this existing body of autograph manuscripts offers a valuable resource for research into many facets of Boccaccio’s literary career. His manuscript production, extending from the late 1330s up to his death in 1375, confirms the breadth of an intellectual interest ranging from Aquinas’s Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle to an early version of Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. These manuscripts reveal the close relationship between Boccaccio and the literary background from which he drew material for his immensely

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diverse opera omnia; they also give ample evidence of his work as an editor. His reading and copying of classical texts suggests a sophistication in understanding ancient authors that has rightly made him one of the most important protagonists of Italian prehumanism.7 Above and beyond his ability to identify Cicero’s Latin, Boccaccio’s work as editor rather than a simple scribe of Dante Alighieri’s texts reveals a more emancipated relationship to the author. He saw fit not only to codify Dante, but to rewrite him as well. By bringing his own intellectual agenda to bear on Dante’s texts, Boccaccio did far more than simply transmit Dante’s texts. Boccaccio was both more and less than a scribe; as we will discover, he saw his work as a correction of Dante’s writing to ensure that the correct ideas, as judged by Boccaccio, would prosper. He took Dante’s palinodic reference to his Vita Nova in the Convivio as licence to correct.8 Dante had expressed doubts about the Vita Nova in the Convivio, but Boccaccio explains the criteria of his editio by referring to Dante’s shame (vergogna) over his earliest work. With the doubt translated into shame, Boccaccio assumes the authority to edit Dante. Neither was Boccaccio a modern philologist. Unlike the editors of Crocian idealism or Contini’s variantistica, Boccaccio was not concerned with returning Dante to a pristine state or recording his creative elaboration of the text. Calling Boccaccio an editor of Latin and vernacular texts introduces an unfamiliar term in the medieval lexicon of textual production. In his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences St Bonaventure summarizes the scholastic categories of manuscript production that were to dominate the Italian fourteenth century. (Q)uadruplex est modus facendi librum. Aliquis enim scribit aliena, nihil addendo vel mutando; et iste merito dicitur scriptor. Aliquis scribit aliena, addendo, sed non de suo; et iste compilator dicitur. Aliquis scribit et aliena et sua, sed aliena tamquam principalia, et sua tamquam annexa ad evidentiam; et iste dicitur commentator, non auctor. Aliquis scribit et sua et aliena, sed sua tamquam principalia, aliena tamquam annexa ad confirmationem; et talis debet dici auctor.9 [The way of making a book is fourfold. For someone writes the words of others, adding or changing nothing, and he is simply called the scribe. Someone else writes the words of others, adding, but not of his own, and he is called the compiler. Someone else writes both the words of others and his own, but with those of others as the principal part and his own annexed for the purpose of clarifying them, and he is called the commentator, not

16

Building a Monument to Dante the author. Someone else writes both his own words and those of others, but with his own as the principal part and those of others annexed for the purpose of confirmation, and such must be called the author]10

Alastair Minnis and Thomas Stillinger cited this passage as an emblem of medieval views of authorship. Minnis emphasizes how little separation exists in Bonaventure’s schema between the role of an author and the lesser roles of scribe, compiler and commentator: all rely, in various degrees, on the statements of other writers.11 Stillinger’s focus on the words aliena and aliquis draws out a medieval concept of authorship. In all four categories (scribe, compiler, commentator, and author) a writer (aliquis) uses another's (aliena) material to create his own text. Bonaventure recognizes God alone as an auctor who can create ex nihilo.12 These categories fit perfectly within the scholastic framework from which Bonaventure wrote. The respect shown the author might also subtend Branca’s editorial policy quoted as an epigraph to this chapter. The text itself suggests the proper relationship between the medieval writer and his authoritative sources. Bonaventure reflects his authoritative source text in his commentary; Lombard’s Sentences compiles fragments from the Christian Fathers into a scholastic primer. Bonaventure’s definition of authorship reflects the world of the monastic scriptoria, the main function of which is the preservation and promulgation of authoritative theological texts for members of their communities. The concept of an editor does not fit into Bonaventure’s scheme of textual production, in which he limits the production of a manuscript that contains the writing of other authorities to copying, compiling, or commenting on their words. Bonaventure explicitly states that changing the material does not enter into the making of a book (nihil addendo vel mutando), words that betray a concern with problems of scribal intervention in copying manuscripts.13 The monastic scriptoria that Bonaventure had in mind would be especially vigilant in limiting variations in products such as Bibles, psalters, decretalists, and patristic authors. In all these cases the writer of a manuscript composes a page by balancing his own words with the proper authorial voices from the tradition. The use of the word annexa in reference to mixed compositions (commentator and author) responds to the physical reality of a medieval manuscript page and the typical relationship between text and marginal gloss common to scriptural texts and scholastic philosophy.14 The writer of the manuscript, whether author, commentator, compiler, or scribe, explicates words in the text by connecting them to the authority of tradition

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through marginal gloss. The annexation of other texts simply illustrates the connection between the author and the tradition. For Bonaventure, authority derives from the divine inspiration of the source text, such as the Bible or the writings of St Augustine. In a broader sense, as Minnis puts it, when discussing authority, ‘To be old was to be good; the best writers were the more ancient.’15 Considering the entirety of Boccaccio’s manuscript production, he too subscribed, at least in part, to this cultural view of textual production. A number of his manuscripts fit comfortably in each of the four categories described by Bonaventure. Two of these (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Cod. Plut. LIV, 32, and Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Cod. Plut. XXXVIII, 17) show Boccaccio’s respectful work as a faithful copyist of classical texts. In these manuscripts, like any scribe in trecento Italy working outside of a formal scriptorium, Boccaccio surely used his best judgment in making simple editorial choices when copying the source texts.16 This work of scribal editing is a persistent practice in medieval scribal culture, but changes are intended as acts of restoration and preservation of an authoritative original text. He also compiled various works in a single volume; the most well known are his two zibaldoni (BML Cod. Plut. XXIX, 8 and BML Cod. Plut. XXXIII, 31), which contain works in Latin and the vernacular probably collected for his own use.17 These two manuscripts shed light on Boccaccio’s method of reading the tradition and incorporating it into his own literary production. The only manuscript in which he assumes the role of commentator (no autograph manuscript of his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante exists) is his own autograph version of his vernacular epic the Teseida (in BML Cod. Acq. e doni 325). Despite the scarcity of medieval self-commentaries, this manuscript, in the most general way, shows his incorporation of both marginal and interlinear gloss for commentary on the main body of the text.18 Boccaccio’s diverse literary pursuits make him a far more complex figure than any of the categories specified by Bonaventure. Indeed, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca represent the leading figures in a larger development of the role of author in the manuscript culture of the Italian trecento.19 As H. Wayne Storey has pointed out, Dante and Boccaccio, along with Petrarca, play a central role in the development of manuscript culture in the trecento. Storey shows how Dante’s Vita Nova, a text that will be discussed in detail below, programs its own innovative structure as libello into the text through inclusion of the divisioni that preempt nonauthorial influence: in the Vita Nova Dante unifies the roles of scribe,

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compiler, commentator, and author.20 Storey also claims that Boccaccio lags behind trecento innovations in vernacular poetry; I will argue that the ‘retrogressive’ aesthetics Storey astutely detects in Boccaccio serve a rhetorical motive.21 The anxiety of authorial control expressed structurally by Dante in the Vita Nova and by Petrarca in the Canzoniere attempts to escape the vagaries inherent in the manuscript culture of the trecento. In what Storey terms the ‘cultural crisis’ of the trecento manuscript culture, Boccaccio sought to restore stability through a return to generic and textual order, but he wants a new order that allows the vernacular into the place reserved for Latin.22 Boccaccio anticipates the discipline of philology that will emerge from humanists such as Salutati and Valla in the quattrocento, but at the same time he resists the rising tide of Latin that came with this movement. Boccaccio, as much as any other author in this literary environment, was acutely aware of his position as an author of a contemporary style of poetics. Old authors were still being read, copied, and revered, but there were also new authors, for whom the same rules did not apply. A passage from Boccaccio’s fiction demonstrates a more open approach to the reading and editing of texts than the conservative attitude of Bonaventure (nihil addendo vel mutando). In the introductory section the Amorosa Visione, Boccaccio invites his reader, here the Lady Mary, to edit his text. Adunque a voi, cui tengho donna mia et chui senpre disio di servire, la raccomando, madama Maria; e prieghovi, se fosse nel mio dire difecto alcun, per vostra cortesia correggiate amendando il mio fallire.

(Amor. Vis., Sonetto I, vv. 9–14)

[Thus to you, whom I hold as my lady, and whom I always wish to serve, I commend it, Lady Maria; and I beg you, if my verse contain some defect, in your courtesy correct it, amending my failings.]

In the period just before Boccaccio took up the editor’s stylus to edit (‘amendare’) Dante, he suggested that his own text might benefit from correction. This solicitation of an editor’s help is not an innovation; there is a limited tradition of similar formulations in the late classical and early medieval periods.23 In this case, whether or not Boccaccio follows the classical precedent, the passage exhibits a vocabulary and an openness to substantive editorial intervention. Of course, the reader and editor is

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no ordinary person: he grants Mary permission to correct his poem, a trope familiar to medieval lyric. Since Christ’s mother Mary intercedes as editor, this may be a nod to the same divine hermeneutic authority that Bonaventure sought to protect in editing Dante. In any case, Boccaccio will take greater liberty when he reads and edits Dante’s texts. Another aspect that brings out Boccaccio’s particular attention to the role of the author comes out in his staging of the writing process in his own writings. The reader knows that Boccaccio constantly finds himself surrounded by manuscripts and, like a modern curator, was constantly looking to acquire them. In the first Proem to his encyclopedic Latin work Genealogia deorum gentilium Boccaccio describes the work of the author as a tireless and perhaps futile attempt not only to read the source texts but also to wander the land searching them out. Vagantur igitur tam deorum quam progenitorum nationes et nomina, huc illuc dispersa per orbem. Habet enim liber hic ex his aliquid, et aliquid liber alter. Que quis, queso, pro minime, seu saltem parum fructuoso labore velit exquirere et tot volumina volvere, legere et hinc inde excerpere perpauca? Credo satius desistendum. (Genea. I, Proem, par. 32–3) [The names and tribes of gods and their progenitors are scattered hither and yon all over the world. Here a book and there another has something to say on the subject. But pray who is there that would wish, for no useful result, or at least very little, to hunt them all up, read, and finally gather a few notes? I believe it would be better to give up.]

This passage most closely follows, even to the point of satire, Bonaventure’s description of one of the varieties of medieval authorship: the compiler. But Boccaccio also dramatizes the material process, a nod to his efforts of recovering and identifying classical texts.24 His increased role in Florentine diplomatic affairs and his shift toward humanistic studies after 1350 took him throughout Italy on various political projects. This passage registers this effort to seek out hard to find, or perhaps even lost, sources. Boccaccio stakes his value as an author on his ability to find, read, and judge the value of manuscripts unknown to his contemporaries. Unlike Bonaventure’s compiler, Boccaccio is a collector. His originality comes from the explicit representation of this process in his own production, and he continues to demonstrate his own distinct take on the relationship between an author and his materials. Boccaccio understands authorship as more than the attribution of the creative spirit of a

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Building a Monument to Dante

text; he understands that authorship is determined by the control of the process of composition. In this attention to the process of textual production and re-production, Boccaccio, along with Petrarca, foreshadows one aspect of the literary culture of Florentine humanism. Boccaccio, Editor of Dante Beyond writing about manuscripts, four of Boccaccio’s sixteen manuscripts illustrate the particular complexity of his material relationship with the textual tradition. In these four manuscripts, devoted almost entirely to works by Dante Alighieri, Boccaccio goes beyond the roles described by Bonaventure. He defies the nihil addendo vel mutando clause: he becomes an editor of the author not the text. Even keeping in mind the radical development of scribal practices in vernacular manuscript culture of the Italian trecento noted by many scholars Boccaccio pushes the limits of his own day and cultural milieu. Boccaccio’s intervention into Dante’s texts exhibits a clear motivation to shape Dante according to his own original cultural and intellectual agenda. These four manuscripts bear witness to Boccaccio’s formulation of a vernacular humanism project; in promoting, as one critic would have it, the ‘cult of Dante,’ Boccaccio elevates Dante to the status of an icon. 25 The more important conclusion concerns the formation of a figure of Dante congruent with Boccaccio’s own poetic theory. This figuration of the poet turns out to be crucial in understanding how profoundly Boccaccio influenced the subsequent reception of Dante. More to my point in this present study, however, an examination of Boccaccio’s manuscript editions of Dante’s texts reveals a great deal more about Boccaccio’s mind than about Dante’s reception. A chronological description of the format and content of these three manuscripts will help to frame Boccaccio’s work as editor. Each one shows Boccaccio’s elaboration of the ‘semigothic’ script peculiar to the prehumanist culture of the Italian trecento. Originated by Petrarca, this script maintains many characteristics of gothic textualis (also know as the littera textualis) with aesthetic changes incorporated from the Italian chancery script.26 The results of Petrarca’s experiment feature a clean and light manuscript page; unlike the fractured and blocky appearance of gothic book hands, this script favours clarity of expression over the architectonic format privileged by earlier gothic styles. Notably, Boccaccio writes with a clear and steady hand showing a skilled practice and an awareness of the aesthetic appearance of his text. His innovations as a

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copyist of Dante’s texts cannot be limited to his textual changes; these manuscripts also show evidence of an equally influential aesthetic development.27 The earliest manuscript is now known as the Toledano (TO; Archivo y Biblioteca Capitolares [Biblioteca del Cabildo], 104.6, in Toledo, Spain). Completed during the first half of the 1350s, this manuscript is one of the first that Boccaccio copied after his turn away from vernacular fiction to begin work on the magisterial Genealogia. The Toledano contains the following works: Trattatello in laude di Dante (1st redaction) by Boccaccio; Dante’s Vita Nova; Dante’s Commedia, including the three terza rima Argomenti written by Boccaccio (also known as the Brieve Raccoglimento) that preface each of the cantiche; and fifteen of Dante’s canzoni distese with Latin rubrics selected and ordered by Boccaccio.28 This is the manuscript in which Boccaccio first devoted himself to organizing an edition of Dante’s lyrical works. The Toledano also contains the first record of Boccaccio’s editorial change to the Vita Nova – a marginal note on the bottom of the initial folio of that work. The manuscript that exhibits Boccaccio’s most profound editorial engagement with Dante is known as the Chigiano, and exists now as two separate manuscripts (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Chigiano L.V. 176 and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Chigiano L.VI. 213). In his facsimile edition of Chigiano L.V. 176 Domenico De Robertis convincingly demonstrates that these two manuscripts were originally one unified codex,29 that the works originally appeared in the following order: Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante (3rd redaction), Dante’s Vita Nova, the Commedia including the Raccoglimenti, Boccaccio’s Latin hymn Ytalie iam certus honos, the fifteen canzoni distese of Dante (without rubrics), and Petrarca’s fragmentorum liber (an earlier version of Petrarca’s Canzoniere). Boccaccio later removed the Commedia from the collection and in its place substituted Guido Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega with the gloss by Dino del Garbo written in his own hand.30 As suggested by the changing nature of this manuscript and the inconsistency of the handwriting, Boccaccio composed the Chigiano manuscript over a long period of time, from 1359 to 1363 or even 1366.31 Compared to the Toledano the Chigiano reveals a different and far more complex project, concerned with placing Dante’s lyric texts within the context of other crucial trecento vernacular authors, including himself: Where the Toledano marks the first material record of Boccaccio dantista, the Chigiano evinces his material formulation of a canon of trecento vernacular literature (Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, and Cavalcanti) that persists to this day.32

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The Riccardiano (Biblioteca Riccardiana Cod. 1035) overlaps with the Chigiano and introduces little new material; instead, Boccaccio promulgates his earlier versions of Dante’s texts.33 The Riccardiano contains only the Commedia (with the terza rima Raccoglimenti by Boccaccio) and the same fifteen canzoni distese (with Italian rubrics) in the same order, as in the previous two manuscripts. It was produced ca 1363–5 and has no features that distinguish it from the previous two autograph manuscripts other than the use of Italian rubrics for the canzoni distese. The texts of the Commedia and the fifteen canzoni are simply copies of Boccaccio’s previous versions; the absence of the Trattatello is the only substantial difference. The Toledano and the Chigiano demonstrate Boccaccio’s desire to influence the texts he copied. The Riccardiano, conversely, offers little editorial change; it simply reproduces the already existing versions. It serves the same purpose as an earlier manuscript of the Commedia (Vaticano lat. 3199) that Boccaccio sent to Petrarca:34 the controlled promulgation of Dante’s texts. Boccaccio’s editorial decisions in these manuscripts disclose an agenda focused as much on adapting Dante’s works to fit his own literary agenda as on simply cleaning up texts corrupted by poor scribal transmission. The following section will demonstrate how philologists and other critics have carefully mapped out Boccaccio’s influence in terms of the transmission of Dante’s texts. As Barolini recently has written, ‘Boccaccio has imposed himself so cannily on the reception of Dante that we have much work to do to recover uncontaminated readings.’35 Clearly driven by philological concerns, philologists and critics have focused their attention on accounting for Boccaccio’s influence and judging in terms of its value to the process of textual recovery. This has been a crucial process in understanding Dante and the manuscript culture of the Italian trecento. Other readers looking to evaluate Dante’s influence on Boccaccio treat these manuscripts only with respect to Boccaccio’s intimate knowledge of Dante’s works.36 Such studies have helped readers to gauge Boccaccio’s relationship with his most important literary forefather. This present study does not seek to recover Dante or his texts; rather it considers Boccaccio’s poetic and intellectual motivation in his formation of a manuscript monument to Dante. Commedia The modern reception of Boccaccio’s edition of Dante’s Commedia demonstrates the limited concern among modern editors and readers about

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Boccaccio’s editorial project. Giorgio Petrocchi, whose critical edition of the Commedia recognizes Boccaccio’s crucial role in the transmission of the text, sees Boccaccio’s versions of the Commedia as deriving fundamentally from Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Latino 3199 (Vat.) or a twin copy of the manuscript that Boccaccio sent to Petrarca. Petrocchi also posits that Boccaccio had access to two other manuscripts, each representing a separate tradition: Biblioteca dell’Archivio Storico Civico e Trivulziana, 1080 (Triv.); and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urbinati latini, 366 (Urb.).37 Petrocchi describes Boccaccio’s editorial process as an attempt to arrive at a better copy of the text through a synoptic reading of the exemplar manuscripts with constant review and evaluation of variant readings:38 not by coincidence, I would suggest, this is a description of modern philology’s modus operandi. Petrocchi carefully dissects many of Boccaccio’s decisions, ascribing various editorial motives: eliminatio, spelling, metre, normalization of verb forms, and Boccaccio’s own conjectural errors.39 In short, Petrocchi, who aimed to establish the best and earliest version of Dante’s text, shows how Boccaccio attempted this same task using three already corrupted versions of the text, and as a consequence, complicated Petrocchi’s task by intertwining the separate branches of the textual genealogical tree. It must have seemed to Petrocchi, motivated by the conceit of the philologist, that Boccaccio made errors common to poor scribal and ecdoctic practice. After all, it was not his object to evaluate Boccaccio’s motives; rather, he sought to produce a critical edition that was as close as possible to Dante’s original poem. Petrocchi’s goal in establishing an edition of the Commedia that could represent an antica vulgata leads him to declare Boccaccio’s editions of the Commedia as the terminus a quo for the deterioration of the manuscript tradition. Petrocchi’s methodology follows lachmannian stemmatics: the theory that an original text can be established based on a comparison of the best existing manuscripts. Petrocchi’s stemma (hypothetical chart of the manuscript history of a text) describes five distinct time periods of codices; Boccaccio’s production falls into the last period.40 Many manuscripts were written after this period, but in Petrocchi’s reconstruction, Boccaccio’s plays a crucial but distorting role in the transmission of the text.41 According to Petrocchi, Boccaccio’s three versions of the Commedia have corrupted generations of readers of Dante’s masterpiece, but his own new version restores an antediluvian artefact to its proper place. The role of the modern editor includes summary judgment of the efforts of previous editors; clearly Petrocchi judged Boccaccio a poor editor.42

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Petrocchi’s comprehensive philological study represents an attempt to replicate as close as possible an original version of Dante’s text, and for decades it was widely accepted as the standard edition of Dante’s Commedia. He deemed it necessary to occlude Boccaccio’s versions from consideration because of his negative evaluation of Boccaccio’s effectiveness as a textual editor. His naming of Boccaccio’s versions as recentiores deteriores underscores his overall dismissal of Boccaccio’s editorial work.43 The vast impact of Boccaccio’s editio, while ignored by Petrocchi and perhaps unimportant for filologia dantesca, underscores just how greatly Boccaccio influenced the transmission of this text. Petrocchi limits his study to pre-Boccaccio editions of the Commedia, but throughout the history of its transmission the Commedia has been diffused, to a great extent, in Boccaccio’s version.44 Like Branca’s statement on his edition of the Decameron, Petrocchi sought to re-create the closest possible version of the author’s will without consideration of the personalities that mediated the transmission. Boccaccio had different ideas about the role of the editor. Boccaccio’s editio of Dante’s Commedia may indeed represent a breaking point for the modern editor of the work, but it offers a few scattered clues on Boccaccio’s plans for his literary monument to Dante. As discussed above, Petrocchi laments that Boccaccio’s copies of the Commedia indicate an untrained, if willing, hand at the rudiments of textual editing. Hidden in Boccaccio’s seemingly spurious variants, however, lie examples of his wilful manipulation of Dante’s text. In two cases – both Inferno XI (v. 90) and Inferno XXIV (v. 119) – Boccaccio changes the word ‘vendetta’ for the word ‘giustizia’.45 This is no error of scribal malpractice. Rather, Boccaccio commits scribal malfeasance; he alters the texts to adjust the meaning. As I will discuss in chapters 3 and 4, Boccaccio takes great pains to correct Dante on the use of ‘vendetta’ for describing Divine justice. In short, Boccaccio disagrees philosophically with Dante, so he changes the word. Boccaccio, as editor, did not want the word vendetta in his version of Dante’s Inferno, so he took it out. In other cases, Boccaccio’s changes to the text of the Commedia mirror his work as editor of his own Decameron. For example, the same changes that Boccaccio’s made to his last copy of the Commedia (Chigiano) he also made in his autograph copy of the Decameron, which was copied in roughly the same period: in both cases Boccaccio prefers a more stylized, or more elevated, version of the vernacular.46 Boccaccio’s desire to elevate the vernacular always subtends his work as editor of Dante’s texts. His editio of the Commedia is not only a crucial point in the transmission of the text; it also hints at his efforts to shape Dante to fit his own poetic and philosophic ends.

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In the nearly fifty years since the publication of Petrocchi’s critical edition of the Commedia, a number of other scholars have attempted to refine Petrocchi’s work with additional philological clarifications.47 Others, taking issue with Petrocchi’s criteria, have proposed new critical editions of the text. In terms of Boccaccio’s editio of Dante’s Commedia, Antonio Lanza agrees with Petrocchi’s negative evaluation, but he objects to his method. His critical edition of the Commedia confirms Petrocchi’s judgment that Boccaccio’s editio of the text signals the corruption of the text, but he scolds Petrocchi for claiming that he follows the norms of lachmannian stemmatics in eliminating all the post-Boccaccian manuscripts.48 Federico Sanguineti’s edition does not even mention Boccaccio’s role as he limits his study to the earliest ‘best’ manuscript.49 Recent palaeographical and codicological studies of the manuscript tradition of the Commedia make a point of confirming Petrocchi’s decision to ignore Boccacio’s editio.50 Even though these new critical editions bring new insights to the Commedia and its early transmission that run contrary to Petrocchi’s assertions, his judgment of Boccaccio’s negative role in the transmission of Dante’s masterpiece remains unchallenged. Vita Nova Boccaccio’s micro-textual alterations in the Commedia are hard to detect without strict attention to the tangle of the apparatus. His radical alteration of the Vita Nova by marginalizing the divisioni makes tracking his version of this text more simple. Paradoxically, whereas Boccaccio’s editio of the Commedia has garnered universal rejection from modern editors of the work, his editio of the Vita Nova has had a more favourable reception. Michele Barbi, who produced the first national critical edition of the Vita Nova in 1907, demonstrated that roughly half of the extant manuscripts of this work derive from Boccaccio’s two autograph manuscripts (Toledano and Chigiano). Moreover, the transmission record of the Vita Nova shows that, until Barbi’s edition, most readers had Boccaccio’s very particular editio, not Dante’s. Boccaccio's direct editorial influence on the manuscript tradition of the Vita Nova goes far beyond his intervention in the Commedia. And yet, while Petrocchi treats Boccaccio’s editorial intervention as the beginning of the corruption of the Commedia, Barbi judges Boccaccio’s version of the Vita Nova as a generally reliable source for his critical edition.51 Guglielmo Gorni’s more recent critical edition of the Vita Nova considers Boccaccio’s intervention; although he takes issue with Barbi’s editorial choices in his critical edition, he does not critique

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Barbi’s use of Boccaccio’s version.52 Gorni’s edition (as he states in his Nota al Testo – he went so far as to change the title of the text) has ignited a worldwide debate among Dante scholars, but it has not altered the fact of Boccaccio’s crucial role in the early (if we can describe 1350–1907 as ‘early’) transmission of the text.53 As with the Commedia, philologists continue to refine their editions of Dante’s texts but the evaluation of Boccaccio’s editio of these texts remains unchanged. Although clearly influential in the long history of filologia dantesca, Boccaccio’s seminal intervention in the manuscript history of the Commedia and Vita Nova as a corrector of variants accounts only for the most mundane portion of Boccaccio’s editorial agenda. His attempt to correct the versions of Dante’s texts available to him illustrates the common practices of the medieval scribe.54 Boccaccio, himself an experienced scribe, understood that scribes produced manuscripts, and that all manuscripts suffer the various infelicities of human intervention. Like his friend Petrarca, Boccaccio aimed to restore venerated texts to a purified form and thereby make them more accessible to his contemporaries. Boccaccio was successful in recovering and transmitting various texts from the classical tradition, working as a grammarian as much as a scribe. Petrarca worked strictly within the world of classical literature, but Boccaccio employed this same method of textual reconstruction with a venerated author in the vernacular. His textual editing of Dante is innovative in that he applied the same process to Dante’s vernacular texts that he and his contemporaries applied to Latin texts. The most remarkable and revealing editorial decision Boccaccio carried out in the entirety of his manuscript copies of Dante concerns his version of the Vita Nova (see figure 2). Boccaccio’s decision to marginalize the divisioni alters the fundamental structure of Dante’s text, in an act that goes beyond Bonaventure, the notaries of Bologna, and Petrarca. The divisioni represent a commonplace element of glossing that occupies the margins of many medieval manuscripts, but Dante’s originality arises from his choice to place his self-commentary within the body of his prosimetrum. A sample divisione will illustrate the nature of this curious form of self-commentary within the context of the Vita Nova. To the sonnet Tutti li miei pensier’ parlan d’Amore, Dante appends this divisione: Questo sonetto in quattro parti si può dividere. Nella prima dico e soppongo che tutti li miei pensieri sono d’Amore; nella seconda dico che sono diversi, e narro la loro diversitade; nella terza dico in che tutti pare che s’accordino; nella quarta dico che, volendo dire d’Amore, non so da qual parte pigli

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matera, e se la voglio pigliare da tutti, conviene, che io chiami la mia inimca, madonna la Pietà; e dico ‘madonna’ quasi per disdegnoso modo di parlare. La seconda parte comincia quivi e ánno in loro; la terza quivi e sol s’accordano; la quarta quivi Ond’io non so.] (Vita Nova, cap. 6, par. 10) [This sonnet can be divided into four parts. In the first I say and submit that all my thoughts are about Love; in the second I say that they are different, and I talk about their differences; in the third I tell what they seem to have in common; in the fourth I say that, wishing to speak of Love, I do not know where to begin, and if I wish to take my theme from all my thoughts, I would be forced to call upon my enemy, my Lady Pity; and I use the term ‘my lady’ rather scornfully. The second part begins: they have in them; the third: only in craving; the fourth: I do not know.]

Critics have given extensive attention to the divisioni as an integral part of the structure of the Vita Nova. The earliest critics offered an extrinsic evaluation of the divisioni by identifying them with existing models of gloss from the literary tradition. Pio Rajna was the first to identify the specific context of scholastic commentaries as Dante’s source.55 Charles Singleton takes this identification one step further by isolating St Bonaventure’s commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard.56 De Robertis posits Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica as a possible vernacular model,57 and D’Andrea contributes to the discussion by limiting Dante’s scholastic models to thirteenth century scholastic commentaries, and specifically a commentary on Boethius’s De Consolatione.58 Thomas Stillinger’s discussion of the divisioni offers another textual source as a fundamental proof in his insightful work. Stillinger sees the glossed psalter, a collection of lyric elements combining to form a historical narrative sequence, as offering a closer parallel than scholastic commentaries on prose theological texts.59 Regardless of exact identification with one specific genre, critical opinion agrees that Dante modelled his divisioni on other medieval examples of marginal glossing. All these types of gloss were also familiar to Boccaccio. Dante’s innovation in the Vita Nova is that he centralized the marginalia common to medieval manuscripts by including them in the body of his text. Beyond the important task of identifying Dante’s possible sources of imitation for his self-commentary, other critics offer an intrinsic evaluation of the divisioni by pointing out their structural and interpretive function in the text. Starting with Singleton, De Robertis, and finally D’Andrea, critics began to understand that the divisioni represent an im-

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Figure 2. Biblioteca Apostolica Latina, Codice Chigiano L.V. 176, f. 17 v.

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portant element of authorial strategy staged in the structure of the text. A synthesis of this view holds that the divisioni represent one way in which Dante concerns himself with the form of this work. He begins by describing the work as a ‘libro de la mia memoria’ and as a ‘libello’ (Vita Nova, cap. 1, par. 1), thereby both claiming a reflexive relationship with the narrative and limiting its scope. Within the text the structure and form of both poetry and prose shift: sonnets and canzoni shift back and forth, and the divisioni come before or after the poems, if they appear at all. The flexibility of divisioni placement emphasizes the reader’s inaccessibility to the author's intention. With an authorized exegetical apparatus, the reader can only watch the text perform an insulated hermeneutic operation. Dante’s attempt to create in the Vita Nova a ‘circular totality,’ in which the author controls both the writing and the interpretation of his own autobiographical poetic narrative, depends equally on the threefold scheme of poetry, prose, and gloss unique to this work.60 Sherry Roush and Steven Botterill take a different view in their studies on the divisioni. Botterill places the divisioni within the exegetical tradition familiar to Dante’s readership. Thus he argues that the divisioni, despite almost universal opprobrium from critics, enrich the interpretive possibilities of the text.61 Roush denies the general critical antipathy for the divisioni by taking Dante at his word: the divisioni are included to open up the work to new meanings. Roush demonstrates that Dante’s task as a self-commentator, indeed the role of self-commentary per se, is not to render an interpretation but rather to open up possible interpretive clues that would be available only to the author, not the reader (altro chiosatore). Thus, according to Roush, Dante does not limit interpretation of his text but rather provides ‘plurisignificant interpretive hints’ for his readers.62 The many and nuanced critical views of Dante’s motives for placing the divisioni within the body of his text and in the first person have done much to illuminate Dante’s artistry and innovative brilliance. In terms of Boccaccio’s decision to marginalize the divisioni, however, these explanations of the divisioni tell us only that Boccaccio disagrees with their purpose, whatever that might be. In his editio of the Vita Nova Boccaccio created a text that more closely resembled the traditional manuscript format of centralized text and marginalized commentary. Boccaccio, like any Latin-literate medieval reader, had come across many different types of gloss. The models of glossing suggested by Singleton (scholastic commentaries) and Stillinger (glossed psalter) represent only two of many contemporary types of gloss that Boccaccio had either written or copied in his own manuscript production. His early education in Naples focused on a study of canon

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law and its attendant sets of glosses. He gifted Petrarca with an ornate manuscript copy of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos.63 He copied out perhaps the most ubiquitous text in the tradition of scholastic commentaries, Aquinas’s Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle.64 Legal texts, sacred scripture, and scholastic commentary do not lend themselves to precise comparison to the Vita Nova. Among all these examples of authoritative Latin texts, the Vita Nova obviously stands out as a contemporary vernacular work. Boccaccio’s experience with glosses on vernacular poetry suggests that he saw his editio of the Vita Nova as an opportunity to correct Dante’s juvenilia while also ennobling the vernacular. The corpus of manuscripts produced by Boccaccio presents two more viable models of glossed vernacular texts that compare more closely to his editio of the Vita Nova. His autograph manuscript of Teseida gives a first person account of how he combined text and self-commentary gloss in his poetry. On a purely formal level, the thousands of marginal and interlinear glosses included with this poem parallel the format that Boccaccio adopted in editing the Vita Nova: one column of text with the gloss occupying the side margin.65 Although some of the glosses differ fundamentally in nature from Dante’s divisioni, a vast majority of Boccaccio’s glosses serve the same basic purpose as do the divisioni in Dante’s text.66 Sherry Roush has demonstrated that Boccaccio’s project of self-commentary in the Teseida is deeply influenced by both of Dante’s prosimetra, the Vita Nova and the Convivio.67 However, Roush goes on to show, Boccaccio had a fundamentally different purpose in including his self-commentary: he wanted to invest his vernacular epic in the likeness of the classical epic. The gloss of the Teseida helps the reader to interpret the difficult passages and obscure poetic structures in his epic poem. In a noteworthy departure from Dante’s self-commentary in both the Vita Nova and the Convivio, Boccaccio glosses in the third person, explicating the difficult passages while maintaining both a spatial and a personal separation between interpreter (glossator) and author. He furnishes the gloss for his vernacular epic that his readership would expect with any Latin epic. A letter written concurrently with the composition of the Teseida notes the necessity of gloss when reading an epic poem.68 Nam cum pridem casu fortuito pervenisset ad manus meas liber pulcerimus, fraternas acies et Tebanorum conflictum suis metribus demonstrantem emi pro pretio competenti; sed cum sine magistro vel glosis intellectum debitum non attingam, recordatus tui Tebaydos, proposui eum tibi amicabiliter querere per presentes; (Epis. IV, par. 29)

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[Indeed, having recently come into my hands by fortune the most wonderful book that describes in verses the armies of the two brothers in the battle of Thebes, I was able to purchase it for a good price; but without the aid of a teacher or a commentary I could not understand it well, and I remembered your Thebaid and I decided to you ask you for it in the name of friendship in this letter.]

Boccaccio found it absolutely necessary to read Statius’s Thebaid with the aid of Lactantius Placidus’s standard commentary on the epic; he also felt it equally important for his readers to have a commentary on his vernacular reworking of Statius’s epic. He translates the scholia tradition familiar to Latin texts, whether pagan or Christian, to his vernacular poem, while retaining the disjunction between text and gloss with his use of the third person. The self-commentary on the Teseida draws a strict division between author and commentator even though the same person performs both functions. Despite these differences the autograph manuscript of Boccaccio’s Teseida suggests a better model for comparison with Dante’s Vita Nova, and Boccaccio’s editio of the Vita Nova partially reinforces this division between author and interpreter/reader. A Latin gloss on Guido Cavalcanti’s (before 1327) Donna me prega written by the physician and philosopher Dino del Garbo offers another model for the reworking of the Vita Nova. Boccaccio included this poem and del Garbo’s Latin gloss in his Chigiano manuscript (see figure 3), and del Garbo’s commentary on Cavalcanti’s poem had also inspired Boccaccio’s self-commentary in the Teseida.69 In the original version of the Chigiano manuscript, the last lines of the Vita Nova face the initial page of Cavalcanti’s philosophical poem.70 This placement establishes a synoptic relationship between the two poems, especially in terms of their appearance on the manuscript folios. Regarding content, del Garbo’s gloss of Cavalcanti’s poem performs the same function as Dante’s divisioni; del Garbo delineates the same two basic textual facts that Dante does in his divisioni: the structure of the poem itself (its internal divisions) and his scholastic interpretation of poetic language. The initial gloss demonstrates that the methods of del Garbo and Dante are fundamentally the same: Ista cantilena, que tractat de amoris passione, dividitur in tres partes: in I ostenditur quot et que sint ea que dicuntur de ipso; secundo, de illis que proponit determinat: tertio, imponendo finem dictis, ostendit sufficientiam eorum que dixit. Ibi II: In quella parte dove sta memoria: III ibi: Tu puoi sicuramente. 71

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Figure 3. Biblioteca Apostolica Latina, Codice Chigiano L.V. 176, f. 29r

[This canzone, which treats amorous affection, is divided into three parts: in the first it is shown how many and what types of things are said about it; in the second, the discussion points are determined; in the third, imposing a conclusion to the discussion, it is shown that what has been said is sufficient. The second part begins: In quella parte dove sta memoria: The third part begins: Tu puoi sicuramente.]

Del Garbo’s commentary describes in great detail the intellectual grounding of Cavalcanti’s poetry, treating the poem as philosophical text rather than vernacular love poetry. In terms of tone and subject matter, the glosses on these two texts closely reflect each other. A closer look at these mirrored images reveals significant differences. Clearly, del Garbo’s glosses the poem in Latin, while Dante writes his in the vernacular. This difference, basic as it is, takes on even larger meaning because this gloss is one of only two Latin elements in the entire

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Chigiano manuscript. Boccaccio’s editio of the Vita Nova with the marginalized vernacular divisioni contrasts with the Latin prose commentary of Donna me prega. Moreover, the copious philosophical gloss on Donna me prega creates a busy manuscript page on which the gloss overburdens the poem; the Vita Nova, although in the same format, seems more balanced between poetry, prose, and gloss. This physical juxtaposition in the Chigiano manuscript contrasts the elegant poetry of the Vita Nova with the intellectually challenging Donna me prega through their markedly different aesthetic value on the manuscript folio. Boccaccio’s versions of the two famous poems, although formatted the same way in the Chigiano manuscript, hint at his stance in the debate between Dante’s and Cavalcanti’s poetics.72 The cluttered appearance of the folio and the dense Latin of del Garbo’s gloss accompanying Donna me prega stand in stark opposition to the clean and elegant format of the vernacular Vita Nova. Boccaccio brings out the difference in poetic styles between Dante and Cavalcanti on the physical space of the manuscript folio. Basing his editorial decision on the scholia that surrounds classical poetry – for example, Lactantius’s commentary on Statius – and recreating the format of his own Teseida, Boccaccio shapes Dante’s Vita Nova to fit a traditional format for poetry, whether in Latin or the vernacular. These two models for Boccaccio’s editio of the Vita Nova add nothing to the discussion of Dante’s intent in writing this unique work of poetry plus self-commentary, but they do contextualize Boccaccio’s editorial decisions: Boccaccio acts decisively to preserve the relationship between text and commentary. The Teseida evinces Boccaccio’s mode of self-commentary limited by the conventions of the Latin epic. The placement of Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega with del Garbo’s abundant Latin gloss immediately after the Vita Nova suggests a desire to contrast Dante’s Vita Nova with Cavalcanti’s earlier poetry. These two examples, coupled with the larger editorial project described in this chapter, lead to the conclusion that Boccaccio sought to contextualize Dante’s poem by firmly positioning the Vita Nova within an emerging definition of vernacular poetry in the Chigiano. Both the self-commentary in the Teseida and Dino del Garbo’s Latin scholia on Calvacanti’s poem are firmly rooted in an existing tradition of commentary tradition while staking a new claim for vernacular poetics. Boccaccio’s editio of the Vita Nova attempts to remedy the perceived transgression of Dante’s self-commentary through a return to a familiar format. Moreover, his active role in altering Dante’s text indicates that he was more concerned with presenting a Dante with whom he agreed than with Dante’s original text.

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Dante’s placement of his own self-commentary within the body of the text – in a sense making the interpretation of the poetry part of the narrative – presents a sharp contrast with previous traditions of gloss and text. As I have noted regarding both Boccaccio’s Teseida and Dino del Garbo’s gloss on ‘Donna me prega,’ the novelty of Dante’s self-commentary lies both in its position within the body of the narrative and in Dante’s use of the first person narrative voice. Boccaccio’s editio of the Vita Nova attempts to remedy this perceived transgression on the part of Dante in the favour of a more traditional format. Whether or not Dante ever came to believe that his self-commentary was an aesthetic failure, his inclusion of the divisioni in the body of the text shifts the interpretive emphasis from reader to author by limiting the reader’s interpretive space. Boccaccio shifted it back. The displacement of the divisioni to the margins indicates Boccaccio’s active role as an editor, but his editorial note accompanying his editio of the Vita Nova reveals much more. Here he speaks to the readers of his manuscripts as a figure of interpretive authority over the author and text itself. The following note appears on the bottom of the first page of the Vita Nova in both the Toledano and the Chigiano manuscripts (see figure 4). Maraviglierannosi molti, per quello ch’io advisi, perchè io le divisioni de’ sonetti non ho nel testo poste, come l’autore del presente libretto le puose; ma a ciò respondo due essere state le cagioni. La prima, per ciò che le divisioni de’sonetti manifestamente sono dichiarazione di quegli: per che più tosto chiosa appaiono dovere essere che testo; e però chiosa l’ho poste, non testo, non stando l’uno con l’altre ben mescolato. Se qui forse dicesse alcuno – e le teme de’ sonetti e canzoni scritte da lui similmente si potrebbero dire chiosa, con ciò 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. La seconda ragione è che, secondo che io già più 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 opera 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; là onde io non potendolo negli altri emendare, in questo che scritto ho, n’ho voluto sodisfare l’appetito de l’autore.

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[A great many will wonder at what I suggest, because I have not placed the divisions (divisioni) of the sonnets in the text as the author of the present little book placed them; but to this I respond that there were two reasons. The first, because the divisions of the sonnets are clearly explanations (dichiarazione) of those sonnets, they appear to be gloss (chiosa) rather than text; and thus I placed them as gloss, not text, the one and the other not mixing well together. If here someone perhaps would say – just so, we might call the expositions (teme) of the sonnets and canzoni written by him gloss, in that they are not less explanations of the poems than the divisions – I say, in as much as they are explanations, they are not explanations that explain, but demonstrations of the reasons that brought him to write the sonnets and canzoni. And it seems that these demonstrations are still part of the principal intention; thus deservedly they are text and not gloss. The second reason is that, according to that which I have heard many times by persons worthy of trust, Dante having composed this little book in his youth, and later in time having grown in knowledge and in practice, he was ashamed of having written this, seeming to him too juvenile. And among the other things he was saddened to have done, he regretted having included the divisions in the text, perhaps for that same reason that moves me; whereas I am not able to emend all the others, in this one I have written, I wanted to satisfy the desire of the author. 73

This dense paragraph, typical of Boccaccio’s rhetorical prose style, needs careful unpacking. He begins and ends by insisting upon his agency in altering the text: in the first sentence he states ‘io le divisioni de’ sonetti non ho nel testo poste, come l’autore del presente libretto le puose,’ and the note concludes by defining the change as an act of editing (‘emendare’). In short, Boccaccio unequivocally asserts his right to edit Dante’s text. Between his claims of agency, he outlines two reasons for marginalizing the divisioni. First, he claims that they are dichiarazioni and not properly testo, and according to an unstated argument they should be considered chiose and properly placed outside of the text. The second reason is more clearly stated: Dante, rethinking his juvenile work in maturity, wanted it that way. These changes to Dante’s Vita Nova hint at how even small modifications of structure reveal larger ideological strategies. In constructing his monument to Dante, Boccaccio needed to shape his material to fit within his own aesthetic, political, and philosophical design. In fashioning Dante’s Vita Nova into a more traditional-looking medieval text, Boccaccio places Dante within a specifically poetic tradition. Boccaccio creates a Tuscan poetic school, especially within the framework of the Chigiano manuscript, which contains works by Caval-

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Figure 4. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Codice Chigiano L.V. 176, 13r.

canti, Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, and positions himself as steward: he is worthy of choosing which texts to include and which texts need to be edited. Although this passage is often cited by scholars of both Dante and Boccaccio, I believe it has yet to receive due attention as a statement of Boccaccio’s editorial policy. The first scholars to take up this passage were exclusively concerned with Boccaccio’s role as witness to Dante’s transmission. Giuseppe Vandelli, a capable representative of traditional philological approaches, recognizes Boccaccio’s manuscript production as nothing more than an attempt to promulgate a corrected version of Dante’s text to a public exposed only to corrupted copies.74 Vandelli’s view still resonates today: Boccaccio was a devotee of Dante whose ‘non mai intermessa amorosa famigliarità con tutto ciò che Dante aveva scritto’ [never interrupted loving familiarity with all that Dante had written] moved him to carefully correct Dante’s work for his contemporary readership. As modern editions of the text manifest, Boccaccio’s effort was

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successful. But Vandelli failed to address the more radical implications of Boccaccio’s editorial statements. Boccaccio unequivocally states that he is much more than a textual editor; rather, he is a corrector of fundamental mistakes made by the author himself. Contemporary readings of this passage follow the same trajectory. Although not driven by specifically philological concerns, critics have inevitably read this passage as proof of Boccaccio’s fundamental misunderstanding, or at least mistrust, of Dante’s text rather than as a wilful act animated by his own literary agenda. Thomas Stillinger’s insightful work on the Vita Nova focuses on the divisioni and on ‘division’ itself as an interpretive key to the entire work; the displacement of the divisioni to the margin, therefore, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the complex textual structures that Dante created.75 Stillinger’s reading of Boccaccio’s editorial statement serves as proof in his overall argument, convincing as it is, concerning the function of the divisioni within Dante’s overall narrative scheme in the Vita Nova. Roush cites the note but offers only a cursory interpretation of Boccaccio’s intention; her focus is on the history of the dismissal of the divisioni as an element of the Vita Nova.76 Corrado Bologna characterizes the intervention as ‘gotico’ in its rigid formality and ‘scolastico’ in its conservative intellectual implications.77 Storey’s consideration of not only Boccaccio’s note but also his multiple copies of the Vita Nova documents how Boccaccio’s intervention in the transmission of the Vita Nova results in his ‘virtually destroying the Vita Nova’s unique and often intricate narratives which interweave episodes with notes.’78 Stillinger, Roush, Bologna, and Storey focus on Dante’s version of the Vita Nova; Boccaccio’s editorial statement once again escapes consideration as a theory of editorial praxis. The most comprehensive discussion of Boccaccio’s editorial note comes in a critical work that aims at an historical account of the act of reading itself. Susan Noakes focuses two chapters of her study on Boccaccio’s legacy, highlighting the importance of his role in the development of new reading and editorial strategies. She sees Dante’s layered text as an authorial attempt to reflect the temporality of reading, and she portrays Boccaccio as a somewhat schizophrenic author whose own glosses in the Teseida indicate both a distrust of the reader’s ability to grasp the text and an idealistic impulse towards the composition of his own literary production.79 Having figured Boccaccio as a mercurial character, Noakes looks sceptically at his editorial decision to marginalize the divisioni. She correctly looks to Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium to locate Boccaccio’s editorial stance within a larger theory of poetics. In

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seeing Boccaccio’s poetic theory as fundamentally concerned with theology, she concludes that the displacement of the gloss and the subsequent destruction of the structurally engineered figuration of temporality of the Vita Nova expose a lack of interest in the reader. In her assessment, Boccaccio aims his editorial intervention not at the audience, but rather at what he considers to be the author’s puerile mistake. In the critical account that most directly considers Boccaccio’s intent in making the change, Noakes casts a disapproving gaze on his reasoning. None of the above accounts fully considers Boccaccio’s editorial intervention aside from its impact on Dante’s text. Boccaccio’s editorial note warrants closer inspection as a unique expression of his dantista’s editorial policy. What immediately stands out is the active role that he proposes for himself. The dominant historical assumption concerning the role of the scribe in the production of medieval manuscripts presumes that the text created by the author will be reproduced as faithfully as possible – even if this process involves editorial intervention to rectify previous scribal errors. How far we have come from Bonaventure’s definition and from Branca’s editorial rationale? The editorial note boldly subverts both the medieval model of proper manuscript transmission and the modern philologists’ attempts to find a mythic textual archetype. In proclaiming his role amending Dante's text, Boccaccio creates a new role – an editor/auctor – in the history of textual transmission. He puts his own intellectual authority into the task of rewriting the final draft of a work by Dante. Behind these questionable philological practices lies the key to deciphering an ideological agenda that subtends shaping a monument to Dante. In the first and last lines of the editorial statement he joins his voice into the formation of the Vita Nova. Just as obviously, he also sets up a familiar relationship with Dante. Rather than mute his voice in the change, he unveils the changes from the author’s original text: ‘io le divisioni de’sonetti non ho nel testo poste, come l’autore del presente libretto le puose’ (italics added). In the last line, having explained his own reasons for making the change, he once again invokes Dante: ‘in questo che scritto ho, n’ho voluto sodisfare l’appetito de l’autore’ (italics added). While keeping faith with the author by maintaining the term ‘libretto,’ he declares his presence as editor of the text and claims to act as a representative of the author. The authorial process begins with Dante’s inclusion of the divisioni and concludes with Boccaccio’s deployment of editorial privilege by marginalizing them. This act stages an intimate relationship between the two actors. The two arguments in this editor’s

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note assert an authoritative control over the text while maintaining an illusion of deference to the author. In the initial statement of agency in his note to the Vita Nova, Boccaccio asserts his authority as an expert in vernacular poetic form. His own works of fiction clearly show that he had read all genres of both classical and vernacular poetry. As discussed above, he had also come across different models of textual gloss: his own Teseida and the other works of vernacular poetry present in the Chigiano manuscript, particularly Donna me prega, evince that Boccaccio had a model of the relation between text and commentary (including self-commentary) in vernacular poetry. In both the Teseida and Dino del Garbo’s gloss on Donna me prega the marginal gloss serves a critical role in helping the reader to understand potentially unfamiliar classical references or to ground particular vocabulary in its proper context within contemporary philosophical and poetic debates. Although writing in the vernacular, both Cavalcanti and Boccaccio strive to reach the intellectual level of classical auctores. The gloss introduces a third party into the reading experience whose sole purpose is to bridge the apparent hermeneutical gap between the erudite author and the reader. Even the most expert readers, such as the reader of Latin literature of Del Garbo’s commentary, are served by the clarification of terms in the commentary. More than just an apparatus criticus, the margins of medieval manuscripts, just as those in books of today, record the interaction between reader and author. Boccaccio marginalizes the divisioni in a bold attempt to preserve the traditional relationship between text and gloss that he had observed in his own writing and in the other poetic texts found in the Chigiano manuscript. The note distinguishes between the three components of the Vita Nova. He understands the canzoni as the principal component of the work. He defines the divisioni as dichiarazioni of the poetry, and therefore considers them chiose rather than text. Thus he argues that gloss should not be mixed with text while clearly laying out a hierarchical notion of authority that privileges poetry. The third element of the Vita Nova enters the debate with the introduction of a possible objection. A hypothetical critic (familiar to readers of Boccaccio) opines that if the divisioni should be removed from the text, so too should the teme that frame the poetic expressions. Boccaccio responds to this anonymous critique by noting that the teme are not glosses as they do not explain the text; rather they are dimostrazioni that situate the poetry in Dante’s autobiographical narrative, and thus still pertain to the poetry. The first argument concludes that the divisioni are accidental to the Vita Nova, whereas the teme are

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crucial to the intento principale of the text. Boccaccio, always the narrator, does not object to the autobiographical prose elements of the Vita Nova. One reader of this note has argued that Boccaccio, in removing the divisioni, completely ignores the reader,80 but the opposite is true. The note boldly addresses the readers of these particular manuscripts and implicitly speaks to those who will come to know his version through copies made from his exemplar. A three-line decorative initial illustrated boldly in blue and red draws the reader’s attention to the words ‘Maraviglierannosi molti,’ asking the reader to wonder at the changes.81 Boccaccio’s editio of the Vita Nova reestablishes the customary space between text and gloss. The corrected version upholds the proper distinction between text and gloss while allowing interpretive space in the margins for the reader to interact. In marginalizing the divisioni Boccaccio ruptured the hermetic seal in which Dante enclosed his text. Boccaccio produces perhaps the most complete poetic theory that informs his actions as editor of Dante in his Genealogia deorum gentilium: The fourteenth and fifteenth books of the work offer an apology for poetry. Boccaccio is not alone in defending poetry in the Middle Ages, but this text attests to Boccaccio’s unique understanding of poetry as the noblest art, whether written in Latin, Greek, or the vernacular. For modern readers these arguments might seem de rigueur for any defence of poetry, but Boccaccio is writing at a critical period in which vernacular poetry has come under attack by Petrarca amongst others. Boccaccio’s poetic theory advanced in this text is part of a larger intellectual project that encompasses the Chigiano manuscript and his dantismo in general as well as his encyclopedic Latin works. As I will discuss in chapter 3, while Boccaccio’s most important interlocutor in this dialogue is Petrarca, he also speaks to other critics of the vernacular, especially the Dominican intellectuals and preachers. One argument goes straight to the heart of his editorial decision concerning the Vita Nova and the intellectual integrity of vernacular lyric. He argues that poetry is a type of divine creation passed into words through the work of a poeta vates capable of revealing truth through poetic allegory. In his retort to those who say that poetry is too obscure to merit any serious attention, he reasons that the innate value of poetic expression lies in its very obscurity. Et ex his esse non nunquam vatum poemata non inficior. Verum non ob id, ut isti volunt, iure damnanda, cum inter alia poete officia sit non eviscerare fictionibus palliata, quin imo, si in propatulo posita sint memoratu et

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veneratione digna, ne vilescant familiaritate nimia, quanta possunt industria tegere et ab oculis torpentium auferre … Nec sit quis existimet a poetis veritates fictionibus invidia conditas, aut ut velint omnino absconditorum sensum negare lectoribus, aut ut artificiosiores appareant, sed ut, que apposita viluissent, labore ingeniorum quesita et diversimode intellecta comperta tandem faciant cariora. (Genealogia XIV, cap. 12 par. 7) [I do not deny that the poems of these poets do not contain obscurities. Yet not by this token is it fair to condemn them, as they would have it; because among the other duties of the poetic office the poet must not rip up and lay bare his poetic fictions. Rather where matters truly solemn and memorable are too much exposed, it is his office by every effort to protect as well as he can and remove them from the gaze of the lazy, that they cheapen not by too common familiarity. Surely no one can believe that poets invidiously veil the truth with fiction, either to deprive the reader of the hidden sense, or to appear the more clever; but rather to make truths which would otherwise cheapen by exposure, the object of strong intellectual effort and various interpretation, so that in ultimate discovery they shall be more precious.]

This passage offers a lucid rationale for his decision to alter Dante’s Vita Nova.82 This format remains faithful both to the poet and to the reader by privileging the reader/author interaction as the catalyst for interpretation. It is exactly this relationship that Boccaccio seeks to restore to the Vita Nova. By including the gloss, in the form of the divisioni, in the text itself, Dante restricts the reader to one authorized interpretation of the text proposed by the author himself. The Geneaologia states that it is not the purpose of the author to ‘rip up or lay bare’ his text; Dante’s divisioni are nothing more than the ripping apart of the poetry. Marginalizing the divisioni readmits into the poetry the interpretive process that holds such an important place in his poetic theory. It also shields the poetry from the eyes of the lazy. Dante remains the author of the divisioni; Boccaccio neither denies nor condemns this, but he indicates his desire to free the text from the controlling presence of an authorial interpretive dominance. Thus he fashions a new editio of the Vita Nova that falls in line with his poetic theory. 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. This new version also provides for the ‘diversimode intellecta’ through the retention of the teme that are no less in need of interpretation than the poetry.

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The second argument in the note claims a special relationship with Dante. Boccaccio relates that Dante came to regret the composition of the Vita Nova, and surmises that this regret was due, in part, to the inclusion of the divisioni within the text. Buttressed by the opinions of other ‘persone degne di fede,’ he states that his emendation arises from the same desire that motivated Dante to retract the Vita Nova. As Dante himself had articulated in the Convivio, these sources ‘degne di fede e d’obedienza’ confer direct authority, although here obedience is left out of the formulation.83 In borrowing Dante’s formulation from the Convivio, Boccaccio invokes a familiar relationship between himself and Dante, linking their two minds together as if they both derive authority from a common source. Boccaccio, as an author, theoretician of poetry, and Florentine, understands how Dante the poet came to regret his earlier production. However, just as Boccaccio expressed regret about his own juvenilia yet continued to rewrite these works until his death, so too he includes the edited version of Dante’s juvenilia to show the historical progression of the author. Although this argument says little about what Boccaccio thinks of Dante’s poetry, it reveals Boccaccio dantista’s method. The repeated grouping of the Vita Nova with the Commedia and the fifteen canzoni in his manuscript editions of the collected works of Dante demonstrates his desire to codify Dante. In the special case of the Chigiano manuscript, Boccaccio sought to include Dante within a select group of Tuscan poets. The second reason for his editorial intervention locates a historical figure of Dante within this contemporary literary environment. By invoking ‘persons worthy of credit’ as his source for his privileged information about Dante’s regret, he links Dante to a historical continuum reaching up to Boccaccio himself. Doubtless Boccaccio knew people who had met or had exchanged letters and poems with Dante, and he had first hand information about Dante through his contact with the Tuscan poet Cino da Pistoia in Naples.84 These men worthy of respect remain unnamed in order to not dislocate Boccaccio’s own role in treating Dante. He concludes that his desire to marginalize the divisioni matches the unstated desire of Dante to change his own text. The proclaimed intellectual affinity between author and editor permits such an invasive editorial project. These changes may not be universal (‘non potendolo negli altri emendare’) but Boccaccio establishes his version as the most faithful to the will of the author himself. He set the stage for this proclaimed affinity with Dante by creating a figure of Dante in his Trattatello in laude di Dante, a text that appears as prologue to all of his

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autograph versions of the Vita Nova and will be the subject of the next chapter. The theoretical underpinnings for Boccaccio’s argument of intellectual affinity can be found within his defence of poetry in the Genealogia. In his second argument he seeks to apply his theory to a poet who is at the same time a historical figure, if recent, and the premier example of the contemporary vernacular idiom. In the entirety of Boccaccio’s Genealogia he refers to only two contemporary poets among the many classical poets who serve as examples. He saves his highest praise for Dante, whom he compares with Virgil for the complexity of thought expressed in his poetry. In linking these two poets together, Boccaccio seconds Dante’s efforts to establish the vernacular idiom as equal to, if not greater, than Latin. Quis tam sui inscius, qui, advertens nostrum Dantem sacre theologie implicitos persepe nexus mira demonstratione solventem, non sentiat eum non solum phylosophum, sed theologum insignem fuise? (Geneaologia XIV, cap. 10, par. 3) [Again, let any man consider our own poet Dante as he often unties with amazingly skilful demonstration the hard knots of holy theology; will such a one be so insensible as not to perceive that Dante was a great theologian as well as philosopher?]

Boccaccio’s identification with Dante must be seen within the context of his entire project of elevating the vernacular genre to a level equal to the writings of the Latin poets. Boccaccio not only describes Dante as a poet, but extends the function of poet to philosopher and theologian, establishing that Dante deserves mention in the context of poetic masters such as Virgil and Homer and elevating the poetic enterprise. Moreover, the formulation of ‘nostrum Dantem’ indentifies Dante with the temporal present of his codification of a Tuscan group of poets: ‘Our Dante’ is the Tuscan Dante, author of the vernacular Commedia who belongs to the same group as Cavalcanti, Petrarca, and Boccaccio himself. The passage in the Genealogia and the editorial note on the Vita Nova both serve Boccaccio’s central purpose of linking Dante to the poetic past and identifying him with an emerging poetic present. Dante becomes a figure that represents the continuity in intellectual greatness from the historical past to the present. The second argument proposed in the editorial note implies Boccaccio’s own importance as an intel-

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lectual figure qualified to foster the rebirth of a poetic tradition equal to Latin but in the new vernacular. This continued advocacy for the vernacular marks the fundamental argument behind Boccaccio’s unique brand of humanism that he develops in his Latin writings and in his work as dantista. Regardless of whether Boccaccio fully understood what Dante had intended with the divisioni within the structure of the Vita Nova, his editorial decision to change Dante’s text came with a clear statement of intention. Boccaccio editio adapted the Vita Nova into a contemporary form that would be more reflective of traditional modes (both Latin and vernacular) of reading and interpreting poetry. He also articulated a new editorial policy that privileges the editor over the author. While Boccaccio did not eliminate the presence of Dante’s self-commentary and could plausibly claim Dante’s permission, he did make the text more available to readers expecting to utilize the gloss as an instrument in their own interpretive operation. He also moulded Dante’s poetry so that it could compare with the Latin authors whose dominating presence in Italian humanism was threatening to stunt the nascent vernacular literature. Dante provided the perfect figure for a hybrid humanism that prioritizes classical models while championing the new perspective of the vernacular. Boccaccio’s editorial work as a dantista not only marks the beginning of the scholarly study of Dante’s texts, as we shall see in the following chapters, but also inaugurates the equally long tradition of employing Dante as a figure in a larger intellectual battle. Rime The editorial operation that Boccaccio performed on the Vita Nova is far and away the most striking example of his impact on Dante’s texts. The remaining editorial decision to be considered is one that haunts filologia dantesca to this day. The fifteen poems collected by Boccaccio have come to be called the raccolta boccaccesca or the canzoni distese. Of the three elements of Boccaccio’s editio, his choice of Dante’s Rime has been the most fortunate; the most recent critical edition of Dante’s Rime by Domenico de Robertis privileges Boccaccio’s editio above all others, even in substitution of a putative authorial order.85 These canzoni appear in all the three manuscripts (Toledano, Chigiano, and Riccardiano) and always in the same order.86 Even before the publication of De Robertis’s critical edition in 2002, as both Barbi and Contini attest in their critical editions of Dante’s Rime, Boccaccio’s canzoni distese were accepted as one of the

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most important early collections of Dante’s poems.87 In his massive introduction to the Rime, De Robertis shows that the particular ordering of the canzoni distese predates Boccaccio’s earliest copy (Toledano),88 but it is due to Boccaccio’s consecration of this order that it remains the most influential formulation of Dante’s Rime.89 A reconstruction of Boccaccio’s editorial intervention in the Rime must still consider Boccaccio’s inclusion of the poems in this particular order. Although Boccaccio may have had an exemplar with the same ordering before him, his decision to include this particular group of poems in his manuscript copies of Dante’s works indicates his desire to contextualize Dante’s entire poetic production. The collection opens with one of the rime petrose: Così nel mio parlar vogli’ esser aspro. This introductory canzone is followed by the three canzoni from the Convivio: Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, and Le dolci rime d’amor ch’io solea. Next come two canzoni that describe the ennobling and oppressive power of love over the poet: Amor che movi tua vertù dal cielo and Io sento sì d’Amor la gran possanza. This group of poems is followed by the three remaining rime petrose: Al poco giorno ed al gran cerchio d’ombra, Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna, and Io son venuto al punto della rota). Next comes a return to Dante’s earlier poetry and the ambiguity inherent in the potency of love. Among the poems of this period Boccaccio prefers those with a Cavalcantian tone: E’ m’incresce di me sì duramente, Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato and La dispietata mente, che pur mia. The final section includes Dante’s poetry of exile: Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute, Doglia mi reca nello cor ardire, and Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia. Unfortunately, Boccaccio has not left a footnote informing the reader as to the reasons behind his inclusion of Dante’s rime in this particular order. The ordering cannot be categorized structurally, chronologically, or, at least completely coherently, biographically. The format of the collection differs from one manuscript to the next: in the Toledano he places the entire collection and each poem under a Latin rubric; in the Chigiano no rubrics appear; in the Ricciardiano he uses Italian rubrics.90 The evidence that the order of these fifteen poems pre-dates Boccaccio’s manuscripts does not preclude a motive behind their inclusion in his editio of Dante’s texts. In his evaluation of Boccaccio’s variants De Robertis notes that he brought his own poetic tastes to his copies of these poems together with a motive to propagate his selection of Dante’s rime.91 It is possible that Boccaccio simply chose canzoni that appealed to his poetic tastes. The variation in the rubrics of the canzoni distese – Latin rubrics, vernacular rubrics, or no rubrics at all – stands alone as unambiguously the

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product of Boccaccio’s editorial intervention. As with the Vita Nova and the Commedia, we can extract Boccaccio’s ideological intent as an editor from small philological details. Where De Robertis sees the variations in rubrics as purely indicative of a problem of translating the existing vernacular rubrics into Latin, the changes follow the trajectory of Boccaccio’s larger project as dantista.92 De Robertis himself speculates that Boccaccio’s translation of the rubrics into Latin in the Toledano manuscript represent an attempt to ennoble Dante’s vernacular poetics.93 Indeed, the turn to Latin recalls a similar move by Boccaccio to dress up Dante’s vernacular poetics for an erudite audience with Ytalie iam certus honos, a poem written concurrently with the manuscript in praise of Dante’s Commedia. Boccaccio’s editorial choice to preface Dante’s canzoni distese with Latin rubrics falls in line with his larger project as dantista. The lack of rubrics in the Chigiano, chronologically the next manuscript that contains the canzoni distese, offers another clue to editorial intent. As I argued above, Boccaccio grouped exclusively Tuscan poets in the Chigiano manuscript in order to establish a specifically Tuscan school of poetics to rival the Latin authorities. In carrying forward this project, Boccaccio standardized these poets so that a consistent style could emerge to rival the Latin models. In the case of the Vita Nova, his editorial motive took priority over the original integrity of Dante’s poem. In the case of the canzoni distese, the rubrics fell away so that Dante’s rime would conform to the other rime that make up the Chigiano, Petrarca’s liber fragment(orum). The editorial change that Boccaccio made to his own earlier collection of Dante’s canzoni distese adheres to his larger intellectual agenda. The Riccardiano manuscript, which was completed in roughly the same time period or just after the Chigiano, offers yet another example of how Boccaccio shapes his editorial decisions. This manuscript contains only the Commedia and the canzoni distese, but this time Boccaccio introduces them with vernacular rubrics. This manuscript has a tighter focus on Dante’s status as poet, avoiding the autobiographical and biographical elements of the Vita Nova and the Trattatello in Laude di Dante. In introducing the canzoni distese Boccaccio writes in a few words missing from the earlier Latin rubrics: ‘Qui cominciano lecançoni distese del chiaro poeta dante Alighieri difirençe, nelle quali diuariecose tractando’ (Here begin the unconnected poems of the famous poet Dante Alighieri of Florence in which he treats various themes).94 Boccaccio’s choice of the word ‘distese’ (a word he uses only in the Riccardiano and Chigiano manuscripts) to describe the poems reveals his shifting perspective. Terming

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the fifteen poems distese defines the Commedia as the centre to which these poems do not adhere. They serve to illustrate Dante’s interest in ‘variecose,’ but the Commedia stands alone as Dante’s principal poetic achievement. Only a few years after the completion of the manuscript, Boccaccio was to devote himself to public readings of the Commedia on behalf of the city of Florence. In the Riccardiano manuscript Boccaccio uses the vernacular rubrics to insist on the essential importance of the Commedia. Boccaccio’s entire project of editorial intervention in these manuscripts suggests that he saw the value of including a lyric collection within the larger corpus of Dante’s works. Specifically in terms of the Chigiano manuscript, Boccaccio’s grouping of lyric works by Dante and Petrarca implies an attempt to bring together his two masters through their shared poetic language and form. As an editor Boccaccio chose specific lyrics to include in his edition of Dante’s texts; the result of his decision has definitively influenced the subsequent reception of these poems. While the implied narrative or thematic implications of this particular ordering of the rime escape articulation, the mere presence of a lyric sequence in these manuscripts further solidifies Dante’s position as a vernacular poet. In chapter 2 I will argue that the canzoni distese offer thematic connections that Boccaccio reinforces in the Trattatello in laude di Dante. The Legacy of Boccaccio’s Edition of Dante Before turning to Boccaccio’s work as a biographer of Dante in the Trattatello in laude di Dante, I would like to survey the impact that Boccaccio’s work as editor had on the transmission of Dante’s work. Boccaccio’s edition of the Commedia, for better or worse, was widely disseminated throughout the manuscript tradition. Although Boccaccio acted, for the most part, only in the traditional role of an intelligent scribe, correcting incorrect readings, his influence on the manuscript tradition is both widely recognized and universally condemned. The case of the canzoni distese is similar. Since these poems comprise only a portion of Dante’s poetic production and were never meant to stand alone as an independent work, the effect of Boccaccio’s edition of the canzoni plays a less conspicuous role in filologia dantesca in general. However, it should be noted that these fifteen poems did prosper as an independent collection, just as the ordering has been preserved within collections of Dante’s Rime up through De Robertis’s edition. The famous Raccolta aragonese, a collection of early Italian vernacular poetry assembled in 1476 by Lorenzo

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de’ Medici (Il Magnifico) for Federico of Aragona, transmits Boccaccio’s group exactly.95 Boccaccio’s reputation and influence as a figure of intellectual force made his versions of the Dantean lyric texts a preferred source. The true shaping force of Boccaccio’s editorial decisions came to bear on the transmission of the Vita Nova. Barbi’s critical edition of the Vita Nuova shows that nearly half of the manuscripts comprising the tradition carry Boccaccio’s version of the text. In addition to the Chigiano and the Toledano, three manuscripts contain not only the marginalized divisioni but also Boccaccio’s explanatory footnote. Four more manuscripts contain the marginalized divisioni without Boccaccio’s statement. But most strikingly, thirteen manuscripts leave out not only Boccaccio’s note but also the divisioni.96 One might wonder whether Boccaccio’s goal is realized in manuscripts completely denuded of the divisioni. Perhaps, although it might be impossible to say for certain, Boccaccio had achieved his ultimate aim of transmitting a version of the Vita Nova consistent with his own poetics. By displacing the divisioni to the margins of the manuscript, Boccaccio functionally removed the gloss from the category of authorial utterance, thereby exposing the divisioni to the vagaries of scribal discretion. Certainly no scribe other than Boccaccio would be so bold as to tamper with Dante’s own words, but because of Boccaccio’s actions, the now marginalized divisioni became merely a gloss to be included or excluded depending on the taste of the editor and his audience, just as in other poetic texts of the Middle Ages. One aspect of Boccaccio’s influence on readers of Dante calls for examination. The nature of philological inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to the production of national editions of Dante’s texts, and this work continues, thankfully, to this day. Scholars such as Giuseppe Vandelli and Michele Barbi produced masterful volumes complete with apparatuses collating the manuscript sources. However, in the search for the best versions of Dante’s Rime, Commedia, and Vita Nova, the context of the manuscript sources themselves has been somewhat overlooked. The task of reconstructing the original version of an individual text over a distance of 700 years requires philologists to strip away those intervening years, but this operation, although necessary for the integrity of the modern edition, may shroud relevant facts concerning the status of the historical situation of the text that have influenced its transmission and reception. Such is the case with Boccaccio’s versions of the Vita Nova and, to a lesser extant, the fifteen canzoni distese. Modern editions have erased most of Boccaccio’s editorial deci-

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sions but his influence on the transmission of these texts has changed the way readers perceive the texts and Dante himself. Readers of Dante’s Vita Nova in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries quite probably saw these works within the specific manuscript context established by Boccaccio. Within the group of manuscripts Barbi denotes as ‘group b’ of the Vita Nova tradition, five manuscripts have the same order of texts that Boccaccio established in the Toledano: Trattatello in laude di Dante, Vita Nova, and the fifteen canzoni. Seven manuscripts have the Vita Nova followed by the fifteen canzoni distese, and two manuscripts have the Trattatello in laude di Dante and the Vita Nova.97 Boccaccio was successful in passing on his own version of the works of Dante, and he was equally successful in transmitting a version of Dante’s lyric works preceded by his own biography of the author. As Boccaccio claims in his editorial note his intimate knowledge of Dante gives him special dispensation to determine the transmission of Dante’s texts. These manuscripts show that Boccaccio does indeed effectively shape a figure of Dante; he selected and ordered the texts in his manuscript, and also edited them to fit into his own vision of vernacular Tuscan poetics. While never explicitly claiming control over Dante’s legacy, Boccaccio puts himself forward as the preeminent authority on Dante; he is also the crucial figure in developing the hierarchy of poets that will come to be called the tre corone.98 When the printing press changed the way that texts were produced and read in Renaissance Italy and Europe, Boccaccio’s grip on the Dante franchise was strengthened still more. The first published edition of the Vita Nova is a direct representation of the tradition of the Toledano manuscript (Trattatello in laude di Dante, Vita Nova, and fifteen canzoni).99 This book, published by Bartolomeo Sermartelli in Florence in 1575, remained the most complete edition of Dante’s minor works in existence until the eighteenth century. It encapsulates not only Dante’s poetic production but also Boccaccio’s role in the transmission of that body of work. In the preface Sermartelli declares, on behalf of his benefactor Nicolò Carducci, the importance of Boccaccio’s role in the understanding of Dante’s work. E perchè il volume era piccolo mi è parso di accompagnarlo con la vita di esso Dante scritta dal facondissimo Boccaccio, la quale credo poterli tenere di maggior fede di nessun’altra, sendo che all’hora il tempo haveva consumato manco assai della notizia dell’azioni di Dante che non è stato dipoi quando da tanti altri è stata scritta, ò sulle conietture, ò sulle opinioni altrui.100

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In Sermartelli’s edition, perhaps because of the manuscript source he had available, the divisioni do not appear either in the text or in the margins. They are replaced by another gloss altogether – a material sign that Boccaccio succeeded in opening the text to new interpretations. Although Sermartelli’s edition of the Vita Nova does not carry Boccaccio’s note, Sermartelli reproduced Boccaccio’s desired version of the Vita Nova. There can be little doubt that Boccaccio knew that his removal of the divisioni to the margins could lead to their eventual omission. Furthermore, Sermartelli sees in Boccaccio, just as Boccaccio had argued, a worthy biographical source to introduce Dante’s text. Seemingly without Sermartelli’s knowledge, he reproduces the edited version of Dante’s poetry as a faithful transmission of the author’s text. The editorial intervention has been a success in every sense. Boccaccio translated his versions of Dante’s text into public circulation, and he positioned himself as the utmost authority on the life and works of Dante Alighieri. Whether or not Boccaccio had inside knowledge of Dante and his works, he convinced posterity that he did. Whether today’s readers have a restored text or still suffer from Boccaccio’s supposed editorial infelicities, it remains the case that centuries of readers read Boccaccio’s version. Boccaccio’s active role in the transmission of Dante’s texts – which was so active that he was inexorably linked to them for centuries – has been exhaustively documented. For the most part, however, the attention given to Boccaccio’s role has been limited to the terms of filologia dantesca. In other words, we have a good idea of what Boccaccio did to Dante’s texts, but scholars have been less interested in why he did it. Boccaccio’s editorial statement ‘Maraviglerannosi molti’ allows a glimpse into his intent in making certain changes in the texts he chose to include. The focus of this chapter on Boccaccio’s manuscript copies of Dante’s texts offered a new interpretive analysis of why Boccaccio interpolated himself into the transmission of Dante. The evidence that he took a radically proactive role, one completely foreign to St Bonaventure’s categories of manuscript production, in altering Dante’s text according to his own poetic theory stands alone as a remarkable fact. I have shown that Boc-

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caccio sought to put Dante’s vernacular production into the specific context of Tuscan poets; he also sought to shape an emerging poetics into an authoritative canon that could compare with the classical poets. In order to argue convincingly for this continuum, Boccaccio needed, like a sculptor working with a piece of unrefined marble, to shape his material. The next chapter will focus on reading Boccaccio’s biographical works on Dante and Petrarca as a key to understanding the intellectual motivation behind his monumental creation.

2 Biographer: Crafting the Figure

Ed, oh vergogna! Udia che non che il cener freddo e l’ossa nude giaccian esuli ancora dopo il funereo dí sott’altro suolo, ma non sorgea dentro a tue mura un sasso, Firenze, a quello per la cui virtude tutto il mondo t’onora. [And oh, O shame, he heard That his cold ashes and his naked bones, After his fatal day, are exiled still Under an alien ground. And-worse-that not a stone Within your walls, O Florence, has been raised To honour him whose greatness keeps your name On earth forever praised.] Giacomo Leopardi, Sopra il monumento di Dante, vv. 23–9 Translation by J. Tusiani

Sopra il monumento di Dante Giacomo Leopardi’s poem Sopra il monumento di Dante, written in support of a project to erect a monument to Dante in Florence, laments the shameful fact that the city, more than 500 years after Dante’s death, had yet to repatriate the remains of the man whose poetry symbolizes the glory of Florence to the entire world. Leopardi’s poem praises those

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who would erect this monument (Dante’s cenotaph was finally placed in Santa Croce in 1830) but his poem also decries Italy’s broken spirit in the face of foreign occupation and constant political division. Indeed, both Dante’s cenotaph and the Ufizzi statue discussed in chapter 1 were civic responses to the stirring winds of the Italian Risorgimento. For Leopardi specifically the history of Dante’s life becomes a cautionary tale of the tragedies of political fragmentation in Florence and in Italy itself.1 Leopardi’s figuration of Dante as a victim of Italian political discord illustrates the impact of Dante’s infamous political biography on the reading of his poetry. Dante is primarily a poet, but he also stands as a political exemplum for Italy. Leopardi’s poetic call to see a monument in Florence dedicated to Dante exhorts Florence and all of Italy to fight for political autonomy. The figure of the exiled Dante emerges primarily from the poet’s own words in the Commedia and elsewhere. However, Boccaccio’s numerous biographical texts first monumentalized Dante as a crucial figure of the highest political and poetic virtue. Although Dante was primarily an intellectual figure in his day and still is in our own, Boccaccio’s biographical writings on Dante were the next part of his efforts to transform Dante from man to monument. Boccaccio’s editorial intervention, innovative as it was, is only one aspect of his work as a dantista. The Toledano and Chigiano manuscripts contain, in different redactions, the text of Boccaccio’s biography of Dante. Whether known as the Trattatello in laude di Dante or a shorter ‘compendium’ version called the Vita di Dante, Boccaccio’s biography of Dante goes far beyond the strict parameters of the accessus or vita poetae. The Trattatello sets up a coherent biographical narrative that will resonate as the reader takes on the individual elements (Vita Nova, canzoni distese, and Commedia) of the edition. As this chapter will demonstrate, Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante constructs a monumental life of Dante designed to urge his fellow Florentine citizens and his prodigal master Francesco Petrarca to reflect on the tragedy of Dante’s political life in Florence and to heed Dante’s political example and ethical teachings. Although the Trattatello represents the most coherent statement on Dante’s life, throughout the 1350s Boccaccio employs the figure of Dante in various other writings in a continuing project of yoking together contemporary vernacular poetics, ethics, and Florentine politics. He certainly did not create his figure of an ethically and politically engaged Dante out of thin air. Not only does Dante himself make an elegant argument for his own moral authority throughout the Commedia, but his own theory of poetics spelled out in the De Vulgari Eloquentia informed

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Boccaccio’s poetic theory: in the second book Dante delineates three primary aims of the vernacular, and identifies himself, alone amongst his contemporaries, as part of the third category, the poet of rectitude (De Vulg. II, ii, par. 8). In defining himself as the poet of rectitude – the Latin rectitudo – Dante specifically associates his poetics with justice and moral virtue. ‘Rectitudo’ describes a strict personal adherence to ethical action but also demands the correctness of will necessary for just action. As Anselm of Canterbury most clearly elaborates concerning rectitude: ‘Justitia igitur est rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata’ [Therefore, justice is uprightness (rectitudo) of will kept for its own sake].2 As a function of the will, rectitude is correct ethical action of the just person. Dante also employs this term beyond his self-definition in the De Vulgari Eloquentia. In the Convivio and the De Monarchia Dante links rectitude with ethics and justice. 3 Dante clearly delineates his role as an agent of ethical correctness in the midst of Florentine political corruption and injustice. As the poet of rectitude, Dante champions the cause of moral virtue in a society that has lost its way in the quagmire of political factionalism. Boccaccio takes Dante at his word and applies his poetics of rectitude to the Florence left widowed of Dante’s example. Boccaccio and the Genres of Medieval Biography Boccaccio’s literary career seems to divide neatly into two phases: his earlier works of fiction in the vernacular, lasting up to the early 1350s and his later humanistic works in Latin that occupied the remainder o his career. While this division itself turns out to be less accurate than previously supposed (considering that Boccaccio wrote the Trattatello in laude di Dante, the Corbaccio, and the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia and also constantly revised his Decameron during the second phase), Boccaccio’s literary production after the Decameron does show a significant shift toward works of historical and biographical subjects. In these pursuits Boccaccio fits within the parameters of Petrarchan or Latin humanism but his subject matter for the most part continues to privilege the history of his own time. Boccaccio engaged with Petrarca in the recovery of the classical authors, but he concurrently moved forward the culture of the literary vernacular. Petrarchan humanism presupposed the intellectual superiority of Latin culture and sought to rediscover and imitate that culture.4 While Boccaccio never rejected Petrarca’s humanist project, he also never abandoned his own vernacular writings or those of his contemporaries. Boccaccio’s chosen medium for treating contem-

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porary history, political ethics, and poetics comes in the varied form of biography. In the period concurrent with or after the composition of the Decameron, Boccaccio composed at least five works that participate, at least partially, in the genre of biography. Boccaccio as a biographer is yet another lens through which we can appraise his intellectual contribution to early Italian humanism.5 In these texts Boccaccio tries out the many different forms of biography current in the Middle Ages. A short biography of Petrarca written in the late 1340s, De vita et moribus domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia, brings together the generic modes of the accessus ad auctores, the vita poetae, and the Provencal vidas. Just after 1350 Boccaccio composed the Trattatello in laude di Dante and placed the canzoni distese lyric sequences in his Toledano manuscript (later repeated in the Chigiano). During the 1350s and 1360s Boccaccio undertook new encyclopedic literary projects with the compilation of two works in the genre of the Latin biographies: De casibus virorum illustrium and De mulieribus claris. Finally, in 1368, at the request of Petrarca, he rewrote the medieval hagiography of St Peter Damian in his short text Vita Petri Damiani. Looking specifically at his biographical production concerning Dante, this chapter will consider four subgenres of Boccaccio’s biographical production: accessus ad auctores and vidas, the lyric cycle, classical biography, and Boccaccio’s own adaptation of the hagiography, the monumental life. Within these generic subcategories Boccaccio maintains a constant dialogue between Dante’s poetic and political experience and contemporary debates. The biography becomes Boccaccio’s chosen form for tying his own unique project of literary humanism to the political crisis he sees as so damaging to contemporary Italian civic life; his Trattatello in laude di Dante represents the fullest articulation of this project. Vita Petracchi Boccaccio’s Vita Petracchi incorporates the conventions of the two dominant forms of medieval literary biography. Although the two forms differ slightly in approach, the vita auctoris and troubadour vidas are closely related generic forms. Both forms relate basic biographical information about the author whom the reader is about to consider and seek to explain an overarching theme in the text. The contrast between the two forms depends much more on differences between vernacular and Latin literature of the Middle Ages than on a difference of purpose. However, in interpolating the two forms in his short biography of Petrarca, Boc-

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caccio purposefully conflates Petrarca’s status as a Latin auctor and vernacular poet. Both the vita auctoris associated with the classical poets and the vidas and razos of the troubadour tradition were familiar to Boccaccio, and both forms of biography illustrate the biographical link between the poet and his lyric production. As a development of the accessus ad auctores that served as prologue to many medieval manuscripts, the vita auctoris introduces its auctor by positioning him as an exemplum. In the case of the vita auctoris the biography of the poet chronicled the intellectual development of the author.6 At times the author of the biography also chastised the subject for his shortcomings and narrated a subsequent moral development.7 The vita auctoris validated the auctor in question through a narrative description of his active development of auctoritas.8 The biography served as an exemplum of the scholarly attitude and the proper dedication to previous auctores to warrant the current readers’ trust. In a sense the biography of the author answered the categorical question cui parti philosophiae supponitur by proposing that the author’s works, his auctoritas, and his biography are part of moral philosophy. The vidas, found in thirteenth and fourteenth century Italian manuscripts containing the works of many troubadour poets, accompanied the poets’ cycles of vernacular lyric. Authors of the vidas, mostly anonymous, often borrowed from material available in the poet’s lyric in providing a short biographical narrative that would, reflexively, historicize the poet’s own autobiographical narrative as recounted in his poems.9 As opposed to the vita auctoris that privileges a description of the works and the author’s intellectual formation by listing his auctores, the vidas attempt to refigure the thematic elements of a poet’s works (the poet’s relationship to his lady or the poet’s struggle with a patron) into biographical events. While the readership of the vita auctoris finds descriptive information helpful for a proper understanding of the intellectual context of the work, the audience of the vidas, whether readers or listeners, gains a narrative framework that preludes and concretizes the poet’s lyric in an encapsulated biographical form. The text that most closely approximates these forms is Boccaccio’s short De vita et moribus domini Francesci Petracchi de Florentia (Vita Petracchi), which was composed in two different versions. The first and shorter version (known as the Notamentum) prefaces works by Petrarca in Boccaccio’s Zibaldone Laurenziano. This version dates from the period after Petrarca’s coronation as poet laureate in Rome in April 1341.10 The date of the second version is less secure, although generally agreed to

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be between 1342 (Villani, Billanovitch) and 1348 (Fabbri, Hauvette, Massèra).11 The one compelling piece of evidence for the later date, the presence of the Argus in the list of Petrarca’s works, might only indicate that Boccaccio, as was his wont throughout his entire career, retouched the Vita Petracchi after Petrarca wrote this second eclogue of the Bucolicum Carmen in 1346–8. Whatever the date of initial composition, the Vita Petracchi was certainly written during the period of Boccaccio’s productive return to Florence and his emergence as an important literary and political figure. The Notamentum has received limited interest from scholars of either Boccaccio or Petrarca because of its proximity to the Vita Petracchi: it seems to be an announcement of Petrarca’s coronation that Boccaccio soon refashioned into a vita auctoris.12 The recent study by J. Usher on Boccaccio’s epigraphic aesthetic discusses the physical presentation of the Notamentum in Boccaccio’s Zibaldone Laurenziana. Usher notes that Boccaccio wrote the entire Notamentum in majuscule script, mimicking epigraphic rustic capital script. The effect of such presentation, Usher points out, is early evidence of Boccaccio’s monumental view of literary biography.13 The Notamentum is not only an early instance of Boccaccio’s biographic style but also evidence of one of his first attempts to transform poets and his own writing into monuments. Boccaccio’s Vita Petracchi shares characteristics with both the vita and vidas traditions. Written in Latin, the text takes great care to explain the classical influences on Petrarca’s literary production. Boccaccio describes Petrarca’s Latin works (Africus, Argus, Philostratus, and bucolic poetry) by detailing the generic distinctions of each work in terms of classical poetics.14 As is the pattern with the accessus, Boccaccio defines Petrarca by his ethical and philosophical outlook and the influence of classical authors such as Virgil, Seneca, Statius, and Juvenal.15 Much of the Vita Petracchi follows directly the model of the accessus; he describes Petrarca’s works and his place in the literary and philosophical tradition. In the full title of the work, Boccaccio claims Petrarca as a son of Florence; thus the Vita Petracchi also follows the conventions of the vidas by conflating literary tropes with biographical data. From the title of the work alone, Boccaccio links Petrarca to Florence, even though, as he notes in the first line, Petrarca was born in Arezzo and, due to his father’s exile, soon moved to France. Boccaccio begins by recording the expulsion of Petrarca family from Florence in 1311, the same year as the confirmation of Dante’s exile. Boccaccio structures these early years of Petrarca’s life so that, despite the historical facts of Petrarca’s birth in

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Arezzo and early move to France, his literary formation remains strictly Florentine. Hic aput Aritium XII kalendas augusti ex ser Petracco patre, Letta vero matre natus est post tamen christianorum iubileum XIII anno IIII; sed postmodum aput Florentiam, opulentissimam Etrurie civitatem, ex qua parentes eiusdem longis fuerant retro temporibus oriundi in copiosa fortuna, a Musarum, ut puto, fuit uberibus educatus. Sed cum causa seditionum multiplicium florentinorum civium nobiles aliqui, ser Petracco amicitia atque consanguinitate coniuncto, tamquam hostes rei publice exilio damnarentur (Vite, Vita Petracchi, par. 1–2). [He was born in Arezzo on 20th day of July of Sir Petracco and his mother Letta, when four years had already passed from the happy beginning of the thirteenth Christian century; but it was later in Florence, the most prosperous of Tuscan cities, where his parents were originally from and where they had long lived with great fortune, that, I believe, he was raised by the Muses. Then it happened, by way of seditious acts by many Florentines, that many nobles connected by friendship or by family to Sir Petracco were condemned to exile as enemies of the republic.]

In his earliest biographical writing, Boccaccio figures his subject as both succoured and offended by Florence. Although he almost never lived on the Arno’s banks, Petrarca is intellectually a Florentine poet. Politically, his family, like Dante’s, is betrayed by the city’s factional conflict. Boccaccio marks his own biographical contribution to Petrarca’s putative Florentine citizenship by inserting the phrase ‘ut puto’ into the biographical narrative that recasts Petrarca’s origins as Florentine. The subsequent narrative elements of the Vita Petracchi detail Petrarca’s quest to gain the laurel crown as verification of his poetic excellence. The entire life itself seems to be a celebration of the moment of Petrarca’s coronation as poet laureate in Rome on 8 April 1341. Indeed, Boccaccio quite probably borrows freely from Petrarca’s own description of this event in Collatio laureationis. As in the tradition of the troubadour vidas, Boccaccio explains the poet’s life through a thematic link with the poet’s works. Petrarca sets the search for fame as the primary topic of his literary production; Boccaccio develops this theme in his biographical description of Petrarca’s achievement of this lofty goal. Boccaccio also borrows from vidas conventions by treating the poet’s lyric poetry as biography. However, in recounting

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Petrarca’s amorous history with Laura, his credentials as a vernacular poet in the stilnovistic tradition, Boccaccio presents a rather offhanded compliment of Petrarca’s vernacular poetic accomplishments. Et quamvis in suis quampluribus vulgaribus poematibus in quibus perlucide decantavit, se Laurettam quandam ardentissime demonstrarit amasse, non obstat: nam, prout ipsemet bene puto, Laurettam illam allegorice pro laurea corona quam postmodum est adeptus, accipiendam existimo (Vite, Vita Petracchi, par. 26). [And although in his many vernacular poems, which he sang most brilliantly, he showed that he loved a certain Lauretta most ardently, in that I do not think that he would resist me in this, I judge that this Lauretta should be read allegorically for the laurel crown that he later attained.]

In this passage Boccaccio demystifies Petrarca’s poetic senhal, Laura, and thus distinguishes Petrarca from the tradition of vernacular lyric of his native Florence, and specifically from Dante’s lyric. Boccaccio does not deny the existence of an actual Laura, but he abruptly detaches Petrarca from the stilnovistic tradition. Here Boccaccio literally reduces Laura by giving her name with the diminutive suffix (‘Laurettam’); he also reduces her to pure symbol by equating her unequivocally to the laurel crown. Indeed, she represents Petrarca’s desire for fame alone, a historical rather than a spiritual transcendence, like Dante’s claims for Beatrice. In this reading of Petrarca’s vernacular poetics, Boccaccio foreshadows Petrarca’s own retractions of his poetry from the confessional Secretum and his Posteritati (Epistle to Posterity). If this is the case, Boccaccio seems to be complicit in Petrarca’s desire to formulate a fiction of his own Latinity. In this celebration of Petrarca’s emergent canonization as poet laureate, Boccaccio codifies a reductive reading of Laura as the laurel crown, and thus effectively combines Petrarca’s vernacular poetry with humanist Latin production. Boccaccio’s Vita Petracchi exalts Petrarca as a representative of Florentine poetic and ethical excellence, even though he is a Florentine in poetics alone. But in subverting Petrarca’s adherence to the stilnovistic tradition, the highest form of Florentine poetics represented foremost by Dante, Boccaccio subtly disassociates Petrarca from Florentine culture. Boccaccio claims Petrarca as a citizen of the Florentine republic of letters while excluding his vernacular poetry from Dante’s sphere of influence.

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Boccaccio’s role in contemporary Italian politics lies at the root of this polemic. By the time Boccaccio wrote his final revision of the Vita Petracchi, Petrarca had refused an invitation to hold a prestigious chair at the new Florentine Studio that Boccaccio had pushed the city to institute and had even written the letter of invitation to Petrarca for this prestigious position (Epis. VII). Boccaccio could never quite accept Petrarca’s preference for the hospitality of Azzo da Correggio in Parma or the tyrant Archbishop Giovanni Visconti in Milan over residence in the assailed Florentine Republic; in a letter from this period Boccaccio figures this choice as a betrayal of his trust by Petrarca (Epis. X).16 The Vita Petracchi subtly plays out this tension between Petrarca’s supposed Florentine heritage (both genealogical and literary) and his refusal to accept his literary and political position in Florence. Boccaccio reduces Petrarca’s Laura to a purely symbolic value, whether in keeping with Petrarca’s own wishes or not, and he also turns Petrarca himself into a symbol of poetic excellence with little political substance. In the Vita Petracchi Boccaccio levels a critique against his mentor by suggesting that Petrarca values his own fame over the poetic heritage and republican virtue that defined Florence. The laurel crowned poet should fill the political role that adheres to that specific office. Combining the subgenres of the vita auctoris and the vidas, Boccaccio moulds a biographical text that presents the author and the author’s works while subverting that author’s life in terms of his own political and poetic agenda. By writing a biography of Petrarca, he helps Petrarca to classicize and monumentalize himself, perhaps with the goal of attracting Petrarca back to Florence; as a text motivated by Boccaccio’s own concerns, the Vita Petracchi can be read as a comment on Petrarca’s poetic excellence and political failings. The Canzoni Distese The authorially organized lyric cycle is a subgenre of biographical composition that developed in the late Middle Ages out of the compilation of troubadour manuscripts in the thirteenth century. As Olivia Holmes has shown, Italian poets and compilers organized these cycles of individual lyrical units to relate an ‘autobiographical’ narrative through structural and thematic links.17 This development of lyric cycles subtends the narrative motive of the troubadour vidas and razos; the cycle develops an authorial persona (different from the historical individual) whose poetic production springs from the conventions of courtly love. Dante played

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a fundamental role in the further development of the canzoniere; in his Vita Nova the songbook is altered by the introduction of a transcendental historical motive into the poet’s narrative. We have seen above how Boccaccio, in his Vita Petracchi, reduced Petrarca’s lyric sequence to the univocal reading of Laura as the laurel crown or the terrestrial symbol of fame. 18 Once again, Boccaccio centres himself in a poetic debate that plays out in the poetry of his two masters. Boccaccio’s Chigiano manuscript contains an early version of Petrarca’s Canzoniere with the title fragmentorum liber. Although Boccaccio neither organized nor altered Petrarca’s early version, he took the opportunity to copy the text from Petrarca’s own edition during a visit in the late 1350s.19 Boccaccio’s grouping of the fragmentorum liber with the Vita Nova and Trattatello in Laude di Dante brings out a particular Tuscan or Florentine school of autobiographical poetry. Boccaccio’s Chigiano manuscript fuses together the two dominant voices of nascent Italian literary history. In his interactions with Petrarca and in his writings on Dante, Boccaccio always aims at being mediator of these two dominant masters. The inclusion of the canzoni distese relates Dante’s poetic experience to Petrarca’s more explicitly autobiographical cycle in the fragmentorum liber within the specific context of the Chigiano. As discussed in chapter 1, Boccaccio included the canzoni distese in his three Dante compendia, each time with a different rubric scheme. Boccaccio’s organization of the Chigiano manuscript in particular is neither simply chronological nor haphazard; the order of the texts hints at Boccaccio’s ‘tuscanizing’ agenda. De Robertis has argued that in the original structure of the Chigiano manuscript the canzoni distese came near the end between Boccaccio’s Latin poem Ytalie iam certus honos and the fragmentorum liber.20 Boccaccio first composed this Latin poem as a dedication for his gift of a Commedia manuscript to Petrarca (Vat. Lat. 3199). In the long polemical exchange between the two authors concerning the value of vernacular poetry, which began in Boccaccio’s Vita Petracchi and continued through their epistolary conversations, this poem makes the most elegant statement of Boccaccio’s insistence that Petrarca should recognize Dante’s importance. Ytalie iam certus honos (Carmina V) will be central to my discussion in chapter 3.21 In terms of its position in the Chigiano, the placement of this Latin poem just before the canzoni distese and Petrarca’s liber fragmentorum testifies to Boccaccio’s claim of a mediating role between Petrarca and Dante. The poem also represents an early indication of Boccaccio’s insistence, in a classical poetic voice, on the validity of the vernacular poetic idiom and the crucial role of poetry in Florentine identity.

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While Petrarca separated himself rhetorically from the vernacular tradition dominated by Dante, the Chigiano manuscript groups the two poets together along with Boccaccio and another Florentine poet, Guido Cavalcanti. Boccaccio’s reductive allegorical interpretation of Lauretta as the laurel crown in the Vita Petracchi fixes his understanding of Petrarca’s poetic project as a search for fame, but he juxtaposes Petrarca’s autobiographical cycle with the canzoni distese, which relates a different intellectual motive. Boccaccio’s persistence in including the canzoni distese among Dante’s Commedia and Vita Nova underscores his determination that Dante be remembered and valued as a vernacular poet. The canzoni distese do not form a coherent narrative, but the collection supports the biographical narrative the Boccaccio will trace in his Trattatello in laude di Dante. The canzoni distese present Dante’s lyric in a way that points up the fundamental conflict in Dante’s poetry between his individual desire for his beloved and the poet’s obligation to serve as a poet of rectitude. Borrowing language from Olivia Holmes’s study of Dante’s poetry, Boccaccio presents Dante’s ‘Two Beloveds’ as a choice between erotics and ethics.22 In the particular instance of Dante, as Boccaccio will bring out more clearly in his Trattatello, this conflict plays itself out most clearly as a struggle between desire and virtue. The first poem, Così nel mio parlar vogli’esser aspro, immediately defines the conflict within Dante’s lyric voice and also contrasts Dante’s collection with Petrarca’s own introductory palinode to the liber fragmentorum: Voi, ch’ascoltate (I) and with Petrarca’s citation of Dante in Lasso me (LXX). Whereas Petrarca’s collection announces itself with a retraction of the entire project, the canzoni distese ordering affirms Dante’s commitment to his own poetry as a vehicle for self-expression. Così nel mio parlar vogli’esser aspro, one of the four rime petrose, lays out most directly the poet’s struggle with the limits of his poetic enterprise. In the penultimate stanza the poet emerges from a paralysis brought on by the attack of love and redirects his thoughts to the lady-object of his desire. S’io avesse le belle trecce prese, che son fatte per me scudiscio e ferza, pigliandole anzi terza, con esse passerei vespero e squille: e non sarei pietoso nè cortese, anzi farei com’orso quando scherza; e s’Amor me ne sferza, io mi vendicherei di più di mille.

Biographer: Crafting the Figure Ancor negli occhi, ond’escon le faville che m’infiamman lo cor, ch’io porto anciso, guarderei presso e fiso per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face, e poi le renderei con amor pace.

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(Rime I, vv. 66–78)

[Once I’d taken in my hand the fair locks which have become my whip and lash, seizing them before terce I’d pass through vespers with them and the evening bell: and I’d not show pity or courtesy, O no, I’d be like a bear at play. And though Love whips me with them now, I would take my revenge more than a thousand fold. Still more, I’d gaze into those eyes whence come the sparks that inflame my heart which is dead within me; I’d gaze into them close and fixedly, to revenge myself on her for fleeing from me as she does: and then with love I would make our peace.]

Boccaccio recognizes this poem as a radical departure from Dante’s earlier poetic production: the physicality and violence presents a strong contrast to the ethos of the dolce stil novo.23 The physical traits of his beloved become loci of violence: her tresses become whips that he can turn on her and her eyes transmute his love into revenge. Dante then invokes vendetta (v. 83) instead of the conventional sublimation to philosophical wisdom or theological truth. The poet’s wrath emerges in the phonetic violence (‘ferza/terza,’ ‘scherza/sferza’) that erupts from this poem. Thus, the canzoni distese opens with a poem that dramatizes the stress between the poet’s sexual and philosophical desires. The fifteen poems of the canzoni distese oscillate between the didactic function of the poetics of rectitude and Dante’s struggles as a lover. The rubrics with which Boccaccio accompanies the poems in the Toldedano manuscript illustrate the tension in this collection between the positive and negative powers of love. The fourth poem, Le dolci rime d’amor ch’io solea, carries the rubric, ‘Idem dantes deuera nobilitate loquitur egregie’ (the same Dante speaks nobly about his excellent lady).’ 24 The rubric for the sixth poem, (Io sento sì d’Amor la gran possanza) emphasizes the overwhelming power power of love: ‘Idem dantes quantu(m) sit amore captus ostendit (the same Dante shows how he is seized by love).’ The rubrics that introduce the poems that make up canzoni distese encapsulate the potentially ambiguous power of love and of vernacular poetry. While Boccaccio summarizes the themes of Dante’s poem with words such ‘crudelitate’ (cruelty) and ‘co(n)queritur’ (conquers), he also speaks of ‘virtutibus (et) pulcritudine’ (virtue and beauty). Although no narrative

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order emerges from the canzoni distese, the rubrics highlight the power that love has over the poet. The collection finishes with the strongest indication, other than perhaps the grouping of the three Convivio poems, of a chronological order: Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute, Doglia mi reca nello cor ardire, and Amor, da che convien per ch’io mi doglia. These poems of Dante’s years in exile signal his move toward his ultimate poetic voice that successfully combines philosophy and lyricism with a style accessible to his audience. By the end of the canzoni distese the poet’s voice has assumed the same tone as that of the author of the Commedia. In an unfair exile from his beloved city, the poet seeks out virtue without contemptus mundi. In including this lyric sequence, Boccaccio continues his decades-long construction of a figurative narrative of Dante’s life. That he chose to include fifteen canzoni might suggest that he wanted to complete the task that Dante had begun with the Convivio.25 However, the collection does not relate a biographical narrative in the same terms as Petrarca’s liber fragmentorum. Instead, Boccaccio stays on the same path that Dante had charted for himself in the Convivio. The canzoni distese only suggest thematic interpretation but its position after the Trattatello in laude di Dante illustrates that Boccaccio, familiar with the convention of the lyric cycle and its strong identification with biography (vidas and razos), realized the necessity of including the poet’s work in the larger biographical scheme that Boccaccio created in his work as dantista. De Casibus Virorum Illustrium It is in this same fertile period of intellectual and political involvement (1355–60) that Boccaccio began his most overtly biographical work: De Casibus Virorum Illustrium.26 The first two modes of biography discussed in this chapter, vita auctoris and the vidas, suggest that Boccaccio pointed out the tension between the desire for poetic fame and for virtue. The De Casibus couples lives of great men with the ethical burdens that accompany power, and dramatizes the role of the poet in relation to this power. It is in the most politically active and productive period of Boccaccio’s life – during which he was engaged in various ambassadorial journeys to prevent political expansion by the Visconti of Milan – that he wrote his most expressly political work.27 Taking as his model the works of classical writers and patristic authors as well as works by his contemporaries (notably Petrarca’s De Viris Illustribus), Boccaccio writes a chronological account of the dangers of political power expressed through numerous

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historical exempla.28 But in a subversion of genre typical of Boccaccio, his political biographies serve as anti-exempla that highlight the dangers that powerful men pose to civil prosperity. In another typically Boccaccian move, he surreptitiously brings both Dante and Petrarca into a discussion that puts the poet’s political function squarely in the middle of a political lesson. The title De Casibus Virorum Illustrium and the Proem of the first book announce Boccaccio’s main theme: the antagonistic relationship between fame and fortune. The choice of the word ‘casibus’ marks the scope of his work as both historical and moral and clearly sets his text in opposition to Petrarca’s. The literal meaning of ‘casus’ is fall or ruination – in this case, of great men from heights of power. Boccaccio will repeatedly tie this fall to the movements of fortune’s wheel in the biographies of his subjects. However, the term ‘casibus’ also implies a moral failure specifically related to the exercise of political power within the res publica. Boccaccio sets up the dichotomy between his ethical purpose and the failures of his subjects in the first sentence of the Proem: Exquirenti michi quid ex labore studiorum meorum possem forsan rei publice utilitatis addere, occurrere preter creditum multa; maiori tamen conatu in mentem sese ingessere principium atque presidentum quorumcunque obscene libidines, violentie truces, perdita ocia, avaritie inexplebiles, cruenta odia, ultiones armate precipitesque et longe plura scelesta facinora. (De Casibus, cap. 1, Proemio, par. 1) [I was wondering how the labour of my studies could perhaps bring benefit to the republic, when more material than can be believed came to mind. With particular force came into my mind the obscene licentiousness, the excessive fury, the wasteful idleness, the insatiable cupidity, the bloodthirsty hate, the rash and ferocious vendettas, and the infinite wicked deeds of the princes and of others who rule.]

Boccaccio intends to use his own poetic erudition for the political good of the city. The title and Proem of the work then suggests that his biographical essays will be an etiological investigation of the historical, political, and ethical failures of the famous and powerful. Boccaccio also defines the cause of the failures of the great, and makes it clear that he has a specific didactic purpose for this work. After an introductory jeremiad against the excesses of the powerful, he sets out to reveal, through examples of historical figures, ‘exemplis agen-

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dum ratus sum eis describere quid Deus omnipotens, seu – ut eorum loquar more – Fortuna, in elatos possit et fecerit’ (De Casibus, cap. 1, Proemio, par. 6). [Therefore, I decided to describe by example the things that almighty God or Fortune – using their idiom – could and did do to those in high positions.] Boccaccio, much like Boethius in the Consolatio, translates the classical idea of fortune into the Christian ideal of God’s justice to arrive at a concept of divine providence that permeates the stories of his anti-exempla. He cautions his audience, through these examples, that God will not tolerate wickedness and immorality from those in power. But he calibrates his text to interact with the real political situation of the day. The political leaders are his subjects, but he directs his text to serve the good of the res publica (‘rei publice utilitatis’ [De Casibus, cap. 1, Proemio, par. 1]), which in Boccaccio’s time meant the Florentine commune and the popolani who constitute Florence’s political institutions. The De Casibus chronicles the misuse of political power and the providential intervention of fortune toward those who eschew the ethics of power in their ambitious search for fame. Thus, Boccaccio proposes that his humanist endeavour of recovering and retelling classical histories serves the pragmatic role of a cautionary tale for trecento Florence and Italy. Following the conventions of medieval historiography, the body of the text moves chronologically through the entirety of history recounting the failures of figures from Adam through the Roman emperors up until Boccaccio’s own day. Boccaccio frames his biographical history as a modified dream-vision wherein his subjects come to him as he sits at his writing desk; however, unlike Dante’s interactive journey in the Commedia, Boccaccio does not, for the most part, interact with his subject. This conventional medieval trope of the dream-vision only thinly veils Boccaccio’s entirely humanist project of textual recovery and political philosophy. In this way also, Boccaccio mediates between Dante and Petrarca: he adopts aspects of both Dante’s Commedia and Petrarca’s De Viris in his work. The writing of the De Casibus brings to fruition Boccaccio’s intense interest in recovering classical sources.29 It is yet another way that Boccaccio figures his own relationship to his sources as an act of collection and organization. When Boccaccio approaches more contemporary history in Book VIII, Petrarca makes a cameo appearance in the vision. The book opens with the narrator languishing in a malaise brought on by his seemingly hopeless attempt to finish the work and falling asleep at his writing desk. In a dream Petrarca appears to him with textual echoes of Cato’s rebuke

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of Dante in Purgatorio II (‘Quid iaces, ociorum professor egregie? Quid falsa inertie suasione torpescis?’ [De Casibus VIII, cap. 1, par. 7]) [Why do you sleep, o excellent master of tranquillity? Why do you laze about persuaded by false idleness?]. Rousing the narrator from his intellectual stupor, in this cameo appearance the character of Petrarca makes a ciceronian oration on fame as the highest virtue of the man of letters. According to Petrarca, not only did the great authors of Latin antiquity gain eternal life through their writing; ‘fama temporalis’ (De Casibus, VIII, cap. 1, par. 13) also inspired even the Christian Fathers Jerome and Augustine. After a lengthy hortative excursus on Fame, the spectre of Petrarca leaves Boccaccio to his work. Quam ob rem in me ipsum collectus sentiensque quibus modis excitet Deus insipidos, damnata detestabili opinione mea, in vetus officium reassumpsi calamum. (De Casibus VIII, cap. I, par. 31) [Because of his visitation, I had pulled myself together and considered how God awakens the negligent, and having condemned my ridiculous ideas, once more I took up my pen for the previous task.]

Petrarca’s lengthy oration on the virtue of fame seems oddly placed in a text with a fundamental thesis arguing that fame and infamy are subject to the vicissitudes of divine providence (fortune). Furthermore, Petrarca’s intervention, coming when it does and including figures from the post-classical period, suggests an important dissonance between Petrarca’s opinions on fame and those of his classical sources. The inclusion of St Jerome and St Augustine as authors who achieved fame through their writings blurs the line between Christian and classical concepts of the use of literature. Petrarca begs the question of the purpose of literature, however, and focuses on the role of the author and his acquisition of eternal fame. Agit et in preteritos istud desiderabile bonum fama, ut gibbos claudos, torvos et quacunque vis deformitate deformes, decoros splendidos augustosque posteritati demonstret; et si sic alios omnes putes, fac, si possis, quin mentalibus oculis fame splendoris superaddas aliquid. (De Casibus VIII, I, par. 22) [Fame has also produced this good for men in the past: to show to posterity handsome, illustrious and revered those who were hunchbacked, lame,

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Building a Monument to Dante blind or with any other such deformity; and if you think this has happened to others, try, if you can, to not add with your mind’s eye any splendour to their fame.]

In this passage, the spirit of Petrarca completely isolates fame derived from literary excellence from the political fame that is at the heart of Boccaccio’s text.30 According to Boccaccio’s Petrarca, the author’s invention can overcome the deformities of a man’s body, which, in the genre of political biography usually indicate an ethical deformity, and create a figure that will gain fame. Petrarca does not interest himself with writing the history of events or lives; instead he uses historical figures, regardless of their true nature, to serve his purpose of literary invention. Petrarca ultimately aims at his own literary fame over historical or ethical veracity. This discourse of fame echoes Boccaccio’s treatment of Petrarca in the Vita Petracchi. Once again, Boccaccio sets Petrarca at odds with his own theory of the ‘publice utilitatis’ of literature; Boccaccio, forever the mediator between his own opinions and those of Petrarca and Dante, leaves the debate open. While the spectre of Petrarca fittingly haunts the confines of Book VIII, dedicated to the lives of the later Roman emperors, Boccaccio calls upon the spirit of Dante to comment on a more contemporary debate. Once again, Boccaccio distances himself from Petrarca’s De Viris, which considers only classical and biblical biographies. Near the end of the ninth and last book of the De Casibus, Boccaccio treats figures of contemporary political history with a decidedly Dantean resonance; the text of chapters XIX to XXV includes discussions of numerous characters from the Commedia.31 While Boccaccio draws on many different sources for his accounts of these political figures of the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, he always follows Dante in condemning the misuse of power by the nobility. As Dante’s appearance draws nearer Boccaccio brings his work closer to the topic of contemporary Florentine politics and moves the discussion to a consideration of how politics and poetics should both be at the service of civic ethics. In chapter XXI, Boccaccio discusses the episode of Jacques De Molai and the destruction of the Knights Templar by the French king Phillip IV in the second decade of the fourteenth century. Although this political intrigue does not directly involve Florentine politics, Boccaccio emphasizes a direct link between himself and the unfolding of this scandalous political drama. Having recounted the affair in which Phillip IV, to satiate his own avarice, unfairly imprisons and tortures the Templar Grand

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Master De Molai and three of his lieutenants and ultimately burns them at the stake, Boccaccio relates his personal and familial link with these events. ut aiebat Boccaccius, genitor meus, qui tunc forte Parisius negotiator honesto cum labore rem curabat augere domesticam et se his testabatur interfuisse rebus (De Casibus IX, cap. 21, par. 22) [Thus Boccaccio said, my father, who at that time was at Paris as a merchant taking care to, through honest work, improve his household and testified to have witnessed these events]

As Warren Ginsberg has noted, Boccaccio, through the invocation of his father’s first-person testimony, legitimizes his own honest standing as author and also as a respected, if illegitimate, child of a respected Florentine citizen.32 This passage also reflects Boccaccio’s insistence on the interaction between personal and civic history. Just as his father witnessed the end of a great political drama through his participation in his particularly Florentine occupation of banker, so too Boccaccio translates oral history into a written political history in the classical style for the benefit of his Florentine audience. Just as banking is a familial and civic industry in Florence, so too for Boccaccio is literature related to his family and his city. Going beyond a localized attack on political tyranny in his account of the Templars’ destruction, he also raises the question of authorial subjectivity in the writing of history. His history does not rely on the usual textual sources; therefore he can, through use of alternate sources (Dante, his father, his knowledge) write the most contemporary history possible. Furthermore, he elevates family history and oral history – stories told around the hearth – to the level of classical accounts. These current historical biographies go beyond the shallow goal of gaining fame for author and subject; rather, Boccaccio sees his contemporary history as directly relevant to the political conflict in Florence. His telling circumvents the shared insistence of medieval and humanist historians that ancient sources provide the best moral lessons. He insists on the immediacy of history and the relevance of current political figures to the formulation of ethical philosophy. Given the problematic episode of Petrarca's oration on fame and the increasing focus on contemporary Florentine political turmoil, the appearance of Dante in chapter XXIII, between a brief excursus on the Templars and the account of Walter, Duke of Athens, signals an impor-

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tant moment near the end of the De Casibus. As a parade of lords who have suffered miserable misfortunes enters Boccaccio’s dream-vision, he sees and approaches Dante, to whom he pays homage more than all the others. He praises Dante, decries his own unworthiness in the face of his unrivalled master, and then begins to speak about Dante’s own political misfortune: ‘furiosam ingrate patrie repulsam, laboriosam fugam, longum exilium’ (De Casibus IX, 23, par. 7) [your mad rejection by your ungrateful homeland, your laborious flight, long exile]. At this point, the spirit of Dante breaks into Boccaccio’s laudatory speech, explicitly contradicting the earlier oration of Petrarca. Siste, fili mi, tam effluenter in laudes meas effundere verba, et te tam parcum tuarum ostendere. Novi ingenium tuum; et quid merear novi. Verum non ille michi nunc animus quem tu reris, nec tanquam a Fortuna victus describar advenio, sed fastidiens civium nostrorum socordiam, ne illatorem, perpetui eorum dedecoris preterires, ostensurus accessi. Ecce, igitur, vide postergantem me domesticam pestem et inexplicabilem florentino nomini labem. Hunc, moresque eius et casum, si quid michi debes, describas volo, ut pateat posteri quos expellant quosque suscipiant cives tui. (De Casibus IX, 23, par. 8–10) [Stop, my son, and do not waste so many words in my praise, while showing yourself so frugal of your own praise. I know your ability, and I know what I have earned. Now I do not have the spirit that you think: I am not here so that I can be described as if I am conquered by Fortune. But loathing the stupidity of our citizens, I have come here so that you will not pass over him who brought her everlasting shame. So look at whom I show you behind me: he is our own plague that made an eternal stain on the Florentine name. If you owe me anything, I wish that you would tell about his deeds and his fate, so that it would be clear to those who come after, those whom your citizens expel and those they welcome.]

As Boccaccio describes in the closing lines of this chapter as well as the entire next chapter (one of the longest in the entire De Casibus), Dante is speaking, in a circumlocution worthy of the Commedia, of Walter, the Duke of Athens. Although Dante did not live to see the imposition of this tyrant on the republican institutions of Florence, Boccaccio brings Dante back from the afterworld to condemn the malfeasance of the magnates who installed Walter and the disastrous factionalism that permitted his short tyranny.33 Indeed, Boccaccio’s Dante cites from the preface of

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the De Casibus as he implores Boccaccio to write of Walter’s ‘moresque eius et casum.’ Not only does Boccaccio’s subsequent extended invective against Walter spring from Dante’s initial condemnation; Dante’s words also validate the impulse and validation for the entire work. In this manner, Boccaccio’s Dante propels the author towards the act of writing and indicates to the reader the nature of Boccaccio’s understanding of Dante’s poetic vocation in the Commedia. Boccaccio figures Dante as the ‘poet of rectitude,’ as self-described in the De Vulgari Eloquentia. Beyond the political lessons of the episode of Walter, this passage continues the project of figuring Dante as a poet eternally concerned with the political past, present, and future of Florence. In the invented drama in the De Casibus, when Petrarca suggests that Boccaccio continue his writing to add to the fame of his subjects and consequently his own, Dante immediately rejects Petrarca’s model. The spirit of Dante cuts straight through the rhetoric of self-praise, ingeniously exposing the subtle dissimulation of the Petrarchan model. Dante denies Boccaccio the right to add to his own fame by writing about Dante as ‘Fortuna victus’ (a victim of fortune), and he remains ambiguous in his own judgment of Boccaccio’s genius. Dante’s refusal to comment openly – notwithstanding the implicit praise suggested by the entire episode – on the merit of Boccaccio’s literary production (‘Novi ingenium tuum; et quid merear novi’ [I know your ability; and I know what I have earned]) challenges Boccaccio to use his ‘ingenium’ for a greater purpose while subtly hinting that Dante would approve of his literary career. The task that Boccaccio has Dante set before him in the De Casibus is specifically political. First, Dante asks Boccaccio to describe Walter’s abuses of power that his tyranny might be exposed. Second, Dante wants Boccaccio to show that Florence, in exiling him and welcoming Walter, suffers from a grievous lack of wisdom in her citizens’ political decisions. Just as Cacciaguida gives Dante the pilgrim his poetic charge as a poet in Paradiso XVII, so here Dante gives Boccaccio his orders. In Dante’s own hortative oration to Boccaccio he posits a broader role for the literary occupation than Petrarca had earlier expressed. Although Dante clearly shows interest in his own damaged political reputation, he argues that an author, through his writing, can serve a political function. Petrarca, like a classical poet, had roused Boccaccio from a slip into ‘ocium’ (De Casibus VII, cap. 1, par. 1) by encouraging him to seek an eternal fame that would outlive his body. Dante pushes Boccaccio toward a greater understanding of the purpose of the literary enterprise, asking Boccaccio to go beyond the search for his own fame to engage in

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a project of political and ethical relevance. These parallel episodes in the De Casibus indicate a possible via media between the literary approaches of the two conflicting masters. In Petrarca Boccaccio had a living mentor who pushed him toward an attitude of contemptio mundi and a discovery and idealization of the past. In Dante Boccaccio could recreate, through his moments of biographical writing, an authoritative counterpoint to the philosophy of Petrarca, who exemplifies poetry as a force for good in political and ethical debates.34 The identification of Boccaccio’s vitriolic description of Walter’s tyranny over the Florentine republic with the ‘matta bestialità’ of Gualtieri in Decameron X, 10, is a matter of scholarly consensus.35 As Ginsberg sees it, Boccaccio’s account of the rise and fall of Walter in 1342 does not lay the entire blame for the political malfeasance at the feet of the tyrant himself. Instead, just as is the case of Gualtieri in the Decameron, the victimized subjects (the popolani of Florence and Griselda) merit reproach for their own passive acceptance of tyrannical power. This reading can certainly be supported by textual evidence; the conclusion that Boccaccio is ambiguous in his final condemnation of both Walter and Gualtieri, however, requires further investigation. In the De Casibus Boccaccio follows the genre of classical biography by rendering an unambiguous judgment on the subject; Walter symbolizes tyranny, and Boccaccio uses Dante’s credential as a poet to explicitly denounce him. In the De Casibus Boccaccio provides a litany of reasons to explain why powerful men fail to rule ethically, and he inserts Dante and Petrarca in cameo appearances to comment on the role of poetry in describing the exercise of power. But as we have seen, Boccaccio differentiates between Petrarca’s poetics of fame and Dante’s poetics of rectitude. As we will see, in the Trattatello in laude di Dante Boccaccio makes a full statement of his ethical position in regards to the political situation of Florence and its ultimate resolution. It is only when Boccaccio makes clear the vital role of the poet in the maintenance of a virtuous republic that his own ideas emerge. Boccaccio set out to write a monumental life of Dante: a biography meant to both inspire ethical action and warn against moral lassitude. Boccaccio is perhaps the most political of the tre corone authors but, as will become even clearer in reading the Trattatello, his political philosophy cannot be separated from his conception of the poet’s function in the city. Unlike those of both Dante and Petrarca, Boccaccio’s political involvement is lifelong and largely practical. Dante, burnt by his own political involvement, becomes a theoretician of power and ultimately

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privileges ideal visions. Petrarca, born in exile, inherits seemingly consciously, Dante’s bitter attitude and chooses the vita solitaria over political engagement. It is Boccaccio’s dedication to the real political present and future of Florence and his almost lifelong participation in Florentine governance that makes him, as Manilo Pastore Stocchi has recently said, the most Florentine of the tre corone. 36 Trattatello in laude di Dante Boccaccio wrote the Trattatello in laude di Dante to accompany his editio of the Vita Nova, the canzoni distese, and the Commedia in the Toledano manuscript. Boccaccio sought to yoke his biography of Dante to Dante’s texts, and the transmission history of these texts reveals that in this sense he was successful. Boccaccio also completed a redacted version of the biography that appears with the works by Dante, Cavalcanti, and Petrarca in the Chigiano manuscript. A third redaction of the work, only possibly written by Boccaccio, has also come to light.37 The first version, written in the mid-1350s, is the more realized of the two authenticated versions of the texts. Longer than the second redaction, it represents Boccaccio’s most imaginative figuration of Dante as a mythic and monumental figure. In the second redaction, written at least a decade later, Boccaccio most certainly has Petrarca in mind and tries to redress Dante to make him more palatable to Petrarca’s humanist aesthetics.38 In the opening paragraphs of the Trattatello in laude di Dante Boccaccio recalls his discussion of Walter, Duke of Athens, by referring to another famous Athenian ruler. Solone, il cui petto uno umano tempio di divina sapienza fu reputato, e le cui sacratissime leggi sono ancora alli presenti uomini chiara testimonianza della antica giustizia, era, secondo che dicono alcuni, spesse volte usato di dire ogni republica, sì come noi, andare e stare sopra due piedi; de’ quali, con matura gravità, affermava essere il destro il non lasciare alcuno difetto commesso impunito, e il sinistro ogni ben fatto remunerare; (Trattatello, par. 1) [Solon, whose breast was said to be a human temple of divine wisdom, and whose sacred laws are to the men of today an illustrious witness to the justice of the ancients, was, according to some, in the habit of declaring that every republic walks and stands, like ourselves, on two feet. In his mature wisdom he affirmed that the right foot consists of not letting any crime that

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Building a Monument to Dante has been committed remain unpunished, and the left of the rewarding of every good deed.]

Solon, the figure with whom Boccaccio chooses to begin his biography of Dante, stands as a poignant counterpoint to Walter, Duke of Athens. From Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies to Gratian’s Decretum, Solon represents the Greek type of Moses. As Boccaccio stresses, Solon derived his legislative power as much from God as from the Seven Sages who chose him, despite his own objections, to rule Athens as the archon. Walter, who gained his nominal lordship of Athens through deceit and violence, assumed political power over Florence through a plot hatched within the halls of mischievous magnates. The sententia attributed to Solon, a commonplace in medieval texts, also prefigures the sentence that Boccaccio will put in the mouth of Dante’s spirit in De Casibus (‘ut pateat posteri quos expellant quosque suscipiant cives tui’ [so that it would be clear to those who come after, those whom your citizens punish and those they support]).39 The first paragraph of the Trattatello sets up a theme that will dominate the entire text: Boccaccio questions whether the wisdom of the poet and the political power of a tyrant can coexist in the republic. Solon held a mythical position in the Middle Ages as a font of divine wisdom outside of the Christian world. Although he was primarily a legislator, he was also a poet. In his Vita Solonis, one of the most important sources for the medieval myth of Solon, Plutarch figures Solon as a reluctant political leader who used his own poetic vocation as a conduit for his wisdom. At first, he used his poetry only in trifles, not for any serious purpose, but simply to pass away his idle hours; but afterwards he introduced moral sentences and state matters, which he did, not to record them merely as an historian, but to justify his own actions, and sometimes to correct and chastise, and stir up the Athenians to noble performances. Some report that he designed to put his laws into heroic verse 40

Boccaccio confirms the importance of Solon in his Genealogia, using him as an example against the interpretation of Plato’s condemnation of the poets. (Genealogia XIV, 4, par. 28; XIV, 19, par. 12) The short biography that Plutarch traces for Solon’s poetic vocation resonates deeply with Boccaccio’s figure of Dante drawn in the Trattatello. Poetry, which might begin as a diversion from serious matters, becomes the vehicle for public

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expression of Solon’s wisdom. At the same time Solon represents the political opposite of Walter: wise, just, and divinely appointed. On the other hand, the figure of Solon in the opening of the Trattatello serves as a model for Boccaccio’s own figure of Dante. Just as Solon’s laws, expressed in heroic verse, have come down to Rome in the Twelve Tables standing as a monument that orients the political life of Rome, so too Dante’s poetry should stand as a monument in Florence to guide the political action of her citizens. After Boccaccio introduces the figure of Solon, he rapidly shifts his focus to Florence and her contemporary political troubles. He laments that Florence has not followed Solon’s sage advice concerning reward and punishment for her citizens, and concludes this invective against his own city by stating his goal for the present biography. Boccaccio’s ‘principale intento’ is to compel Florence to redress the injustice brought upon Dante. Rather than erecting a physical statue (or monument and cenotaph as will be done later), Boccaccio sets out the noble virtue and divine wisdom of Dante Alighieri in his monumental life of Dante. In the Trattatello Boccaccio makes his argument by building on the various modes of biographical writing to situate Dante’s life within a recognizable framework of auctoritas. At times his descriptions of the facts of Dante’s life and work will seem a vita auctoris, yet his linking of Dante’s poetry to his biography recalls the vidas. Boccaccio’s description of Dante’s lyric development brings out the same themes that are juxtaposed in the canzoni distese. The political emphasis on Dante’s life foreshadows the concerns of the classical biography seen in the De Casibus. In addition to the biographical genre discussed above, the Trattatello takes on a hagiographic tone. Boccaccio had experimented with the hagiographic genre in his rewriting of the Vita Sanctissima Patris Petri Damiani, and in his vernacular works he borrowed freely from both the hagiographic and the exemplum tradition common in the contemporary sermons of the Dominicans in Florence.41 This rewriting and borrowing of saints’ lives puts him at the vanguard of Italian humanism.42 As Susanna Barsella illustrates in her treatment of Boccaccio’s Vita of St Peter Damian, Boccaccio, who offered his revision of the Vita to Petrarca as material for his De Vita Solitaria, portrayed St Peter Damian as a solitary spirit who, because of the duties of his vocation, left his refuge and engaged the world.43 In his continuing debate with Petrarca about the public and political role of the intellectual, Boccaccio’s St Peter Damian contradicts Petrarca’s call for otio – the restful solitude of the poet. Boccaccio’s one attempt at hagiography engages the same themes found in

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the Trattatello, emphasizing the political importance of the intellectual figure, even of a hermit saint. Boccaccio carefully figures Dante as a man ordained by divine providence to instruct through poetry. Presenting him as a passionate solitary spirit who spurned company, a political thinker who formed a party unto himself, and a poet who spoke with divine wisdom, Boccaccio acknowledges Dante’s well-known public and private failings while insisting on his crucial role as a contemporary moral authority. Like St Peter Damian, Dante spurned public office while remaining engaged in political discourse. If Florence would only honour the greatness of her own greatest citizen and learn the lessons of his exile, her political and moral divisions would come to an end. At the outset of the Trattatello, having stated the purpose of his work, Boccaccio begins the text in much the same way that any vita auctoris might introduce its subject. In paragraphs 10 through 17 he details Dante’s family history and his relationship to the Florentine political scene. However, before Boccaccio goes on to describe Dante’s birth, youth, and juvenile studies he recounts the supposed dream-vision that Dante’s mother had just before Dante’s birth. Boccaccio stages this simple allegorical scene, beginning with Dante’s mother giving birth in a field near a fountain and under a laurel tree. The youth feeds only upon the tree’s berries and the pure water of the fountain. In reaching for the laurel leaves the boy slips and, upon his recovery, has become a peacock (Trattatello, par. 17–18). Boccaccio spares the reader a full exegesis of this allegory until the last pages, but its significance resides not so much in its interpretive value but rather in its structural function. In describing the birth of the poet, Boccaccio draws on the repertoire of biographies of authoritative figures and hagiography to give Dante’s birth and life a divine mandate. Specifically, the allegorical narrative of Dante’s mother’s dream draws on the hagiographic tradition widespread in the Italian trecento. As discussed above, Boccaccio revised a version of the life of St Peter Damian,44 which includes a discussion of the situation of St Peter Damian’s birth as illustrative of his holy vocation.45 However, Dante’s own narrative on the birth and naming of St Dominic in Paradiso XII is a closer parallel to this allegory. Just as is the case with Dominic, the mother’s dream presages the birth of one favoured by God to carry out a special mission. For Dominic the mission is that of reuniting the wandering spirits back into God’s family: hence his name, the possessive of God.46 So too Dante’s name is figured by Boccaccio as, ‘seguì al nome l’effetto’ (Trattatello, par.

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18) [the result fitted the name excellently]. Boccaccio goes on to relate that Dante’s name indicates his generosity (dante is the present active participle of the Latin verb ‘dare,’ meaning ‘to give’) in speaking with the special dispensation of divine grace and restoring poetry to the Italians by choosing the vernacular as his language of poetic expression.47 Through this allegory and rhetorical description of Dante’s poetic vocation Boccaccio clearly marks Dante as more than a poet. Indeed, he elevates the status of the poet – and the vernacular poet- to the level of the classical poets. In employing an idealistic conclusion (‘seguì al nome l’effetto’), he establishes a primary relationship between Dante’s poetic vocation and his ontological status. Boccaccio takes great pains to mark Dante as something more than just a vernacular poet, and his opening description of the divine portent of Dante’s birth seeks to elevate him to the authoritative position of auctor and divine agent.48 The bulk of the Trattatello will attempt to negotiate between the evidence of Dante’s turbulent life and Boccaccio’s claim of Dante’s ethical and theological authority. The structure of the Trattatello dramatizes the conflict between the events of Dante’s life and the intellectual response that Boccaccio identifies in Dante’s poetry. The first section, which has been discussed above, consists of an introduction to the biography wherein Boccaccio situates Dante’s life in a teleological narrative. The allegorical dreamvision predicts the end result of Dante’s life: Dante, through his poetical works, will become a modern day prophet of God’s word for the corrupt citizens of Florence and Italy. After this introductory section, he shifts to a chronological account of Dante’s life, ending with the poet’s death and his maligned reputation in contemporary Florence (Trattatello, par. 20–109). This chronological narrative is followed by a description of Dante’s physical characteristics, focusing on a description of the intellectual history of the poet and his works (Trattatello, par. 110–208), as would be conventional in a vita auctoris. The biography concludes with an exegesis of the dream-vision proposed in the introductory phase of the work (Trattatello, par. 209–29). The structure appears simple, but in truth Boccaccio complicates his design by inserting his own detailed excursuses on various subjects throughout the text. As will be discussed below, through his personal intervention in his narrative of Dante’s life, as with his editorial intervention in the Vita Nova, Boccaccio attempts both to present a figure of Dante representative of his own claims about poetic wisdom and to mediate between Dante’s work and his contemporary readership.

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The first section of the Trattatello narrates the poet’s early life and his student years in Bologna. However, before he gets far along in his history, Boccaccio sets up the basic conflicts that will define his biography of Dante. Following the tone of the Vita Sanctissima Patris Petri Damiani, Boccaccio points out that the poet needs solitude for the fulfilment of his vocation, but, in Dante’s case, he needed to overcome certain obstacles, love, and politics, in the practice of his vocation. In luogo della quale rimozione e quiete, quasi dallo inizio della sua vita infino a l’ultimo della morte, Dante ebbe fierissima e importabile passione d’amore, moglie, cura familiare e publica, esilio e povertà; l’altre lasciando più particulari [noie], le quali di necessità queste si traggon dietro: le quali, acciò che più appaia della loro gravezza, partitamente convenevole giudico di spiegarle. (Trattatello, par. 29) [But in the place of this freedom and quiet, almost from the beginning of his life to the day of his death, Dante was the prey of the fierce and unendurable passion of love, and he had a wife, and public and private responsibilities, and he suffered exile and poverty. Leaving aside other more particular cares which these necessarily bring with them, I think it right to mention these burdens one by one, so that their weight may be more evident.]

These are the five problems that will persist in Dante’s life, chronic problems that Boccaccio uses as guideposts for his biographical construction of Dante’s life; for each problem he offers his own perspective, through an excursus, on the ethical issues at stake. The entire force of his figuration lies not in a straightforward narrative of the man’s life or a year-byyear analysis of his poetic production; rather, Boccaccio, just as we might find in a Provencal vida, uses the conflicts in Dante’s life to dramatize the spiritual and poetic development of the model poeta vates. Although Boccaccio specifies five problems that haunted Dante’s life, these problems can generally be reduced to two familiar entanglements: love and politics. Boccaccio begins his account of Dante’s love troubles with the history of his involvement with Beatrice and his later marriage to Gemma Donati, and finishes this section with a long misogynistic diatribe against marriage that echoes St Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum but sounds quieter in tone than the Corbaccio. Boccaccio draws from Dante’s own Vita Nova as well as from the familiar rhetoric of courtly romance to describe the pathology of love. The pattern of Dante’s amorous diver-

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sions in the Trattatello recalls the oscillating themes in the canzoni distese. Boccaccio brings Dante’s love poetry into play by employing vocabulary from the fifteen poetic works. In the first paragraph of his description of Beatrice, Boccaccio uses such words as ‘leggiadretta,’ ‘angioletta,’ and ‘pargoletta,’ that resonate with Dante’s Vita Nova and elements from the Rime as well as the Commedia.49 Boccaccio ties Dante’s production of love poetry with the factual events of his amorous history with Beatrice in a procedure that follows the pseudo-biographical narratives found in the troubadour vidas. Boccaccio cites Dante’s own poetic language to describe his history with Beatrice, letting Dante tell his own story; in a sense, Boccaccio puts into biographical form themes resounding in the Vita Nova, Rime, and Commedia. As argued above in this chapter, the cycle of Dante’s canzoni distese contrasts the potential virtue and destructive power of love while never cohering as a narrative. In the biographical narrative of the Trattatello Boccaccio solidifies the themes found in the canzoni distese. Egli era, sì per lo lagrimare, sì per l’afflizione che il cuore sentiva dentro, e sì per lo non avere di sé alcuna cura, di fuori divenuto quasi una cosa salvatica a riguardare: magro, barbuto, e quasi tutto transformato da quello che avanti esser solea; intanto che ‘l suo aspetto, non che negli amici, ma eziandio in ciascun altro che il vedea, a forza di sé metteva compassione; come che egli poco, mentre questa vita così lagrimosa durò, altrui che ad amici veder si lasciasse. (Trattatello, par. 43) [By his weeping, by the pain in his heart, and by taking no care of himself, he had taken on the appearance of a wild thing. He was lean, unshaven, and almost completely transformed from what he had been before. His appearance aroused pity, not only in his friends, but in everyone who saw him, although while this tearful life of his lasted, he let himself be seen by few others than his friends.]

Boccaccio paints a picture of a man who has lost his reason and social instinct towards both his friends and himself. Boccaccio’s narrative of Dante’s amorous history is as much informed by the Convivio as by the more direct influence of the Vita Nova.50 Beyond the strictly narratological considerations of Boccaccio’s description of the lovesick Dante, Boccaccio points up the direct link between Dante’s amorous history and his development as a poet by employing imagery native to Dante’s own earlier writings (Vita Nova, cap. 14, Rime Petrose). Boccaccio continues

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the theme that he developed in the introductory stages of the work: although Dante suffered through terrible difficulties in his life, he figures Dante as providentially destined to turn his personal turmoil into prophetic wisdom. In the Trattatello Boccaccio first tells how Dante’s difficult love affair with Beatrice and his arranged marriage gave him the first impulse to turn toward poetry. The second issue concerns the well-publicized political disasters that affected Dante’s adult life. As is the case in the De Casibus, Dante is presented as a victim of Florentine factional strife, eternally resolute in his own personal political convictions. Boccaccio seems little concerned with a full explanation of Dante’s political involvements; the intended audience for this political narrative – most certainly Florence and her political leaders – would have known this recent history well. Although Boccaccio begins by recounting Dante’s political activity and eventual exile (Trattatello, par. 62–68), the bulk of this section is another extended invective against the culture of Florentine politics (Trattatello, par. 69–81). While Dante’s exile gave him the opportunity to continue his travels and education, Florence still suffers the shame of having exiled its most virtuous citizen. Boccaccio once again calls upon Florence to make herself worthy of her great ancestors, such as Athens, Rome, and Mantua, by honouring her poetic son with a fitting memorial. He claims that Dante’s exile stands as a ‘marmorea statua’ of her own wickedness. In telling the story of Dante’s political hardships, Boccaccio, following the conventions of classical biography, intends to persuade his fellow Florentine citizens to reconsider their own political ethics and to see in Dante an example of the danger of political division. Having linked Dante’s poetic growth with his amorous difficulties, Boccaccio points out that Dante came to his true poetic vocation only as a result of the maturity and focus gained through his exile. In his narration of Dante’s death and funeral in Ravenna, Boccaccio makes the most radical of his claims about Dante’s status. Non poterono gli amorisi disiri, né le dolenti lagrime, né la sollecitudine casalinga, né la lusinghevole gloria de’publici ofici, né il miserabile esilio, né la intollerabile povertà giammai con le lor forze rimouvere il nostro Dante dal principale intento, cioè da’ sacri studii … E se, ostanti cotanti e così fatti avversarii, quanti e quali di sopra sono stati mostrati, egli per forza d’ingegno e di perseveranza riuscì chiaro qual noi veggiamo, che si può sperare che esso fosse divenuto, avendo avuti altrettanti aiutatori, o almeno

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nuino contrario, o pochissimi, come hanno molti? Certo, io non so; ma se licito fosse a dire, io direi che egli fosse in terra divenuto uno iddio. (Trattatello, par. 82–3) [No loving desires, nor tears of grief, nor household cares, nor the tempting glory of public office, nor the miserable exile, nor intolerable poverty had the power to divert Dante ever from his principal intent – his sacred studies … And if, in spite of all those obstacles which have been mentioned, he by dint of intellect and perseverance became as illustrious as we see him to be, what might he have become if he had had as much to help him, or nothing working against him, or very few hindrances, as many have? Surely, I do not know, but if it were proper to say so, I should say that he would have become a god on earth.]

In this remarkable passage Boccaccio makes an outlandish claim. Had Dante, devoted as he was to his ‘principale intento,’ had assistance rather than obstacles, or even no obstacles at all and no assistance, Boccaccio rather blatantly suggests, Dante would have become a God on earth.51 Balancing the evidence of the preceding narrative where the obstacles of love and political exile pushed Dante towards his destined vocation as a poet with this conflicting claim of Dante’s possible divinity, had he met with had no obstacles, shows an expert’s rhetorical tactics in the Trattatello. Boccaccio has incorporated various modes of biographical writing to create a new genre that, in this paragraph, becomes a monumental biography. The Trattatello transforms the earlier generic experiment of the Vita Nova into a familiar biographical genre; or, as Ginsberg has argued, the Trattatello is a palimpsest of the Vita Nova.52 Specifically, Boccaccio borrows from Dante’s strategies of deification of Beatrice in the Vita Nova and applies them to Dante himself. The initial allegorical representation of Dante’s birth and subsequent claim of the ontological equivalency of his name parallels the description of Beatrice’s special value echoed in her name. The explicit deification in this passage overwrites Dante’s final defeat at the end of the Vita Nova in writing about the deification of Beatrice. The Trattatello consists of much more that just a reformation of the Vita Nova. In composing this monumental biography, Boccaccio necessarily converts the personal drama of Dante’s struggles into public affairs. Dante, like St Peter Damian and other saints from the hagiographic tradition, overcomes his personal distractions to achieve beatification. But

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like the classical biography also familiar to Boccaccio, Dante’s deification serves an ethical purpose for the city. The monument to Dante crafted here belongs in the piazza not in the church. Boccaccio’s figure of Dante yokes together the secular concerns of political ethics and courtly love with the sacred attributes of providence, prophecy, and divinity. However, at this point in the work these two worlds seem oddly incongruous as Dante remains outside of contemporary intellectual discourse. Boccaccio shows his frustration at Dante’s marginality by constantly berating Florence for her apathy and by making such his extraordinary claim about Dante’s near divinity. As this section of the Trattatello comes to a close with Dante’s death in Ravenna and burial outside his home, Boccaccio once again digresses from the biographical mode to chastise Florence. The biography seems to end with Dante dead and buried, Florence obstinate, and Boccaccio frustrated. The first part of the Trattatello figures Dante’s life within the confines of his intellectual and political struggles in Florentine history. By the end of the strictly biographical portion of the work, Dante assumes a saintly aspect that Boccaccio hopes will stand as a statue-like monument to both the greatness of his life and the wickedness of contemporary political factionalism. In the second half of the Trattatello the discussion turns to Dante the poet and the role of poetry in the world. Boccaccio argues for Dante’s importance as a poet in the current political and intellectual crisis facing Florence and Italians. The Trattatello goes beyond the confines of the classical biographies; in his hands Dante becomes the central figure in a historical narrative that contains the biography of an individual but describes the history of a city: the subject is as much Florence as it is Dante. As the second part begins, Boccaccio draws the reader’s attention to Dante as a poet. In the second half of the work (Trattatello, par. 110–208), Boccaccio hopes to provide, through the example of Dante as poeta vates, a theoretical solution to the political woes that plague Florence. In fact, most of the remaining text unfolds a theory of poetry that situates the poet at the origin of political wisdom and civic ethics. Boccaccio will first reclaim Dante as an ethical citizen of Florence and of the world, and then argue that Dante’s poetry can serve as a new Twelve Tables for the Florentine republic. The opening paragraphs of the second section of the Trattatello recover the historical Dante that was lost in the earlier deification of the poet. Boccaccio begins by describing the physical attributes, domestic habits, and intellectual worth of his subject (Trattatello, par. 111–25). Just as Boccaccio relied on classical and contemporary sources to describe the arc

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of Dante’s life (biographers Suetonius and Plutarch, chroniclers such as Livy and Tacitus, and the contemporaries chroniclers Villani and Compagni) so too he models his description of Dante’s physical attributes on earlier sources. Dante takes on all the attributes typical of a great figure: he is melancholic, solitary, temperate, and fervently devoted to his intellectual vocation.53 However, Boccaccio goes beyond the conventions of biographical description when he draws upon first-hand accounts of Dante’s interaction with his world. Two anecdotes emphasize the gravity of the poet’s presence and his position of authority among his contemporaries. The first episode, which has become part of Dante folklore, tells of two women in Verona who see the poet pass by and remark that, judging by his stern and haggard appearance, he truly must have travelled through hell and returned (Trattatello, par. 113). Dante, hearing these observations, says nothing and smiles to himself. In the second episode Dante stops by a merchant in Siena hoping to collect a manuscript promised him and amazes those standing by as he remains completely oblivious to a mock battle taking place in the street just outside (Trattatello, par. 121–2). First, although these two events might be simply apocryphal, anecdotal, or simply fiction, they serve an important role in localizing Dante’s presence in the contemporary history that so deeply concerns Boccaccio. He credits ‘alcuni degni di fede’ (Trattatello, par. 121) as the authoritative source for his stories, thereby underlining Dante’s presence in a collective living memory. This phrase also recalls Boccaccio’s attribution of ‘persone degne di fede’ in his footnote to the Vita Nova. Second, Dante derives his authority from his fellow citizens rather than from his own words. He says nothing in either episode but his poetry speaks for him. In the first episode, the ladies name the Inferno; in the second episode his intellectual intensity elicits reverence from those he encounters. The first section of the Trattatello inserted Dante into a well-known historical narrative to figure him as a heroic victim of political divisions. The second section begins by describing Dante’s authority in local and contemporary history. After this descriptive section of Dante’s physical and intellectual attributes and their effect on his reputation, Boccaccio reduces the previous description to a final conclusion on Dante’s intellectual calling (Trattatello, par. 125–7). E per questa vaghezza credo che oltre ad ogni altro studio amasse la poesia, veggendo, come che la filosofia ogni altra trapassi di nobilità, la eccellenzia

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Building a Monument to Dante di quella con pochi potersi comunicare, e esserne per lo mondo molti famosi, e la poesia più essere apparente e dilettevole a ciascuno, e li poeti rarissimi. E perciò, sperando per la poesì allo inusitato e pomposo onore della coronazione dell’alloro poter pervenire, tutto a lei si diede a istudiando e componendo. (Trattatello, par. 125) [It was because of this desire, I believe, that he loved poetry more than any other study, seeing that, although philosophy surpasses all the others in nobility, its excellence can be communicated only to a few, and many are famous throughout the world for distinction in it, whereas poetry is more comprehensible and delightful to everyone, and poets are rare. He hoped, moreover, through poetry to attain to the rare and distinguished honour of being crowned with the laurel, and so gave himself up to study and composition.]

Boccaccio goes on to relate how the political misfortune of exile robbed Dante of the merited honour of the laurel crown in Florence. He provides Dante with two fundamental desires in this summa of the poet’s intellectual calling. First, Dante selected poetry over philosophy so that his message might be heard and understood by the most people. Second, he thought that by virtue of his vernacular poetry he might earn an honourable repatriation as poet laureate to Florence. However, Boccaccio modifies this second motive by inserting the adjectives ‘inusitato’ before the laurel, as if to suggest that to honour a poet, especially with a civic honour, is a rare event. As Boccaccio has maintained throughout the Trattatello and will continue to do so in the De Casibus, Dante always subordinated his search for personal fame to his political and ethical purpose. Dante’s stubborn political isolationism prevented the fulfilment of his search for fame, and the laurel crown indeed became ‘inusitato’ for a political exile. The second motive that Boccaccio draws from Dante’s poetry stands in stark opposition to the first. As Boccaccio illustrated in the anecdotal stories of the poet’s reputation from Verona to Siena, Dante’s poetry had indeed reached all societal strata. While his political position had prevented the achievement of his fame, it is by virtue of the political nature of his work as poet that he will become a monument in Florence. As Boccaccio will go on to show in the longest excursus of the entire text, Dante fulfilled the divine calling of poetry through his engagement of the contemporary world in his poetry. The bulk of the second section of the Trattatello serves as an extended excursus on the origins of poetry. Unlike Boccaccio’s defence of poetry in

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the fourteenth and fifteenth books of the Genealogia deorum gentilium, this passage defines poetry and its role in contemporary society. As numerous critics have pointed out all too simplistically, Boccaccio’s definition of poetry closely follows a similar passage in letter written by Petrarca for his Carthusian brother Gherardo.54 Although a good portion of the passage in the Trattatello does indeed quote liberally from Petrarca’s letter, significant variations distinguish the two texts. Petrarca’s letter is written as a defence or an apology for poetry. His main argument turns on the definition of theology as a poetical work with God as the subject.55 From this main point Petrarca can defend both the classical poets and his own Latin poetry against accusations of irreligiousness from his Carthusian brother. Boccaccio’s discussion includes this same argument, but his intention is completely different. Petrarca seeks to defend Latin poetry from charges that it belongs strictly to the secular world; Boccaccio seeks to demonstrate how poetry and the poet serve a critical civic function. The long diversion (Trattatello, par. 128–63) on the function of poetry begins with a description of the history of civilization. Ancient Greece used poetry as a crude metaphysics to order the supernatural forces that escaped their early intellects. From these etiologies were born the first poetic theology that, along with statues and other public monuments, helped to civilize society. Boccaccio goes on to tell how certain men – ‘sacerdoti’ – were charged with the task of composing poems that, although in elevated style, might reach and instruct even the lowest orders of society. Boccaccio sees poetry in the earliest age as an expression of society’s collective imagination and a basis for the earliest religious formulations. In this initial passage, Boccaccio does indeed follow Petrarca’s formulation of the origin of poetry: poetry allowed prerational man to formulate a primitive theology that explained the natural laws that mysteriously governed his world. At this point in his argument, Petrarca moves on to discuss the sacred scriptures as a later manifestation of this same theological impulse and a further defence of the classical poetic idiom, but Boccaccio continues with his history of the early Greek civilization. Where Petrarca limits his discussion to a defence of poetry in terms of his project of humanistic restoration, Boccaccio widens the scope to include poetry in a larger debate. He continues his history by tracing the manner in which these earliest poets contributed to the establishment of political and religious institutions. In this model the poets, in their reverent poetic formulations, created the myths and histories on which they based their civilization (Trattatello, par. 134–5). Poetry began as a crude theology but did

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not stop there; as man became civilized poetry served to ‘ad impaurire i suggetti e a stringere con sacramenti alla loro obedienzia quegli li quali non vi si sarebbono potuti con forza costringere’ (Trattatello, par. 135) [to frighten their subjects and to bind to obedience with sacraments those whom they could not have bound by force]. Boccaccio treats poetry as an inherently political tool that mediates between institutions of civil power and their subjects by substituting reverence and ornament for raw force and power. These poetic formulations became an expression of a ‘naturale equità’ (Trattatello, par. 134) that preceded and foreshadowed written law (‘ragione scritta’). In his identification of poetry as historiography and mythology and in his reduction of politics and poetry to the same origin, Boccaccio leaps beyond Petrarca’s understanding of poetry. Not until Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova will poetry be given such an elevated status in terms of its role in human intellectual history and its crucial importance in contemporary political ethics.56 Although Boccaccio clearly labels his discussion of the origins and purpose of poetry as an excursus from his given subject, the passage does indeed bear upon his main subject. Throughout the Trattatello he makes great efforts to emphasize Dante’s political life. In this excursus on poetry he brings out his final theoretical conclusions about the role that Dante’s poetry must play in the Italy of his day. At the same time, the passage strongly contradicts what Petrarca describes as the role of poetry. In so far as poetry has an inherently political function, Boccaccio takes pains to explain that poetry must communicate effectively to its desired audience. Le quali cose non si poterono commodamente fare senza l’oficio de’ poeti, li quali, sì per ampliare la loro fama, sì per compiacere a’ prencipi, sì per dilettare i sudditi, e sì 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 idii 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. (Trattatello, par. 136) [These things could not easily be done without the work of poets, who helped them by spreading their own fame, by pleasing the princes, by delighting their subjects, and by persuading all to act virtuously. That which if spoken openly would have defeated their ends, but which the princes

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wished to have believed, they made the people believe by masterly fictions, such as are hardly understood by the uneducated now, not to mention then. For the new gods and for the men who pretended to be the descendants of gods, they used the same style that the early peoples had used only for the worship of the true God and for venerating Him.]

With one concession to Petrarca concerning the poet’s just pursuit of fame, Boccaccio assigns poetry a political function that is mostly foreign to Petrarca’s humanistic values. The poet serves a crucial role between political and religious institutions; he must express the just ethical demands of both political and religious institutions in a way that persuades without terrorizing. The poet must write a poetic theology in a style accessible to his audience: this is the significance of Dante’s choice to write in the vernacular. As the entire Trattatello points out, Dante willingly fulfilled the poet’s calling, but the wickedness and corruption of his time punished rather than rewarded him. Boccaccio concludes his discussion of the political function of poetry by again pointing out that Dante, who in the tradition of Solon truly merited the laurel crown, has been denied his rightful position of civic honour due to Florence’s corruption (Trattatello, 156–62). The tension between Boccaccio and Petrarca regarding the value of Dante’s contribution to the trecento arises from this difference in their understanding of the proper role of poetry. Indeed, Boccaccio, besides putting forth his own statement on the role of poetry, takes Dante’s side against Petrarca in the battle of poetic ideologies. After his lengthy excursus on the history of poetry and Dante’s function as poet-theologian for contemporary Florence, Boccaccio once again recapitulates the primary biographical elements that he has established throughout the entire work. First, he restates Dante’s suffering from two primary defects that troubled his entire life: political animosity (‘animosità,’ Trattatello, par. 170) and lust (‘lussuria,’ Trattatello, par. 172). He then recounts the history of Dante’s composition of the Commedia (Trattatello, par. 175–94). Finally, Boccaccio discusses all too briefly the other works that Dante produced (Trattatello, par. 195–204). This penultimate section functions as little more than a review of the primary themes of the entire work. Although the content may come across as redundant, the section serves an important function within the structure of the work as a whole. Boccaccio realizes that his extended discourse on poetry might have shifted the focus away from the primary subject matter of the work. With this summary of the key elements of Dante’s life he effectively reconfirms Dante’s position as primarily a poet.

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All that remains for the completion of the biography of Dante is an interpretation of the allegorical dream-vision with which he began the text. As in the exposition of the allegory at the beginning of the work, Boccaccio reminds the reader that the dream-vision given to Dante’s mother prior to his birth represents a sure sign that his life and works spring from divine providence. In the allegory his mother gives birth to a son under a laurel tree near a fountain; the child nourishes himself from the berries of the tree and the water in the fountain. The child grows to become a shepherd who fails in his attempt to reach the laurel leaves; upon failing, the shepherd becomes a resplendent peacock – at which time the dream ends. Boccaccio’s itemized interpretation of the allegory does not need too fine a point put on it. The most salient aspect that emerges from his reading is the view that the entirety of Dante’s life and learning come to fruition with the completion of the Commedia. In Boccaccio’s interpretation the shepherd, representing Dante’s pulling together of poetic, philosophical, and theological learning, is transformed into a peacock, which represents the Commedia. While Boccaccio’s Petrarca in the De Casibus maintains that a poet might live through the fame garnered from his own works, so too Boccaccio argues here that the poet can be nothing greater than his poetry. This concept of the legacy of the poet informs Boccaccio’s entire biographical project. In the vision narrated by Boccaccio the transformation from historical individual to multifaceted literary text permits Boccaccio to create a figure that transcends history. The choice of a peacock as the symbolical referent for Dante’s Commedia indicates Boccaccio’s sense that the poet’s work belongs in the public space were it can be seen in all its glory. He concludes his biographical project by transforming the life and works of a man into a myth capable of transcending his own historical particularities and serving as a monument to all of his fellow Florentine citizens. Although the Trattatello in laude di Dante contains the most coherent statement of his biographical treatment of the figure of Dante, Boccaccio goes to great pains, as is his custom, to speak on this subject from multiple perspectives. Throughout his entire literary career he remained in dialogue with different factions of the literary community of trecento Italy. The Trattatello in laude di Dante serves as an important prologue to his editions of Dante’s text for the vernacular audience; on the other hand, his thoughts on Dante would reach the erudite humanistic audience through De Casibus and his other Latin texts. Boccaccio’s own poetic theory argued for the crucial relevance of literature in the public life

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of contemporary citizens, and, concerned with the reception and utility of his own literary production, he spread his gospel of Dante to the greatest possible audience. His work as editor of Dante’s text had a great influence on the version of Dante encountered by centuries of readers; he also managed the image of the poet for that readership by creating a figure of Dante through his biographical writings. An Empty Tomb During the 1350s Boccaccio was an important player in a Florence that was in a political quagmire similar to the one that had so troubled Dante’s day. Florence, fresh from the disaster of Walter, Duke of Athens, struggled to maintain its political independence from the growing shadow of Viscontian tyranny spreading down from the north. The city itself suffered from catastrophic internal divisions similar to those that had forced Dante into exile. In Dante, Boccaccio found a potentially powerful voice from beyond the grave that might serve as an authority that would rein in the tyrannical abuses of the magnates and drive the city toward a more virtuous, and therefore stable, existence. For this reason, in the Trattatello Boccaccio speaks in clear and literal terms about Florence’s need to honour Dante with a monument rather than to continue to treat him as a political exile. Questa fu la marmorea statuta fattagli ad etterna memoria della sua virtù! con queste lettere fu il suo nome tra quegli de’ padri della patria scritto in tavole d’oro! con così favorevole romore gli furono rendute grazie de’ suoi benefici! Chi sarà dunque colui che, a queste cose guardando, dica la nostra republica da questo piè non andare sciancata? (Trattatello, par. 69) [This was the marble statue erected to the eternal memory of his virtue! With these letters was his name inscribed on tablets of gold among those of the fathers of the country! By such a favourable opinion were thanks returned for his kindness! Who, considering these things, will say that our republic is not lame in this foot?]

In this monument Boccaccio wants more than just a memorial to the poet and his legacy. The word ‘monument’ itself describes a dual task. As discussed in the Introduction to this book, a monument – derived from the verb ‘moneo’ (to remind, to warn) – reminds viewers of a specific historical object and warns these same viewers of present dangers. In

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proposing his own biography of Dante as a monument to the poet, Boccaccio indicates his intention to do more than preserve the memory of the poet. He encourages Florence to follow the wisdom of the great poetruler Solon’s sententia: he seeks civic virtue and justice. In another sense Boccaccio clearly wants his own written monument to continue to serve Dante’s self-described poetic function of rectitude. As was the case with Solon’s poetic legacy for the res publica that opens the Trattatello, Dante’s poetry, the living remnant of his life, will serve as the public expression of a moral law common to all nations and times. It would be centuries before Florence enacted Boccaccio’s call for a monument to Dante within her walls. As Italian intellectuals geared up their nationalistic rhetoric during the shameful years of Napoleonic rule in Italy, Dante emerged as a critical figure of nationalist pride. A pamphlet circulating in Florence and the rest of Italy in 1818 called for the erection of a funerary monument in Santa Croce to celebrate the poet and end Florence’s ignominy for not honouring her greatest son.57 In the manifesto the signatories recall the many failed efforts to erect a monument to Dante, including Boccaccio’s biography, and urge the citizens to act now. There is no doubt that this pamphlet spurred the poem by Leopardi that is cited as the epigraph to this chapter.58 Unlike the pamphlet, Leopardi’s poem assumes a more critical stance against the city, using the movement for a monument to Dante in Florence as an opportunity to reprimand Florence, and Italy, for the same political deficiencies that Boccaccio described nearly 500 years earlier. Leopardi’s intellectual complexity prohibits any direct identification of his rhetorical stance on Dante and Florence with that of Boccaccio. However, Leopardi’s poem clearly follows Boccaccio in linking the political hardship of his current time with a failure of moral wisdom symbolized by Florence’s lack of proper respect for Dante’s legacy. Through his editorial and biographical works Boccaccio constructed this image of Dante. Although it might not be possible to claim that Leopardi had direct knowledge of the Trattatello, it is certain that Boccaccio’s work as dantista had both a direct and an indirect influence on Leopardi. In his Zibaldone di pensieri Leopardi cites time and again Dell’amor patrio di Dante, a work by the contemporary scholar Conte Giulio Perticari.59 Perticari not only cites Boccaccio’s Trattatello in defending Dante’s political stance but also employs the same rhetorical devices used in the introduction to the Trattatello.60 Perticari’s text depends heavily on Boccaccio’s work as biographer of Dante, and in doing so he passes on to readers, Leopardi included, the Dante that Boccaccio formulated. In the erecting of

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the cenotaph inside the church of Santa Croce, the first statuary monument to come actually into existence, Boccaccio’s work as biographer of Dante, although written almost 500 years previously, served as model and inspiration for the effort. Boccaccio’s literary monument to Dante had finally found realization in Tuscan marble. Boccaccio’s great influence on the movement to monumentalize Dante in Florence arose from two primary sources. First, as shown in chapter 1, Boccaccio’s edition of Dante’s work and the inclusion of his own Trattatello in this edition had tremendous success in the manuscript and printed history of Dante’s work.61 Second, by virtue of his own reputation as part of the tre corone of trecento Italy, Boccaccio’s biographical works on Dante, as elaborated in this chapter, authorized his figure of Dante. The figure of Dante that Boccaccio crafted was specifically a political figure that Leopardi and countless others saw fit to elevate to mythic status in their nationalistic campaign. Because Boccaccio himself was at the very foundation of the Italian literary tradition, his words on Dante transcended the historical particularities of trecento politics and remained the primary symbol of the conjoined legacy of Italy’s cultural and political history. Throughout the entirety of Boccaccio’s literary production Dante appears repeatedly as an important point of reference. However, as this chapter has argued, during the 1350s Boccaccio approached Dante with an expanded scope. In the four separate biographical projects concerning Dante, he articulates a coherent myth of the poet. This Dante perfectly conforms to Boccaccio’s own theory of poetics that he elaborates in the Trattatello in laude di Dante and the Genealogia deorum gentilium. Boccaccio uses Dante as a means to forward his own belief in the political function, and therefore the greatest public utility, of vernacular poetry. Current critical conceptions of his relationship to Dante tend to exist on the extremes of the spectrum: Boccaccio adored the poet, or he continually sought to undermine his moral vision. But Boccaccio’s specifically biographical works reveal a far more sophisticated ideological relationship. He monumentalizes Dante in a literary ploy to defend political republicanism and the worth of vernacular poetics in a prehumanistic environment noxious to both.

3 Apologist: Defending the Monument

Quam tandem veri faciem habet ut invideam illi qui in his etatem totam posuit, in quibus ego vix adolescentie florem primitiasque posuerim? Still what likelihood is there that I should envy that man who devoted his whole life to the kind of works that were only the flower and first fruits of my youth? F. Petrarca to G. Boccaccio (Familiarium Rerum Libri XXI, 15)

Boccaccio dantista’s work as an editor and biographer illustrates how he sought to influence the reception of Dante through manipulating the transmission of these texts in his manuscripts. Through his biographical writings, he crafted a figure of Dante that mirrored his own intellectual position. He prefaced the readers’ encounter with his own ‘monumental’ figure of Dante. In this way he propagated a version of Dante and his works into the manuscript culture for centuries to follow. For some of his contemporaries, Boccaccio dantista used other more direct tools to convince specific audiences of his particular vision of Dante. This chapter will examine his arguments in defence of Dante to two different audiences. Indeed, the remainder of this study will contemplate Boccaccio’s position as mediator between his Dante and these two distinct but crucial audiences and the manner in which Boccaccio shifted his reading of Dante, especially Dante’s theological implications, in accordance with his intended audience. In the first case, he enters into a friendly debate with Francesco Petrarca – and by extension the community of Petrarchan humanists – concerning the virtue of Dante’s political life and the validity of his choice to compose in the vernacular. Secondly, he enlarges

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his audience of critics to include those who condemned Dante because he pushed the limits of poetry, particularly vernacular poetry. Boccaccio engages with a group of vernacular authors that dominated the Florentine trecento: the Dominican preachers and volgarizzatori, specifically Bartolomeo di San Concordio and Jacopo Passavanti, who purported to speak to and for the majority of illiterate citizens of Florence and Tuscany. As Boccaccio becomes aware of the vicious nature of Dante’s critics, his defence of Dante becomes equally vicious. This chapter will examine the Corbaccio, his most enigmatic and controversial work, as an apology for Dante as well as an invective against the critics of the new vernacular poetics championed by both Dante and Boccaccio. Along with his effort to build a monument to Dante, he also shows concern that his monumental figure not be defaced by his contemporaries. The epigraph of this chapter epitomizes the subtle nature of the critique raised against Dante by Petrarca. Clearly Petrarca wants to be viewed apart from Dante’s heritage as an innovator of vernacular poetry and in his own vernacular lyric production; it is this success in the vernacular idiom, and the appeal to the wider audience who could read only the vernacular, that had troubled Petrarca and his fellow critics of Dante. As Petrarca will only intimate but never say, he critiques Dante because of his use of the vernacular and the idiom of the courtly tradition in the Commedia. Petrarca feigns disinterest in Dante because he wrote in a genre defined by a different language, a genre that Petrarca claims, disingenuously, to have given up in his youth. Petrarca therefore echoes Boccaccio’s praise of Dante throughout his epistolary writings while, in effect, dismissing Dante as a vernacular poet, or a poet of vernacular culture. I begin by taking up Boccaccio’s stance on the distinction between Latin and the vernacular. Just as with his work as an editor and a biographer, as an apologist Boccaccio sought to define Dante in specifically political and ethical terms so as to better defend him. I will also suggest that among other valid readings, the Corbaccio may be read as an apology for Dante’s Commedia. There are many more unresolved questions than answers surrounding Boccaccio’s last work of vernacular fiction, but specific intertextualities among the Corbaccio, the Commedia, and the Esposizioni sopra la comedia di Dante point up a grating disharmony between Dante and Boccaccio; a sense of crisis with Dante’s Commedia emanates from the Corbaccio. In my reading Boccaccio’s Corbaccio stages a satirical misreading of the Commedia that seeks to defend Dante from his critics while also downplaying and potentially offering a corrective to the potentially controversial claims of the poem. Boccac-

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cio’s Corbaccio adopts, parodically I argue, the perspective of two Dominican volgarizzamenti – Bartolomeo di San Concordio’s Ammaestramenti degli Antichi and Jacopo Passavanti’s Lo Specchio della vera penitenzia – in an attempt to discredit their critique of vernacular poets. Boccaccio also conflates these historical critics with the fictional critics that he writes into the Decameron. As marks his literary style, he speaks to different audiences with different voices. Boccaccio’s letters to Petrarca take on the tone of a poetic agon guided by the grammar and conventions of friendship. The Corbaccio, on the other hand, offers a subtle critique of Dante just as it loudly and comically denounces Boccaccio’s own contemporary critics. Boccaccio’s Advice to Petrarca: Read Dante! Boccaccio’s relationship with Petrarca certainly begins in the mode of a pupil and teacher, but in regards to Dante Boccaccio wants to instruct and even cajole Petrarca. Although rhetorically Boccaccio always maintains proper respect for his praeceptor inclitus, in 1351 he gave Petrarca a gift that suggests more of a collegial relationship. Having met Petrarca for the second time, travelling to Padua for a more extended period, Boccaccio sent Petrarca a book that added to his world-class library. Seeing that his teacher did not have a copy of Dante’s Commedia, Boccaccio sent a manuscript of the poem now known as Vaticano Latino 3199 along with a short Latin poem in praise of Dante.1 Indeed, the early 1350s saw an entire complex of texts that Boccaccio wrote in conversation with Petrarca: two letters, this poem, the Vita Petracchi, and possibly the Vita Petri Damiani. The conversation between the two humanists about the importance of Dante exists in fragments of letters and other literary guises, but this short poem appended to the Commedia stands out as Boccaccio’s first recorded challenge to Petrarca’s apparent ambivalence toward Dante. The gift of the manuscript of Dante’s Commedia and his dedicatory poem were part of a greater political and cultural strategy spearheaded by Boccaccio on behalf of the city of Florence. Petrarca met Boccaccio only briefly at the gates of Florence on his way to Rome, yet this first meeting with Petrarca as he travelled through Florence sparked a mutual friendship between the two authors. It seems that this meeting gave Boccaccio and other local literary luminaries the idea of attempting to lure Petrarca, recently crowned poet laureate, back to Florence. In the spring of 1351 Boccaccio personally delivered a letter, likely composed

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by himself on behalf of the Signoria of Florence, to Petrarca offering him the prestigious chair of the Studio Fiorentino as well as restitution of his family’s patrimony (Epis. VII).2 How it must have disappointed him, the prime mover of this recruitment process, to return to the Signoria with only Petrarca’s letter of gratitude (Fam. XI, v) and a verbal refusal of the offer that Boccaccio himself had delivered. In June of the same year he received another letter from Petrarca announcing his plans to return to Avignon, that Babylon on the Rhone (Fam. XI, vi). In his response to the offer of the cattedra, Petrarca hints at his continued disaffection with Florence for having exiled his father and seized their patrimony. Cui unquam filio culpa patris aut maiorum ager perditus publico consilio restitutus est? Inaudita sunt hec pietatis et liberalitatis indicia, et cum fere raritatem claritas sequatur, quantus exemplo carentis vestre benificentie fulgor erit! Advocor; sed quis, oro, sed a quibus? Quam validis precibus, quam imperiosis blanditiis, quanta spe? (Fam. XI, v. par. 7–8) [Still, what son ever had his land, lost by his father or by his ancestors, restored by public decree? These are rare examples of piety and generosity, and since rarity brings renown, your unique kindness will shine ever so brightly! I am summoned; but who, I ask, summons me? And with what powerful entreaties, with what imperious flattery, with what expectation?]

Petrarca’s bitterness at his family’s exile and this late, self-serving move by the Signoria to bring him back bleeds through the letter. Even more apparent is Petrarca’s fear of the responsibilities that this position would entail; without doubt he would have to sacrifice his poetic solitude, so clearly dear to him in the De Vita Solitaria. This was the message that Petrarca charged Boccaccio to deliver to his political bosses in Florence. Whether the Dante manuscript and the poem were part of the initiative sponsored by the city or a private gift from Boccaccio, the poetic accompaniment betrays his firm resolve to bring Petrarca back to Florence. Where worldly enticement had failed, Boccaccio knew to resort to poetic arguments. The gift of the Commedia suggests that he wanted to invite Petrarca back to Florence for a reward greater than property and position. Rather, he invites Petrarca to take hold of the intellectual patrimony to which he is a possible heir. Laurel crown notwithstanding, Petrarca must accept Dante as his poetic father and return to the patria.

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Boccaccio’s poem reads like an exercise in Latin metrics performed by an advanced student; it does little to improve his reputation as a rather clunky Latin poet.3 However, a certain clarity of theme does surface from the poem’s stilted language and imagery. The sparse commentary on this poem focuses on Boccaccio’s defence of Dante’s philosophical and theological subject matter despite his choice of the vernacular. Although reading the entire poem does bear out this interpretation, Boccaccio is hardly the first to make the claim that Dante is both poet and theologian.4 Fundamentally, in this poem Boccaccio claims that Dante achieved more than just bringing together poetry and philosophy into the vernacular. Rather, this poem defines a unique vision of Dante’s importance in the literary landscape of the trecento. The opening lines immediately define the principle concern of the poem: the promotion of an Italian cultural and political agenda through poetry. 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;

(Carmina V, vv. 1–4)

[O indisputable honour of Italy, whose brow the leaders of Rome adorned with laurel, receive this work of Dante, charming to the learned, wondrous to the multitude, composed, I opine, of a song like no others in any previous age]

Boccaccio ties together Dante and Petrarca as sympathetic figures in the cause of Italian poetry and politics. Petrarca’s laurel crown represents the possible rebirth of a Romanitas, both political and ethical, in a politically fragmented Italy. The laurel crown ties Petrarca to this Roman past, but the poet laureate must also remember his more recent poetic heritage: Boccaccio tells Petrarca to read Dante. Boccaccio addresses this poem specifically to Petrarca as the poet laureate (Illustri viro Francisco Petrarce Laureato) in an effort to remind him of the importance of Florence and of Dante, his greatest poetic predecessor in the vernacular while also appealing to Petrarca’s vanity. However, this poem has a more overt political agenda; it reads as a metrical reprimand for Petrarca’s recent decision to refuse an invitation to return to Florence as magister of the new Florentine Studio, with full reparations for the exile of Petrarca’s family from Florence. Boccaccio purposefully

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conflates Dante and Petrarca as subjects of his poem in their shared exile and poetic vocation. Nec tibi sit durum versus vidisse poete Exulis et patrio tantum sermone sonoros, Frondibus ac nullis redimiti. Crimen inique Fortune exilium; reliquum, voluisse futuris Quid metrum vulgare queat monstrare modernum, Causa fuit vati (Carmina V, vv. 5–10) [May it not be hard for you to look upon verses (so rich in our native tongue!) of a poet who was in exile, not wreathed with any garlands at all. His exile was the fault of adverse fortune. As for the rest, to have wanted to show to future generations what modern poetry could reveal was the poet’s goal.]

The subject of exile and repatriation are just as pertinent to Petrarca as to Dante. Whereas Florence had yet to revoke Dante’s exile, Petrarca willingly prolongs his exile. Boccaccio’s poem links the poet’s mission with the political responsibility to further the culture of the patria; in this sense Petrarca’s refusal to vindicate his family’s shameful exile insults Dante’s struggle to clear his own name. As the epigraph of this chapter illustrates, Petrarca refused to afford full honours to Dante the poet of the vernacular text. We can only imagine the conversation in Padua between Boccaccio and Petrarca in the spring of 1351 as they discussed Dante. We know from Boccaccio’s elegiac remembrance of this meeting in a letter (Epis. X) that they looked over a great many books in Petrarca’s garden. That one of the results of that visit was the copy of the Commedia and this poem hints at a conflict between the two men. Although Petrarca had received all that Dante desired, he sets aside his political role as poet laureate for Italy and Florence. Boccaccio’s poem dedicated to Petrarca serves as both an apology for Dante’s political and literary importance as an exiled Florentine and as an indictment of Petrarca’s refutation of his position as Dante’s natural poetic heir. Consistent with his own arguments put forth in the Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, begun in the period roughly contemporaneous with this poem and discussed in the first chapter of this book, Boccaccio continues to insist on the value of Dante’s vernacular poetry, emphasizing even in

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this Latin the excellence of Dante’s vernacular. Once again, the argument hinges both on Boccaccio’s identification of Dante as new Virgil, a poet of political unification, and on the theological value of Dante’s poetry. Boccaccio outlines Dante’s classical studies, comparing them to Petrarca’s own education. At last, Boccaccio comes to the final, monumentalizing, moment of praise for Dante. Hinc illi egregium sacro moderamine virtus theologi vatisque dedit, simul atque sophye agnomen, factusque fere est gloria gentis altera Florigenum; meritis tamen improba lauris mors properata nimis vetuit vincire capillos.

(Carmina V, vv. 18–22)

[Here, through her sacred guidance, virtue gave him the illustrious appellations of theologian and poet, and at the same time, wisdom. He nearly became the second glory of the Florentine people; but greedy death, too eager, prevented him from binding his hair with the garlands that he deserved.]

Boccaccio’s apology for Dante strives to put aside the question of language, vernacular versus Latin, and emphasizes Dante’s virtue and his status as a theologian and a poet. He resists Petrarca’s critique of Dante as a vernacular poet and stresses the similarity of the poetic mission of his two teachers: poetry as a veil for theological discourse and as a voice for Florentine political unity. He almost grants Dante a posthumous laurel crown by referring to him as ‘gloria gentis altera Florigenum’ (Carmina V, vv. 20–1), appealing one last time to the duty that Petrarca’s laurel crown carries. Boccaccio goes as far as to promise Petrarca continued primacy by putatively naming Dante ‘altera’ (other or second) glory of the Florentine people. The intimate details of Boccaccio and Petrarca’s decade-long discussion of the value of Dante and the overall worth of vernacular poetry in a literary world witnessing the rise of Latin can never be known in their entirety: readers will never recover the missing letters, unrecorded personal conversations, and undetected literary allusions that define this debate. However, much of the recorded interaction between the two comes across as germane to this literary conflict. Boccaccio as an apologist for Dante was as persistent as he was subtle. In the envoi of the poem, Boccaccio moves into the imperative voice, leaving behind the niceties of his disciple status to compel Petrarca to honour Dante.

Apologist: Defending the Monument Nunc, oro, mi care nimis spesque unica nostrum, ingenio quanquam valeas celosque penetres, nec Latium solum fama sed sydera pulses, concivem doctumque satis pariterque poetam suscipe, perlege, iunge tuis, cole, comproba: nam feceris, ipse tibi facies multumque favoris exquires; et, magne, vale, decus Urbis ed orbis.

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(Carmina V, vv. 34–40)

[And now, I pray you, dearest to me, our one and only hope, although you are superior and you soar to the heavens because of your literary talent, and although you strike not only Italy but also the stars with your fame, take in your fellow citizen, as much a scholar as a poet, read him carefully, add him to your collection, cultivate him, approve him. If you do, you will create and discover much favour for yourself. Farewell, great glory of the City and the world.]

With this gift and poem, Boccaccio still entertains hope of luring Petrarca to Florence, but that hope was futile; Petrarca was already on his way to Avignon. Only a few years later, in a letter 1353, Boccaccio takes a much sharper tone with Petrarca, chastising him for his decision to move from Avignon to Milan under the protection of the Visconti tyrant. Hic solitudinum commendator egregius atque cultor, quid multitudine circumseptus aget? Quid tam sublimi preconio liberam vitam atque paupertatem honestam extollere consuetus, iugo alieno subditus et inhonestis ornatus divitiis faciet? Quid virtutum exortator clarissimus, vitiorum sectator effectus, decantabit ulterius? Ego nil aliud nosco quam erubescere et opus suum dampnare, et virgilianum illud aut coram aut secus cantare carmen: Quid non mortalia pectora cogis auri sacra fames? (Epistole X, par. 27–8) [What will this lonely advocate and cultivator of solitude do surrounded by the multitudes? And he who used to exalt with great praise the free life and humble honesty, now put under the foreign yoke and ornamented with ill-gotten riches – what will he do? What will this famous champion of virtue celebrate, having become a follower of vice? I know that there remains nothing for him but to blush and condemn his actions, and sing that song of Virgil to him and to all: ‘To what do you not lead the spirits of men, o wicked and inexorable lust for gold?’

This highly wrought passage contains a citation of Virgil (Aen. III, v. 56–

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7) that has a remarkable literary afterlife in Dante’s Commedia. In Purgatorio XXII (vv. 40–1) Statius cites this passage to Virgil and Dante in his description of his own prodigality: “‘Per che non reggi tu, o sacra fame/ de’l’oro, l’appetito de’ mortali?’” [‘To what end, O cursed hunger for gold, / do you not govern the appetite of mortals?’] Readers of Dante from Francesco da Buti in the trecento to Hollander’s new edition of the Purgatorio have debated whether Dante misconstrued Virgil’s words because of a mistranslation or a purposeful misprision.5 What Boccaccio thought about Dante’s citation of Virgil escapes our purview here, although it is certainly fair to point out the Boccaccio had no problem changing the text of his literary father in his copy of the Vita Nova. But Boccaccio does remind Petrarca, once again, that he and Dante share a poetic heritage that goes back to Virgil, and that this shared poetic tradition should serve a political and ethical purpose rather than a wealthy and powerful patron. Petrarca’s choice to serve the Visconti tyrants in Milan just two years after his refusal to return to Florence as first citizen is a great political and intellectual betrayal, both of the Florentine patria and of Boccaccio.6 A period of cooling off seems to follow this communication. The last letters between the two attest that Boccaccio remained ever respectful of Petrarca as his teacher, but Dante remained Boccaccio’s master. The interaction between these two nobles of the tre corone illustrates how Boccaccio continuously sought to defend his version of Dante so that he could advance his own vision of the role of poetry and the poet on the manuscript page and in the city. The Corbaccio: Boccaccio’s Vernacular Parody Boccaccio approaches the task of defending Dante from Petrarca’s pronounced apathy with a light touch. Fundamentally, he respects Petrarca and knows that his masters are sympathetic thinkers, but he takes up the gauntlet in defence of Dante from his lesser critics. In the Corbaccio, Boccaccio offers a satirical misreading of the Commedia that demonstrates how a purely theological reading of the poem can lead to ambiguous moral action. His audience in this text is both the vernacular readership of his Decameron and Dante’s Commedia and the more educated volgarizzatori and preachers who are also the target of his satire. Boccaccio intends to protect Dante from criticism for his theological views by changing the subject of the critical debate. In the Corbaccio, he offers Dante’s critics a defence of Dante by shifting the blame from the author to the misin-

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formed reader. In defending Dante, Boccaccio attempts to figure him as a political and literary figure rather than a theological poet; he stakes the political future of Florence on the recovery of Dante as a figure of moral rectitude, not as a poet of theological vision. In confronting the many critics of Dante’s poem Boccaccio utilizes satire to reclaim Dante’s political value. What Is the Corbaccio? In the light of Boccaccio’s entire literary production, vernacular as well as Latin, critics have registered justifiable confusion when faced with the unmistakably misogynist ravings of this wicked little work. Because the Corbaccio, Boccaccio’s last literary work in the vernacular, seems so philosophically out of step with his other vernacular fiction, it has forced critics to articulate an amazing variety of readings. Robert Hollander, in his characteristic detail, summarizes the decades of debate around the Corbaccio (and also notes how his own mind has changed over time).7 His observations, at least in this work, do not claim to answer any of the questions raised by the Corbaccio; rather he plainly details the most problematic issues in the critical discussion. Most of the interpretive questions cannot be answered here, but it is helpful to enumerate them. Is the text autobiographical? If not, does Boccaccio truly mean what his narrator and spirit-guide recommends to the lost soul? What is the meaning of the title Corbaccio? Was the text written in the mid 1350s or the 1360s? And why is it laden with overtly Dantean language and imagery? Scholars have answered these questions with widely divergent opinions that attempt to illumine Boccaccio’s artistic vision and psychological state in the later part of his literary career. Those who read the Corbaccio as an autobiographical or at least non-satirical misogynist diatribe against women tend to rely on the justification that the author underwent a radical spiritual and moral conversion in the early 1360s.8 On the other hand, some scholars have moved to discount any autobiographical intention in the Corbaccio, positing a more playful reading of the text as a satire. Perhaps the most convincing argument is by Psaki, who states that the Corbaccio is a ‘self conscious and slyly critical commentary’ on the conventions of two specific literary traditions: the misogynist scholarly tract and the dream-vision.9 In the strictly autobiographical narrative that has mostly dominated scholarship on the Corbaccio, Boccaccio, having undergone a radical spiritual conversion in his old age, uses the Corbaccio to retract the views expressed earlier in his vernacular fiction;

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the Corbaccio is Boccaccio’s conversio amoris.10 The other side of the argument holds that the Corbaccio represents an appendix to the Decameron. In both cases critics see the Corbaccio as a text produced in the same milieu as the Decameron. Of course, since the Decameron itself remains the subject of divergent opinion, this initial supposition does not greatly clarify the meaning. Even a first appraisal of the Corbaccio suggests many possible responses to the basic question: what is the Corbaccio? The narrative device that characterizes the text is a framed dream-vision. The reader can hardly imagine a narrative device more indebted to familiar texts of trecento Italy. A scholar-narrator recounts his spiritual depression at the rejection of his amorous advances to an older lady. After a Boethian consolatio, the narrator slips into a dream-vision. Lost in a Dantean wilderness, he encounters a spirit-guide who, after a lengthy misogynistic diatribe, counsels the scholar to take vengeance on the woman, who happens to be the same spirit-guide’s chronically unfaithful widow. Awake, the scholar ends the text by invoking a negative envoi that, instead of indicating the proposed audience for the text, asks that the text not come into the hands of the woman who is the object of the author’s formidable scorn. The Corbaccio fits comfortably into the particular trecento genre of the dream-vision: it invokes not only the Commedia but also Petrarca’s Trionfi and Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione along with a myriad of other classical and medieval texts. Once again, in the Corbaccio, Boccaccio formulates the category of the tre corone by pushing the generic limits his medieval models. The structure of the Corbaccio adheres to the conventions of the medieval dream-vision, but as many readers have pointed out, the work also tips its hat to Ovid.11 Clearly Ovid’s Remedia Amoris is the closest thematic parallel to Boccaccio’s work but the misogynist tenor, present but less exaggerated in Ovid’s corpus, pertains just as much to the Christian tradition as to Ovid or other classical sources. There are, to be sure, some classical genres that play a role in the Corbaccio and are likely models. For example, another Ovidian source present in Boccaccio’s mind at the time of composition must have been the specialized autobiographical rant known as the ‘invective’ or curse literature. Boccaccio’s discovery and subsequent autograph copy of the only Latin example of the curse literature genre, Ovid’s Ibis, sheds light on this relationship. Ovid’s Ibis, written in exile, focuses the narrator’s autobiographical rage on a political foe, while Boccaccio’s narrator and spirit-guide both rail against an unwilling lover, but the two texts share

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a vituperative tone and a tendency to exhaust the literary catalogue of possible insults. Furthermore, the avian similarity in the names of the two texts cannot be overlooked (Corbaccio is certainly derived from the Italian ‘corvo’ meaning crow; ibis’ is a type of bird in both Latin and English).12 While Boccaccio did not suffer the political exile like that which inspired Ovid, he may have written this invective during a period of bitter political disaffection after Niccolò Acciaiuoli’s poor treatment of him in Naples in 1362–3 added venom to his tongue.13 Ovid was a favourite source for Boccaccio throughout his literary career, and his discovery of a new Ovidian text must have sparked his creativity. The Corbaccio participates in many different generic categories available in Boccaccio’s vast canon of classical sources. However, the specific relationship between Boccaccio and Ovid’s newly discovered classical satire Ibis links the Corbaccio to the specific genre of the invective, in which the author’s particular political state – exile – tempers the meaning of the text. The Corbaccio shares both the parodic, almost comedic, aspect of the Ibis and its overtly satirical and moralistic tone. The generic hybridism of the Corbaccio has led to numerous claims about the final motive of the text. The very fluid nature of the Corbaccio’s literary membership presents the opportunity for any number of insightful readings, and it would certainly not be beyond Boccaccio’s playful attitude to provide the reader with such a literary spectacle. This chapter proposes another possible reading of the Corbaccio that provides a new perspective on some of the philological and interpretive issues that continue to plague the critical history of this text. I propose that the Corbaccio be read, at least in part, as a defence of Dante’s Commedia (as well as a defence of Boccaccio’s Decameron) in light of the criticisms levelled against vernacular literature by contemporary Dominicans. After discussing two of the key critical issues surrounding the text, the date of composition and the contemporary critiques of texts such as the Commedia and the Decameron, I will argue that the Corbaccio defends Dante the author by satirizing the critics of the Commedia and the Decameron in a way that reveals the hypocrisy latent in the critics of vernacular literature. The spirit-guide character in the Corbaccio takes on the perspective of those critics who would misunderstand and abuse Dante’s vision. However, this critique is offered through the lens of Boccaccio’s experience of writing and defending the Decameron and with Boccaccio’s own reservations about the theological valence of Dante’s text. In defending both Dante and himself as champions of the new vernacular literature, Boccaccio must take on preachers such as Bartolomeo di San Concordio and

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Jacopo Passavanti. Once again, Boccaccio stakes the validity of Dante’s legacy on ideological points that resonate with his own agenda concerning the political and literary life of Florence. Corbaccio’s Date (Does It Matter?)? As pointed out in Hollander’s summary of critical opinions about the Corbaccio, views on the date of composition of the text depend on whether the text is accepted as an autobiographical text or as a satire.14 The traditional dating, which was based on philological evidence as well as a reading of the narrator’s self-description in the text itself, suggests that it was composed in 1354–5, shortly after the initial debate between Boccaccio and Petrarca over the Studio Fiorentino.15 This date also places the composition of the work in the same period as Passavanti’s Lenten sermons in front of Santa Maria Novella. Other readers, most notably Giorgio Padoan, want to move the date of composition forward to 1365– 66. Padoan’s article on the subject cites weak textual evidence along with biographical suppositions regarding Boccaccio’s own pious conversion to argue that Boccaccio could not have conceived of the Corbaccio so near to the composition of the Decameron: rather, the text comes from the period of his withdrawal to Certaldo in 1365–6.16 Padoan’s argument has convinced many readers, but his suggestions have also stirred up others who reacted against the inference that the Corbaccio was a serious autobiographical work marking a complete ideological about-face from the Decameron. The most recent contribution to the controversy about dating the text comes from Marco Veglia who buttresses Padoan’s position. Veglia relies more on matching the moral tone of the Corbaccio with the composition of Boccaccio’s opere latine in the 1360s.17 Indeed, the similarity of tone between the Corbaccio and Boccaccio’s Epistle XIII to Francesco Nelli of 1363 would further support this later date. The state of opinion about the composition date of the Corbaccio has veered off any philological footing and now serves as a support structure for predominantly autobiographical or ideological readings of the text. The seemingly immense ideological gap that separates the Corbaccio from the Decameron has led most critics to the inevitable conclusion that the Corbaccio could only have been written after a dramatic shift on Boccaccio’s part. As one astute reader of Boccaccio puts it, ‘what Boccaccio understood so well in the Decameron VIII, 7, however, he forgot in the Corbaccio.’18 Whether one chooses to accept the earlier or later dating of

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the Corbaccio, recent conclusions about the composition of the Decameron reveal the false supposition that underpins this entire debate. In a series of recent studies, Vittore Branca, foremost critic on Boccaccio’s textual history, has definitely established that Boccaccio completed two distinct redactions of the Decameron.19 It has long been understood that during the second half of the 1360, in the same period as the supposed later composition of the Corbaccio, Boccaccio made an autograph manuscript of the Decameron that is now known as Hamilton 90. Branca’s research reveals that Hamilton 90 is more than just a copy of an earlier work: it is a new version. Thus, whether critics assign the Corbaccio to the early to middle 1350s or the mid-1360s, it was written between the two versions of the Decameron. This new philological information concerning the chronology of Boccaccio’s literary production forces readers to reconsider their attitude of approach to the Corbaccio; as a work composed in concert with the writing or the rewriting of the Decameron, current with Boccaccio’s work as dantista, and within the parameters of the debate over the vernacular with Petrarca, the Corbaccio holds important clues about Boccaccio’s authorial perspective and his stance on Dante. Perhaps the simplest fact about the Corbaccio stands out as the most informative. Boccaccio wrote the Corbaccio in the vernacular so that it would be in dialogue with Dante, Petrarca, and his own earlier texts. Who Is the Corbaccio? Along with Boccaccio, Petrarca, and other trecento humanists, another group of literate men were translating Latin culture, both classical and Christian, for the newly sophisticated audience of vernacular readers in Florence. As yet, no readers of the Corbaccio have considered this group as a potential audience (or a target of parody) for this text. The Dominican Order, founded by St Dominic as the ordo praedicatorum (order of preachers), preached to audiences throughout Tuscany. At the beginning of the trecento these oral sermons turned into longer written treatises that translated Latin sources, classical, patristic, saints’ lives, and others, into the contemporary Tuscan dialect used by Boccaccio: the so called volgarizzamenti. A translation of the Vitae Patrum into the Tuscan vernacular by Domenico Cavalca (ca. 1270–1342) brought a rich source of stories, anecdotes, and names to a wider audience. Although composing their works in the same language and dialect used by the poets, these Dominican preachers had a different view of the utility of the vernacular.

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As Delcorno has shown in his study on Italian preachers, they composed the literature of exempla that both influenced and was influenced by other vernacular narrative trends of the trecento.20 Of specific interest in this discussion of possible analogues to Boccaccio’s Corbaccio is Cavalca’s fellow Pisan-born Dominican, Bartolomeo di San Concordio (1267–1342). A more accomplished writer of his own accord than Cavalca, Bartolomeo produced one of the most important volgarizzamenti of the trecento, Gli Ammaestramenti degli Antichi. Dedicated to Geri degli Spini, a Florentine best known to modern audiences for his cameo in the Decameron (VI, 2), Gli Ammaestramenti collects and translates classical, patristic, and scholastic opinions on questions of natural philosophy, vice, virtue, and fortune. However, the questions of vice and virtue take up the greatest portion of the work. Bartolomeo has put together more than just a handbook to virtue; the word ‘ammaestramenti’ describes his motivation to indoctrinate his readership in the Latin teachings of the ancients. His pedagogical method involves citation of Christian and classical sources (always in that order) in reference to specific philosophical questions. At times he also interjects his own opinion into the collection of authorities. However, in Bartolomeo’s desire to ‘ammaestrare’ (indoctrinate) his readers, as the title of the work announces, he focuses his moralistic discussion of his sources on questions of vice and virtue.21 He carefully subordinates his use of classical sources to the needs of his Christian moral project. He undertakes to bring sources that are unavailable to the illiterate citizens, both through his translation from Latin and his rare knowledge of non-Christian philosophy, but he shows caution toward these sources by categorically disqualifying certain genres. The eleventh distinction, ‘De dottrina, e modo dire,’ takes on the relationship between doctrine and authority. Bartolomeo’s third rubric in this distinction sums up his scepticism about specific sources of doctrinal authority. Che’l parlare de’dottori, ovvero de’dicitori non dee essere tropo composto. Rub(rica) III. 1 Non dee il dottore tanto studiare a bene parlare, che ‘l suo dire paja troppo composto.22 [The language of the teachers, or of the authors, should not be too elegant. Rubric III. 1 The teachers should not study too much how to speak well, so that their speech should not be too elegant.]

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Bartolomeo takes up Augustine’s position in De doctrina cristiana (he cites that work in this rubric) about the dangers of dressing up doctrine in the vestments of figurative or rhetorically elaborate language. This tension, which subtends Bartolomeo’s entire project, is perhaps best evidenced by his continual reference to St Jerome, the other canonical authority on the use and danger of classical literature. Bartolomeo wants to save the pagan auctores that he translates into Tuscan while warning his audience off of the contemporary dicitori (I read this category broadly: preachers, storytellers, and poets speaking and writing in Tuscan) who mimic the same classical authors that he cites as authorities. For Bartolomeo, Virgil is an authority but Dante is not heard from; Ovid and Valerius Maximus yes, but certainly not Boccaccio; Cicero in, Petrarch out. In Bartolomeo’s view then, the vernacular is the mode of simplification of unavailable sources for the moral edification of his audience; he is not just translating classical texts for an illiterate audience, but also redressing the errors of the classical authors to achieve a Christian end. St Augustine and St Jerome would approve. The Corbaccio takes apart this view of the value and use of classical literature in its new vernacular form. In mimicking Ovid’s Remedia Amoris and Ibis, Boccaccio contemporizes classical genres into the Tuscan culture of the trecento. As part of this redressing of classical sources that refuses to be a simplification or an imitation, Boccaccio parodies Bartolomeo’s view of classical literature and its uses. As in the Ammaestramenti the spirit-guide who speaks of vice and virtue like a Dominican comes across as a parodic version of a preacher and spends a great deal of time laying out the vices of his widow. In his long harangue against women, he touches on all the vices: ‘lussuria’ (lust, Corbaccio, par. 149), ‘avarissima’ (most avaricious, Corbaccio, par. 160), ‘ira e superbia’ (wrath and pride, Corbaccio, par. 182), ‘gulosa, invidiosa, accidiosa’ (gluttonous, envious, lazy, Corbaccio, par. 185). Bartolomeo outlines these same seven deadly sins in his twenty-fourth distinction and goes on to treat them in more depth in his next ten distinctions (Ammaestramenti, 195–261). A further sympathy with the Corbaccio, or at least with the misogynistic literature that the spirit-guide of the Corbaccio mimics, emerges with the thirty-fifth distinction: ‘De’ vizi delle femmine’ (On the vices of women, Ammaestramenti, 261–5). Citing biblical, patristic, classical and Christian philosophers, Bartolomeo comes up with the conventional misogynistic attacks on women: ‘La prima, che femmina è capo da’mali. / La seconda, che le femmine sono mobili. / La terza, contro le femmine bevitrici. [The first, that woman is the source of all evils. The second, that women are

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fickle. The third, against women who drink] (Ammaestramenti, 261). The Corbaccio reproduces and mimics, at least in the spirit-guide’s rhetorical attack, the conventional misogynistic voice of the Dominican preacher Bartolomeo di San Concordio. Beyond the cataloguing of vices and the spirit-guide’s misogynistic voice, the preacher and the spirit-guide share another trait: the stated desire to teach (‘ammaestrare’) their sinful subjects. For Bartolomeo the purpose of his work resonates directly from the title: Ammaestramenti degli Antichi. The ‘ammaestramento,’ which relates specifically to the teaching of doctrine and authority that Bartolomeo offers to his readers and listeners, reflects his Dominican charge to teach and preach. Boccaccio’s spirit-guide in the Corbaccio claims this same doctrinal purpose and authoritative position in his instruction of the lost soul. Ma, per ciò che la contrizione delle commesse colpe, la quale mi pare conoscere in te venuta, ti dimostri docile e attento dovere essere a’futuri ammaestramenti, mi piace una sola delle cagioni per la quale la divina bontà si mosse a dovere me mandare ad aiutarti ne’tuoi affanni. (Corbaccio, par. 70) [However, since contrition for the sins you have committed (which I sense has entered you) shows you that you must be obedient and attentive to the future teachings, I would like to consider only one of the causes for which Divine Goodness was moved to send me to help your afflictions.]

The spirit-guide speaks in the same terms as the Dominican preacher; he indoctrinates his audience (‘ammaestrare’) from a position of divine authority (‘divina bontà’). Boccaccio uses the character of the spirit-guide to offer a critical parody of the Dominican preachers. The arguments from the Corbaccio are not particular to Bartolomeo but the presentation of the argument by a preacher in the vernacular creates the parodic nature of the text. The spirit-guide character in the Corbaccio not only sounds but also, and as we will soon see, looks the part of a Dominican preacher roaming trecento Tuscany. Bartolomeo di San Concordio’s Ammaestramenti degli Antichi proposes a strict use of classical literature that limits it to the realm of Christian morality. Through his entire literary career, from his early vernacular works through his defence of poetry at the end of the Genealogia, Boccaccio argues that literature, specifically the vernacular, has a broader function: it has a political as well as a moral end. In the Corbaccio, he offers a parody of this view of a specifically moral purpose

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of literature. Indeed, the spirit-guide’s discourse sounds just like the Dominican preacher’s, but the vehemence of his message is more like Ovid’s furia in the Ibis. Boccaccio brings out the hypocrisy of the Latinliterate preacher who cites classical authors for his sermon while prohibiting contemporary authors from using them as models. Bartolomeo’s work is a volgarizzamento of both Christian and classical sources but his literary labour claims the spiritual authority of the church. The vernacular production of Dante and Boccaccio exists outside of the protection of the church or monastery. Another Dominican preacher provided a possible source of parody for the Corbaccio. As with Bartolomeo di San Concordio’s Ammaestramenti degli Antichi, we need look no further than the title of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio to find an intriguing relationship. Jacopo Passavanti’s Lo specchio della vera penitenza is a collection of his sermons delivered in 1534 in Florence at the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella during Lent. Passavanti served as prior of that church from the 1340s until his death in 1357 (notably, he would have been prior when the brigata met there to flee Florence in the frame-story of the Decameron) and he was Vicar General of the Dominican Order in Florence from 1350 to 1352. Passavanti was a well-known figure in the Tuscany of his day, as an authoritative official of the ordo praedicatorum, as a theologian, and as a captivating and zealous public preacher. His stories of sinners and saints, ancient and contemporary, competed with Boccaccio’s own tales in trecento Tuscany.23 Along with the works of Bartolomeo di San Concordio and Domenico Cavalca’s translation of the Vitae Patrum, Passavati’s tales of sinners turned saints were part of the vernacular culture of Tuscany and all of Italy. Passavanti’s Specchio interlaces authoritative doctrinal questions on sin and penitence from biblical, patristic, and scholastic sources with exempla that bring out his penitential message. Thus his work is simultaneously a religious manual for the illiterate, a volgarizzamento of Christian authors, a collection of saints’ lives, and a source of entertainment for his listeners. In one distinction we find a possible analogue to Boccaccio’s Corbaccio. In a discussion of fear as an obstacle to true penitence, Passavanti relates the story of ‘Ser Lo.’ This exemplum likely refers to Serlo of Wilton (ca. 1105–81), a Latin grammarian and poet turned Cluniac monk and later Cistercian abbot of L’Aumone in Blois.24 While a master of logic and philosophy at Paris Serlo is visited by a recently deceased former pupil dressed in a parchment-like robe covered with philosophical aphorisms and syllogisms. The robe, being of divine manufacture, possesses other hidden devices:

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Vedi tu, diss’egli, questa cioppa piena di soffismi, della quale io paio vestito? Questa mi pesa e grava più che s’io avessi la maggiore torre di Parigi o la maggiore montagna del mondo in su le spalle … Vedi tu il fodero di questa cappa? tutta è bracia, e fiammma d’ardente fuoco pennace …25 [‘Do you see,’ he said, ‘this gown full of sophisms that I seem to be dressed in? This weighs and holds me down more than if I had Paris’ greatest tower or the world’s biggest mountain on my shoulders … Do you see the sleeve of this cape? It is really a brace, and it burns with the ardent flame of punishment’]

This description of the vestments worn by the suffering student closely resembles the description of the robe worn by the spirit-guide in the Corbaccio.26 The student warns his former master of the torments of Inferno for those distracted by worldly desires, whether carnal desire or the desire for knowledge. With just a little more convincing about the torments of hell by the student and the dangers of delaying penitence, the master of logic gives up philosophy and leaves Paris for a monastery. The story of Serlo concludes with a distich that brings out the moral lesson. Serlo declares his true penitence with the statement: ‘Linquo coax ranis, cra corvis vanaque vanis; Ad loycam pergo, quae mortis non timet ergo,’ which Passavanti translates for his illiterate audience: Io lascio alle rane il graccidare e a’ corvi il crocitare, e le cose vane del mondo agli uomini vani; e io me ne vado a tale loica, che non teme le conclusione della morte: cioè alla santa Religione. (Specchio, 45) [I leave croaking to the frogs, cawing to the crows, and vanities to the vain; I go by the logic that does not fear the finality of death: namely by Holy Faith.]

Boccaccio could well have known this aphorism of Serlo through its inclusion in Passavanti’s Specchio or in other sources that tell of Serlo of Wilton and his conversion, including Jacques de Vitry’s Sermones de tempore. The cawing of Serlo’s crows refers, in the context of the story as told by Passavanti, to the idle chatter of the philosophers and logicians of Paris. Boccaccio’s title Corbaccio (from the word ‘corvo’) might refer to Passavanti’s aphorism and his moralizing sermons performed, and even perhaps witnessed by Boccaccio, during Lent of 1354. Serlo’s story also recalls Boccaccio’s story of Tignoccio and Meuccio (Corbaccio VII, 10)

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in which Tignoccio brings Meuccio ‘novelle dall’altro mondo’ after his death. As with Bartolomeo di San Concordio, Boccaccio seems to draw attention to the Dominican preachers and their distrust for those who seek anything other than moral edification from their studies; I also offer Serlo’s story as another possible identification (as if one were needed) for the enigmatic title of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio. In Bartolomeo’s Ammaestramenti degli Antichi we needed a fine sieve to sift the tension between his classical sources and the proper use of rhetoric for contemporary dicitori; indeed, his project of harmonizing classical and Christian thought represents a continuation of the scholastic mode into the trecento. Jacopo Passavanti, on the other hand, does not spare the rod in his castigation of his contemporaries who wander from the safe fields of the evangelists and Church Fathers: he is not a scholastic harmonizer. è manifesto segno ch’ e’ maestri e predicatori sieno amadori adulteri della vanagloria, quando, predicando e insegnando, lasciano le cose utili e necessarie alla salute degli uditori, e dicono sottigliezze e novitadi e vane filosofie, con parole mistiche e figurate, poetando e studiando di mescolarvi rettorici colori, che dilettino agli orecchi e non vadano al quore. (Specchio, 283) [it is a clear sign that the teachers and preachers are false lovers of vainglory, when preaching and teaching, they forget the things useful and necessary to the health of their listeners, and they speak of subtleties and of novelties and of vain philosophies, with mystical and figurative language, speaking in poetry and attempting to mix in rhetorical colours that bring pleasure to the ears rather than going into the heart.]

Passavanti warns his audience against the pride of those preachers and teachers who stray from the simple lessons of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers. He aims his barbs at those who seem, by their use of poetic language, to privilege the aesthetics of their words rather than the edifying value of the text, never pausing to consider whether aesthetics and ethics might be complementary. Shortly after this blanket condemnation of poetry Passavanti focuses his attention on the vernacular poets in particular and perhaps Dante himself. e non si dee cercare ne’libri vani de’filosafi e de’ poeti mondani; i quali avvegna che dicessono molte e belle cose disputando de’vizi e delle virtudi,

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e del cielo e delle stelle, e de’costumi delle genti, non per ispirazione de Spirito Santo, ma per ingengo dello spirito naturale, parlando molte cose vane, e non vere favoleggiano, dissono più tosto a dilettare gli orecchi che a correggere i vizi . . . e molti di loro studiano le commedie di Terrenzio e di Giovanale ed d’Ovidio, e ramanzi e sonetti d’amore; che è al tutto illecito. (Specchio, 285–6) [and one should not look in the vain books of the philosophers and of the worldly poets; in these books they say many comely things in discussing vice and virtue, the stars the heavens, the habits of men, not through inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but by the genius of their natural spirit, saying many vain things, and telling untrue stories, they speak to delight the ears rather than to correct vice . . . Many of them study the comedies of Terrence and Juvenal and of Ovid, and romances and love sonnets; this is all forbidden.]

Although the references are too oblique to conclude that Passavanti has Dante in mind, this harangue indicates that he certainly would include Dante (and Boccaccio, for that matter) in his list of ‘maestri’ that obscure the true religious purpose of preaching and teaching with their ‘poetando’ and desire to ‘dilettare gli orecchi.’ With the same privileged hypocrisy noted in Bartolomeo’s writing, Passavanti goes on to make fun of the volgarizzatori in a manner similar to Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia. He singles out a number of Italian dialects for scorn, including that of the Florentines: ‘Tra i quali i Fiorentini, con vocaboli squarciati e smaniosi’ [among which the Florentines, with their truncated and crazy words] (Specchio, 288). His criticism of the poets and others who would misuse their skill in the ars rhetorica goes well beyond what we saw in Bartolomeo di San Concordio. Passavanti, perhaps as a result of living in Florence, the epicentre of vernacular culture, targets the poets who dare to go beyond simplifications of classical authors for a Christian moral end. He rails against the very project of Dante’s and Boccaccio’s poetics: the validation of poetic discourse, whether Latin or vernacular, as a source of ethics. The Corbaccio offers a parody of the limited view that Bartolomeo, and to a greater extent, Passavanti propose in their volgarizzamenti. The spiritguide’s desire to ‘ammaestrare’ the lost lover in Ovidian terms mimics Bartolomeo’s motive to reform rather than simply translate his classical and Christian sources. Bartolomeo’s scepticism toward rhetorical language and his misogyny bleed through to Boccaccio’s spirit-guide. Jacopo Passavanti’s Specchio della vera penitenzia further sequesters the

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vernacular readership from the dangers of vernacular literature by condemning not only the figurative language of the classical poets but also the modern practitioners of the Tuscan dialect. His manual of penitence and contrition communicates the same lessons that we hear from the spirit-guide in the Corbaccio. It remains to be seen how Boccaccio will react to this wholesale condemnation of vernacular poetics. Misreading Dante in the Corbaccio Readers of the Corbaccio have never doubted the presence of Dante’s Commedia. While textual references often escape exact identification, the overwhelming density of Dantean allusions demands the reader’s attention.27 These intertextual moments come almost exclusively, as so far identified, from either the Inferno or Purgatorio. However, as the remainder of this chapter will highlight, these echoes resist more specific categorization. The textual allusions to the Commedia, often ambiguous to point of catachresis, offer non-sequential narrative signposts taken straight from Dante’s Commedia without ever resolving them into a coherent system. Furthermore, written at the same time as the Decameron, Boccaccio similarly conflates the Commedia with his own authorial voice(s) in that text. Thus, in the Corbaccio Boccaccio employs a metaleptical narrative strategy to simultaneously recall and yet elude the strong moral framework of Dante’s Commedia.28 Boccaccio models his text on his most important literary predecessor, Dante; likewise, he positions the Corbaccio as a response to his own earlier text, the Decameron. Thus, Boccaccio resolves to connect himself with Dante as a literary model (Commedia and the Decameron) while creating parodic distance from these two models. In the end, however, he seeks not to rewrite or overcome either Dante’s Commedia or his own Decameron, but instead, to salvage the reputation of vernacular poetics from the attacks of contemporary critics such as the Dominican authors Jacopo Passavanti and Bartolomeo di San Concordio, who dismissed vernacular poetics as perilous to the redemptive purpose of literature. Boccaccio obscures the theological context of Dante’s poetry so that the substance, the political and ethical, might be more apparent. Moreover, the Corbaccio also parodies the vernacular sermons of these two Dominican preachers. The very elusiveness of meaning that marks my current reading and that has troubled modern readers of the Corbaccio is, in a sense, the rhetorical mode of the text itself. The Corbaccio brings up more questions than it answers; one of the most salient questions raised by this text – What does Boccaccio intend the Corbaccio to tell

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us about Dante’s Commedia? – asks only that the reader take another look at Dante’s thought. At the beginning of the dream-vision narrative in the Corbaccio Boccaccio drops the reader into an apparently familiar Dantean landscape. The narrator finds himself in ‘una solitudine diserta, aspra e fiera, piena di salvatiche piante’ [in a desolate wilderness, rough and harsh, rankly overgrown with trees], in which he cannot discern ‘da qual parte io mi fossi in quella entrato’ [from what direction I had entered it] (Corbaccio, par. 31–2). This passage clearly comes directly from Inferno I, 4–10: ‘esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte . . . Io non so ben ridir com’i’v’intrai’ [that savage forest, dense and difficult ... I cannot clearly say how I entered the wood]. In choosing to stage the initial act of the dream-vision within such a blatantly Dantean mise-en-scène, Boccaccio prepares the reader for a straightforward prose retelling of Dante’s Commedia. Moreover, the rhetorical opening deposits the reader into the narrative structure of the classic account of the author’s moral chaos. While the narrator is meandering lost and bewildered through the wasteland, the reader knows that a wise man will come to lead the dreamer out of his distress. Initially, Boccaccio fulfils the reader’s rational expectation by bringing forward, on cue, the guide figure analogous to Dante’s Virgil. But Boccaccio deliberately veers away from his model as he manipulates the source text: he conflates his guide with other characters from the Commedia. Boccaccio’s guide definitely plays the role of Dante’s Virgil: he greets the lost narrator and serves as the principal source of guidance throughout the entire vision. Lexically, the description of the guide more closely follows Dante’s description of Cato in Purgatorio I, 31–4: ‘vidi presso di me un veglio solo … lunga la barba e di pel bianco mista’ [I saw a solitary patriarch near me … his beard was long and mixed with white]. Boccaccio presents his guide similarly: ‘un uomo senza alcuna compagnia … era di statura grande, e di pelle e di pelo bruno, benchè in parte bianco divenuto fosse per gli anni’ [A solitary man … he was of great stature … with dark skin and hair though partly white due to his age] (Corbaccio, par. 34–5). Although the guide holds the narrative place of Virgil, Boccaccio presents him in the textual terms not just of Virgil but also of Cato. Like Virgil, Cato evokes the classical, and specifically Roman, world. Yet Dante’s Cato, unlike Virgil, belongs to the economy of Christian redemption. This process continues throughout the Corbaccio: Boccaccio employs Dantean imagery and language in an intentionally elusive manner to create vague and multiple parallels within the reader’s mind. Instead of

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facilitating the reader’s interpretive experience, the overwhelming presence of Dantean echoes only confuses the narrative of the dream-vision. Boccaccio figures the reading experience as irreducible to one simple point: the reader’s mind turns within a labyrinth of literary voices. Unlike Dante’s text and the genre of the dream-vision, the spirit-guide character in the Corbaccio assumes the role of protagonist, or perhaps more accurately, antagonist. Aside from the brief prologue to the dream, the Corbaccio relies on the guide, rather than the supposedly autobiographical character of the scholar, to narrate the events. Indeed, the narrative turns from the danger of the scholar to the history of the spiritguide. The Corbaccio is not the story of the scholar’s amorous difficulties and redemption through vengeance; rather it is a forum for the bitter testament of a jilted cuckold. The guide, as hinted in the discussion of Passavanti’s Specchio, is the character suggested by the title Il Corbaccio. If Boccaccio’s initial presentation of the spirit-guide figure gives the experienced reader pause in its conflation of Virgil and Cato and pilgrim and guide, his continuing description of the man’s dress signals an even more suspicious intertextual moment. Boccaccio notes that the guide’s cloak: ‘era lunghissimo e largo di colore vermiglio, come che assai più vivo mi paresse … che quello che tingono i nostri maestri’ [was very long, wide, and vermilion in colour … it seemed far brighter to me than those which our craftsmen dye here] (Corbaccio, par. 35). Then he goes on to describe the guide’s movement toward the pilgrim with ‘lenti passi’ (slow steps), slowed by the weight of his robe (Corbaccio, par. 36). Compare Boccaccio’s description of the guide’s dress with Dante’s picture of the hypocrites Loderingo and Catalano. Là giù trovammo una gente dipinta che giva intorno assai con lenti passi, piangendo e nel sembiante stanca e vinta. Elli avean cappe con cappucci bassi dinanzi alli occhi, fatte della taglia che in Clugnì per li monaci fassi. Di fuor dorate son, sì ch’elli abbaglia: ma dentro tutte piombo, e gravi tanto, che Federigo le mettea di paglia.

(Inf. XXIII, vv. 58–66)

[Below that point we found a painted people, / who moved about with lagging steps, in circles, / weeping, with features tired and defeated. / And they were dressed in cloaks with cowls so low / they fell before their eyes,

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of the same cut / that’s used to make the clothes for Cluny’s monks. / Outside, these cloaks were gilded and they dazzled; / but inside they were all of lead, so heavy / that Federick’s capes were straw compared to them.]

Both Dante’s hypocrites and Boccaccio’s guide wear robes of brilliant external appearance that despite their beauty are very heavy, so that their victims walk with ‘lenti passi.’ Boccaccio not only conflates the guide of the Corbaccio with Virgil and Cato, proper guide figures from the Commedia, but also continues the distortion of his source text by drawing on evocative imagery of the infernal sinners themselves. It is worth noting, moreover, that the sinners in questions are hypocrites – figures that in appearance dissemble – a favoured target of Boccaccio’s satirical ire. As noted above, this description also resembles that of the unrepentant Serlo in Passavanti’s Specchio della vera penitenzia. Boccaccio’s guide figure takes on the common vestments of a sinner, not of a saved soul. The conflation of textual images from Dante and Passavanti links Dante’s hypocrites with Passavanti’s penitential sermons. After the preliminary meeting between the guide and the pilgrim Boccaccio establishes a personal link through the revelation that the woman who scorned the pilgrim, causing his spiritual crisis, is the widow of the guide. Unlike Cato, who leaves behind the power of his earthly bride’s eyes (Purgatorio, I, 88–9), the spirit-guide fumes with hatred of his widow. The lengthy misogynistic diatribe that follows this revelation should be viewed with a certain amount of scepticism. At this point the text definitively shifts genre from the dream-vision narrative to the specific genre of invective. Boccaccio, having destabilized the character of the guide through the conflating of specific Dantean intertextualites, warns the reader that the guide holds a less than authoritative position. The misogynistic diatribe that spews forth from the guide serves as a further indication of the demented state of the guide’s intellect. Boccaccio must have really enjoyed composing this section; rare indeed is the opportunity for an author to assume the voice of an almost comically deranged mind; such was also the case for Ovid in his Ibis. Hollander argues that Boccaccio draws heavily from Ovid’s Remdia amoris in his formulation of the guide’s rant.29 However, I propose that the Ibis serves equally as a model. What must have been most attractive to Boccaccio on his discovery of the Ibis was the catalogue of classical topoi that Ovid places in the orator’s mouth in his extended curse against the Ibis – the political enemy who brought about his exile. For Ovid, the deranged speaker’s rage expresses itself in an exhaustive catalogue of all the pernicious classical figures

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used as analogues to his enemies.30 Boccaccio’s guide employs the same tactic in condemning his unfaithful wife, exhausting the entire catalogue of misogynistic literary genre. Therefore we must add the invective to the list of proposals for the Corbaccio’s generic affinity. Not only does the Corbaccio mimic the Ibis in its ornithological title; the furor mentis of the two protagonists also links the two works in a shared satirical madness. Indeed both works tend to call into question the sanity of their authors. Perhaps Boccaccio’s misogynistic schizophrenia is a literary experiment similar to the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta and Boccaccio’s Epistle XIII? All three texts feature the unhinged ravings of a character that, rhetorically and thematically, catalogue the topoi of the curse. Given the ambiguous manner in which Boccaccio portrays the guide, the reader should be more than prepared to doubt the authenticity of the guide’s pseudo-moralistic discourse. The final conclusion reached by the guide in his advice to the pilgrim substitutes human vendetta for divine vengeance, distorting, in a sense, Dante’s system of divine justice. The spirit-guide asks the scholar to assume the sword of divine justice and punish the widow while she still lives. Furthermore, this advice goes against Boccaccio’s own stance as expressed in the Decameron. A volere de’ falli commessi satisfare interamente si conviene, a quello che fatto hai, operare il contrario; ma questo si vuole intendere sanamente. Ciò che tu hai amato, ti conviene avere in odio; …voglio che della offesa fattati da lei tu prenda vendetta: la quale ad una ora a te e a lei sarà salutifera. (Corbaccio, par. 382) [If you want to atone fully for the errors you have committed, you must act in the opposite way to what you have done; but this must be understood correctly. What you have loved you must hate; … I wish you to avenge the offense she has done to you, for it is something which will bring salvation to both of you at the same time.]

Ovidian in wrath against his wife and her cuckolding ways, the spiritguide preaches a sermon of violence and hate. In this true comedy of misreading, the guide attempts to cite the words of Christ in Luke 14:26: si quis venit ad me et non odit patrem suum et matrem et uxorem et filios et fratres et sorores adhuc autem et animam suam non potest esse meus discipulus.

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[Anyone who comes to me without hating father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, cannot be my disciple.]31

The guide in the Corbaccio guide does not content himself with offering his version of Christ’s advice to turn one’s back on all that the present world offers, loved ones included; he shows his true colours by further suggesting that this hate translate directly into violent vengeance (‘vendetta’). The violence of the guide’s misogynistic words and his ultimate reliance on violence as a form of punishment to be delivered by one person on another firmly roots him in the ethical vacuum of Inferno, where the spectacle of ‘divina vendetta’ and ‘vendetta di Dio’ rules (Inf. XI, v. 90; Inf. XIV, v. 16). However much ambiguity there might be in the Corbaccio, no reader, not even Petrarca, has proposed to read the spirit-guide as God. Thus the spirit-guide misreads Dante’s Inferno when he substitutes his own personal vengeance for the divine vengeance that Dante cites twice in the Inferno. Indeed, Boccaccio’s focalization on the word ‘vendetta’ in the Corbaccio (the noun appears seven times, the verb ‘vendicare’ appears twice) betrays a point of disagreement between Dante and Boccaccio that will come up again.32 The peculiar pleasure the spirit-guide takes in being the agent of vendetta on his widow demonstrates a misreading of the system of justice in Inferno where divine justice reigns, but the Corbaccio never transcends hell’s misery: there is no promise of redemption. The Corbaccio is a dream-vision devoid of sound teleological narrative impulse; instead, the guide and his befuddled protégé sink deeper and deeper into the empty rhetoric of hell. The move toward transcendence is radically misdirected by an embittered cuckold who, through his misguided adaptation of Dantean language and ethics, convinces a gullible scholar that vengeance falls in line with proper Christian morals.33 The reader of the Corbaccio need not fall into the same trap that the guide set for the poor scholar. As shown above, Boccaccio provides adequate textual clues to suggest a parodic reading of the guide’s mad ramblings, if not of the entire text. The intertextual conflations of the guide with Virgil and Cato, as well as with the friar hypocrites of Inferno XXIII and Passavanti’s sermons, mark a metalepsis that invokes Dante’s text only to simultaneously recast in a parodic genre. The rhetorical dominance of the guide in the Corbaccio classifies the text as an invective that is inherently satirical in nature and that highlights the speaker’s furor mentis rather than his ethical logic. While the dream-vision narrative suggests an ethical reading consistent with conventions of the genre, the charac-

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ters in the text move within an economy of misreading that typifies Boccaccio’s authorial voice in his entire vernacular production. As can be reasonably expected of two works written (or rewritten, depending on the date) within a short space of time, the Corbaccio utilizes themes and language that figure prominently in the Decameron. Scholars have dutifully pointed out the dramatic similarity between the Corbaccio and Decameron VIII, 7; indeed, the breakdown that comes to fruition so bitterly in the Corbaccio is already apparent in Decameron VIII, 7.34 They have, however, completely missed the echoes in the Corbaccio from the consciously self-reflective passages in the frame of the Decameron. The most salient intertextualites come from the guide’s direct adoption of the language that Boccaccio attributes to his critics in the ‘Introduzione alla quarta giornata’ and the ‘Conclusione dell’autore’ in the Decameron (Dec. IV, Intro., par. 30–45, Conclusione, par. 3–28). In these passages the critics of the Decameron argue that Boccaccio’s work, for various reasons, is not in keeping with his age, social status, and humanistic culture. The guide of the Corbaccio mimics these critiques in his condemnation of the pilgrim’s dalliance with his widow: the guide of the Corbaccio and the author of the Decameron clearly stand on opposite sides of the issue. The satirical tone that bleeds from Boccaccio’s self-defence in these sections of the Decameron comes through to the Corbaccio.35 That the guide of the Corbaccio speaks the same way as the critics of Boccaccio’s Decameron suggests a deliberate link between the Dantean nature of the Corbaccio and the critics’ reading of the Decameron. In fact, the spirit-guide in the Corbaccio and the critics in the Decameron speak with the same voice. At the beginning of the Decameron Boccaccio proposes an aphorism that stands in perfect contrast to the guide’s final conclusion in the Corbaccio: ‘Umana cosa è l’aver compassione agli afflitti’ [To have compassion for those who suffer is a human quality] says Boccaccio’s authorial voice in the Decameron (Dec., Proemio, par. 1). The guide’s final piece of advice to his disciple could not be more opposite: ‘Ciò che tu hai amata, ti conviene aver in odio’ [That which you have loved, you must now hate.] As shown above, this advice coupled with a push to take vengeance on his scornful lover completes the narrative of the Corbaccio. As if to stress the absolute difference between the Decameron and the Corbaccio, both of which were written or rewritten in the same period, Boccaccio ends the Corbaccio by indicating that this work is meant for a completely different audience than the Decameron. In the Proem of the Decameron Boccaccio specifies a female audience.

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Nelle quali novelle piacevoli e aspri casi d’amore e altri fortunati avvenimenti si vederanno cosí ne’ moderni tempi avvenuti come negli antichi; delle quali le già dette donne, che queste legeranno, parimente diletto delle sollazzevoli cose in quelle mostrate e utile consiglio potranno pigliare, in quanto potranno cognoscere quello che sia da fuggire e che sia similmente da seguitare: le quali cose senza passamento di noia non credo che possano intervenire. (Dec., Proemio, 14) [In these tales will be found a variety of love adventures, bitter as well as pleasing, and other exciting incidents, which took place in both ancient and modern times. In reading them, the aforesaid ladies will be able to derive, not only pleasure from the entertaining matters therein set forth, but also some useful advice. For they will learn to recognize what should be avoided and likewise what should be pursued, and these things can only lead, in my opinion, to the removal of their affliction.]

Boccaccio intends his collection of stories to be not only diverting but useful to his audience: a remedia amoris for the gentle ladies of Florence’s salons. Whether or not his text has a palliative effect on lovesick ladies, Boccaccio assumes that his stories will be equally amusing to men and women. The message in the Corbaccio could not be more opposed to the Decameron; so too Boccaccio aims these two works at different audiences, confirming his tendency to target specific audiences for his writings. After the events of the dream-vision come to an end and the narrator returns to his waking life in order to take vengeance on the spirit-guide’s wife, the narrator attaches an envoi to his work: he hopes that his text might be useful to the young and in love, but parting company from the Decameron, he also specifies those for whom his stories are not intended. Ma sopra ogni cosa ti guarda di non venire alle mani delle malvagie femine, e massimamente di colei che ogni demonio di malvagità trapassa e che della presente tua fatica è stata cagione: per ciò che tu saresti là mal ricevuta, ed ella è da pugnere con più acuto stimolo che tu non porti con teco; il quale, concedendolo Colui che d’ogni grazia è donatore, tosto a pugnerla, non temendo, le si farà incontro. (Corbaccio, par. 413) [But above all, see that you do not come into the hands of evil women, especially into those of her who surpasses every demon in wickedness and who has been the cause of your present toil, since you would be ill received. She

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is to be stung by a sharper goad than you bear with you; swiftly and fearlessly this will attack and wound her, if the Giver of all Grace grants it.]

In the confused world of the Corbaccio even the envoi seeks revenge. The narrator cannot decide if he wants the victim of the Corbaccio to read the text, but if she does, he hopes that the words will bring the desired effect: vendetta. Rather than serving as Cupid’s arrow destined for the beloved’s heart, the narrator fires off this envoi as a potentially lethal missile. However, Boccaccio subtly suggests the impotence of the attack by pointing out the limited use of his weapon: ‘più acuto stimolo che tu non porti teco’ (italics added). Both the subject and the audience of the Corbaccio are in clear and direct opposition to the Decameron. This complex confluence of conflicting moral proclamations between Boccaccio’s own works (Decameron and Corbaccio) couched in a matrix of Dantean language and imagery implies a hermeneutic breakdown between the critics of both Dante’s Commedia (the Dominican preachers) and the Decameron (the unnamed critics). The Corbaccio dramatizes this breakdown by creating a character who misreads the Decameron by applying a specific, and specifically incorrect, reading of Dante’s Commedia to a literary discourse lifted straight from the Decameron. The spirit-guide counsels the narrator to take vengeance on the widow rather than allow the ‘vendetta di Dio’ to punish her sins. As I have stated earlier, crisis emanates from the Corbaccio, and readers, both medieval and modern, have become burdened by the cumbersome intertextual apparatus of the text. The crisis deflates both the apparent moral claims in the Corbaccio and the attacks of the preachers and critics who criticized Dante’s poetic vision. In his misreading of both the Decameron and the Commedia the fictional spirit-guide of the Corbaccio makes a fatal error by not applying the proper hermeneutical method to the two texts. In the case of the Decameron, he misses the first and most important line of the text. The opening line of the Decameron condenses Boccaccio’s sense of the human and humane scope of his work, while the guide’s vengeful disposition negates any human compassion that Boccaccio proposes as the ethical key to his text. Fundamentally, the first line of the Decameron reflects the same interest Boccaccio has in crafting a figure of Dante; he seeks a human ethical rather than divine theological message from vernacular poetics, whether his own works or Dante’s. This will continue in his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante. The guide’s interpretive misstep in the Corbaccio regarding the Comme-

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dia is less clear but ultimately more dangerous: he confuses his position in the afterworld – either in Purgatory as he would have the narrator believe, or in hell as the textual clues suggest – with the power of divine justice that judges him. Boccaccio plays out the spirit-guide’s confusion in generic terms as well; he confuses the moral economy of the Commedia with the generic conventions of courtly love. The spirit-guide, however, cannot go beyond the ethics of hell, which, although staged in the allegory of the Commedia as God’s eternal justice, are a reflection of Dante’s judgment on human vice. Boccaccio wants to save his readers from the same fate of the spirit-guide who misreads Dante’s Inferno as a theological manual rather than as allegory of human ethics. From these textual results it is clear that the Corbaccio remains an extremely tricky text to come to terms with. As readers continue to point out, the Corbaccio participates in so many generic conventions that, depending on the reader’s perspective, the text can be made to support any reading.36 In reading the Corbaccio as a satire against the critics of vernacular poetry with an embedded parody of the Dominican preachers and their limited view of literature, I suggest that Boccaccio was acutely aware of a hermeneutical crisis amongst his intellectual contemporaries: they were not up to the rigour and vision of Dante’s poetics. As suggested by the sermons of Bartolomeo di San Concordio and Jacopo Passavanti, the Commedia’s radical convergence of vernacular poetry and ethics did not sit well in the traditional scholastic discourse. In part a reaction against those who would condemn him for his own Decameron and other vernacular works, the overwhelming thrust of the Corbaccio forces a confrontation with contemporary readers of the Commedia. At the end of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio the reader must exculpate both Boccaccio the author and Dante the author of the source text, due to insufficient, or at least conflicting, evidence. In his various attempts to defend Dante from his contemporary detractors, Boccaccio reveals his own interests in protecting the image of Dante that he himself had created. In what Harold Bloom might term a strong misreading, Boccaccio remakes Dante into strictly a poet of human ethics. Against Petrarca’s criticism of Dante’s preference for the vernacular over Latin, Boccaccio counters with Petrarca’s own claim to Dante’s poetic heritage. The poetic questione della lingua, as is always the case, hides a political battle. Petrarca’s refusal of the chair of the Studio Fiorentino embodies his rejection of Dante’s vernacular poetics. Bartolomeo di San Concordio and Jacopo Passavanti similarly criticize the practitioners of vernacular poetics for their misuse of language and literature. Boccac-

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cio defends Dante (and himself) from these attacks by offering a parody of the preachers in his Corbaccio. The hypocrisy of these preachers and their specific limits of the vernacular apply just as well to Boccaccio’s own critics who are mirrored in the Corbaccio’s spirit-guide. Boccaccio defends both Dante and himself from those who would limit the poet in any way, whether in terms of idiom or of ideology.

4 Commentator: Presenting the Monument

Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo, spiritibus quae lata patent, quae premia solvunt pro meritis cuicumque suis etc. [I shall sing of the kingdoms distant, bordering on the changing world, which open wide for souls, which provide rewards to each according to their merits.] Supposed incipit to the Latin version of the Commedia

Boccaccio’s Latin Dante In 1375, only two years after Boccaccio gave his public lectures on Dante’s Commedia in Florence and probably just a few months before his death in Certaldo, Benvenuto da Imola offered an anecdote in glossing Dante’s expression of doubts about his worthiness to follow Virgil’s lead in undertaking his otherworldly journey (Inf. II, vv. 10–36). Benvenuto understands the pilgrim’s hesitation to begin his journey as a manifestation of the author’s reluctance to compare himself to his poetic forefathers, Homer and Virgil. To illustrate Dante’s message of humility in this canto, Benvenuto recounts the story of how Dante originally began the Commedia in Latin. cum jam literaliter incoepisset sic: ‘Ultima regna canam,’ Alii tamen et multi comuniter dicunt, quod autor cognovit stilum suum literalem non attingere ad tam arduum thema; quod et ego crederem, nisi me moverat autoritas novissimi poetae Petrarcae, qui loquens de Dante scribet ad ven-

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 125 erabilem praeceptorem meum Boccatium de Certaldo: ‘Magna mihi de ingenio ejus oppinio est potuisse eum omnia, quibus intendisset.’1 [(Dante) had already commenced the Commedia in Latin: ‘Ultima regna canam.’ But many others say that Dante recognized the fact that his Latin style did not come up to the standard necessary for so exalted a subject; and I might also have believed this, had not the idea been put out my head by the authority of our latest poet, Petrarch, who, speaking of Dante, writes to my revered teacher Boccaccio of Certaldo as follows: ‘I have a strong opinion, as to his genius, that all was within his reach that he might have attempted.’]

Benvenuto first cites the opening lines of Dante’s Latin ‘Commedia,’ and then calls on the authority of Petrarca through Boccaccio,2 citing Petrarca’s letter to Boccaccio sent in response to the gift of the Commedia manuscript and the Latin poem Ytalie, iam certus honos (Fam. XXI, 15).3 Benvenuto uses the correspondence between Petrarca and Boccaccio to show that Dante had other reasons than humility for choosing the vernacular over Latin. Unfortunately, Boccaccio probably never heard or read Benvenuto’s lecture on this passage in Bologna. This lecture would have been particularly gratifying to the dying Boccaccio because it reflects and validates his work as dantista. First, Benvenuto cites an anecdote that Boccaccio had propagated: a dubious story of Dante’s Latin incipit to the Commedia. Second, Benvenuto’s linking of Petrarca and Boccaccio in relation to Dante’s Commedia ratifies Boccaccio’s project of articulating a cultural project that includes the new Latin humanism as well as the vernacular literary culture native to Florence. The legend that Dante first began the Commedia in Latin originates from Boccaccio’s Zibaldone Laurenziano (Mediceo-Laurenziano, Plut. XXIX, 8).4 In a section of the Zibaldone devoted to Dante, which includes Dante’s exchange of eclogues with Giovanni del Virgilio and three of Dante’s epistles (IV, VIII, IX), Boccaccio includes a fragment of a letter by a ‘frater Ylarus’ addressed to Uguccione della Faggiuola. In this letter Friar Ilaro tells of welcoming Dante (although he never mentions Dante by name) to his monastery Santa Croce del Corvo near the source of the Magra River in the Apennines.5 The fragment goes on to relate that Dante showed Ilaro a copy of the recently completed Inferno, and when Ilaro expressed wonder that such profound thoughts could be expressed in the vernacular, Dante claims that he began the work in Latin and cites

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the two and half lines that serve as epigraph to this chapter. However, the letter continues, Dante explains that he opted for the vernacular upon seeing that all great and powerful men had forgotten Latin. The letter breaks off after Ilaro promises to send the last two parts of the poem to his patron. Judging the authenticity of this letter and, more importantly, the story that it relates has been a continuing problem for scholars interested in filologia dantesca.6 As before with the Vita Nova and the Rime (see chapter 1), Boccaccio is at the origins of this confusion. His ‘copy’ of the letter is the sole contemporary manuscript witness to this letter, and thus, he can claim responsibility for finding, fabricating, or transmitting this story of Dante’s Latin Commedia. He entered the letter into the manuscript record in the early part of the 1340s as one of his first acts as dantista. Some ten years later he relates the same story in the Tratattello in laude di Dante, and in 1373 he turns the story into oral history by telling it as part of his public lectures on Dante. Benvenuto likely heard the story in this venue, and by transmitting it to his audience in Bologna he set it deeper into the record. This story of Dante’s Latin Commedia marks the beginning and the end of Boccaccio’s efforts as dantista and it serves as the cornerstone for Boccaccio’s monumental figure of Dante, as one who was capable of writing in Latin, like the great poets of old, but who was also willing to bring his work to the people who need it most by composing his masterpiece in the vernacular. The other aspect of Benvenuto’s commentary that would have pleased Boccaccio, we can only imagine, is his reference to Petrarca’s opinion on Dante. First, Benvenuto authorizes Boccaccio by interpolating him between the two great poets Dante and Petrarca. Thus Benvenuto continues Boccaccio’s self-appointed role of mediator; this is one of the first references to the three authors that does not appear in Boccaccio’s own writings: the myth of the tre corone has taken root.7 Another fruit of Boccaccio’s mediation between Dante and Petrarca comes out in this passage from Benvenuto. In Benvenuto’s recounting of the interchange between Boccaccio and Petrarca, Petrarca attests to Dante’s genius as a poet – a formulation that does not accurately represent Petrarca’s original words (see chapter 3 for a discussion of this exchange). Petrarca, the ‘auctoritas,’ becomes the apologist for Dante’s choice to write in the vernacular, according to Benvenuto’s understanding of what Petrarca wrote about Dante in his letters to Boccaccio. Benvenuto, unwittingly perhaps, has converted Petrarca into an apologist for Dante. This chapter will focus on Boccaccio’s last efforts as a dantista. Ben-

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venuto was one of many witnesses to Boccaccio’s greatest public act of dantismo, his lectures on Dante’s Commedia in Florence from the autumn of 1373 to early 1374. Transmitted in written form as the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, these public lectures allowed Boccaccio to stage his lifelong work, not only on Dante but also on his vision of the centrality of poetry, to a large and mixed (literate and illiterate) audience. This public venue gave Boccaccio an opportunity to monumentalize Dante (and to perform his own erudition for his fellow Florentines) as a figure of public good. In creating a specifically public and civic monument, he offers a mostly secular and strictly ethical reading of Dante, eschewing specifically Christian or biblical readings. This study has explored how Boccaccio dantista served as a mediator between Dante and Petrarca; in the Esposizioni and in his other writings of this period, Boccaccio continues to persuade his mixed audience, erudite and illiterate, of the virtue of his Dante and of his project of vernacular humanism. Pro Dante Poeta The last years of Boccaccio’s life saw a natural shift in his literary output from beginnings to endings. Aside from the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, which is to a great extent a collection of translations of earlier writings, Boccaccio did not begin new works but sought to complete those already undertaken.8 In terms of his dantismo, Boccaccio was also more active in promulgating his earlier work as dantista than in formulating new projects. He continued to copy Dante’s work in the Riccardiano manuscript, but made few substantial changes from the earlier manuscripts; he may have completed a second revision of the Trattatello; he continued to lobby for Dante’s importance to Petrarca and his other humanist colleagues. Rather than undertake new work, Boccaccio became an advocate, both in public and in private, for his Dante. Boccaccio dantista in these later years developed an understanding of, and at times also an acute frustration with, the dual nature of his audience. On the one hand, Boccaccio continued to argue for Dante’s validity in the new Latin humanist culture emerging around Petrarca. On the other hand, his Dante needed to be a figure of Florentine vernacular culture in order to justify the choice to write in Italian. His reporting of Dante’s encounter with Frate Ilaro, apocryphal or not, attempts to clarify this contradiction by showing a historical (almost mythical) Dante negotiating between these two competing cultural directives and choosing the option with the greatest public utility. Whether he invented this

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tale or only took up his Dante’s misgivings, Boccaccio faced a similar dilemma in the 1370s. A letter of 1371 (Epis. XIX) from Boccaccio to Jacopo Pizzinga, a young Sicilian humanist, attests to his continuing desire to reconcile these two cultural perspectives. Little is known about the addressee other than what comes from the letter itself.9 Boccaccio’s letter informs the reader that Jacopo is a noble (‘militi’) working as a court official (‘logothete,’ meaning probably chancellor) for Frederico III of Aragon. Furthermore, Pizzinga belongs to the humanist elite of the trecento. The letter notes his ability to read all the great Latin poets in addition to the rare capacity to read Homer in Greek.10 Boccaccio’s letter is respectful and encouraging but he writes in a tellingly confident tone that perhaps betrays the confidence of an elder statesman in the literary world writing to a new pupil. Boccaccio encourages Pizzinga to continue his reading of the poets and the cultivation of his poetic craft. However, this letter carries a specific interest in terms of Boccaccio’s dantismo because of Pizzinga was not part of the Florentine and Petrarchan circle of humanists. Pizzinga’s unfamiliarity with the Tuscan poets and the debates surrounding them allows Boccaccio to formulate a novel panegyric for Dante. Instead of yet another explanation of Dante’s choice of the vernacular, Boccaccio offers a defence of poetry that closely follows Cicero’s oration Pro Archia Poeta.11 Without debating the nobility of the Tuscan vernacular, he can move straight to a humanist defence of poetry. He cites Cicero’s argument that the poet not only belongs in the centre of res publica, but that, as Gregory Stone has shown in a discussion of Cicero’s defence of poetry, ‘without the poet, the res is not publica,’12 Boccaccio thus adopts Cicero’s concept of poetry as essential to the survival of the city. After invoking Cicero, Boccaccio translates the message to contemporary Italy. For Pizzinga, who likely has no interest in Florentine affairs, Dante becomes an ‘Italian’ national poet. Boccaccio lists a series of classical poets who were from Italy and laments Italy’s lost glory (‘deperditi luminis ytalici’) while noting the native poetic spirit of the Italians (Epis. XIX, par. 23–4). Then he changes the tone of the letter to praise Dante as ‘celebrem virum’ who raised himself to the heavens through his poetry written in the vernacular (Epis. XIX, par. 26). This is followed by a lament over the fact that Dante never received his due glory because of his early death, without mentioning Dante’s exile. Boccaccio also praises Petrarca and Zanobi da Strada as living examples of poetic virtue linked with civic excellence. The letter to Jacopo Pizzinga exemplifies how Boc-

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caccio propagated his figure of Dante even after his active work as dantista had come to an end. For Pizzinga, who was likely unfamiliar with the intricate debates around the vernacular, Boccaccio’s letter argues for an Italian school of poetry that underlies the past and future of Italy. This letter serves as an invitation for Pizzinga to join the elite circle of humanists in Italy. In writing a young man foreign to the native debates, Boccaccio could say that a knowledge and appreciation of Dante provides the password needed for entry. The summer of 1373 brought Boccaccio a novel opportunity to promulgate his version of Dante to a broader audience. The Signoria of Florence passed a petition brought by ‘quamplurium civium civitatis Forentie’ [diverse citizens of Florence] calling for a publicly financed reading of Dante’s Commedia.13 The petition clearly specifies the purpose and intended audience of these lectures. tam pro se ipsis quam pro aliis civibus aspirare desiderantibus ad virtutes, quam etiam pro eorum posteris ed descendentibus, instrui in libro Dantis, ex quo tam in fuga vitiorum, quam in acquisitione virtutum, quam in ornatu eloquentie possunt etiam non grammatici informari: [as well as for themselves and for other their fellow-citizens, as for their posterity, who desire to follow after virtue, they ask to be instructed in the book of Dante, wherefrom, both to the shunning of vice, and to the acquisition of virtue, no less than in the ornaments of eloquence, even the unlearned may receive instruction.]

The Signoria intended the lectures to be a public lesson on vice and virtue administered by Florentines for Florentines. Indeed, the petition stipulates that a ‘valentem e sapientem virum in huiusmodi poesie scientia bene doctum’ [a worthy and learned man, well versed in this type of poetry] be found to deliver the public readings on Dante in the name of civic virtue. Who else but Boccaccio could have been nominated for this position? By 1373 there were already numerous commentators on Dante’s Commedia, but Boccaccio was alone in calling for the return of Dante’s ethical vision to Florentine political life. He had been sounding this horn since the early 1340s with the letter to Frate Ilaro, and this was the thrust of his Trattatello in laude di Dante discussed in chapter 2. In the Florentine petition Boccaccio saw the culmination of his work as dantista. Boccaccio began the lectures at the end of October 1373 in the church of Santo Setafano di Badia and continued, with interruptions due to his

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poor and worsening health, until January of 1374 when the series was suspended indefinitely.14 Boccaccio must have felt a great satisfaction when he stood before the crowd of his fellow intellectuals (Benvenuto da Imola, at least, must have been there), the signori who had commissioned the work, and the Florentine popolani. In an important sense, Dante’s exile had finally ended: Boccaccio stood ready to present and make present Dante’s message to the audience for which it was originally written. But these public readings lasted only a few months before age and illness sent Boccaccio back to Certaldo, and his enthusiasm for his mission of civic instruction turned into bitter resignation. Forced into exile by age and illness rather than by the political factionalism of his own past, he lashed out at those who had criticized his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante while he was still giving the lectures. Our knowledge of these critics, as is often the case, comes only from Boccaccio’s response to them. The three poems written after his return to Certaldo (Rime CXXII, CXXIII, CXXIV) are little more than litanies of complaints against these detractors. Although Boccaccio does not name those who had so harshly criticized him for his public readings of Dante, they certainly could have been ideological sympathizers with the Dominicans who opposed poetry, and especially vernacular poetry: examples include Giovannino da Mantova, who critiqued Mussato, and Guido Vernani, who refuted the De Monarchia. Bartolomeo di San Concordio and Jacopo Passavanti had also preached against vernacular poetics in their own volgarizzamenti, and the Dominican ban on the Commedia in Florence must also be noted.15 The incipit of the first of these three sonnets reveals Boccaccio’s rancour during their composition: ‘S’io ho le Muse vilmente prostrate’ [If I have vilely laid low the Muses] (Rime CCXXII, v. 1). These sonnets, which do little to change critical opinion of Boccaccio’s poor skills as lyric poet, reveal his great dissatisfaction with his incomplete commentary on the Inferno, and read as a stark rebuke of his aforementioned critics. Sonnet CXXIII lays out Boccaccio’s frustration with the audience of his lettura. Se Dante piange, dove ch’el si sia, che li concetti del suo alto ingengo aperti sieno stati al vulgo indegno, come tu di’, della lettura mia, ciò mi dispiace molto, né mai fia ch’io non ne porti verso me disdegno: come ch’alquanto pur me ne ritegno,

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 131 perché d’altrui, non mia, fu tal follia. Vana speranza e vera povertade e l’abbagliato senno delli amici e gli lor prieghi ciò mi fecer fare. Ma non goderan guar di tal derrate questi ingrati meccanici, nimici d’ogni leggiadro e caro adoperare.

(Rime CXXIII)

[If Dante weeps, wherever he might be, because the concepts of his high genius have been laid open to the unworthy crowd, as you say, by my lecture, that grieves me greatly. And, on that account, I will never fail to bring shame upon myself. Yet I refrain from doing so for it was the folly of another, not me. Vain hope and true poverty and the deluded reason of friends and their prayers made me do it. But they will little enjoy such yield, those ungrateful mechanics, enemies of all sweet and lovely ventures.]

This particular sonnet most starkly dramatizes Boccaccio’s profound disillusion with his own attempts at providing a sufficiently clear exposition of Dante’s ‘alto ingeno’ [high genius] (Rime CXXIII, v. 2) as well as a more acute crisis with the unlettered members of his audience – whether the ‘vulgo indegno’ [unworthy crowd] (Rime CXXIII, v. 3) or the ‘meccanici’ (mechanics, or practitioners of the mechanical arts) (Rime CXIII, v. 13). Boccaccio encapsulates his despair that his work has failed to convince his erudite audience just as he has failed to reach the illiterate citizens of Florence. All three sonnets demonstrate how his decades-long role as dantista had come to dominate his intellectual life. They mimic the same barbs that Petrarca and the unnamed critics cited in the Decameron had lobbed in his direction.16 But this retreat into old debates should not be read as a palinode by Boccaccio on his role as dantista. In the last tercet of the sonnet quoted above, Boccaccio conflates his two conflicting audiences into one simple phrase ‘questi ingrati meccanici’ (these ungrateful mechanics) and opposes them to his own ‘leggiadro e caro’ (refined and dear) dantismo (Rime CXIII, v. 12–14). It is not Boccaccio who has failed in his didactic enterprise; rather, his audiences have let him down. The noun ‘meccanici’ used in this poem has a specific resonance in the economy of Boccaccio’s work: he employs the term once in the Corbaccio, once in the Decameron, and three times in the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante.17 According to Hugh of St Victor in the Didascalicon, the seven mechanical arts – fabric-making, armament, commerce, agri-

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culture, hunting, medicine and theatrics were also known as the ‘adulterate’ arts as they pertain to labour rather than philosophy or art.18 Many characters from the Decameron deal in the mechanical arts (sailors, traders, bankers, shopkeepers) and this class of citizens represents a key element of the audience whom Boccaccio hoped to reach in his Esposizioni. If the Decameron was addressed to the ‘delicate donne’ unable to find solace in the needle and thread, the domestic version of the mechanical arts [Dec. Proemio, 13], Boccaccio provides the Esposizioni for their husbands, brothers, and fathers. In this sonnet Boccaccio uses the word ‘meccanici’ to denigrate those who had condemned him for his public reading of the Commedia. To be clear, the ‘meccanici’ in this poem are not his audience of Florentine tradesmen but rather the same Dominicans and humanists who had condemned Dante’s choice of the vernacular. Boccaccio also identifies one of the complaints brought forward by these ‘ingrati meccanici.’ They attack his public lectures for bringing Dante down to the ‘vulgo ingrato’ [unworthy crowd] (Rime CXXIII, v. 3). The ‘ingrati meccanici’ would not have condemned Boccaccio for lecturing to them. Rather, Boccaccio’s accuses his erudite audience, the dottori of the liberal arts, of acting like ‘ingrati meccanici’ in restricting Dante to themselves, and thus making him a commodity. Boccaccio insults his critics by categorizing them as ‘ingrati meccanici,’ not sophisticated enough to recognize Dante’s genius while he appeals directly to the actual ‘meccanici’ of Florence. Like Boccaccio’s parody of Passavanti in the Corbaccio, this poem violently decries those who condemn his public reading of Dante. These three sonnets betray a profound frustration with his audience, yet I propose that this frustration manifests itself as an oblique intimation of Boccaccio’s doubts about the works of Dante himself. In this chapter I will consider specific intertextualities between the Corbaccio, the Commedia, and the Esposizioni sopra la comedia di Dante that point up a consistent critique of Dante. In this view, just as Boccaccio’s work as editor, biographer, and apologist had ideological implications, his commentary on Dante’s masterpiece is more than a localized and occasional gloss. The Corbaccio emanates a sense of interpretive crisis; the text produces a cacophony of authorial voices. The Esposizioni, by contrast, are consistently dissonant; Boccaccio speaks to different audiences with different literary voices. In chapter 3 we saw how the Corbaccio offered a clamorous parody of contemporary preachers. Here the Esposizioni explicitly aims at providing clear readings for a rather unsophisticated audience while promoting Dante as a poet of Virgilian stature.

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 133

As I have repeatedly argued, Boccaccio’s work as dantista articulates a figure of Dante that would conform to his own poetic, political, and ethical agenda. This procedure suggests a hermeneutic dissonance between the commentator and the text. Although Boccaccio’s treatment of Dante for the most part follows Dante’s lead, he does challenge Dante’s views at times. In his role as commentator, both to his literate humanist colleagues and to the uneducated public, Boccaccio must confront the Commedia itself head on, without extensive prior editorial intervention. As Boccaccio illustrates in the three sonnets, his first problem is the lack of intellectual sophistication of both the dottori and the meccanici in his audience. Just as the unruly mob may not be prepared to understand the brilliance of Dante’s genius, so too the pedantic scholar may be distracted by Dante’s vernacular language and literary culture. Thus, Boccaccio fulfils his role as commentator by negotiating the rival space between a brilliant text and a set of unprepared but ultimately necessary audiences. Boccaccio overcomes this conflict by employing a selective and limited reading of the text: in the Esposizioni sopra la comedia di Dante he proffers a reading that brings out Dante’s position in a continuous literary and ethical tradition stretching from antiquity to the present, a reading that highlights the importance of Dante as an auctor and moralist. In short, Boccaccio privileges Dante the humanist over Dante theologus-poeta that he argues for elsewhere.19 Like Petrarca, who had given Boccaccio his definition of the role of the poet, Boccaccio argues, in the Trattatello and in the Genealogia, for poetry as source of theology. Unlike Petrarca, however, who, much to Boccaccio’s consternation, was holed up in various seigniorial redoubts, Boccaccio translates this poetic theology into a civic ethics for the ‘vulgo indegno’ (Rime CCXXIII, v. 3) who needed lessons in practical philosophy. Boccaccio’s Esposizioni: Dante as ‘Vernacular Humanist’ The scare quotes around the term ‘vernacular humanist’ in the heading of this section indicate the provisory nature of Boccaccio’s project as dantista. From the earliest incarnation of his ‘copy’ of Frate Ilaro’s letter Boccaccio has attempted to resolve Dante’s choice to use the vernacular to express his great synthesis of classical and Christian knowledge. In the Esposizioni Boccaccio brings this literary debate into the public forum. Indeed, by performing these lectures publicly and in the vernacular, he directed his attention to the popular audience (or more accurately, the popolano) rather than to the Latin humanists such as Pizzinga or Petrarca

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and his influential circle. Thus the Esposizioni had to bridge the wide gap between Dante’s literary and philosophical complexity and the ethical project that, in Boccaccio’s view, underlies the entire project of vernacular poetics. The Esposizioni proposes a hermeneutical approach that dwells on explaining the literal level by explicating the many obscure characters and references from Dante’s varied literary sources. Boccaccio also reduces the allegorical to a strictly moral meaning, ignoring to a great extent the other possible allegorical senses. The literal includes not only reading the text for its historical and narrative sense but also for its literary genealogy. In Boccaccio’s allegorical reading of the text, for which his interest diminishes as his reading proceeds, he privileges a moral rather than a Christian, and specifically biblical, allegoresis. In a sense, the Esposizioni compare to the earlier volgarizzamento of Bartolomeo di San Concordio; however, Boccaccio’s translation is not linguistic but cultural. In offering this vision of Dante as the vernacular humanist author, Boccaccio takes the poet’s lead in bringing together classical and Christian literary culture into a useful and coherent ethical system.20 The conundrum that he faced in the Esposizioni – perhaps insoluble if we read the sonnet discussed above with too much emphasis – grew out of his efforts to harmonize his readings to appeal to both of these audiences. Dante, Boccaccio and Poetic Translatio The Accessus to the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante brings together much of the work Boccaccio had already completed as dantista. In the Accessus he cites the letter to Frate Ilaro again, cites liberally from the Trattatello in laude di Dante, and borrows from his own encyclopedic Latin works. After a brief invocation to God he plays up Dante’s syncretism by invoking Plato and Virgil and then outlines three critical elements that the Accessus will define: the causes, the title, and the philosophy of the work (Esp. Acc., 6). Boccaccio wastes precious little space on his delineation of the philosophical mode, but the tangle of scholastic jargon includes a crystal clear statement of the Commedia’s import to the audience. La terza cosa principale, la quale dissi essere da investigare, è a qual parte di filosofia sia sottoposto il presente libro; il quale, secondo il mio giudicio, è sottoposto alla parte morale, o vero etica: per ciò che, quantunque in alcun passo si tratti per modo speculativo, non è perciò cagione di speculazione ciò posto, ma per cagione dell’opera, la quale quivi ha quel modo richiesto di trattare. (Esp. Acc. 42)

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 135 [The third principal part which I said needed investigation, pertains to what area of philosophy the present book comes under; this book, according to my judgment, comes under the heading of moral or ethics: thus, although in some places it proceeds in the speculative mode, it is not thus placed for speculative reasons, but for reasons of the work itself, which in that particular place needs to proceed in that mode.]

Boccaccio’s clarity in describing the Commedia as a text of practical philosophy or moral philosophy derives from Boccaccio’s adhesion to Dante’s interpretive program in the Epistle to Cangrande.21 The question of the authenticity of the Epistle to Cangrande is doubly vexing because of Boccaccio’s liberal use of it in the Accessus: one issue is the actual authenticity of the letter; the other issue is whether Boccaccio believed that it was authentic.22 On these debates we can here afford to risk critical rebuke, at least in the consideration of Boccaccio’s Esposizioni, and remain agnostic on both questions.23 The evidence in the Esposizioni suggests that Boccaccio both knew the Epistle to Cangrande and followed its interpretive pronouncements in his public readings. In defining the work as moral philosophy or ethics, Boccaccio must also follow the Epistle and dismiss the pars speculativa as only occasional moments not integral to the principal intent of the work. Indeed, the tricky nature of Dante’s text lies in the speculative nature of the fictio that makes up the literal narrative. Literally, Dante’s Commedia witnesses corporally that which can only have been known speculatively: Boccaccio wants no part of this for his public reading lest he subject Dante to the same type of rebuke offered earlier by Jacopo Passavanti. The moral philosophy, or ethics, that Boccaccio identifies in the Commedia is the most practical of all the philosophical disciplines; it serves to negotiate interactions in the world of human affairs: politics, commerce, and civil virtue.24 In declaring that the Commedia concerns itself with ethical instruction, Boccaccio informs his audience that he intends to treat ethics, not philosophy or theology. Just as Dante did not dismiss his theological concerns with the Epistle to Cangrande, so too Boccaccio does not obliterate Dante’s theological interests clearly present in the Commedia. He does, however, cage his public interpretation of Dante in the category of ethics. The ‘cagione dell’opera’ of the Esposizioni indicates Boccaccio’s purpose as a public lecturer on Dante and describes the importance of Dante’s text: the Commedia and Boccaccio’s public reading of it are aimed at the public good of Florence. Although these readings adopt the public format of the sermon, he tries not to entangle himself or Dante in theological questions.

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The accessus concludes with a close analysis of the title of the first canticle: Inferno. Under this rubric Boccaccio provides a long catalogue of Christian and classical genealogies of the name and concept of Inferno. This lengthy excursus (Esp. Acc., pars. 43–73), which takes up nearly a third of the entire Accessus, offers a preview of Boccaccio’s hermeneutic method: an encyclopedic display of Dante’s – and by inference, Boccaccio’s – erudition on classical sources. In his opening remarks on the title ‘Inferno,’ he notes that there are three categories of Inferno recognized by the Scriptures: upper, middle, and lower (Esp. Acc., par. 46). This generic reference to the authority of the Scriptures is followed by a catalogue of all the classical characters that appear in the Inferno, from Cerberus to Tantalus (pars. 47–55), and a catalogue that lists, in order of importance, all the classical authors who wrote about the underworld: Homer, Virgil, Statius, Seneca, Pomponius Mela, only referring back to the Scriptures once (Esp. Acc., pars. 57–73). By linking Dante’s poem to pagan sources more than Christian authority, whether biblical, patristic, or scholastic, Boccaccio lines the Commedia up with a distinct tradition of texts. While he acknowledges the adherence of the text to scriptural authority, he hastily moves on to Dante’s position within a literary rather than religious landscape. He points out that he wants to avoid making any statements that do not conform ‘alla cattolica verità’ (Esp. Acc., par. 43), and avoids this pitfall by subordinating Dante’s Christian sources to his pagan auctores. Boccaccio, the most outspoken of all the humanists on the value of the vernacular, finds in Dante’s text a possible nexus connecting his two audiences: the practitioners of the practical arts and the educated theoreticians of ethics. Dante’s text does more than just cite his pagan sources; he stages a poetic translatio of classical thought. Boccaccio steps in to rewrite his Latin encyclopedic texts, especially the Genealogia, through his commentary on Dante; he also hopes to convince his fellow humanists that Dante’s erudition compares with their own. Boccaccio’s final explanation of the hermeneutic intention he brings to his public reading of Dante comes at the end of the Accessus. At this crucial point he recalls his earliest move as dantista, citing the Latin incipit of the Commedia from the supposed letter of Frate Ilaro. He invokes this again story in an attempt to appease both of his audiences in prelude to his reading. After parroting the same lines from the letter about Dante’s decision to switch to the vernacular so that he might reach his intended audience, the ‘prencipi’ and ‘signori’ who cannot read Virgil (Esp. Acc., par. 76; Virgil represents the paragon of Latin literacy), he defines both Dante’s motivation to compose the Commedia and his own motivation for the public readings.

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 137 Di che gli parve dovere il suo poema fare conforme, almeno nella corteccia di fuori, agl’ingegni de’ presenti signori, de’ quali se alcuno n’è che alcuno libro voglia vedere e esso sia in latino, tantosto il fanno trasformare in volgare; donde prese argomento che, se vulgare fosse il suo poema, egli piacerebbe, dove in latino sarebbe schifato. (Acc. par. 76) [Thus it seemed right to him that his poem conform, at least in its outer bark, to the minds of today’s lords, if one of whom wants to read a book that is written in Latin, immediately they have it translated into the vernacular; thus he decided that, if his poem were in the vernacular, it would be pleasing, where the Latin would be rejected.]

Not wanting to risk the intervention of a volgarizzatore, Dante offers his own translatio of his masterpiece. In the Corbaccio Boccaccio, a volgarizzatore in his own right, had satirized the Dominican volgarizzatori Bartolomeo di San Concordio and Jacopo Passavanti, who had doubted the ability of the vernacular audience to receive texts outside of the canon of scriptural or patristic authority. As Boccaccio notes in the last paragraph of the Accessus, Dante had this specific audience in mind: the princes, lords, and noblemen of Italy (Esp. Acc., par. 75)25 Boccaccio has already established that his reading of the Commedia would be primarily ethical and has demonstrated that his hermeneutic method would be an interpretation of the classical and Christian genealogy of Dante’s poetry. The final words of his introduction leave no room for doubt that the desired audience includes those political leaders of the city who need to hear the ethical lessons at the root of the poem that Dante had made clear, even on its outer layer, through his portrayal of the effects of vice and virtue. The last two paragraphs of the Accessus also delimit the subject of the readings. Boccaccio’s invocation of the ‘ingegni’ of the ‘presenti signori’ establishes the centrality of the ars poetica to Dante’s – and to Boccaccio’s – ethical vision. The word ‘ingegni’ has specific resonances with poetic virtue.26 The subsequent use of the term ‘corteccia,’ (from ‘cortex,’ meaning ‘bark’) to describe the aspect of Dante’s poem available to all of Boccaccio’s audience, suggests the specific aim of his public interpretation of Dante.27 Boccaccio states that Dante wanted to make his text comprehensible, at least in its outer ‘bark’ (‘almeno nella corteccia di fuori’), to an illiterate audience. The simple reading of this passage is that Boccaccio understands the word ‘corteccia’ to refer to the choice of the vernacular instead of Latin rather than (or as well as) to the literal level of the text. Thus, Boccaccio extends the metaphor that

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Dante puts in the mouth of Adam in Paradiso XXVI (vv. 130–8): Dante, following Horace in the ars poetica, compares language, and specifically the development rather than degeneration of language, to the natural regeneration of a tree (‘l’uso de’mortali è come fronda / in ramo, che sen va e altra vene’). The choice of the word ‘corteccia’ also suggests a particular take on the relationship between the literal and allegorical. Boccaccio begins the Accessus by employing the term ‘poetico velo’ (Esp. Acc., par. 3) to describe the fictio of the text. However, this term reappears only rarely in his reading of the text: Boccaccio uses ‘velo’ only four times in the entire text but he employs ‘corteccia’ much more often.28 Indeed, Boccaccio defines the outer sense of the text, or the literal reading, as the ‘corteccia litterale.’ That Boccaccio prefers ‘corteccia’ to the term ‘velo,’ resonant with biblical significance, for his interpretive task establishes, once again, his interest in avoiding specifically a biblical explication of the Commedia. Boccaccio’s own theory of poetry, expressed eloquently in the Genealogia deorum gentilium, clearly evinces his familiarity with the relationship between poetry and philosophy or theology. However, he limits the language of biblical exegesis through his preference for terming the outer level of the text as ‘corteccia.’ One particular usage of the term ‘velo’ illustrates Boccaccio’s sparing use of the biblical exegetical mode in his public commentary on Dante’s text. In a striking example, Boccaccio actually engages the biblical interpretive mode, the allegory of the theologians as outlined by Dante in the Epistle to Cangrande, but it is not to interpret Dante’s text. Boccaccio’s his commentary on the opening babble of Pluto in Canto VII offers a particularly meaty digression on the mythical Pluto, bringing up Cerberus, a figure he had interpreted in his commentary on Canto VI (VI, esp. alleg. 50–61). His allegorical interpretation of Cerberus as avarice in Canto VII differs from his interpretation of this same figure as gluttony in Canto VI (VII, esp. alleg. 30–1). Boccaccio, as is his habit, posits a possible critique of his different interpretations of the same figure, and then launches into a long, and purely biblical list of examples of polysemy (VII, esp. alleg. 32–43). This is the only place in the entire Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante where he performs specifically Christian allegorical exegesis, including anagogical and typological readings. He underscores the difference between biblical allegory and moral allegory by setting off these limited examples of purely biblical exegesis from his interpretation of Dante’s poem. It is therefore fitting that in this particular instance of biblical allegorical exegesis Boccaccio uses the word ‘velo’ his conclusion to this excursus.

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 139 non conoscendo che la varietà de’ sensi è quella che n’apre la verità nascosa sotto il velo delle cose sacre, la quale noi aver non potremmo, se sempre volessimo ad una medesima cosa dare un medismo significato. (VII, esp. alleg., 44) [not knowing that the variety of the senses is that which opens up the truth hidden under the veil of sacred things, which we cannot have, if we want to give one meaning to one thing.]

This excursus ends with Boccaccio’s return to his reference to Cerberus as an example of polysemy (VII, esp. alleg. 43–4), but only in the sense that Cerberus has two different significations in terms of the vices: gluttony and avarice. Boccaccio’s interpretation admits multiple meanings, but these meanings pertain exclusively to moral allegory. The word ‘corteccia’ appears earlier in the tradition of vernacular commentaries on the Commedia, but Boccaccio uses this term much more frequently than his predecessors did.29 Boccaccio couples ‘corteccia’ with modifiers such as ‘roza’ (Esp. I. esp. litt. 5) and ‘dura’ (Esp. I, esp. litt. 7) to indicate the low status of this term. However ‘corteccia,’ even with these modifiers, is not simply something to remove or look under. Rather, the ‘corteccia litterale’ becomes the natural substance (after all, ‘corteccia’ is a naturalistic metaphor) of his public reading. Indeed, Boccaccio uses ‘corteccia’ in its literal sense when discussing cosmetics as a cover for the face (Esp. V. esp. alleg. 59). As Boccaccio notes in his first allegorical exposition on Canto I, the allegorical sense appeals to the more sublime intellects but because his task is a public lecture to both the literate and the illiterate, he remembers his audience. cioè come quegli, che di minor sentimento sono, si possano intorno al senso litterale non solamente dilettare, ma ancora e nudrie e le lor forze crescer in maggiori, è da dimostrare la seconda, intorno alla quale si possano gl’ingegni più sublimi esercitare. (Esp. I, esp. alleg. 25) [that is to say those, who are of less sensitivity, may not only delight in the literal sense, but foster and increase their faculties into greater powers as well, and to the second sense to be examined, in which those with most sublime genius might endeavour.]

The purpose of Boccaccio’s project in presenting public lectures on the Commedia, as defined by the civic petition, rests not in reaching out to those with sublime intellects who might comprehend the allegorical

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sense of the text. Rather, Boccaccio wanted to instruct those who would benefit the most from a directed literal reading. He proposes that the literal meaning of the text, the ‘roza corteccia,’ will offer a moral lesson to his listeners ‘di minor sentimento’ just as the allegorical readings offer more profound instruction for the more erudite. In his reading for the crowd gathered at the church of Santo Stefano di Badia, he could use the stories of fellow Florentine citizens, such as the haughty Ghibelline Farinata in Canto X, to teach his contemporaries about civic virtue. He could also instruct them on classical ethics through his discussion, for example, of Nessus the Centaur in Canto XII. Dante’s poetic translatio of classical and Christian ethics comes to fruition in Boccaccio’s Esposizioni. Perhaps Boccaccio’s reticence to elaborate the allegorical interpretation reveals itself most clearly through a simple structural observation. Since the literal subject of Dante’s text so closely adheres to the purpose of Boccaccio’s allegorical interpretation, he does not find it always necessary to provide any allegorical interpretation. Unlike previous commentators, he splits his commentary into two distinct sections: an esposizione litterale and an esposizione allegorica. Moreover, as he proceeds through the canti he gradually reduces the allegorical interpretation until the final three (XV, XVI, and XVII [incomplete]), where he offers none at all. Of course, it is not possible to know exactly what he intended the completed version of the Esposizioni to look like, but his public lectures as we know them emphasize the esposizione litterale. Dante the Humanist Boccaccio’s emphasis on the ‘corteccia’ of the Commedia, in both its linguistic and its ethical vernacularity, appealed to his audience of ‘meccanici,’ but he also had to confirm Dante’s place with another audience of great importance: the literate audience, which included both the humanist circle of such men as Benvenuto da Imola and the Dominicans who had often spoken out against Dante. Therefore, Boccaccio offers a reading of Dante’s Commedia that conservatively holds to a commentary tradition familiar to both of these audiences: the commentary on a pagan auctor. As described in chapter 1 of this book, Boccaccio as editor of the Vita Nova reformed Dante’s text so that it would conform to contemporary generic models. In the case of the Esposizioni, Boccaccio models his commentary on commentaries of pagan authors – specifically the commentaries on Virgil written by Bernardus Silvestris and Fulgentius – as

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 141

well as commentaries on other classical texts by such writers as Lactantius and Macrobius, of whose work Boccaccio had made manuscript copies. Boccaccio relies on commentaries by Bernardus and Fulgentius on the Aeneid in his glosses on the Commedia,30 not only for erudite knowledge that threw light on Dante’s classical references, but also as texts of moral philosophy and as guides to self-knowledge, a methodology that Bernardus and Fulgentius explicitly adopted in their own commentaries. This tradition of Christian commentary on pagan authors provided Boccaccio a model for a commentary primarily concerned with human history and human action while safely rooted in a Christian perspective. Indeed, Boccaccio’s commentary insulates Dante from threats to his stature occasioned by Petrarca’s lack of interest in Dante’s vernacular culture and the Dominicans’ scepticism of the role of vernacular poetics in theological debate. In treating Dante as a classical author, Boccaccio both elevates Dante to a status that the Petrarchan circle could respect and exculpates him from the Dominican charge of misusing literature.31 Crucial to both motives is Boccaccio’s denial of Dante’s claim to prophetic revelation.32 Unlike at least one of the earlier commentators – Guido da Pisa – who lent credence to Dante’s own claims of prophecy, Boccaccio coldly erases that notion: ‘Certa cosa è che Dante non avea spirito profetico’ [Certainly Dante did not have the prophetic spirit] (Esp. VIII, esp. litt., 16).33 In choosing to discount one of Dante’s claims to authority in the Commedia, Boccaccio buttresses another: Dante’s claim to authority as an auctor. The earliest Christian commentaries on Virgil positioned their interpretation in a strictly moral framework. The commentary by Fulgentius, Expositio Virgilianae Continentiae Secundum Philosophos Moralis, was probably composed in the first quarter of the sixth century; it similarly downplays anything other than a moral reading of Virgil, including Virgil’s hidden pronouncements on the liberal arts and his prophetic moments.34 Fulgentius limits his interest in the Aeneid to an exposition of the ‘full range of human life.’ Having established the strictly human ethical relevance of the Aeneid, he goes on quickly to reduce Virgil’s twelve books to an allegory of the three stages on human life. He does not investigate the differences between the literal and allegorical in Virgil; for his purposes the moral allegory of the Aeneid trumps all other readings. Bernardus Silvestris composed Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii six centuries later but he followed Fulgentius as a model. What Bernardus emphasizes in his Accessus to his commentary on the Aeneid, however, is Virgil’s place as a polymath and encyclopedist, a poet and

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a philosopher. In his reading of the most important classical text in the medieval world, Bernardus offers a more elaborate statement than that by Fulgentius on the multiple virtues that arise from Virgil’s poem. Ex hoc opere ex ornatu verborum et figura orationis et ex variis casibus et operibus hominis enarratis quaedam habetur delectatio. Si quis vero haec omnia studeat imitari, maximam scribendi peritiam consequitur, maxima etiam exempla et excitationes aggrediendi honesta et fugiendi illicita per ea quae narrantur habentur.35 [The Aeneid gives pleasure because of verbal ornament, the figures of speech, and the diverse adventures and works of men which it describes. Indeed, anyone who imitates these matters diligently will attain the greatest skill in the art of writing, and he will also find in the narrative the greatest examples of and inspiration for pursuing virtue and avoiding vice.] (4)

Bernardus highlights Virgil’s importance as an example of rhetorical skill (Bernardus was a teacher of rhetoric) and as a source for moral philosophy. He utilizes Virgil as an example of excellence in the ars rhetorica and for the ethical exemplarity of Aeneas. Virgil as prophet or poet of the divine wisdom does not figure. This delimitation of the value of a pagan author in a Christian setting serves as Boccaccio’s model for his commentary on Dante. Bernardus’s commentary on the Aeneid offers another model in the way he defines the outer layer, or fictio, of the text in relationship to the moral allegory. Just as Boccaccio prefers the term ‘corteccia’ to describe the literal aspect of his text, so too Bernardus prefers ‘integumentum,’ a term that does not imply specifically Christian allegoresis. Thus when Bernardus describes the allegory of the Aeneid, he avoids suggesting Christian exegesis for Virgil. Modus vero agendi talis est: sub integumento describit quid agat vel quid patiatur humanus spiritus in humano corpore temporaliter positus … Integumentum vero est genus demonstrationis sub fabulosa narratione veritatis involvens intellectum, unde et involucrum dicitur. Utilitatem vero capit home ex hoc opere secundum sui agnitionem, homini vero magna utilitas est, (Acc. 3: 12–22) [His procedure is to describe by means of an integument what the human spirit does and endures while temporarily placed in the human body …

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 143 The integument is a type of exposition which wraps the apprehension of truth in a fictional narrative, and thus it is also called an involucrum, a cover. One grasps the utility of this work, which is self-knowledge;] (5)

Bernardus describes the mode (‘modus’) of the Aeneid by limiting both the literal and the allegorical senses. First, he defines the allegorical interpretation of the text to the moral sense (‘describat quid agat’).36 Second, by fixing on ‘integumentum’ as his term of art for the fictio of the Aeneid, he distinguishes his hermeneutic from biblical exegesis.37 In other words, the fictio of the Aeneid becomes the subject of interpretation since the significance of the pagan text must be limited to the superficial events of the narrative. Boccaccio and Bernardus share this particular mode of reading their texts in terms of practical ethics. For Bernardus, Virgil’s status as a pagan author lends itself to this hermeneutic; Boccaccio chooses to treat Dante’s Commedia as he would treat the Aeneid, downplaying Dante’s specifically Christian allegory. In the Esposizioni, Boccaccio publicly interprets the Commedia as a secular text. Viewed in total, he focuses most of his interpretive acumen on glossing classical references, explicating ‘istorie,’ and offering moral lessons from the characters, rather than explaining the specifically Christian landscape of the narrative. Boccaccio’s preference for the term ‘corteccia’ lines up with Bernardus’ choice of the term ‘integumentum.’ Although in his introduction to his first allegorical reading (Esp. I, esp. alleg., par. 20) Boccaccio recognizes the anagogical sense as expounded in the Epistle to Cangrande, he quickly moves on to discuss the allegory as strictly moral: ‘Il secondo senso è “allegorico” o vero “morale”’ [The second sense is ‘allegorical’ or truly ‘moral’] (Esp. I, esp. alleg. 18–21). He might indeed be intentionally misreading, or at least selectively reading, the Epistle to Cangrande, in which the author stipulates: ‘Et primus dicitur litteralis, secundus vero allegoricus, sive moralis, sive anagogicus’ [And the first sense is called literal, the second called allegorical, whether moral, or anagogical] (Esp. X, par. 20). In limiting his allegorical interpretation of the Commedia to the moral sense, Boccaccio centres his entire reading of the text on a hermeneutical operation exclusively concerned, on both the literal and the allegorical levels, with a discussion of human history and human action, even if the fictio of the text depicts the state of the soul after that life has ended. In his entire project as a dantista Boccaccio attempts to raise the figure of Dante to the level of the ancient masters in terms of both his poetic craft and his erudition. Boccaccio adopts the same hermeneutic

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that earlier commentators had applied to Virgil, the greatest of all pagan authors. Boccaccio’s Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante reads the Commedia as dramatic encyclopaedia of ancient wisdom that can serve to translate classical ethics to a vernacular audience in need of instruction. That the fictio of Dante’s Commedia already portrays a moral judgment – the punishment of sin and the reward of virtue – renders the allegorical explication of the text, limited to a moral sense in Boccaccio’s system, more and more superfluous. Thus Boccaccio can speak of Dante’s great erudition and moral vision while allowing the theologians to have their way with Dante. E in questa maniera intorno al senso allegorico si possano i savi essercitare e intorno alla dolcezza testuale nudrire i semplici, cioè quegli li qua’i ancora tanto non sentono che essi possano al senso allegorico trapassare. E così possiam vedere questo libro avere in publico donde nudrir possa gli’ingegni di quegli che meno sentimento hanno e donde egli sospenda con ammirazione le menti de’ più provetti. (Esp. I, esp. all. 23–34). [And in this way the wise can work around the allegorical sense, and around the sweetness of the text the simple can feed, that is to say those who are not yet able to broach the allegorical sense. And thus in public we can see that this book can feed the minds of those of less understanding and it can hold the minds of the more skilful ones in admiration.]

Boccaccio clearly knows and understands the limits of his audience, and he directs his commentary of the Commedia to the most important part of that audience: the secular leaders of the city. He conducts his Esposizioni as a didactic exercise to promulgate, through an understanding of Dante as a moralist, an ethics of civil society. In doing so, he was keenly aware of the particulars of his audience. For those of the literate culture, Dante was a theologian and a poet, as Boccaccio notes earlier in the Genealogia and the Trattatello in laude di Dante. Indeed, in this section of the Esposizioni Boccaccio leaves open the option for the theologians to apply their theological knowledge (Esp. I, esp. alleg. 22–5). But for the audience of his public commentary commissioned by the civic authorities, Dante was a poet of the city of man. Boccaccio provides an interpretation fitting to both of his audiences. Two examples from the Esposizioni illustrate how Boccaccio sought to negotiate the different abilities of these two audiences. The first example comes, likely not by chance, as a gloss on a passage that treats Virgil, the

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epitome of pagan auctoritas, as both a rhetorical and moral exemplar. As noted above, Boccaccio, in multiple texts and with multiple voices, disparages the ‘meccanici’ as the practitioners of the practical, or mechanical, arts. However, in this passage on Virgil, he makes an important distinction about the place of the mechanical arts in the poetic and interpretive enterprise. In his commentary on Inferno IV, v. 73, Boccaccio discusses the two realms of knowledge through a gloss on Dante’s periphrastic invocation of Virgil as ‘O tu ch’onori scienza ed arte’ [O you who honour art and science both] (Inf. IV, v. 73). Catta qui l’autore la benivolenza del suo maestro commendandolo e dicendo lui essere onoratore di scienza e d’arte. Dove è da sapere che, secondo che scrive Alberto sopra il VI dell’Etica di Aristotile, sapienza, scienza, arte, prudenzia ed intelletto sono in cotal maniera differenti, che la sapienza è delle cose divine, le quali trascendono la natura delle cose inferiori; scienza è delle cose inferiori, cioè della lor natura; arte è delle cose operate da noi, e questa propriamente apartiene alle cose meccaniche, e, se per avventura questa si prende per la scienza speculativa, impropriamente è detta ‘arte’, in quanto con le sue regole e dimostrazioni ne costringe infra certi termini: (Esp. IV, esp. litt. 80–1) [The author gains the benevolence of his master by commending him and by saying that he honours both knowledge (scienza) and art. It is to be understood that – according to what Albertus Magnus writes on the VI book of Aristotle’s Ethic – wisdom, knowledge, art, prudence and intellect are different in this manner, that wisdom is of divine things, which transcend the nature of lower things; knowledge is of lower things, that is to say of their natures; art is of the things made by us, and this (art) really pertains to the mechanical things, and, if by chance one takes this (art) for speculative knowledge, it is not correctly called ‘art,’ in as much as it is constrained into certain limits by its rules and demonstrations.]

In this commentary on Dante’s visit to Limbo, the locus of classical knowledge, Boccaccio articulates a classification of the arts that brings together the liberal and mechanical arts. More strikingly, in the place where Dante at once celebrates classical knowledge and shows its limits, Boccaccio interpolates his own theory of knowledge into his commentary. Using Albertus Magnus as his authority, he describes a hierarchy of knowledge that draws a sharp distinction between human and divine knowledge. In Boccaccio’s explanation of Virgil’s position as a classical

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poet, Virgil exemplifies the summit of human knowledge (at least in terms of Boccaccio’s interpretation). Art or poesis – as Boccaccio would have understood from Aristotle, and as he specifies in the Trattatello in laude di Dante – concerns artful representation of human matters. Boccaccio limits Virgil to knowledge of these ‘lower things’ or human matters that exclude speculative knowledge.38 Thus Virgil, as a poet, represents a mastery of ‘scienza e arte’: his art stands as the ultimate mode of creating and relating human knowledge, not divine wisdom. Boccaccio cannot take on Dante’s challenge to bring together the Christian and the classical world; he prefers to lower the stakes by bringing poetry down to strictly human terms. In this passage Boccaccio hints at a relationship between the practical arts and the work of the poet. He makes it clear that ‘arte’ is not a speculative science; rather, ‘making’ itself must follow certain real rules (‘regole’) and have observable outcomes (‘dimostrazioni’). In this manner, Boccaccio follows an important tradition. Hugh of St Victor, in his Didascalicon discussed above, was the most important thinker on the connection between the mechanical and liberal arts. Dante, in the voice of Guido Guinizelli, highlights the link or metaphorical relationship between poetry and the practical arts when he defines Arnault Daniel as a ‘meccanico’ of language: ‘Il miglior fabbro del parlar materno’ [he was a better artisan of the mother tongue] (Purg. XXVI, v. 115). St Bonaventure, in his treatise De reductione artium ad theologiam, also argues for the potential importance of investigating the practical arts as a path to knowledge. In relating ‘arte’ to the practical arts as well as to the poetic craft, Boccaccio claims a practical utility for poetry in the sphere of public life. Boccaccio, as a biographer of Dante and a lifelong participant in Florentine and Italian politics, translates the practical value of poetry to its highest public good: politics. Poetry, as the apex of ‘arte’ and a link between the ‘cose meccaniche’ and ‘scienza,’ serves a crucial role in guiding the city. In the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, Boccaccio focuses on the centrality of poetry to civic ethics by offering a secular and humanistic reading of the text. His bringing together of knowledge and the practical arts also attests to his desire to unite his two audiences. As an important proponent of vernacular humanism, Boccaccio sought to assign the Commedia the same moral force that other humanists saw only in classical authors, but he made these lessons available to all. Yet another example of Boccaccio’s insistence on presenting a moral reading that will benefit both of his audiences and offend neither comes

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near the end of the Esposizioni. In his exposition of Canto XIV and the overtly allegorical description of the Veglio di Creta (Esp. XIV, esp. alleg. 7–43), Boccaccio manifestly refuses to link Dante’s story to its biblical source. Despite Dante’s references to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and Daniel’s political and historical interpretation of that dream (Daniel 2, 1–49), Boccaccio distances his interpretation both from Dante and from the previous commentary tradition.39 discrive l’effetto formale della sua intenzione, il quale finge in una statua simile quasi ad una, la quale Danièl profeta dimostra essere stata veduta in sogno da Nabucdonsòr re; ma non ha nella sua l’autore quella intenzione, la quale Daniello dimostra essere in quella, ... l’autore intende alcuni effetti seguiti in certe varietà di tempi, cominciate dal principio del mondo infino al presente tempo. (Esp. XIV, esp. alleg., 20) [he (the author) describes the formal effect of his meaning, he imagines a statue almost like the one that Daniel the prophet showed was in the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar; but the author does not have that meaning in his text that Daniel showed in his ... in this one the author means certain events happening in a variety of times, starting from the beginning of the world to the present time.]

Boccaccio interprets the Veglio di Creta as an allegory of universal human generation and decline. He distinctly limits his interpretation to secular history, avoiding at all costs, even the price of fidelity to Dante’s text, biblical allegory. Boccaccio’s vision of human history borders on the eschatological without ever becoming specifically biblical, but his insistence on human causality for both vices and virtue marks his interpretation. He does not offer an apocalyptic vision; instead, he describes the course of human history as an accumulation of human actions (XIV, esp. alleg., 18). In this same section he describes the development of the arts as part of the progression, or better devolution, of human history. In yet another move to bring together the practitioners of the liberal and mechanical arts, the genesis and evolution of knowledge explicated here claims that the liberal arts and the mechanical arts happened concurrently: ‘dalle speculazione a formare le scienze, l’arti liberali e ancora le meccaniche’ [from speculation to form the sciences, the liberal arts and then the mechanical arts] (Esp. XIV, par. 29). Boccaccio’s hermeneutic method mediates between his two audiences by reducing the distance between the liberal and mechanical arts.

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Petrarca in the Esposizioni With his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, Boccaccio presents Dante in a way that would appeal to the mixed Florentine audience. For the illiterate ‘meccanici,’ the Commedia, through his Esposizioni, serves as a vernacular translatio of classical history and ethics. For his humanist colleagues, Dante is refashioned as a Christian equivalent of a pagan poet. Moreover, Boccaccio goes beyond the audiences present in Florence to directly address two points of ideological difference that separate him from Dante and Petrarca. For Dante, Boccaccio reacts to ideological differences by, in some cases, interpolating his own opinion. For Petrarca, Boccaccio uses his interpretation of Dante’s Commedia to defend his own Decameron from Petrarca’s abuses. In his reading of Virgil’s exposition of the system of divine justice represented by the physical structure of Inferno, Boccaccio rejects Dante’s use of the adjective ‘matta’ to modify the noun ‘bestialitade’ (Inf. XI, vv. 82–3), noting that the adjective is superfluous and serves only to fulfil the requirements of the rhyme (Esp. XI, esp. litt., 57). In a second instance, Boccaccio denies the validity of Dante’s apostrophe in Canto XIV: ‘O vendetta di Dio’ (Inf. XIV, v. 16) by rejecting the ascription of human emotions to God, who is perfect and not susceptible to passions such as vengeance. Dante, Boccaccio suggests, would have been better to substitute the word ‘giustizia’ (justice) for the inappropriately used ‘vendetta’ (Esp. XIV, esp. litt., 21–3). These two interpretations are presented as disagreements with Dante; however, a deeper tension with his other magister, Francesco Petrarca, subtends this discord. These minor points of interpretive difference indicate, I argue, larger conflicts among the members of the tre corone. Boccaccio has much more at stake than simply correcting Dante on minor terminological issues, as presented in the Esposizioni. Rather, Boccaccio corrects Dante so that his audience in Florence, and his distant master Francesco Petrarca, will understand what is proper and improper to take away from Dante. Additionally, the two terms in question, ‘matta’ and ‘vendetta,’ have intriguing intertextualites in Boccaccio’s writing. Their appearances in Boccaccio’s texts not only register how he interprets Dante; they also specifically relate to Boccaccio’s understanding of poetry and ethics. Boccaccio’s difference with Dante pertains as much to his disagreement with the emerging disdain for vernacular literature as with Dante’s poem per se. In his interpretation of Dante, he seeks to shelter both the Commedia and his own vernacular production from the attack of those who would judge the vernacular unworthy or heterodox.

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The term ‘vendetta’ has a history in previous chapters of this study.40 The reader will recall that in the Corbaccio the bitter and cuckolded spiritguide finishes his long misogynistic diatribe by urging the scorned scholar to take ‘vendetta’ on the widow. In chapter 3 I argue that Boccaccio places the guide of the Corbaccio in an extremely dubious position of moral authority. In his mad rage against his former wife who has cuckolded him he implores the scholar to serve as his agent of vengeance. The ironic fiction of the Corbaccio holds that this guide, like Virgil, speaks under the auspices of divine justice; however, as the many intertextualities between the Corbaccio and the Inferno demonstrate, this mad guide has misunderstood the message of the entire Commedia, at least in terms of the phrase ‘vendetta di Dio.’ From the fictio of the Commedia and its depiction of divine punishment and reward the spirit-guide claims the power of divine judgment. However, in his critique of Dante’s use of the phrase ‘vendetta di Dio,’ Boccaccio shows an intellectual consistency between the two works separated by as many as twenty years. The Boccaccio of the Corbaccio and of the Esposizioni rejects any characterization of divine justice in human terms. In considering these two moments together, Boccaccio makes a convincing argument about the dangers of a reading of Dante that draws theological lessons from the Commedia: the poem’s concern is practical, not speculative, philosophy. In the Corbaccio Boccaccio presents a satirical representation of a misreading of the Commedia. With the mixed audience of the Esposizioni, the stakes are too high to play with irony, so Boccaccio makes his critique explicit. He seeks to protect Dante from a dangerous implication of his work, namely, that he intends his Commedia to be read as literally true. Perhaps Boccaccio himself ponders the implications of a literal reading of Dante’s journey, but he does not allow his audience room for that speculation; nor does he give the Dominican preachers such a potent weapon for their attacks. The other critique that Boccaccio levels against Dante in his Esposizioni appears at first blush to be less critical, but it still radiates significant intertextual questions. In his literal commentary on Inferno XI and Virgil’s description of Hell’s ethical geography, Dante has Virgil describe the gravest sin as ‘matta bestialitade’ (Inf. XI, vv. 81–2). In his commentary, Boccaccio offers the following gloss. ‘e la matta bestialitade?’ e questa è la terza disposizione che ‘l ciel non vuole. Questo adiettivo ‘matta’ pose qui l’autore più in servigio della rima che per bisogno n’avesse la bestialità, per ciò che bestialità e matteza si posson dire essere una medesima cosa. (Esp. XI, esp. litt., 56–7)

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[‘and mad bestiality?’ and this is the third disposition that offends heaven. The author places this adjective ‘mad’ in this place more in service of the rhyme than for any need that the word bestiality has, in as much as bestiality and madness can be said to be the same thing.]

Although Boccaccio as an editor of Dante is well attuned to micro-textual issues, his criticism seems particularly pedantic and out of character with the general tone of his project.41 However, this gloss becomes much more problematic considering Boccaccio’s own citation of this very term in his Decameron. In one of Boccaccio’s most famous textual citations of Dante’s Commedia, Dioneo, the most mercurial narrator of Boccaccio’s brigata, prefaces his story of Gualtieri and Griselda (Dec. X, 10, par. 2) by defining Gualtieri’s action as ‘matta bestialità.’ As many critics have noted, Dioneo cites Dante’s Inferno as well as Aristotle’s Ethics.42 Given Boccaccio’s criticism of Dante’s use of the adjective ‘matta’ as a purely rhetorical flourish, his direct importation of the entire term in this prose passage (and therefore unconcerned with rhyme) begs for interpretation. The fact that Boccaccio rewrote the Decameron around the same period as the composition of the Esposizioni eliminates the possibility that his use of the term ‘matta bestialità’ to describe Gualtieri’s actions can be explained as juvenile error.43 Rather, the citation seems by all accounts to be explicitly direct and is therefore implicitly problematic. As critics have come to understand, in this last story of the Decameron Boccaccio hinges overarching interpretive issues concerning not only his Decameron but also his entire project of vernacular poetics on the reading of Gualtieri’s tyranny over the patient Griselda.44 Most obviously, Boccaccio’s positioning of the novella as the final story gives it greater weight than the 99 (or 99 and one-half) that come before. The first shot at cracking the implicit allegory behind the story was, famously, Petrarca’s. In one of his last letters to Boccaccio, Petrarca continues his lifelong polemic against vernacular culture, while praising, in his typically ambiguous fashion, Boccaccio’s Decameron. Librum tuum, quem nostro materno eloquio, ut opinor, olim iuvenis edidisti, ... Nam si dicam legi, menciar, siquidem ipse magnus valde, ut ad vulgus et soluta scriptus oratione, ... Delectatus sum ipso in transitu; et si quid lascivie liberioris occurreret, excusabat etas tunc tua dum id scriberes, stilus, ydioma, ipsa quoque rerum levitats et eorum qui lecturi talia videbantur. Refert enim largiter quibus scribas, morumque varietate stili varietas excusatur.45

Commentator: Presenting the Monument 151 I have seen the book [Decameron] you produced in our mother tongue long ago, I believe, as a young man; ... If I were to say I have read it, I would be lying, since it is very big, having been written for the common herd and in prose … I did enjoy leafing through it; and if anything met my eye that was too frankly lewd, your age at the time of writing excused it – also the style, the idiom, the very levity of the subject matter and of those who seemed likely to read such things. It matters a great deal for whom you are writing, and variety in morals excuses variety in style.

Petrarca perpetuates the same critiques against vernacular culture that had marked his earlier correspondences with Boccaccio regarding Dante. At the outset Petrarca notes that he did not read the Decameron because, being in the vernacular it was intended for the ‘common herd.’ He extends his distaste for the style of the Decameron to distrust of its content when he intimates that, perhaps, the Decameron will appeal to the common herd since ‘morumque varietate stili varietas excusatur.’ For Petrarca, the ethics of the Decameron, or any other vernacular text, cannot be separated from its aesthetics. However, Petrarca, ever Boccaccio’s friend and teacher, finds something redemptive in the Decameron. In the same letter he notes how powerfully the final story of Gualtieri and Griselda gripped him; he comments that the novella, in its position as the last story, carries special interpretive importance. Beyond memorizing the story and retelling it to his friends, Petrarca decided to translate it into Latin so that a greater – and more sophisticated Latin-literate – audience could delight in and learn from it. Thus, Petrarca translates Boccaccio’s final story into Latin, leaving the author with both the praise and the blame. In other words, Petrarca refuses the ‘corteccia’; he applies the word ‘veste’ (garment) to Boccaccio’s text, preferring to redress the allegory in a more fitting garment. Scholars of Boccaccio, Petrarca, and Chaucer who later translated Petrarca’s translation into the ‘Clerkes Tale’ in the Canterbury Tales have taken turns sorting out the various authorial motivations behind the translations and adaptations.46 Petrarca at least attempts to clarify his motivations in a brief epilogue attached to his translation. Hanc historiam stilo nunc alio retexere visum fuit, non tam ideo, ut matronas nostri temporis ad imitandam huis uxoris pacienciam, que michi vix imitabilis videtur, quam ut legentes ad imitandam saltem femine constanciam excitarem, ut quod hec viro suo prestitit, hoc prestare Deo nostro audeant47

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[I decided to retell this story in another language not so much to encourage the married women of our day to imitate this wife’s patience, which to me seems hardly imitable, as to encourage the readers to imitate at least this women’s constancy, so that what she maintained toward her husband they may maintain toward our God.]

As Ginsberg has noted, Petrarca replaces patience, the supposed virtue of Griselda, with constancy.48 The constancy that Petrarca plays up in Griselda tellingly contradicts the ‘variety of morals and style’ for which Petrarca had, perhaps mockingly, praised Boccaccio in the prologue to his translation. Petrarca takes the same attitude toward Boccaccio’s Decameron as he had taken with Dante’s Commedia: the insidious condemnation of faint praise. The conclusion to Petrarca’s translation reveals another disagreement with Boccaccio. In his version, Petrarca entirely does away with the frame of the story that contains Dioneo’s conclusion that Gualtieri acts out of ‘matta bestialità.’ Instead, Petrarca reduces the tale to a retelling of the biblical narrative of Job. Gualtieri plays the role of God and Griselda the patient and enduring Job: this is precisely the type of specifically Christian allegoresis that Boccaccio resisted in his public reading of the Commedia in the Esposizioni. Petrarca even brackets his version of the tale with two biblical citations (Judges 17, James 1:13) that support his allegorical reading. Petrarca’s rewriting of the Griselda story violates two precepts that had guided Boccaccio in his work as dantista: Petrarca downplays the importance of vernacular culture, and he forces Boccaccio’s nuanced story into a simple and specifically Christian allegory. In this reading I fundamentally agree with Ginsberg’s but I detect in the Esposizioni a response to Petrarca’s manipulation of Boccaccio’s story, a response that continues to be at odds both with Petrarca’s politics and his humanist elitism. When Boccaccio reproduces Dante’s phrase ‘matta bestialità’ in the Decameron and then, in his Esposizioni, critiques Dante for its use, he continues his nuanced appropriation of Dante’s vernacular poetics and Petrarca’s Christian humanism. The force of Petrarca’s Christian allegorical reading of this passage had such great impact that Boccaccio’s story, stripped of its defining context, remained one of Europe’s most popular moral tales for centuries. However, in the past few decades critics have taken another look at the text: this time the key is trecento politics. Wallace and Ginsberg argue for identification of Gualtieri as the Florentine podestà Walter, Duke of Ath-

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ens, a villain in Boccaccio’s De Casibus. Both Walters are hated tyrants; Wallace and Ginsberg read this tale as a criticism of political tyranny in the trecento and, more specifically, as a critique of Petrarca’s political affiliation with the Visconti tyrants of Milan. This interpretation of the final tale of the Decameron maintains the use of allegory but reads the tale using Dioneo’s declaration of Gualtieri’s ‘matta bestialità’ as an interpretive key. This view of the tale forces an ethical judgment of Gualtieri’s actions; Boccaccio’s condemnation of Gualtieri (through Dioneo) in specifically Aristotelian (by way of Dantean) terms suggests a political allegory. Indeed, Boccaccio’s lifelong preoccupation with Petrarca’s political choice to work for tyrants had not abated. As I argue throughout this study, Boccaccio, in his Vita Petracchi, his Latin poem Ytalie, iam certus honos, and his epistolary exchanges with Petrarca, reprimanded him for choosing to stay under the protection of various lords rather than return to Florence and republicanism. Even in the waning years of their lives, Boccaccio continues this criticism. Petrarca defends himself again from Boccaccio’s accusations in a letter written immediately before his translation of Boccaccio’s tale. Huc etiam illud effers: bonas me partes temporum sub obsequio principum perdidisse. Hic, ne erres, verum accipe. Nomine ego cum principibus fui, re autem principes mecum fuerunt. Nunquam me illorum consilia et perraro convivia tenuerunt. Nulla michi unquam conditio probaretur, que me vel modicum a libertate et a studiis meis averteret. Itaque cum palatium omnes, ego vel nemus petebam vel inter libros in thalamo quiescebam. At this point you also bring up that I wasted a good part of my time in the service of princes. So that you may not err in this, here is the truth: I was with the princes in name, but in fact the princes were with me; I never attended their councils, and very seldom their banquets. I would never approve any conditions that would distract me even for a short while from my freedom and from my studies. Therefore, when everyone sought the palace, I either sought the forest or rested in my room among my books.49

More like an old married couple than two distinguished intellectuals, they return to the old debates. Boccaccio’s vision of poetry remains through his Esposizioni fundamentally political and ethical; Petrarca insists on the solitary and contemplative nature of the poetic enterprise. Even if Petrarca had chosen to remain with the tyrants in Parma, Milan,

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and Pavia, Boccaccio would have preferred that he attend the palace and sit in on the secret meetings of political strategy, rather than shut himself away or flee to the forest glen. As the reader will recall, Boccaccio’s critique of Dante’s redundant use of the adjective ‘matta’ to modify the noun ‘bestialitade’ was specifically about the restraints of poetic prosody; the demands of the terza rima and the hendecasyllabic line required ‘matta’ to rhyme with ‘pertratta’ and ‘accatta.’ Boccaccio retained this phrase in his rewritten version of the Decameron, unconcerned with the constraints of rhyme, but at same time Boccaccio critiqued Dante’s use of it in the Esposizioni. I argue that this intellectual inconsistency is a response to Petrarca’s translation of his story of Gualtieri and Griselda just a few months earlier. Boccaccio uses the phrase ‘matta bestialitade’ to reinforce the moral judgment of Gualtieri’s tyrannical actions. Once again, Boccaccio notes a difference with Petrarca by means of a direct reference back to Dante, even if Dante’s source text is flawed. In the Esposizioni Boccaccio over and over again makes clear that his reading of the Commedia will highlight the ethical lessons of the text for the broadest public audience possible. He limits his interpretation of Dante’s text, specifically the allegorical interpretation, to teaching the history of human ethics, avoiding biblical allegory. Conversely, even at the end of his life, Petrarca disparages the vernacular, even that of his poetic father Dante and of his poetic son Boccaccio. In the Esposizioni, Boccaccio presents Dante’s text as a monument to the public role of the poet. In doing so, realizing that different audiences needed different perspectives, he limits his interpretation of the text to the moral; by portraying Dante as a model of vernacular humanism, Boccaccio places his monument to the poet in the centre of Florentine civic life. The Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, Boccaccio’s last major work, articulates through Boccaccio’s reading of Dante, a figure of Dante that appeals to both his literate and his illiterate audiences. Boccaccio viewed his task as a public function of the state. His goal was to reach out to those who could never grasp the nuances of Dante’s text and to those who had dismissed Dante’s vernacular poetics. In his attempt to provide the most utility to his audience, Boccaccio performs an oral volgarizzamento of his unrivalled knowledge of classical authors and the ethical relevance of Dante’s text for his fellow citizens. For his erudite audience, the format adheres to traditional commentaries on pagan authors: he starts with an accessus followed by a systematic gloss of the literal and allegorical significance. Thus, Boccaccio’s reading of Dante’s Commedia treats the text

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as a modern-day secular classic; on both the literal and the allegorical levels his reading is centred on offering a historical and ethical account of Dante’s text. He presents Dante as a vernacular humanist while also holding himself up as the primary exponent of this young tradition. His approach helped set the course for Dante’s preeminence both as a poet and as a political monument. With Boccaccio, as with Petrarca, but without the elitism, we witness the birth of the humanist ever ready to argue for the enduring value of poetry to Florence, Italy, and the city of men. Boccaccio’s Paradiso Boccaccio’s illness in his old age and the reappearance of the plague in Florence brought his public lectures and his written commentary on the Inferno to a premature end. We are left to speculate on how he might have moved forward through the rest of Dante’s poem, especially the Paradiso. The poems cited at the outset of this chapter detail the disillusionment that these public readings brought him, but the Esposizioni remain a monument to Dante that has influenced readers from the trecento through to our own day. Only a year after the public lectures were interrupted, Benvenuto da Imola was to repeat some of Boccaccio’s material in Bologna. Boccaccio’s commentary on Dante’s Commedia presented Florence with a domestic hero, a household god for the Florentine people. Throughout his lifelong project of building the monument to Dante Boccaccio kept one particular person in mind: Francesco Petrarca. As much as his dantismo served Dante’s poetic legacy, he always mediated between the two guiding lights of Florentine poetics. Although he had political and even ideological disagreements with Petrarca, he never abandoned his hope of harmonizing Petrarca and Dante. His last literary effort, a sonnet composed in the crepuscular comfort of Certaldo after receiving news of Petrarca’s death, eulogizes his friend and master. Even in this ultimate act, Boccaccio follows Petrarca’s lead; his master had composed a similar sonnet to mark the death of Sennuccio del Bene (Canzoniere, 287). The poem, CXXVI ‘Or sei salito,’ opens with the recognition that Petrarca has ascended to paradise, but Boccaccio reaffirms Petrarca’s literary citizenship in the Tuscan school of vernacular poetics. Or se’ colà, dove spesso il desio ti tirò già per veder Lauretta; Or sei dove la mia bella Fiammetta

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siede con lei nel cospetto di Dio. Or con Sennuccio e con Cino e con Dante vivi, sicuro d’eterno riposo mirando cose da noi non intese. [Now you are there, where desire had already drawn you to see your Lauretta; now you are where my beautiful Fiammetta sits with her under the gaze of God. Now with Sennuccio and Cino and Dante you live, sure of eternal rest gazing at things unknown to us.]

Boccaccio’s final poem realizes his lifelong desire to locate Petrarca’s vernacular works in the empyrean of fame. As in his short biography of Petrarca, Boccaccio names Lauretta along with his Fiammetta in a direct invocation of their vernacular poetic projects. Petrarca in death becomes something that he never would allow Boccaccio to make him in life: a member of the Tuscan school of poetry. Along with his friend Sennucio del Bene, his teacher while in Naples Cino da Pistoia, Boccaccio imagines a heaven where Dante, Petrarca and, eventually, he will wear laurel crowns as ‘tre corone fiorentine,’ just as these three men have been immortalized in stone monuments throughout the world. 50

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Just as Boccaccio’s work on Dante was influential in creating the monumental Dante, so too Boccaccio’s monument in the loggiato of the Uffizi bears the imprint of Petrarca’s judgment on Boccaccio. His statue stands just a few paces down from the statue of Dante that Boccaccio helped to construct. And between the two stands Petrarca. These three statues follow the traditional hierarchy of the tre corone. Dante’s statue was one of the original four proposed and erected, in a group with Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Lorenzo Il Magnifico in the same group.1 Petrarca followed Dante; Boccaccio was the last of the poets accepted for the honour. The statues of Petrarca and Boccaccio play their traditional roles as opposite ends of the tre corone. Petrarca’s statue (see figure 5) figures him gazing up as if responding to a query from on high by Cicero or Augustine, closely following the standard of seriousness set by Dante’s visage. Boccaccio’s statue resides in the here and now. He does not look up at the heavens in contemplation but rather gazes off into the near distance (see figure 6). The finger of his right hand is placed in the middle of the book he holds, to mark the place he is reading, and he surveys the crowd of passing tourists as if ready to begin a new tale of the folly of the human condition. The legacy of his Decameron is clearly seen in his own monument as well as in the words of Petrarca: as the statue suggests he is the author writing for the vulgar crowd. In chapter 4 of this book I discussed Petrarca’s famous letter to Boccaccio and his translation of the Griselda story (Seniles XVII, 3). Now I want to return briefly to Petrarca’s language in that letter. Petrarca writes that he was able to peruse the work hastily, but that he did take pleasure (‘delectatus sum’) in the reading, and goes on to pay underhanded compliments to Boccaccio while really castigating him for writing too

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Figure 5. Statue of Francesco Petrarca by Andrea Leoni, erected in 1845 in the loggiato of the Uffizi Museum, Florence.

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Figure 6. Statue of Giovanni Boccaccio by Odoardo Fantacchiotti, erected in 1845 in the loggiato of the Ufizzi Museum, Florence.

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freely (‘lascivie liberioris’) about frivolous subjects (‘rerum levitas’). He suggests that there are some serious matters (‘quedam pia et gravia’) contained in the tome, but admits that he has not read the work closely enough to know what they might be: we get the sense that Petrarca’s close reading of the Decameron never actually came to pass. Indeed, we might be forgiven for thinking that Petrarca is just adding his voice to the chorus of critics assailing the Decameron. Petrarca’s lack of interest in Boccaccio’s vernacular masterpiece may well have been for the best, given the results of his close reading of the Griselda story (detailed in chapters 2 and 4). However, Petrarca may have read Boccaccio’s Decameron a little more attentively than his dismissive words imply, and that his dismissal of the work participates in his larger critique of vernacular literature. In his choice of the verb ‘delectatus sum’ to describe his reading of the work Petrarca might be acknowledging that the work was more than just a collection of frivolous tales written by a younger and less serious Boccaccio. Perhaps Petrarca wants to let Boccaccio know that he had seen the second title of the work: Prencipe Galeotto. Despite his protestations that he has read neither Dante nor Boccaccio closely, even Petrarca could not have failed to notice that this subtitle cites Dante’s Inferno V, the canto in which the lustful Paolo and Francesco swirl in the winds of their forbidden love. Famously, in describing what led to her sin, Francesca blames her reading of vernacular love stories as the goad that pushed her to her adulterous affair with her husband’s brother. Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse; soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

(Inf. V, 127–9)

[One day, to pass the time away, we read Of Lancelot-how love had overcome him. We were alone, and we suspected nothing.]

As countless readers have rightly pointed out, Dante links the reading for pleasure (‘per diletto’) of vernacular love stories with the sin of lust punished in the third circle of Hell.2 In giving his Decameron the subtitle Prencipe Galeotto, the author of the love stories named by Francesca in the Inferno passage, Boccaccio seemingly invokes Dante’s judgment against his own work even before it begins.3 When Petrarca writes that he took pleasure in reading Boccaccio’s

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Decameron, we must wonder what side of the Decameron/Commedia polemic he falls on. I would suggest that Petrarca’s choice of this particular verb dismisses Boccaccio’s text from the category of literature that Petrarca concerned himself with; whatever the Decameron is, it is not part of Petrarca’s humanist project. This is just another piece of evidence that attests to the intellectual difference between these two authors. Petrarca’s dismissal of Boccaccio’s Decameron recalls Augustine’s prioritization of literature as necessarily useful (uti) and only secondarily, if at all, pleasurable. This motive lies behind Petrarca’s translation of Boccaccio’s Griselda story. He might have employed this particular verb without realizing its resonance within Dante’s Commedia or Boccaccio’s Decameron, but Petrarca’s judgment on Boccaccio’s comes across in his decision to translate and adapt one of the one hundred stories. Petrarca plays a role, wilfully or not, in the formation of the figure of Giovanni Boccaccio as a frivolous author whose intellectual contribution has been reduced to the realm of delectatio. However, as I have tried to elucidate in this book, there is another Boccaccio: Boccaccio the dantista who constructed the figure of Dante that lives to our own day. The loggiato of the Uffizi testifies to the important influence of this aspect of Boccaccio’s literary career. Unlike both Dante and Petrarca, Boccaccio was always a Florentine. His early years in Naples were formative for his literary imagination, but they also influenced his later definitive self-identification as a Tuscan poet. Both Dante and Petrarca were exiles. For Dante, this was a true and bitter exile from home and hearth that coloured his entire life. Petrarca’s exile was selfenforced, and, as such, more a convenient literary trope than a political reality. The civic value of poetry and of art in general that Boccaccio extolled in his work on Dante finally found realization in Risorgimento Italy of the mid-nineteenth century. In Italy more than in any other modern nation, poets became the representative statesmen. Poetry as a civic office and art as a locus for a delectatio patriae finds visible manifestation in the loggiato of the Uffizi, a secular shrine where millions of tourists pay homage to Florence every year. In a sense, the loggiato complex of statues is a monument to Boccaccio’s vision of the value of poetry in building a just city. The statues of the three poets, and indeed the entire monumental structure, allow me to elucidate a distinctive view of Boccaccio’s hermeneutics. In what I am sure was meant to be complimentary, readers have linked Boccaccio, as if a dependent clause, to Petrarca’s new humanist ‘archaeological,’ or epistemological hermeneutic.4 As I have attempted

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to show over the course of this study of Boccaccio dantista, at every phase of his work he finds himself at odds with Petrarca. This lifelong disagreement over the value of Dante’s poetry heralds an intellectual distance between the two men. Boccaccio was an archaeologist working under the guidance of Petrarca, but at the same time, he was an architect of a new literary artifice. His own poetics were not entirely concerned with unearthing the treasures of the past; rather, he sought to use the material of the past in the construction (or reconstruction for the post-plague world) of the present. This study has focused on how Boccaccio brought this architectural hermeneutic to the construction of a monument to Dante Alighieri. The same operation can be seen in Boccaccio’s encyclopaedic works. Augustine, for example, viewed reading as an act of recollection, the ultimate virtue or vice of which depended on the reader’s own inner understanding.5 Augustine can happily say that pagan literature has value only in that it leads to a better understanding of the sacred Scriptures.6 In Augustine’s system reading is only appropriate when it is useful (uti) for salvation. The contributions of pagan literature to human institutions and human sciences can serve the Christian reader, but Augustine would prefer that Christians write their own encyclopaedias to replace those of the pagans.7 Almost a millennium after Augustine’s call for Christian encyclopaedias, Boccaccio took up the project. He constructed a new edifice of knowledge out of the structures of the pagan authorities. In other words, Boccaccio filled his encyclopaedias, whether his Latin works or the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, with poetic knowledge useful for life before death. He turned away from Augustine’s ideas on the value of literature as useful only for the salvation of the soul. Concerned with human institutions in their own right, Boccaccio saw his literary enterprise as the education of the Christian to live well in the world. In this sense, the pagan authors were just as useful as the Christian authors, if not more so. Boccaccio’s new literary constructions translated poetic wisdom – pagan, Christian, vernacular, or Latin – to the presenti signori who would benefit from its moral lessons. He did not seek to educate the world on the city of God; rather he spoke to the citizens of his city, the leaders of Florence, and to the rulers of Italy about their role in this world. Boccaccio’s encyclopaedic works show how incredibly erudite he had made himself. His knowledge of the Latin authors might not have been as profound as that of Petrarca but Boccaccio could not be matched in knowledge of the vernacular tradition, and unlike Petrarca he had

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the desire and patience to learn Greek. Indeed, Boccaccio’s openness to cultures other than that of the classical Latin auctores, encapsulates the difference between the archaeologist and the architect; Boccaccio integrated the ‘recovered’ world of the pagan authors into the present world of vernacular culture. His project as encyclopaedist goes beyond a love of texts and authors; rather, his work was a recovery and reconstruction of a philosophical system the loss of which had left his fellow citizens morally adrift. Boccaccio’s literary reconstructions are not replicas of original Latin or Greek sources; rather, like the practice of quarrying of crumbling Roman monuments for the construction of medieval architectural features, Boccaccio created a new literary monument from the old. As a dantista, Boccaccio used his experience with textual criticism to ‘recover’ a Dante suitable to his ends. Boccaccio Dantista and the Decameron Aside from Boccaccio’s work as dantista, the Decameron itself has left a monumental imprint on European literary culture. In the Introduction to this book I admitted that trying to discover Boccaccio’s attitude through a reading of his Decameron and his fictional works in general was a slippery proposition at best. However, the presence of Dante, both explicitly and implicitly, in Boccaccio’s own works of creative fiction make the text impossible to ignore in any study of Boccaccio’s relationship to Dante. Therefore, I will conclude this book about Boccaccio’s construction of his monumental Dante with a brief consideration of Boccaccio’s fiction and the presence of Dante. Specifically, I will examine one story from the Decameron that is both overtly Dantean in nature and implicitly linked to Dante’s biography: the story of Nastagio degli Onesti (Day V, 8). In reading this most Dantean of all of the stories in light of Boccaccio’s project as dantista, I hope to more fully explain Boccaccio’s dantismo in terms of his entire intellectual career. The Decameron represents the fullest expression of Boccaccio’s artistic genius, but it is not his earliest attempt to incorporate Dante into his fiction. The earliest phase of his work as a dantista, somewhat previous and peripheral to his monumentalizing project, involved his attempts to imitate Dante’s poetic style. In the wake of Dante’s impact on the literary scene in trecento Italy, especially Tuscany, it would be surprising if Boccaccio did not imitate Dante. Boccaccio’s efforts as an imitator of Dante begin with his earliest recognized work. La caccia di Diana, which overtly recalls Dante through the utilization of the terza rima rhyme scheme,

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attests that Dante was Boccaccio’s first reference for poetic style, and he continues to rely on Dante’s forms throughout his early career as a vernacular poet. Despite the clear borrowings from Dante, however, Boccaccio never seems to approach Dante in spirit; the early works copy his style while glossing over the philosophical implications of Dante’s dolce stil novo. Boccaccio as imitator is less concerned with shaping Dante than with adopting the literary mode of his great Tuscan literary ancestor in an exercise of style.8 However, one of Boccaccio’s early works does attempt to follow Dante in both style and substance. The Amorosa Visione, written shortly after Boccaccio’s return to Florence from his long sojourn in Angevin Naples, once again takes up Dante’s terza rima and adopts the conventions of the dream-vision narrative from the Commedia. While not philosophical in nature this rather poetic compendium of tropes of Venus nevertheless closely imitates Dante’s poetics. I doubt that many readers will argue with my characterization that it represents Boccaccio’s greatest artistic failure. In addition to holding to Dante’s allegorical vision and complicated metrical structures, Boccaccio burdens the poem with an acrostic that provides a cumbersome superstructure over the poem. What previous critics have found ambiguous, whether it is seen a moralistic poem or a proto-humanist celebration of classical learning, turns out to be Boccaccio’s struggle between his two masters: Dante and Petrarca.9 It is ironic but not surprising that the Amorosa Visione mediated Petrarca’s most Dantean text, the Trionfi.10 As is the case with many attempts to imitate two masters in a single work, the Amorosa Visione is an aesthetic and intellectual hybrid of a text that only points up the limits of Boccaccio’s poetic craft. It may well be that Boccaccio realized the failings of his imitation of Dante in the Amorosa Visione as he never again attempted such close reproduction of Dante’s poetics. Indeed, the many instances of Dantean borrowings that pervade the Decameron pointedly avoid direct imitation or citation. Just as with the Corbaccio, as I argue in chapter 3, Boccaccio uses Dante’s matrix of language and imagery to populate the Decameron with echoes that would resonate with his reading public.11 These intertextualities simultaneously recall and recast Dante’s text in a metalepsis. In the case of the Corbaccio, Boccaccio wanted to protect Dante from the critiques of the Dominican preachers and others who had rejected Dante’s Commedia for its vernacularity. I will now turn to one story from the Decameron to evaluate how Boccaccio as dantista reads and shapes Dante’s Commedia in his own fiction.

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There are a number of stories that carry more or less specific references to Dante’s literary world. Readers of the Decameron have not been reticent to call out the myriad resonances in many of the novelle. Panfilo’s opening lines in the first story of the Decameron about the wicked Ser Cepparello and his eventual translatio to sainthood in Burgundy as San Ciappelletto challenge Dante’s entire poetic claim to truth in the Commedia.12 In the last story about patient Griselda, Dioneo opens with an obvious quotation from Dante’s Inferno in his description of the wicked Gualtieri’s actions as ‘matta bestialità.’ As I discussed in chapter 4 Dioneo’s citation of Dante is both evident and problematic, as is much of Boccaccio’s citation of Dante in the Decameron. Indeed, even Boccaccio’s one explicit reference to Dante in the Introduction to Day IV provides few clues about his attitude to his predecessor. In the frame(s) and stories of the Decameron, Dante exists specifically as a literary auctoritas, but Boccaccio never accepts or rejects this model. In considering the eighth story from the Day V (V, 8) I apply Boccaccio dantista’s architectural hermeneutic to both this story and to the entire Decameron. Boccaccio privileges the public and present value of literature, its monumental value, over the private and philosophical. He prefers that his Dante reach a wide, public audience rather than remain within the confines of the elite, literate culture of Latin humanism. In this story, Boccaccio constructs an overtly Dantean episode at the crossroads of the public, private, political, and religious: courtship and marriage. Although written a few years before beginning his project of monumentalizing Dante, the Decameron, and this story in particular, prefigures Boccaccio as dantista. Before the story begins, Filomena’s opening introduces a central theme of this book. ‘Amabili donne, come in noi è la pietà commendata, cosí ancora in noi è dalla divina giustizia rigidamente la crudeltà vendicata: [Adorable ladies, just as our pity is commended, so is our cruelty severely punished by divine justice] (Dec. V., 8, par. 3). The juxtaposition of divine justice with cruelty and vengeance is, of course, an oft-cited disagreement between Boccaccio and Dante; in this novella Boccaccio, as in the Corbaccio, refits a Dantean literary structure with his own ethical, rather than speculative, façade. The story takes place in Ravenna, where a young and wealthy man, Nastagio degli Onesti, nurses an unrequited love for the daughter of a nobleman Paolo Traversari. Spurned despite the lavish nature of his courtship (‘spendere smisuratamente’), Nastagio leaves Ravenna only to end up in Classe, a coastal town only three miles from Ravenna. He

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brings enough baggage on this excursion to set up a pavilion and entertain friends in a lordly fashion. One day Nastagio wanders into a pine forest; he witnesses a naked woman running through the woods chased by a black knight on horseback with a pack of hounds. Attempting to intervene and lacking weapons, Nastagio presents himself to the knight armed with a tree branch. The knight explains that Nastagio need not protect the lady as they are both actually in Hell and this is their mutual punishment. He is punishing her for being too well pleased at his suffering by her cruelty, and in playing his role in this scene he is punished for his act of suicide out of despair for this lady’s refusal. Nastagio watches as the knight stabs the lady with his sword, and also witnesses the knight carving open her back, removing her heart, and feeding it to the mastiffs. The lady then rises and runs off again chased by the knight to replay the chase to the same end on the following Friday. This point is not the end of the story, but it marks the end of the particularly Dantean elements. As one reader has remarked, the entire story is generically Dantean.13 Indeed, the forest setting recalls the woods of Inferno I as well as the idyllic landscape of the Garden of Eden in Purgatorio; the chase through the underbrush is reminiscent of the suicides in Canto XIII, while the punishment of the woman (a suicide in the story) recalls the punishment of those who brought scandal and discord in Canto XXVIII. The nature of the punishment suggests Dante’s contrapasso. Nastagio’s position as spectator of this event and interlocutor with one of the two members of the coupled sinners evokes the entire structure of Dante’s Inferno, especially the Paolo and Francesca episode in Canto V. Moreover, Nastagio’s own profligacy in his pursuit of his lady reminds the reader that the suicides in Inferno XIII share their environment and punishment with the profligate chased by hounds: thus, Nastagio is a spectator but also a participant in this drama. These allusions and others mark this story with the undeniable sign of Dante’s Inferno. Just as I have shown for the Corbaccio, Boccaccio employs a metaleptical narrative strategy in the simultaneous restaging and reshaping of Dante’s Inferno. Other critics have noted that for this text Boccaccio draws upon other dream-vision narratives, both classical and medieval, including De amore libri tres (The Art of Courtly Love) by Andreas Capellanus.14 However, the story, ‘generic’ as it might be, most pointedly echoes Dante’s afterworld. Boccaccio’s clues in the description of the story suggest more than a ‘generic’ reference to Dante by bringing out specifically biographical details about Dante. By setting the story in Ravenna, Boccaccio places the reader in the place of Dante’s own death and burial. Only a few years

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later Boccaccio will call for the return of Dante’s remains to Florence. By specifically naming the lady as one of the Traversari family, Boccaccio links the characters with characters in Dante’s Commedia.15 The woods at Classe not only recall a generic wood in Dante’s Inferno, but more specifically allude to the Garden of Eden in Purgatorio XXVIII. As in the Corbaccio, this story has the unmistakable Dantean stamp, but Boccaccio conflates different scenes from the Commedia into one hybrid scene. Once again, he wants to recall Dante’s text in its structure without resurrecting the entire philosophical or moral edifice. The second half of the story offers an example of Boccaccio’s architectural instinct. He uses the existing structure of Dantean imagery to construct a uniquely Boccaccian literary scene. The novella converts a distinctly Dantean narrative of personal sin and punishment into a public drama. Having beheld this scene, Nastagio is at first horrified by the event, but then he decides to make use of this occurrence of ritualistic punishment to his benefit. He gathers his friends and family and asks them to help him stage a show. ‘Voi m’avete lungo tempo stimolato che io d’amare questa mia nemica mi rimanga e ponga fine al mio spendere, e io son presto di farlo dove voi una grazia m’impetriate, la quale è questa: che venerdí che viene voi facciate sí che messer Paolo Traversari e la moglie e la figliuola e tutte le donne lor parenti, e altre chi vi piacerà, qui sieno a disinar meco. Quello per che io questo voglia, voi il vedrete allora.’ (Decameron V, 8, par. 33–4) [For some little time you have been urging me to desist from wooing this hostile mistress of mine and place a curb on my extravagance, and I am willing to do so on condition that you obtain for me a single favour, which is this: that on Friday next you arrange for Messer Paolo Traversari and his wife and daughter and all their womenfolk, together with any other lady you care to invite, to join me in this place for breakfast. My reason for wanting this will become apparent to you on the day itself.]

Thus Nastaglio convinces the Traversari family to witness this Dantean spectacle of punishment. The tale ends with a fantastic banquet that becomes dinner theatre as the Traversari family and the other young ladies behold the terrible punishment of this young woman. Of course, the young lady understand Nastagio’s intended message in staging the scene and agrees to do anything Nastagio pleases; as Filomena the storyteller concludes, the women of Ravenna were much more tractable to men’s

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desires after that day. Nastagio saves the novella from out and out ethical parody by proposing marriage to the terrified lady, but the ambiguity of Boccaccio’s reframing remains. The Dantean elements that seed this story grow into a new narrative of indefinite sin – Is it cruel to refuse illicit love? – and mock punishment that performs its function, admonition, and persuasion, in a public, civic space. In a sense, Boccaccio’s conclusion to this story prefigures his public reading of the Inferno before the citizens of Florence in 1372. Just he delivered his readings on the steps of the church of Santo Stefano Badia, Boccaccio translates Dante’s ethics to the public sphere. In his work as dantista he sought to bring Dante’s poetic story of sin, redemption, and grace to a larger audience by tempering some of the more radical claims. For Nastagio in the Decameron, the hellish scene serves as a path to his redemption through his marriage into the noble Traversari family and his return from self-imposed exile. This scene also leads to the civil tranquillity of Ravenna by teaching young women how to treat, or rather how not to mistreat, the young men of the city. Boccaccio’s sharp irony, of course, makes this second conclusion somewhat problematic for the reader. As in the Corbaccio, Boccaccio irrigates this Dantean moment with a critique of Dante’s system of divine justice that takes root in human vengeance and violence. Although both the characters in the story and the members of Boccaccio’s brigata find the conclusion a happy one, the reader – this reader at least – finds Nastagio’s moral play disturbing.16 Written between Boccaccio’s failed attempts to imitate Dante’s poetics and his decades-long project to monumentalize the poet, the Decameron offers clues about how Boccaccio developed as a dantista. This story contains the same elements that I have identified in Boccaccio’s work as dantista. First, Boccaccio places Dante’s work within a larger group of source texts; Boccaccio’s Dante is first among equals, not revolutionary. Moreover, as in many of his texts, Boccaccio craftily reworks his source material into playful texts that simultaneously recall and subvert the tradition. The second element of Boccaccio’s work as dantista prioritizes the ethical importance of poetry; for Boccaccio, poetry serves a goal of civic virtue. In this story Boccaccio transports the dream-vision narrative from the world of personal consolation and salvation to the public sphere. Nastagio makes this vision in the forest a theatre of ethics for his unwilling beloved and for the city of Ravenna. When Boccaccio penned this story, redolent with Dante’s presence in the city of Dante’s death, he foreshadows his own performance of Dante’s Inferno in Florence twenty years later. Just as Boccaccio had risked censure for exposing the Muses

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in his public readings of Dante, so too in this novella Boccaccio unveils his subject – literally the naked lady who receives punishment, but figuratively the eschatological valence of Dante’s Commedia – for the edification of his audience.17 Despite Petrarca’s dismissal of the Decameron, this text has secured Boccaccio a place as a monumental author in Italy and in the Western canon. Through his work as a dantista, he has had a quiet but similarly profound impact on the Italian literary landscape. In both fields of work, Boccaccio understood that his own reputation depended on his relationship to his two contemporary authors: Dante and Petrarca. Indeed, Boccaccio understood the practical workings of transmission of texts and influences. In laying bare the mechanics of his work as a dantista, I hope to have made evident Boccaccio’s important role not only in fashioning the figure of Dante (and for that matter, the category of the tre corone as well) that has persisted to this day but also in translating the emerging culture of humanism to vernacular culture.

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Notes

Introduction 1 The project to monumentalize Dante in Boccaccio began with Boccaccio himself in his Trattatello in Laude di Dante. For the origins of the cult of Dante linked with the Italian Risorgimento, see M. Missirini, Delle memorie di Dante in Firenze e della gratitudine de’Fiorentini verso il Divino Poeta (Firenze: Tipografia Calasanziana, 1830). 2 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, 24 April 1843, Acquisiti e Doni, n. 104, cc. 67r–v. Cited from Magnolia Scudieri, Gli uonini illustri del Loggiato degli Uffizi: Storia e restauro (Firenze: EDIFIR, 2001), 100n19; the translation is my own. 3 In the Trattatello in Laude di Dante Boccaccio carefully insists on one particular spelling of Dante’s name: ‘E come che gli altri nominati si fossero, in uno, sì come le donne sogliono essere vaghe di fare, le piacque di rinovare il nome de’ suoi passati, e nominollo Aldighieri; come che il vocabolo poi, per sottrazione di questa lettera “d” corrotto, rimanesse Alighieri. Il valore di costui fu cagione, e quegli che discessero di lui, di lasciare il titolo degli Elisei e di cognominarsi degli Alighieri; il che ancora dura infino a questo giorno’ (Tratt. Par. 15) [Although she was not unduly concerned with the names of her other children, she chose to revive for one the name of her ancestors, as women like to do, naming him Aldighieri, although the word afterwards, dropping the letter ‘d,’ became Alighieri. The worth of this man brought it about that all who descend from him forsook the surname Elise, and instead called themselves Alighieri – a practice which has lasted to our time.] 4 Tobias F. Gittes points out Boccaccio’s knowledge of this passage from Livy and its importance in the development of his literary project; see. T.F.

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7

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Notes to pages 6–12

Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse: Eros, Culture, and the Mythopoeic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 224–7. In the preface to the Ab urbe condita Livy writes, ‘Hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum exitu quod vites.’ [What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that you behold the lessons of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous monument; form these you may choose for yourself and for your own state what to imitate, from these marks for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.] Livy, Livy I: Books I and II, trans. B.O. Foster. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988, I: 10–11. ‘Chiamasi “monimento” per ciò che ammoniscono la mente de’ riguardanti, recando loro a memoria la morte o il nome di colui che in esso è sepellito.’ [They name it ‘monument’ because they warn the mind of the viewers, bringing to their memories the death or the name of the person buried there] (Esp. IX, esp. litt., p. 102). Maria Rosa Menocal discusses Dante and Boccaccio and their relation to the history of romance philology in The Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Given the many articles and books that discuss Boccaccio’s relationship to Dante as a writer and intellectual figure, it is most useful to point the reader to a Boccaccio bibliography that devotes a section to this question; see J. Consoli, Giovanni Boccaccio: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1992), especially part F, 247–96. For a more recent discussion, see R. Hollander, Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). There is a great deal yet to understand about Boccaccio’s influence on Dante. There is a wealth of criticism on Boccaccio’s work in the manuscript tradition of Dante and many others, but little focus on his contribution to the development of textual studies. For Boccaccio’s influence on the transmission of Dante’s texts, see G. Vandelli, ‘Giovanni Boccaccio editore di Dante,’ in Atti della R. Accdemia della Crusca, 1921–2 (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1923), 19–24. For a view of Boccaccio’s dantismo, see C. Grabher, ‘Il culto del Boccaccio per Dante e alcuni aspetti delle sue opere dantesche,’ Studi Danteschi 30 (1951): 129–56; Giuseppe Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio,’ in Prime ricerche dantesche (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1947). See also Hollander, Boccaccio’s Dante. Gittes also takes up this image of Boccaccio the archaeologist in his recent

Notes to pages 12–15

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study of Boccaccio’s intellectual project; see Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, 16. 1 Editor 1 Vittore Branca, Decameron: Edizione critica secondo l’autografo Hamiltoniano, xci; the translation is my own, with important corrections from Teodolinda Barolini. 2 See Teodolinda Barolini’s recent discussion of the history of editing Dante’s text and Boccaccio’s fundamental influence on this historical process; ‘Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca … Barbi, Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis,’ in Teodolinda Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 245–78. While Barolini notes the importance of Boccaccio’s intervention in the transmission of Dante’s texts (she speaks specifically of the Rime), she advocates the modern editor’s task as returning to a ‘preBoccaccio understanding of Dante’ (259), and calls for study into how Boccaccio had such a great influence (258). The present study seeks to ask both how and why Boccaccio intervened. 3 On the two redactions of Boccaccio’s Decameron, see V. Branca and Maurizio Vitale, Il Capolavoro del Boccaccio e due diverse redazioni, 2 vols (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2003). See also my article on the manuscript evidence of two versions of the Decameron; J. Houston, ‘Due codici parzialissimi del Decameron,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 35 (2003): 2–22. 4 Italian philologists, most importantly Gianfranco Contini, have responded to multiple authorial versions (varianti d’autore) of the same text with the theory of variantistica. On Gianfranco Contini and development of variantistica, see D. Isella, ‘Contini e la critica delle varianti,’ Filologia e critica 15 (1991): 281–97. 5 See Ginetta Auzzas, ‘Elenco e bibliografia dei codici autografi,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1973): 1–20. See also V. Branca, ‘Una carta dispersa dello Zibaldone Magliabecchiano: Una familiare petrarchesca autografa del Boccaccio,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 2 (1964): 5–14; Giuseppe Billanovich, ‘Nuovi autografi del Boccaccio,’ in Petrarca e il primo umanesimo (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1996), 142–57. 6 For a summary of Boccaccio’s entire manuscript production, see Auzzas, ‘Elenco.’ 7 For a discussion of prehumanism, see Natalino Sapegno, Il Trecento (Milan: F. Vallardi, 1955), 151–2. For Boccaccio’s role as a prehumanist, see V.

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10 11

12 13

14 15 16

Notes to pages 15–17

Branca, ‘Motivi preumanistici,’ in Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul ‘Decameron,’ 2nd ed. (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1996), 277–99. Ronald Witt points out the ambiguous nature of the term and its possible meanings; see In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 18–21. Dante Alighieri, Convivio. ed. F.B. Ageno, 2 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 2005), I: 1, 16–17 ‘E se nella presente opere la quale è Convivio nominata … più virilmente si trattasse che nella Vita Nuova, non intendo però a quella in parte alcuna derogare, ma maggiormente giovare per questa quella: veggendo sì come ragionevolemente quella fervida e passionata, questa temperata e virile essere conviene.’ See A. Ascoli’s recent discussion of Dante’s palinodic nature specifically in terms of his tempered recantation of the Vita Nova in the Convivio; A. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of the Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 282–3. St Bonaventure, Commentaria in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum, in Doctoris Seraphicis St. Bonaventurae Opera Theologica Selecta, ed. M. Bello, 4 vols (Florence: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1934–64), 1: 12. The translation of this passage is from Thomas Stillinger, The Song of Troilus (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 1. Alastair J. Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic and Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 94–5. Stillinger, Song of Troilus, 1–2. On scribal error, see B. Bergh, Palaeography and Textual Criticism (Lund: Geerup, 1979–80); L. Havel, Manuel de critique verbale appliquee aux textes latins (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1911). See C.F.R. De Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1984), 4–9. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 9. A. Petrucci discusses the different typologies of book production existing concurrently amongst copyists in trecento Italy and Boccaccio’s particular position as “master of the typologies of book production. Petrucci also notes that Boccaccio aimed to raise the dignity of vernacular book production by conflating the different graphic registers of his many manuscripts. See A. Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Mediaeval Italy, trans. C. Radding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 189–92. Boccaccio’s overt agency in copying and amending Dante’s text distinguishes his intervention from the phenomenon of mouvance. Zumthor specifies that mouvance, from the perspective of the modern reader or editor, should not be seen as emendation, but rather as a new creation through reuse of material. Moreover, mouvance

Notes to pages 17–18

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18 19

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describes the instability of transmission of anonymous text, while in the present case both the author and the ‘editor’ are conspicuously defined individuals. See Paul Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans. P. Bennett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 40–9. Much has been written concerning Boccaccio’s two zibaldoni, both of which are discussed in Michelangelo Picone and Claudia Cazalé Bérard, eds., Gli zibaldoni di Giovanni Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura. Atti del Seminario internazionale di Firenze-Certaldo 26–28 Aprile 1996 (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 1998). Giuseppe Vandelli, ‘Un autografo della Teseide,’ Studi di Filologia Italiana 2 (1929): 50–76. See also Stillinger, Song of Troilus, 3–11. Minnis admits the special case of Boccaccio and Petrarca, and I have added Dante to this list; see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2. On the development of the idea of authorship in trecento Italy, especially concerning vernacular lyric, see O. Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). As Justin Steinberg demonstrates in his recent study, some of the first ‘editors’ of Dante’s texts were Bolognese notaries; Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers in Medieval Italy (South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 2005); see especially chapter 1, ‘Dante’s First Editors,’ 17–60. H. Wayne Storey, ‘Following Instructions: Remaking Dante’s Vita Nova in the Fourteenth Century,’ in Medieval Constructions in Gender and Identity: Essays in Honor of Joan M. Ferrante (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 117–32. H. Wayne Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (New York: Garland, 1993), see 28 (on Boccaccio’s retrogressive form); see also chapter 6 ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Manuscripts and Scribal Forms,’ 225–340 H. Wayne Storey, ‘Cultural Crisis and Material Innovation: The Italian Manuscript in the XIVth Century,’ Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire, fasc. 3, Langues et littèratures modernes 83 (2005); 869–86. Put another way, in terms of Storey’s important development of the field of trecento manuscript studies, although Boccaccio and Petrarca certainly share a great deal in their approach to the manuscript, I argue that they do not share ‘textual cultures.’ Indeed, Boccaccio favours writing Dante into a pre-existing textual culture, where Petrarca fashions his own. For a discussion of the term ‘textual cultures,’ see Storey, ‘A Note on the Application of Petrarchan Textual Cultures,’ in Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, ed. T. Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 13–21.

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Notes to pages 18–22

23 On this tradition in classical literature, see T. Janson, Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in Literary Conventions (Stockholm: Ivar Haeggstroms Tryckeri, 1964), 141–5. 24 For a discussion of Boccaccio’s efforts in discovering and recovering classical texts, see R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci nei secoli XIV e XV, 2 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), 29–33, 208. 25 The term ‘cult of Dante’ comes from Carlo Grabher’s article, ‘Il culto del Boccaccio per Dante e alcuni aspetti delle sue opere dantesche,’ Studi Danteschi 30 (1951): 129–56. 26 The most important discussion of the development of semigothic script belongs to A. Petrucci, Breve storia della scrittura Latina (Rome: Bagatto Libri, 1989), 165–71. On semigothic script and its presence in Italy, see Bernard Bischoff, Latin Paleography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Dáibhí ó Cróinín and David Ganz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 145–6. For a full discussion of Boccaccio’s book hand and dating of his autograph manuscripts, see Pier Giorgio Ricci, ‘Evoluzione nella scrittura del Boccaccio e datazione degli autografi,’in Studi sulla vita e le opere del Boccaccio (Milan: Ricciardi, 1985), 287–96. 27 On Boccaccio’s changes to the format of Dante’s texts, especially the Commedia, see Sandro Bertelli, La ‘Commedia’ all’antica (Florence: Mandragora, 2007), 44–5. 28 For a description of the Toledano manuscript, see M.B. Rotiroti, Codicologia trecentesca della ‘Commedia’ (Rome: Viella, 2004), no. 269, p. 142. 29 Il Codice Chigiano L.V. 176: Autografo di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Domenico De Robertis (Rome: Archivi Edizioni, 1974), 18–34. For a description of the Chigiano manuscript, see also Rotiroti, Codicologia trecentesca della ‘Commedia,’ no. 36, p. 113. 30 On the inclusion of Cavalcanti’s poem in the Chigiano, see J. Usher, ‘Boccaccio, Calvacanti’s Canzone “Donna me prega,” and Dino’s Glosses,’ Heliotropia 2, 1 (2004). 31 Ricci, ‘Evoluzione nella scrittura,’ 293–4. 32 The Chigiano manuscript continues to be a source of intense critical attention. See the recent contributions by H.W. Storey, ‘Early Editorial Forms of Dante’s Lyrics,’ in Dante for the New Millennium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 16–37; Storey, ‘Following Instructions: Remaking Dante’s Vita Nova,’ 117–32); T. Barolini, ‘Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History’; Corrado Bologna, Tradizione e fortuna dei classici italiani, 2 vols (Turin: Enaudi, 1994), 1: 166–81. 33 See Rotiroti, Codicologia trecentesca della ‘Commedia,’ no. 156, p. 129. 34 I refer to Petrarca’s response to Boccaccio’s manuscript gift: Familiares, Lib.

Notes to pages 22–4

35 36

37 38 39 40 41

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XXI, epist. XV, in Francesco Petrarca, Epistolae: De rebus familiaribus, ed. T. Rossi, 4 vols (Florence: Le Monnier, 1863), 3: 108–16. T. Barolini, ‘Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History,’ 258. Such scholars typically list Dantean echoes in Boccaccio: see Attilio Bettinzoli’s two-part article, ‘Per una definizione delle presenze dantesche nel Decameron,’ part 1, ‘I registri ideologici, lirici, drammatici,’ and part 2, ‘Ironizzazione e espressivismo antifrastico-deformatorio,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 13 (1981–2): 267–326 and 14 (1983–4): 209–40. See also Carlo Delcorno, ‘Note sui dantismi nell’ Elegia di madonna Fiammetta,’ in Studi sul Boccaccio 11 (1979): 251–94; Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction: ‘Il Corbaccio’ (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1988). Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, 4 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1966), 1: 40. Dante, La Commedia secondo, ed. Petrocchi, 1: 41–2. Dante, La Commedia secondo, ed. Petrocchi, 1: 41–5. Dante, La Commedia secondo, ed. Petrocchi, illustration of the stemma in a pull-out leaf at the end of the volume. Dante, La Commedia secondo, ed. Petrocchi: ‘L’individuazione di un’antica vulgata, turbata dall’affettuosa ma non perspicua editio del Boccaccio e incanalata poi in un nuovo corso che reperiva le sue sorgenti non nel capostipite ma nel grande lago delle copie boccaccesche, si è determinata in termini sufficientemente chiari da convalidare il presente lavoro e richiamare le testimonianze del Boccaccio e posteriori al Boccaccio in mera funzione di controprova’ (1: 9). Petrocchi’s judgment on Boccaccio’s work as editor influenced other readers and critics of Boccaccio. Indeed, noted Dante and Boccaccio critic Giorgio Padoan follows Petrocchi’s conclusions about Boccaccio’s limited editorial prowess. In his entry for ‘Giovanni Boccaccio’ in the Enciclopedia Dantesca he throws salt on Boccaccio’s wounds by declaring that Petrarca was a better editor than Boccaccio; see Giorgio Padoan, ‘Giovanni Boccaccio,’ in Enciclopedia Dantesca, ed. U. Bosco, 6 vols (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1984), 1: 645–50, especially 647. Petrocchi writes: ‘In complesso il Boccaccio contamina più che non corregga; … Recentiores deteriores senza dubbio, almeno per la Commedia, e proprio come punto d’arrivo di mai pretermesse interrogazioni di quanti codici tardo-trecenteschi o quattrocenteschi c’è occorso conoscere’ (Dante, La Commedia secondo, ed. Petrocchi 1: 45). Petrocchi’s list of the ‘most important manuscripts’ for the textual tradition of the Commedia contains 150 manuscripts, of which on 27 were used for establishing his ‘antica vulgata.’ Many of the 123 manuscripts he eliminates

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48

49 50 51

52

53

54

Notes to pages 24–6

were contaminated by Boccaccio’s editions (see Dante, La Commedia secondo, ed. Petrocchi, 1: xiii–xix and 57–8). Dante, La Commedia secondo, ed. Petrocchi, 22, entry for Inf. XI, v. 90, and entry for Inf. XXIV, v. 119. Dante, La Commedia secondo, ed. Petrocchi 1: 40, entry for Par. XIX, 100. In his earliest copy (Toledano) Boccaccio prefers ‘si quetaron,’ but in his last copy (Chigiano) he uses ‘si quetaro.’ This change from the more typical Tosco-Florentine form (‘arono’) of the third person plural form of the preterit verb to the more poetic form (‘aro’) runs through his autograph copy of the Decameron. For this discussion, see V. Branca and M. Vitale, Il Capolavoro del Boccaccio, 1: 160. See Franca Brambilla Ageno, Studi danteschi (Padua: Edizioni Antenore, 1990); L. Cassata, ‘Note sul testo del canto I dell’Inferno,’ in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 15 (1985): 103–28. Dante Alighieri, La Commedia: Nuovo testo critico secondo i più antichi manoscritti fiorentini, ed. Antonio Lanza (Anzio: De Rubeis, 1995). For Lanza’s discussion of Boccaccio’s editions, see pp. x and xvi; for his judgment of Petrocchi’s ‘antica vulgata,’ see pp. xix–xxiv. Dante Alighieri, Dantis Alagherii Comedia, ed. Federico Sanguineti (Florence: Edizioni del Galuzzo, 2001). M. Rotiroti, Codicologia trecentesca della ‘Commedia,’ 7–8; Bertelli, ‘La Commedia’ all’antica, 44–5. Michele Barbi, ed., La Vita Nuova di Dante Alighieri, by Dante Alighieri (Florence: Bemporad & Figlio Editori, 1932): for Barbi’s comments on Boccaccio’s edition of the Vita Nuova, see especially cxli–cxliii and cclxxiii–ccllxxx; figures A (Albero Genealogico dei Testi) and B (Sviluppo di k2) illustrate the importance and influence of the Boccaccio manuscript tradition represented by b and k2. Dante Alighieri, Vita Nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni (Venice: Einaudi, 1996); for Gorni’s comments on Boccaccio’s edition of the Vita Nova and Barbi’s evaluation of Boccaccio, see especially xxvii–xxix and 287–97. For an important entry in this debate and a helpful summary of the varied opinion, see. P. Trovato, Il Testo della ‘Vita nuova’ e altra filologia dantesca (Rome: Salerno Editore, 2000). See also Gorni’s response ‘Material Philology, Conjectural Philology,’ in Barolini, Dante for the New Millennium, 44–55. H. Wayne Storey provides the most coherent statement on the editorial practices surrounding the culture of the Italian poets of the duecento and trecento in his discussion of a contemporary manuscript that contains the Vita Nova without Boccaccio’s changes: see Storey, Transcription and Visual

Notes to pages 27–30

55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62 63 64 65

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67 68

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Poetics, chapter 3 ‘The Editorial Redefinition of Margins: The Memoriali bolognesi and the Literary Culture of Chigiano L. VIII. 305,’ 111–70. Pio Rajna, ‘Per le divisioni della Vita Nuova,’ Biblioteca delle scuole italiane 2 (1890): 161–4. Charles Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 134. Domenico De Robertis, Il libro della Vita Nuova, 2nd ed. (Florence: Sansoni, 1970), 212–13. A. D’Andrea, ‘La Struttura della Vita Nuova,’ in Il nome della storia: Studi e ricerche di storia e letteratura (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1982), 25–58. Stillinger, Song of Troilus, 61–72. The term ‘circular totality’ comes from Stillinger, Song of Troilus, 46. For discussions of this reading of the structure of the Vita Nova, see also Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Maria Rosa Menocal, Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Singleton, Essay on the Vita Nuova. Steven Botterill, ‘Però che la divisione non si fa (V.N., XIV, 13),’ in La Gloriosa donna de la mente: A Commentary on the ‘Vita Nuova,’ ed. V. Moleta (Florence: Leo. S. Olschki Editore; Perth: Department of Italian, University of Western Australia, 1994), 61–76. Sherry Roush, Herme’s Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 25–51. Petrarca extends his gratitude for the gift in a short letter to Boccaccio: Fam. Lib. XVIII, 3 Biblioteca Ambrosiana Cod. A. 204 part. inf. For the definitive opinion on this autograph manuscript of Boccaccio’s Teseida, see Giuseppe Vandelli, ‘Un autografo della “Teseide,”’ Studi di Filologia Italiana 2 (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1929), 5–76. Vandelli includes seven photographs of the manuscript that attest to the similarity with other Boccaccio autographs. For an account of the general nature of the different types of glosses in this manuscript, see Robert Hollander, ‘The Validity of Boccaccio’ Self-exegesis in His ‘Teseida,’’ Medievalia et Humanistica 8 (1977): 163–83. Hollander relates of a total of 1,250 glosses: more than 1,000 are ‘modes and exercises in philology,’ and 225 are ‘interventions which reveal Boccaccio’s knowledge of the classical world’ (164). Roush, Hermes’ Lyre, 54–68. This same letter and passage is referenced by R. Hanna et al., ‘Latin Commentary Tradition and Vernacular Literature,’ in The Cambridge History of

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74 75 76 77 78

79 80

Notes to pages 31–40

Literary Criticism: Volume 2: The Middle Ages, ed. A. Minnis and I. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 363–421, especially 416. Usher, ‘Boccaccio, Cavalcanti’s Canzone “Donna me prega” and Dino’s Glosses.’ De Robertis, ed., Il Codice Chigiano L.V. 176 (Rome: Archivi, 1974), ff. 28v– 29r. As noted earlier, the current Chigiano manuscript differs from the initial version of the manuscript as completed by Boccaccio, but the contents the two manuscripts as they now exist are both in Boccaccio’s hand; the reworking of the one manuscript into two could have been completed by Boccaccio himself. The Latin text is from G. Favati, ‘La glossa latina di Dino del Garbo a Donna me prega del Cavalcanti,’ as presented in La canzone d’amore di Guido Cavalcanti e i suoi antichi commenti (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1999), 86–133. The English translation is my own with reference to the ‘Volgarizzamento indedito del comento latino di Maestro Dino del Garbo sulla canzone Donna me prega fatto per Ser Jacopo Mangiatroja notajo e cittadino fiorentino’ in Rime di Guido Cavalcanti edite ed inedite, ed. Antonio Cicciaporci (Florence: Niccolò Carli, 1813), 73–115. G. Tanturli, ‘Guido Cavalcanti contro Dante,’ in Studi di letteratura italiana offerti a Domenico De Robertis, ed. F. Gavazzeni and Guglielmo Gorni (Milan: Ricciardi, 1993), 1–13. The translation of this passage is my own with reference to the translation from Susan Noakes, Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 82–3, and Storey ‘Following Instructions: Remaking Dante’s Vita Nova,’ 123–4. Michele Barbi, the first to discuss this passage identifies it from the Toledano manuscript and confirms its presence in the Chigiano; Barbi, ed., Vita nuova, xvi–xvii. Giuseppe Vandelli, ‘Giovanni Boccaccio editore di Dante,’ in Atti della R. Acc. della Crusca, 1921–2 (Florence: Ariani, 1923), 19–24. Stillinger, Song of Trolius, 59: ‘For Boccaccio, the relationship of narrative and lyric is open to discussion; the divisioni are unambiguously glosses.’ Roush, Herme’s Lyre, 27–8. Bologna, Tradizione e fortuna, 1: 168–9. Storey, ‘Following Instructions: Remaking Dante’s Vita Nova,’ 123–26. See also Storey, ‘Cultural Crisis and Material Innovation,’ 872–4, where Storey discusses Boccaccio’s first argument in terms of his scribal practice. See Noakes, Timely Reading, chapter 2, ‘Dante’s Stories of Reading, 18–67, and her summation of the Vita Nuova, 70. Noakes, Timely Reading: ‘The most striking thing about this passage to anyone who already knows the Vita Nuova “divisions” under discussion must

Notes to pages 40–6

81 82 83

84

85

86 87

88 89

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be Boccaccio’s omission of any mention of the reader. Whereas Dante’s own statements about the function of the divisions are entirely focused on the reader and the reader’s efforts to understand the poems, Boccaccio overlooks the reader to focus exclusively on author and text: specifically, the author’s “appetito” (desire) and the text’s definition and properties seen from the viewpoint of contemporary Aristotelian analysis’ (83–4). Biblioteca Vaticana Apostolica Chigiano L.V. 176, f. 13r. Roush (Herme’s Lyre, 9–10) also points to this passage as evidence of Boccaccio’s dislike of self-commentary. Dante Alighieri, Convivio, IV, 6, 5: ‘L’altro principio onde, “autore” discende, sì come testimonia Uguiccione nel principio del le sue Derivazioni, è uno vocabulo Greco che dice “autentin,” che tanto vale in latino quanto “degno di fede e d’obedienza.” E così “autore,” quinci derivato, si prende per ogni persona degna d’essere creduta e obediata.’ On this passage, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making of the Modern Author, 12–16. For a discussion of Boccaccio and Cino, see G. De Blasiis, ‘Cino da Pistoia nell’Università di Napoli,’ in Archivio Storico Provincia di Napoli 11 (1886), and V. Branca, ‘L’incontro napoletano con Cino,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 5 (1968), 1–12. In his monumental critical edition of Dante’s Rime, Domenico de Robertis privileges Boccaccio’s ordering of Dante’s poems; Dante Alighieri, Rime, ed. Domenico De Robertis, 3 vols, 5 tomes (Florence: Le Lettere, 2002). De Robertis devotes part of his lengthy ‘Introduzione’ to the Rime (almost 1,500 pages) to establishing that ‘La fortuna di questa “forma” (Boccaccio’s editio), proprio grazie a lui e all’impresa generale di cui essa fa parte, ne costituisce la massima autorizzazione’ (2: 1148, italics added). De Robertis follows this order in his critical edition. Michele Barbi, Studi sul canzoniere di Dante (Florence, Sansoni, 1915), 250– 55; Dante Alighieri, Rime, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Turin: Einaudi, 1946), ‘Note al testo,’ 254–60. De Robertis, ‘Introduzione’ to the Rime, vol. 2, tomo 1, 243–4. See T. Barolini, ‘Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History,’ 245–78 for a cogent discussion of the complex history of Dante’s Rime and a sharp critique of De Robertis’s philological criteria, particularly in terms of his reliance on Boccaccio’s authoritative editorial intervention. Dante Alighieri, Rime, ed. De Robertis, “Documenti,” vol. 1, 335–8, vol. 2, 657–9, 745–7. De Robertis, ‘Introduzione’ to the Rime, vol. 2, tome 1, 270–80. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 2, tomo 1: 270–80. De Robertis notes that the Latin rubrics in the Toledano manuscript are translations of the same vernacular

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Notes to pages 46–53 rubrics that appear in the later Riccardiano manuscript, which precede Boccaccio’s work. De Robertis points out that in the Toledano manuscript Boccaccio left a space in the rubric to poem XI (Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato) so that it reads ‘Idem dantes de [ ] vera egregie loquitur’ (Rime, vol. 1, tomo 2: 658). De Robertis convincingly attests this lapsus scribendi to the fact that the vernacular rubric in the Riccardiano for the same poem contains the word leggiadria, a concept for which there is no Latin equivalent. De Robertis’s reasoning is impressive and faultless. However, I do not think this is a sufficient explanation for the variations since it does not explain why, in the Chigiano, Boccaccio left out the rubrics entirely. Dante Alighieri, Rime II, tome 1, 279. Dante Alighieri, Rime I, tome 1, 336; the translation is my own. Contini, ed., Rime, 259. For a complete description of the Raccolta Aragonese, see Barbi, ‘La Raccolta Aragonese,’ in Studi sul Canzoniere di Dante, 215–326. Barbi, ed., La Vita Nuova, cxli–cxlii; see also Barbi’s stemma codicum for the Vita Nuova, figure A. Barbi, ed., La Vita Nuova, cxli–cxlii. On the history of the idea and origins of the tre corone, see. Guglielmo Gorni ‘Storia della lingua e storia letteraria (A proposito di Accademia della Crusca e di “Tre Corone”),’ in Storia della lingua e storia della letteratura italiana. Atti del I Convegno dell’Associazione per la Storia della Lingua Italiana, ed. N. Maraschio and T. Poggi Salani (Florence: Franco Cesati, 1998), 19–32 Barbi, La Vita Nuova, see lxxxix–civ for a discussion of the earliest published editions of the Vita Nova. The first edition of the Vita Nova, published in Florence in 1527, only contains the poems. The editions published after Sermartelli’s edition of 1575 through to the nineteenth century bear the mark of Boccaccio’s influence. The Vita Nova is slowly returned to its original whole. Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante continues to preface Dante’s work. Bartolomeo Sermartelli, Origine, vita, studii, e costumi del Chiarissimo Dante Alighieri, Poeta Fiorentino. Fatta, e compilata dall’Inclito M. Giovanni Boccaccio de Certaldo (Florence: Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1576); The translation is my own (italics added).

2 Biographer 1 Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, edited by Niccolò Gallo and Cesare Gàrboli (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 12–20. For Dante’s importance to Leopardi and

Notes to pages 54–6

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his role as a figure for the Italian Risorigimento, see Cristina La Porta ‘History and the Poetic Vocation in “Sopra un monumento di Dante,”’ Rivista di studi italiani 16, 2 (1998): 325–59; La Porta correctly underlines the political importance of Italy’s literary history, and above all of Dante, in the Risorgimento. Anselm of Canterbury, De Veritate XII, in Truth, Freedom, and Evil: Three Philosophical Dialogues, ed. and trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (New York: Harper, 1967), 114. For Dante’s view on the category of rectitude as a virtue, see Convivio IV, XXI, 14: ‘E però vuole santo Augustino, e ancora Aristotile nel secondo dell’Etica, che l’uomo s’ausi a ben fare e a rifrenare le sue passioni, acciò che questo tallo che detto è, per buona consuetudine induri e rifermisi nella sua rettitudine, si che possa fruttificare, e del suo frutto uscire la dolcezza dell’umana felicitade.’ See also De Monarchia I, XI, 3: ‘Ad evidentiam subassumpte sciendum quod iustitia, de se et in propria natura considerata, est quedam rectitudo sive regula obliquum hinc inde abiciens.’ The classic study of Petrarca’s role in the birth of humanism is Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). See also Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). To the best of my knowledge no critic has looked exclusively at Boccaccio’s work as a biographer, but M. Giglio at least considers this role: ‘Boccaccio Biografo,’ in Boccaccio in Europe, ed. G. Tournoy (Louvain: Leuvan University Press, 1977), 149–64. Giglio chooses to focus on the De casibus virorum illustrium and Boccaccio’s apparent deference to Petrarca and on his collection of biographies, the De viris illustribus. On the Vita auctoris, see Margarita Egan, ‘Commentary, vita poetae, and vida: Latin and Old Provençal “Lives of Poets,”’ Romance Philology 37, 1 (1984): 36–48. Egan offers her own commentary as well as a structural comparison between the vita auctoris and vidas. On the moral scope and Boccaccio’s knowledge of the vita auctoris tradition, see F. Ghisalberti, ‘Medieval Biographies of Ovid,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946): 10–59. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 211–17, discusses Petrarca’s and Boccaccio’s development of the familiar style of the vita auctoris in terms of Boccaccio’s Trattatello but not in terms of the Vita Petracchi. This construction of authority, especially in Dante, is the subject of A. Ascoli’s study, Dante and the Making of the Modern Author; see especially chapter 2, ‘Definitions: The Vowels of Authority,’ 67–129. Although Ascoli does not discuss Boccaccio, we can see Boccaccio’s reaction – both absorbing and rejecting – to Dante’s constructed auctoritas in his work as dantista.

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Notes to pages 56–60

9 For examples of troubadour vidas, see Margarita Egan, ed., The Vidas of the Troubadours, Garland Library of Medieval Literature 6, series B (New York: Garland, 1984); see her ‘Introduction’ (xiii–xxxii) for a discussion of the vidas forms. For a structural comparison between the accessus and vidas, see also Egan, ‘Commentary, vita poetae, and vida,’ 36–48. 10 For a reproduction of the shorter, earlier version in the Zibaldone Laurenziano, see Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere latine minori, ed. A. Massèra (Bari: Laterza, 1928), 366–7. For the dating of the earlier text, see H. Hauvette, ‘Notes sur des manuscrits autographes de Boccace à la bibliothèque Laurentienne,’ Mèlanges d’archèologie et d’histoire 14 (1894), 101–33. 11 See also G. Boccaccio, Vita di Petrarca, ed. and trans. G. Villani (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2004). For questions on the dating of the text, see vol. 5, tome 1 of Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed Renata Fabbri, 881–5; G. Boccaccio, Opere latine minori, ed. A. Massèra (Bari, La Terza, 1928), 363–7; Villani, ed., Vita di Petrarca, 11–50; G. Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, I. Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1947), 74. For the dating of the later text, see Massèra, pp. 363–67. 12 On the Notamentum, see C. Godi, ‘“La collatio laureationis” del Petrarca,’ Italia medioevale e umanistica’ 13 (1970): 1–27. 13 J. Usher, ‘Monuments More Enduring than Bronze: Boccaccia and Paper Inscriptions.” Heliotropia 4, 1 (2007): 1–26, especially 19–23. 14 ‘Quid Terentius Culleus placida infestante Talya meretricum lenonum iuvenum et servorum actus describendo reliquerit: quid Maro divino dotatus ingenio, pastorum scenicos ludos, arvorum necessarios cultus, troadum clades et arma victosque penates et lacrimas morientis Elysse cantando narraverit’ (Vita Petracchi, par. 6) [that which Terrence, pushed on by serene Talia, narrated about the actions of the prostitutes, pimps, young people and servants; that which Virgil, gifted with divine genius, narrated in his verses: the ludic scenes of the shepherds, the necessity of the cultivation of the fields, the destruction, battles and defeated household gods of the Trojans and the tears of the dying Elyssa]. 15 ‘Hinc vero morales est philosophos diligenti studio imitatus, et maxime M. Tullium Ciceronem et egregium Senecam cordubensem, in tantum quod iam locutione et moribus alterum istorum possit merito iudicari’ (Vita Petracchi, par. 9). [Later, with careful study, he gave himself over to imitation of the moral philosophers, and above all Cicero and of the famous Seneca of Cordova, so much so that he could be rightly judged from a literary and moral aspect another one of them.] 16 In 1353 Boccaccio wrote to Petrarca lamenting Petrarca’s decision to refuse the position in Florence. Boccaccio uses a coded poetic language to

Notes to pages 60–4

17 18 19

20 21

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denounce the tyrannical violence of Giovanni Visconti. The thrust of the letter accuses Petrarca of surrendering his moral and ethical high ground by accepting Visconti’s patronage. Boccaccio fears that Petrarca will lose his place as a moral philosopher by associating with the evils of a tyrannical government. Note that at this time Florence and Milan were in a struggle over possession of Lucca, and Boccaccio was serving as an ambassador of the Florentine Republic to the Venetians. Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). For this argument, see John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,’ in Diacritics 5 (1974): 20–32. For Boccaccio’s intervention in the textual history of the Canzoniere, see Ruth Shepherd Phelps, The Earlier and Later Forms of Petrarch’s ‘Canzoniere’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Ernst H. Wilkins, The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’ and Other Petrarchian Studies (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951); Domenico DeRobertis, ed., Il Codice Chigiano LV 176: Autografo di Giovanni Boccaccio (Rome: Archivi Edizioni, 1974), 47–71. De Robertis, ed., Il Codice Chigiano, 26–7. In his famous letter in response to the gift (Le Familiari XXI, 15), Petrarca denies any hostility to Dante while refusing Boccaccio’s invitation to declare his importance. Olivia Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds: Ethics and Erotics in the ‘Divine Comedy’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Holmes defines the duality that I only suggest throughout Dante’s entire poetic career. Boccaccio, I suggest, had detected this tension in his biographical considerations of Dante. Although by no means definitive, I adopt Hollander’s point of view by limiting the definition of the dolce stil novo to a theological value, not so much to remove the historical question, but rather to differentiate, as I argue Boccaccio does, Dante’s poetics from those of Petrarca. On the question of the dolce stil novo and the critical debate surrounding the term, see R. Hollander, ‘Dante’s “Dolce Stil Novo” and the Comedy,’ in Dante; mito e poesia; atti del secondo Seminario dantesco internazionale, ed. M. Picone and T. Crivelli (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 1999), 263–81. All citations of the rubrics from the Toledano manuscript are taken from D. Aligheiri, Rime, ed. D. DeRobertis (Florence: Le Lettere, 2002), vol. 1, tomo 2, pp. 657–8. For a discussion on the relationship of the canzoni distese to the Convivio, see Bruno Nardi, Dal ‘Convivio’ al ‘Commedia’: Sei saggi danteschi (Rome: Istituto storico per il Medio Evo, 1960), 1–30. For a discussion of the dating of the two redactions of the text, see Pier

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29 30

31

32 33

34 35 36

Notes to pages 64–73

Giorgio Ricci, ‘Le due redazioni del ‘De Casibus,’ in Studi sulla vita e le opere del Boccaccio (Milano: Ricciardi, 1985), 179–88. On Boccaccio’s political involvement during this period, see Vittore Branca, Giovanni Boccaccio: profilo biografico (Florence: Sansoni, 1997). For a discussion of the political climate of during this period, see Gene Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society 1343–1378 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 148–93. On Boccaccio’s sources for this work see, Giovanni Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci and E. Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio (Milan: Mondadori, 1983) 9: xix and xxv. See also the classic work on Boccaccio’s Latin sources, A. Hortis, Studi sulle opere latine del Boccaccio (Trieste: J. Dase, 1879). For a discussion of Boccaccio’s sources, see Vittorio Zaccaria,‘Introduzione,’ in Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, ed. Ricci and Zaccaria, xix–xxv. For my account of the following episodes in the eighth and ninth books I am indebted to the chapter ‘Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Early Italian Humanism: The De Casibus virorum illustrium,’ in Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 190–239. However, I disagree with a few details in Ginsberg’s reading: his sense that ‘Boccaccio’s humanism is to a large extent Petrarchan’ (190) and that ‘Petrarch is not without his political attachments, as his “royal mantle” acknowledges’ (205). His royal mantle, as Ginsberg notes in a footnote, indicates more Petrarch’s attachments to his own emblems of fame than to the political duty of the poet. Boccaccio mentions Charles I of Anjou (Purg. VII, 113, et al.), Manfredi (Purg. III, 103–45), Pope Nicholas III (Inf. XIX, 31–6, 64–120), Ugolino della Gherardesca (Inf. XXXIII), Pope Boniface VIII (Inf. XIX, passim), Phillip IV of France (Inf. XIX, 87), and the Templars (Purg. XX, 90–93). Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 200–202. On Walter’s year-long rule, see Brucker Florentine Politics, 7–10, 107–10. See also M. Becker, ‘Gualtieri di Brienne e l’uso delle dispense giudiziarie,’ in Archivio Storico Italiano 113 (1955): 245–51. Ginsberg gives a similar treatment of these episodes in Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 197–208. See also D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 303–5. See Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 208–25 for the most recent treatment. It is from these pages that I take my discussion of his argument. See Malino Pastore Stocchi, ‘Firenze di Dante, Firenze di Boccaccio,’ in Dante e Boccaccio: Lectura Dantis Scaligera, 2004–2005, in Memoria di Vittore Branca, ed E. Sandal (Rome: Editore Antenore, 2006), 213–26, especially 223.

Notes to pages 73–6

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37 On the three redactions of the Trattatello, see Pier Giorgio Ricci, ‘Le tre redazioni del Trattatello in laude di Dante,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1974): 197–214. See also Giuseppe Italo Lopriore, ‘Le due redazione del Trattatello in laude di Dante del Boccaccio,’ Studi Mediolatini e volgari 3 (1955): 35–60. 38 For this reading of Boccaccio’s redaction of the Trattatello, see T. Boli, ‘Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, or Dante Resartus,’ Renaissance Quarterly 41: 3 (1988): 379–412. For Boccaccio and Petrarca’s various opinions on Dante, see Simon A. Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 39 Boccaccio may have been reminded of this same sententia by reading Petrarca’s letter sent to the Florentine commune in 1349 asking for just retribution of his friend’s murder at the hands of bandits (recorded as Familiares VIII, 10). However, this seems to be an error of a previous editor; the letter appears in Giuseppe Fracassetti’s edition as Lettere varie, LIII. Frascetti suggests that it is properly placed as Familiares, VIII, 8; see Giuseppe Fracassetti, ed., Lettere di Francesco Petrarca, vol. 5 (Florence: Le Monnier, 1892). 40 Plutarch, Twelve Lives, trans. John Dryden (Cleveland: Fine Editions, 1950), 83. 41 Although Boccaccio’s redrafting of the life of St Peter Damian probably postdates his first draft of the Trattatello, he quite likely had the text in the period of the Toledano manuscript. Aside from this source, recall Boccaccio’s satire of the hagiographic tradition in the Decameron (es. Day I, 1; Day VI, 10). On Boccaccio’s rewriting of the life of St Peter Damian, see Renata Fabbri’s introduction to the critical edition in Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 5, tome 1, 889–93. On Boccaccio’s use of sources from the hagiographic and the exempla traditions, see Vittore Branca, ‘Studi sugli exempla e il Decameron,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 14 (1983–4), 178–89. Indeed this entire number of Studi sul Boccaccio deals with these connections. See also Carlo Delcorno, ‘Modelli agiografici e modelli narrativi: Tra Cavalca e Boccaccio,’ in La novella italiana: Atti del convegno di Caprarola, 19–24 settembre 1988 (Rome: Salerno Editore, 1989), 1: 337–63; T. Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Brill: Leiden: 2006), 99–114. 42 On the importance of hagiography in the humanist tradition, see A. Frazier Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1–13. 43 S. Barsella, ‘Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Peter Damian: Two Models of the Humanist Intellectual,’ in Modern Language Notes 121 (2006): 16–48. 44 For a discussion on Boccaccio’s revision of Giovanni da Lodi’s Vita Petri

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Notes to pages 76–81

Damiani, see Antonietta Bufano, ‘Il rifacimento boccacciano della Vita Petri Damiani di Giovanni da Lodi,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 11 (1979): 333–62. In the first chapter of Boccaccio’s version of Vita Sanctissima Patri Petris Damiani (Vite 913–4) Boccaccio tells the story of young Peter’s abandonment by his mother and his subsequent return to his mother through divine providence. The passage from Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi (Milano: Mondadori, 1966–7) reads: ‘e come fu creata, fu repleta/ sì la sua mente di viva vertute/ che ne la madre, lei fece profeta./ Poi che le sponsalizie fuor compiute/ al sacro fonte intra lui e la Fede,/ u’ si dotar di mutüa salute,/ la donna che per lui l’assenso diede,/ vide nel sonno il mirabile frutto/ ch’uscir dovea di lui e de le rede;/ e perchè fosse qual era in costrutto,/ quinci si mosse spirito a nomarlo/ del possessivo di cui era tutto./ Domenico fu detto; e io ne parlo/ sì come de l’agricola che Cristo/ elesse a l’orto suo per aiutarlo’ (Inf., XII, vv. 58–72). The relevant passage reads: ‘per nome chiamaron Dante: e meritamente, perciò che ottimamente, sì come si vedrà procedendo, seguì al nom l’effetto. Questi fu quel Dante, del quale è il presente sermone; questi fu quel Dante che a’ nostri seculi fu concedutto di speziale grazia da Dio; questi fu quel Dante, il quale primo doveva al ritorno delle muse, sbandite d’Italia, aprir la via’ (par. 18–19). On the idea of medieval authorship and authority, see Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship, 75–85; see also 214–16, where Minnis discusses Boccaccio’s Trattatello and the peculiar role of the familiar authors in the construction of authority. ‘Leggiadria’ is the stated theme of Dante’s moral poem Poscia che amor del tutto m’ha lasciato. ‘Pargoletta’ is a particular Dantean figure that comes from his ballata ‘Io mi son pargoletta bella e nova.’ Dante reprises this word in Beatrice’s accusation of him in Purg. XXX, vv. 58–60: ‘Non ti dovea grava le penne in giuso, / ad aspettar più colp, o pargoletta/ o altra novità con sì breve us.’ Just because Boccaccio did not include this lyric in his canzoni distese does not mean that he did not know it. ‘Angioletta’ is a specific citation of the Vita Nova, ch. 2. See Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 111–19, for a discussion on the relationship between the Trattatello and Dante’s own writings on Beatrice. Nichols translates ‘principale intento’ rather mundanely as ‘main intent.’ However, this phrase is common to Boccaccio. He uses it to define his own purpose in writing the Trattatello (par. 4) and also in his marginal note on his edition of the Vita Nova, where he declares that the descriptive prose passages in the Vita Nova belong to the ‘intento principale’ of the work

Notes to pages 81–90

52 53

54

55 56

57

58 59

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while the divisioni do not; see chapter 1 of this book, p. 40, for a discussion of this passage. The phrase ‘principale intento’ has its roots in scholastic philosophical discourse where it indicates the necessary relationship of subject and action; see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 15–16 and 20–1. Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 117. This typical description of the wise man appears time and again in texts by both Dante and Boccaccio. For example, compare it with Dante’s description of Cato in Purgatorio (I, vv. 31–7), Boccaccio’s description of Guido Cavalcanti in the Decameron (VI, 9, 9), or his description of the spirit-guide in the Corbaccio. Both Ricci’s edition of the Trattatello and the more recent edition by Luigi Sasso suggest that the entire passage derives entirely from Petrarca and that Petrarca proposed his reading based on Isidore; for Petrarca’s letter, see Epistolae de Rebus Familiaribus, X, 4. Petrarca, Familiaribus X, 4: ‘theologiam poeticam esse de Deo.’ The only other reader to note the relationship between Vico and Boccaccio is Giuseppe Mazzotta, ‘Boccaccio: The Mythographer of the City,’ in Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, ed. Jon Whitman (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 349–64. Just as for Boccaccio Vico figures Solon as an important nexus between poetry and law as the first institution of political power in the second book ‘Della sapienza poetica,’ chapter three, ‘Corollari d’intorno al parlare per caratteri poetici delle prime nazioni’: G. Vico, Scienza Nuova (Milan: BUR, 1994), 287–8. The pamphlet was first issued in July 1818 and was reprinted in 1830 to celebrate the actual dedication of Ricci’s cenotaph; Melchior Missirini, Delle memorie di Dante in Firenze e della gratitudine de’ Fiorentini verso il Divino Poeta (Firenze: Tipografia Calasanziana, 1830), 47–50. Two of the signatories of the 1818 pamphlet were friends and patrons of Leopardi: Vittorio Fossombroni and Gino Capponi One such citation comes as Leopardi explains the foundational role of Dante and Boccaccio in the development of a viable national vernacular; Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, ed. Giuseppe Pacella, 3 vols (Milan: Garzanti, 1991) 2: 1445–6 (2715). Giulio Perticari, ‘Dell’amor patrio di Dante e del suo libro intorno il volgare eloquio,’ in Proposta di alcune corrrezioni ed aggiunte al ‘Vocabolario della Crusca (Milan: Imp. Regia Stamperia, 1819), vol. 2, par. 1, 1–447. In the first two paragraphs Perticari follows Boccaccio’s Trattatello by using Solon as a prime example of the poet-politician and by evoking the same sententia that Boccaccio used in his introduction (3–6).

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61 Many new editions of Dante’s work based on Boccaccio’s authority and sometimes including his biography of Dante were printed in the early decades of the nineteenth century supported this call for a monument to Dante: Vita di Dante Alighieri per Messer Giovanni Boccaccio (Parma; 1801); La divina commedia di Dante Alighieri di mano del Boccaccio (Roveta: Negli Occhi santi di Bice, 1820); and Vita di Dante per Messer Gio. Boccaccio, cittadino fiorentino (Milan: G. Silvestri, 1823). These editions only add to the many earlier publications attributed specifically to Boccaccio. Furthermore, many of the existing published editions of Dante came from Boccaccio’s autograph manuscript and included the Trattatello as a preface to the Commedia. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-editions of Dante with a preface and commentary by Cristoforo Landino represent the most significant exception to this trend. 3 Apologist 1 On Boccaccio’s manuscript gift, see Carlo Pulsoni, ‘Il Dante di Francesco Petrarca: Vaticano Latino 3199,’ Studi Petrarcheschi 10 (1993): 156–208. 2 On Boccaccio’s authorship of the letters see. G. Auzzas, ‘Studi sulle Epistole. I. L’invito della Signoria fiorentina al Petrarca,’ in Studi sul Boccaccio, 4 (1967): 203–40. 3 See M. Rotiroti, ‘Sul carme Ytalie iam certus honus del Boccaccio nel Vaticano latino 3199,’ Studi Danteschi 68 (2003): 131–7. 4 Simon A Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Gilson points out that in this aspect of the poem, Boccaccio follows Giovanni del Virgilio’s epitaph for Dante. 5 For this particular citation, I have used Hollander’s translation: Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. J. Hollander and R. Hollander, introduction and notes by R. Hollander (New York: Random House, 2004). See Hollander’s note in this edition for a long, complex, and controversial critical appraisal of this event. No absolute consensus has been reached, but the view that Dante deliberately altered Virgil’s text has the upper hand. 6 On Petrarca’s stay in Milan under the Visconti, see D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 43–54. 7 Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction ‘Il Corbaccio’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); see especially the third appendix, ‘A partial census of some critical views concerning various problems in the Corbaccio,’ 76–7, for a sense of the divergent critical opinions on the work. 8 For the most important critical contribution from this camp, see Giorgio

Notes to pages 101–6

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Padoan, ‘Sulla datazione del Corbaccio,’ in Il Boccaccio, le muse, il Parnaso e l’Arno (Florence: Olschki, 1978), 199–228. The quotation and argument discussed come from F. Regina Psaki, ‘The Play of Genre and Voicing in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio,’ Italica 5 (1993): 41–54. For the most recent elaboration of this view of the Corbaccio as a moral text, see Marco Veglia, Il corvo e la sirena: Cultura e poesia del ‘Corbaccio,’ (Pisa: Istituti Editorial e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1998), 9–41. See Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, 35–59 and 77 for a discussion of the Ovidian influence and a summary of critical opinion on the subject. For the most complete discussion of the possible titles of the text, see Marco Veglia, Il corvo e la sirena, 77–92. Friends of Petrarca had advocated luring Petrarca himself to Naples to serve as the chancellor for the newly powerful Acciaiuoli now Grand Seneschal. Petrarca refused, just as he had refused the honour from Florence ten years earlier. Boccaccio was nominated by Francesco Nelli in his stead; he accepted the offer and arrived first in Nocera then in Naples. Boccaccio’s Epistle XIII records in comical detail his dismay at his treatment at the hands of Acciaiuoli. Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, 26–33. For the traditional dating, see Nurmela’s critical edition: G. Boccaccio, Il Corbaccio: Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia: Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, ed. T. Nurmela (Helsinki, 1968) Ser. B, 147. Padoan, ‘Sulla datazione del Corbaccio.’ Veglia, Il corvo e le sirene, 20–5. Millicent Marcus, ‘Misogyny as Misreading: A Gloss on Decameron VIII, 7,’ Stanford Italian Review 4 (Spring 1984): 23–40. Vittore Branca and M. Vitale, Il capolavoro del Boccaccio e due diverse redazioni. 2 vols (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere Arti, 2003). See also V. Branca, ‘Su una redazione del “Decameron” anteriore a quella conservata nell’autografo Hamiltoniano,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 25 (1977): 4–73; V. Branca, ‘Ancora su una redazione del “Decameron” anteriore a quella autografa e su possibli interventi “singolari” sul testo,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 26 (1998): 4–38. See Carlo Delcorno, Exemplum e letteratura: tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989). On the particular moral value of the verb ‘ammaestrare,’ see Kircher, The Poets’ Wisdom, 130–1. Bartolomeo di San Concordio, Ammaestramenti degli Antichi (Milan: Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1808), 99; the translation is mine. All subsequent citations are parenthetical.

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23 Carlo Delcorno has produced the most interesting research on the vibrant relationship between the preachers and Boccaccio’s own novelle; see Delcorno, Exemplum e letteratura tra Medioevo e Rinascimento and ‘Modelli agiografici e modelli narrativi: Tra Cavalca e Boccaccio.’ 24 See Jan Öberg, ed. Serlo de Wilton: Poèmes latins (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1965). For the transmission of Serlo’s exemplum, see A.C. Friend, ‘The Proverbs of Serlo of Wilton,’ Mediæval Studies 16 (1954): 179–218; Dan Ransom, ‘“Rana Loquax” and the Frogs of Provençal Poetry,’ in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. A. Groos (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 69–83. 25 Jacopo Passavanti, Lo specchio della vera penitenzia (Florence: Le Monnier, 1856), 44; see 43–5 for the story of Serlo of Wilton. The translation is mine. All subsequent citations are parenthetical. 26 Boccaccio, Il Corbaccio: ‘e il suo vestimento era lunghissimo e largo e di colore vermiglio, … Il quale, come è detto, con lenti passi appressandomisi’ (Corbaccio, par. 36). The weight of the robe weighs down the spirit-guide so he must walk with ‘lenti passi.’ Note also the following passage: ‘sappi che questo mio vestimento, … non è panno manualmente tessuto, anzi è fuoco della divina arte composto, sì fieramente cocente che ‘l vostro è come ghiaccio, a rispetto di questo, freddissimo’ (Corbaccio, par. 63). 27 For an attempt at an exhaustive list of the Dantean textual echoes in the Corbaccio, see, once again, Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, 59–75. 28 For a discussion of metalepsis see, Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1973). 29 Hollander notes the similarities between Boccaccio’s Corbaccio and the Remedia Amoris as a clue to the problematic nature of the spirit-guide’s advice; Hollander, Boccaccio’s Last Fiction, 35–9. 30 Gareth D. Williams, The Curse of Exile: A Study of Ovid’s ‘Ibis’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1996), 81–103. 31 Luke 14: 26, Biblia Sacra: Iuxta vulgatam versionem (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft: Stuttgart, 1969); the translation is from The New Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday: New York, 1990). 32 As I pointed out in chapter 1, Boccaccio replaced the fist instance of the word ‘vendetta’ with ‘giustizia’ in his copy of the Commedia. In chapter 4 I will discuss how Boccaccio takes Dante to task in his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante for using the term ‘vendetta di Dio.’ 33 Anthony Cassell has made this point most convincingly in his introductory essay to his translation of the Corbaccio: see A. Cassel, ‘Introduction,’ in The Corbaccio, or The Labyrinth of Love, by G. Boccaccio (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), v–xxii.

Notes to pages 119–26

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34 See Veglia, Il corvo e le sirene, 9–11. 35 On Boccaccio’s Horatian satire in the ‘Introduzione alla quarta giornata’ of the Decameron, see S. Marchesi, Stratigrafie Decameroniane (Florence: Olschki, 2004), 31–66. I also suggest that this same satire is present in the ‘Conclusione dell’autore.’ Moreover, what was comedic satire in the Decameron has morphed into critical satire in the Corbaccio. 36 Simonetta Mazzoni Peruzzi’s recent Medievo francese nel ‘Corbaccio’ (Milan: Le Lettere, 2003) suggests another ‘inesplorato territorio’ of the Corbaccio. 4 Commentator 1 Benvenuti de Rambaldis de Imola Comentum super Dantis Aldigherij Comoediam, ed. Jacobo Philippo Lacaita (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1887); Inf. II, vv. 10–12. The translation is from W.W. Vernon, Readings of the Inferno Based upon the Commentary of Benvenuto Da Imola and Other Authorities, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1907), 1: 47–8. 2 Benvenuto, a student of Boccaccio, claimed to have been present at Boccaccio’s public lectures on Dante, and also corresponded with Petrarca (Seniles, XV, 11). For Benvento da Imola and bibliographic material, see Saverio Bellomo, Dizionario dei Commentatori Danteschi (Florence: Olschki, 2004), 142–62. 3 For a detailed discussion of this letter from Petrarca to Boccaccio, see chapter 3. 4 Giovanni Boccaccio, Lo Zibaldone boccaccesco Mediceo-Laurenziano Plut. XXIX 8, facsimile reproduction, ed. G. Biagi (Florence: Olschki, 1915). For the different elements of the zibaldone Mediceo-Laurenziano, see S. Zamponi, M. Pantarotto, and A. Tomiello, ‘Stratigrafia dello Zibaldone e della Miscellanea Laurenziani,’ in Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura. Atti del Seminario internazionale di Firenze-Certaldo 2–28 aprile 1996, ed. M. Picone and C. Cazalè Bèrard (Florence: Cesati, 1998), 181–258. 5 For the transcription of the letter, see Giorgio Padoan, ‘Il progetto di poema paradisiaco: “Vita Nuova,” XLII (e l’epistola di Ilaro),’ in Il lungo cammino del ‘poema sacro,’ (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 5–24. 6 The current consensus is that this letter is not authentic. This position is best represented by Giuseppe Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio,’ in Prime ricerche dantesche (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Lettteratura, 1947), 21–86. Giorgio Padoan offers a spirited defence of the letter’s authenticity in ‘Il progetto di poema paradisiaco.’ See also Padoan’s entry ‘Ilaro’ in the Enciclopedia Dantesca, 2: 361–3, for a history of the critical reception of the letter. Storey also defends both the authenticity of the let-

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Notes to pages 126–30

ter and Boccaccio’s belief in that authenticity: H. Wayne Storey, ‘Contesti e culture testuali della lettera di frate Ilaro,’ Dante Studies 124 (2006): 57–76. Storey also recognizes, and is exasperated by, Boccaccio’s crucial role in the formation of philological questions around this letter. On the early history and unknown origin of the myth of the tre corone, see Gugliemo Gorni, ‘Storia della lingua e storia letteraria (a proposito di Accademia della Crusca e “tre Corone”),’ in Storia della lingua italiana e storia letteraria (Florence: F. Cesati, 1998), 19–32. For the view of Boccaccio’s Esposizioni as a translation of his earlier Latin texts, see Giorgio Padoan, L’ultima opera di Giovanni Boccaccio le ‘Esposizioni sopra il Dante’ (Padua: CEDAM, 1959), especially chapter 2, ‘Il Commento come raccolta di materiale: Rapporti con le altre opere boccaccesche,’ 17–43. Padoan’s conclusions on the Esposizioni remain the most persuasive. For information on Jacopo Pizzinga and the Pizzinga family, see A. De Stefano, ‘Jacopo Pizzinga protonotaro e umanista siciliano del sec. XIV,’ Bollettino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani 5 (1957): 183–97. ‘Nam divinas Homeri Yliadem atque Odisseam et Maronis celestem Eneidam et quicquid a ceteris poetis memoratu dignum hactenus compositum est, dummodo contingere possit, pervigili studens ingenio totis viribus Parnasum direxit animum,’ [For Homer’s divine Iliad and Odyssey and the celestial Virgil’s Aeneid and whatever by other poets has been composed worthy of remembering, whenever he could have them, he has directed his soul with all his energy to Parnasus and studying with the subtlety of his genius] (Epistola XIX, par. 11). See the endnotes to the Epistole, 825n.12. Gregory Stone, The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), 123–34. The text of the petition is reproduced in P. Toynbee, ‘Boccaccio’s Commentary on the Divina Commedia,’ Modern Language Review 2, 2 (1907): 97–120; republished in Heliotropa 4, 1–2 (2007), online journal. For details about Boccaccio’s public lectures on Dante, see Toynbee, ‘Boccaccio’s Commentary’; Bellomo, Dizionario dei commentatori danteschi, 171–83. On Giovannino di Mantova and Mussato and the broader question of Dominican theologians against Dante and vernacular poetics, see C. Mésoniat, Poetica Theologia, La ‘lucula Noctis’ di Giovanni Dominici e le dispute letterarie tra ’300 e ’400 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), 9–27. On the Dominican condemnation of Dante’s Commedia in Florence, see Guido Vernani, Il più antico oppositore politico di Dante: Guido Vernani da Rimini: Testo critco del ‘De reprobatione monarchiae,’ ed. Nevio Matteini (Padua: CEDAM,

Notes to pages 131–5

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1958). On Bartolomeo di San Concordio and Jacopo Passavanti and their opposition to vernacular poetics, see chapter 3. For Boccaccio’s critique of his own critics, see Decameron: Edizione critica seconda l’autografo Hamiltoniano (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1976), ed. V. Branca, ‘Introduzione,’ ‘Introduzione alla Quarta Giornata,’ and ‘Conclusione.’ Petrarca’s letter to Boccaccio concerning his reading of the Commedia is recorded in Epistolae: De rebus familiaribus (Florence: Le Monnier, 1863), Liber XXI, epist. XV. In the Corbaccio, see par. 194; in the Decameron, see II, 6, 54; in the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, see, I, esp. all., IV, esp. litt., 80–81, XIV, esp. litt., V, XV, 98. Hugh of Saint-Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies, 64 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 74. On the development of the mechanical arts in the Middle Ages, see Steven A. Walton’s online paper, ‘An Introduction to the Mechanical Arts in the Middle Ages,’ AVISTA, Toronto, 2003. Boccaccio had argued for Dante’s position as a theologian in the Genealogia; see for example, XIV, 9. On this question of Boccaccio’s understanding of the relationship between poetry and theology, see Mésoniat, Poetica Theologia, 91–105. Teodolinda Barolini has identified Dante’s representation of classical and Christian philosophical systems in the Inferno, the only part of the Commedia for which we have Boccaccio’s commentary, as ‘medieval multiculturalism.’ Boccaccio certainly inherits Dante’s ‘multi-culti’ interest; See. T. Barolini, ‘Medieval Multiculturalism and Dante’s Theology of Hell,’ in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham, 2006), 102–121. A great deal of the Accessus derives from Letter to Cangrande. For example compare Boccaccio’s passage in the Esposizioni (203) to the Epistle to Cangrande: “Genus vero philosophiae, sub quo hic in toto et parte proceditur, est morale negotium, sive ethica; quia non ad speculandum, sed ad opus inventum est totum et pars.” (The branch of philosophy to which the work is subject, in the whole as in part, is that of morals or ethics; inasmuch as the whole as well as the part was conceived, not for speculation, but for a practical purpose). For a history of the question of the authenticity of the Epistle as well as the most persuasive argument for its authenticity, see R. Hollander, Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Hollander records the various stages in the long debate over authenticity and offers rebuttals of many arguments against authenticity. It seems that Hollander

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Notes to pages 135–9

and the many others who argue in favour of authenticity have the field. For the most current counter-arguments to authenticity, see Z. Baranski ‘The Epistle to Can Grande’ in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages, ed. A. Minnis and I. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 583–89. Boccaccio knew the letter in detail, but it is simply not possible to determine whether he believed it to be authentic. Daring to speculate, one supposes that if Boccaccio thought that the text was written by Dante he might have included it in the zibaldone or one of his three manuscripts of Dante’s work. He never refers to the letter as being from Dante’s hand. Barolini made a claim of agnosticism about the authenticity of the Epistle in the course of a highly polemical discussion recorded in two brief notes; see Teodolinda Barolini, ‘For the Record: The Epistle to Cangrande and Various “American Dantisti,”’ and R. Hall and M. Sowell, ‘On Dante and Cursus: A Brief Response to “For the Record,”’ in Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 6 (Spring 1990): 140–2 and 142–4. Hugh of St Victor’s delineation of the four types of philosophy, theoretical or speculative, practical or moral, mechanical, and logical underlies Boccaccio’s classification of the pars philosopiae; see Hugh of St Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor, 62–3. According to Hugh, theology belongs with theoretical or speculative philosophy. Boccaccio is not only clearly referring to Dante’s argument in the Introduction to the Convivio, but also recapitulating his own words in his letter to Jacopo Pizzinga written in the same period. On the term ‘ingegno’ or ‘genius’ as a specifically poetic faculty, see P. Delhaye, Le Microcosmus de Godefroy de Saint Victor, 2nd ed. (Lille: Editions J. Duculot, 1951), 111 ff.; W. Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 94–8. On the term ‘cortex’ and the range of technical terms used to describe the literal and allegorical levels of the text, see D.W. Robertson, ‘Allegory, Humanism, Literary Theory,’ in A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 286–364. Note the following the instances of the use of the word ‘velo’: Accessus, par. 3, I, esp. alleg. 3, VI, esp. alleg. 50, and VII, esp. alleg. 15. The early ‘Ottimo’ commentary on the Commedia employs the term ‘corteccia’ twice to describe the literal level of the work; L’Ottimo Commento della ‘Divina Commedia’ di un contemporaneo di Dante, ed. Alessandro Torri, 3 vols (Pisa: Capurro, 1827–9). The word ‘corteccia’ appears in IX, par. 62 and in XIII, par. 92. This word does not appear in Jacopo della Lana’s commentary nor does its Latin equivalent, ‘cortex,’ appear in Guido da Pisa.

Notes to pages 141–3

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30 For a description of Boccaccio’s autograph manuscripts of all the cited authors see G. Auzzas, ‘Elenco bibliografia dei codici autografi,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1973): 1–20; R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci de’secoli XIV e XV, 23 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1967). Boccaccio cites Bernardus directly (II, esp. alleg. 30–1) and he cites Fulgentius many times (Acc., 51, I, esp. litt. 96, II, esp. litt. 24–9, VII, esp. alleg. 14, IX, esp. litt. 66–7, esp. alleg. 28–30). 31 On Dante’s claim to prophecy and the Dominicans’ resistance to this claim, see Padoan, L’ultima opera di G. Boccaccio, 55–60. 32 The question of Dante’s claim to prophecy is championed by Bruno Nardi: ‘Dante profeta,’ in Dante e la cultura medievale, 2nd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1949), 336–416. The question also draws upon the issue of Dante as theologus-poeta; see Hollander, ‘Dante Theologus-Poeta.’ Teodolinda Barolini defends Nardi in her own championing of Dante’s claim to prophecy; she gives an outline of this debate in ‘Detheologizing Dante: Realism, Reception, and the Resources of Narrative,’ in The Undivine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3–20, especially 3–9. 33 Guido da Pisa is nearly as explicit but reaches the opposite conclusion in his Prologus: ‘Re vera, potest ipse dicere verbum prophete dicentis: “Deus dedit michi linguam eruditam”; et illud: “Lingua mea calamus scribe velociter scribentis.” Ipse enim fuit calamus Spiritus Sancti, cum quo calamo ipse Spiritus Sanctus velociter scripsit nobis et penas damnatorum et gloriam beatorum’ (Guido da Pisa, Commentary on Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ ed. Vicncenzo Cioffari [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974], 4). 34 Fulgentius, The Mythographer, trans. L.G. Whitebread (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971); see especially chapter 1, where Fulgentius skips both the Eclogues and the Georgics specifically because they contain “mystical matters in which Virgil has concealed the innermost profundities of almost every art.” On Virgil’s prophecy Fulgentius writes: ‘in the fourth (eclogue) he has taken up the art of prophecy.’ 35 Bernardus Silvestris, Commentum Bernardi Silvestris super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii, ed. Guilielmus Riedel (Gryphiswaldae, 1924), Acc. 2: 19–25: all subsequent passages are cited parenthetically. The translation is from Bernardus Silvestris, Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid,’ translated by Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). 36 This language by Bernardus is clearly in line with the ubiquitous Medieval distich: ‘Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia [The letter teaches of deeds, the allegory what to believe, the moral what you should do, the anagogical what to strive for] (italics added).

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37 For a discussion of the implications of the term ‘integumentum’ or ‘involucrum,’ see J. Dane, ‘Integumentum as Interpretation: Note on William of Conches’s “Commentary on Macrobius,”’ Classical Folia: Studies in the Christian Perpetuation of the Classics 32 (1978): 201–15, especially 201–7. See also M.D. Chenù, ‘Involucrum: le mythe selon les théologiens médiévaux,’ Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du môyen âge 22 (1956): 75–9. 38 For example, an earlier commentary by Jacopo della Lana glosses the word ‘scienza’ in Inf. IV, 73–5, as ‘cognizione scientifica’ and ‘arte’ as ‘Rettorica.’ The Ottimo Commento is even simpler; for this passage, ‘scienza ed arte’ become ‘teorica e pratica.’ Citations from these two commentaries are taken from the online database of Dante commentaries created by Robert Hollander; see the Dante Dartmouth Project at http://dante.dartmouth.edu/. 39 Jacopo della Lana, L’Ottimo Commento, and Guido da Pisa all recognize the clear links to the Book of Daniel; L’Ottimo Commento and Guido da Pisa also cite Ovid (Metamorphoses I, 89–131) as a source. 40 In chapter 1 I describe how Boccaccio seems to offer, or at least prefer, a variant reading of the Inferno that substitutes ‘giustizia’ for Dante’s ‘vendetta.’ In chapter 3, I argue that the spirit-guide takes ‘vendetta di Dio’ as permission for him to be the agent of ‘vendetta.’ 41 There are other moments when Boccaccio clarifies Dante’s language by reference to the requirements of the rhyme scheme (II, esp. litt., 101; VII, Esp. litt., 16, 98, 121), but only in the case of ‘bestalitade’ does he go so far as to say that the word has no added meaning. 42 For a discussion of this citation, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 123. 43 I deal with Boccaccio’s rewriting of the Decameron in the opening pages of chapter 1. See also V. Branca and M. Vitale, Il capolavoro del Boccaccio e due diverse redazioni. 44 For an example of this critical opinion, see Teodolinda Barolini, ‘The Wheel of the Decameron,’ in Romance Philology 36 (1983): 521–39. For a recent summary of critical opinion on this story with some important new conclusions, see Mazzotta, The World at Play, 122–30. 45 Text of Seniles XVII, 3, quoted in J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationship of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 290–1; the translation is from Francesco Petrarca, Letters of Old Age, trans. A. Bernardo, S. Levin, and R. Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 2: 655–68. 46 The most important study on the various iterations of this story and the motivations behind them come from D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 277–86. Warren Ginsberg summarizes the many arguments around the Griselda

Notes to pages 151–61

47 48 49

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affair and offers the most sophisticated reading of Boccaccio; see Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 240–61. Severs, Literary Relationship of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale, 288. Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 255–7. As there is still no critical edition of Petrarca’s Seniles, I have taken the text from the Biblioteca Italiana website maintained by La Sapienza (http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/exist/bibit/browse/autore.xq?autore= Petrarca,%20Francesco), Seniles XVII, 2. The translation is Bernardo’s in Petrarch, Letters of Old Age XVII, 2, 650. The term ‘tre corone’ first appears in Giovanni Gherardi da Prato’s Il paradiso degli Alberti, ed. A. Lanza (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1975), 4.

Conclusion 1 For a description of the history of the project from its genesis through the recent restoration of the statues, see S. Iacopozzi, ‘Il ciclo scultoreo degli Uffizi: genesi e sviluppo di un progetto non solo celebrativo,’ in Gli uomimi illustri del Loggiato degli Uffizi, ed. M. Scudieri (Florence: EDIFIR, 2001), 15–33. 2 See Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poet: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 5–7 for a summary of the many critical readings of this episode in relationship to vernacular reading. 3 On the relationship of Boccaccio and Dante in regards to the subtitle of the Decameron and the entire Proem in general, see R. Hollander, ‘The Proem of the Decameron,’ in Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1997), 89–107. As always, Hollander includes a complete bibliography. See also Barolini’s discussion of Boccaccio’s strange treatment, or appropriation, of the Francesca story in his Esposizioni: T. Barolini, ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender,’ in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, 304–332, especially 317–22. Barolini raises important issues concerning Boccaccio’s retelling of the Francesca story that leave out the one important moment of description of Paolo and Francesca’s fall into adultery over, literally, the reading of the book ‘per diletto.’ I suggest that the public nature of Boccaccio’s Esposizioni required him to tone down the highly erotic content of that passage and focus, as Barolini herself argues, on the political and historical elements of the episode that Boccaccio and other commentators provided. 4 I refer to Thomas Greene’s formulation of Petrarca, and Boccaccio, as ‘archaeological’ humanists in The Light in Troy, Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 81–104. Greene

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Notes to pages 162–4

notes that, ‘Petrarch, like Boccaccio, situated the otherness of the past beneath his feet and formulated his hopes of renewal in terms of a return to life’ 93). See also, W. Ginsberg’s formulation that ‘Boccaccio’s humanism is to a large extent Petrarchan’ (Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 190). For Petrarca’s epistemological break from the Middle Ages and Boccaccio’s participation in that culture, see G. Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 18; Mazzotta notes the distance between Boccaccio and Petrarca in terms of the relationship to the ancients (125–6). Finally, see T. Kircher’s study The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of the Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), which treats both authors as engaged in the same philosophical project brought on by the many crises in the trecento; see especially pp. 3–41. On Augustine’s views of reading and the interaction of Christian readers with pagan texts, see Sabine MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), especially chapter 2, ‘The Scent of a Rose,’ 45–87. On Augustine as a reader, see B. Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Augustinus (Sanctus) Aurelius, De doctrina christiana, ed. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), II, 18.28, 25.38–9, 59. Augustinus, De doctrina christiana II, 39.59. One might regard Boccaccio’s early poetic texts as exercises similar to his earliest known epistolary writings. His first three letters are written to a fictitious personage, to Petrarca (but never delivered), and to an unknown and probably fictional correspondent. For the critical view of the Amorosa Visione as an ambiguous text, see S. Huot, ‘Poetic Ambiguity and Reader Response in Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione,’ Modern Philology 83 (1985): 109–122. For the discussion of Boccaccio’s position between Dante’s Commedia and Petrarca’s Trionfi, see V. Branca, ‘Implicazioni espressive, temi e stilemi fra Petrarca e Boccaccio,’ in Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul ‘Decameron’ (Florence: Sansoni, 1996), pp. 300–32. Branca proposes the Dantean influence of the Amorosa Visione in V. Branca, Boccaccio medievale (Florence: Sansoni, 1996), 315. See also M. Eisner, ‘Petrarch Reading Boccaccio,’ in Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, ed. T. Barolini and H.W. Storey (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 130–46. I refer the reader to the Introduction to this book for details on the critical perspectives on Dante’s presence in the Decameron. The two most important articles about the actual textual presence of Dante in the Decameron are both by Attilio Bettinzoli: ‘Per una definizione delle presenze dantesche nel Decameron’: I – I registri ideologici, lirici, drammatici,’ and II – ‘Ironiz-

Notes to pages 165–9

12

13 14

15 16

17

201

zazione ed espressivismo antifrastico-deformatorio,’ Studi sul Boccaccio 13 (1981–2): 257–326, and 14 (1983–4): 209–40. Indeed, almost every book or article on Boccaccio must, in some way, discuss for Dante’s presence in Boccaccio’s writing. On the relationship of this story to Dante see, Hollander, ‘Imitative Distance,’ 21–52. See also G. Mazzotta, World at Play in Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron,’ 47–74. For this characterization of Day V, 8, see R. Hollander, Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire, 4. For one such view, see G. Mazzotta, World at Play in Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron,’ 86–9. For more a more systematic discussion of sources for this story see, G. Kamber, ‘Antitesi e sintesi in “Nastagio Degli Onesti,’” Italica 44 (1967): 61–8; C. Segre ‘La novella di Nasagio delgi Onesti (Dec. V, 8): i due tempi della visione.’ In ricordo di Cesare Angelini (Pavia: Saggiatore, 1980), 65–74. Dante mentions the Traversari family as model of virtue in Purgatorio, Canto XIV, 107. Of course, I am not alone in questioning the conclusion of this story; see M. Migiel, A Rhetoric of the Decameron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 156–7. Gittes has shown how Boccaccio’s ‘naked muse’ is a necessary result of his project to translate literary culture to his contemporaries. He speaks specifically of Boccaccio’s bitter sonnets written after the delivery of his public lectures on the Commedia; see Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, 166–8.

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Index

accessus (ad auctores), 53, 55–7, 134, 136, 138 Acciaiuoli, Niccolò, 103, 191n13 Adam, 66, 138 Ageno, Franca Brambilla, 178n47 allegory, 88, 122, 134, 140, 141, 144, 150, 155, 164, 196n27; Christian allegorical exegesis, 138, 142, 143, 147, 152, 154, 197n36; moral, 139, 142; political, 153 amendare. See editing ammaestrare, 106, 108, 112 Anslem of Canterbury, 54 antica vulgata, 23, 177n44, 188n48 apocalyptic vision, 147 Apparatus, 25, 39 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, St Archivo y Biblioteca Capitolares (Biblioteca del Cabildo) 104.6, Toledo. See Toledano manuscript archon, 74 Arezzo, 57, 58 Aristotle, 14, 153; Ethics, 145, 150; (Thomas Aquinas commentary on), 14, 30 ars poetica, 137–8 ars rhetorica, 112, 142

Ascoli, Albert, 174n8, 181n83, 183n8 Athens, 74, 80 Augustine, St, of Hippo, 17, 67, 157, 161, 162; De doctrina cristiana, 106; Enarrationes in Psalmos, 30 authority, 16, 17; auctor, 9–10, 14, 16, 38, 77, 107, 133, 140–1; auctoritas, 56, 75, 126, 165; classical, 39, 56, 136, 140–2, 145, 163 authorship, 16, 19, 175n19 autobiography. See biography and autobiography Auzzas, Ginetta, 173nn5–6, 190n2, 197n30 Azzo da Correggio, 60 Baranski, Zygmunt, 196n24 Barbi, Michele, 25, 26, 44, 48, 49, 173n2, 178n51, 180n73, 181n87, 182nn95–7, 182n99 Barolini, Teodolinda, 22, 173nn1–2, 175n22, 176n32, 177n35, 178n53, 181n89, 195n20, 196n23, 197n32, 198n44, 199nn2–3, 200n10 Barsella, Susanna, 75, 187n43 Bartolomeo di San Concordio, 93, 103, 106–9, 111–13, 122, 130, 134,

218

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137, 191n22; Ammaestramenti degli Antichi, 94, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111 Beatrice, 59, 78–81 Becker, Marvin, 186n33 Bellomo, Saverio, 193n2 Benvenuto da Imola, 124–7, 130, 140, 155 Berard, Claudia Cazalé, 175n17 Bergh, Birger, 174n13 Bertelli, Sandro, 176n27 Bettinzoli, Attilio, 177n36, 200n11 Bible, 16, 17, 117, 118, 127, 134, 136, 154; Daniel, 147; James, 152; Job, 152; Judges, 152. See also Christianity Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Cod. Chigiano L.V. 176. See Chigiano manuscript Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Cod. Chigiano L.VI. 213. See Chigiano manuscript Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Urbinati Latini 366 (Urb.), 23 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Vaticano Latino 3199 (Vat.), 22, 23, 61, 94 Biblioteca dell’Archivio Storico Civico e Trivulziana 1080 (Triv.), 23 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Cod. Acq. e doni 325. See Boccaccio, Giovanni: Teseida Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Cod. Plut. LIV 32, 17 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Cod. Plut. XXIX, 8. See Boccaccio, Giovanni: Zibaldone Laurenziano Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Cod. Plut. XXXIII, 31. See Boccaccio, Giovanni: Zibaldone Laurenziano

Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Cod. Plut. XXXVIII, 17, 17 Biblioteca Riccardiana, Cod. 1035. See Riccardiano manuscript Billanovich, Giuseppe, 57, 172n8, 173n5, 184n11, 193n6 biography and autobiography: biographical forms, 55, 56, 81; biographical writings, 9, 48, 49, 92, 104; biography of Dante, 53, 73, 74, 77, 78, 86, 88, 90, 91, 146, 163; Boccaccio’s role as biographer, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 59–61, 64, 72, 90, 93, 132, 146; classical biography, 72, 82 Bischoff, Bernard, 176n26 Bloom, Harold, 122, 192n28 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 5–27, 29–31, 33–51, 53–156, 160–9; critical parody of Dominicans, 108, 111, 113, 137; death, 124, 130; ideologies, 35; and Italian politics, 60, 86; rhetorical style, 35; role as biographer, 55, 72; role as biographer of Dante, 49, 53, 64, 90, 146, 183n5; role as biographer of Petrarca, 57, 59–61; statue by Odoardo Fantacchiotti, 157, 159, 161 – Amorosa visione, 18, 102, 164 – Argomenti (Brieve Raccoglimento), 21 – La caccia di Diana, 163 – canzoni distese, 21, 22, 29, 32, 35, 39, 42, 44–9, 53, 55, 60–4, 73, 75, 79 – Carmina V, 9, 10, 21, 46, 61, 97–9, 125, 153 – Corbaccio, 9, 10, 54, 78, 93, 94, 100, 101–23, 131, 132, 137, 149, 164, 167, 190n7, 192n26; as Boccaccio’s apology of Dante, 92, 93, 97, 98, 126, 132

Index 219 – Decameron, 7, 11, 12, 13, 24, 54, 55, 94, 100, 102–5, 109, 113, 117, 131, 148, 163–5, 173n3; Griselda and Gualtieri, 150–4, 157, 160, 161, 165; Prencipe Galeotto, 160; Proem, 120, 132; Introduction to Day I, 119; Day I, 165–9; Day IV, 119, 165; Day V, 165; Day VI, 189n53; Day VIII, 119–22, 165–9; Day X, 72, 150–4, 157, 160, 161, 165; Conclusion, 119 – De casibus virorum illustrium, 9, 55, 64, 65–72, 74, 75, 80, 84, 88, 153 – De mulieribus claris, 55 – Editio of Dante’s Vita nova, 9, 29– 31, 33, 34, 40, 44, 73 – Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, 117 – Epistles, 200n8; IV, 30–1; VII, 60; X, 60, 97, 184–5n16; XIII, 104, 117, 191n13; XIX, 128–9, 194n10 – Esposizioni sopra la Comedia de Dante, 6, 7, 10, 17, 54, 93, 121, 127, 130–4, 138, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147–50, 152–5, 162, 172n5, 198n41 – Genealogia deorum gentilium, 8, 19, 21, 37, 40, 41, 43, 74, 85, 91, 97, 108, 133, 136, 138, 144, 195n19 – Notamentum, 56, 57 – Rime: CXXIII, 130–2, 155 – Teseida, 17, 30, 33, 34, 37, 39, 179n66 – Trattatello in laude di Dante, 7, 9, 21, 22, 42, 46, 47, 49, 53–5, 61, 62, 64, 72–91, 126, 127, 129, 133, 134, 144, 146, 171n1, 171n3, 188n47 – Vita Petracchi, 9, 55–62, 68, 94, 153, 184nn14–15 – Zibaldone Laurenziano, 56, 57, 125, 184n10 Boethius: De Consolatione, 27, 66, 102

Boli, Todd, 187n38 Bologna (Italy), 78, 125, 126, 155, 180n77 Bologna, Corrado, 37, 176n32, 180n77 Bonaventure, St, 14–20, 26, 27, 38, 50, 146; De reductione atrium ad theologiam, 46 Botterill, Steven, 29, 179n61 Branca, Vittore, 12–14, 16, 24, 38, 105, 173n1, 173n3, 173n5, 174n7, 178n46, 181n84, 186n27, 187n41, 195n16, 200n9, 200n10 brigata, 109, 150, 168 Brucker, Gene, 186n27, 186n33 bucolic poetry, 57 Bufano, Antonietta, 188n44 Cacciaguida, 71 canonical texts, 7 canon law, 30 Capellanus, Andreas: De amore libri tres (The Art of Courtly Love), 166 Capponi, Gino, 189n58 Carducci, Nicolo, 49 Carthusians, 85 Cassata, Letterio, 178n47 Cassell, Anthony, 192n33 Catalano, 115 Cato, 66, 114–16, 118 Cavalca, Domenico, 105, 106, 109 Cavalcanti, Guido, 21, 31–3, 36, 39, 43, 45, 62, 73; Donna me prega, 21, 31, 33, 34, 39 Cerberus, 138, 139 Certaldo, 104, 124, 130, 155 Chaucer: Canterbury Tales, 151 Chigiano manuscript (Cod. Chigiano L.V. 176 and Cod. Chigiano L.VI. 213), 9, 21, 22, 176n32, 180n70;

220

Index

Canzoniere in, 61; Commedia in, 24, 25; Donna me prega in, 31; Rime in, 44–8; Trattatello in laude di Dante in, 53, 55, 73; Vita Nova in, 33–5, 39, 40, 42 Christ, 19, 117, 118 Christian allegorical exegesis, 127, 134, 138, 142, 143, 147, 152, 154 Christian authors, 141 Christian church fathers, 16, 67, 111 Christian encyclopaedias, 162 Christian genealogies, 136 Christian ideals, 66 Christianity and paganism, 74, 133, 140–2, 146, 148 Christian morals and ethics, 66, 102, 106–9, 112, 118, 140 Christian scriptures, 162 Christian texts, 31, 67, 106, 107, 162 Christian tradition, 102, 114, 136. See also Bible; theology Cicero, 67; Pro Archia poeta, 128, 128 107, 157 Cino Da Pistoia, 42, 156, 181n84 classical authority, 39, 56, 109, 136, 140–2, 145, 163 classical biography, 72, 82 classical ethics, 66, 140, 148 classical genealogies, 136 classical knowledge, 133, 145, 146 classical poets, 13, 51, 72, 77, 85, 112, 128, 141 classical texts, 33, 67, 69, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 111, 112, 114, 116, 136, 141–3; transmission of, 14, 15, 17, 19, 26, 54 codicology, 25 Compagni, Dino, 83 Consoli, Joseph, 172n7 contemptus mundi, 64, 72

Contini, Giafranco, 15, 44, 173n4, 181n87, 182n95 contrapasso, 166 conversio amoris, 102 corteccia (cortex), 137–40, 142, 196n27, 196–7nn32–3; vs. velo, 138 courtly love, 60, 78, 82, 122, 166 Crocian idealism, 15 D’Andrea, Antonio, 27, 179n58 Dane, Joseph, 198n37 Daniel, Arnault, 146 Dante Alighieri, 8–11, 13–27, 33–51, 61–5, 69–71, 73–84, 86–98, 111–16, 122–38, 143–57, 161–9; biography of, 53, 73, 74, 77, 78, 86, 88, 90, 91, 146, 163; critics of, 121, 130, 153; cult of, 20, 171n1; death and funeral, 80, 82; exile from Florence, 3, 5, 9, 53, 57, 78, 80, 81, 84, 89, 97, 130; name spelled ‘Allighieri,’ 3, 4; ‘nostrum Dantem,’ 43; prophetic wisdom, 80, 197nn32–3; statue by Paolo Emilio Demi, 3, 4, 53; as theologus-poeta, 133; vernacular of, 97, 98, 122, 132, 141 – Commedia, 7, 9, 10, 14, 21–6, 42, 43, 46–8, 53, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 79, 88, 93, 94, 97, 100, 102, 103, 113, 114, 116, 121–2, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132–6, 138–41, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148–50, 152, 155, 160, 164, 165–8, 167; in Latin, 124, 125; Inferno, 24, 83, 113–15, 118, 122; Canto I, 139; Canto VI, 138; Canto VII, 138; Canto X, 140; Canto XI, 24; Canto XII, 140; Canto XIII, 166; Canto XIV, 147; Canto XV, 140; Canto XVI, 140; Canto XVII, 140; Canto XXIII, 115–16, 118;

Index 221 Canto XXIV, 24; Purgatorio, 100, 113, 166; Canto I, 114, 116, 189n. 53; Canto II, 67; Canto XII, 100; Canto XIV, 201n15; Canto XXVI, 146; Canto XXVIII, 167; Paradiso, 155; Canto XII, 76, 188n46; Canto XXVI, 138; Canto XXX, 188n49 – Convivio, 15, 30, 42, 45, 54, 64, 174n8, 181n83, 183n3 – De monarchia, 54, 130 – De vulgari eloquentia, 53, 54, 71, 112 – Epistles: IV, VII, IX, 125 – Epistle to Cangrande, 135, 138, 143, 195–6nn21–3 – Rime, 13, 14, 44–8, 60–4, 79, 126, 130, 131–3, 181n5, 181–2n92, 188n49; rime petrose, 45, 62, 79 – Vita nova, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 27, 29–31, 33–5, 37–44, 46, 48–50, 53, 61, 62, 73, 77–9, 81, 100, 126, 140, 192n99; alternate spelling (nuova), 48 dantismo, 6–8, 10, 40, 127, 128, 155, 163, 172n8 De Blasiis, Giuseppe, 181n84 Degli Spini, Geri, 106 De Hamel, Christoper, 174n14 Del Bene, Sennuccio, 155, 156 Delcorono, Carlo, 106, 177n36, 187n41, 191n20, 192n23 delectatio, 161 Del Garbo, Dino, 21, 31–4, 39 Delhaye, Philippe, 196n26 Della Faggiuola, Uguccione, 125 Della Lana, Jacopo, 198n39 Dell’amor patrio di Dante, 90 Del Virgilio, Giovanni, 125, 190n4 De Molai, Jacques (Templar Grand Master), 68, 69 De Robertis, Domenico, 13, 21,

27, 44, 45–7, 61, 173n2, 176n29, 179n57, 180n70, 181n85, 181n86, 181n88, 181n91, 182n92, 185n20 De Stefano, Andrea, 194n9 De Vitry, Jacques: Sermones de tempore, 110 dialects: Florentine, 112; Tuscan, 113 dichiarazione (explanations), 35, 39 dicitori, 107, 111 dimostrazioni, 39 Dioneo, 150, 152, 153, 165 divisioni (divisions), 17, 25–7, 29, 30, 31, 33–5, 37–42, 44, 48, 50 dolce stil novo, 63, 164, 185n23 Dominic, St, 76, 105 Dominicans, 94, 105–9, 113, 130, 132, 137, 140, 141, 194–5n15; Boccaccio’s critical parody of, 10, 40, 103, 108, 111, 113, 122, 137; preachers and sermons, 75, 93, 108–9, 111, 122, 149, 164, 192n23 Donati, Gemma, 78 dottori, 132, 133 dream-vision, 101, 102, 114–16, 120, 168 Dryden, John, 187n40 editing (amendare): Boccaccio as editor, 9, 12–16, 18, 22, 26, 34, 36–8, 42, 53, 89, 93, 132, 150; editions, 173n2, 181n89; editio princeps, 14, 15, 24–6, 41, 45; editorial agenda, 26, 38; editors of Dante (other than Boccaccio), 11, 13, 23–4, 25– 6, 44–9, 90; editor’s role, 9, 12–16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 26, 34, 36–8, 42, 44–9, 53, 89, 90, 93, 132, 150 11 Egan, Margarita, 183n6, 184n9 eliminatio, 23 eschatology, 169

222

Index

ethics, 14, 135, 137, 154, 155; Christian, 140; classical ethics, 140, 148; ethical vernacular, 140; Ethics (Aristotle), 14, 30, 145, 150; etymology, 6 exemplum, 53, 56, 64, 65, 75, 106, 109 exile: of Dante, 3, 5, 9, 53, 57, 78, 80, 81, 84, 89, 97, 130; of Nastagio, 168; of Ovid, 103; of Petrarca family, 57, 58, 73, 95, 97–100, 104, 105, 107, 161; restitution, 95 Fabbri, Renata, 56, 187n41 Farinata, 140 Favati, Guido, 180n71 Federico of Aragona, 48 Fiammetta, 156 fictio, 135, 138, 142–4, 149, 163 Filomena, 167 Florence, 19, 42, 49, 62, 75, 93, 105, 106, 109, 112, 120, 140, 148, 154, 162, 164; Boccaccio’s public reading of Dante in, 10, 47, 124, 129, 155, 168; city fathers, 3, 5; Dante’s exile from, 3, 5, 9, 53, 57, 78, 80, 81, 84, 89, 130; literary culture of, 20, 61, 104, 125, 127, 128, 130–2, 152; literature and politics in, 14, 53, 66–73, 75, 76–89 passim, 98, 155; Patria, 95, 97, 100; Petrarca’s citizenship and exile, 57–60, 84, 95–7, 99–101; poet laureate, 84; politics of, 53, 74, 146, 153; popolani, 66, 72, 130; Signoria of, 95, 129; statues and monuments, 3–6, 11, 52–4, 89–91, 157, 158, 159, 161 Fossombroni, Vittorio, 189n58 Fracassetti, Giuseppe, 187n39 France, 57, 58

Francesca da Rimini, 160, 166, 199n3 Francesco da Buti, 100 Frazier, Allison, 187n42 Freccero, John, 185n18 Frederico III of Aragon, 128 Fulgentius, 140–2, 197n34; Expositio virgilianae continentiae secundum philosophos moralis, 141 furor mentis, 117, 118 Galileo, 3 Garden of Eden, 166, 167 Gherardo, 85 Ghisalberti, F., 183n6 Giglio, M., 183n5 Gilson, Simon A., 187n38, 190n4 Ginsberg, Warren, 69, 72, 81, 152–3, 186n30, 186nn34–5, 188n50, 198n46, 200n4 Giotto, 3 Giovannino da Mantova, 130, 131, 194–5n15 Gittes, Tobias F., 6, 171–2n4, 172n9, 201n17 gloss, 124, 132, 141; of Donna me prega, 21, 30–3, 39; in Esposizioni, 143–4, 150, 154; medieval forms of, 26–7, 29–31; relationship with main text, 16–17, 39–41, 48; of Teseida, 30, 39; of Vita Nova, 29, 33–41, 44, 48, 50 Godi, Carlo, 184n12 Gorni, Guglielmo, 25, 26, 178n53, 182n98, 194n7 Grabher, C., 172n8, 176n25 Gratian: Decretum, 74 Greene, Thomas, 183n4, 199n4 Guido da Pisa, 141, 196n29, 197n33, 198n39 Guinizelli, Guido, 146

Index 223 hagiography, 55, 75, 76 Hamilton 90 manuscript, 12, 13, 105 Hanna, Ralph, 179n68 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 179n60 Hauvette, Henri, 56, 184n10 Havel, L., 174n13 Hollander, Robert, 100, 101, 104, 116, 172nn7–8, 177n36, 179n66, 185n23, 190n5, 190n7, 191n11, 191n14, 192n27, 192n29, 195n22, 197n32, 198n38, 199n3, 201nn12– 13 Holmes, Olivia, 60, 62, 175n19, 185n17, 185n22 Homer, 43, 124, 128, 136 Horace, 138 Houston, Jason, 173n3 Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, 131, 146, 185n22, 195n18, 196n24 humanism: Christian humanism, 152; Dante as humanist, 7, 19, 133, 140; formation of humanism, 9, 14, 18; Italian vernacular humanism, 55, 75, 127, 128, 134, 146, 154, 155; Latin humanism, 54, 59, 125, 127, 133, 165; Petrarchan humanism, 54, 73, 87, 92, 161, 186n30, 199–200n4; prehumanism, 91; Tuscan humanism, 10, 44, 66, 105, 129, 132, 148; Tuscan vs other forms of humanism, 10, 85, 128, 133, 136, 161 Huot, S., 200n9 Iacopozzi, Stefania, 199n1 ideologies: of Boccaccio, 6, 8, 35, 38, 46, 103, 104, 123, 130, 132, 148, 155; poetic, 87 Ilaro (Friar), 125–7, 129, 133, 134, 136, 193–4n6

intento principale (principale intento), 40, 75, 81, 188–9n51 Isella, Dante, 173n4 Isidore of Seville: Etymologies, 74 Jacopo della Lana, 198n39 Janson, Tore, 176n23 Jerome, St, 67, 107; Adversus Jovinianum, 78 Juvenal, 57, 112 Kircher, Thomas, 187n41, 191n21, 200n4 Knights Templar, 68–9 lachmannian stemmatics, 23, 25 Lactantius, 33, 141 Lanza, Antonio, 25, 178n48 Latin, 77, 96, 97, 103, 126, 134, 136, 151, 154, 162; authors, 9, 163; Boccaccio’s difference with Petrarca over, 9, 17–18, 40, 87, 92–3, 96–100, 125; Latin Commedia, 124, 125; Latin poetry, 85; Latin writing, 9, 31, 40, 54, 57; vs vernacular, 30, 32–3, 43, 44–6, 54–6, 92–3, 96–8, 105–7, 122, 137 Latini, Brunetto: Rettorica, 27 laurel crown, 57–9, 61, 84, 87, 95, 96, 97, 156 laurel tree, 76, 88 Leonardo da Vinci, 3, 157 Leopardi, Giacomo, 182n1, 189n58; Sopra il monumento di Dante, 52–3; Zibaldone di pensier, 90–1, 189n59 Letta (mother of Petrarcha), 58 libello, 17, 29 liberal arts, 141, 145–7. See also mechanical arts Limbo, 145

224

Index

literary culture, 20; in Boccaccio’s manuscript production, 21, 26, 48, 105; Christian, 134; European, 163; vernacular, 54, 103, 106, 112, 113, 125, 133, 148, 150, 151, 160 literary tradition, 26 littera textualis, 20 Livy, 83, 171–2n4; History of Rome, 6 Loderingo, 115 loggiato (Uffizi), 3, 5, 156, 161 Lombard, Peter: Sentences, 15, 16, 27 Lopriore, Giuseppe Italo, 187n37 Lorenzo de Medici (il Magnifico), 48, 157 lyric collection, 47 MacCormack, Sabine, 200n5 Macrobius, 141 Magnus, Albertus, 145 Malatesta, Paolo, 160, 166 Mantua, 80 manuscript culture, 6, 18, 22, 174– 5n6, 175n22 manuscript tradition, 23, 25 Marchesi, Simone, 193n35 Marcus, Millicent, 191n18 Mary (Lady Mary, Mary mother of Christ), 18, 19 Massèra, Aldo, 56, 184n10, 184n11 matta bestialitade, matta bestialità, 72, 150, 152–4, 165 Maximus, Valerius, 107 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 183n4, 189n56, 198n42, 198n44, 200n4, 201n12, 201n14 mechanical arts, 131, 132, 145–7; meccanici, 131–3, 140, 145, 146, 147, 148 Mela, Pomponius, 136 Menocal, Maria Rosa, 172n6, 179n60

Mésoniat, Claudio, 194n15, 195n19 Michelangelo, 3, 157 middle ages, 48, 55, 60, 74 Migiel, Marilyn, 201n16 Minnis, Alastair, 16, 17, 175n19, 183n7, 188n48, 189n51 misogyny, 78, 101–2, 107–8, 112, 116–17, 118, 149 Missirini, Melchior, 171n1 moneo (root of ‘monument’), 6, 89 Mussato Albertino, 130 Nardi, Bruno, 185n25, 197n32 Nastagio degli Onesti, 11, 163, 165, 166–8 Nebuchadnezzar, 147 Nelli, Francesco, 104, 191n13 Nessus, 140 Nichols, John, 188n51 Noakes, Susan, 37–8, 180n73, 180nn79–80 novella, 11, 150, 151, 165, 167–9 Nurmela, Tauno, 191n15 Oberg, Jan, 192n24 ordo praedicatorum (order of preachers), 105, 109 otio, 75 Ottimo Commento, 198nn38–9 Ovid, 102–3, 107, 109, 112; furia, 109; Ibis, 102, 103, 107, 109, 116–17; Remedia Amoris, 102, 107, 116, 120 Padoan, Giorgio, 104, 177n42, 191n8, 191n16, 193n5, 193n6, 194n8, 197n31 Padua, 97 Panfilo, 165 parody, 118, 132 pars speculativa, 135

Index 225 Passavanti, Jacopo, 93, 94, 104, 109, 110–13, 115, 116, 122, 130, 132, 135, 137, 192n25; Lo Specchio della vera penitenzia, 94, 109–13, 115, 116 persona (authorial persona), 60 Perticari, Conte Giulio, 90, 189n60 Peruzzi, Simonetta Mazzoni, 193n36 Peter Damian, St (Vita sanctissima patris Petri Damiani and Boccaccio’s Vita Petri Damiani), 9, 55, 75–7, 78, 94, 187n41, 188nn44–5 Petracco (father of Petrarcha), 58 Petrarca, Francesco, 17, 36, 40, 43, 47, 51, 55–62, 92, 105, 118, 125, 128, 131, 133, 156, 160–2, 169; disagreement with Boccaccio over Dante, 7–11, 53, 64–73 passim, 93– 8, 122, 126–8, 141, 148–55; exile of family, 57, 58, 73, 95, 97–100, 104, 105, 107, 161; Laura, 59–61, 156; magister, 148; poet laureate, 57–9, 97; praeceptor inclitus, 94; restitution of family property, 95; statue by Andrea Leioi, 158 – Africus, 57 – Argus, 57 – Bucolicum carmen, 57 – Canzoniere, 7, 18, 21, 61, 155; I, 62; LXX, 62 – Collatio laueationis, 58 – De viris illustribus, 64, 66, 68 – De vita solitaria, 75, 95 – Familiares: X, 85, 187n39, 189nn54–5; XXI, 92, 185n21 – fragmentorum liber, 21, 46, 61, 62, 64 – Posteritati (Epistle to Posterity), 59 – Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 14 – Secretum, 59 – Seniles XVII, 150–4, 157, 160, 193n2, 198n45, 199n45

– Trionfi, 102, 164 Petrocchi, Giorgio, 23–5, 177nn41–4, 177n48 Petrucci, Armando, 174n16, 176n26 Phelps, Ruth Shepherd, 185n19 Phillip IV (king of France), 68 philology, 3, 5, 6, 18, 22–6, 36, 37, 39, 103–5; filologia dantesca, 6, 7, 24, 26, 44, 47, 50, 126; modern, 5, 13, 14, 23, 38, 48, 105 philosophy, 57, 84, 88, 96, 106, 135, 138, 164, 167; moral philosophy, 56, 135, 141, 142, 145 Philostratus, 57 Piazza della Signoria, 3 Picone, Michelangelo, 175n17 Pizzinga, Jacopo, 10, 128–9, 133, 194n9, 196n25 Placidus, Lactantius, 31 plague, 155 Plato, 74, 134 Plutarch, 83; Vita Solonis, 74 Pluto, 138 poetry, 33, 76, 79, 80, 196n26; apology of, 40, 85, 112, 128, 155, 161; ars poetica, 137–8; classical poets, 13, 72, 77, 85, 112, 128, 141; contemporary style, 18; definition, 85; Italian national poetry, 128; Italian school of poetry, 129, 138, 168; poesis, 146; poeta vates, 40, 78, 82; poetic theology, 85, 87, 88, 133; poetic theory, 41, 54; poetic tradition, 35, 37, 43; poet laureate of Florence, 84; poet laureate of Rome (Petrarca), 57–9, 97; poet’s role in res publica, 9; as political tool, 86, 87; Tuscan poets, 9, 14, 35, 42, 43, 46, 49, 51, 61, 128, 155, 156, 161

226

Index

politics, 54, 66, 73, 75, 76, 80, 82, 98; Boccaccio and Italian politics, 60, 86; of Florence, 87, 89, 146; poetry as a political tool, 86, 87; political allegory, 153; political biography of Dante, 53, 86, 146; political identity, 9; political republicanism, 9, 91, 153; trecento politics, 152 polysemy, 139 ponte vecchio, 3 popolani (of Florence), 66, 72, 130 presenti signori, 137, 162 Psaki, F. Regina, 101, 191n9 Pulsoni, Carlo, 190n1 quattrocento, 18 raccolta aragonese, 47 raccolta boccaccesca, 44 Rajna, Pio, 27, 179n55 Ravenna, 165, 167, 168 razos, 56, 60, 64 recentiores deteriores, 24 rectitudo, 54 Renaissance, 7, 49 res publica, 9, 65, 66, 90, 128 rhetoric, 18, 142, 145; ars retorica, 112, 142; Boccaccio’s rhetorical style, 35 Riccardiano manuscript, 22, 44–7, 127, 182n92 Ricci, Pier Giorgio, 176n26, 176n31, 186n26, 187n37, 189n54 Risorgimento, 5, 53, 161, 171n1 Robertson, D.W., 196n27 Romanitas, 96 Rome, 75, 80, 96, 114; Roman emperors, 66, 68; Twelve Tables, 75, 82 Rotiroti, Marisa Boschi, 176n33, 176nn28–9, 190n3

Roush, Sherry, 29, 30, 37, 179n62, 179n67, 180n76, 181n82 Sabbadini, Remigio, 176n24, 197n30 saints, 76, 81; lives of, 75, 105, 109. See also specific saints Salutati, Coluccio, 18 Sanguineti, Federico, 25 Santa Croce del Corvo, 53, 90, 91, 125 Santa Maria Novella, 104, 109 Santo Stefano de Badia, 140, 168 Sapegno, Natalino, 173n7 satire, 9, 19, 116, 117, 122, 137 scholastic commentaries. See gloss scholia, 31, 33 scribe, 26, 38, 47; scribal malpractice and malfeasance, 24 scriptoria, 16, 17 Scriptures, sacred, 85, 162 Scudieri, Magnolia, 171n2 self-commentary, 33, 34, 44, 90 semigothic script, 20 Seneca, 57, 136 senhal, 59 Serlo of Wilton (Cistercian abbot), 109–11, 116 Sermatelli, Bartolomeo, 13, 49, 50, 182n100 Severs, J. Burke, 199n47 signori, 130, 131; presenti signori, 137, 162 Signoria of Florence, 95, 129 Silvestris, Bernardus, 140–3; Commentum super sex libros Eneidos Virgilii, 141–3 Singleton, Charles, 27, 29, 179n56 Solon, 73–5, 87, 189n56; as archon, 74; sententia, 90 spirit-guide, 112, 113, 115–23, 149

Index 227 Statius, 33, 57, 100, 136; Thebaid, 31 stemma, 23 Stillinger, Thomas, 16, 27, 29, 37, 174n10, 174n12, 175n18, 179n59, 179n60, 180n75 Stilnovistic tradition, 59 Stocchi, Manlio Pastore, 73, 186n36 Stone, Gregory, 128, 194n12 Storey, H. Wayne, 17, 18, 37, 175n21, 175n22, 175nn20, 176n32, 178n54, 180n36, 180n78, 194n6 Studio Fiorentino, 60, 95 Suetonius, 83 summa, 84 Tacitus, 83 Tanturli, Giuliano, 180n71 teme (expositions), 35, 39, 41 Templars (Knights Templar), 68–9 terminus a quo, 23 Terrence, 112 terza rima, 22, 154, 163, 164 textualis (littera textualis), 20 theology, 38, 100, 109, 121, 122, 135, 138, 141, 144, 149; Dante’s poetic theology, 43, 63, 77, 85, 87, 88, 92, 96, 101, 103, 113, 133; editing of theological texts, 16, 27; poetic theology, 85, 87, 88, 133; sacred Scriptures, 85, 162. See also Christianity Thomas Aquinas, St: Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle, 14, 30 Tignoccio and Meuccio, 110, 111 Toledano manuscript, 21, 22, 25, 34, 44–6, 48, 53, 55, 63, 73, 180n73, 181–2n92 Toynbee, Paget, 194n13, 194n14 translatio, 136, 137, 140, 148, 165 Traversari, Paolo, 165, 167, 168

trecento, 14, 17, 18, 20–2, 76, 91, 93, 96, 100, 102, 105–8, 111, 128, 152, 163 tre corone, 6, 7, 10, 49, 72–3, 91, 102, 126, 148, 156, 157, 169, 182n98, 194n7, 199n50 troubadour tradition, 55, 56, 60, 79 Trovato, Paolo, 178n53 Tuscany: Tuscan dialect, 113; Tuscan humanism (See under humanism); Tuscan poets, 9, 14, 35, 42, 43, 46, 49, 51, 61, 128, 155, 156, 161; Tuscan vernacular, 105, 107, 108, 128, 155, 163 Tusiani, Joseph, 52 Uffizi Museum (Florence): statue of Boccaccio, 157, 159, 161; statue of Dante, 3, 4, 53; statue of Petrarca, 158 Usher, Johathan, 57, 176n30, 180n69, 184n13 Valla, Lorenzo, 18 Vandelli, Giuseppe, 36, 37, 48, 172n8, 180n74 variantistica, 15 Veglia, Marco, 104, 191n10, 191n12 Veglio di Creta, 147 velo (poetico velo), 138 vendetta, 34, 63, 117–18, 121, 148–9, 192n32; and vendicare, 118; and vengeance, 117, 119, 121, 148, 168 Venus, tropes of, 164 vergogna, 15 vernacular, 24, 48, 62, 103–9, 119, 136, 139, 154, 156, 157; audience, 10, 88, 100, 105; critics of, 40, 104, 111, 113, 121–3, 130, 132–3, 137, 141, 144; Dante’s vernacular, 43–4,

228

Index

62, 77, 84, 87, 97, 98, 141, 164; ethical, 53, 112, 140; Italian vernacular rubric, 45–7; literary culture, 10, 11, 21, 26, 48, 91–4, 125–9, 148, 151, 160; manuscript culture, 18, 20, 26, 45–7; noble vernacular, 7, 24; poetics, 8–10, 18, 39, 40, 59, 61, 63, 87, 134, 141, 150, 162; texts, 15, 21, 27, 30–3, 54–6, 100–1; Tuscan, 49, 51, 105, 107, 108, 128, 155, 163; vernacular humanism, 20, 55, 75, 127, 128, 133–4, 146, 154, 155, 169; vs Latin (See under Latin) Vernani, Guido, 130 Vico, Giambattista: Scienza Nuova, 86, 189n56 vidas, 55–8, 60, 64, 79, 183n6, 184n9; Provencal vida, 55, 78 Villani, Gianni, 57 Villani, Giovanni, 83 Virgil, 3, 43, 57, 98–100, 107, 114–16, 118, 124, 132, 134, 136, 140–2, 144–6, 148, 149; The Aeneid, 141–3 Visconti, 99, 100, 153 vita auctoris, 55–7, 75–7

Vitae Patrum, 105, 109 Vitale, Maurizio, 173n3, 178n46 vita poetae, 53, 55 Vita sanctissima patris Petri Damiani. See Peter Damian, St vita solitaria, 73 volgarizzamenti, 94, 105–6, 109, 112, 130, 134, 154, 180n71 volgarizzatori, 10, 93, 94, 100, 112, 137 vulgo ingrato, 132 Wallace, David, 152, 153, 186n34, 190n6, 198n46 Walter, Duke of Athens, 69–75, 89, 152, 153 Williams, Gareth, 192n30 Witt, Ronald, 174n7 Ylarus (frater), 125 Zaccaria, Vittorio, 186n29 Zamponi, Stefano, 193n4 Zanobi da Strada, 128 Zumthor, Paul, 175n16